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If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people [...]

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 [...]

Quick test: should saying Hitler, not a good guy" cause you to be banned from your social media account? Seems simple enough. But apparently not for Meta, the largest social media company on the planet. I've talked about the Masnick Impossibility Theorem and the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. [...]

Very few states laws can be considered to be famous." Almost any state law immediately recognized by people in other states can only be described as infamous." The Wiretap Law enacted in Massachusetts is definitely infamous. For years, this statute was abused by law enforcement officers and other state employees to punish or prosecute residents [...]

Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function according to pre-defined requirements. Courses cover the basics, Bugzilla, JIRA, testing techniques, Java TestNG, and more. It's on sale [...]

As we head into next week's election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do). While any private [...]

A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey's findings aren't surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to [...]

This lawsuit could not be more impeccably timed. Whether or not this timing is more fortuitous than impeccable remains to be seen, but there's no denying the bang-bang-bang effect on display here, even if it may just be coincidental. Last week, a Virginia federal court ruled three hits from Flock ALPR cameras wasn't enough to [...]

Here are two things that are not secrets, but play into this story. First, it's known that Google and Russia have had an acrimonious relationship for some time. Between various threats from the Russian government to ban Google and/or YouTube here and there, typically because the country doesn't like Google's decisions over what content to [...]

According to some people (you know the people I mean...), our biggest crisis" is border security. This one guy - a supposed billionaire with multiple bankruptcies under his belt - claimed he could solve the problem if he ever got elected. He would build the wall" and make Mexico pay for it. This is stuff [...]

Sometimes I love a good mashup" story hitting on two of the different themes we cover here at Techdirt. This one is especially good: Alaska legislators relying on fake stats generated by an AI system to justify banning phones in schools, courtesy of the Alaska Beacon. It's a mashup of the various stories about mobile [...]

This is something that should have happened years ago, but I guess we can be grateful it's happening now. And part of the reason it's finally happening is because of the warrant requirement for obtaining historical cell site location info created by the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. One of the many ways the government obtains [...]

We've noted repeatedly that in the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition). Recently, T-Mobile imposedanother $3-$5 per month price hike on most of its plans- including customers who believed they were under [...]

Another lobbyist win over common sense, it seems. Earlier this year, we discussed a group of video game preservationists, led by the Video Game History Foundation, seeking DMCA exemptions that would allow groups to curate, preserve, and make available for streaming antiquated video games for purposes of study. The chief opposition to the request came [...]

When the government shuts down a protest because both protesters and counter-protesters are physically attacking each other, it's not a heckler's veto." It's just common sense, even though there was very little of that on display during the protest, nor during law enforcement's belated response to the violent confrontation. But Warren Balogh thinks only his [...]

The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts havechronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynical moves from the academic publishing industry in order to retain theirfabulous profit margins. As a [...]

What are the odds. Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone - including its investors - that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn't exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people [...]

The Speed Reading Mastery Bundle has 6 courses to help you learn to absorb new information faster by learning speed reading methods used by top universities and Guinness World Record holders. These skills will not only help you with your everyday tasks, but open doors to take on any new interest or career. Within minutes, [...]

You may recall last December when we wrote about the somewhat shocking news that an Indian court had ordered Reuters to take down an entire article investigating a company, Appin and its founder Rajat Khare, that were accused of running a giant hacking for hire" operation. Ten months later, that article is back online with [...]

To be very clear: SpaceX's Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription and up front hardware costs. But contrary to what [...]

It's that time of the year in the Midwest, when the skies darken early and the temperature drops. And that means it's pho season. As a lover of pho, allow me to educate anyone that hasn't heard of it. It's a soup of sorts, with rice noodles, spices, and meat. And it's considered the national [...]

Well, a wrong has been righted. Kind of. And for how long, no one really knows. Texas is on the leading edge of book censorship in the United States - you know, the land most famous for its freedoms, one of which is the famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) First Amendment. It's only second [...]

The release of a bipartisan draft of the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) reinvigorated the effort to pass a federal consumer privacy law, only to sputter and stall amid concerns raised from across the political spectrum. All that is gone, however, is not forgotten: it is only a matter of time before Congress returns its [...]

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool [...]

Donald Trump and the politicians that either think like him, or think saying things like this might make him like them, continue to pretend major US cities are besieged by violent criminals. While there have been a few spikes in certain cities, for the most part, crime rates are returning to their normal, historic lows [...]

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Hey Jeff, Since I know you'll never actually read this, I figured the best way to set this up as an open letter. One that you should read, but never will. It appears that your stupendously cowardly decision to block the Washington Post from publishing its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the [...]

