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Sure, this administration isn't just tone-deaf, but life-deaf. But it must be pointed out that what AG Todd Blanche is doing here comes in opposition to members of his own party. Every since it became readily apparent that hundreds of law enforcement officers were regularly abusing access to ALPR (automatic license plate reader) databases to [...]

Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, in which youth protests against various governments were celebrated in much of the Western World, we saw countries like Egypt move to shut down the internet in an effort to keep the public from communicating. I've been thinking about that a lot while following a series of stories [...]

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Texas governor Greg Piss Baby" Abbott lost his office during the mid-terms. What a shame. The guy who spent years engaging in attacks on free speech when not trying to turn all of Texas into a thin blue line finally got kicked to the curb by residents who were sick of both his shit and [...]

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk's dodgy DOGE bros illegally stole vast troves of government datasets. Some of these random, unqualified assholes stole data simply using USB drives. But you might recall how many of the DOGE bros had also installed Starlink terminals duct-taped to the White House roof (and the Eisenhower Executive [...]

The injection and prioritization of religion into government institutions, specifically Christianity, is a very real thing. This sort of Christo-fascism shows up in a variety of ways. Attempts to inject Judeo-Christian icons and messages into public classrooms. Pete Hegseth's attempt to create a Religious Affairs" office at the Pentagon, likewise trying to claim that this [...]

There are times I wonder if the leaders of France and Australia have a secret bet to see which one of them can come up with worse internet policy than the other. Apparently it's France's turn. As a few sources have been reporting, French lawmakers slipped an amendment into the country's budget bill that is [...]

Among the dated and dumb business concepts exposed as folly during the COVID-19 pandemic was the traditional Hollywood film release window, which originally involved a 90 day gap between the time a move appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release (in France this window is even more ridiculous at three years). Opposition to [...]

I now look like an alarmist. I assumed everything done by the Trump administration prior to the midterm elections was designed to swing the election towards MAGA. For that, I don't apologize. It definitely was. However, I routinely assured readers that the weird shit being done by the administration was just laying the groundwork for [...]

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California legislators, led mainly by two of the most anti-science, anti-kid legislators in the state - Josh Lowenthal and Buffy Wicks - make sure that every year they experiment on our children with unproven, untested, scientifically illiterate laws that seek to protect the children." And, every year Gavin Newsom eagerly signs them into law forcing [...]

Despite already enjoying a voting majority, the GOP has simply flat out refused to appoint any new Democratic Commissioners to the nation's top media and telecom regulator, the FCC. They've also refused to begin the process of appointing Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez to another term despite her term technically ending on June 30 (in [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Just Word Me with a comment about Sam Altman's case against people inefficiently" owning their own RAM: This can be said about most things that make the world's economies run Consumerism". How many of us need a lawnmower seven days a week or a [...]

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The national embarrassment that is America's measles problem continues to have devastating effects. While the federal government generally, and RFK Jr. specifically, blissfully ignores the thousands getting sick from a disease that was declared eradicated more than two decades ago, it all continues to get worse and worse. We have the tools at our disposal [...]

In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information. This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three rolling waves: It started with DOGE, moved to agency-to-agency data sharing with ICE, and then attempted data-driven purges of state voter rolls. We all deserve to live in a [...]

Last year when Donald Trump sued Rupert Murdoch over the WSJ's article revealing the... um... birthday card he sent Jeffrey Epstein, we pointed out that it was a pure SLAPP suit (and also that it was against a guy who, you could argue, is one of the main reasons he ever got elected). Trump insisted, [...]

All good things come to those who wait? Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes, you need to take action to make good things happen. Other times, you just have to hang back and wait for the slow-moving wheels of justice to do their thing. It's the latter here. Last month, an ICE officer deliberately (allegedly) ran over [...]

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You may have heard some talk in the last week or so regarding a criminal case against two former FBI agents, supposedly having something to do with Hunter Biden's infamous laptop." On Monday, a magistrate judge dismissed the case, noting that it was pure political hackery. A federal judge on Monday tossed out a criminal [...]

For years I've noted that while Elon Musk's low-Earth-orbit (LEO) Starlink satellite broadband system can be very useful for people with no other options (war zones, RVs, boats, rural Americans), the network has struggled to maintain performance as it grows into more mainstream markets, resulting in not only widespread slowdowns, but also the company socking [...]

The midterms are over and the Republicans got their asses waxed. We can point to any number of reasons why the country delivered a stinging rebuke to the GOP across the union. It was a slap to Donald Trump. It was about the economy. It was the war in Iran. It was all of the [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

Recently, two federal appeals courts issued opinions that will allow Florida and Georgia to start enforcing laws that will age-gate and block young people from accessing social media. The laws do not adequately respect minors' rights to play, speak, and learn online. More fundamentally, these laws don't help young people stay safe online-a goal that [...]

