Techdirt

When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public.Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government. Palantir's two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is [...]

Last week, we wrote about two federal judges who were clearly fed up with the Supreme Court's shadow docket nonsense-one sarcastically apologizing" to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the other flat-out calling their approach Calvinball." Turns out those weren't isolated incidents. They were canaries in the coal mine. Soon after that, NBC News dropped a remarkable [...]

I know it's never great to blame the victim, but this all could have been avoided if ICE officers hadn't decided they all needed to act like paramilitary death squad members while raiding Home Deport parking lots. If you're in the sort of business you feel you can't do safely with your entire face exposed, [...]

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 [...]

I didn't like Charlie Kirk. His morals and principles, as expressed through his rhetoric and actions, disgusted me. I've no reason to mourn his death-and no plans to celebrate it. Kirk was killed in what is most likely an act of politically inspired violence. He was shot during one of his usual speaking events; at [...]

Earlier this month, we noted how Wired and Business Insider were among a half-dozen or so major news organizations that were busted publishing fake journalism by fake journalists using AI to make up completely bogus people, narratives, and stories. The Press Gazette found that at least six outlets were conned by a fraudster going by [...]

The fact that this is still going is absolutely insane. If you haven't followed along with us in the saga of Katy Perry, the famous pop star, and Katie Perry, a local Australian clothing designer, and the trademark dispute between the two, I will happily catch you up in truncated form. Please note that I [...]

Qualified immunity" is included nowhere in the Bill of Rights. But that's because it's not your right. It's a right that only exists because the Supreme Court said it should exist. And ever since it made this proclamation, it's done everything it can to ensure this judicial doctrine can swallow nearly any rights violation thrown [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration's Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security's many [...]

This is the sort of thing any organized government would consider truly embarrassing. We don't have one of those at the moment, so if there's any embarrassment to be had, it has to be experienced on behalf of the Trump administration because this administration is thoroughly incapable of feeling shame itself. Let's lay a bit [...]

Capture emotions and tell stories through photography with the 6-in-1 Photography Master Class Bundle. Transform your skills with six diverse courses, including Portrait Photography, DSLR Photography, Wedding Photography, and more. Whether you're a beginner or experienced, this bundle offers a wealth of knowledge and techniques to enhance your craft. It's on sale for $40. Note: [...]

The verdict is in on Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation," and it's devastating. A new piece in TES Magazine systematically demolishes Haidt's claims by doing something revolutionary: actually asking experts who study this stuff what they think. The result reads like an academic execution: When I read the book, I found it really hard to [...]

What if I told you the Trump FCC just leveraged a fake investigation into an American company to force it to sell valuable assets to companies and billionaires loyal to the administration? Well that's exactly what's happening with the news that Dish Network and Echostar are selling $17 billion in valuable spectrum to Elon Musk, [...]

Ohio State University has had a history of being fairly ridiculous when it comes to trademarks. Whether its trademarking the word the" (yes, seriously) or stretching the concept of public confusion so far that the school challenged the trademark for a random brand of vodka, the Buckeyes sure love some trademark shenanigans. But I guess [...]

CBS has decided it likes being in an abusive relationship. A few months ago, it laid the groundwork for perpetual extortion by settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump over allegedly deceptive editing of an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump claimed this was election interference and sued, despite winning the election, re-taking power, and [...]

Support us on Patreon In what feels like something of a throwback to much earlier days of Techdirt, the Supreme Court is getting into the weeds of the DMCA. Cox v. Sony is a case centered around questions of repeat infringers and intermediary liability, and we've submitted an amicus brief from the Copia Institute, written [...]

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals did something remarkable last week-they followed binding Supreme Court precedent. In 2025. Involving Trump. Which, predictably, got them immediately overruled by the Supreme Court just days later. In a 2-1 decision, the court dissolved the government's stay and ordered that FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter be reinstated to her [...]

The fresh hell" administration keeps on rolling. There's no need to actually ask what fresh hell awaits. You need do nothing more than exist and a new fresh hell will be delivered, almost daily. Here's the freshest: the US military decided to blow up a boat traveling in international waters - one carrying eleven people, [...]

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 [...]

You know that Family Guy meme where they have the skin color chart to determine how suspicious someone should be? Yeah, you know the one. Well, the Supreme Court just essentially codified that into constitutional law. And they did it on the lawless shadow docket without a real explanation, because of course they did. In [...]

For fifty years or so, U.S. media academics warned anybody who would listen about the perils of letting your media companies consolidate in the hands of a bunch of rich assholes and giant, amoral corporations. Not only did America ignore those recommendations every step of the way, the avoidable issues our ignorance created are rearing [...]

Cory Gardner, who spent a decade as a Republican senator, has been freshly announced as the CEO of the NCTA-The Internet & Television Association-the cable industry's biggest lobbying organization. As the revolving door spins you might recall that Gardner is replacing Michael Powell, former FCC boss, whose stint at the agency has largely destroyed government [...]

