Techdirt

I need to say something that will be deeply uncomfortable for many of you: if you have friends, family, or colleagues defending what's happening right now, their old sane selves may not be coming back. Let me be specific about what I mean. This week, Donald Trump postedexplicit orderson Truth Social directing federal law enforcement [...]

It has never been about removing dangerous criminals - the worst of the worst" - from the United States. Under Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has been about removing immigrants from the country. Period. That's the whole thing. (And, apparently the only immigrants welcome to seek shelter in the US are those of the whiter variety [...]

Disclosure: I am on the board of Bluesky and am inherently biased. Adjust your skepticism of what I write on this topic accordingly. It seems a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can't stop writing about it. Consider the curious case of Bluesky, which, according to various pundits, is a failed [...]

The 2025 Java Bundle has 6 courses designed to help you build real projects and fast-track your way to a becoming a Java expert. Courses cover the fundamentals of Java with exercises to help you improve your skills. You'll learn how to build a website with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There's also a course to [...]

As Mike Masnick noted late last week while covering yet another extremely disturbing development in the ongoing horror show that is our current government, the Trump Administration isn't fucking around. It wants to destroy America so it can have the only kind of America it's willing to put up with: one it can rule, rather [...]

Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networkseven after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

Back in May, we talked about a change that Nintendo made to its EULA that essentially amounted to We'll brick your console if we don't like how you use it." Now, Nintendo will tell you that the changes were done to protect the company from the threat of piracy. The problem is that's not what [...]

What may be one of the U.S. Supreme Court's most important and far-reaching rulings in decades dropped in late May 2025 in an order that probably didn't get a second - or even first - glance from most Americans. But thisnot-quite-two-page ruling, as technical and procedural as they come, potentially rewrites a major principle of [...]

One recurring theme of our head-first rushed adoption of AI" is that half-cooked automation routinely reflects the often shitty natures of the companies or individuals installing it. Health insurance companies with a history of being crooks implement Medicare rejection AI with a 90% error rate. Incompetent media company executives implement half-cooked AI" that plagiarizes, undercuts [...]

Brazil's Supreme Court appears close to ruling that social media companies should be liable for content hosted on their platforms-a move that appears to represent a significant departure from the country's pioneering Marco Civil internet law. While this approach has obvious appeal to people frustrated with platform failures, it's likely to backfire in ways that [...]

At some point, there's supposed to 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines added to a volatile mix that already includes peaceful protesters, some not-so-peaceful protesters, definitely-not-peaceful peace officers, and a large migrant community already on edge. Piled on top of this is mindless, harmful rhetoric steadily flowing from the mouths of Donald Trump, Secretary [...]

TheJavaScript DOM Game Developer Bundlehas 8 courses to help you master coding fundamentals. Courses cover JavaScript DOM, Coding, HTML 5 Canvas, and more. You'll learn how to create your own fun, interactive games. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from [...]

I'm old enough to remember Republicans claiming that any lawsuit against a Republican was lawfare" and political persecution. But, as with so many things in the modern MAGA GOP, the reason they said such things was because, given the chance, they would totally seek to engage in actual political persecution and lawfare against anyone who [...]

For years we've noted how this country's corrupt inability to protect consumer security, regulate data brokers, or pass even a baseline privacy law was going to have increasingly deadly consequences. Endless signs have been there; from stalkers abusing app and cell phone data to pursue their victims, to right wing extremists using data broker data [...]

Here we go again. We have talked for years now about famed burger chain In-N-Out and its strategic, and very bullshit, practice of opening up pop-up locations in countries where it does not, and does not appear to plan to, have any real brick and mortar presence. This sort of trademark tourism is not unheard [...]

This is a combo piece with the first half written by law student Elizabeth Grossman about her take on the recent FTC moral panic about the internet, and the second part being some additional commentary and notes from her professor, Jess Miers. The FTC is fanning the flames of a moral panic. On June 4, [...]

Support us on Patreon In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship - and it's a worryingly effective tactic. But there's one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. [...]

Let's talk about constitutional hypocrisy so brazen, so comprehensive, so morally bankrupt that it would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous to the republic. I've learned something about modern Republicans that crystallizes everything wrong with our current political moment: they care more about the constitutionality of Biden's student debt forgiveness than they do about [...]

When a federal judge ruled last week that Marco Rubio can't just declare that the US can detain green card holder Mahmoud Khalil based on the Secretary of State's vibes check" assessment of his political beliefs, you might think Khalil would finally be free to return to his family. You'd be wrong. The DOJ has [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Trusted by top-tier organizations like NASA, Calvin Klein, and TripAdvisor, Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking [...]

For a brief moment, it looked like real life was finally having an effect on Trump's immigrants are inherently evil" fantasies. There was a brief window, last week, where Trump indicated he'd roll back some of his deportation goons because it was going too far. The fact that this moment of realization has arrived at [...]

Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit the presidency for a quick and tacky buck, the Trump administration is getting into the cell phone business. Well, sort of: the Trump administration is launching a lazy new MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that piggybacks on existing wireless networks with an added perk: a fake-gold $500 [...]

It's one of those things I don't discuss on main. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it was my strict religious upbringing, which made discussing anything outside of preferred interpretations of the Bible sacrilegious, if not actually blasphemous. Or maybe it was a concern about being a bit outside of the mainstream, which might result [...]

The second most frustrating aspect of RFK Jr.'s performance as the head of Health and Human Services has been just how predictable the actions he's taken are. When you start with a simple premise, that Kennedy is a vehement anti-vaxxer, the view that measles is less harmful than the MMR vaccine makes sense. The appointment [...]

