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Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Celebrating 100 Episodes & Launching Our Patreon

1 week 5 days ago
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 special episode, Mike and Ben reflect on 100 […]
Leigh Beadon

James Cameron Is A Weird Hypocrite When It Comes To Giant Hollywood Mergers

1 week 5 days ago
Back when Netflix was proposing a takeover of Warner Brothers, you might recall that director James Cameron had no shortage of critical things to say.   Cameron went so far as to write a heavily publicized letter to Senator Mike Lee, lamenting the Netflix Warner Brothers merger (and only the Netflix merger) as “disastrous to the motion […]
Karl Bode

France Keeps Breaking the Internet to Stop Piracy, Even Though It’s Not Working

1 week 5 days ago
Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The 2026 Complete Godot Stack Development Bundle

1 week 5 days ago
Dive into Godot – a rising star in the game engine world – with the 2026 Complete Godot Stack Development Bundle. You’ll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you’ll also explore techniques for game design and game […]
Daily Deal

Wireless Giants To Get Off The Hook For Spying On Your Daily Movements For Years

1 week 5 days ago
There’s some endless, curious tensions within the corrupt Trump administration when it comes to their effort to completely destroy the government’s ability to hold corporations accountable for dodgy, nefarious, or even illegal behavior. Their own, lazy, circular logic and bad faith legal interpretations are creating vast new legal minefields we’ll be untangling for decades. The […]
Karl Bode

Digital Hopes, Real Power: The Rise Of Network Shutdowns

1 week 6 days ago
Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored […]
Jillian York

Arkansas Tried To Pass An Unconstitutional Social Media Law. Again. It Lost. Again.

1 week 6 days ago
Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill’s own sponsor couldn’t accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube while the sponsor publicly claimed those were the exact platforms being targeted. When the state’s own expert witness testified that Snapchat […]
Mike Masnick

Hypocritically, The Origin Of The Supreme Court’s ‘Shadow Docket’ Was An Attempt To Curb Executive Power

1 week 6 days ago
I originally began this headline with the word “ironically.” But it would only be ironic if it wasn’t by design. Irony suggests something slightly out of the control of the principal figures resulted in something somewhat unexpected. That isn’t the case here. This was by design. The New York Times has obtained the behind-the-scenes memos […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: CyberTraining 365 Online Academy

1 week 6 days ago
CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned […]
Daily Deal

The Broken U.S. Press Sits Down For Cocktails And Giggles With Fascists

1 week 6 days ago
This Saturday is the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCA). And there’s been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corrupt administrations in U.S. history. This year, because an actual comedian might get somewhere close to […]
Karl Bode

Kash Patel’s Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic Is Designed To Generate Headlines, Not Win In Court

2 weeks ago
There are defamation lawsuits designed to win, and then there are defamation lawsuits designed to generate headlines for your fans on social media, punish journalists, and maybe — if you’re lucky — force a settlement or intimidate future reporting. FBI Director Kash Patel’s brand new defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic is very obviously the second […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete Big Data And Power BI Bundle

2 weeks 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

2 weeks 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

2 weeks 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

2 weeks 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