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Back when Vladimir Putin first launched his aggressive war of choice on Ukraine, much of the Western world mobilized into action in a way that was fairly impressive. All kinds of companies and brands voluntarily began pulling out of the market, sometimes at the request of Ukraine itself. Much was made of tech firms pulling [...]

It's well-known that cops can lie to suspects to obtain confessions or further information from suspects. But not always. This Delaware case, brought to us by FourthAmendment.com, demonstrates that while lying in interrogation rooms is usually cool and fine, it isn't when it moves someone to consent to a search they wouldn't have agreed to [...]

Elon Musk declaring the EU DSA regulation as exactly aligned with my thinking" and agreeing with everything" it mandates is looking pretty hilarious at this point. Elon Musk loves endorsing things he clearly doesn't understand and then lashes out when they backfire. Last week, we had the story of how he was demanding criminal prosecution [...]

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As has often been said about ICE and CBP, the cruelty is the point. Both agencies have seemingly gone out of their way to harm people, even though their directives don't demand the often cruel actions they take. Both CBP and ICE have been separating immigrant families for years, even though Trump's decision to badmouth [...]

By now we've well established that the AT&T->Time Warner->Discoveryseries of media mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived. The utterly senseless saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than50,000 people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands (like Mad Magazine and HBO), createdoceans of animosity among [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Gina Carano's lawsuit against Disney, in response to another commenter asserting that all she's asking for is consistency": What makes you think she's entitled to it? Disney is not bound by her subjective personal view of what she said. In [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we wrote about how getting rid of Section 230 would just strengthen the internet giants, the dangers of forthcoming deep fake legislation, and why thinking of privacy as a property right would end badly. We looked at the backwards approach of the UK's online harms legislation, while UK [...]

Cops love a pretextual stop. A perceived traffic infraction is all that's needed to cast out a fishing net in hopes of landing something bigger than a citation for an illegal lane change. That's why cops have historically led most traffic stops with a leading question: do you know why I've pulled you over? It's [...]

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 [...]

Karl Bode was just talking through some of the changes that Netflix is making to its subscriptions, most of which revolve around charging more for same or lesser service. In the case of Netflix, this means raising subscription rates while injecting advertisements where once there were none. This so-called enshittification" process - a word I [...]

During the Trump administration, ICE came up with the highly questionable scheme of setting up a completely fake college solely for the reason of setting up immigrants on H-1B visas for failure. The DHS and ICE created a faux university in Michigan (the University of Farmington"), complete with a (fake) social media presence. Then it [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a phone stand for FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, and [...]

Elon Musk's ExTwitter just set a new speed record: from enthusiastic joiner of an advertising coalition to potential plaintiff against the same organization in just over a week. Sometimes, timing is everything. This week has been a travel week for me, so on Tuesday evening, I wrote up a short article on last week's news [...]

Like a growing number of states, the FTC under Lina Khan continues to show it's somewhat serious about protecting consumers' rights to repair their own tech. In 2021 the agency issued a useful report busting a lot of lobbying myths about repairability, and over the last few years has been cracking down on companies that [...]

Here we are again, with yet another example of how buying digital products, or buying products that have a digital component to them, doesn't mean you have any actual ownership and control of those products. We have seen a bunch of examples of this recently, from Oral-B removing Alexa-based features from one of its toothbrush [...]

The famous line is Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." But what do you call it when Elon Musk fools advertisers over and over again into believing that ExTwitter will protect their brand safety, despite making it clear that he has no interest in doing so? At this point, [...]

One of the common themes here at Techdirt over the last 20 years is how in the digital and internet-connected era, the very meaning of ownership" and property" has changed - often for the worse. It simply takes a merger or an ill-timed firmware update to render something you thought you owned - completely obsolete. [...]

I'm not going to go through all the background on this story, because we just did that yesterday. If you missed that post, it will help to go read it before reading this one. I concluded that post by noting that, thanks to district court Judge Terry Doughty petulantly claiming he can't stay an obviously [...]

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It's a problem that likely dates back to the department's inception, but in 2015, the New York City Inspector General released a report that explained why residents were forced to shell out millions every year to foot the bill for police misconduct: Historically, NYPD has frequently failed to discipline officers who use force without justification. [...]

Back in April the Biden FCConce again voted along party linesto restore net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump FCC in a flurry of sleazy industry behavior that included using fake and dead peopleto create the illusion of public support. The Trump FCC was also caughtmaking up a DDOS attackto explain away public outrage [...]

Most people would respond to a possible drug overdose by seeking immediate medical attention and following up with medical professionals to see how the victim is faring. I mean, that's what the EMTs who responded to a drug overdose call did. They took Corban Elmore's son to the emergency room and, from there, medical professionals [...]

On any given Sunday there's simply no shortage of U.S. antitrust violations, where some giant predatory corporation leverages its consolidated power to derail price competition and harm consumers. But because U.S. antitrust enforcement is a feckless and inconsistent mess, in most instances (see: telecom), a company can engage in these kinds of practices for decades [...]

There's a stunning degree of fear mongering and lack of humility about what California AI bill SB 942 can or can't do. Honest conversation about this bill's limitations are essential to ensuring we don't pass this ineffective law. But its proponents have obstructed reasoned policy development by injecting panic into that conversation and pretending it [...]

