Musk Decries Hitler’s Censorship, Right Before Threatening To Jail Critics
I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a fairly wild suggestion: if you spend years calling yourself a “free speech absolutist” while decrying “government censorship,” maybe one of your first moves after taking over the government shouldn’t be demanding prison sentences for journalists who report things you don’t like. But that’s […]
German Prosecutors Think It’s Funny People’s Homes Are Being Raided And Their Devices Seized Because They Said Stuff On The Internet
Germany’s history informs its current laws. That much is undeniable. But it doesn’t excuse the over-correction applied by legislators in hopes of heading off another Hitler. And it certainly doesn’t excuse prosecutors who are prosecuting “hate speech” in Germany. The country’s hate speech law has been problematic since its inception. Within days of its debut […]
Daily Deal: Babbel Language Learning (All Languages)
Become a language expert with the Babble Language Learning deal. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/18/daily-deal-babbel-language-learning-all-languages-15/
The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes
Here’s a silly thing that happens sometimes: A powerful person says something obviously false, and everyone pretends not to notice. This is the plot of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where an entire kingdom maintains a collective delusion until one child (who, importantly, hasn’t yet learned the sophisticated art of lying to yourself) points out that […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/18/the-elon-doge-emperor-has-no-clothes/
In A Monday Night Declaration, The White House Admits Musk And DOGE Violated The CFAA (Although They Might Not Realize It)
Suing Elon Musk and DOGE has finally led to at least one thing: the White House now finally defining Musk’s role in government. On Monday night, in the New Mexico v. Musk, it claimed him as a “an employee of the White House Office” with only “the ability to advise the President, or communicate the […]
This Week In Techdirt History: February 9th – 15th
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz dropped a case after suing on behalf of the wrong party and trying to swap plaintiffs, while copyright stroll Strike 3 got shut down by a judge and hit with $40k in legal fees. We looked at how US antitrust enforcement was clearly broken, […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/15/this-week-in-techdirt-history-february-9th-15th/
No Personal Liability For DOGE Yet, But With Two More Lawsuits We Get Closer
I’m going to keep pounding the drum for personal liability against Musk and DOGE, partly to scare them into backing off from their unlawful seizure of our government, and eventually to compensate us for the immense harm they’ve caused. So far it doesn’t seem like anyone has tried to personally sue them for damages, but […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Backdoors And Backsteps
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 […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/14/ctrl-alt-speech-backdoors-and-backsteps/
Trump’s DOJ Corruption Laid Bare… By His Own Conservative Prosecutors
Here’s a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don’t resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what’s happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted last fall for allegedly trading favors with Turkish officials, and is […]
Drugs Have Won The War On Drugs: Drugged-Up Rat Infestation Edition
Perhaps the only headline just as repeatable as “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” is this other banger from The Onion: Drugs Win Drug War. 50+ years of hardline prohibition have only resulted in better prices, better purity, and a slew of states legalizing or decriminalizing personal use amounts […]
Police Union Still Insists NY Misconduct Records Are Secret Despite Court Decisions Saying Otherwise
When you’re playing with house money, playing one losing hand after another isn’t a sign of tenacity. It’s just a way of signaling you can’t be trusted with the house’s money. That’s why appeal after appeal from government entities don’t tend to indicate that they’re in the right. It just means they don’t care how […]
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Linux and UNIX operating systems have become increasingly popular in commercial computing environments. Due to their rapid growth in today’s businesses, Linux/UNIX administrators have also become very much in demand. This Linux/UNIX Training Bundle will help you learn the knowledge and skills to install, configure, & support a Linux/UNIX server, and more. It’s on sale […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/14/daily-deal-linux-unix-training-bundle/
DOGE’s ‘Genius’ Coders Launch Website So Full Of Holes, Anyone Can Write To It
If you want to write something on the U.S. government’s official DOGE website, apparently you can just… do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal. The story here is that DOGE — Elon Musk’s collection of supposed […]
Price Hikes, Enshittification Trigger 700K Customer Losses At Disney+, ESPN+
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions (like equating password sharing with “piracy”) — […]
Mississippi’s Top Court Says Rights Violations Are OK If Cops Don’t Know How To Do Their Jobs
There are things you can and can’t do when setting up checkpoints. If it’s DUI enforcement, you can talk to drivers and see if they seem intoxicated. If it’s near a border, you can stop every vehicle to search for undocumented immigrants or contraband. What you can’t do, however, is just set up a checkpoint […]
Democrats And The Price Of Protection
While democracy burns, corporate America is busy checking the wind direction. Google renames the Gulf of Mexico to flatter a wannabe autocrat’s ego. Business leaders draft contingency plans for the end of constitutional government. And the Democratic Party, funded by these same genuflecting corporations, responds with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning. This isn’t […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/13/democrats-and-the-price-of-protection/
The Real ‘Gulf Of America’ Is Between The News Outlets That Cover This Administration
Way back in the far more innocent times of 2012, we covered a brief but tense dispute between Google and Iran over the lack of a label for the Persian Gulf on Google Maps. Ostensibly so as not to upset anyone about the name of that body of water, given that there was some dispute […]
Appeals Court Judges Say Some Worrying Things While Re-Thinking Their Geofence Warrant Decision
Last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to have shut the door on constitutional discussions of geofence warrants. These so-called warrants operate from a point of ignorance. Investigators have no idea who they’re looking for. So, they ask Google to do some of the work for them. Casting a small dragnet around a […]
At Last, DOGE And Musk Are Finally Named In A Lawsuit, Albeit “Officially”
Given that there does not seem to have been a single thing Trump has done since entering office that has been legal, nor has his lackey Musk (or is it Trump that’s the lackey…?), there is not a single thing that doesn’t require litigation to challenge and enjoin. But we’re starting to see the floodgates […]
Daily Deal: The Complete Master GIMP Design Bundle
Go from absolute zero to GIMP pro with this comprehensive 9 course bundle. Jump into the Complete Master GIMP Design Bundle, and you’ll go all the way from installing the GIMP software and configuring it to run on Windows, to producing banners, book covers and even memes that you’ll display using Facebook and other social […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/13/daily-deal-the-complete-master-gimp-design-bundle-5/