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Donald Trump swore he could turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into something he could use to bask in his own reflected glory. Instead, it turned out to be everything we expect from Trump: braggadocio followed by abject failure. Trump hired some guys he used to do some stuff to his personal pool(s) back in [...]

Earlier this week we noted how the Trump administration's unpopular ban on Chinese drones had become a crony capitalist mess, with Brendan Carr and his FCC struggling to fine or ban companies for violations. The ban is a stupid, protectionist mess that has far more to do with coddling the president's sons' drone investments than [...]

I will admit it's always a special kind of fun when a topic we cover here at Techdirt gets the John Oliver treatment. He and his writing team generally gets things right, which helps. And I'm not saying that Oliver and his crew are definitely Techdirt readers, but, well, hi John and crew! Readers here [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. This year, Wikipedia iscelebrating 25 yearsas the Internet's encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerdsexploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to thedismay of skeptical [...]

It's not that AI can't be useful or helpful in certain contexts. And this is certainly not to say AI can't take over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on things that need more of human touch. The problem with AI isn't necessarily AI itself. It's that far too many tech companies are pitching [...]

There's been a bunch of news this week regarding Minnesota's new law that purports to prohibit nudification" technology, and the fact that xAI has sued to have the law blocked as unconstitutional. A few things need to be said upfront, because it's very, very easy to just say the tech is terrible, that Elon Musk [...]

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The on-again, off-again, new forever war we've been cursed with because Donald Trump felt people just weren't paying attention to him enough is going to be headache for years to come. Trump assumes that if he acts like a bully, everyone will just back down. But now he's dealing with a regime just as willing [...]

Quick background: the $8 billion FCCUniversal Service Fund(USF) applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks torampant telecom monopolization). While the USF, like all government programs, hasn't been absent of fraud (usually at the hands of [...]

The American healthcare system and the portion of the government in charge of our health have been a failure of record proportions for the second consecutive year. In 2025, America set a record for collecting the most confirmed cases of measles since 1991, with 2,289 confirmed cases. This year, America already blew past last years [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters. That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had beenplanning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when [...]

Flock Safety's aggressive expansion into the law enforcement market has been coupled with nearly constant negative coverage of its tech and its practices. Multiple cities have paused or cancelled their agreements with Flock following public outcry over the surveillance tech. Flock's willingness to allow law enforcement agencies to search a nationwide network of cameras has [...]

Just recently Karl warned that we were going to see some absolute nonsense as the US sought to somehow ban" Chinese AI models from being used in the US. That seems to already be happening. It kicked off with talk that the US might fight Chinese AI" using nearly identical arguments to what was used [...]

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There are several layers of bullshit in operation here, so we'll walk through it all. But keep in mind the only reason this is all being exposed is because Trump administration officials feel they're more obligated to own the libs" than actually do their damn jobs. Last October, conservative influencer" Nick Sortor was arrested by [...]

A bipartisan roster of former top-level FCC officials have submitted a filing to the Trump FCC blasting the agency's ongoing violations of the First Amendment and urging it to terminate its phony investigations" into ABC - including the unprecedented early ownership review of the company's broadcast licenses. In the filing, former FCC officials allied under [...]

Sony's decision to stop producing PlayStation discs starting in 2028 was met with a ton of initial backlash, especially in the wake of Sony reminding its customers yet again that a digital purchase of content isn't actually a purchase of content at all and what you've bought can be ripped away from you with the [...]

For a long time, cell site simulators, a.k.a. Stingrays" made headlines on nearly a daily basis. Then they just kind of fell off the map. L3Harris - the manufacturer of cell site simulators that commanded enough market share to see its flagship product become the victim of genericide - saw the writing on the wall [...]

Just as Larry Ellison and Paramount executives had worried, the state antitrust challenge to their $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers has resulted in significant delays that could prove terminal. Two weeks ago California and eleven other states filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, [...]

On Friday this week the FTC's open comment period regarding its Policy Statement Addressing AI Accuracy" will close, which means that a bunch of very smart, very busy people are wasting a ton of time this week writing up comments that will mostly be ignored by the FTC - but still matter for the record. [...]

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The always-invaluable 404 Media has scored another minor coup. We all know ICE is heavily invested in surveillance tech, ranging from its purchases of cell location data from data brokers to throwing money at Clearview AI, the most notorious of facial recognition tech firms. But there's so much more to it than that. On top [...]

