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What began in Los Angeles and Washington DC is being expanded to any other place the president thinks is being run by people who just aren’t subservient enough to the GOP. The next city in line for the Trump Treatment is Memphis, Tennessee, which is (of course) run by a member of the Democratic party, […]

This is part two of a two-part series about the recent settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Utah Consumer Protection Division (CPD), and Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub. The order (which has now been approved by a federal court) settled allegations that Aylo let child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual intimate […]

Well, they finally did it. A federal agency finally shattered the precarious base that upholds the edifice of prosecutions for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in America. That agency is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which just entered into a deeply problematic settlement with a major online content platform for “doing little to block” CSAM […]

I am not here to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. I will not, however, engage in the completely unearned celebration of his life that is happening pretty much everywhere in the wake of his murder. What’s happening now would normally be considered inexplicable in any other political climate. But this one is front-loaded to […]

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 according to pre-defined requirements. Courses cover the basics, Bugzilla, JIRA, testing techniques, Java TestNG, and more. It’s on sale […]

As a reminder, I’m on the board at Bluesky, which means you should consider me extremely biased, even as this article isn’t really about Bluesky. The writer Jerusalem Demsas wants you to stay on Twitter. In “The case for staying on Twitter,” she admits the site is effectively overrun by neo-Nazis, but she argues that […]

Long before the great TikTok moral panic of 2021 to 2024, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent a solid decade freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on […]

This week, we’ve got a double-win on the insightful side for MrWilson. In first place, it’s a comment about walling off the open internet to stop AI: The thing is, everyone is a victim, not just the sites getting hammered. The value of the internet is its openness. You can always route around one obstacle […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we learned about how the White House supposedly blocked Walmart from buying TikTok, and we asked why amidst all the fear around the site, nobody was equally worried about advertising tech and location data sales. GOP Senators released the latest stupid attempt to reform Section 230, the FISA […]

As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter’s hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents for what are generally considered generic game mechanics that also have a bunch of prior art from before their use […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers. President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S. […]

We’ve been tracking the growing judicial revolt against the Supreme Court’s shadow docket nonsense, from individual district judges getting snarky in footnotes to anonymous judges speaking to reporters. But what happened Thursday at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals crosses into entirely new territory: a full en banc panel of federal judges openly criticizing the […]

The Himalayan nation of Nepal has featured only rarely on Techdirt. The first time was back in 2003, with a story about an early Internet user there. According to the post, he would spend five hours walking down the mountain to the main road, and then another four hours on a bus to get to […]

Rep. Clay Higgins wants to use his government power to ban Americans from the internet for life if they say unkind things about Charlie Kirk’s death. Yes, the same Clay Higgins who just two years ago co-sponsored the “Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act“—a performative bill that did literally nothing except restate that government actors […]

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This news — you know, the stuff that shows National Guard troops aren’t exactly happy to be expendable pieces in Trump revenge schemes — is unsurprising. No one signed up for this, but Donald Trump and a bunch of suck-ups scattered across a handful of red states have made Trump’s War on DC the new […]

For many, many years security experts have warned that the “internet of things” (IOT) (or the myriad “smart home” devices we have scattered around our homes) was a security and privacy dumpster fire. A lot of these devices are made in China (often poorly) introducing new network attack vectors and widespread national security concerns. So […]

Despite being the somewhat crispied face of (extremely limited) unrest in Los Angeles in response to ICE activity, Waymo hasn’t suddenly decided it’s time to get snitchin’. In fact, it’s chosen to go the other direction, as Riley McDermid reports for Gizmodo: Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana recently emphasized that the company will challenge, limit, or reject robotaxi […]

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.

When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public. Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government. Palantir’s two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is […]