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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...
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...
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...
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 “...
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...
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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...
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...
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...
We’ve long established that modern “smart” devices aren’t always all that smart.
Whether it’s “smart” door locks that are easily hacked to gain entry, “smart” refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials, or “smart” vehicles that sell data to insurance companies without your permission, the act of modernizing something with internet access and a CPU isn’t always a step forward.
The latest case...