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The Microsoft Office Pro for Windows 2021 + HP EliteBook + Office Courses Bundle is pretty self-explanatory. You get one license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and 8 courses to help you learn how to get the most out of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. You also get a refurbished HP […]

Here’s some amazingly good news amidst all of the nonsense of late. On Thursday, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House announced that they were updating policy guidance to mandate that all taxpayer-supported research should be immediately available to the public at no cost. According to the actual policy guidelines, […]

Thanks to their dominance over broadband access in the U.S., cable companies had spent the last decade seeing significant broadband subscriber growth each and every quarter, since, well, there weren’t any other options. That ended during the second quarter of 2022, when companies like Comcast failed to add any new broadband subscribers for the first […]

Xbox’s management team’s inability to put out a clear public message regarding exclusive titles is becoming a real thing. When the season of acquisitions kicked off last year and Microsoft bought up Zenimax/Bethesda studios, the muddled messaging began. First were conflicting statements over the exclusivity of those studios’ titles, then came Microsoft saying those titles […]

There’s presumptive access to court records under the First Amendment. But that presumption presumes a lot of other things, as this recent Sixth Circuit Appeals Court ruling demonstrates. Just because something is open doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accessible. But the Sixth Circuit has decided access (no matter how limited) is still access, and that’s all […]

As you may recall, in his response to Twitter’s lawsuit trying to force him to fulfill the terms of the purchase agreement he made, Elon Musk relied on the findings of a tool called Botometer to argue that there were more bots on Twitter than Twitter was claiming. Again, I have to remind everyone, as […]

Four years ago, the Laredo Police Department arrested a citizen journalist for the crime of receiving an answer to a question she asked. Priscilla Villarreal patrols the streets of Laredo with her camera, reporting on police activity simply by turning on her camera during traffic stops, arrests, and other incidents, and providing commentary. Her reporting […]

Would you be surprised to find out that the censorial, moral panic bill based on hype and nonsense, but very likely to pass in California and potentially change how the internet functions… was actually written by a British noble with a savior complex? Yesterday I wrote about California’s AB 2273 bill and how it is […]

The 2022 Big Data Visualization Toolkit Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn data analytics. Courses cover Tableau, Alteryx, Python, Qlik Sense, and more. It’s on sale for $39. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured […]

Earlier this week, the popular Australian news publication Crikey, published what it is referring to as “The Lachlan Murdoch letters.” Lachlan Murdoch, as you likely know, is one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons, and who has increasingly been taking over the worst aspects of Murdoch’s approach to dividing society and profiting off of the carnage: namely […]

We’ve frequently noted how stupid it is that we’ve ceded a major communications platform to robocalling scammers and scumbags. We’ve noted for just as long that many regulatory “solutions” to the robocall problem have been dumb and half-hearted. Every six months the FCC will announce some new plan they promise will demolish robocalls, and every […]

I love this story so much I want it to find other similar vulgar stories so that those stories can have little baby vulgar stories for me to read. You may recall the saga of Erik Brunetti, founder of FUCT, a fashion brand with a name supposedly standing for Friends U Can’t Trust. We wrote […]

We have discussed at great lengths the many problems of the UK’s Online Safety Bill, in particular how it will be a disaster for the open internet. Unfortunately, it appears that important politicians seem to think that the Online Safety Bill will be a sort of magic wand that will make the “bad stuff” online […]

Lie down with dogs, get put in the position of producing potentially damning evidence. That’s the lesson NSO is going to learn if this lawsuit goes any further. Israeli tech firm NSO Group has sold its malware to plenty of questionable customers and, thanks to an endless stream of revelations about misuse of its phone […]

I really don’t have time for this kind of thing, but I wanted to pass along that it appears that the California legislature is very, very close to passing AB 2273, “The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act.” As far as I can tell, it has strong support in the legislature and very little opposition. And […]

There’s a vast difference between what the government thinks it should know vs. what it’s actually entitled to know. And when the government decides more surveillance is needed, the most frequent targets are non-citizens (even if they’re legal residents) and children. Children are vulnerable. In the name of protecting children, the government often exploits the […]

The 2022 FullStack Web Developer Bundle has 11 courses to help you step up your game as a developer. You’ll learn frontend and backend web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP. You’ll also learn how to use Git and GitHub, Vuex, Docker, Ramda, and more. The bundle is on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt […]

We already wrote a long story looking at many of the eye-opening claims from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko in his whistleblower report regarding Twitter’s security operations, and the possibility that the company both has shit security practices and violated its FTC consent decree regarding those security practices. As I noted, the report is a mixed bag […]

If you recall, AT&T spent nearly $200 billion on megamergers thinking it was going to dominate the online video advertising space. But after spending a fortune on DirecTV and Time Warner, laying off 50,000 people, killing off popular properties like Mad Magazine and DC’s Vertigo imprint, it quickly became clear that AT&T executives had absolutely […]

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked, but the trademark and publicity rights dispute between Disney and K&K Promotions, the company that manages the rights for the late stuntman Evel Knievel, was still ongoing until recently. If you’re not aware of what I’m talking about, the movie Toy Story 4 included a character named Duke Caboom, […]