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Posts by Techdirt

Caught In The Crackdown: As Arrests At Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled This story was originally published by ProPublica and Frontline. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school. A squad of […]
5 hours ago 1 1 0 0
Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit. The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past […]
7 hours ago 0 1 0 0
Rep. Mike Johnson Tries, Fails To Sneak Clean Section 702 Re-Authorization Past The Goal Line Despite a bunch of Republican lawmakers being extremely (and mostly performatively) upset that their communications were accessed during investigations of the January 2021 insurrection attempt, the current version of the Trump administration seems to prefer a clean re-authorization of the surveillance powers it so recently deemed a dangerous part of the “deep state.” The FISA […]
9 hours ago 0 1 0 0
Daily Deal: The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi & ESP32 Bundle The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ESP32 Bundle has 14 courses covering what you need to get started on building out your own smart home. After learning the basics, courses show you how to create a weather monitoring system, a smart home security system, a plant watering system, and more. Courses also cover getting familiar […]
9 hours ago 0 0 0 0
Court To Bondi: Demanding Platforms Censor Speech And Bragging About It On Fox News Is, In Fact, A First Amendment Violation For the better part of five years, we’ve been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of “jawboning.” Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri’s AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of […]
10 hours ago 1 3 0 0
Netgear Gets Mysterious Exemption To Trump FCC ‘Router Ban,’ Refuses To Say How Late last month we noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a “new ban” on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC […]
14 hours ago 1 1 0 0
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is dfbomb with a comment about the insane charges being brought against adults who assist students during anti-ICE protests: These fucking assholes terrorized our schools. They approached our people observing schools during morning and afternoon drop offs, pretending to be locals. We saw through them. […]
1 day ago 1 1 0 0
Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Lilac Song We’re past the halfway point in 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, and Best Visuals winners, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Remix: Lilac Song by Autumn […]
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AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam Two trends that I’m very interested in are about to collide and it’s going to be a mess. By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I’m also not […]
3 days ago 0 1 0 0
Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked Back in January, we covered Trump’s audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It’s also worth remembering […]
3 days ago 2 1 0 0
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Inside Trump’s Effort To “Take Over” The Midterm Elections This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had […]
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A First Amendment Legend Eviscerates Brendan Carr With Substance And Style We’ve been covering Brendan Carr’s censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the “free speech warrior” branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a massive coalition of 80+ legal scholars, former FCC officials, and civil liberties groups […]
3 days ago 0 0 0 0
Daily Deal: Python Crash Course The Python Crash Course is a guide on how to get started in Python, why you should learn it, and how you can learn it. The syntax of the language is clean and the length of the code is relatively short. In this comprehensive course, you will get in-depth knowledge in data types, loops, python […]
3 days ago 0 0 0 0
Trump Still Pretending The Most Dangerous Domestic Terrorists Are People Who Don’t Like Fascism Just to be clear, when I refer to “Trump” in terms of his administration, I’m referring to the collective hive mind of dangerous enablers he employs. Trump, by himself, is incapable of closing an umbrella. It’s the people around him that are dangerous, since they’re able to convert his rants and brain stem impulses into […]
3 days ago 1 0 0 0
Brendan Carr Cooking Up New Sham Investigation Of Jimmy Kimmel 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 […]
3 days ago 0 1 0 0
Rockstar On Latest Potential Hack & Information Leak: Meh, We Don’t Care 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 […]
4 days ago 1 1 0 0
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: The Silence Of The LLMs 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 […]
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The Right Wing Origins Age Verification Laws Don’t Disappear Just Because They’re Going Bipartisan. 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 […]
4 days ago 0 2 0 0
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All But 3 Of The 4,499 Refugees Admitted To The US Under Trump Are White South Africans 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 […]
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Daily Deal: The Ultimate Python & Artificial Intelligence Certification Bundle 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 […]
4 days ago 0 0 0 0
Oh Look, The MAGA FTC Built The Censorship Industrial Complex It Was Screaming About 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 […]
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The Wall Street Journal Wonders Why There Are Suddenly So Many Sleazy Fees 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 […]
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Nintendo’s Haphazard ‘Mario Maker 2’ Takedown Process Rife With Abuse 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 […]
5 days ago 0 0 0 0
War As A Pretext: Gulf States Are Tightening The Screws On Speech—Again 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 […]
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ACAB: Cops Are Bringing ‘Delinquency Of A Minor’ Charges Against Adults Who Assist Students During Anti-ICE Protests 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 […]
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Judge Tosses Trump’s Ridiculous $10 Billion Defamation Suit Against Rupert Murdoch 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 […]
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Daily Deal: Geekey Multi-Tool 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: […]
5 days ago 0 0 0 0
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Administration Apparently Planning To Blow Off FISA Court’s Ordered Fixes For Section 702 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 […]
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‘Trump Phone’ Sees Price Hike, But Still No Release Date (Or Actual Phone) 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 […]
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The CDC Doesn’t Want You To See A CDC Report On How Effective COVID Vaccines Are 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 […]
6 days ago 1 1 0 0