Techdirt

Here we go again. Whenever policy makers insist that there's some nerd harder" solution to tricky societal problems, actual experts have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining basic realities to them. Sometimes those are realities about the technology. And sometimes it's realities about the technology. This time it's age verification's turn. Steve Bellovin-one [...]

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Suck it up, shitbirds. You're the beneficiaries of full-throated support from a megalomaniac who has just untied the purse strings and dumped pretty much everything in it into ICE's back pocket. ICE is on its way to becoming the largest law enforcement recipient of federal tax dollars, and yet the head of its controlling entity [...]

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only to those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster [...]

How much vodka would you have to drink before you mistakenly and drunkenly believed you were drinking it out of a shoe? That is essentially the question that has been raised by a vodka distillery that sued an online sneaker marketplace for declaratory judgment that no trademark infringement exists between them. I'm sure you're confused; [...]

Western allies are abandoning American leadership while we stand by, morally bankrupt and intellectually spent, watching children starve in Gaza with weapons we provided to a corrupt authoritarian we're too cowardly to constrain. Meanwhile, the same brilliant minds who assured us Trump was a master negotiator who'd never actually implement his policies are already preparing [...]

Few areas of law have lately been as relevant, and the focus of so much dispute, as preliminary injunctive relief. Because the subject has come up so many times already, and is inevitably bound to come up again in the near future, this post takes a moment to discuss what is meant by preliminary injunctive [...]

While this latest bit of low-key embarrassment may not be a black eye for the administration, it certainly isn't putting any more lipstick on this pig. Whatever you may think about the recent summit meeting between these two international besties, you can be assured that some of the attendees thought even less of it than [...]

A federal judge has delivered an extraordinary rebuke to the FTC's Andrew Ferguson, finding that his investigation into Media Matters was motivated by retaliatory animus" rather than legitimate antitrust concerns. In a scathing ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan granted Media Matters' motion for a preliminary injunction, calling out not just the investigation's pretextual nature, but [...]

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Trump and his GOP enablers wouldn't know subtlety if it held them down and punched them in the face repeatedly. Being a little bit crafty is never an option for an administration that prides itself on its performances. A little subtlety tends to go a long way, especially when you're already fighting dozens of federal [...]

A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what's left of already soggy U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight. You might not know this because the U.S. press and many policymakers genuinely don't appear to care, but it's happening all the same. Whether bydodgy Supreme Court ruling,executive order, orcaptured regulators, the U.S. authoritarians, often [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Strawb with a reply to a couple parts of a comment on our post about Trump derangement syndrome" turning out to be pretty damn correct: In second place, it's Rocky with a comment about the FCC installing a babysitter at CBS: And here it [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we wrote about how the idea that banning TikTok thwarts Chinese intelligence was ridiculous, and how any real threat probably comes from America's feebly secured infrastructure. As for failed security, we looked at the incredible waste of Baltimore's aerial surveillance program, and as for worrying security", we looked [...]

We've talked a bunch about the lawsuit drama between Nintendo and the Pokemon Co. against PocketPair, the makers of the hit game Palworld. The short version goes something like this. Palworld is clearly inspired by the Pokemon world and games, but does not directly copy anything from those properties. Nintendo in particular seems very annoyed [...]

Thisseries of postsexplores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological [...]

Age verification laws and regulations that target online pornography and digital sex work are far from being the modest" child safety measures intended to protect public decency favored by the far-right. Proponents of these laws benefit from the fearmongering and framing of age verification as a necessity to protect children from inappropriate material found on [...]

There was a colloquy at oral argument earlier this year in the Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton case between Justice Kavanaugh and FSC that raised the unsettling prospect that at least several of the Supreme Court justices did not understand what preliminary injunctions are for. In that case, the bad Texas law had already been [...]

The US Court system's electronic filing front-end has always been a mess. Not only is it prohibitively expensive for most casual users, it's prohibitively dysfunctional even for power users. Whoever isn't discouraged by the outdated front end will be just as unimpressed by its back end. PACER charges per page like it's a librarian running [...]

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Donald Trump has declared war on American cities, and he's sending in the troops to prove it. As Rolling Stone rightly notes regarding Trump seizing direct control of DC law enforcement by deploying the National Guard: President Donald Trump has expanded his military campaign against the United States by deploying armed troops to yet another [...]

While there was a lot to criticize the Biden administration about, it did at least try to shift the balance back toward antitrust reform (see: Lina Khan), boosting competition, and occasionally trying to help labor (see: the noncompete ban). This desperately upset America's richest assholes, which is why so many of them have rushed to [...]

Almost exactly a year ago, we discussed a really, really dumb trademark fight between NFL quarterback Lamar Jackson and former NFL quarterback Troy Aikman. This got to our attention when Jackson filed an opposition to a trademark application from Aikman. Typically, we go in pretty hard on oppositions to trademark applications, because they are almost [...]

Remember back in February when the DOJ told a court that, despite multiple public statements from both Elon Musk and Donald Trump to the contrary, Elon Musk was not associated one bit with DOGE and therefore should not be subject to litigation regarding DOGE's wildly illegal actions? And remember how lots of people just kinda [...]

It has been more than six months since Trump took office and kicked off his Musk-led rampage through the federal government. And more than six months that everyone has been turning to the courts to stop the DOGE destruction. These litigation efforts have led to some wins, although too many of them have been short-lived [...]

