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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 [...]

Updated: make sure you read the update at the end of this story. Here's a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don't resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what's happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who [...]

Perhaps the only headline just as repeatable as No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is this other banger from The Onion: Drugs Win Drug War. 50+ years of hardline prohibition have only resulted in better prices, better purity, and a slew of states legalizing or decriminalizing personal use amounts [...]

When you're playing with house money, playing one losing hand after another isn't a sign of tenacity. It's just a way of signaling you can't be trusted with the house's money. That's why appeal after appeal from government entities don't tend to indicate that they're in the right. It just means they don't care how [...]

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If you want to write something on the U.S. government's official DOGE website, apparently you can just... do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal. The story here is that DOGE - Elon Musk's collection of supposed [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth of growth's sake" megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions (like equating password sharing with piracy") - [...]

There are things you can and can't do when setting up checkpoints. If it's DUI enforcement, you can talk to drivers and see if they seem intoxicated. If it's near a border, you can stop every vehicle to search for undocumented immigrants or contraband. What you can't do, however, is just set up a checkpoint [...]

While democracy burns, corporate America is busy checking the wind direction. Googlerenamesthe Gulf of Mexico to flatter a wannabe autocrat's ego. Business leaders draft contingency plans for the end of constitutional government. And the Democratic Party, funded by these same genuflecting corporations, responds with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning. This isn't [...]

Way back in the far more innocent times of 2012, we covered a brief but tense dispute between Google and Iran over the lack of a label for the Persian Gulf on Google Maps. Ostensibly so as not to upset anyone about the name of that body of water, given that there was some dispute [...]

Last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to have shut the door on constitutional discussions of geofence warrants. These so-called warrants operate from a point of ignorance. Investigators have no idea who they're looking for. So, they ask Google to do some of the work for them. Casting a small dragnet around a [...]

Given that there does not seem to have been a single thing Trump has done since entering office that has been legal, nor has his lackey Musk (or is it Trump that's the lackey...?), there is not a single thing that doesn't require litigation to challenge and enjoin. But we're starting to see the floodgates [...]

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Here's a story about being wrong. Not just regular wrong - we're all wrong sometimes! - but spectacularly, publicly, I'm going to double down again and again and again on this obviously false thing even after being corrected" wrong. This week, Elon Musk stood in the Oval Office at the White House and was finally [...]

Since his appointment by Trump in 2017, the FCC's Brendan Carr has never stood up to telecom giants on any issue of substance to consumers. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the company's destruction of net neutrality, privacy violations, bullshit hidden fees, or its technically unnecessary usage caps, there's nothing a company like Comcast [...]

It's always interesting to me to see companies identify what they see as a threat by looking at what type of content they attempt to DMCA or otherwise disappear. When actual direct and flagrant wholesale copying of a digital product occurs, you can understand why the takedowns are issued. We might still want to argue [...]

Terumo Cardiovascular, a company that makes six-figure medical equipment used in heart surgeries, is apparently keen on attracting the ire of the right to repair" movement. But given the Trump administration's assault on state and federal consumer protection, it's not clear they'll face many meaningful repercussions for it. In a letter obtained by 404 Media, [...]

Billionaires are already deleting parts of our government, as well as various safety mechanisms on the internet that sought to minimize hate and abuse. Do we also want them to be able to rewrite our understanding of the First Amendment? Steve Wynn's latest Supreme Court petition represents a dangerous escalation in the ongoing assault on [...]

Late last fall, a number of Norfolk, Virginia residents - with the assistance of the Institute for Justice (IJ) - sued the city for blanketing Norfolk with nearly 200 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) provided by Flock Safety. Flock Safety made its first inroads with the private market, selling plate readers to gated communities and [...]

Another day, another computer system for DOGE to unlawfully access. This time it is the one running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the latest to be unlawfully shut down. Bloomberg is reporting that this time the DOGE bros incursion into the systems came with some sort of MOU, which did a few things [...]

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It turns out that when you let the world's richest man take over significant portions of the federal government, some people might get nervous. Who knew? Last week we wrote about how some staunch conservatives were finally admitting that Elon's takeover of the government represented a constitutional crisis. Then earlier this week, we showed how [...]

We'velong notedhow absurd it is that scammers, debt collectors, and greedy telemarketers have ruined our voice communications networks. We've somehow just normalized it. We've also noted how a big reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the legit" companies like debt collectors thatuse [...]

Techdirt has been writing about India's huge Aadhaar database of biometrics, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, for a decade now. The system was introduced to make it easier for people in India to access key government services by authenticating their identity, but there were soon plans to allow businesses to [...]

Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you." Thesewordsmarked a cultural moment-one that captured our collective anxiety about reality itself.The Matrixwasn't just a movie about robots and kung fu. It was a story about questioning the systems of power and control that shape our understanding of the world. Thered pillbecame a powerful metaphor for choosing difficult [...]