Last year the Trump administration announced it would ban Chinese-made drones from the U.S. As I noted at the time, the plan had several problems, not least of which being the Trump administration is a racist, corrupt, dysfunctional mess filled with weirdos and lazy incompetents, primarily interested in assorted personal investment grifts and protecting less [...]

Persuasion plays a key role in society. Whether it is political or financial decisions, workplace or family choices, or simply reading a book or article (like this one), often someone is trying to persuade someone else to agree with them, possibly by changing their mind. This raises an interesting question: if persuasion is such an [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes [...]

We all know this administration is more than willing to reward red" states and punish blue" states. There will always be an administration official on hand to claim the incredibly transparent vindictiveness of this administration is actually just regular government business devoid of animus. No one believes these officials, of course. And the officials mouthing [...]

Back in December we called out Google for filing a DMCA 1201 lawsuit over companies scraping Google's results. Almost everything about the lawsuit seemed problematic, not the least of which is that Google's entire business was built on scraping the web. To sue another company for scraping Google just felt... obnoxious. And now a judge [...]

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Atlanta, Georgia's attempt to erect a law enforcement officer training center in Atlanta was met by months of concerted protests. As the months stretched into years (the center was announced in 2021 but did not complete construction until 2025), opposition efforts ranged from peaceful protests to heated exchanges during public comment sessions to attacks on [...]

Earlier this year the Trump administration decided to illegally dismantle the 2021 Digital Equity Act, which was intended to help push internet access into long-neglected parts of the U.S. The Act took very vague aim at digital redlining, or the longstanding practice by telecom giants of refusing to upgrade (or at times even timely repair) [...]

This week, both top comments on the insightful side come in response to our post about the attempted murder charges that were dropped after bystander recordings exposed the lies of ICE officers. First, it's Citizen with a reminder that the word of law enforcement officers shouldn't be trusted: In second place, it's Pixelation with a [...]

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Stop me if you've heard this one: Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department's top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff's [...]

Just last week we had the story of the Trump DOJ issuing very questionable subpoenas of NY Times journalists while trying to track down who leaked information to those reporters regarding the potentially catastrophic security flaws of the gift" 747 plane he received from Qatar. As we noted in that original post, this appeared to [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

Will Elon Musk actually face legal consequences for illegally paying voters in an attempt to interfere in an election? We're at least one step closer to finding out. Back during the 2024 Presidential election, he got away with offering $1 million to a random" (not actually random) voter who would sign his petition in an [...]

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No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible. Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, [...]

Earlier this year FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a series of fake investigations into ABC because the network (1) hosted Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico on The View, (2) aired comedians who made fun of the president and his wife, and (3) occasionally engaged in journalism critical of Trump corruption. The details of these [...]

If you're not a particular kind of sports fan, a certain trademark dispute may have escaped your attention. The Chicago Bears quarterback is Caleb Williams and he's pretty great. He also has acquired a nickname: Iceman." This nickname has become so associated with him that it is even referenced on Williams' appearance on the cover [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens - a decision he worries would [...]

In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that regulates unfair or deceptive advertising, proposed limiting TV ads for sugary foods on programs targeted at children. The Washington Post's editorial board scoffed that the plan would turn the agency into a great national nanny." Congress clipped the agency's wings, and kidvid" entered history as a [...]

We spent a few years pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole TikTok ban" moral panic, and the fact that all of the concerns" magically melted away after Trump became president and then effectively gifted a controlling stake to some of his friends should raise some pretty big questions. However, most people seem to have [...]

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The Trump administration's continual trend towards maximum awfulness means that every report seems to be I've got bad news and I've got worse news." What was already bad has become even worse now that more of the administration's actions have been exposed during court proceedings. Last July, the Trump administration unilaterally decided ICE should have [...]

Last month I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how Republicans had hijacked the Biden-era infrastructure bill to redirect billions of dollars away from next-generation fiber, and instead funnel it into the pockets of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - in exchange for congested, expensive, satellite broadband service they'd already planned to deploy. [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Concerns surrounding young people's screen time are widespread. Australia became the first country toban social media for users under 16in December 2025, andDenmark,Franceand the U.K.have since announced similar restrictions to begin this year. In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

We've written in the past that people online often get way too excited about theoretical pending discovery" in frivolous lawsuits filed by bad actors. Because while there are certainly a few cases where (1) a frivolous case even reaches discovery and (2) some elements of that discovery are revealed to the public, in the vast [...]