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Trump and his loyalists crave actual martial law. DHS head Kristi Noem has - out loud! - threatened to liberate" Californians from the democracy they currently enjoy in the state of California. Plenty of idiots and idiot newscasters continue to pretend Los Angeles is under siege when, in reality, protests against ICE have been limited [...]

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Democratic politicians have a chronic problem: they keep accepting Republican framing instead of creating their own. They run scared of Fox News, moderate their positions to appease the unappeasable, and let political consultants convince them that authenticity is dangerous. They are so worried about how Fox News will portray anything they say, they try not [...]

Authoritarian assholes really don't like public broadcasting. They don't like it because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media. If we bolsteredrealindependent media or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested intelling people the truth and challenging wealth and [...]

It was over a decade ago that Mike wrote about the state of New York's trademark bullying ways when it comes to enforcing its trademarks for I NY." Now, it should be obvious just how absurd it is for the state to even hold onto a trademark designed to promote the state, nevermind the [...]

To be sure, the DHS is just going to blow off Senator Wyden's demands for answers, just as it has blown off congressional oversight, court orders, and pretty much the entirety of the US Constitution. (We're all just waiting to be told we're obligated to house National Guard troops sent by the administration to whatever [...]

We've seen some pretty ridiculous lawsuits here at Techdirt, but the one that Donald Trump filed on Friday against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over the article about the birthday card he was alleged to have given Epstein is so legally incompetent that it reads like a masterclass in how not to file [...]

No matter what the DHS and ICE say about the justification of ICE officers remaining masked during raids, it's all about avoiding public accountability. DHS boss Kristi Noem says alarmist things about ICE officers being targeted" or doxxed," but it's all about inflicting America with its own secret police while it undergoes the process of [...]

Whether you're a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote [...]

I've been warning people since the beginning of the year to expect the Trump regime to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government and now we're seeing exactly that play out. Trump is facing a bunch of pushback over the Jeffrey Epstein nonsense, so he needed some big new distraction quickly. Director of [...]

In a lead up to the last Presidential Election, one of the lies circulated by the Trump camp to befuddle plebs and rubes was that Trump 2.0 was going to be serious about antitrust reform." You didn't have to look far for some baseless claims in the press (or by supposed experts like Matt Stoller) [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about the behavior of Grok and LLMs in general: LLMs are just bias engines. That's literally what they do. That's how they work. They find patterns (biases) and replicate them. Not all biases are bad. Sometimes you want a machine [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we saw a new breed of scammers start abusing the DMCA on YouTube, and a new evolution of copyright trolls abusing the DMCA to take down social media accounts and demanding money to reinstate them. We also saw the debate following the Harper's letter reach new heights of [...]

Back when the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out, to the surprise of nobody intelligent, fraud schemes around vaccination cards began to pop up. Groups, including some doctors, were illegally handing out vaccination cards without actually vaccinating anyone. One of those doctors, according to charges brought by the DOJ, was Michael Kirk Moore Jr. in [...]

Donald Trump admitted yesterday that he called Rupert Murdoch and demanded the Wall Street Journal kill its story about Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. When Murdoch couldn't deliver, Trump promised to sue the media company and gleefully looked forward to putting Murdoch on the witness stand. Update: Just as this story was going live, it [...]

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 [...]

The DHS has been hyping assault stats for weeks, making it sound like there's an actual war on ICE officers. The reality was much more underwhelming: the 700% increase touted in press releases reflected a mere 69 more assaults on officers than during the same period in 2024. Hardly worth remarking on, especially since ICE [...]

We've written before about how attacks on free speech often start with unpopular speakers who lack political power. That's why a new dissenting opinion from Trump-appointed Judge Paul Matey should set off alarm bells for anyone who cares about the First Amendment. In a case involving an imam's immigration status, Judge Matey penned a remarkable [...]

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The Trump administration's maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it. To make things even worse, [...]

When last we checked with CBS/Paramount, company executives had just paid Trump $16 million in bribe money to settle a completely baseless lawsuit, effectively purchasing regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. It was arguably one of the biggest acts of corporate cowardice in recent memory, resulting in many CBS journalists and executives [...]

Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption [...]

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. The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data. ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an on demand" process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of [...]

Even during the (relatively more sane) first Trump administration, it was clear there just weren't enough dangerous criminals residing in this country illegally to back up Trump's bloated, fact-free invasion" claims. Statistics continually show migrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens while doing other useful things like paying taxes and providing an incredibly reliable workforce. [...]

