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The Fourth Amendment exists for a reason. It's supposed to protect our private possessions and data from government snooping, unless they have a warrant. It doesn't entirely prevent the government from getting access to data, they just need to show probable cause of a crime. But, of course, the government doesn't like to make the [...]

We've had plenty of posts discussing all manner of behavior from the Los Angeles Police Dept. and/or the LAPD union here at Techdirt. As you might imagine if you're a regular reader here, the majority of those posts haven't exactly involved fawning praise for these supposed crimefighters. In fact, if you went on a reading [...]

I think we could witness one of the most important First Amendment legal showdowns ever. The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to rule on the constitutionality of mandatory age verification for porn websites. If the high court takes up the case, it would queue up a landmark debate pertaining to the First Amendment and [...]

Apparently, the TikTok ban bill is back. Speaker Mike Johnson plans to include TikTok divestiture legislation already passed by the House in a fast-moving aid package for Ukraine and Israel that the chamber is set to clear on Saturday. The Senate is expected to quickly take up the measure, and President Joe Biden promised Wednesday [...]

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A few months ago, we wondered if Wired had fired its entire fact-checking staff because it published what appeared to be a facts-optional article co-authored by professional consistently wrong Jaron Lanier and an academic I'd not come across before, Allison Stanger. The article suggested that getting rid of Section 230 could save everything." Yet the [...]

Last month Oregon state lawmakers passed a new right to repair" law making it easier and cheaper to repair your electronics. The law requires that manufacturers that do business in the state provide users with easy and affordable access to tools, manuals, and parts. It also cracks down on practices like parts pairing," which often [...]

Cops hate being watched, no matter where they're located. In the United States, we've seen several arrests and prosecutions of journalists and citizens for daring to record public officials performing their public duties. The case law isn't completely settled in the United States, but in most parts of the country, it's understood the First Amendment [...]

We've had several posts on the video game sensation that is Palworld in the past. Given that the game has been described by others as Pokemon, but with guns", we kicked things off both wondering if Nintendo was going to try to take some kind of misguided legal action on the game, while also pointing [...]

Let's say I told you a harrowing story about a crime. Criminals from halfway around the world used fraudulent means and social engineering to scam a teenager, causing them to effectively destroy their lives (at least in the mind of the teen). The person whose life was destroyed then took an easily accessible gun from [...]

Cops continue to wonder why people don't trust them. Go figure. At the center of this latest we're better than you" posturing by law enforcement is the raid of the wrong house by self-proclaimed trained and experienced" officers, who mistook one Arab male for another before rushing into a house and pointing guns at everyone. [...]

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What do Fentanyl and TikTok have in common? Well, the real answer is absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. But, if you want to push a nonsense moral panic, apparently, you compare the two. While it's unclear exactly where Congress currently stands on the push to ban TikTok in the US (or, at the very least, [...]

One of the key reasons the net neutrality fight even became a thing was widespread concern that big ISPs would abuse their power to behave anti-competitively, picking winners and losers across the internet ecosystem, and nickel-and-diming consumers in a variety of obnoxiously creative ways. Verizon, for example, charges you extra if you want 4K video [...]

For a little while, it looked as though Section 702 surveillance might finally be curtailed, if not substantially reformed. Lots of House Republicans were irritated that some of Trump's inner circle had been (inappropriately) targeted by FBI investigators taking advantage of the agency's backdoor access to US persons' communications collected by a foreign-facing collection program. [...]

Not every bad mistake is evil. Not every poor decision is deliberate. Especially in these more automated times. Sometimes, machines just make mistakes, and it's about time we came to terms with that simple fact. Last week, we wrote about how, while Meta may be a horrible awful company that you should not trust, there [...]

Twelve years ago, internet usersspoke upwith one voice to reject a law that would build censorship into the internet at a fundamental level. This week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a group that represents six giant movie and TV studios, announced that it hoped we'd all forgotten how dangerous this idea was. The MPA is [...]

It's enough to make you want to shoot yourself in the face in embarrassment. It's enough to make you want to dress as a mime when visiting Europe because at least you won't be mistaken for an American. It's enough to make you wonder how the Land of the Free became the Land of the [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In this course you'll cover not just data [...]

Elon Musk does not seem to like it much when reports point out that ExTwitter appears to have a neo-Nazi issue. Of course, he could respond to these reports by noting that, as a free speech absolutist," that includes those who support Nazism, as distasteful as that is, but he stands by that horrific speech [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23+ million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount every month. But those 23 million Americans are poised to soon lose the discount because key Republicans - who routinely dole out billions of dollars onfardumberfare-refuse to fund a $4-$7 billion extension. As [...]

We've written about Bell Canada plenty over the years and not typically for good reasons. This is a company that wanted to ban VPNs to combat people getting around geo-blocked content, has a habit of acting petulant when it comes to regulators, and has engaged in other consumer-unfriendly practices. So, not the best reputation when [...]

When last we checked in with our friends at Roku, they had made the unpopular decision to effectively brick" user streaming hardware and television sets if users didn't agree to a typically draconian end user agreement that effectively bans your legal right to sue the company. Eroding your legal rights using fine print isn't new; [...]

Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee had a hearing all about Section 230, in which they didn't even attempt to find a witness pointing out its benefits. Among the many organizations that could have provided that vital perspective is the Wikimedia Foundation (as seen in three excellent posts on Medium), and this week [...]

