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It’s best to view Elon Musk’s DOGE as an attack. While right wing propaganda (and gullible media outlets and politicians) frame DOGE as a “cost saving” effort at “improving government efficiency,” that’s just flimsy-ass cover for its real purpose: the dismantling of corporate oversight, environmental guard rails, consumer protection, civil rights, and the social safety […]

The enshittification of Roku’s streaming service, by which the company seeks the exact pinpoint at which it can extract the most amount of money from its customers without fostering a mass exodus of those same customers, continues. While Roku is not alone in the world of streaming services descending into this muck, it has been […]

California legislators have begun debating a bill (A.B. 412) that would require AI developers to track and disclose every registered copyrighted work used in AI training. At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable step toward transparency. But it’s an impossible standard that could crush small AI startups and developers while giving big tech […]

Support us on Patreon » We recently announced the launch of Otherwise Objectionable, a brand new documentary podcast hosted by Mike in partnership with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, covering the history — and the vital importance — of Section 230. This week, we’re featuring the entire debut episode right here on the Techdirt Podcast. Check it […]

When faced with a difficult technology policy challenge, policymakers can respond in one of two ways: with careful analysis of what’s technically possible, or by demanding Silicon Valley simply wave a magic wand and make all problems disappear. Romania has chosen… the latter. The backstory here is pretty straightforward: A Russian-supporting candidate leveraged TikTok to […]

I honestly don’t understand this compunction to break things that are already working fine. Axon makes body cameras (and Tasers!), but it simply wasn’t enough to equip cops with cameras and cop shops with expensive service contracts. No, the company insisted the way forward was dropping AI into existing tech so robots could start doing […]

Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function according to pre-defined requirements. Courses cover the basics, Bugzilla, JIRA, testing techniques, Java TestNG, and more. It’s on sale […]

It took exactly three days for Trump to prove that Judge Beryl Howell’s “Alice in Wonderland” comparison wasn’t just apt, but prescient. After the judge blocked his executive order attempting to destroy Perkins Coie for representing his political opponents, Trump has now issued an almost identical order targeting another major law firm, Paul Weiss. Because […]

There are more than $42.5 billion in broadband grants headed to the states courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The GOP voted against the bill, but have repeatedly turned around and taken credit for its looming benefits among our broadly misinformed electorate. And, as we long predicted, they’re now redrafting key components of the program to the direct benefit of […]

While the number of trademark dispute stories in the alcohol industry has slowed down compared to where it was five years ago, they certainly haven’t gone away entirely. While many past stories were a matter of brewery on brewery trademark violence, owing largely to the creative manner in which craft breweries name and trade dress […]

Late last month, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a request for public comment on so-called “tech censorship.” America has a vibrant and successful market-driven system for content moderation, enabled by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows platforms to set their own rules, while users decide where to engage. That’s why conversation on […]

The DHS and its main anti-immigration component, ICE, have always been big fans of social media surveillance. This has been part of the so-called “enhanced screening” protocols for several years now, deployed against foreign residents upon arrival in this nation, whether at border crossings or international airports where they’re just flying in for a short-term […]

It’s no secret that Russia has taken advantage of the Internet’s global reach and low distribution costs to flood the online world with huge quantities of propaganda (as have other nations): Techdirt has been writing about Putin’s troll army for a decade now. Russian organizations like the Internet Research Agency have been paying large numbers […]

There’s a certain poetry to Tesla executives discovering that trade wars are, in fact, not good and easy to win. Last week, someone at Tesla sent a detailed letter to the US Trade Representative essentially begging for relief from the very policies their CEO has been championing as he destroys the traditional institutions of government. […]

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Well that was fast. We were just talking about RFK Jr.’s recent comments on the measles outbreak in several southern states, mainly Texas, and how those comments were dangerous. The HHS Secretary, while not specifically denouncing the MMR vaccine, suggested that malnourishment was to blame for severe illnesses and death within the outbreak. But he’s […]

For years, more ham-fisted printer manufacturers have waged a not-so-subtle war on consumers by blocking the ability to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. HP and Canon have both been particularly obnoxious on this front, and continue to engage in the practice despite a growing pile of assorted lawsuits. Brother has historically been one of the […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rocky with a reply to an unhinged comment about the “debunked” Steele Dossier “funded by Hillary Clinton”: What’s funny here is that you don’t actually know the origin of said dossier or you have conveniently excised that knowledge from your brain, just like do […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the DOJ ended up with a mistrial in its first attempt to prosecute an accused leaker, and also proposed some Section 230 reform ideas that were even dumber than expected, while Match.com was also getting on the anti-230 bandwagon. FBI Director Chris Wray was pitching weakened encryption at […]

As we’ve been following along to some degree with the whole Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni legal mess, the more recent stories have been about Baldoni’s attempt to go after protected creative speech in a Deadpool movie, the choice of waging a PR war before the trial even starts, and the Streisand Effect nature to […]