If cops aren't going to follow the law or the Constitution, I don't know why we're expecting them to adhere to end user agreements. It's not just the fake social media profiles officers and investigators use. It's also the tech they deploy. No matter how well facial recognition tech may perform, it's still problematic. And [...]

There have been legitimate debates about whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act - which makes it a criminal act for US entities to bribe foreign government officials - sometimes creates gray areas in international business. For example, over a decade ago, the Walmart Mexico case highlighted how Walmart payments to speed up" permitting to build [...]

As if things weren't terrible enough, the techbros of the world have decided the one-two punch of Donald Trump and Elon Musk will make them even richer than they already are, even if it means making the world a worse place to live... or suddenly die. Palantir has been on the leading edge of surveillance [...]

Six Sigma is a detail-orientated crafted set of tools and techniques that help improve processes within an organization. The main goal of the Six Sigma certification is simple: to equip individuals with the skills to recognize errors in a business process and remove them. You will receive an introduction to the tools and methods that [...]

Before the election, Elon Musk declared: I think that the strong bias with respect to government information should be to make it available to the public. Let's be as transparent as possible. Fully transparent." When one of his fanboys tweeted that quote, Elon responded by making an even bigger claim, saying: There should be no [...]

Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry hassome of the worst privacy practicesof any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn't secured, often isn't encrypted, [...]

While we all know the Thin Blue Line" flag is just a bastardization meant to signify cops are above the law, there's no constitutional way we can forbid cops from displaying their deliberate antagonism against their obligations to the people they serve: things like transparency, accountability, and the service and protection so many law enforcement [...]

I'm quite certain that by now, a few weeks into the second Trump term, many or most of our readers are already tired of the coverage over the administration's actions. And if that's you, your quarrel is not with us. It's with the administration and its plainly stated strategy of flooding the zone with shit" [...]

I've long maintained the certitude that anti-pornography campaigners aligned with the far-right and conservative Christian movements are directly or indirectly transphobic and anti-LGBTQ. A body of evidence in my own reportingand experiencescovering the rights of sex workers and the online pornography businesshas built out this schema of anti-LGBTQ and anti-pornography campaigners being tied at the [...]

The collapse of our democratic institutions isn't unstoppable. Saving them requires understanding what we're fighting for-and how human freedom actually works in our technological age. Truth isn't complicated. It lives in simple principles we all understand: People deserve a voice in decisions that shape their lives. Our ability to think and choose depends on accurate [...]

Last week, we highlighted how the richest person on the planet - Elon Musk, who currently appears to have unparalleled, Constitutionally-violating control over the US government - was running around repeating every confused 4chan dipshit's conspiracy theory about USAID, all of which were easily debunked if you... understood how reality worked. Now it turns out [...]

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Early Saturday morning a judge imposed an emergency temporary restraining order in response to the State of New York v. Trump litigation. This particular lawsuit was brought by several (blue) state attorney generals against Trump, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and the Treasury department itself. The order, in short, tells DOGE to get out [...]

A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we're in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They're right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority - agencies that Congress explicitly created and funded - we're watching in real-time as our system of checks and balances crumbles. Yet supporters of the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the assault on the idea that laws have any meaning at all: A lot of people-especially in right-wing circles-tend to forget that the process of civilization is the process of everyone forgetting that they can grab a [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Facebook paid out a hefty settlement in a facial recognition lawsuit in Illinois, which looked like bad news for the also-just-sued new kid on the block: Clearview AI, about whom we were learning lots of disturbing new things. In an ongoing attempt to avoid its own similar problems, [...]

Last June, Louisiana became the third state to decide the US Constitution was subservient to cops' wishes that they not be filmed while performing their public duties. Arizona had already tried this twice, starting at 25 feet before trimming the halo" to an 8-foot diameter. It didn't matter. A federal court permanently blocked the law [...]

And there you have it. It was a mere couple of weeks back that I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs potential to reach the Super Bowl and go for a third straight title and how that would mean you'd start hearing a whole lot about Pat Riley. I don't want to say I told [...]

A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) topass a new state right to repair lawdesigned to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical datato consumers and third-party independent repair shops. [...]

In a stunning escalation that confirms our worst fears, the UK government has finally shown its true hand on encryption - and it's even worse than we predicted. According to a bombshell report from Joseph Menn at the Washington Post, British officials have ordered Apple to create a backdoor that would allow them to access [...]

After years of screaming save the children" while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory. I'm one of those people who doesn't think you can (or should) call most people inherently [...]

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Marine vet Stephen Lara's lawsuit against the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) and forfeiture abuse in general in that state has paid off. Not just for Lara, whose $86,900 was returned to him shortly after he filed this lawsuit, but for all residents of the state, who are now less likely to see cops walk off [...]

For a long while there it was good to be a lumbering U.S. cable monopoly. Companies like Comcast and Charter pretty much enjoyed a monopoly on broadband at next generation" speeds (over 100 Mbps) in most towns. So while they were losing traditional cable TV customers to streaming (or piracy), they could still extract their [...]

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 [...]