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Daily Deal: The Complete Big Data And Power BI Bundle

1 week 3 days ago
The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all […]
Daily Deal

The Kids Are (Mostly) Alright: New Pew Study Deflates The Social Media Panic

1 week 3 days ago
A couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are […]
Mike Masnick

CBS Hosting Dinner Praising Trump And His Love Of The First Amendment

1 week 3 days ago
Talk about pathetic. CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed […]
Karl Bode

YouTuber Copyright Struck After Others Layer AI Voiceovers On Video Game Music

1 week 3 days ago
It’s barely been a few days back since we discussed just how open to mistakes and abuse YouTube’s copyright takedown system is, when NVIDIA’s demo video for its controversial DLSS 5 tech got briefly pulled down because an Italian news channel did a piece featuring the footage which it copyrighted. The copyright bots took it […]
Timothy Geigner

Caught In The Crackdown: As Arrests At Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled

1 week 4 days ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica and Frontline. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school. A squad of […]
A.C. Thompson and Gabrielle Schonder

Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well.

1 week 4 days ago
Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit. The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past […]
Mike Masnick

Rep. Mike Johnson Tries, Fails To Sneak Clean Section 702 Re-Authorization Past The Goal Line

1 week 4 days ago
Despite a bunch of Republican lawmakers being extremely (and mostly performatively) upset that their communications were accessed during investigations of the January 2021 insurrection attempt, the current version of the Trump administration seems to prefer a clean re-authorization of the surveillance powers it so recently deemed a dangerous part of the “deep state.” The FISA […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi & ESP32 Bundle

1 week 4 days ago
The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ESP32 Bundle has 14 courses covering what you need to get started on building out your own smart home. After learning the basics, courses show you how to create a weather monitoring system, a smart home security system, a plant watering system, and more. Courses also cover getting familiar […]
Daily Deal

Court To Bondi: Demanding Platforms Censor Speech And Bragging About It On Fox News Is, In Fact, A First Amendment Violation

1 week 4 days ago
For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of […]
Mike Masnick

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

1 week 5 days ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is dfbomb with a comment about the insane charges being brought against adults who assist students during anti-ICE protests: These fucking assholes terrorized our schools. They approached our people observing schools during morning and afternoon drop offs, pretending to be locals. We saw through them. […]
Leigh Beadon

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Lilac Song

1 week 6 days ago
We’re past the halfway point in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals winners, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Remix: Lilac Song by Autumn […]
Leigh Beadon

AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam

1 week 6 days ago
Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess. By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not […]
Timothy Geigner

Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked

2 weeks ago
Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It’s also worth remembering […]
Mike Masnick

Inside Trump’s Effort To “Take Over” The Midterm Elections

2 weeks ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had […]
Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield

A First Amendment Legend Eviscerates Brendan Carr With Substance And Style

2 weeks ago
We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a massive coalition of 80+ legal scholars, former FCC officials, and civil liberties groups […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Python Crash Course

2 weeks ago
The Python Crash Course is a guide on how to get started in Python, why you should learn it, and how you can learn it. The syntax of the language is clean and the length of the code is relatively short. In this comprehensive course, you will get in-depth knowledge in data types, loops, python […]
Daily Deal

Brendan Carr Cooking Up New Sham Investigation Of Jimmy Kimmel

2 weeks ago
As the boss of the country’s media and telecom regulators, there’s plenty of corporate malfeasance and corrupt shenanigans Brendan Carr could be targeting on any given day at the country’s biggest media and telecom companies. But because Carr’s never been all that interested in the public interest, he’s once again spending his time trying to […]
Karl Bode

Rockstar On Latest Potential Hack & Information Leak: Meh, We Don’t Care

2 weeks ago
Several years ago, Rockstar Games suffered an intrusion into its corporate network. During that intrusion, a trove of data, files, and information about the in-development and unfinished Grand Theft Auto 6 game was exfiltrated. Under monetary threat of that data leaking, Rockstar completely lost its mind and went on a DMCA takedown campaign to try […]
Timothy Geigner