Over the last year or so I've seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train. Yes, there are the big name folks who everyone knows about and who didn't really surprise anyone-Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, [...]

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T-Mobile has long kissed the ass of the Trump regime. You might recall when the company wanted its competition-eroding merger with Sprint approved, it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump hotel properties. It hired Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski not long after he publicly mocked a child with Down Syndrome. It worked with Trump [...]

Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone we've witnessed an unprecedented wave of disruption across these platforms. Government workers, locked out of their jobs, struggled to [...]

We just talked about Ross Scott's Stop Killing Games initiative, started last year, which has found new life recently due to an online back and forth with some gaming industry veterans. As a short primer, Scott's campaign centers around game preservation and ownership, two topics we discuss here regularly. It's not a complicated set of [...]

Axon Enterprise's Draft One - a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers' body-worn cameras - seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found. Our review of public records from police agencies already using the technology - including [...]

Trump claims to love the military. Of course, he loves himself even more. And he tends to view those injured, killed, or captured by enemy forces as suckers" and losers." He also considers people who volunteer to serve this country as idiots, since the idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good is the antithesis of [...]

There's a fundamental architectural flaw in how the internet works that most people have never heard of, but it explains nearly every frustration you have with modern technology. Why your photos are trapped in Apple's ecosystem. Why you can't easily move data between apps. Why every promising new service starts from scratch, knowing nothing about [...]

LabsDigest is built for those who learn best by doing. Whether you're preparing for a CompTIA certification or diving into Python development, our platform offers interactive labs that simulate real-world tasks-no passive watching or reading, just real experience. Work through performance-based exercises for CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and more, or sharpen your coding skills with [...]

The Trump administration continues to demonstrate it cares nothing for the law, despite repeated claims that it's here to restore respect for the rule of law. It's been clear since the early days of Trump's first term that he only respects the laws that let him do what he wants. For everything else, there's the [...]

A little over a year ago we discussed YouTuber Ross Scott's attempt to build political action around video game preservation. Scott started a campaign and site called Stop Killing Games when Ubisoft shut down support for The Crew, rendering this game that people bought unplayable. The goal of the site was to build political action [...]

Belkin is the latest company to painfully demonstrate that you no longer own what you buy, and the whims of corporate executives can very often leave you with expensive paperweights. In a recent statement to customers, Belkin says that it will no longer be providing support or software updates for the company's Wemo smart home" [...]

The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expedite its ejection of anyone not white enough to be considered worthy of citizenship. ICE raids occur daily, performed by masked officers who look more like cartel thugs than US law enforcement officers. The excuse for evoking a law last used to dump anyone looking vaguely [...]

When your CEO gets murdered and half the internet celebrates, most companies might pause and ask why do so many people hate us?" But UnitedHealth had a different response: hire more lawyers to silence the critics. The New York Times has an excellent piece by David Enrich detailing UnitedHealth's ridiculously aggressive campaign to quiet critics [...]

In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can't demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to [...]

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When Joe Biden wanted the Department of Education to forgive student loans, the Supreme Court shut him down hard. The Court spent pages in Biden v. Nebraska explaining why the Department lacked authority under the HEROES Act, demanding clear congressional authorization" for such a significant policy change. But when Donald Trump wants to dismantle the [...]

I've mentioned more than a few times that the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (2021) wound up funding a lot of very good things. The very sort of everyday abundance" a lot of high-profile pundits claimed was no longer possible under American leadership. ARPA helped shore up infrastructure, housing, and sewage upgrades across countless U.S. [...]

It's no secret that starting during the onset of the pandemic, as well as in its aftermath, the video game industry has undergone a period of consolidation. This is quite common during times of economic flux and/or turmoil, but Microsoft/Xbox appeared to go after acquisitions in something of a blitz. While Xbox gobbled up several [...]

Two recent statements from the surveillance company-oneaddressing Illinois privacy violationsand anotherdefending the company's national surveillance network-reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place. Flock's aggressive public relations campaign to salvage [...]

It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, asnumerous [...]

The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they're bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California. Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be [...]

Last week, Elon Musk's Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, calling itself MechaHitler" and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But that wasn't the most revealing part of the story. The real smoking gun came courtesy of AI researcher Simon Willison, who discovered something far more insidious: when you ask Grok controversial questions, it quietly [...]

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