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It's been several years since we last did this, but I'd like to remind you all that the National Football League plays a lot of make believe when it comes to what its trademarks for the Super Bowl" do and do not allow it to do in terms of enforcement. Thanks largely to media outlets [...]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, includingbreaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, abombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, [...]

Back in August, we wrote about the Department of Justice's unprecedented decision to file a judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg. The complaint, which Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted about in what was itself likely a violation of the law governing such complaints, accused Boasberg of violating judicial ethics by... privately expressing [...]

Back in 2023 we noted how a company named Telly proclaimed it had come up with a new idea for a TV: a free TV, with a second small TV below it, that shows users ads pretty much all of the time. While the bottom TV could also be used for useful things (like weather [...]

For over half a century, the CIA's World Factbook has been one of the most quietly useful things the federal government has ever produced. A comprehensive, regularly updated, freely available reference on every country in the world-population stats, government structures, economic data, geography, the works. It was the kind of thing that made you think, [...]

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In the grand scheme of things - the wanton cruelty, the routine violations of rights, the actual fucking murders - this may only seem like a blip on the mass deportation continuum. But this report from Dell Cameron for Wired is still important. It not only explains why federal officers are approaching people with cellphones [...]

The Trump administration keeps demonstrating that it really hates affordable broadband. It particularly hates it when the government tries to make broadband affordable to poor people or rural school kids. In just the last year the Trump administration has: I'm sure I missed a few. This week, the administration's war on affordable broadband shifted back [...]

Echo chambers are generally bad. Any group making important decisions should have a certain level of diversity of thought to avoid groupthink. But I would argue that there are some stances that are so fundamental that it's good when everyone is on the same page about them. Vaccines, for instance. It would be just 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.

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Days into President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, a cryptocurrency billionaire posted avideo on Xto his hundreds of thousands of followers. Please Donald Trump, I need your help," he said, wearing a flag pin askew and seated awkwardly in an armchair. I am [...]

For years, we've been subjected to an endless parade of hyperventilating claims about the Biden administration's supposed censorship industrial complex." We were told, over and over again, that the government was weaponizing its power to silence conservative speech. The evidence for this? Some angry emails from White House staffers that Facebook ignored. That was basically [...]

I have to admit: the first one-and-a-half paragraphs of this CNN report had me thinking the Trump administration was shedding another pretense and just embracing its inherent shittiness. Justice Department officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss how to reenergize probes that are considered a top priority for President Donald Trump - reviewing the [...]

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If you've been paying attention to surveillance and civil liberties issues over the past fifteen years, you've likely learned to recognize a particular pattern. Senator Ron Wyden will occasionally send a public letter that essentially says hey, I can't tell you what's happening because it's classified, but something really bad is going on and you [...]

We've been talking about how the Trump GOP is launching an all out attack on Netflix's proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust or corporate power, but because they really want Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison to buy Warner Brothers, CNN, and HBO. It's part of their unsubtle plan to acquire what's [...]

It's darkly funny, in a way, to recall a racist trope that gets trotted out about immigration all the time: immigrants bring disease into the country. That in itself isn't funny, obviously. The funny part is that it seems like we're proving the opposite to be true under the Trump administration. As the measles outbreak [...]

The Baton Rouge Police Department announced recently that it will begin usinga dronedesigned by military equipment manufacturer Lockheed Martin and Edge Autonomy, making it one of the first local police departments to use an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a history of primary use in foreign war zones. Baton Rouge is now one of the [...]

It is no secret that large language models (LLMs) are being used routinely to modify and even write scientific papers. That's not necessarily a bad thing: LLMs can help produce clearer texts with stronger logic, not least when researchers are writing in a language that is not their mother tongue. More generally, a recent analysis [...]

Jeff Bezos this week continued to dismantle what's left of the Washington Post via another massive round of layoffs that left remaining staff stunned. Among the latest cuts is the elimination of the paper's popular sports desk,scaling back of international and local news, the firing of an untold swath of journalists, and the ending of [...]