Sam Altman's vision of a gentle singularity" where AI gradually transforms society presents an alluring future of abundance and human flourishing. His optimism about AI's potential to solve humanity's greatest challenges is compelling, and his call for thoughtful deployment resonates. Altman's essay focuses primarily on the research and development side of AI, painting an inspiring [...]

When Andrew Ferguson made his pitch to Donald Trump to take over the organization, his one-page pick me" plea talked about ending" former FTC Chair Lina Khan's politically motivated investigations." We pointed out at the time how hilarious it was that he then made it clear he fully intended to abuse the power of the [...]

Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle has 10 courses to help equip you with the skills to design, program, and implement microcontroller-based solutions. Gain hands-on experience with Arduino, PIC, and ESP32, master C programming for embedded applications, and [...]

While Donald Trump was trying (and failing) to cheer himself up with a self-congratulatory birthday parade - I mean, just look at this sad boy: - the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriffs Department were busy turning peaceful protests in violent protests. Throughout the nation, millions gathered peacefully to protest Trump's military parade. [...]

Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb planto try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they'd pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out ofvibes and twine. As wenoted back in 2019, [...]

This week, our winners on the insightful side are a comment-and-reply combo regarding Trump ordering the National Guard into California. In first place, it's huskcummerbund with a question: Hey, remember when Kristi Neom tweeted If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard, that would be a direct attack on states' rights. Over the last several years, [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Don Henley was using TikTok as a reason to push for stronger copyright laws, while some Senators were asking the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 in a ridiculous manner, and Ron Wyden was explaining how Trump and many others were totally wrong about 230. Meanwhile, we continued to [...]

One of the legitimate criticisms of large language models, generative AI, and chatbots is that they produce hallucinations -- output that is plausible but wrong. That's a problem in all domains, but arguably it's a particularly serious one in the field of law. Hallucinated citations undermine the entire edifice of common law, which is based [...]

You might recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everyone amazing new synergies for the media sector. Instead it wound up being a giant sloppy turd of a deal resulting in endless layoffs, the shuttering of numerous popular media brands, the cancellation of a long line of popular programming, higher consumer prices, and lower [...]

Each day adds another layer of fucked-upness to this country's anti-immigration efforts. We, as a nation, are now involved daily in extrajudicial renditioning of migrants to countries they've never lived in. We're all implicated in nearly daily rejections of court orders and any remaining shred of human decency. We're treating human beings like trash to [...]

Mere days ago, and only a few weeks out from a meeting in Atlanta to discuss immunization policy and vaccination recommendations, we talked about the batshit move by RFK Jr. to fully wipe out and fire the entirety of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an immunization advisory panel. All 17 members of [...]

It would be too kind to say the irony is lost on Republican lawmakers. They would have to be capable of comprehending and acknowledging their own hypocrisy to even begin to recognize the irony. That's why these lawmakers are so unconcerned with the long-term destruction they're causing. It's all worth it if it results in [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

When a federal judge grants a temporary restraining order within hours of a hearing and writes 36 pages explaining why the President of the United States is acting illegally and unconstitutionally, you know something significant just happened. Federal Judge Charles Breyer did exactly that last night, blocking Donald Trump's deployment of the National Guard to [...]

Ah, the daily joys of living in a country that's literally too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet-era. Meta has once again been busted playing fast and loose with consumer privacy. Security researchers last week discovered that Meta and Russia's Yandex have been embedding tracking code into millions of websites [...]

Editor's Note: As I was getting this article ready to publish, a judge granted California a Temporary Restraining Order against the deployment of the National Guard. We'll have a separate write up of that later. When the Secretary of Homeland Security announces that federal forces will remain in an American city until they liberate" it [...]

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 [...]

As you'll likely recall, in late 2023, Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck yourself" and don't advertise" in response to a question about advertisers feeling uncomfortable placing their brands next to the kind of content that Musk was promoting via the ExTwitter algorithm. But the full context of the quote is interesting in retrospect: [...]

Palantir has never had a great reputation. Even before it teamed up with Trump to create a massive, abusable database of American residents' information, it was working with forward-looking cop shops, that wanted similar massive, abusable databases of their own, even if those were limited to surveilling people in their own jurisdictions. The company is [...]

Today we need to examine something that reveals the machinery of authoritarian propaganda with surgical precision: how a handful of violent incidents across a few city blocks in Los Angeles was transformed into a crisis" justifying the deployment of federal troops against American citizens. And how easily that transformation succeeded. I write this from Los [...]

They say you should never stop learning, and at Stone River, that mantra is a way of life. Through this subscription, you'll get full access to 800+ courses and 4,800 hours of online learning, covering everything from iOS mobile development to graphic design. Plus, you'll get a range of VIP perks, including unlimited eBooks and [...]

We've written a few times about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student who was one of the first people detained by ICE and told he was being kicked out of the country solely because Marco Rubio said he doesn't belong here. No due process. No hearing. Just Rubio's arbitrary say-so. A [...]

We've noted many times that there are two major reasons the U.S. doesn't have a functional privacy law for the modern internet era. One, we're too corrupt and greedy to do the right thing, causing us to prioritize making money over literally everything else - including public safety. And two, the government long ago realized [...]

While the Justin Baldoni legal fight with Blake Lively is still going on, one half of the dispute has been thrown in the dumpster... for now. If you're not up on the case, here is the TL;DR version. Baldoni and Lively costarred in the movie It Ends With Us. Lively filed a claim of workplace [...]

I already wrote about the GOP's bloodthirsty desire to use the military on Americans. They manufactured a nonsense crisis" by over-aggressively sending in ICE agents to grab people off the streets, leading to protests, which were focused on provoking protestors into violence, which would then be used to justify an even more violent crackdown. Given [...]