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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 [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking a new language with confidence in no time. It's on [...]

Elon Musk's favorite lawyer, Alex Spiro, isn't having a great week. Sure, sure, he just signed up embattled NYC mayor Eric Adams as a new client, but he seems to have royally fucked up in defending Elon. One of Elon's many legal fights currently is a defamation lawsuit filed by a California man, Ben Brody. [...]

So you might recall that both Gannett and Sports Illustrated were caught recently creating fake, AI" generated journalists to create fake, plagiarism-prone journalism." In both instances the kind of brunchlord executives that fail upward at these kind of companies thought it would be great to replace real human journalism with automated junk - without informing [...]

Back when Vladimir Putin launched his aggressive war on Ukraine, even before western government sanctions began rolling out, the video game industry started its own mini warfront on Russia. Companies began suspending sales in Russia entirely and otherwise disallowing Russian citizens to participate in global gaming culture. Groups like Itch.io began selling game bundles with [...]

Oregon recently became the seventh state to pass right to repair" legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill's passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York, Minnesota, Maine and California. U.S. consumer protection has [...]

Elon Musk is like the most gullible confirmation bias sucker who has ever existed. If you present him with literally anything that confirms his priors, no matter how obviously bullshit, he'll run with it as truth. His Twitter feed is just non-stop stupid people feeding him nonsense, and when he sees something he agrees with, [...]

We've long known no one cares what happens to people who are incarcerated. The indifference flows through the so-called criminal justice system to the private sector to tons of voters who firmly believe the nation could be better served by stripping certain Americans of all their rights. The fact that we jail more people than [...]

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It's been twelve years since the big SOPA/PIPA fight. I've been talking with a few folks lately about how it feels like many people have either forgotten that story or weren't paying attention when it happened. Two years ago, we did a 10-year retrospective on the fight, and it feels like some people need a [...]

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they're arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resultingsky high rates(upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for [...]

The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and distribute on paper, but in a digital format they can be shared globally for [...]

The best place to be the sort of cop who thinks it's a good idea to associate yourself with the Punisher remains the Fifth Circuit. Cops in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are blessed with the most forgiving appellate court in the land - one even capable of irritating the same Supreme Court that has spent [...]

One very important thing to understand in the conversation about online speech is that there are many different kinds of online communities, big and small, and they all have their own needs when it comes to rules and governance. This fact is a key element of a new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online [...]

This headline is like a version of Mad Libs for Techdirt titles. We've been covering the problem of copyright trolls for many years. And lately, we've been covering the scammy uses of generative AI tools. And we've absolutely covered quite a few SEO scam stories, where people try to use some scam or another to [...]

I guess being incarcerated isn't dehumanizing enough. Being treated like barely sentient meat deserving of any abuse perpetrated by guards or other inmates just isn't enough oppression, apparently. This country talks a big game about rehabilitation and paying your debt to society," but when it comes to the day-to-day business of incarcerating people at a [...]

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Over the last few years, Elon Musk has repeatedly said that his definition of free speech means that which matches the law." He says this whenever anyone calls out that he's not actually the free speech absolutist he claims to be. He regularly and expeditiously caves in to censorship demands, without any protest, from authoritarian [...]

The FCC is expected to vote to restore net neutrality rules on April 25. And while there're early indications that the rules may be slightly weaker than those stripped away by the Trump administration - and absolutely no indication the rules could meaningfully impact telecom revenues - telecom giants have already begun their whining about [...]

In all of the posts we have done on the topic of video game preservation, I have often made the point that it's probably long past time that there be some sort of political action to address the real or potential disappearance of cultural output that is occurring. The way this works far too often [...]

While it's not ultimately a factor in the court's decision, it's nice to see a court call out biased policing while discussing the merits of the case. This decision [PDF], handed down by an Illinois state appellate court, makes it pretty clear the court believes this stop would never had happened if the driver happened [...]

As Mike has already chronicled, Meta has managed to alienate itself from reasonable people by first suppressing links to an independent Kansas journalism outlet, then links to others reporting on the suppression, and eventually entire accounts discussing the episode. I tend to be of the view that what happened was an error caught in a [...]

Every few years, it seems, we're reminded of the incredible number of dependencies built into the software we all rely on. Remember kik? Or Chef Sugar? Or any number of similar situations? The xkcd comic on dependency is so well known for a reason. So, the backdoor that was discovered in xz utils a week [...]

While it's understandable to desire someone be held responsible for brutal acts of terrorism, the responsibility for those actions lies with those who committed them. That's hardly satisfying because it can be almost impossible to extract anything from the terrorists themselves, other than the limited recompense of seeing them arrested and jailed. And that's something [...]

Demand for Python is booming in the job market and it is a skill that can help you enter some of the most exciting industries, including data science, web applications, home automation, and many more. The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle has 7 courses to take you from beginner to expert in no [...]

Truth matters. Even if it's inconvenient for your narrative. I'm going to do a question and answer style post, because I want to address a bunch of questions that came up on this story over the weekend, but let's start here. So what happened? Last Thursday, the Kansas Reflector, a small local news non-profit in [...]

You might recall that, back in February, Senator Ron Wyden's office revealed how a data broker named Near Intelligence had collected the data of women visiting abortion clinics, then sold that data (via a proxy) to right wing activists. Those activists then turned around and used it to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation. [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Jim Jordan demanding major ad companies explain why they won't advertise on Truth Social: Far right: we support free speech and free markets!Businesses: We've decided it's not in our best interest to advertise on this far-right website.Far right: Advertise there [...]

And here we are! We've arrived at the end of our series of posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! We've already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and [...]

It is often said that ignorance of the law is no defense." But the corollary of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people can find them, read them and obey them. Secret laws, or laws that are hard to access, undermine the ability and thus the willingness of citizens to [...]