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We’re past the halfway point in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals winners,...

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Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess. By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game...

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Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the...

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a...

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The Python Crash Course is a guide on how to get started in Python, why you should learn it, and how you can learn it. The syntax of the language is clean and the length of the code is relatively short. In this comprehensive course, you...

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We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a...

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Just to be clear, when I refer to “Trump” in terms of his administration, I’m referring to the collective hive mind of dangerous enablers he employs. Trump, by himself, is incapable of closing an umbrella. It’s the people around him that...

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As the boss of the country’s media and telecom regulators, there’s plenty of corporate malfeasance and corrupt shenanigans Brendan Carr could be targeting on any given day at the country’s biggest media and telecom companies. But because...

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Several years ago, Rockstar Games suffered an intrusion into its corporate network. During that intrusion, a trove of data, files, and information about the in-development and unfinished Grand Theft Auto 6 game was exfiltrated. Under...

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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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I think it’s important to understand that, despite claims to the contrary, age verification is, inherently, a right-wing effort. While it’s currently true that age verification laws are being supported globally by those on the political...

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The Ultimate Python and Artificial Intelligence Bundle has 9 courses to help you take your Python and AI knowledge to the next level. You’ll learn about data pre-processing and visualization, artificial neural networks, how to use the...

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We’ve got a throwback administration that wants to bring us back to halcyon days of early 1950s America, that preceded Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation. If it could, I’m sure it would go back even further, taking at least another...

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We’ve been covering the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against NewsGuard for a while now. It started with the House Oversight Committee’s absurd investigation of the company for the crime of expressing opinions about news...

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I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and...

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We’ve talked for many years about Nintendo’s shotgun approach to IP enforcement, as well as its heavy-handed ToS enforcement policies that can include bricking customer consoles and/or banning their accounts if they do something Nintendo...

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War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered.  When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation...

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While the Trump administration’s extremely aggressive, thoroughly bigoted attempts to eliminate as many non-white people from this country as possible have resulted in some periodic push back from law enforcement officials, we can never...

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Back in January of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a leather-bound birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell had assembled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The book included letters from various...

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Geekey is an innovative, compact multi-tool like nothing seen before. It’s truly a work of art with engineering that combines everyday common tools into one sleek little punch that delivers endless capability. Geekey features many common...

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It wasn’t all that long ago that GOP legislators were collectively stonewalling a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Three years ago, these legislators were seeking to end the FBI (and other IC components’) access to Americans’...

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Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” was generous; it was a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, “MAGA-focused”...

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One of the most remarkable staffing decisions of the second Trump administration has been to allow the anti-vaxxers to run America’s health agencies. While RFK Jr. and his cadre of lieutenants prattle on about how they’re going to be super...

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A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of multiple state, federal, and class action lawsuits for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company...

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Support us on Patreon » As we work our way towards a better future for the internet, the most encouraging and exciting part is the people out there building towards that future. Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler is one such person,...

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Dive into Godot – a rising star in the game engine world – with the 2026 Complete Godot Stack Development Bundle. You’ll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine...

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In early March, 438 security and privacy researchers from 32 countries signed a massive open letter warning that age verification mandates for the internet are technically impossible to get right, easy to circumvent, a serious threat to...

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If you’re not corrupt, you generally don’t have to say certain things. Let’s take a look at ex-NYC mayor Eric Adams who, while dealing with plenty of corruption investigations and allegations, protested his innocence by saying stuff no one...

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More than 1,000 top Hollywood professionals ranging from Glenn Close to Denis Villeneuve have signed off on a new letter opposing the merger between Larry Ellison’s Paramount/CBS and Warner Brothers, warning that the massive $111 billion...

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With all that RFK Jr. has done, and failed to do, as the Secretary of HHS, he should be terribly busy cleaning up mess after mess. The measles outbreak that is going to cause America to lose its elimination status is still ongoing and on...

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The Trump administration has restricted the First Amendment right to record law enforcement by issuing an unprecedented nationwide flight restriction preventing private drone operators, including professional and citizen...

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The government’s reliance on grand juries to bring charges against activists, protesters, and the president’s personal enemies has been misplaced. Increasingly, grand juries are refusing to give the government what it wants: rubber-stamped...

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We’ve been warning for a while now that Section 230 is dying by a thousand legal workarounds rather than a straightforward repeal, and the hits just keep coming. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how two jury verdicts against Meta in New...

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We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it’s hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you’ll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start...

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More of the same for the Trump administration — one that seems incapable of achieving its goals without breaking the law or disregarding the Constitution. Hundreds of judges handling thousands of cases have already told the administration...

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VPNs (when integrity is maintained and the owners aren’t sleazy scammers) have long been the mortal enemy of shitty, surveillance-happy governments. And when shitty, surveillance-happy governments try to block or degrade the use of VPNs,...

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This week, we’ve got a double-winning comment from Shannon Vanshoon that took first place on the insightful side and second place on the funny side. It’s a response to a particular passage in our post about the scammy AI company that...

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It’s time for the third in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation and Best Deep Cut winners, and this week we’re...

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Last month, we discussed NVIDIA’s demo video for its forthcoming DLSS 5 technology and the controversy surrounding it. While I’m going to continue to be of the posture that an injection of nuance is desperately needed in the reaction to AI...

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The Trump administration’s AI policy is two-faced, torn between deregulation and despotism. In March, the administration released its National AI Legislative Framework, directing Congress to “prevent the United States government from...

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In case you’ve been asleep, what appears to be an increasingly mentally unstable Donald Trump has further destabilized the middle east with a war nobody asked for or wanted. Most U.S. media coverage of Trump’s disastrous Iran war hasn’t...

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First, some of the good news: certain AI models—currently Anthropic’s Mythos, but surely others are well on their way if they haven’t already arrived—turn out to be really good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities. As Anthropic itself...

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Luminar Mobile is your all-in-one creative companion designed for iOS, Android OS, and Chrome OS. Powered by an intuitive, touch-responsive interface, it lets you enhance photos effortlessly—anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re adjusting...

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I’m not here to cut the Trump administration any slack or engage in both-sides bullshit, but this is something that has always been true: we treat anyone imprisoned or detained as less than human. The dehumanization begins with something...

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Last month FCC boss Brendan Carr illegally ignored remaining U.S. media consolidation laws to rubber stamp Nexstar’s $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna. It’s part of the generational Republican quest to steadily consolidate media, then replace...

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A little over a year ago, we wrote about a fairly silly lawsuit filed against Netflix (and Warner Bros.) by Pepperdine University in California for trademark infringement. At issue is the Netflix show Running Point, which is a...

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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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Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity. Too often, it’s used to extract payouts from others. Higbee & Associates, a law firm known for sending copyright demand letters to website owners, targeted May First Movement...

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The 2026 Canva Bundle has six courses to help you learn about graphic design. From logo design to business cards to branding to bulk content creation, these courses have you covered. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store...

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We’ve talked for years about how the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system is ripe for abuse. The legal structure of the law practically begs for such abuse: send a notice, content disappears, and the target has to fight through a slow...