Over the past week, two federal judges have issued rulings on immigration cases that aren't just legally significant-they're genuinely extraordinary documents. One includes a photo of a five-year-old in a Spiderman backpack, biblical citations, and closes with Ben Franklin's warning about keeping the republic. The other spends 83 pages methodically dismantling a cabinet secretary's decision, [...]

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The two murders by immigration officers during Trump's vengeful surge" in Minneapolis, Minnesota have grabbed most of the headlines recently. And deservedly so. The violent rhetoric used by nearly every administration official - combined with a lack of training and the explicit understanding no one will be punished by Trump for whatever's done in Trump's [...]

So we've been noting how the Trump administration has been helping Larry Ellison wage war on Netflix's proposed merger with Warner Brothers. Not because they care about antitrust (that's always been a lie), but because they want Larry Ellison to be able to dominate media and create a safe space for unpopular right wing ideology. [...]

Kash Patel, FBI Director, is not very good at his job. There are plenty of examples to demonstrate that notion, from him apparently completely misunderstanding the purpose and protections of the 2nd Amendment and Minnesota gun laws (whatever your thoughts on gun rights might generally be), to his gathering of barely trained castoffs to serve [...]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a paramilitary force." Rep. John Mannion, a New York Democrat, called ICE apersonal paramilitary unitof [...]

Support us on Patreon On a recent episode of our other podcast, Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Mike was joined by guest host Konstantinos Komaitis for a far-reaching discussion about online speech. One point that was briefly raised in that discussion was the question of whether AI tools are good or bad for user agency, and since Mike and [...]

The administration's racist goon squads have absolutely been steamrolling the Constitution since Trump's return to office. When ICE et al started roving throughout the nation looking for anyone non-white enough to be foreign, all rights were considered expendable. The DHS made swift work of the Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendments by denying arrestees due process [...]

For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about values" and belonging" and bringing your whole self to work." If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats. Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone [...]

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No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let's just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration's bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio: MPR News has learned that the police chief in [...]

So foryearswe pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive. One, it killed off a lot of local community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with [...]

In any war, information is power. Be it kinetic wars, cyberwarfare, or information wars, data is everything. And since RFK Jr. has clearly declared war on vaccines in America, it's not a huge surprise that he is looking to control information about vaccines. Or, as it turns out, simply sweep that information away. Nearly half [...]

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last weekposted a photoof the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St. Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office. A short while later, the White [...]

Let's just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they're currently at the top of Trump's shitlist. Prior to last month's escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it's possible ICE would [...]

Remember last summer when everyone was freaking out about the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material? The New York Times ran a piece in July with the headline A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet." NCMEC put out a blog post calling the numbers an alarming increase" and a wake-up call." [...]

Trump's going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his be the despot you wish to see in the world" efforts. His top appointees are [...]

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We called bullshit when Republicans tried to order websites to carry content. We're calling bullshit now when Democrats are trying to do the same. We spent years explaining to politicians across both parties why the government can't dictate how private platforms moderate content. During the Biden admin, GOP governors seemed most aggressive about trying to [...]

We've long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included$42.5 billion for broadbandgrants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn't without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access. But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Raphael with a comment about Trump demanding billions from the IRS: This reminds me, Trump loves to rant and rave about how poorly and dysfunctionally the countries of origin of many migrant to the USA are run, and how bad things look like there. [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we looked at the future of net neutrality under the new interim FCC boss, and at how broadband monopolies continued to get money for networks they never fully deployed. Twitter got immunity from a banned user's lawsuit thanks to Section 230, while dozens of human rights groups were [...]

Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no. So the DOJ arrested him anyway. On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. [...]

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines-tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued. Courts disagreed. They recognized that [...]

If you've been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run" CBS News. And by run" CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant andcreate an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to [...]

We've been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it's always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that's worth keeping in mind today [...]

A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about border czar" Tom Homan's ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn't stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they'd just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex [...]

Yeah, there's the overt cruelty. There's the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from shithole" countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief. Then there's everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts [...]

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Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era-and that's saying something: I think everybody - the American public believe it's absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just [...]