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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]
When Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a national security risk because it wouldn’t agree to his dangerously unethical demands for what Claude should be able to do, Anthropic sued to challenge the directives. One of the challenges was brought in the Northern District of California, where Anthropic has now notched another significant win. While the previous […]
The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico With the Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich IoT learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. With over 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming and IoT engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming […]
Compliant Technologies probably would have preferred to keep flying under the radar. But a gaudy new no-bid contract with ICE (worth up to $20 million!) made it impossible. Prior to ICE’s big purchase, it may as well have never existed. It only had a few clients, and those few clients purchased a few pairs for […]
Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment. Which is every bit as stupid and corrupt as it sounds. Previously, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), political parties were subjected to strict […]
The country is continuing to reel from multiple infectious disease outbreaks in America, even as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough: you don’t actually need me to go on. With RFK Jr. using his position as Secretary of HHS to further muddy the waters on vaccines and their safety, some states […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In his White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026, President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the “failing” New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn’t smile enough. He […]
The unpopular Paramount Warner Brothers merger should have been a perfect opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate they are finally serious about stuff like media consolidation, right wing propaganda, media reform, and antitrust after decades of policy incoherence. Instead, numerous prominent California Democrats have been buckling to Paramount demands aimed at settling a 12-state antitrust lawsuit […]
Six years ago, when Trump first tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to his billionaire buddy Larry Ellison at Oracle, we wondered if this would finally get Oracle to change its tune on Section 230. While not as widely known outside of Silicon Valley, Oracle has been a driving force behind the […]
Take your design skills to the next level with the 2026 Canva Creator Mastery Bundle, a powerful all-in-one course for modern creators and business owners. This program teaches you how to use Canva effectively to produce professional-quality visuals for any purpose. You’ll explore practical design techniques, creative workflows and branding strategies that make your content […]
Flock Safety is hurting. It spent the early part of its career pitching plate reader tech to people who honestly didn’t need it: HOA supervisors and gated communities. Then it realized there was far more money to be made by courting governments, rather than the richest parts of the private sector. A few years later […]
As we’ve been noting, billionaire Larry Ellison’s effort to dominate what’s left of corporate media is facing some headwinds after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against his planned $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. As we’ve also noted, this is a giant turd of a deal, the debt from which will indisputably […]
Last year, as decades of work by RFK Jr. to undermine vaccines with false links to deaths and autism culminated in his appointment to lead HHS, America saw the largest resurgence of measles cases in something like three decades. Three people died, including two children, all unvaccinated. Kennedy mostly ignored the outbreak from the beginning […]
By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta’s platforms. The headlines are all covering the basics: the years-long case these states filed against Meta ends, and Meta pays somewhere […]
The thing about raiding law offices is that they tend to be filled with people who actually know the law. A bunch of opportunistic ICE officers thought they might be able to talk their way into an illegal search, but that initiative (is that the word for this?) died out almost immediately when the interloping […]
Imagine a scenario where a documentary filmmaker, in the course of making the documentary, captures some damning footage of corporate malfeasance, which she wishes to share with an investigative reporting organization anonymously. Should we be concerned that mandates on AI watermarking might reveal who she is, even if she’s not using AI at all? Last […]
The Essential MATLAB and LabVIEW Mega Bundle has 9 courses to help you improve your skills in programming and visualization. You’ll learn the basics of each and then go through hands-on courses building apps, learning about data analysis and visualization, and more. It’s on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and […]
Flock Safety has been on the wrong side of the press cycle — if not the wrong side of history — for most of the last couple of years. Flock’s automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are more comprehensive than many of those previously deployed by law enforcement agencies. Not only do they capture plate/location data, […]
Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post simply isn’t what it used to be. During the Trump era Bezos and his lackeys have fired all of the paper’s black columnists, turned the op-ed section into pro-corporatist agitprop, censored cartoonists that criticized Jeff, and generally shifted the paper’s journalistic tone in a more right wing, corporate/autocrat-friendly direction. You know, like the […]
To say that Donald Trump has been waging an ideological war against the American free press would be an understatement in the extreme. Even attempting to list out the many, many ways in which he has attempted to threaten, sue, undermine, stifle, chill, attack, and hamstring media outlets would be a waste of time. No […]
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