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Here’s another appellate anomaly. Most circuits (including this one!) have concluded destroying someone’s home and property while engaging in law enforcement activity is just the sort of thing citizens are supposed to abide with good grace in exchange for living in a society. The Ninth Circuit isn’t most circuits. It covers a lot of ground […]

We’ve seen this sort of thing before, but it never really works. One of the symptoms of the permission culture we’ve built for ourselves, largely in the Western world, is that people or organizations think they can game otherwise legitimate systems in order to silence others. Intellectual property is one of those systems, where we’ve […]

How do you win the global AI race? If you asked Elon Musk or his supporters in the Trump administration, they’d probably talk about deregulation, or getting government out of the way, or maybe something about GPU clusters and massive power consumption. What they probably wouldn’t mention is USAID, the US government’s primary foreign aid […]

Every day Donald Trump seems to implement yet another of the key schemes of Project 2025, despite claiming last summer that “I know nothing about Project 2025.” According to the Project 2025 Web site, it is organized by the Heritage Foundation, which is also working on what it calls its “Oversight Project”: The Oversight Project […]

California taxpayers are now on the hook for $345,576 in legal fees to… Elon Musk. Why? Because Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta ignored warnings about the obvious Constitutional problems with AB 587, their social media “transparency” law. The law, which Google and Meta actually supported (knowing full well that they could comply […]

The Complete 2025 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt […]

This stupid state. These stupid legislators. This goddamn constituency. This is my current home state. And it is painful to be here. Kristi Noem is now the head of the DHS, presumably because she never asked what this country could do for her, but instead asked “what can I do for Donald Trump?” She kept […]

We’ve noted repeatedly how new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is a Trump bootlicker of the highest order. He’s also busy illegally leveraging FCC power to trample the First Amendment and bully media companies that aren’t kissing Trump’s ass. At least when he isn’t busy attacking FCC civil rights reforms or dismantling whatever’s left of […]

While I have no interest in celebrating the demise of a company, one in which very real people had and have jobs that are going to go away, this was also a long time coming. The five year story about how EV trucking company Nikola ended in bankruptcy started in spectacular fashion in 2020, when […]

I am, unabashedly, a Humean emotivist. Like David Hume, I hold that emotions—not abstract reason—form the foundation of our ethics. Cold logic alone doesn’t guide our moral compass; it is shaped by the deep wellspring of human feeling. This isn’t a rejection of reason, but a recognition of its limits and its partnership with emotion in […]

I realize that using the word “racist” to describe an ExTwitter account is pretty much redundant at this point, but there’s something more to this story. It’s not that a racist is using ExTwitter to make racist posts. It’s that a prosecutor working for ICE is, and has been, posting racist content for years on […]

In a stunning display of government overreach, the UK has effectively forced Apple to disable its iCloud encryption for British users. Earlier this month, we wrote about the UK wielding the Investigatory Powers Act — aka “The Snooper’s Charter” — to demand Apple create a backdoor in its iCloud encryption for all users globally. Despite […]

It really doesn’t seem like too much to ask that legal representatives who are specifically trained to handle legal work actually know what the fuck they’re doing when they engage in legal representation. While I understand that not every lawyer’s competence will be equal, I don’t believe we should be expected to put up with […]

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you’ll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you’ll learn how to build your Software […]

Last Friday brought two seemingly unrelated stories: the Associated Press suing White House officials over retaliatory press access restrictions, and Trump’s interim DC US Attorney Ed Martin launching what appears to be a personal intimidation campaign against Trump/Musk political rivals — precisely the kind of unconstitutional “lawfare” that Trump and Musk themselves have previously denounced. […]

Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense. CBS/Paramount is looking for […]

We have been talking about the problem of ownership in the modern world for some time, particularly as it revolves around how digital or internet-reliant products are sold. It’s become such a prevalent problem that there’s something of a generic mantra for it: You don’t actually own the thing you bought. There’s a spectrum to […]

You might recall Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti as the guy who gutted Buzzfeed’s talented news division and fired oodles of human beings back in 2023. As part of that transition, Peretti heavily embraced half cooked ‘AI’ technology in the form of generative and interactive AI chatbots he insisted would dramatically boost the site’s traffic and […]

Here was a fun surprise last night. John Oliver just delivered what might be the most accessible and accurate mainstream takedown of content moderation myths we’ve seen yet. The latest episode of “Last Week Tonight” tackled content moderation head-on, while systematically dismantling Mark Zuckerberg’s increasingly dubious justifications for Meta’s policy changes. In this era where […]

Blithely ignoring decades of jurisprudence, Mississippi Chancery Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued a temporary restraining order directing a small local paper, the Clarksdale Press Register to remove an op-ed that criticized the city for holding a meeting that was supposed to public without notifying the public about the upcoming meeting. This order was crafted and […]