Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that “emergency” keeps getting 75-day extensions. Trump is reportedly about to hit the snooze button on TikTok enforcement for the third time, extending a deadline that was supposedly so urgent that Congress had to rush through legislation ignoring basic […]
The Ultimate Python Programmer and Data Bundle has 9 courses that cover a variety of data science and Python related skills and tools. Start with learning the basics and move into learning how to use Keras, PyTorch, R, and more for data analysis and visualization. There’s more and it’s all on sale for $40. Note: […]
As ICE continues to engage in a mass deportation program that more closely resembles a mass kidnapping program, communities have literally taken to the streets to chase ICE and their law enforcement enablers out of town. Rolling in looking like some sort of cartel death squad just isn’t intimidating enough anymore. And if you can’t […]
Despite the ongoing fake promise of “populism,” so far Trump 2.0 has proven to be a bonanza for telecom giants seeking to get even bigger. As usual that means higher broadband prices and shittier broadband service are just over the horizon. As a reward for promising to be more racist, Verizon recently saw its $20 […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side MrWilson with a comment about a Republican school superintendent bemoaning that “parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history”: Another accusation-confession. Walters has opted the state of Oklahoma out of understanding American history. In second place, it’s Professor Ronny with a simple comment […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, while many in the media were hedging their bets and wringing their hands in their coverage of the rapidly escalating protests over the murder of George Floyd, I was proud that we ran an appropriately uncompromising take from our own Tim Cushing: Let The Motherfucker Burn. In a […]
There are many stupid things about copyright law today, and one of them is how copyright law applies to characters. Because it shouldn’t, at least not in the ways it does. Copyright can legitimately apply to expression, which is why it can restrict you from copying, for example, a book or movie, because those are […]
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United […]
When you specifically ask a judge for something, get exactly what you requested, then immediately start whining about how burdensome your own suggestion is — well, that’s not legal strategy. That’s performance art. Worse: having a senior Justice Department official claim that the solution that the DOJ itself requested is being unfairly imposed on the […]
Become a language expert with the Babble Language Learning deal. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle […]
Welcome to the expanded panopticon, American citizens. Thanks to a very small percentage of your fellow Americans, the president, whom a minority of the general public returned to power, is throwing millions at a private contractor to gather as much data on US citizens as possible for reasons it has left unstated. That private contractor […]
We’ve long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The “news” outlet, originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVID was created in a North Carolina […]
It was a couple of weeks ago when I was stupidly watching one cable news channel or another when I witnessed some GOP talking head say that Donald Trump likes to build a team of competing viewpoints that fight with one another as a way of producing the best results. I think it was Scott […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space. His […]
This is a cross post from Prof. Eric Goldman’s blog, mostly written by Prof. Jess Miers, with additional commentary at the end from Eric. Two things can be true: Non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is a serious and gendered harm. And, the ‘Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act,’’ […]
This is delicious. Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma have tried to bend the education system to their will. And now they’re finding out it won’t be bent quite as easy as they thought. First, let’s take a look at the backstory here, which is steeped in the sort of stupidity we’ve come to expect from the […]
The Complete 2025 Cloud Computing Bundle has 4 courses focused on security, compliance and infrastructure. Courses cover AWS, Azure, and more. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements […]
Generally speaking, if a judge begins an order — in a case where hundreds of men were illegally renditioned to a Salvadoran concentration camp directly against that judge’s orders — by talking about Franz Kafka’s The Trial, you’d think that the judge is going to go hard against the government. Instead, Judge James Boasberg delivers […]
During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask. It costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without success: the […]
stLouIST