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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 [...]

Here's the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform. Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent problems of human behavior at scale. I spent last week [...]

A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars. The researchers found that given [...]

Here we go again. The idea that, at least in the realm of digital goods or IoT devices, we no longer own what we've bought has been a long-running theme here at Techdirt. While the practice of pulling back features available upon purchase via firmware updates has been a regular occurrence in the video game [...]

For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there's been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer [...]

The Canadian government is preparing to give away Canadians' digital lives-to U.S. police, to the Donald Trump administration, and possibly to foreign spy agencies. Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill withmultiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it's a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands. It's [...]

The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be an antidote to this madness" and talking about how the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage" of important news stories. The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly [...]

It's no secret that Photoshop can be a bit dense when you're first getting your feet wet with it. That's why it pays to have a expert instructors show you the ropes. Led by a Photoshop pro, the Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle will help you master Photoshop CC and become an expert-no prior experience [...]

We've finally got a Stalin to call our own. Just like Soviet Russia, homelessness is now basically a criminal offense, thanks to Trump's latest executive order, which pretends it's about crime but actually just wants to put homelessness people in places where other Americans won't be inconvenienced by them. Like most Trump executive orders, it's [...]

One of the bigger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be serious about antitrust," and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. You'd have to be a turnip to not see that was an aggressive lie, pushed by a lot of folks (even supposed antitrust buster Matt Stoller), who seemed hellbent on [...]

It's been a while since we checked in on Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's Superintendent and all around assbag fascist. If you've read any of our previous posts featuring Walters, you know that he loves himself two things, and in this order of importance: Donald Trump and god. You can tell this because, while it was always [...]

We've noted repeatedly how the U.S. is dominated by regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast that have spent decades working tirelessly to crush regional broadband competition, and have also spent millions of dollars to crush state and federal regulatory oversight. The result is a patchwork of monopolies that don't try very hard on availability, [...]

President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador's homicide rate since he became president, but it's more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges [...]

The Trump administration's war on higher education has reached new levels of authoritarian absurdity. Not content with merely investigating George Mason University and its president Gregory Washington for his diversity efforts, the Department of Justice has now decided to investigate the faculty members who dared to support him. Yes, you read that correctly. Federal agents [...]

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I know it often seems like it's bad news all the time on the Techdirt channel. And I'm sorry it's that way. I wish we weren't dealing with a daily deluge of new awfulness from the current president and his enablers. But that's what's happening so that's how it ends up looking here, as well [...]

Last week Trump's FCC lackey, Brendan Carr, quickly set about rubber stamping approval for the $8 billion CBS Skyance merger, now that CBS execs paid their $16 million bribe to the king. One of the key merger conditions to net approval was the installation of a sort of FCC bias ombudsman," who'll be installed at [...]

(To all readers: the use of God" in this post refers to the generically Christian ideal of God, and not any particular god or gods referenced/respected by other religions. The capitalization is there to make a point to the kind of people who insist on capitalizing God while cherry-picking the Bible for justifications for their [...]

Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of certain kinds of adult-only content."The news rippled across tech and gaming news media, even for adult entertainment industry journalists like myself. But if it weren't for the reporting of Ana Valens (which Vice then deleted) then we [...]

Tom Lehrer's passing this weekend at age 97 has rightfully sparked tributes to his brilliant satirical songs. But amid all the well-deserved praise for The Elements" and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," there's another aspect of Lehrer's legacy that deserves equal celebration: his decision to dump his entire catalog into the public domain. In an [...]

I wasn't wrong when I wrote that Apple, Google, Akamai, and others faced tremendous liability risk if they continued to provide any of their hosting services to TikTok. Of course, not because it should be illegal - the operative law is incredibly unconstitutional, despite the trite reasoning by the Supreme Court finding it otherwise. But [...]

Donald Trump is a notorious media bully. He uses lawsuits, executive power, and political pressure to punish critics and bend institutions to his will. Disney, Meta, and Paramount have since paid out multi-million-dollar settlements over content disputes. CBS News leaders resigned. Colbert's show was canceled. The AP was barred from the White House. Even Rupert [...]

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Sure, Department of Justice" has always been a misnomer, what with its blessing of things like civil asset forfeiture, bogus CFAA prosecutions, cop junk science, the 1033 program, and the complete inability to successfully sue federal officers for blatant Constitutional violations. But it also used to have things like a civil rights division that investigated [...]

Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The original law proposed that the biggest ISPs would need to make sure they offered speeds of at least 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up for $15 a month to California residents [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about our call for the government to accept accountability for the power it wields: Bold of you to assume that Republicans will ever place responsibility for their actions on their own shoulders instead of on the backs of [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the DHS was going full gestapo in response to protests in Portland, then quickly expanding the tactics to other cities, starting with Chicago, and was also engaging in domestic surveillance to protect statues and monuments. We asked why the US was trying to punish hackers for accessing vaccine [...]

