Pure Tech

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PB&J with a straightforward reaction to one of the more stunning details about oppressive laws pushing people out of Idaho: TWO-FUCKING-THIRDS of the doctors have left...

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Five Years Ago This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study “anti-conservative bias” on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated...

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There’s a great deal that is absurd about copyright law in America, but its most basic absurdity remains the length of time for which the copyright monopoly applies. The length of copyright protection a work gets depends on a number of...

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When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the...

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Elon Musk may claim he’s leaving the government, but regardless of whether he or anyone DOGE leaves the damage has been done, and their potential legal exposure to it remains.  And with this decision earlier this week, some of the...

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Any bit of data that isn’t nailed down by court precedent will apparently find its way into the hands of the US government. For years, the DEA has been data mining traveler data in hopes of finding people carrying around “too much” cash....

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Remember “Liberation Day”? The day when Trump launched those apparently freedom-loving taxes on all Americans by declaring war on global commerce so hard that we were even planning on taxing penguins on uninhabited islands? Well, some of...

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Transform your future in cybersecurity with 7 courses on next‑level packet control, secure architecture, and cloud‑ready defenses inside the 2025 Complete Firewall Admin Bundle. Courses cover IT fundamentals, topics to help you prepare for...

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Hey, if we have to be fair (and we don’t), we can trace some of this intranational movement to policies that predate the current shitshow we’re somehow expected to believe is the host to the Leader of the Free World. A patchwork of...

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So you might recall that Republicans recently have been making a gigantic stink about how the $42.5 billion in broadband grants included in the infrastructure bill hadn’t actually connected anybody yet. I pointed out in detail why things...

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We recently talked about Donald Trump’s foray into medicine when he declared, sans any actual evidence of course, that autism cannot possibly be caused by anything other than some external source. It was an admittedly odd stance to take...

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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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What the fuck is going on at the Pentagon? We’ve talked about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s apparent penchant for exposing attack plans over unsecure, easily hacked messaging apps. But there was also a bit of a scandal in April, when...

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That summation greatly oversimplifies things, but if all you’re going to read is a headline, it will have to do. We’ll dig in deeper into the Fifth Circuit’s second attempt to handle content moderation vis-a-vis public libraries, but...

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced this week that he’s barring visas for foreign nationals who “censor Americans,” declaring that “free speech is among the most cherished rights we enjoy as Americans.” This is yet another example of...

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The Ultimate 2025 Cyber Security SOC Analyst Bundle has 12 courses covering what you need to know to help identify vulnerabilities, monitor for threats, and respond to incidents as a Security Operations Center analyst. Courses cover IT...

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The critics are out there, saying things like “Techdirt is alarmist!” and “Trump stuff is normal!” and “Tim Cushing’s posts have too many typos!” Well, here’s some news for the haters: everything I said a month ago is actually true, except...

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U.S. wireless providers are, it should go without saying, very shitty when it comes to consumer privacy and security. After decades of mindless deregulation and competition-killing consolidation, there’s less serious regulatory oversight...

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As HHS and RFK Jr. continue to bumble their way towards making America less healthy, while saying they’re doing the opposite of course, measles cases are still on the rise. The rate of new cases appears to be slowing somewhat, assuming we...

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When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades.  At the end of the day, public safety vendors...

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The destructive force that is DOGE still somehow manages to exist, despite it not being (depending on which claim is made and when) an official federal agency and/or overseen by anyone specifically identifiable as the head of DOGE. Until...

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Federal judges don’t normally punctuate their rulings with multiple exclamation points while invoking the Founding Fathers. But then again, no president before has issued executive orders targeting law firms for the clients they represent...

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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...

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The useful lie that alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members are engaging in coordinated violence inside the United States at the direction of the Venezuelan government has been debunked so often it’s hardly worth rehashing. Oddly enough,...

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The Trump administration has managed to achieve a remarkable legal double standard: ask a court for a specific remedy to address your own violations of an injunction, get exactly what you asked for, then ask for a do-over, and when you...

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If you’ve been around a while you might recall that Verizon used to be utterly obnoxious when it came to absolutely everything about using your mobile phone. Once upon a time, the company banned you from even using third-party apps...

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Here we go again. Late last year we talked about how revisions Japan made to copyright law within the country, predominantly as a gift to the manga and anime industries, was resulting in some absurd arrests. Specifically, the law was...

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Hamilton Vagi, head of Papua New Guinea’s National Cyber Security Centre, apparently never learned the first rule of trying to bury embarrassing information: threatening journalists just makes them dig in harder. And quite often leads to...

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Support us on Patreon » In something of a followup to our last episode about Elon Musk’s playbook, today we’re digging deeper into the comparison between Washington and Silicon Valley and what it tells us about DOGE. Johns Hopkins...

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For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech. According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a...

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Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function...

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When five Supreme Court Justices recuse themselves from a single case, that’s news. When they do it because most of them have book deals with the same publisher, that’s potentially a problem. Last week’s Monday order list included this...

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Earlier this month, the federal government — multiple wings of it — went apeshit when dealing with routine oversight of ICE detention facilities. Three New Jersey Congressional reps (of the federal variety) made an unannounced visit to...

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Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23...

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This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the head of ICE saying journalists should stop asking questions about ICE officers. In first place, it’s Justinfinity with a comment about the fear of...

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We’ve now arrived at the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, the honorable mentions,...

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We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts,...

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Eight men were put on a plane from Texas, bound for South Sudan — a country the State Department warns Americans not to travel to because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” None of these men were from South Sudan. The Trump...

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The timing here is incredible. The very same day that the FTC’s “public inquiry” into “big tech censorship” closes, that very same FTC opens an investigation not into “big tech,” but rather Media Matters. Yes, the very same Media Matters...

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This is exactly what it looks like: the actions of an administration infested by vindictive thugs. Former South Dakota governor and current DHS boss Kristi Noem returned to South Dakota to get her ego stroked a bit by Dakota State...

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Dive into the world of self-driving cars, speech recognition technology, and more with the Complete Machine Learning Bundle. Over 10 courses, you will learn about pattern recognition and prediction, and how to harness the power of machine...

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Lawmakers continue to propose new bills that would require social media companies and app stores to segment users by age and obtain parental consent for minors. Laws like Utah’s new App Store Accountability Act and an identically...

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DHS announced yesterday that Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, stripping the university of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. The timing is particularly brazen: around the same time, a federal judge in...

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Back in March, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he was “investigating” Verizon because the company hadn’t scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts quickly enough for the bigots in the Trump administration. Despite the...

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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 really used to love our series of posts on how companies and content creators can build more revenue and loyalty with their customers through what we called the “Connect with Fans and a Reason to Buy” philosophy. Shortened to “Cwf+RtB,”...

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You can’t say that Elon Musk hasn’t gotten his money’s worth after spending $277 million to help buy Donald Trump an election victory (that’s not including the $44 billion Musk spent on turning Twitter into a right wing propaganda mill)....

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The Complete Circuit Design and Simulation Super Bundle has 19 courses on electronics, 3D simulation, and PCB builds. You’ll learn what tools you need to set up your own home lab, how to build your own Arduino board, how to solder, how to...

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his...

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FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson begged Donald Trump for his job by promising he would “end Lina Khan’s politically motivated investigations.” And, yet, one of his first orders of business upon getting the job was to… kick off a politically...