One of the unfortunate knock on effects of being generally insufferable is that many people don’t want to be associated with you in any way. And when you’re both insufferable and happen to be the most divisive American political figure in modern history, all the more so. And that is certainly why, during both of […]
Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here—about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights—is worth […]
ICE can’t keep up with the baseline set by resident ghoul/White House advisor Stephen Miller. Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests per day, which he presented as the minimum he would be satisfied with. To reach this goal, tons of talent from other federal law enforcement agencies have been added to the mix. The results have […]
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so […]
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If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you’d think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it. And yet, here we are. […]
Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount’s latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible: “The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder […]
Measles. Yes, yes, I know you’re sick of hearing about it. For that, though, you must lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and this entire administration of clown-tools that isn’t bothering to do anything about what has become the worst continuous outbreak of the disease in America in several decades. […]
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. In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online […]
I’ll take my joy where I can. And this iteration of the Trump DOJ continues to provide bright bursts of schadenfreude-tinted sunshine. Any competent DOJ can close cases. Any barely competent prosecutor can push a case past a grand jury. Any sufficiently slippery solicitor (mixing in some British for the sheer alliteration of it all) […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback. Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the […]
We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was […]
Most of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s time lately has been split between destroying all consumer protection oversight and threatening media companies with fake investigations if they’re not appropriately deferential to our mad idiot king. The latter has tended to overshadow the former, but it’s all been an ugly combination of authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and […]
It will only take a few moments perusing all the headlines of posts we’ve done on the collective group that owns the Pokémon properties to know that they really, really care about intellectual property. It doesn’t matter if it’s patents, copyright, or trademark, these people will wield it all if they sniff out even the […]
We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that […]
Support us on Patreon » Late last year, Mike was a guest on Seb Agertoft’s Humans in the Loop podcast for a wide-ranging discussion all about restoring the promise of the decentralized internet. That interview was just released, and we’re dropping the whole conversation here as well on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast. You […]
Well, we always knew it would come to this. In a blow to the First Amendment and privacy, the Trump administration last week approved a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) plan to collect social media handles from people applying to change their immigration status. The new requirement, which was approved for one year, comes after the administration has […]
The Secretary of Defense has given an ultimatum to the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their technology to be used in the two ways they have publicly […]
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West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey wants you to think he’s protecting children. His press release says so. His legal complaint opens with the genuinely horrific line that Apple has, in internal communications, described itself as the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.” He makes sure you know that Google made 1.47 million CSAM reports […]
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