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Trump’s FTC Turns Consumer Protection Into MAGA Protection Racket

4 months ago
When Andrew Ferguson made his pitch to Donald Trump to take over the organization, his one-page “pick me” plea talked about “ending” former FTC Chair Lina Khan’s “politically motivated investigations.” We pointed out at the time how hilarious it was that he then made it clear he fully intended to abuse the power of the […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The 2025 Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle

4 months ago
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 […]
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LA Law Enforcement Agencies Rioted So Hard They Ended Up Shooting Each Other

4 months ago
While Donald Trump was trying (and failing) to cheer himself up with a self-congratulatory birthday parade — I mean, just look at this sad boy: — the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriffs Department were busy turning peaceful protests in violent protests. Throughout the nation, millions gathered peacefully to protest Trump’s military parade. […]
Tim Cushing

The Trump Admin’s Dish Network Con Reaches Its Ultimate Conclusion: Failure, Bankruptcy, And Rich New Spectrum Holdings For Elon Musk

4 months ago
Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

4 months ago
This week, our winners on the insightful side are a comment-and-reply combo regarding Trump ordering the National Guard into California. In first place, it’s huskcummerbund with a question: Hey, remember when Kristi Neom tweeted “If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard, that would be a direct attack on states’ rights. Over the last several years, […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: June 8th – 14th

4 months ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Don Henley was using TikTok as a reason to push for stronger copyright laws, while some Senators were asking the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 in a ridiculous manner, and Ron Wyden was explaining how Trump and many others were totally wrong about 230. Meanwhile, we continued to […]
Leigh Beadon

Senior English Judge Warns That Lawyers Who Use AI Must Check Their Legal Citations Thoroughly – Or Face ‘Severe Sanction’

4 months ago
One of the legitimate criticisms of large language models, generative AI, and chatbots is that they produce hallucinations –- output that is plausible but wrong. That’s a problem in all domains, but arguably it’s a particularly serious one in the field of law. Hallucinated citations undermine the entire edifice of common law, which is based […]
Glyn Moody

Warner Bros. Discovery Investors Balk At CEO Zaslav Getting Another Fat Raise As Company Unwinds Disastrous And Pointless Megamerger

4 months ago
You might recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everyone amazing new synergies for the media sector. Instead it wound up being a giant sloppy turd of a deal resulting in endless layoffs, the shuttering of numerous popular media brands, the cancellation of a long line of popular programming, higher consumer prices, and lower […]
Karl Bode

Migrant Children Are Being Added To A Criminal DNA Database Just Because

4 months ago
Each day adds another layer of fucked-upness to this country’s anti-immigration efforts. We, as a nation, are now involved daily in extrajudicial renditioning of migrants to countries they’ve never lived in. We’re all implicated in nearly daily rejections of court orders and any remaining shred of human decency. We’re treating human beings like trash to […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class

4 months ago
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll […]
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Judge: No, Donald Trump Can’t Just Order The National Guard To Invade Los Angeles

4 months ago
When a federal judge grants a temporary restraining order within hours of a hearing and writes 36 pages explaining why the President of the United States is acting illegally and unconstitutionally, you know something significant just happened. Federal Judge Charles Breyer did exactly that last night, blocking Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to […]
Mike Masnick

Noem Announces Military Will ‘Liberate’ LA From Democracy, Then Watches Security Throw Senator To Ground

4 months ago
Editor’s Note: As I was getting this article ready to publish, a judge granted California a Temporary Restraining Order against the deployment of the National Guard. We’ll have a separate write up of that later. When the Secretary of Homeland Security announces that federal forces will remain in an American city until they “liberate” it […]
Mike Masnick

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Outrage For The Machine

4 months 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 week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]
Mike Masnick

Elon Musk’s New Business Model For ExTwitter: Give Us Money Or We Sue

4 months ago
As you’ll likely recall, in late 2023, Elon Musk told advertisers to “go fuck yourself” and “don’t advertise” in response to a question about advertisers feeling uncomfortable placing their brands next to the kind of content that Musk was promoting via the ExTwitter algorithm. But the full context of the quote is interesting in retrospect: […]
Mike Masnick

Palantir Continues To Burnish Its Evil Tech Overlord Reputation By Kicking Journalists Out Of A Tech Conference

4 months ago
Palantir has never had a great reputation. Even before it teamed up with Trump to create a massive, abusable database of American residents’ information, it was working with forward-looking cop shops, that wanted similar massive, abusable databases of their own, even if those were limited to surveilling people in their own jurisdictions. The company is […]
Tim Cushing

A Manufactured Crisis: How A Few Hooligans In LA Became The Pretext For Military Rule

4 months ago
Today we need to examine something that reveals the machinery of authoritarian propaganda with surgical precision: how a handful of violent incidents across a few city blocks in Los Angeles was transformed into a “crisis” justifying the deployment of federal troops against American citizens. And how easily that transformation succeeded. I write this from Los […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Stone River eLearning

4 months ago
They say you should never stop learning, and at Stone River, that mantra is a way of life. Through this subscription, you’ll get full access to 800+ courses and 4,800 hours of online learning, covering everything from iOS mobile development to graphic design. Plus, you’ll get a range of VIP perks, including unlimited eBooks and […]
Daily Deal