Earlier this month the FTC announced it was modifying some existing rules to crack down on companies that make it extremely difficult to cancel services. The agency's revamp of its 1973 Negative Option Rule"requires companies be completely transparent about the limitations of deals and promotions, requires consumers actively consent to having read terms and deal [...]

There must be something about the alcohol business that creates silly trademark disputes over geographic terms. We've seen this several times in the past, such as in the whole Ravinia Festival dispute, or the time two breweries fought over a trademark for the neighborhood one of them operated out of. While these don't always turn [...]

Considering how to increase competition in the search space without damaging end users is a trickier question than it seems at first. Many of the suggestions that people have tossed out have tended to focus on ideas that are purely punitive to Google, but which would also have negative impacts on users (and even some [...]

As Mike and others have pointed out, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have utterly failed the public. While it is of course their right to endorse, or not endorse, anyone they choose, the refusal to provide any such endorsement in an election with such high stakes abandons the important role the press plays [...]

Well, this is certainly one of the more entertaining decisions I've ever read, even though most of it deals with the more boring side of civil rights litigation, i.e., questions of standing and mootness. I mean, those can be interesting but they're far less interesting than seeing a court dig into cases where the either [...]

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The NY Times has real difficulty not misrepresenting Section 230. Over and over and over and over and over again it has misrepresented how Section 230 works, even having to once run this astounding correction (to an article that had a half-page headline saying Section 230 was at fault): A day later, it had to [...]

After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022announcedthat it would start politely asking the nation's lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of nutrition label" on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the legality of Elon Musk's vote-buying scheme: My trainers say it's illegal (volunteer voter registrar) We were taught that under no circumstances could we induce or attempt to induce anyone to register to vote, let alone to vote, let alone [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, congress rushed to pass a bill empowering copyright trolls to shake people down, while Ajit Pai was complaining about the state-level net neutrality laws he helped create. Donald Trump was threatening to sue CNN for its coverage based on a dumb legal theory, while we wrote about how [...]

Newspaper presidential endorsements may not actually matter that much, but billionaire media owners blocking editorial teams from publishing their endorsements out of concern over potential retaliation from a future Donald Trump presidency should matter a lot. If people were legitimately worried about the weaponization of government" and the idea that companies might silence speech over [...]

Over a decade ago, we wrote about how the flurry of trademark lawsuits seen at that time over competitors buying up Google Adwords to get their company ads displayed when competitors are searched might finally be coming to an end. While these types of suits have certainly reduced in number based on anecdotal evidence, they [...]

The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world ofgenerative AIthrough a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed previously on Walled Culture. We now have ourfirst decisionin this area, from the regional court in Hamburg. Andres Guadamuz has provided anexcellent detailed analysisof a ruling that is important [...]

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. Ben and Mike are technically off this week, but we [...]

Not all cops are terrible people, but a whole lot of terrible people seem to be cops. For some reason, a police officer (who has not been officially identified by the district) has a side gig as a substitute English teacher. I don't know what qualifications this officer brings to that job, but absolutely none [...]

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What do you do when the misinformation is coming from inside the house? In the recent book Character Limit, about Musk's takeover of Twitter, there's an anecdote that is in the introduction. A data scientist who worked at the company (and had survived the early purge), who was horrified at how Musk had fallen for [...]

At no point has the cable industry or its executives been particularly keyed in to the cord cutting" threat. As streaming video chipped away at their subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded byraising prices and being difficult. When confronted by growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting theTVcord but keeping [...]

It was only a few weeks ago that we were discussing how, thanks to how fractured streaming has become, watching NFL games is becoming more and more an expensive and complicated process. It's gotten so bad that ESPN has released an app designed specifically just to help viewers find where to watch the NFL game [...]

You probably remember Redbox, the DVD-rental kiosk company that went went bankrupt last June. The story behind the bankruptcy is interesting, in case to you missed it. The company failed to pivot to streaming (you might recall the failed joint venture with Verizon), and the bankruptcy has been profoundly ugly in a scorched Earth kind [...]

Axon - having apparently exhausted the market for Tasers - has moved on to hawking body cameras to police departments. The cameras are the loss leaders. The real money comes from perpetual service contracts and access fees. With every new feature added to Axon's line of products, the difficulty level of switching manufacturers and service [...]

Elon Musk's SLAPP suit against Media Matters has hit a roadblock, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals-not exactly known for its progressive rulings-has granted a stay on Judge Reed O'Connor's order compelling the nonprofit to reveal its donor information. These days, the Fifth Circuit is where good law goes to die, but apparently even [...]

Sometimes, people who think they know things about defamation pursue their own lawsuits, making fools of themselves because they so very firmly believe anything said about them that they don't like must be libel. Then there are the lawyers who do the same thing. They should know better. Even if they don't specialize in defamation [...]