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America, which used to be a serious country run by adults, has since devolved into something else. We were just talking about how the White House had made the brilliant decision to bar AP News reporters from all kinds of official briefings. Why? Well, because the AP refused to update its influential Stylebook to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its newly dictated and entirely made up name, the “...
First, the bad news: a court yesterday declined to immediately enjoin Musk and DOGE, as New Mexico and 13 other states had asked it to do. But don’t panic: it was a heavy lift to get what they were asking for, and even though they didn’t get it now, their quest continues.
With this case the plaintiff states are swinging for the fences, asking for one big injunction to knock Musk and DOGE out of...
Here’s a dumb thing that happened: Elon Musk’s ExTwitter just agreed to pay Donald Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit that ExTwitter had already won. (Yes, you read that right: already won.) This is becoming something of a pattern in tech and media these days — call it the digital-age protection racket.
The plot twist was telegraphed back in November, when ExTwitter filed something with the...
Apparently, ICE is feeling it might deal with a bit more backlash than normal now that Trump is back in charge and promising to expel as many immigrants as he can as quickly as he can. Rather than deal with it like grownups with big boy pants and black ICE shirts, the agency has decided it needs to employ a social media dragnet to keep apace with “threats” and mean stuff people are saying.
Here’s...
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote,...
Here’s a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: just make stuff up!
I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient processes. But why bother when you can just… invent numbers? (This is not financial advice.)
The innovator of this approach — and I really should give credit where credit is due — is DOGE, the government agency...
Last November you might recall that Wired released an excellent report documenting how it was trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. The culprit, as usual, was a global collection of super dodgy data brokers and adtech firms that see little in the way of meaningful oversight and regulation.
The original story...
Long time readers of Techdirt will recall the deluge of posts we did years ago on trademark disputes within the craft beer industry. While trademark issues in that industry certainly haven’t gone entirely away, they are nothing like what was occurring between 2015 and 2020. In that time period, it felt like I was writing up a handful of posts on trademark disputes within the industry per week....
The NYPD is proving it’s impossible to fix an entity that doesn’t want to improve. It has engaged in more than a decade of straight-up ignoring court-ordered reforms of its stop-and-frisk program. The program’s original form was declared unconstitutional in 2013. Since then, it has only marginally improved. And much of that improvement is probably an illusion created by officers’ flat-out refusal...
Note: This piece originally said the AP was kicked out of the Briefing Room. In fact, they were kicked out of the Oval Office and Air Force One.
You probably saw that one of Donald Trump’s early executive orders was to demand that the Gulf Of Mexico be renamed the Gulf Of America. It’s pointless pseudo-productivity, and an obvious effort to excite his base’s nationalist and racist tendencies....