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As the boss of the country’s media and telecom regulators, there’s plenty of corporate malfeasance and corrupt shenanigans Brendan Carr could be targeting on any given day at the country’s biggest media and telecom companies. But because Carr’s never been all that interested in the public interest, he’s once again spending his time trying to […]

Several years ago, Rockstar Games suffered an intrusion into its corporate network. During that intrusion, a trove of data, files, and information about the in-development and unfinished Grand Theft Auto 6 game was exfiltrated. Under monetary threat of that data leaking, Rockstar completely lost its mind and went on a DMCA takedown campaign to try […]

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 […]

I think it’s important to understand that, despite claims to the contrary, age verification is, inherently, a right-wing effort. While it’s currently true that age verification laws are being supported globally by those on the political right and left, they started as very much a right wing effort to suppress disliked speech by claiming it […]

We’ve got a throwback administration that wants to bring us back to halcyon days of early 1950s America, that preceded Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation. If it could, I’m sure it would go back even further, taking at least another 100 years off the clock. The Trump administration has no problem with embracing bigotry. That much […]

The Ultimate Python and Artificial Intelligence Bundle has 9 courses to help you take your Python and AI knowledge to the next level. You’ll learn about data pre-processing and visualization, artificial neural networks, how to use the Keras framework, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated […]

We’ve been covering the Trump administration’s escalating campaign against NewsGuard for a while now. It started with the House Oversight Committee’s absurd investigation of the company for the crime of expressing opinions about news reliability. But then there was the FTC’s burdensome fishing expedition and blocking of the merger of two advertising giants — Omnicom […]

I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and regulatory capture have ensured that big companies see no meaningful penalties […]

We’ve talked for many years about Nintendo’s shotgun approach to IP enforcement, as well as its heavy-handed ToS enforcement policies that can include bricking customer consoles and/or banning their accounts if they do something Nintendo doesn’t like, even if it’s not strictly illegal. This has all set up an ecosystem where being a Nintendo fan […]

War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered.  When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments have intensified efforts to silence […]

While the Trump administration’s extremely aggressive, thoroughly bigoted attempts to eliminate as many non-white people from this country as possible have resulted in some periodic push back from law enforcement officials, we can never forget that federal law enforcement officers are still just law enforcement officers. And, more often than not, they’ll always have the […]

Back in January of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a leather-bound birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell had assembled for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The book included letters from various associates, and one of them bore Donald Trump’s name. According to the article, it featured a hand-drawn outline of […]

Geekey is an innovative, compact multi-tool like nothing seen before. It’s truly a work of art with engineering that combines everyday common tools into one sleek little punch that delivers endless capability. Geekey features many common tools that have been used for decades and proven essential for everyday fixes. It’s on sale for $23. Note: […]

It wasn’t all that long ago that GOP legislators were collectively stonewalling a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Three years ago, these legislators were seeking to end the FBI (and other IC components’) access to Americans’ communications via “backdoor” searches of the NSA’s supposedly “foreign facing” collections. It wasn’t that the Republicans cared that Joe […]

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” was generous; it was a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, “MAGA-focused” mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resold T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy Trump brand […]

One of the most remarkable staffing decisions of the second Trump administration has been to allow the anti-vaxxers to run America’s health agencies. While RFK Jr. and his cadre of lieutenants prattle on about how they’re going to be super transparent, data-driven stewards of American health, their actions have put the lie to all of […]

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of multiple state, federal, and class action lawsuits for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, […]

Support us on Patreon » As we work our way towards a better future for the internet, the most encouraging and exciting part is the people out there building towards that future. Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler is one such person, and his new company Metalabel has some extremely interesting projects in the works, including the Dark […]

In early March, 438 security and privacy researchers from 32 countries signed a massive open letter warning that age verification mandates for the internet are technically impossible to get right, easy to circumvent, a serious threat to privacy and security, and likely to cause more harm than good. While many folks (including us at Techdirt) […]

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