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Whoops: T-Mobile Reveals Names, Real-Time Locations Of Customers’ Kids

4 months 2 weeks ago
T-Mobile has long been a hot mess on issues of security and privacy. Distracted by its problematic merger with Sprint, T-Mobile was hacked eight times in less than five years, leaking oodles of sensitive customer information onto the open web. The company was also a key player in gobbling up user sensitive location data to […]
Karl Bode

Texas Judge Says Prior Restraint Is Cool And Legal While Silencing A Critic Of PTK Honor Society

4 months 2 weeks ago
Welcome to the arena, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society! Here’s your Streisand Beachfront Property commemorative dinner plates which, we must inform you, contain massive amounts of lead and should never, for any reason, be used as dinner plates. PTK (as its abbreviated everywhere, even by the “society” itself) considers itself to be above the frat […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The Complete Web Developer Bootcamp

4 months 2 weeks ago
No coding experience? This is the course for you. Whether you’ve dabbled in HTML or never touched a single line of code in your life, the Complete Web Developer Bootcamp will prepare you to take on programming jobs big and small. From basic CSS styling to popular frameworks like Bootstrap, this training will help you […]
Daily Deal

Supreme Court Hides Behind Ridiculous Procedural Argument To Allow Human Trafficking To Continue

4 months 2 weeks ago
The Supreme Court yesterday effectively provided the executive branch with a technical manual for legally disappearing people to foreign slave labor camps. While claiming to require “due process,” the Court’s ruling dismantles real protections by treating fundamental human rights violations as mere procedural technicalities that can be overcome with minimal paperwork. We’ve been covering this […]
Mike Masnick

Supreme Court Not Ready to Blow Up Free Speech… Yet

4 months 2 weeks ago
We came a bit too close to losing one of the most important First Amendment protections in American history — but at least for now we have a tiny bit of good news. Billionaire Steve Wynn, joining a growing chorus of the wealthy and powerful who want to make it easier to sue critics into […]
Mike Masnick

Site-Blocking Legislation Is Back. It’s Still A Terrible Idea.

4 months 2 weeks ago
More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” […]
Joe Mullin

Federal Consumer Protection Is Dead. The Fate Of Net Neutrality Warned You It Was Coming.

4 months 2 weeks ago
A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of U.S. federal consumer protection. Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. right, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental […]
Karl Bode

The X/xAI Shell Game: When Musk Merges With Himself

4 months 2 weeks ago
In what might be the most perfectly on-brand Elon Musk move yet, at the end of March on a Friday evening, Elon Musk suddenly declared that xAI, his AI company that was always connected at the hip with X (which we’d been calling ExTwitter to avoid confusion), was officially “acquiring” X at a valuation of […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle

4 months 2 weeks ago
It’s no secret that Photoshop can be a bit dense when you’re first getting your feet wet with it. That’s why it pays to have a expert instructors show you the ropes. Led by a Photoshop pro, the Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle will help you master Photoshop CC and become an expert—no prior experience […]
Daily Deal

DHS Now Demanding The IRS Turn Over Tax Records On 7 Million Immigrants

4 months 2 weeks ago
Less than a week ago, the Trump Administration and its assorted haters undermined one of their own lies. Among the many smears leveled against immigrants, the one that claims they’re lazy freeloaders who take more than they give back to the US is one of the stupidest. Immigrants pay taxes, even if they’re not here […]
Tim Cushing

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

4 months 2 weeks ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump’s unhinged trade war that includes uninhabited islands: Reminder: This policy was spearheaded and implemented by a man who thinks nobody says the word “groceries” these days because “it’s an old-fashioned word” and he somehow brought it […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: March 30th – April 5th

4 months 2 weeks ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the COVID news continued. Some hospital administrators were trying to silence doctors and nurses from commenting on pandemic shortages, voluntary virus tracking apps were trying to get a grip on the spread, and the UK’s NHS was enlisting Palantir to analyze data. We wrote about the tone deafness […]
Leigh Beadon

Israeli Malware Maker Linked To Six Government Purchasers, Abusive Deployments

4 months 2 weeks ago
Israel-located NSO Group may no longer be a malware option for the US and other discerning governments around the world, thanks to blacklists, lawsuits, and its disturbing willingness to sell to some of the most abhorrent governments of earth. But the market for powerful phone exploits isn’t dying up. Governments still want powerful surveillance tech, […]
Tim Cushing

How 18F Transformed Government Technology − And Why Its Elimination Matters

4 months 2 weeks ago
Healthcare.gov, the government health insurance marketplace website, launched in October 2013 only to buckle under the weight of just 2,000 simultaneous users. As millions of Americans stared at error messages and frozen screens, a political crisis unfolded, but so did a new era of government technology. The result was 18F, an in-house digital services consulting agency that […]
Mike Masnick

Amid The Measles Outbreak, HHS Cuts 1/8th Of Workforce

4 months 2 weeks ago
The measles outbreak that began in Texas continues at a brisk pace. RFK Jr. and his Department of Health and Human Services, as we’ve discussed, continues to make the outbreak worse through a combination of public opining on alternative treatments that are making some even sicker, garbled messaging that seeks to downplay the severity of […]
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