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Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren't to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

Lawmakers in Congress are moving quickly on theGUARD Act,an age-gating billrestricting minors' access to a wide range of online tools, with a key vote expected this week. The proposal is framed as a response to alarming cases involving AI companions" and vulnerable young users. But the text of the bill goes much further, and could [...]

There's a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. Hans," one asks, peering at his cap, are we the baddies?" The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for [...]

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Not that ICE was ever that great about taking care of all the people it detains. It certainly wasn't during Trump's first term. The DHS Inspector General released a report that said there were numerous problems in a single detention facility. Not only that but what was contained in the report was incomplete because the [...]

More than 4,000 Hollywood insiders recently signed a letter blasting Paramount's planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, noting that the massive consolidation will be very harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. As we saw with the AT&T Warner deal, history generally supports this; these debt-riddled deals are broadly, uniformly harmful. Companies that take on [...]

You're all sick of me saying we need to have more nuance in the discussion about AI use in the gaming industry. I get it. I'm also not going to stop. And I hope you will have noticed that I have called for nuance in both directions. While I'm more optimistic than many in our [...]

As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea ofopen access(OA) - allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free - is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That's because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to such an extent that the [...]

Raids and arrests around the nation by federal immigration officers all feature the same thing: a bunch of people in masks shoving people into unmarked vehicles. What's happening under Trump during his second term doesn't feel like America. And it certainly doesn't look like America. Instead, it looks like the actions of paramilitary jump-out squads, [...]

James Comey is not exactly someone we've ever been a fan of on Techdirt. He was a terrible FBI director in so many ways. We've spent years criticizing the man - for his crusade against encryption, his supporting the FBI's ridiculously aggressive impersonation of reporters, his embrace of the FBI's program to coerce and entrap [...]

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The administration's anti-migrant tactics are now months into an indefinite period of continuous escalation. That protest efforts have escalated alongside it apparently means nothing to the officials spearheading this brazen attack on non-white people. It wasn't until federal officers began killing people in front of witnesses that the administration decided to dial things back a [...]

Anonymous insiders tell the access journalists at Semafor that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is cooking up a review" of ABC broadcast licenses after Jimmy Kimmel once again made the President sad. The FCC clearly leaked word of the inquiry to Semafor in the hopes that Semafor would present it as a serious, big boy [...]

We discussed RFK Jr.'s recent appearance before Congress, where he bravely declared that the current measles outbreak in America has absolutely nothing to do with him, despite that definitely not being true. But, unsurprisingly, that wasn't the only craziness that Kennedy put on display in the hearing. The Secretary of HHS doesn't believe in the [...]

There's stilla meaningful effort afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. Alaska [...]

Apparently we've reached the stage of the second Trump presidency when we're doing reruns of the old hits. As you'll recall, Donald Trump has been desperate to get late-night TV host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel fired for quite some time. While Trump has long complained about any late night comedian making fun of him, he [...]

There have been plenty of absolutely batshit crazy legal filings from Trump and his crew over the last few years, but a filing last night takes the crazy to new levels. This is in the case filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against the National Park Service over the ballroom Donald Trump is [...]

Simplify your daily charging experience and replace most of the chargers and cables on your desktop, with this one mini station that does it all. The Magstand Mini Magnetic Charge Station is a mini charging station that features 3 wireless charging spots, one USB-A port, and can also double as a bedside lamp with 2 [...]

Under Trump, DHS, ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol have violated every single right affected by their daily work. When you're trying to perform 3,000 arrests per day, you can be slowed down by things like the Constitution. And these agencies certainly haven't been slowed. In fact, they've been encouraged to continue violating rights by being [...]

Late last monthwe noted howthe Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a new ban" on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time, we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional [...]

Progress may be slow, but it's still progress. While I've been talking about the importance of video game preservation as a function of our own overall cultural preservation, very few people out there are actually trying to do something about it all. One of those doers has been Ross Scott and others involved in the [...]

As its name suggests, generative AI is designed to generate material in response to prompts by drawing on its probabilistic database built up through analyzing huge quantities of training input. But it can draw on those patterns to analyze other files, and that's also a widely used application. Writing in The Argument, Kelsey Piper encountered [...]

The DOJ continues to be the Trump Administration's preferred avenue of vengeance. Since his return to office, multiple prosecutions targeting the president's critics and political opponents have been mounted. To date, not a single one has succeeded. (And more than a few have been stalled completely by Trump's refusal to engage in the legally required [...]

