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Nintendo Updates Console EULA: We’ll Brick Your Shit If We Don’t Like What You Do With It It's no secret that Nintendo is among the most draconian actors when it comes to intellectual property. Techdirt is rife with posts on the various ways the company has been a royal and overreaching pain in…

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

Judge Tosses BS Trespassing Charges From ‘Military Zones’ Hastily Erected At Southern Border It's not enough to simply go after anyone looking kinda Venezuelan these days. DHS components have an unquenchable thirst for arrest stats, especially now that Trump's second Oval Office stay has removed…

submitted 10 hours ago • 0 comments

After GAO Started Investigating DOGE, DOGE Decided To ‘Investigate’ GAO In a brazen attempt to avoid oversight, Elon Musk's DOGE team is now trying to "audit" the very agency tasked with auditing them. On Friday, NOTUS reported that DOGE officials showed up at the Government Accountability Office…

submitted 12 hours ago • 6 comments

The FCC Must Reject Efforts To Lock Up Public Airwaves President Trump’s attack on public broadcasting has attracted plenty of deserved attention, but there’s a far more technical, far more insidious policy change in the offing—one that will take away Americans’ right to unencumbered access to our…

submitted 14 hours ago • 0 comments

Republican Lawmakers Want To Replace The Community Standard For Obscenity With Their Own Standard They may claim they care about the children, but the Republican push for age verification laws, book bans, and the general censorship of anything not specifically straight and (preferably) white is…

submitted 15 hours ago • 0 comments

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submitted 15 hours ago • 0 comments

Where Did All Those Brave Free Speech Warriors Go? Since the start of the Trump administration, many of our biggest concerns about how MAGA would attack free speech have not only proven true, but have turned out to be understated. Nearly all parts of the administration are seeking to silence…

submitted 17 hours ago • 7 comments

New Law Would Add New Tax To Your Netflix Bill So AT&T And Comcast Execs Can Get Richer Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for decades in the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent…

submitted 21 hours ago • 0 comments

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Stephen Miller suggesting the suspension of habeas corpus: Remember: Once they suspend the civil rights of non-citizens, they’ll only ever…

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Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Cocoanut Hotel We're nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, and the honorable mentions, and this week we're…

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Buc-ee’s Gas Station Chain Is Becoming The Monster Energy Of Gas Stations For Trademark Bullying If you're from Texas or its surrounding states, you've probably heard of Buc-ee's. The gas station and convenience store chain is a staple of the area and has a well-known branded logo that looks like…

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Supreme Court Pumps The Brakes On Trump’s Use Of The Alien Enemies Act The Supreme Court has delivered a clear rebuke to the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the Alien Enemies Act, issuing a slightly more detailed ruling that follows up on last month's midnight emergency order. That…

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

The Kids Online Safety Act Will Make The Internet Worse For Everyone The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back in the Senate. Sponsors are claiming—again—that the latest version won’t censor online content. It isn’t true. This bill still sets up a censorship regime disguised as a “duty of care,”…

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DHS, CBP Looking For Facial Recognition Tech That Will Allow Them To Scan Every Person In A Vehicle The festival of bad ideas continues. Despite facial recognition having proven over and over again it's not really the solution to speedy ID verification that far too many people think it is,…

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FCC Commissioner Gomez Calls Out Administration’s Attack On Free Speech, Warns She May Get Fired We mentioned recently that the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC (and the only remaining Dem commissioner across both the FCC and FTC since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC…

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Trump’s FCC Wants To DOGE Itself, Yet Still Somehow Bully Companies For Doing Critical Journalism Or Not Being Racist Enough Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump's mindless…

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RFK Jr. Finally Says Something Sensible: ‘Don’t Take Medical Advice From Me’ Fresh off of his Mother's Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts…

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Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Hypocritical Infrastructure 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…

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

AI Is Making Many People Rethink Copyright For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons…

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Trump FCC To ‘Investigate’ Dish 5G Network, To The Direct Benefit Of… Elon Musk You might recall that the first Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to cover up the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they'd help Dish Network…

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Missouri AG Thinks Supreme Court Ruling Lets Him Control Social Media Moderation (It Doesn’t) Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey apparently thinks he gets to be editor-in-chief of every social media platform. In his latest attack on free speech rights, Bailey has announced a…

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Milwaukee PD Wants To Trade 2.5 Million Mugshots For Free Facial Recognition Tech Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking…

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Warner Brothers Discovery Continues Reign Of Post-Merger Incompetence As HBO Brand Once Again Rises From The Dead We've well documented by now how the AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless "business deals" ever conceived by modern…

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Palworld Patching Out More Gameplay Features As It Seeks To Invalidate Nintendo/Pokémon Patents Though we haven't discussed the lawsuit between Palword creator PocketPair and Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. so far this year, this turd of a suit is still going on. To the uninitiated, Palworld has long…

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Trump Administration’s Targeting Of International Students Jeopardizes Free Speech And Privacy Online The federal government is using social media surveillance to target student visa holders living in the United States for online speech the Trump administration disfavors. The administration has…

