Trump EO Tries To Destroy Whatever Corporate Regulatory Oversight Hasn’t Been Already Killed By DOGE And The Supreme Court
Welcome to the golden age of corruption. Last year I warned repeatedly how a concussive series of Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright were poised to dismantle already shaky regulatory authority and corporate oversight, turning most U.S. regulators into the legal and policy equivalent of decorative seasonal gourds. It was the ultimate victory in a […]
Xbox Boss Surrenders In The Great Console Wars
For twenty years, a great war has raged. A console war, between the two great powers, Sony and Microsoft. Sure, there were other regional powers in play, such as Nintendo. And it’s true that Sony won nearly every campaign in this war, to varying degrees. But the war raged on right up until this week, […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/20/xbox-boss-surrenders-in-the-great-console-wars/
Donald Trump Is Turning CISA Into The Embodiment Of His Election Conspiracy Theories
Donald Trump spent the four years between presidential terms complaining about a “stolen” election. He — and his enablers — made multiple baseless claims about election fraud and claimed the entire system was rigged against him. His lawyers and supporters suggested voting machines were so insecure that the Venezuelan government itself might have been involved […]
BBC Study Finds “AI” Chatbots Routinely Incapable Of Basic News Synopses
Automation can be helpful, yes. But the story told to date by large tech companies like OpenAI has been that these new language learning models would be utterly transformative, utterly world-changing, and quickly approaching some kind of sentient superintelligence. Yet time and time again, data seems to show they’re failing to accomplish even the bare […]
Michigan Appeals Court Says State’s ‘Terroristic Threat’ Statute Is Unconstitutional
Here’s another win for free speech that probably isn’t going to please most people. But that’s how it goes. Fourth Amendment rulings reinforce protections while coming down on the side of accused criminals. First Amendment jurisprudence tends to be generated by people who seem to have nothing worthwhile to say. That’s the way it goes. […]
History Will Not Treat Those Sleepwalking Through This Crisis Well
There’s a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential threats until they’re already overwhelmed by them. This isn’t just normal human shortsightedness—it’s a specific kind of cognitive failure bred by generations of relative peace and […]
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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/20/daily-deal-headway-premium-18/
Trump Is Going To Make Private Prison Companies Rich And They Couldn’t Be Happier
Trump’s first presidency brought a lot of latent human ugliness to the surface. It stayed there during the four years he sat, sulked, broke laws, lost lawsuits, and continued to stoke the fires of hate. Now, he’s leveraging the hatred his last term in office turned into part of everyday politics to inflict further misery […]
After 5G Was Idiotically Overhyped And Fell Flat, 6G Appears To Be A Nervous Mess
We’ve long noted how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution. But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, […]
Court Grants Immunity To DA Who Shared Nude Photos From A Searched Phone With Local Law Enforcement
The phrase “no harm, no foul” doesn’t apply to law enforcement personnel, whether they’re patrol officers or the chief local prosecutor. Instead — thanks to the qualified immunity doctrine — the phrase is: “whatever amount of harm, no foul.” As long as the harm isn’t something specifically covered by precedent, the general feeling of courts […]
Mexico Threatens To Sue Google Over ‘Gulf Of America’ Change
America, which used to be a serious country run by adults, has since devolved into something else. We were just talking about how the White House had made the brilliant decision to bar AP News reporters from all kinds of official briefings. Why? Well, because the AP refused to update its influential Stylebook to refer […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/19/mexico-threatens-to-sue-google-over-gulf-of-america-change/
State Plaintiffs Lose A Disappointing Battle, While Musk And DOGE Get Closer To Losing The War
First, the bad news: a court yesterday declined to immediately enjoin Musk and DOGE, as New Mexico and 13 other states had asked it to do. But don’t panic: it was a heavy lift to get what they were asking for, and even though they didn’t get it now, their quest continues. With this case […]
ExTwitter Pays Trump $10M to Settle Case It Had Already Won
Here’s a dumb thing that happened: Elon Musk’s ExTwitter just agreed to pay Donald Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit that ExTwitter had already won. (Yes, you read that right: already won.) This is becoming something of a pattern in tech and media these days — call it the digital-age protection racket. The plot […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/19/extwitter-pays-trump-10m-to-settle-case-it-had-already-won/
ICE Wants To Set Up A Social Media Dragnet So It Can Figure Out Who’s Criticizing The Agency
Apparently, ICE is feeling it might deal with a bit more backlash than normal now that Trump is back in charge and promising to expel as many immigrants as he can as quickly as he can. Rather than deal with it like grownups with big boy pants and black ICE shirts, the agency has decided […]
Daily Deal: Daily Deal: The Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows + Windows 11 Pro Bundle
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 or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, […]
Lithuanian Adtech Firm And Florida Data Broker Trafficked In Sensitive U.S. Military And Intelligence Worker Location Data
Last November you might recall that Wired released an excellent report documenting how it was trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. The culprit, as usual, was a global collection of super dodgy data brokers and adtech firms that see little in the way […]
It’s Easy To Save Billions In Taxpayer Funds When Everything Is Made Up
Here’s a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: just make stuff up! I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient processes. But why bother when you can just… invent numbers? (This is not financial advice.) The innovator of this approach — and I […]
Trademarks: Sometimes David Is Petty And Goliath Deserves To Win
Long time readers of Techdirt will recall the deluge of posts we did years ago on trademark disputes within the craft beer industry. While trademark issues in that industry certainly haven’t gone entirely away, they are nothing like what was occurring between 2015 and 2020. In that time period, it felt like I was writing […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/18/trademarks-sometimes-david-is-petty-and-goliath-deserves-to-win/
NYPD Still Routinely Violating Rights With Its Stop-And-Frisk Program
The NYPD is proving it’s impossible to fix an entity that doesn’t want to improve. It has engaged in more than a decade of straight-up ignoring court-ordered reforms of its stop-and-frisk program. The program’s original form was declared unconstitutional in 2013. Since then, it has only marginally improved. And much of that improvement is probably […]
White House Access Press Shrinks Like Feckless Daisies After AP Kicked Out Of Briefing Room For Rejecting ‘Gulf Of America’ Name Change
You probably saw that one of Donald Trump’s early executive orders was to demand that the Gulf Of Mexico be renamed the Gulf Of America. It’s pointless pseudo-productivity, and an obvious effort to excite his base’s nationalist and racist tendencies. Amoral cowards at Google got right to work making the change in their map products, […]