One of the more frustrating things about the case in which Donald Trump sued the IRS that he runs, demanding $10 billion over nothing, was that it seemed like it might just work, and there might be nothing that could be done to stop it. But at least one federal judge (luckily the one overseeing [...]

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The patron saint of the debate me, bro" grift is getting his due as most saints do: posthumously. The best thing that ever could have happened to people perpetrating violent left" bullshit was Charlie Kirk being shuffled off this mortal coil by the predictable end result of his divisive, racist, bullying speech. What should have [...]

There's been a flood of new state laws placing restrictions on 3D printing that are driven by sloppy moral panics about 3D printed guns (and a desire by large manufacturers to dominate the market), but are so ignorantly and broadly written that they do more harm than actual good. New York's 2026-2027 executive budget bill [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Palantir's general creepiness: I mean, yeah, the name of their company is basically I read Lord of the Rings and wanted to be Sauron." In second place, it's MrWilson with a comment about Arkansas's latest failed attempt to pass [...]

We're nearing the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! We've already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, and Best Remix winners, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Digital Game: I Could [...]

Amidst all the other chaos and damage RFK Jr. is doing in his current role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we noted a few weeks back that he was also seemingly having a hard time finding someone to fill the opening for CDC Director. That opening, created when Kennedy fired Susan Monarez after [...]

If you own one of the Sony Bravia lines of televisions (like I do) and were hoping that the expensive television would suddenly become slightly less functional for no good reason, I have some good news for you. Sony just announced that the company is making adjustments that will reduce the usefulness and efficiency of [...]

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld what would seem to have been an extremely obvious conclusion reached by the federal court handling the case: yes, it definitely violates the Constitution to mandate the posting of a religious text in every classroom in Louisiana. This wasn't about displaying an assortment of foundational texts" [...]

To have one defamation case about public allegations of your drinking as FBI Director would be unfortunate. To have a second dismissed the very next day would be, well, perhaps a sign that something has gone wrong. Earlier this week we wrote about Kash Patel's ridiculously weak defamation case against The Atlantic over its big, [...]

The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for [...]

The state of Virginia is trying to break with its racist past. It's not pretending it doesn't exist. But, better late than never, it's trying to undo some of the damage still being perpetrated by Virginians and their legislators. Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill into law that stripped confederate-friendly organizations of their tax exempt [...]

We've noted how Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to receive a $550 million golden parachute from the sale of Warner Brothers to Paramount, despite the fact that his tenure has been broadly viewed as disastrous at best. Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers mergers, which included [...]

In the year 2,000 (cue the Conan O'Brien music), America had so successfully defeated measles as a disease that we were awarded elimination status for the disease. Then Trump was elected to a second term, for reasons I still can't fully explain, after which RFK Jr. somehow was confirmed as the Secretary of HHS. Almost [...]

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 special episode, Mike and Ben reflect on 100 [...]

Back when Netflix was proposing a takeover of Warner Brothers, you might recall that director James Cameron had no shortage of critical things to say. Cameron went so far as to write a heavily publicized letter to Senator Mike Lee, lamenting the Netflix Warner Brothers merger (andonlythe Netflix merger) as disastrous to the motion [...]

Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet [...]

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The government needs more funding than ever, which is kind of hilarious when you realize the Tea Party of the Obama era was the predecessor of this Big Government version of the GOP. The DHS can't even get itself a budget at the moment. Sure, it will get some money thrown to it sooner or [...]

There's some endless, curious tensions within the corrupt Trump administration when it comes to their effort to completely destroy the government's ability to hold corporations accountable for dodgy, nefarious, or even illegal behavior. Their own, lazy, circular logic and bad faith legal interpretations are creating vast new legal minefields we'll be untangling for decades. The [...]

Iran's internet has beenintermittently disruptedfor months. After years of bombardment, Gaza's telecommunications infrastructureremains fragile. In India,recurring shutdownsand throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Acrossdozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized-cut, slowed, or selectively restored [...]

Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill's own sponsor couldn't accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube while the sponsor publicly claimed those were the exact platforms being targeted. When the state's own expert witness testified that Snapchat [...]

I originally began this headline with the word ironically." But it would only be ironic if it wasn't by design. Irony suggests something slightly out of the control of the principal figures resulted in something somewhat unexpected. That isn't the case here. This was by design. The New York Times has obtained the behind-the-scenes memos [...]

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Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate. I've written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking [...]

This Saturday is the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (WHCA). And there's been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corrupt administrations in U.S. history. This year, because an actual comedian might get somewhere close to [...]