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For much of Techdirt’s nearly three decades in existence we’ve covered attacks on the media by the rich and powerful. And sometimes we’ve been on the receiving end of such attacks ourselves. But I have never seen or heard of anything quite as extreme as what happened to Ina and David Steiner, proprietors of the […]

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I don’t know but when your best argument is “we got locked out of our accounts for supporting violent insurrectionists,” maybe it’s time to stop arguing. But if there’s anything Trump likes, it’s being a plaintiff in a lawsuit. So, that’s exactly what the Trump Organization argued, in hopes of pressuring Capital One into a […]

It’s hard to not have noticed that a key enabler of U.S. authoritarianism was our consolidated corporate media, which (with scattered exception) was more than happy to throw the entirety of journalistic integrity in the toilet for a chance to please a mad, idiot king. In large part because our press is increasingly owned by […]

Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts […]

Last week we wrote about how Elon Musk’s xAI had filed a lawsuit to attempt to block Minnesota’s anti-nudify app law. As we tried to explain, even if you (reasonably, understandably) dislike both Elon and “nudify” apps, there were real problems with the Minnesota law. In particular, it was not narrowly tailored to just target […]

The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they […]

Hail to the Chief. Our country is being run by paranoid conspiracy theorist megalomaniac who openly wishes to kick-start America’s first autocracy. Nothing that goes wrong is ever the president’s fault. It’s always the fault of officials with insufficient loyalty or the criminal acts of people out to get him. Trump decided the Lincoln Reflecting […]

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Sometimes it helps to just write out everything that happened leading up to a situation so we don’t lose sight of just how ridiculous it is. I mean, would you believe that a President would sue his own IRS for something that happened under his own watch and did him no harm, demand $10 billion, […]

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that policy all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, and consumer rights abuses. But big companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and accountability, eroding quarterly revenues. So instead we […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the protestor who is charged with destroying property for giving CBP agents the “duress mode” password to wipe his phone. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment extending our characterization of what the DOJ is doing here: While simultaneously pushing to institute […]

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RFK Jr. has a lot on his plate at the moment as the head of HHS. America is currently dealing with a record breaking outbreak of the measles, for instance. His agency has had a very hard time getting people confirmed for key roles. There’s that whole cyclosporiasis thing going around, which you’ll know you’ve […]

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This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms. From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, […]

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 choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

On a laptop screen in a dimly lit tent near the Donetsk front, a Ukrainian drone team steers its aircraft into the turret of a Russian T-72 and glimpses the start of an explosion before the picture dissolves into static. The strike is uploaded, verified, and scored against the point value assigned to the tank. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. This year, Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years as the Internet’s encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerds exploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to the dismay 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 […]

It’s time you get up to speed with Ruby on Rails! This full-stack web framework is all about letting you build applications quickly. Its elegance, flexibility, and speed make Ruby on Rails a popular choice for businesses, so taking the time to master it can pay huge dividends down the road. In this course, you’ll […]

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 FCC Universal 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 to rampant 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 from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original 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 been planning 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 was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. 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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