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DOJ Learning In The Abrego Garcia Case That Judges Don’t Like Being Lied To

1 year 1 month ago
When a federal judge starts calling out government lawyers for “willful and bad faith” behavior and “deliberate evasion of fundamental discovery obligations,” you know things have gotten serious. But in the case of Abrego Garcia — the man who the DOJ admitted they accidentally sent to a Salvadoran gulag without due process — the DOJ […]
Mike Masnick

5th Circuit Obediently Lets AT&T Off The Hook For Major Location Data Privacy Violations

1 year 1 month ago
For decades, major wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile collected vast troves of sensitive user location and movement data, then sold access to any random nitwit with two nickels to rub together. The result was a parade of scandals wherein everybody from stalkers , law enforcement (or people pretending to be law enforcement), car companies, governments, and right wing […]
Karl Bode

Techdirt Podcast Episode 415: The Problems With Age Verification

1 year 2 months ago
Support us on Patreon » It’s hard to create a law about children online without first identifying who the children are. We’ve written a lot about the problems that arise with mandated age verification, and a new paper by Eric Goldman, The “Segregate-and-Suppress” Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online, digs into why the entire popular approach […]
Leigh Beadon

Daily Deal: LabsDigest Subscription

1 year 2 months ago
LabsDigest is built for those who learn best by doing. Whether you’re preparing for a CompTIA certification or diving into Python development, our platform offers interactive labs that simulate real-world tasks—no passive watching or reading, just real experience. Work through performance-based exercises for CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and more, or sharpen your coding skills with […]
Daily Deal

Harvard Goes To Court To Stop Trump Nonsense

1 year 2 months ago
Last week, we wrote about Harvard showing a bit of institutional courage in telling the Trump administration to fuck off with its demands that the university fire certain professors, change its curriculum, and allow government oversight of campus activities. In response, Trump escalated things, as he tends to do, cutting off over $2 billion in […]
Mike Masnick

Verizon CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath Gives Predictably Wimpy Response To Being Bullied By Radical Trump FCC

1 year 2 months ago
For decades, telecom giants like Verizon reacted hysterically every single time the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to do anything to protect consumers or hold telecom giants accountable. I spent decades covering it as a telecom policy reporter. Whether privacy rules or popular net neutrality rules, Verizon (and its lobbying proxies at various think tanks) […]
Karl Bode

Industry Begins Embracing True Fans, Super Fans, Core Fans As An Alternative Way To Fund Creators

1 year 2 months ago
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) concluded with a look at “true fans,” an alternative way of funding creators that avoids the main problems of the current copyright system. The approach is based on nurturing the connection between artists and their most dedicated fans, allowing the former to generate extra revenue by providing the […]
Glyn Moody

A New One: House Speaker Blames Video Games For Medicaid ‘Abuse’

1 year 2 months ago
I guess it’s good to know there are still surprises left for me in this universe. We have talked about the common absurdity in which video games are blamed for all manner of things. It’s the moral panic of our time. Video games are blamed for violence, for supposed addictions, for violence, for the eventual […]
Dark Helmet

RIP John Roberts’s Summer Vacation

1 year 2 months ago
At 1:15am early Saturday morning the Supreme Court, in just a few lines of text, did something that was both small and huge: It “directed” the government not to remove anyone detained in the Northern District of Texas (or, more specifically, “All noncitizens in custody in the Northern District of Texas who were, are, or […]
Cathy Gellis

Daily Deal: Babbel Language Learning (All Languages)

1 year 2 months ago
Become a language expert with the Babble Language Learning deal. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle […]
Daily Deal

Hegseth Shared Attack Plans In Another Signal Chat… With His Wife, Brother & Lawyer

1 year 2 months ago
There’s a certain predictable pattern when unqualified MAGA political appointees get put in charge of highly technical government operations. First, they demonstrate their complete misunderstanding of the systems they’re supposed to oversee. Then, they make a series of increasingly dangerous mistakes. Finally, they try to distract from those mistakes by focusing on culture war issues. […]
Mike Masnick

Microsoft Is Dedicated To Building A Dodgy New Database Of Every Windows 11 User’s Online Behaviors

1 year 2 months ago
Last year Microsoft announced that it was bringing a new feature to its under-performing Windows 11 OS dubbed “Recall.” According to Microsoft’s explanation of Recall, the “AI” powered technology was supposed to take screenshots of your activity every five seconds, giving you an “explorable timeline of your PC’s past,” that Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant, Copilot, can then help […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

1 year 2 months ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the Trump administration’s pivot to claiming that it meant to send Abrego Garcia to El Salvador: Remember, folks: If they’ll do it to non-citizens, they’ll do it to citizens soon enough. They want you afraid of being […]
Leigh Beadon

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: A Pocketful Of Peril!

1 year 2 months ago
It’s time for the second in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered Best Remix winner Accoutrements, and now it’s time for a closer look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: A Pocketful of Peril! by Perrin Ellis […]
Leigh Beadon

Pushing The ‘Shoplifting Crime Wave’ Narrative Allowed Cops To Stock Up On LEO Goodies

1 year 2 months ago
For most of a half-decade, law enforcement officials and retail execs have been engaged in a “mass crime spree” duet. Despite this hysteria being debunked several times by rigorous reporting, cops and shops have been manipulating a non-existent shoplifting crime wave for their own benefit for nearly as long. Every time another smash-and-grab hits TikTok, […]
Tim Cushing