RFK Jr. seems to believe that being a Kennedy and spouting anti-vax nonsense qualifies him to be President. Now, he's taking his delusions to a whole new level by arguing that the Supreme Court's Murthy decision means the government can't even talk to social media companies anymore. Buckle up, folks, this is going to be [...]

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An ex-big city cop who blew into a small town under suspicious circumstances to become police chief. A business owner seeking a liquor license who spent a lot of time driving around with a suspended license due to DUI violations. A small town paper that dug into all of these stories and more to the [...]

We've illustrated repeatedly how as streaming subscriber growth has slowed, streaming giants have had to pivot to some bad industry habits to ensure Wall Street gets those sweet improved quarterly returns. That's included everything from utterly pointless layoff-creating mergers and price hikes, to annoying new restrictions and a steady increase in ads (that you have [...]

As all DOJ investigations of law enforcement agencies are, the one targeting the Phoenix, Arizona Police Department was scathing in its assessment of the department's officers and tactics. It led off with this, before providing graphic details covering everything from routine abuse of force to unchecked biased policing that led the DOJ to conclude PhxPD [...]

Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism history as part of their ongoing cost saving" efforts. It was just the latest casualty in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent people imaginable. We've [...]

It was over six years ago when we last had Renee DiResta on the podcast for a detailed discussion about misinformation and disinformation on social media. Since then, she's not only led extensive research on the subject, she's also become a central figure in the fever-dream conspiracy theories of online disinformation peddlers. Her new book [...]

Remember that SLAPP suit, financed by Elon Musk, that actor Gina Carano filed against Disney after they chose not to renew her contract for the Mandalorian? That's the one where Carano seems to be insisting that failing to renew her contract after she made some controversial political comments is somehow a violation of her First [...]

Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. This version is designed for PCs that need a new license for Windows [...]

Daniel Horwitz - who has fought plenty of free speech battles for Tennesseans - has secured an extremely quick victory for his client, Lakeland resident Julie Pereira. According to the complaint [PDF], which was filed June 6 of this year, the city of Lakeland took offense to a sign Pereira had placed in her yard. [...]

The Supreme Court issued a recent ruling that could take an absolute wrecking ball to everything from consumer protection and environmental reform to public safety. It was a ruling that dismantled decades of precedent and puts nearly all regulatory enforcement efforts at risk, yet it somehow barely warranted much coverage by a largely disinterested, billionaire-owned [...]

I don't often praise law enforcement agencies, generally because they rarely do anything praise-worthy. And the Chicago PD is so fraught with problems and problematic tactics that it's difficult to give it credit even when credit is due. But here we are, doing the difficult thing. After years of fighting to keep this information secret [...]

Here we go again. The Streisand Effect has become so noticeably prevalent these days that I quite often hear the term being discussed in all manner of media. Hell, I came across it on a local Chicago sports radio broadcast a couple of weeks back. If the term and its implications aren't being taught in [...]

Have we considered giving Supreme Court justices their own blogs in which they can vent their ill-informed brain farts, rather than leaving them to use official Supreme Court order lists as a form of a blog? Justice Clarence Thomas has been the absolute worst on this front, using various denials of certiorari on other topics [...]

The US Postal Service has been retaining metadata on snail mail for years. Back before mass scanning of every piece of mail was a reality, law enforcement requests had to be a bit more targeted. Investigators had to put in requests that required the postal service to log information about any mail sent to/from certain [...]

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Just when you thought the internet was safe from the meddling minds of the Supreme Court, the Justices have decided to take another crack at reviewing whether or not a new set of state regulations of the internet violates the First Amendment. And this time, it has a but won't you think of the children [...]

Things aren't too exciting if you're a telecom executive right now. All the hype in tech is singularly fixated on the more headline catching, stock fluffing, and usually very broken aspects of AI." 5G, hyped as a transformative world changing tech by overly eager telecom marketing departments, wound up being a consumer dud that users [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about clarifying robots.txt in the age of AI crawlers: As I understand it, the crux of the debate is that AI tools are not making bulk requests to servers. They're making very limited requests to specific pages based [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the Wall Street Journal came out with an op-ed in defense of Section 230, while we wrote about implementation questions around the few good parts of the EU Copyright Directive. A California college decided to start targeting its own student newspaper with public records requests, and a Massachusetts [...]

It's no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That's in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice [...]

Showing yet again that you can lead a cop to a court order but you can't make them follow it, Matthew Petti reports for Reason that the Baltimore PD apparently barely paused its scraping of seized cell phones following a court order telling it to get its warrant particularity house in order. Less than a [...]

Perplexity is an up-and-coming AI company that has broad ambition to compete with Google in the search market by providing answers to user queries with AI as its core technology. They've been in the news because their news feature repurposed content published on the Forbes website in an investigative article, which severely annoyed the Forbes [...]

The House Oversight Committee is investigating NewsGuard, a private company, for supposed censorship" for the crime of... offering its own opinions on the quality of news sites. The old marketplace of ideas seems to keep getting rejected whenever Republicans find that their ideas aren't selling quite as well as they'd hoped. Up is down, left [...]

All facial recognition tech is flawed. Some offerings may be less flawed than others, but the underlying problems (mainly, the inability to be as accurate when identifying minorities and women) remain. In Detroit, the problems became problematic fairly quickly and dramatically. Hundreds of US law enforcement agencies utilize facial recognition tech, but the Detroit PD [...]