This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Stephen Miller suggesting the suspension of habeas corpus: Remember: Once they suspend the civil rights of non-citizens, they’ll only ever need to declare someone a non-citizen to justify black-bagging an American citizen off the street and sending […]
We’re nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, and the honorable mentions, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: Cocoanut Hotel by […]
If you’re from Texas or its surrounding states, you’ve probably heard of Buc-ee’s. The gas station and convenience store chain is a staple of the area and has a well-known branded logo that looks like this. I recently came across a settlement that was the result of a trademark suit Buc-ee’s initiated back in November […]
The Supreme Court has delivered a clear rebuke to the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act, issuing a slightly more detailed ruling that follows up on last month’s midnight emergency order. That emergency ruling came as the administration was literally loading detainees onto buses headed to airports, racing to deport them before […]
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming—again—that the latest version won’t censor online content. It isn’t true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a “duty of care,” and it will do what previous versions threatened: suppress lawful, important speech online, especially for young people. […]
The festival of bad ideas continues. Despite facial recognition having proven over and over again it’s not really the solution to speedy ID verification that far too many people think it is, government agencies (along with retailers, sports arenas, and bored billionaires) seem to believe the real problem is that there just hasn’t been enough […]
Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle has 10 courses to help equip you with the skills to design, program, and implement microcontroller-based solutions. Gain hands-on experience with Arduino, PIC, and ESP32, master C programming for embedded applications, and […]
We mentioned recently that the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC (and the only remaining Dem commissioner across both the FCC and FTC since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC Commissioners) has started calling out FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s attacks on free speech. In a speech yesterday, she went even further: calling out the […]
Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump’s mindless quest to dismantle most U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory independence. Yet at the same time he wants to bully companies for not being racist […]
Fresh off of his Mother’s Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts that have and are proposed further for HHS, and an explanation for why some programs are […]
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 […]
For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the […]
You might recall that the first Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to cover up the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d help Dish Network create a new 5G network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was […]
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey apparently thinks he gets to be editor-in-chief of every social media platform. In his latest attack on free speech rights, Bailey has announced a “first-in-the-nation rule” that would force social media companies to let users choose third-party content moderators rather than using the platforms’ own moderation systems. There’s just one […]
The JavaScript DOM Game Developer Bundle has 8 courses to help you master coding fundamentals. Courses cover JavaScript DOM, Coding, HTML 5 Canvas, and more. You’ll learn how to create your own fun, interactive games. It’s on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from […]
Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking into your reputation. Clearview’s tactics have gotten it banned, fined, and sued and it doesn’t […]
We’ve well documented by now how the AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless “business deals” ever conceived by modern man. The mergers resulted in bottomless layoffs, the closure of numerous valuable and popular brands and shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward executives shifted the company’s […]
Though we haven’t discussed the lawsuit between Palword creator PocketPair and Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. so far this year, this turd of a suit is still going on. To the uninitiated, Palworld has long been described as “Pokémon with guns”. Due to that, lots of folks thought that PocketPair would eventually get sued by […]
The federal government is using social media surveillance to target student visa holders living in the United States for online speech the Trump administration disfavors. The administration has initiated this new program, called “Catch and Revoke,” in an effort to revoke visas, and it appears to be a cross-agency collaboration between the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and […]
Behind effective accelerationism’s techno-optimist smile lies a familiar and dangerous impulse: subordinating human dignity to a technological imperative framed as inevitable. The effective accelerationism movement (e/acc) presents itself as an enlightened embrace of technological progress, especially artificial general intelligence. Led by figures like Guillaume Verdon and embraced by venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, the movement claims humanity faces a binary […]
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