Earlier this year, I wrote about how ICE had decided to publish a horrifying recruitment video that mixed in footage of ICE raids, including one that got Kristi Noem in some hot water, along with the introduction to the Pokémon animated series, complete with the theme music behind it. The video itself wasn't terribly surprising. ICE is filled with, and run by, terrible people and their decision to liken illegal immigrants in America to fantasy animals fit only for capture and vicarious battle is simply par for the course.

After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats saying this is the line—healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first. Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works. Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot imagine doing what this moment requires: actually fighting power instead of managing accommodation to it.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship. The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative to pool confidential data from varied sources that it claims will help identify noncitizens on voter rolls, tighten immigration enforcement and expose public benefit fraud.

Over the weekend, the President of the United States fell for obvious satire from a website literally called "The Dunning Kruger Times." Donald Trump—a man with access to the best, most accurate information on basically any subject—posted to Truth Social a screenshot claiming that "DOGE halts yearly payments of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for 'royalties linked to Obamacare.' Obama has collected this payment since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars."

Upgrade your workspace with the Turonic TP1 — a wireless touchpad designed for seamless navigation, precision gestures, and multi-device flexibility. Whether you’re working on a laptop, desktop, or tablet, the TP1 offers smooth, intuitive control across Windows, Android, and Linux devices. With both Bluetooth 5.0 and 2.4GHz wireless connectivity, you can switch between devices in seconds or plug in via USB-C for a fast, reliable wired connection.

This administration isn't content to be normal awful. It insists on being ghastly awful as often as possible. Not content to eject hundreds of migrants into foreign torture prisons, the administration has decided it's time to start killing foreign people in boats just because. That's not me using a worn-out turn of phrase. That was the administration's official response when it began engaging in extrajudicial killings in international waters.

For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts. For the end user, so-called “retransmission feuds” usually go something like this: a TV broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry the same content. The pay TV provider balks, and one side or the other…

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment on our post about receiving a bogus DMCA takedown from CyberGhost over our previous post about receiving a bogus DMCA takedown from CyberGhost: Sometimes the cover-up's worse than the crime I’m really struggling to think of a non-damning story about why they’d be so desperate to scrub any mention of the company and I’m coming up blank.

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about why most complaints about Section 230 are really just complaints about the First Amendment, and another with a deep dive into the implications of the presidential election for various issues in tech. As the votes from said election poured in, we noted how social media was…

Thankfully, the Stop Killing Games movement isn't stopping this time. YouTuber Ross Scott kicked the movement off in 2024 to generate political action around the disappearance of games that people had bought purely because the company that sold them decided to no longer support them or run backend infrastructure needed play them. While the movement found very little purchase at first, it resurfaced earlier…

When Congress eventually reopens, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will be moving toward a vote. This gives us a chance to see the priorities of the Secretary of Defense and his Congressional allies when it comes to the military—and one of those priorities is buying technology, especially AI, with less of an obligation to prove it’s effective and worth the money…

Within twenty-four hours of Republicans getting crushed in elections they’d convinced themselves were winnable, Fox News deployed the counter-move. Not denial—the losses were too visible for that. Bret Baier had already explained to Fox & Friends viewers how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.” Not acceptance—that would threaten the narrative that MAGA represents the inevitable American future.

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright. I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly. There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell which ones are legit, and which ones to be wary of.

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This news should be far more heartening than it is. In any normal version of the United States, it might have been. The administration's willingness to perpetrate immoral and illegal evil on a daily basis has outpaced efforts by citizens and the judicial branch to stem the tide. Still, maybe this is hopeful? I mean, if mandatory detention of people suspected of immigration violations is this obviously (and almost unanimously) illegal, …

Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim of a massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently…

We knew this was coming, but it doesn't make it any less stupid. The road to the IRS' Direct File program was long and hard-fought. We here at Techdirt have been talking about, and advocating for, something like the Direct File program for at least 15 years. The concept behind the program is a simple one. For a class of citizens with very simple income and tax payments, the IRS already has all the information it needs to process a tax return.

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 speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. ⚠️ This story contains videos showing violence. President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in “War ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege. But a ProPublica review found a wide gap between the reality on the ground and the characterizations by the president and the Department of Homeland Security, which said ICE facilities like Portland’s were under “coordinated assault by violent groups.”

Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling—a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with no actual governing philosophy beyond "own the libs."

Tuesday, Republicans got crushed in elections across New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. Not close races. Not razor-thin margins. Massive defeats in states they’d convinced themselves were winnable after Trump’s 2024 victory. Bret Baier—on Fox News, to Fox & Friends—had to explain to his audience how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.” Young women “overwhelmingly” supported Democrats based on the economy and “those ICE images.” Based on how they “feel about the economy” versus “how Wall Street’s doing.”

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Nothing survives a purge. Especially not the truth. The DOJ secured a conviction for Washington state resident Taylor Taranto. According to the DOJ's May 21, 2025 press release, Taranto had committed several federal crimes, including carrying two guns without a license and engaging in "false information and hoaxes." Here are the details: On June 28, 2023, near National Harbor, Maryland, Taranto broadcast a livestream of himself as he sat behind the wheel of his van.

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disaster was the poster child for this phenomenon.

Well, this is actually pretty fascinating. We've been discussing the somewhat bizzare patent lawsuit Nintendo is waging against PocketPair in Japan for some time now. PocketPair is the company behind the hit game Palworld, which has obviously drawn inspiration from the Pokémon franchise, without doing any direct copying. Powering this attack were several held or applied-for patents in Japan that cover some pretty general gameplay elements, most, if not all, of which have plenty of…