Feed Items
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...
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 doing a better job than traditional media at fact-checking...
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...
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 the government...
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...
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. I would...
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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...
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...
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...