It seems to be part of human nature to try to game systems. That's also true for technological systems, including the most recent iteration of AI, as the numerous examples of prompt injection exploits demonstrate. In the latest twist, an investigation by Nikkei Asia has found hidden prompts in academic preprints hosted on the arXiv [...]

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 [...]

We've spent years documenting the challenges of crafting sensible AI policy, from Biden's misguided plan, to various state-level attempts at regulation. Now Trump's AI Action Plan has landed, offering a striking example of how even potentially useful policy ideas can be corrupted by political theater and special interests. The plan reflects the deep influence of [...]

So many pro-police lawmakers and city officials have always insisted the only way to bring down crime rates is to add more cops to the mix. This may work if you're mainly interested in racking up meaningless arrests or handing out broken windows" citations, but it doesn't address why certain areas have higher crime rates. [...]

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Here's how you know the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case represents something fundamentally broken in government accountability: within hours of two federal judges ordering his release and explicitly warning the government not to play games with him, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin went on X to repeat laughably false claims about Abrego while declaring that he will [...]

With the cowards at CBS/Paramount having paid their $16 million bribe to the King, Trump's FCC has quickly ended its phony investigation" into the media giant, and given its rubber stamp approval to the company's $8 billion merger with Skydance (owned by Trump's friends in the Ellison family). In a press release, Trump FCC boss [...]

It should be uncontroversial at this point to say that the Russian government has waged a long but incremental war on both free speech and a free and open internet. Always couched in terms of preventing extremist content" to infiltrate the minds of its own people, the truth is that Russia denotes any content 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. Our second annual live at TrustCon recording of Ctrl-Alt-Speech! Ben [...]

The Trump administration iscontinuingitsdangerous pushto surveil and suppress foreign students' social media activity. The State Department recentlyannouncedan unprecedented new requirement that applicants for student and exchange visas must set all social media accounts to public" for government review. The State Departmentalso indicatedthat if applicants refuse to unlock their accounts or otherwise don't maintain a social [...]

Here we go. Again. Nonstop. The Racist Fucks Regime is at it again, leveraging every piece of data involuntarily collected by the government as a weapon to deploy against brown people. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will be given access to the personal data of the nation's 79 million Medicaid enrollees, including home addresses and [...]

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The Supreme Court's shadow docket has become a lawless mess. The justices are issuing extremely consequential rulings with either no explanation at all, or with barely a paragraph of reasoning. No full briefing. No oral arguments. Just vibes-based constitutional law that lower courts are somehow supposed to follow. Now the Court has made this chaos [...]

Last year you might recall that Vice Media suffered its final collapse after years of mismanagement by incompetent, fail-upward brunchlords. The new owners, Savage Ventures, quickly made it clear they were going to be even worse than past Vice management, firing a ton of talented writers and editors, and shifting Vice's focus even harder toward [...]

This saga of dumb began nearly a decade ago, in 2016, when a grocer named Iceland Foods," that was somehow granted an EU trademark for Iceland," began bullying other EU businesses using that word over supposed trademark infringement. Iceland, the country, caught wind of all of this when the company had the stones to oppose [...]

As numerous Walled Culture posts attest,site blockingis in the vanguard of the actions by copyright companies against sites engaged in the unauthorized sharing of material. Over the past few months, this approach has become even more pervasive, and even more intrusive. For example, in France, the Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was forced togeoblock more than [...]

On July 8, an expanded coalition of library associations, civil society organizations, journalist groups, and other advocates for information access sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee explaining their opposition to the Pro Codes Act. This coalition has grown significantly from the original group that opposed the bill, now including major organizations like the [...]

Peter Shane'sdevastating analysisinThe Atlantichas performed the invaluable service of documenting what many suspected but few could prove: that Chief Justice John Roberts has systematically dismantled American constitutional government while claiming to restore it. But Shane's meticulous account of Roberts's proto-authoritarian canon" reveals something even more damning-the entire Unitary Executive Theory project is essentially an exercise [...]

Microsoft Project 2024 Professional is the ultimate project management tool, designed to help professionals plan, execute, and complete projects with precision and efficiency. With its robust features and user-friendly interface, this software is perfect for project managers, team leaders, and executives who need a reliable solution to manage their projects from start to finish. It's [...]

When you're shooting for 3,000 arrests a day, it seems kind of pathetic to complain about being mildly bruised a few times a week. DHS and ICE have constantly used a supposed massive increase in assaults on ICE officers to justify ICE's tactics: the masks, the unmarked vehicles, the refusal to present IDs or warrants, [...]

Earlier this month, CBS wimped out and paid Donald Trump a $16 million bribe to settle a completely baseless lawsuit - and to buy regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. The result is now going to be a CBS owned by Trump's close billionaire friends, the Ellison family, who are clearly signaling [...]

I recognize that trademark law is a nuanced thing and I don't expect the average person to be familiar with all of its intricacies. Hell, I write about trademarks all the time and I could probably fill a law school gymnasium with what I still don't know about it. But I honestly am often surprised [...]

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff isback at the helmof the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is thesurveillance-first-privacy-lastapproach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new [...]