Let’s start out with the obvious (and obviously heartbreaking): this is not related to the multiple times ICE officers have murdered people. Those officers still remain at large and the DOJ and DHS have shown absolutely zero interest in following up on those cases. In fact, when any local agency attempts to do so, they’re […]

Here we go again: another case where it’s easy to cheer a court ruling against Elon Musk, and unfortunately easy to miss the much more important underlying point — which the judge clearly did. In July, we wrote about how even as awful as Elon Musk is, and as awful as it was that (with […]

InfoSec4TC Projects Hub is the missing link between cybersecurity theory and real-world practice. Instead of watching more lectures, you’ll step directly into simulated corporate environments and complete actual cybersecurity and GRC projects designed by industry professionals, the same kind of work security analysts and compliance officers handle on the job every day. The Hub includes […]

One of the natural side effects of flooding the zone with hastily hired, poorly trained immigration enforcement officers is an increase in violence and rights violations. Christian Castro may not have been a new ICE hire, but he’d been there long enough to realize the new White House boss had given him and his fellow […]

In addition to the $111 billion Paramount/Warner Bros merger just being foundationally bad for creatives, labor, and consumers, the Ellison family-owned company’s executives just keep demonstrating why they’re not really the kind of folks you want dominating the lion’s share of U.S. media. That’s included calling deal critics “antisemitic,” cozying up to foreign authoritarians, constantly […]

The measles outbreak, that began in America nearly two years ago, has only increased in velocity. We recently talked about the deaths of two children in Pennsylvania who both died while infected with measles. I’m altering my language slightly here from that original post in which I described those children as having died of measles […]

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do […]

It would be nice to go a day or two (or three-day weekend!) without being apprised of some new awfulness from this administration. Since that’s not going to happen, let’s check in with the latest shitshow! And here it is: the Pentagon has “enlisted” some X.com influencers to thrust and parry on behalf of the […]

I am never asking the monkey’s paw for a federal government that defends fair use again. For decades on Techdirt, I’ve talked about the absolute necessity of strong fair use, and have been disappointed over and over again at how little the federal government has fought for fair use. For decades, the rare times when […]

The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle has 7 online courses designed to help learners build skills that align directly with industry expectations. The focus is on practical tools and languages used by data professionals: Python for programming, Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation, foundational certification prep and specialized work with Databricks, an industry-standard platform for data engineering […]

A whistleblower report delivered to the DHS Office of the Inspector General makes it clear ICE is willing to hire pretty much anyone who applies for the job. Keeping up appearances (and by “appearances,” I mean constantly pushing for 1,500-3,000 arrests per day) is tough when you don’t have the warm bodies to do all […]

We’ve well established how the $111 billion Paramount and Warner Brothers merger is terrible for labor, creatives, consumers, and markets. But the kind of behaviors Paramount leadership have been engaged in to sell the deal also give a pretty clear indication what kind of company we’re dealing with, and why they shouldn’t be allowed to […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.’s resignation coming entirely from Democrats: And that’s why trying to distill partisan politics down to just “team blue” vs. “team red” is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death […]

This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006

I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don’t […]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. You might assume that what you tell a doctor stays between you, your physician and perhaps your insurer. But the reality is more complicated. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal privacy law that governs health information and is commonly known as […]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

There is a flood of lawsuits against social media, from a variety of different parties, all claiming some kind of harm. Would you feel differently about some of those lawsuits if you found out the plaintiffs bringing them were talking amongst themselves about how they were doing it just to become rich? Because we just […]

CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned […]

You have to know you’re fucking up when your largest and best-paying customer base is increasingly noping out of contract renewals. That more than anything is probably what provoked ALPR maker Flock Safety to start implementing a few guardrails for use. It seemingly had no problem with being the target of negative press for most […]

Just so we’re clear: pre-merger promises (especially in the media and telecom sectors) are absolutely worthless. There’s fifty years of indisputable evidence that all of the “synergies” and innovative improvements promised on the front end of major media mergers mean absolutely nothing. Especially in a country dead-set on defanging its labor and consumer protection regulators. […]

To quote the opening line from the court opinion that this post is based upon, “Millions of American teenagers have sex.” This post is has nothing to do with whether that sort of thing is good or bad, natural or otherwise, nor the moral implications of it all. Whatever you think about that opening line, […]

At this point all fifty states have considered passing “right to repair” law aimed at making it easier and cheaper for consumers (and independent repair shops) to repair their tech. That said, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, none have seen any enforcement […]

If you’re worried about the bad optics of working with ICE, the federal government is here to help subsidize your recovery from mass deportation conjunctivitis. If you’re worried about the personal negative side effects of buddying up to ICE’s masked kidnapping squads, the administration is here to assure cops that it might cover some of […]

From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it “age” verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we’ve been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn’t waiting. Maybe it was already happening. This week a […]

Become a language expert with a Babbel Language Learning subscription. With the app, you can use Babbel on desktop and mobile, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ […]

A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration pushed a novel legal theory in order to juice its migrant arrest stats. It was a two-part process. First, the administration unilaterally declared expansive areas near US military bases to be “national defense areas.” This meant that areas surrounding bases — like (especially) Fort Bliss […]

When we look back at this time and history words like “courage,” “integrity,” and “ethics” aren’t words you’re going to be associating with U.S. tech industry leadership. Everywhere you look you have tech sector executives either openly embracing fascism and the frontal assault on representative democracy, or too feckless and timid to take any sort […]

Sony’s ability to generate anger lately is pretty impressive. After the company announced that there would be no more physical media versions of games made starting in 2027, to the resounding anger of many people, Sony also demonstrated yet again that it’s capable of ripping away the digital “purchases” people had made once its own […]

Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: Note: A chunk of the settlement addresses unauthorized users […]