We all know ICE officers can't be trusted. Neither can the agency that heads up most of Trump's anti-migrant activities. Every murder by immigration officers is immediately greeted with self-justifying lies about threats" to officers. Every assault gets the same treatment. Every recorded instance of abuse is immediately rebutted by bullshit claims about violent resistance [...]

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Well it's now been a couple days since the Democrats obliterated Donald Trump and MAGA in the midterm. It turns out that the messaging of price hikes, soldiers in the street, new forever wars, and diarrhea for everyone, with a side of enriching the rich while protecting pedophiles" somehow failed to resonate. Which is how [...]

Israeli spy outfit Discover-Tech spied on internet users through a sprawling network of dodgy online ads that it used to track, surveil, and geolocate internet users. In some instances simply having the firm's zero click" spyware ads displayed by devices resulted in infection. The company seemed particularly interested in using ads to surveil and geolocate [...]

The impact of the midterm election result is going to be felt for years, to be sure. But some of the effects will be far more swift than that, likely kicking off right after the new Congress is sworn in. We're mere hours removed from the election, with some votes still being tallied, but already [...]

A last minute attempt to throw the midterm election into chaos failed. Leading up to this point, the signs were never good in the Magic 8 Ball way. The Trump administration wants people to believe California was overrun with non-citizen voters. The facts, however, refuse to comply with the narrative. This particular ship has been [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. On the evening of Oct. 11, just weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop airing taxpayer-funded television advertisements praising President Donald Trump. Yet two of the ads continued running past the court's deadline, including [...]

US federal court have overwhelmingly ruled (10,000 orders and counting) that migrants are - just like natural-born citizens - entitled to constitutional rights. Among them is the right to due process. This means that detained migrants have a right to a hearing to see whether they can be held in custody until a hearing on [...]

We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it's hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you'll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start to see the results straight away. It helps you overcome the language barrier [...]

Last week, Ofcom, the UK regulator in charge of all this stuff, released its rapid assessment of highly effective age assurance at 16." That came right on the heels of its quietly released (only because the law required it) report showing that the Online Safety Act's duty of care wasn't actually having any noticeable impact [...]

One cornerstone of Elon Musk's fraud-packed SpaceX IPO prospectus includes the claim that they'll extremely quickly (as in a year or two) boost Starlink subscriber totals from 13 million to something closer to 300 million. Given the network's congestion problems and physics constraints, that's simply not realistic. Also: more users means even greater capacity problems [...]

It's very gross for this to be any sort of I told you so" opening to this post, but the measles outbreak in America continues to get worse, as predicted. While last years case counts and deaths from the disease, which had been vaccinated to the point of eradication back in 2000, were a record-breaking [...]

Incourts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It's easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people [...]

Support us on Patreon For the past few weeks on Techdirt, we've been publishing The Metric Is Not The Mission, a ten-part series by internet governance and digital policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis which is now available as a single, complete paper. This week, Konstantinos joins the podcast to talk all about his argument in the [...]

So, it's come to this. The good ship USS Revenge Prosecution is sinking. And the deserting rats are deciding which rats should desert first, apparently based on nothing more than the current state of the organizational chart. Two people figured heavily into the disastrous attempt to prosecute a handful of Chicago residents for engaging in [...]

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While Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have tried to downplay Aaron Swartz's role in founding" Reddit, he was still an instrumental part of the company's early journey. His infogami" project was rolled into Reddit, and the founder credit was a part of the deal. Part of the point of infogami was to support open access [...]

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned 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-quality infotainment and agitprop. Despite claims that the internet would fix this," doing quality local journalism [...]

As I continue to say, you may be done with the measles, but the measles is not done with you, nor the entire country. Coinciding with the profane installment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, 2025 saw the largest number of cases of measles in America in 3 decades. After decades [...]

Walled Culture has just written about the possibility that recent AI breakthroughs might accelerate a move to open access, at least in the field of mathematics. It would be particularly welcome against a backdrop of relatively slow progress in the open access world. That is not because the need for different business models that provide [...]

Last week Cathy wrote about the amicus brief we filed in the big multi-district litigation (MDL) that consolidated a bunch of different lawsuits claiming that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed the plaintiffs' copyrights by training AI models on their works. A lot of people and groups offered proposed amicus briefs. For boring procedural reasons, unlike in [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. With the U.S. midterms this week, about 1 in 5 voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found. But many voters may not know that governments around the world increasingly shape what chatbots can say. And because [...]

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By now it's likely you've heard of the whole concept of the AI paperclip maximizer problem - a hypothetical first put forth by Nick Bostrom - suggesting that a misaligned AI system that looks to optimize on the wrong single thing (in this case creating paperclips) could lead to the end of humanity. Specifically, the [...]

Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. For decades now we've documented how while smart" [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is the first of several comments about Trump's voting fraud squad proudly announcing the arrest of... 28 people in California. It's an anonymous comment summing up their attitude: Republicans just want election fraud. That's it. In second place, it's a double-winning comment that also took [...]