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 been described as “Pokémon with guns”. Due to that, lots of folks thought that PocketPair would eventually get sued by […]
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 initiated this new program, called “Catch and Revoke,” in an effort to revoke visas, and it appears to be a cross-agency collaboration between the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and […]
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 (e/acc) presents itself as an enlightened embrace of technological progress, especially artificial general intelligence. Led by figures like Guillaume Verdon and embraced by venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, the movement claims humanity faces a binary […]
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 Richard Blumenthal joined MAGA Republicans to reintroduce the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — a bill that Heritage itself has proudly proclaimed as central to its strategy […]
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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 something with tens of millions of dollars of “street value,” Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly claimed Trump’s return to office […]
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 measles outbreak expand for no good reason, has promised to have the […]
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 companies for the next decade. To do this, they quietly added language preventing states from regulating “artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems.” This is, […]
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 Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/13/techdirt-podcast-episode-418-the-elonification-of-government/
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 attempts to bully nations or even large economic blocks are well documented. But its threats outside Western markets are just as reprehensible, though less well […]
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 beliefs when re-entering their own country. But while CBP’s behavior was egregious, Piker’s response was potentially even more dangerous: he chose to engage in a two-hour […]
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 company considering exiting the highly-profitable offensive malware market. Sure, this will be appealed and NSO will try to […]
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 about giving Musk’s DOGE kiddos access to all kinds of data they shouldn’t have and something of a creative writing exercise […]
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 DOJ has generally been run as an impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics. Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump […]
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 them, but we note here that, while the report is due criticism, the criticism does not warrant or justify the firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter from her duly-appointed position. […]
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, but the mass deportation efforts have also met with considerable resistance from federal court judges. The administration hoped to keep the courts from doing anything to protect migrants […]
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 check out books. Carla Hayden, the astoundingly effective Librarian of Congress for the past nine years, was abruptly […]
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 first take a look at the local reporting from where ICE is putting boots on the ground: Newark, New Jersey. Three House of Representatives members […]
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 “premium” Garmin+ tier takes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation. Users […]
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!” Beattie: ‘Starts a project that wastes government time and money, and creates a fraudulent narrative that […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/11/funniest-most-insightful-comments-of-the-week-at-techdirt-159/
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 two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/10/game-jam-winner-spotlight-honorable-mentions/
New US Surgeon General Nominee Is RFK Jr.’s Favorite ‘Wellness Influencer’
The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump’s detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that […]
Gavin Newsom Is Normalizing Trump’s Constitutional Violations
Gavin Newsom’s rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality. Newsom appears to have convinced himself that the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding “common ground” with an administration actively dismantling constitutional […]
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/09/gavin-newsom-is-normalizing-trumps-constitutional-violations/
Judge To ICE: No, You Can’t Actually Kidnap Students For Writing Op-Eds
There have been so many absolutely crazy stories in the first few months of the second Trump administration, but the story of federal agents kidnapping Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk entirely over a fairly boring op-ed she co-authored criticizing the Tufts administration still stands out for its utter pointlessness. It is extreme even when compared […]
IRS-ICE Immigrant Data Sharing Agreement Betrays Data Privacy And Taxpayers’ Trust
In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently reached an agreement allowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) was exposed in a court case, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent […]
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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/09/daily-deal-labsdigest-subscription-3/
Trump Using Pointless, Shitty Tariffs To Bully Countries Into Coddling Elon Musk’s Starlink
By now most sentient people realize Trump’s tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that’s going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There’s bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump […]