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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...

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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...

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This series of posts explores 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 From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each...

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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...

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Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle has 10 courses to help equip you with the skills to design, program, and...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of...

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access...

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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...

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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...

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Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Last January, Democratic California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner introduced the California Affordable Home Internet Act (AB 353), which mandated that large ISPs in the state needed to provide broadband service at speeds of 100 Mbps...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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The Complete 2025 Cloud Computing Bundle has 4 courses focused on security, compliance and infrastructure. Courses cover AWS, Azure, and more. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce....

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Two recent statements from the surveillance company—one addressing Illinois privacy violations and another defending the company’s national surveillance network—reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of...

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It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly...

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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...

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The Coding with Python Bundle is great training for aspiring developers. The 6 courses cover Python basics, how to build web apps, how to work with APIs, how to automate software testing, and more. The bundle is on sale for $50. Note:...

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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...

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That an agency overseen by former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would fail to handle flooding capably shouldn’t come as a surprise. That sort of thing is directly on brand for Noem, who did this to her own state because she was trying...

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With the Trump administration openly destroying whatever is left of U.S. federal corporate oversight, regulatory independence, and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. It’s asking the Trump FCC to roll back...

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This week, both our top winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about DOGE and the disaster in Texas. In first place, it’s That Anonymous Coward with a reaction to the government’s response: Devoting a large portion of...

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Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at the encryption dilemma created by the EARN IT Act, while a federal case showed that cops already had plenty of options when dealing with device encryption. There was pushback against the Trump...

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This isn’t the first state court to reach this conclusion, but so few courts bother to examine the science-y sounding stuff cops trot out as “evidence” that this decision is worth noting. There’s no shortage of junk science that has been...

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Two weeks ago the Supreme Court rejected an effort by a dodgy right wing activists to destroy an $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural communities to the internet. The plaintiff in the case, a fake right wing “consumer...

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There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary. This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid...

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We haven’t talked about the numbers in America’s measles outbreak in a couple of months, but that certainly doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. It was back in April that we wrote about how the numbers were on pace to eclipse the...

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Visual Studio Professional 2022 is a fully featured development environment that developers around the world know and love. The 64-bit IDE makes it easier to work with even bigger projects and more complex workloads. Enhance your...

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Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That’s a good example of using existing technology to monitor the...

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Martial law still appears to be the plan. The rollout has been limited, but the wholly unnecessary deployment of military troops to California sent a message our performative president wanted to get across. Trump sent an even more explicit...

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Techdirt has always made it very clear that broadband usage caps on fixed-line broadband are bullshit. The costly and confusing restrictions serve no legitimate technical function. They don’t help your ISP “manage congestion.” They exist...

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Sheriff Christina Corpus is on the cusp of being an ex-sheriff and the first sheriff removed from office in San Mateo County via a county board vote. But her term as sheriff started a lot more promisingly. Running as a reformer, Corpus won...