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FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent much of the last five years on cable TV whining incessantly about foreign entanglement with U.S. companies. Even companies he doesn’t regulate. He was positively apoplectic about China’s ownership of TikTok, which you may recall they “fixed” by offloading the social media company to Trump’s billionaire friends (while curiously […]

This week, n00bdragon takes both top spots in the insightful side. In first place, it’s a comment about Trump’s latest attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel fired: What gets me the most confused is that Kimmel gave his monologue multiple days before the WHCD. No one objected at the time. No one, not even the administration, […]

We’ve arrived at the end of 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, Best Visuals, Best Remix, and Best Digital Game winners, and now we’re wrapping things up with a look at […]

A quick reminder: America has not had a confirmed Surgeon General at the federal level since January of 2025. Yes, that’s over a year ago. How we got here is a microcosm of the Trump administration generally: chaos, misfires, and the wrong people at the very top. Janette Nesheiwat was Trump’s first nominee. MAGA gremlin […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her […]

I will continue to make the case for a 100 Justice Supreme Court because we need to get to the point that no single Supreme Court Justice matters. As it stands, each individual Justice has way too much power, and when they go mad with it, they can undermine the very structure of democracy. And […]

Shortly before the Supreme Court inflicted enormous damage on the Voting Rights Act, the Reconstruction Amendments of the Constitution, any pretense of constitutionally guaranteed Equal Protection, the civil rights movement, its credibility, and our democracy writ large with its Alito-penned decision in Louisiana v. Callais, it released a separate decision in First Women’s Choice Resource […]

Capture emotions and tell stories through photography with the Photography Master Class Bundle. Transform your skills with six diverse courses, including Portrait Photography, DSLR Photography, Wedding Photography, Off Camera Flash photography, and more. Whether you’re a beginner or experienced, this bundle offers a wealth of knowledge and techniques to enhance your craft. It’s on sale […]

Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in the 2018 mid-term election, Moore had already been suspended from the Alabama bench for a long list of violations: A normal […]

Brendan Carr’s FCC claims to be moving forward their their plan to “review ABC’s broadcast licenses” because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the president’s wife. And it’s every bit as dumb and legally baseless as you might expect. Carr has sent a letter to ABC/Disney saying he’s accelerating the review of their existing broadcast […]

Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren’t to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. […]

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 roundup of the latest news in online […]

Lawmakers in Congress are moving quickly on the GUARD Act, an age-gating bill restricting minors’ access to a wide range of online tools, with a key vote expected this week. The proposal is framed as a response to alarming cases involving “AI companions” and vulnerable young users. But the text of the bill goes much further, and could […]

There’s a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. “Hans,” one asks, peering at his cap, “are we the baddies?” The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for […]

The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt […]

Not that ICE was ever that great about taking care of all the people it detains. It certainly wasn’t during Trump’s first term. The DHS Inspector General released a report that said there were numerous problems in a single detention facility. Not only that but what was contained in the report was incomplete because the […]

More than 4,000 Hollywood insiders recently signed a letter blasting Paramount’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, noting that the massive consolidation will be very harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. As we saw with the AT&T Warner deal, history generally supports this; these debt-riddled deals are broadly, uniformly harmful. Companies that take on […]

You’re all sick of me saying we need to have more nuance in the discussion about AI use in the gaming industry. I get it. I’m also not going to stop. And I hope you will have noticed that I have called for nuance in both directions. While I’m more optimistic than many in our […]

As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free – is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That’s because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to such an extent that the […]

Raids and arrests around the nation by federal immigration officers all feature the same thing: a bunch of people in masks shoving people into unmarked vehicles. What’s happening under Trump during his second term doesn’t feel like America. And it certainly doesn’t look like America. Instead, it looks like the actions of paramilitary jump-out squads, […]