New data from the UK's age verification rollout provides hard evidence of what internet governance experts have been warning about for years: these laws don't protect children-they systematically drive users from regulated, compliant platforms to unregulated, non-compliant ones while accomplishing nothing except creating a massive privacy surveillance apparatus. The Washington Post has done the legwork [...]

Good lord, here comes another act of preemptive cowardice in service of ensuring the most powerful man in the world enjoys his appearance before a crowd he can't control or doesn't own. Here's Ben Rothenburg of tennis-focused blog Bounces with the scoop: An internal email sent by the U.S. Tennis Association leadership to U.S. Open [...]

A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I'd reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard-until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world, people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now cheering as that same internet [...]

Achieve picture perfection with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025. You can create with stylish effects and templates, and be creative on the go. With the magic of AI and automation behind the scenes, it's never been easier to fix flaws, fine-tune specific areas, and add motion to quickly bring your vision to life. Get a 3-year [...]

I, for one, cannot wait for the commenters to show up to call this headline hyperbole. mfers please. Why don't you just read it for yourselves, in your own god-king's words and images: So, what are we looking at here, you might be asking if the embed didn't load or you've averted your eyes in [...]

Last yearTrump Republicans killeda popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) had broad, bipartisan support, and more than 23 million Americans received the discount at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason, of [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Shannon Vanshoon with a comment about RFK Jr's congressional hearing: So, yeah, I'd say on one hand that it's nice Senator Cassidy is railing against Kennedy like this for all the unmitigated and horrifically dangerous decisions he's making. But hey, you know what would've [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, AT&T was hypocritically calling for Section 230 reform and astroturfing the FCC in support of Trump's attack on social media, while we submitted FCC comments both from Mike and from the Copia Institute on the NTIA petition calling for 230 to be reinterpreted. We also wrote about how [...]

For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk's Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations areharming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimedwould never happen in the first placeis making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can bemitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. And [...]

Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat [...]

Below is the brief, in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, I have been waiting my career to write, to finally tell the Supreme Court that when it comes to platform liability for their users' alleged copyright infringement, we've been doing it wrong. While I've already had a chance to tell the Supreme Court that [...]

Well, the RFK Jr. congressional hearing is now over. And, to the shock of very few thinking persons, it was a complete and total shitshow. I'm sure I will be writing something up on the hearing soon, but the short version is that Congress members on both sides of the aisle went in fairly directly [...]

Trump continues to wield everything he controls like a weapon against his enemies, even when the law says he can't. Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops (and a couple hundred Marines) to Los Angeles to quell nonexistent riots and otherwise get in the way of local law enforcement. Of course, it was nothing but [...]

The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

Let's be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They're the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people [...]

Last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, theruleallowed schools to leverage the FCC's E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can't [...]

Last year, Andres Freund, a Microsoft engineer, spotted a backdoor in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility that is found on nearly all versions of GNU/Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Ars Technica has a good report on the backdoor and its discovery, as well as a visualization by another Microsoft employee, Thomas Roccia, [...]

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 [...]

When federal judges with decades of experience start publicly mocking the Supreme Court's lack of clarity, you know the system is broken. This week brought us two remarkable examples of lower court judges who are clearly fed up with trying to parse the Supreme Court's vibes-based jurisprudence" from its unexplained shadow docket rulings. First, we [...]

You don't often see blackmail victims extending offers to their blackmailers to sit down and discuss political issues, but that's what happened when CBS - who recently paid off Trump to settle a lawsuit the broadcaster could have won - invited Kristi Noem to talk out of her perfectly coiffed ass for most of an [...]

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has apparently decided his latest form of politically motivated lawfare (the thing he insisted he would end once he took over) should be threatening Google over... checks notes... having spam filters that work too well at blocking actual spam. In a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, Ferguson [...]

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 [...]

Since before RFK Jr. was even confirmed into his position as the head of HHS and American health, I have been pleading for someone to step in and correct this obvious mistake. Everything about his first half a year or so in the role has been a disaster. Layoffs and resignations at HHS agencies have [...]

I generally try not to engage in I told you so," but I told you so. The Trump administration's long-percolating plan to use Dish Network as flimsy cover for harmful wireless consolidation is dead, just as I predicted five years earlier. Dish will lumber forward as another lazy MVNO for a while longer, but the [...]

The Ryan Walters saga of stupid continues. Walters is the Superintendent of Oklahoma, where he oversees a state education system that ranks near the bottom among states, while also carving out time to lick Donald Trump's boots as thoroughly as possible. Between naked attempts to sell the Trump bible in state schools and attempting to [...]

Kristi Noem made an appearance on Face the Nation" last week, squaring off against Ed O'Keefe of CBS News. CBS, of course, has already engaged in plenty of capitulation. And O'Keefe's interview - while containing some probing questions - didn't contain much push back against numerous bogus claims made by DHS head Kristi Noem. Somehow, [...]

Earlier this month, Dish's Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called mini-subscriptions," allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks [...]

Last summer, when Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws through its search distribution agreements, I was left wondering what the hell any reasonable remedy would look like. The case always struck me as weird-Google was paying billions to Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine because users actually wanted [...]