a Better Bubble™

TechDirt 🕸

DOJ Arrests Journalists Don Lemon & Georgia Fort For Acts Of Journalism, Even After Courts Rejected Arrest Warrants

5 hours 54 minutes ago
Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no. So the DOJ arrested him anyway. On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. […]
Timothy Geigner and Mike Masnick

Search Engines, AI, And The Long Fight Over Fair Use

10 hours 4 minutes ago
Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued. Courts disagreed. They recognized that […]
Joe Mullin

Bari Weiss Pauses Her Pathetic Podcast To Focus Full Time On Ruining CBS

12 hours 1 minute ago
If you’ve been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to […]
Karl Bode

Tom Homan To Minneapolis: Look, I Warned You If You Weren’t Nice, We’d Have To Kill Again, And Look What You Made Us Do

13 hours 34 minutes ago
A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about “border czar” Tom Homan’s ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they’d just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex […]
Mike Masnick

The Casual Cruelty Of The GOP’s Migrant Purge

14 hours 46 minutes ago
Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief. Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: Cable Blocks Magnetic And Weighted Cord Organizers

14 hours 51 minutes ago
Keep your workspace neat and clutter-free with this premium magnetic cable management system. The latest version of Cable Blocks is almost twice as heavy as the original version with only a slight increase in size. Featuring three connectable silicone blocks, each double-weighted to hold cables in place securely, Cable Blocks prevent annoying cable drops and […]
Daily Deal

Trump Demands $10 Billion From Taxpayers For Leaked Tax Returns; His Own Lawyers Get To Decide What He Gets

16 hours 10 minutes ago
Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something: I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just […]
Mike Masnick

Enshittification Ensures Streaming Prices Soar Faster Than Any Other Consumer Good

20 hours 6 minutes ago
According to new data from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That’s compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services. Of course BLS doesn’t explain why streaming video prices are […]
Karl Bode

Stop Killing Games Gets Over 1 Million Petition Signatures Verified By EU

1 day 5 hours ago
I’ve been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on […]
Timothy Geigner

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Think Globally, Stack Locally

1 day 10 hours ago
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 […]
Mike Masnick

Administration Lied To Itself To Keep Pushing Its Fake ‘Tren De Aragua’ Terrorism Narrative

1 day 11 hours ago
We always knew the narrative was false. The administration’s insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow — just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison. For months, it’s been clear the intelligence doesn’t back the claims made by the deliberately stupid […]
Tim Cushing

Speak Its Name: Yes, This Is Naziism

1 day 13 hours ago
History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to recognize when it is indeed repeating—too many little things may be different the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the previous. But it’s the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are meaningful. […]
Cathy Gellis

Daily Deal: The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle

1 day 14 hours ago
The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle has 3 courses designed to help you learn the essentials of graphic design and how to apply those skills to your projects. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You’ll learn all aspects of the design process. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated […]
Daily Deal

JD Vance: Children Of People Seeking Asylum Are Illegals That Need To Be Deported

1 day 16 hours ago
Let’s open with a joke: Mr. Bovino said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents were probably more experienced at handling young people than “any domestic law enforcement agency.” “I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” he said. “Not because we want to be, but because we have […]
Tim Cushing

California Regulators Force Verizon To Do “Woke” Stuff Like Make Sure Broadband Is Semi-Affordable To Poor People

1 day 20 hours ago
Last year we reported how Verizon executives happily agreed to be more racist and sexist in exchange for Trump DOJ and FCC approval of their $20 billion merger with telecom giant Frontier Communications. Verizon embarrassingly said they’d cull race and gender equality initiatives, and try harder moving forward to protect downtrodden white people from the […]
Karl Bode

ACIP Chair Wonders Aloud If We Should Really Be Vaccinating For Polio These Days

2 days 5 hours ago
The travesty that is RFK Jr. in charge of American health and what he’s done to the CDC’s ACIP committee for vaccines continues to be visited upon all of us. It’s really important to keep in mind that during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy lied repeatedly about his stance on vaccines. Supposedly serious senators, like Bill […]
Timothy Geigner

There’s A Reason Many Police Dept’s Ban Shooting At Moving Vehicles: It Saves Lives Without Putting Officers In Greater Danger

2 days 9 hours ago
Minneapolis is once again the focus of debates about violence involving law enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, in her car. The incident quickly prompted dueling narratives. Trump administration officials defended the shooting as justified, while local officials condemned it. The shooting will also likely prompt renewed scrutiny of […]
Ben Jones

Automaker Lobbyists Keep Undermining Maine’s Effort To Pass Popular ‘Right To Repair’ Reforms

2 days 12 hours ago
We’ve covered how there’s a real push afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed […]
Karl Bode