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Effective Accelerationism Is Just Technological Authoritarianism With A Smile Behind effective accelerationism's techno-optimist smile lies a familiar and dangerous impulse: subordinating human dignity to a technological imperative framed as inevitable. The effective accelerationism movement…

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Why The Fuck Are Democrats Helping Build MAGA’s Censorship Machine With KOSA? The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership's response is… to help them? Earlier today, Chuck Schumer and…

submitted 5 days ago • 25 comments

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DOJ Declares Victory In The War On Drugs, Claims 250 Million Lives Have Been Saved By Fentanyl Seizures Our long national nightmare is over. More lives have been saved than have possibly ever lived. And that's just since earlier this year. Using the same drug math that turns a couple of kilos into…

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Ted Cruz Proudly Makes Broadband Shittier And Homework Harder For U.S. School Kids Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule providing portable Wi-Fi hotspots to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program…

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RFK Jr. Takes His Grandkids For A Mother’s Day Swim In A River Of Human Shit Look, folks, I have to admit that I'm running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let's just do this quickly. He's a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy, is letting the current…

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

The House GOP Quietly Slipped In An AI Law That Would Accidentally Ban GOP’s Favorite ‘Save The Children’ Laws Buried in the House GOP's massive budget reconciliation bill is a seemingly simple provision about AI regulation. The idea appears straightforward enough: stop states from regulating AI…

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Techdirt Podcast Episode 418: The Elonification Of Government Support us on Patreon » We've written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York…

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Meta Threatens To Pull Facebook And Instagram Out Of Nigeria Over $290 Million Fine Imposed For Violation Of Local Privacy Laws It’s hardly a secret that Meta is an unpleasant company. That’s reflected both in terms of what happens behind closed doors, and its actions in the market. Some of its…

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Hasan Piker Just Gave His Millions Of Followers A Masterclass In What Not To Do When Detained By CBP Progressive streamer Hasan Piker's recent detention by CBP at the Chicago airport has generated widespread outrage — and rightfully so. No US citizen should be interrogated about their political…

submitted 6 days ago • 19 comments

Daily Deal: Adobe Photoshop Elements 2025 3-Year License Edit with the magic of AI, create with stylish effects and templates, and be creative on the go. With Adobe Photoshop Elements, it’s never been easier to fix flaws, fine-tune specific areas, and add motion to quickly bring your vision to…

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

NSO Group Owes Meta $167 Million In Damages For Using WhatsApp Servers To Deliver Malware We'll have to see if NSO Group has this sort of cash just laying around. Seems unlikely, what with its financial backers pulling out in response to a steady stream of negative headlines, as well as the…

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Sorry, Affordable, Evenly Deployed Fiber Optic Broadband Is Illegal Now Under Our Shitty, Ignorant Government The Trump administration has illegally declared the Digital Equity Act of 2021 "racist and unconstitutional," and called for it to be dismantled. The grant program had been helping push…

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Trump’s Plan For Tracking Costs Of Large Natural Disasters At NOAA: The Ostrich Routine The nightmare that is Elon Musk's DOGE cuts continues. The program, originally billed as a method for identifying all kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse within government spending, has shown itself to be more…

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

DOJ Lawyers Work For Justice & The Constitution — Not The White House In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon tried to fire the Department of Justice prosecutor leading an investigation into the president’s involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters. Since then, the…

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

The Copyright Office Issues A Largely Disappointing Report On AI Training, And Once Again A Major Fair Use Analysis Inexplicably Ignores The First Amendment As this post explains, we have issues with the third installment of the Copyright Office's report on AI. The rest of this post discusses…

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

With Courts Repeatedly Telling Trump Migrants Have Rights, Stephen Miller Suggests It’s Time To Suspend Habeas Corpus The mass renditioning of migrants hasn't gone exactly as planned. Sure, it's resulted in extreme amounts of stupid cruelty, which is very much on-brand for Trump administrations,…

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Trump Fires Nation’s Top Librarian Over Made-Up Culture War Claims The Trump administration last week fired one of the most respected librarians in America because she allegedly put "inappropriate books" in a library that basically gets copies of nearly all books and doesn't even allow children to…

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Daily Deal: Microsoft Office Professional 2021 Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork…

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DHS Proudly Declares It Might Arrest Congressional Reps For Doing Their Oversight Job, Settles For Arresting The Local Mayor You can believe any version of this story you want, but there's no version that makes ICE and the DHS look like heroes protecting themselves from an actual threat. Let's…

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Garmin CEO Hints More Paywalls And Enshittification Are Coming, Falsely Claims Users Love It We recently noted how device maker Garmin had decided to follow in the footsteps of Google's Fitbit, and begin putting basic features behind an annoying subscription paywall to goose revenues. Garmin's new…

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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt This week, we've got a double winner taking first place for both insightful and funny. It's Strawb with a comment about Darren Beattie embracing the Twitter Files playbook: Trump: “We will stop waste, fraud and abuse in the goverment!”…

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Honorable Mentions This is a brief detour in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last…

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments