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Well look who else thinks Trump's plan to use a centuries-old law to vanish people to El Salvador is batshit crazy: one of his own judges, Fernando Rodriguez Jr. I'm sure the admin will be out there calling him a far-left radical Marxist before long. Let's be clear about how absolutely unhinged this whole thing [...]

In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, data suggests that wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition). Recently, T-Mobile imposedanother $3-$5 per month price hike on most of its plans- including customers who believed they were under a [...]

RFK Jr.'s tenure at HHS must be put to an end. We already have ample evidence for that necessity, both in the form of his complete mismanagement of a ballooning measles outbreak that continues to expand, his vaccine skepticism that has led to him stating that he's going to have the origin of autism all [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency's dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found. Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-oldDepartment of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the [...]

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a state legislature, caught up in the moral panic about social media, passes yet another clearly unconstitutional bill that will waste taxpayer money on doomed legal battles. This time it's Colorado, whose legislature passed a ridiculously bad social media regulation bill (SB25-086) that looks suspiciously similar to [...]

Back in 2021, Apple mostly won the antitrust case that Epic brought against it, and the Ninth Circuit largely agreed. The court rejected most claims about Apple's App Store being an illegal monopoly. The company just had to make one small change: let developers tell users they could make purchases elsewhere. Simple enough. Instead, Apple [...]

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Radley Balko's post on Substack details an ordeal, however brief, Texas appellate lawyer Clayton Jackson suffered through recently. A longer one possibly awaits, thanks to his employer firing him shortly after he went public with his recounting of this unwanted interaction. Balko's opening paragraph explains why the Trump Administration has hit law firms and universities [...]

So we've established by now that the second Trump administration is attempting to completely destroy regulatory authority, consumer protection, labor rights, and corporate oversight. Whether by precedent-ignoring court ruling, executive order, illegally firing commissioners, cronyism, or regulatory capture, the effort isn't subtle, and is poised to usher forth a new golden age of corruption. That's [...]

Okay, there's a lot to unpack in this story, so hang with me here. For the past month or so, Americans and American businesses have been stuck in tariff hell. Blanket and additional tariffs issued via executive order by Trump have been in a seesaw pattern for a month now. This tariff program was a [...]

Last year, we were thrilled with the success of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users, the Social Media Card Game. In case you missed it at the time, One Billion Users is a fun, fast-paced game where 2-4 players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. Now, the game is about [...]

Support us on Patreon We probably don't need to tell you that the current tariff situation is causing complete chaos in global supply chains, in large part due to the uncertainty - for all we know, the exact rules will have changed since this episode was recorded just yesterday. But we wanted to get some [...]

When last we checked in with CBS, the company was preparing to fold under pressure from the Trump administration, amidst bogus accusations that 60 Minutes had unfairly made Donald Trump look bad. As we've noted previously, the accusations are utterly baseless, but that's apparently not stopping the CBS board from kissing authoritarian ass and throwing [...]

The Party of Free Speech" is at it again. House Speaker Mike Johnson just bragged about using legal threats to remove his opponents' political advertising - perhaps the most constitutionally protected form of speech that exists. And he did it while lying about them lying. As he says in that clip: Do not believe the [...]

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Donald Trump's two terms in office have proven Orwell right. No, not the 1984 is not an instruction manual" thing. The other one. Animal Farm. Some animals are more equal than others. At the top of the heap? The pigs. Trump led off his first term in office by threatening to create a police state [...]

Google is developing a tried and true reputation for buying products people like, making them worse, then pulling the rug out from under users' feet. That's been a particular problem with Google's purchase of FitBit, which has generally resulted in less useful hardware, more paywalls, more annoying nickel-and-diming efforts, and just a more miserable user [...]

Roughly two weeks ago, in a post about how America was risking losing its elimination status for measles as the current outbreak is exploding thanks to the inaction from RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department, I wrote the following paragraph: At the start of April, we were at 483 confirmed reported measles [...]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show. The office of the Treasury Inspector General [...]

USA Today has secured the DOJ's official rules of engagement for mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. (Better yet, it has shared it with everyone, rather than keep it to itself!) Trump's resurrection of a law no one thought the Land of the Free would ever use again is disturbing enough. What's in the [...]

The FTC's politically motivated inquiry into tech censorship" has managed to prove exactly the opposite of what it intended: the government agency is now actively censoring public comments from people complaining about being censored by tech platforms. It's almost too perfect. The FTC, under Chair Andrew Ferguson, launched what it called an investigation into tech [...]

The administration's justification for reviving the justifiably reviled Alien Enemies Act is the literally unbelievable claim that the Venezuelan government has sent Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to the United States to wreak general havoc, something the Trump Administration claims is a literal act of war. It's just not happening. There's no link between [...]

The Academy of Educational Engineering is a premier platform tailored for aspiring and professional geeks. This all-in-one educational ecosystem is designed to empower you with expert-level knowledge and hands-on experience across embedded systems, electronics, IoT, and software development. As a premium member, you'll access comprehensive tools, engaging projects, personalized feedback, and direct mentorship, helping you [...]

We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does not [...]

When Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel stepped down, we noted how she couldn't be bothered to even mention that terrible things were brewing at her agency. Same for Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, who recently decided to sheepishly step down without, again, so much as acknowledging the dangerous and radical zealotry Brendan Carr has been [...]

You know, there's stupid, and then there's stupid on a level that is unbelievably dangerous. While RFK Jr. is very busy attempting to ensure that America loses its measles elimination status through a combination of vaccine skepticism, pushing alternative treatments, and generally being unable to present a solid message around the current outbreak, you will [...]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a politician" with the LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois." Barberis, [...]

Oh hooray. Another part of our new normal under Trump 2.0. Here's the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with the gory details: Milwaukee County Circuit JudgeHannah Duganwas charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom. According toa 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused [...]

Here's a puzzle: How do you write a law that's so badly designed that (1) the people it's meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act. The bill started with [...]

When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don't quite say we want to censor speech" (after all, they pretend to be the party that brought free speech back.") Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it's got nothing to do with the content, even as they can't hide their true intentions and [...]

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Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn't want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? [...]

State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction ofa new right to repair" law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRGnotethat all 50 U.S. states have now at leastintroducedsuch bills. But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado,California, andOregon have actually [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a failed fact check" by another commenter: Hey twinkle farts, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to authorize the government to detain enemy aliens. Further, the executive order didn't need to [...]

It's time for the third in our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix and Best Deep Cut, and today we're looking at the winner of the Best Visuals category: A Warning by DigNZ. One of the requirements for [...]

Bethesda has something of a history of embracing its modding communities. This has historically included not being aggressive on matters of IP against modders, attempting to build an economy around the modding community itself, and even being quite tolerant of fan-made expansions and the like of the publisher's titles. This was all well and good [...]

Gavin Newsom'scharacterizationof the Abrego Garcia deportation as a distraction" represents a catastrophic failure of moral clarity and constitutional understanding. This isn't a distraction. This is the constitutional foundation of our Republic hinging on a single case. Let's be absolutely clear about what's at stake: The Supreme Court has issued a unanimous 9-0 order demanding that [...]

This post is about two things: that it looks like DOGE has violated an injunction, at least in spirit if not letter, and why it matters. The injunction in question arose in the hybrid case, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration, which named both DOGE and agency officials [...]

The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just... helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not they won't let me tweet slurs" censorship, but literal we're going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship" censorship. It's painfully stupid, but that's just what we get with the folks running the government these days. This [...]

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What could possibly go wrong? Operatives from ElonMusk's so-calledDepartment of Government Efficiency(DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumentedimmigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social [...]

A few days ago I talked about how the Trump administration is desperate to present the illusion it still cares about consumer protection and antitrust reform." Via executive order, regulatory capture, DOGE cuts, and a rightward-lurching court system, Trump 2.0 really is taking an absolute hatchet to consumer protection, labor rights, corporate oversight, environmental law, [...]

Leaks can be both embarrassing and aggravating for any content producer, though we often see the most anger over this sort of thing coming from large corporate interests. The video game space is lousy with examples of this, but there is perhaps no more notoriously draconian respondent to leaks than Nintendo. The company has unsurprisingly [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas. A federal prosecutorsent a letterto a medical journal editor, probing [...]

There are a few ways to think about Elon Musk's announcement this week that he's stepping back from DOGE. The first is that he's leaving a job he officially doesn't have. The second is that he's returning to a job (Tesla CEO) that he's supposedly been doing this whole time. The third, and perhaps most [...]

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Gang databases are just handy racism. They're a way for cops to harass, arrest, or otherwise make minorities' lives more miserable. Very little in the way of logic or evidence is required to allow officers to add people to these databases. That's why victims of gang violence and the occasional infant have been labelled gang [...]

There's simply no limit of problems in telecom and media that competent FCC regulatorscouldbe taking aim at.Broadband price gouging by monopolies, widespreadtelecom privacy and security failures, the obvious harm ofunchecked media consolidationall come quickly to mind. Instead of tackling any of this, new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the lion's share of his [...]