Various states and the federal government are proposing and passing a wide variety of kid safety" laws. Almost all of them pretend that they're about conduct of social media sites and not about the content on them, but when you boil down what the underlying concerns are, they all end up actually being about the [...]

It looks like we're headed to several more years of the same old abuse. The House vote on Section 702 reauthorization - something postponed several times since EOY2023 due to infighting and out-fighting - has indicated that whatever concerns people might have about warrantless access to US persons' communications can be handled the next time [...]

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That thing is happening again, where politicians are pushing a bad law that will benefit Rupert Murdoch, while harming the public. Rather than blaming Murdoch or the politicians pushing the law, they're blaming big tech" for actually responding to the law accordingly. Because that's easier. But it's wrong. In this case, it's California's terrible attempt [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill is throwing more than $42 billion at America's mediocre broadband networks. And while a lot of that money will be put to good use shoring up fiber, a lot of it is being dumped in the laps of regional monopolies with a long, long history of taking subsidies in exchange for [...]

Here we go again. There seems to be a thing happening among a select few big name video game publishers that have decided for some reason that they want to go to war with their own modding communities. The reasons for doing so vary, but they all amount to wanting to strictly control the experience [...]

Here come more bad laws, courtesy of the Florida legislature - a government body that hasn't met a right it isn't willing to violate to further its bigoted agenda. These laws won't necessarily violate rights right out of the gate, but the potential is definitely there. Here's Douglas Sole of the Tallahassee Democrat (it's a [...]

Apparently, the forced bluechecking will continue until the culture on ExTwitter improves. Providing a bit more confirmation to the theory that Elon's recent decision to give free Premium" accounts to basically anyone with a half-decent follower base was about his realization that only the absolute worst people were willing to pay for Twitter Blue, Twitter [...]

It took the FBI carelessly, stupidly, and unlawfully targeting members of Trump's inner circle to make Section 702 program reform a thing that might actually happen. It's kind of astounding, considering the Snowden leaks provided a much better argument for reform, as well as the FBI's long-documented history of abusing its access to Section 702 [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

The First Amendment has won again, this time against another pretend free speech absolutist" (Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton) in his attempt to punish someone for their free speech. Perhaps Ken Paxton will have to learn about the First Amendment in these remedial legal ethics education classes he's required to take as part of closing [...]

For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who'd listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either news deserts," or local news that's mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the internet would fix this," fixing local journalism just wasn't profitable [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bloof, responding to a complaint that our negative coverage of Elon Musk prevents us covering other completely made-up transphobic stuff: The difference is that the things Elon does is actually happeni9ng, while the things you feel we -should- be concerned about are just 4chan [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Colorado's net neutrality bill was heading to the governor's desk while Mitch McConnell was promising a House net neutrality bill would never get past the Senate. The UK proposed a ridiculous plan to fine internet companies for vaguely defined harmful content" while the European Parliament was moving forward [...]

A couple of years back, Mike wrote about a lawsuit brought against Paramount Pictures over its Top Gun movies. There were several things that colluded to make this lawsuit a thing, as Mike laid out. First was the mess that is copyright termination rights and the second is movie studios' habit for licensing factual articles [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations 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 [...]

I'm not sure we should welcome in our new AI-powered robot overlords determining how elections come about just yet. The media keeps telling me that deep fakes and generative AI are going to throw all of the important elections this year into upheaval. And maybe it's true, but to date, we've seen very little evidence [...]

It often seems that anything not immediately comprehensible to a law enforcement officer must be responded to with violence. Sure, we get to hear plenty about officers' training and expertise," but the tool set seems extremely limited when it comes to dealing with unforeseen circumstances. Whatever can't be handled with a gun can probably be [...]

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Just a few weeks ago, we pointed out that the purpose of a trust & safety team is not, as Elon Musk falsely claims, to censor" users, but rather to make sure they're safe on the site. We were highlighting this in the context of Elon's site disguising posted links in a manner that made [...]

For the better part of the last decade, the FCC had been pondering the idea of requiring a sort of nutrition label" for broadband access. The idea is to make ISPs - which routinely mislead consumers about pricing, speeds, restrictions, usage caps, and everything else - be more transparent with the end user at the [...]

Ah, the good old days of the internet - a utopian paradise where everyone was kind, respectful, and definitely not arguing about Hitler. Or was it? A recent study published in Nature has some surprising findings that might just shatter your rose-tinted glasses about this past internet that never actually existed. Brace yourself for a [...]

For years and years, Apple has done its best to prevent emulators from appearing in its App Store. Given Apple's walled-garden approach, not to mention console manufacturers never-ending hatred for emulators generally, it wasn't a huge shock that Apple went this route. Even when the occasional workaround has been discovered to allow people to get [...]

In Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal," he satirized politicians who were out of touch and were treating the poor as an inconvenience, rather than a sign of human suffering and misery. So, he took what seemed like two big problems, according to those politicians, and came up with an obviously barbaric solution to solve both [...]

I've been watching this story since late last week. A lot of what I saw then showed this was going to end in embarrassment and exoneration for Albuquerque (NM) police chief Harold Medina. But I still held out hope the city might find something to criticize about the chain of events that left city resident [...]

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