For many many years, experts have warned about massive longstanding flaws in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signaling System 7), a series of protocols used by cellular networks hackers can exploit to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. Governments and various bad actors routinely exploit the flaw to covertly spy on wireless users around the planet…

Walled Culture first wrote about Piracy Shield, Italy’s automated system for tackling alleged copyright infringement in the streaming sector, two years ago. Since then, we have written about the serious problems that soon emerged. But instead of fixing those issues, the government body that runs the scheme, Italy’s AGCOM (the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees), has extended it. The problems may be evident, but they have not been systematically studied, until now: a peer-reviewed study from a group of (mostly Italian) researchers has just been published as a…

The Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political organization. It has transformed into a corrupt, immoral, and criminal enterprise that serves the interests of one man’s power while systematically destroying the constitutional principles this nation was founded upon. What we’re witnessing isn’t political competition but organized crime wrapped in patriotic rhetoric. When the President threatens military officers’ careers for not applauding his political agenda, when he declares American cities “enemy territory” to be conquered by federal forces, when he orders the creation of “quick reaction forces” to suppress civilian dissent, this isn’t governance.

Support us on Patreon » Techdirt recently passed its 28th anniversary as an independent online media outlet. Once, it looked like such outlets might take over, but then most were scooped up by traditional media or grew into more traditional companies themselves. But now we're seeing a new generation emerge, especially via newsletters on platforms like Substack, and one such journalist is…

When 47 out of 65 federal judges tell The New York Times that the Supreme Court is mishandling its emergency docket and creating a "judicial crisis," you might think a Supreme Court Justice would show some humility about the criticism. Instead, Justice Amy Coney Barrett decided to go on Fox News Sunday to dismiss the concerns entirely, arguing that the Court's stream of unexplained emergency orders is no big deal because they're just "preliminary" decisions.

It's a meme so famous it has its own Wikipedia page. And like plenty of memes with this sort of pedigree, its origins are humble: just another article by The Onion (or rather its Clickhole offshoot). You know the face and you know the words: Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point To Marjorie Taylor Greene's credit, …

Networks are all around us and you are using one right now to access this course. The Internet is extremely important in modern life today and this reliance is only predicted to continue with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the next few years. The Cisco CCNA 200-301 Exam Course will teach you how networks actually work and how you are able to connect to websites like Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

Elon Musk's promises on government spending cuts have followed a predictable trajectory: slash $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then a mere $150 billion. Now we have the final accounting from the Congressional Budget Office: DOGE didn't just fail to cut spending—it presided over spending increases that exceeded even pre-DOGE projections. The CBO's fiscal year 2025 report shows that despite all the performative cruelty, mass firings, and destruction of essential programs, total federal spending (excluding interest) rose by $220 billion, or 4%, for the entire fiscal year.

Six former Surgeons General have gotten together to publicly pen an opinion piece in the Washington Post about the dangers of RFK Jr. The post is fairly long and, frankly, reads as though all six of them are part of a Techdirt fan club for posts about Kennedy. As the post cycles through what Kennedy is doing that represent this danger, it's the greatest hits from our own posts on Kennedy.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a reply to someone pushing back on calling the Trump administration fascist: No, it isn’t. Regardless of how you feel about Democrat-led government administrations, Joe Biden didn’t… give a speech to the Navy in which he heavily implied that the United States Armed Forces would soon have to “take care of” (i.e., commit potentially lethal violence against) Republicans…

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Reps. Gabbard and Gosar brought out the ridiculous House companion to one of the Senate's anti-Section 230 bills, while Donald Trump got on board the "repeal 230" bandwagon even though it was copyright that kept getting his content removed. A federal judge made a ridiculous free speech ruling regarding warning people about the presence of cops…

My cancer is back. This is disappointing but not unexpected; of the 2/3 of people who survive their first bout with ovarian cancer, 80% usually have it recur at some point. For me it was sooner than expected, and disheartening because, even if I beat it back this time, it will likely come back again and again at shorter and shorter intervals.

Hello from the free state of Illinois! We just talked about Donald Trump's incurrsion into Chicago and the surrounding area, in which he first sent in a bunch of masked ICE agents to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, at one point raiding an apartment building with agents repelling from blackhawk helicopters like the reincarnated form of Osama Bin Laden was hiding inside of it.

In July, a California federal court handed down what should have been considered an obvious decision: of course it violates constitutional rights to consider skin color, spoken language, "accent," or place of employment sufficient to support a stop, much less arrest and detainment. In August, the appeals court affirmed that ruling following the government's absolutely expected rejection of that solid decision.

Just when you think corporate content moderation can't get any more absurd, Apple has managed to redefine "protected class" in a way that would make Orwell proud. According to internal correspondence obtained by Migrant Insider, Apple has removed the DeICER app—which allowed users to log sightings of ICE enforcement activity—by invoking guidelines normally reserved for protecting marginalized communities from hate speech.

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America isn't the land of the free. We abandoned that title when we returned Donald Trump to office -- the same person who refused to engage in the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and, immediately upon his return to power, pardoned almost everyone who engaged in an attempted insurrection on his behalf. The so-called "party of free speech" has repeatedly…

When FCC boss Brendan Carr isn't failing embarrassingly to censor comedians who make the President sad, he's taking a hatchet to corporate oversight and consumer protection. From weakening robocall enforcement to killing net neutrality, it's part of Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" performance that is attempting to dress up corruption and regulatory capture as streamlined government efficiency. This week, Carr began taking aim at recently passed rules requiring that your broadband ISP be clear about all the sneaky fees and restrictions they impose on your broadband line.

Here is a brief timeline of events that got us here. Chicago has had a decline in violent crime and murders over the course of the last several years, with 2025 on pace to mark it as the safest year yet in the city. Despite that plain fact, Donald Trump has banged on about how my beautiful city is a "war zone" and "crime ridden" and so on.

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 roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Thomas Hughes, CEO of…

This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren't white leave the country because they're not white. And this is according to this administration's own press release, which celebrates the fact that we're now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty's base, which read: Give me your tired, your poor…

A San Francisco supervisor has proposed that police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help pass that law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used new spying technologies. Bit by bit…

In what may be the most accidentally honest moment of his presidency, Donald Trump just admitted what we've been documenting for months: "We took the freedom of speech away." Yes, that's literally what he said: For those who've been following Trump's systematic assault on the First Amendment—which we've covered extensively at Techdirt—this admission is remarkable not for its content, but for its candor.

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It's not enough to go after the "worst of the worst." It was never a sustainable effort, what with migrants committing fewer crimes than natural citizens. The attempt to rid the country of as many non-white people as possible under Trump always had to go bigger. It has become ICE raiding swap meets and Home Depot parking lots because that's where the non-whites are at.