Techdirt

Now that our detour for the game jam winner spotlights is complete, we’re rolling out a new version of these weekly history posts after collecting your feedback. We’re shifting the timeframes to drop Five Years Ago and instead cover Ten, Fifteen, and Twenty Years Ago, and simplifying things a bit by just presenting a list […]

Ah, Denuvo. It’s been several years since we checked in on this once vaunted DRM tool that billed itself as undefeatable. The end of PC gaming piracy was said to be at hand, at least for any title using Denuvo. Then, predictably, the cracking community saw the target the company had put on its own […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is one of the most controversial figures in the Trump administration, a gate crasher in the buttoned-up world of national security.  In a field where quiet professionalism is revered, Gorka is loud and mercurial. With a booming, British-accented voice, he describes U.S. […]

Not this again. For many years now there have been a series of ongoing lawsuits between E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump, involving a variety of issues, but mainly whether or not he sexually assaulted her back in the 1990s and, separately, whether he defamed her in claiming he’d never met her after she accused […]

Maybe this isn’t just another vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration. But we’re going to need a lot more evidence to the contrary to abandon this conjecture: The FBI searched the Virginia state Senate leader’s hometown office and her neighboring cannabis shop Wednesday, bringing into public view what two people familiar with the matter told […]

Back in early 2025, DOGE bros Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh were handed multiple government roles with a simple mandate: go find the woke stuff and kill it. Fox and Cavanaugh had zero relevant experience for any of it — at one point Cavanaugh, a twenty-something college dropout whose main prior credential was a patent […]

In late 2023, I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s attempt to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money for worse […]

By now you likely have caught wind of GameStop, the video game and collectables retailer, announcing a bid to buy eBay. Perhaps you heard of this, as I did, because of GameStop’s CEO, Ryan Cohen, showing up to CNBC’s Squawk Box program where he pulled off one of the strangest interviews about business I’ve ever […]

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 […]

John Roberts has spent years whining about how totally unfair it is that people claim he and his colleagues rule based on partisan leanings. He did it in 2014. He did it in 2017. He did it in 2019. Hell, he did it a couple months ago too. So it’s little surprise that he’s out […]