There are levels of corruption, and then there’s whatever the hell this is. Donald Trump is demanding that American taxpayers pay him $230 million for being prosecuted. Which is like getting a speeding ticket and then billing the state for the cost of your traffic lawyer. Except in this case, the traffic lawyer is now […]
If Elon Musk probably has a superpower, it isn’t his engineering or business savvy. It’s probably his rank opportunism. The latest case in point: this week saw a massive outage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that managed to take many of your favorite websites and services offline. The outage also hampered the workflows of countless […]
Look, folks, I’m sorry, but RFK Jr. is going to force us to talk about sperm. And I’m very much going to try to keep the jokes at an absolute minimum, because, as per usual when Kennedy starts spouting off about something health-related, this isn’t actually funny. At this point I don’t think it makes […]
Just days after we wrote about the EU’s renewed push for chat control, Germany has delivered a very important “no” vote. During discussions with EU countries last Wednesday, Germany’s opposition was decisive enough to kill the proposal’s momentum and remove it from this week’s agenda for EU justice ministers. But it wasn’t just a procedural […]
Support us on Patreon » As you know, we talk a lot about decentralization and protocols over platforms. When it comes to decentralized social media in particular, one person who has been working on it since the earliest days is developer Rabble, who was around at the very beginning of what would become Twitter and has […]
The Party of Free Speech Snowflakes is at it again. Despite Charlie Kirk not actually being a member of the administration or, indeed, a political leader of any sort, the Trump Administration continues to act as though one of its own has been assassinated, rather than just another podcaster who happened to be more popular […]
Look, we get it. Your inbox is probably drowning in newsletters right now. Every publication, influencer, and their cousin’s dog walker has suddenly discovered the revolutionary concept of… sending you emails with stuff to read. Who could have predicted that people might want content delivered directly to them? Well, actually, we could have. Because we’ve […]
The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico W Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. With over 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming and IoT concepts. Packed […]
Two Trump-appointed federal judges just decided that facts don’t matter when the President wants to send the military into American cities. Donald Trump declared Portland a “war-ravaged” city requiring military intervention based on a few anti-ICE protests and imagery from five years ago on Fox News that he apparently thought was happening now. The actual […]
For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has embraced a neat trick: by claiming that literally anything in factual opposition to their beliefs is “biased” and therefore must be discarded as unreliable, they’ve bullied U.S. media into becoming a feckless mess terrified of accusations of “liberal bias.” Of course, if you ask the […]
Several weeks back, we wrote about a very silly trademark opposition filed by Ohio State University against a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called The Brown Jug. At issue was the restaurants offering of an alcoholic drink called “Buckeye Tears.” See, the University of Michigan and OSU are big time rivals in the realm of […]
As all things old are new again, a bill that would make obtaining bad patents easier and harder to challenge is being considered in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced. PERA would overturn long-standing court […]
2025 has delivered almost nothing but bad news. Here’s more of that, as first reported by Israeli press outlet, Calcalist: Control of NSO Group is set to leave Israeli hands. A group of American investors led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds has agreed to acquire the controversial spyware developer in a deal valued at several […]
Brian Reed’s “Question Everything” podcast built its reputation on careful journalism that explores moral complexity within the journalism field. It’s one of my favorite podcasts. Which makes his latest pivot so infuriating: Reed has announced he’s now advocating to repeal Section 230—while demonstrating he fundamentally misunderstands what the law does, how it works, and what […]
At least the last time this many journalists fled an oppressive regime, the military actually offered to give them a ride. That’s not the sort of thing that’s happening these days. In fact, the current administration is more like the current Vietnam government than it would care to admit, especially when it rails against socialism […]
The Adobe Acrobat Pro + Microsoft Office Professional License Bundle isn’t around for much longer. It’s a chance to get a 3-year Adobe Acrobat Pro 2024 license and a license for Microsoft Office Pro 2021 for $100. It’s your all-in-one bundle for editing PDFs, creating docs, and working smarter on Windows. Note: The Techdirt Deals […]
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command…. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into history and became truth.” —George Orwell, 1984 This past weekend witnessed what may have […]
Whoops! Some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrid owners were stranded after the company pushed out a buggy software update that prevented the vehicles from running, and, at least according to one Reddit poster, resulted in the vehicle shutting off in the middle of a highway: “I was driving 65 on the left lane of the highway […]
This week, MrWilson takes both top spots on the insightful side (and the top spot on the funny side). In first place for insightful, it’s a comment about Elon Musk’s disastrous impact on the government: The worst part about it isn’t just that the Fox News sponges won’t get the full message, they’ll not understand […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Ajit Pai put the final bullet in net neutrality and decided to move forward with unconstitutional rulemaking on Section 230, while Clarence Thomas joined the brigade of opposing 230, and Congress introduced yet another anti-230 bill, because sure why not? We looked at the pretty crummy results of […]
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