Good news, Americans of a certain age and certain... shall we say... persuasion: you'll never need to be too old for this shit again! U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem today announced U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will waive age limits for new applicants so even more patriots will qualify to join [...]

Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide.The 2025 Complete [...]

For years we've talked about the serious problems of the Bayh-Dole Act, which encouraged universities to patent every damn idea that anyone associated with the university came up with in the hopes of commercializing" it. In practice this has been a total disaster. Universities locked up a ton of (often publicly funded) research behind patents" [...]

If you actually pay attention you might notice the right wing's pearl-clutching over China is neither effective nor consistent. The GOP, for years, made a giant stink about China's Huawei network gear being a massive national security threat, and pushed through legislation to tear the inexpensive gear out of U.S. networks. Then just... forgot to [...]

Police have now confirmed that Patrick White is the man who killed a police officer while going on a shooting rampage targeting the CDC campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Police have also confirmed that the motive for the attempted mass shooting was White's complaints about COVID-19 vaccines and the CDC's response to the pandemic overall. Documents [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes. The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had [...]

Maybe this won't actually mean anything when all is said and done. Maybe what we're seeing here is the last dying breaths of a democracy as its current owners sell it off for parts and consolidate their power. But maybe it's the other thing: the checks and balances putting down as much damaging stuff on [...]

Two headlines walked into a UK courtroom: the BBC says Wikipedia loses challenge," while the Guardian says Wikipedia can challenge if the strictest rules apply." Annoyingly, both are true-and that split-screen is a perfect microcosm of what's wrong with the UK's Online Safety Act. The core issue is whether or not Wikipedia would be considered [...]

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It's no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world's coolest dictator" - two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he'll take the latter in the lieu of the former...) Bukele - the recent recipient of (apparently illegal) [...]

The sort of executives who fail upward into positions of prominence at major media and streaming companies are all out of original ideas. So as the Wall Street pressure for impossible, perpetual quarterly growth mounts, they've increasingly resorted to the same tactics we've long seen at major shitty cable companies like Comcast. For streaming video [...]

This past Friday, August 8th, Patrick Joseph White allegedly opened fire on the CDC campus in Atlanta, killing a police officer while expending nearly 200 shots that sprayed the office buildings. This being America, this news in and of itself is not particularly compelling. We do mass shootings and attempted mass shootings better than anyone [...]

Hysterical." Alarmist." Trump Derangement Syndrome." He'll be constrained by institutions." There are adults in the room." You're overreacting." The generals won't let him." Stop being so dramatic." Every single person who said we were being hysterical about Trump being an existential threat should be forced to explain how the Presidentseizing controlof the capital's police force [...]

Support us on Patreon One of the most troubling things about this era in American history is the number of institutions that have caved to Trump's bullying and given him what he wants, especially when it comes to media organizations. The folks over at the non-profit Free Press have done a lot of research and [...]

Amidst the current batch of child safety bills in Congress, a familiar name appears: the STOP CSAM Act. It was previously introduced in 2023, when I wrote about the threat the bill posed to the availability of strong encryption and consequently to digital privacy in the post-Roe v. Wade era. Those problems endure in the [...]

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Three weeks ago, California federal court judge Maame E. Frimpong issued an order blocking ICE from pretending looking a bit foreign was reasonably suspicious enough to justify stops, much less the mass arrests ICE officers have been carrying out regularly in the Los Angeles area. The opinion had to spell out things that should have [...]

With the cowards at CBS/Paramount havingpaid their $16 million bribe, Trump's FCC was quick to rubber-stamp its approval to the company's $8 billion merger with Skydance (owned by Trump's billionaire friends in the Ellison family). Part of that deal involves installing a Trump babysitter to ensure what's left of the media giant's journalism division is [...]

Although the Supreme Court has yet to say so itself (and probably won't any time soon, given its current composition), it's generally accepted that citizens have the right to film public officials performing their public duties. Law enforcement officers, however, seem to feel this should never be a right and that their actions in full [...]

There's a trick at the center of American political discourse-so deeply embedded that even well-meaning people don't realize they're performing it. It goes like this: if you're a fair-minded individual, you must believe that both political parties are fundamentally the same. To assert a meaningful difference in their commitment to truth, democracy, or constitutional governance [...]

This was the way it was always going to end: with Trump turning the Oval Office into the palace of a king. One need look no further than Trump's attempt to invoke the vengeful spirits of the Overlook Hotel by adding a $200 million ballroom to the White House, as though this were the early [...]

When politicians immediately blamed social media for the horrific 2022 Buffalo mass shooting-despite zero evidence linking the platforms to the attack-it was obvious deflection from actual policy failures. The scapegoating worked: survivors and victims' families sued the social media companies, and last year a confused state court wrongly ruled that Section 230 didn't protect them. [...]

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This remains one of the most unintentionally funny things the Trump administration has ever done. Of course, this regime isn't known for its sense of humor, so anything generating a laugh exists despite the regime, rather than because of it. But laugh we will! Trump is throwing billions at ICE, hoping a whole bunch of [...]

Back in June the Trump administration announced it would be launching a new mobile phone company, including a new Trump branded phone they claimed would be made in the U.S." As we noted then, it was all mostly bullshit: the venture was just a flimsy rebranding of an existing MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), which [...]