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For years, a vocal group of self-described contrarian" Substackified pundits warned about a supposed censorship industrial complex" involving collusion between the White House and social media companies to set content moderation policies. There was just one problem: it wasn't even close to true. Now, with Elon Musk owning ExTwitter and Donald Trump back in the [...]

While the concept has been endlessly demonized by right wing media (working hand in moist hand with shitty companies like AT&T and Comcast), net neutrality was always well intentioned. It was, in essence, some inconsistent, rarely enforced rules to try and prevent regional broadband monopolies from abusing their regional broadband monopolies to rip off consumers [...]

When we and others discussed the massive trademark lawsuit between Molson Coors, makers of Keystone beer amongst other brands, and Stone Brewing, it was billed as a David versus Goliath scenario. Now, if I remember my bible studies correctly, once David slung a couple of well-placed rocks into Goliath's forehead, Goliath didn't then get up [...]

It looks like Dallas, Texas residents aren't going to wait around for the courts to react to marijuana legalization. They've (overwhelmingly) decided to answer one of the legal questions legalization creates by adding the answer to the ballot measure itself. (h/t Jacob Sullum, Reason) Shall the Dallas City Charter be amended by adding a new [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got another cross-post for you this week, and this time it's also a live panel recording. Recently, Mike joined a panel at Boston University Questrom School of Business which was recorded for WBUR's Is Business Broken? podcast, alongside professors Marshall Van Alstyne and Nadine Strossen, and moderated by host Curt [...]

Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, patents are not a measure of innovation, nor are they needed for companies to thrive - something even Elon Musk understands. But one aspect of patents that is rarely considered is their morality. The European Patent Office's Board of Appeal wrestled with this issue in an interesting case involving [...]

It should be clear by now that being a fan of one particular politician doesn't make you a member of a protected" group. It's just a stupid as cops claiming they should be given more rights and protections because people just don't seem to be showering them with unconditional love in recent years. Wearing clothing [...]

You have likely heard that Donald Trump has nominated conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his next Secretary of Health and Human Services. This is dangerous and cruel for a very long list of reasons, but his nomination also exposes the critical flaws in a bill proposed by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben [...]

We noted earlier this week how Trump had unsurprisingly picked Brendan Carr to head the FCC. We also pointed out how Carr's policies" are utterly indistinguishable from the interests of unpopular telecom and media giants like Comcast and AT&T. He's going to demolish whatever's left of the FCC's consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, [...]

If this sounds familiar, sadly, it is. Three years ago, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court somehow arrived at the conclusion that tasing someone soaked in gasoline - an act of escalation that not only killed the suicidal person officers were supposed to rescuing but also burned the entire residence to the ground - was not [...]

Whatever your politics, there can be no arguing that the election of Donald Trump once more to the highest office in the land has served as a permission slip for some of the worst people in the country to behave badly. We're already seeing this in all sorts of ways, from incel fuckwits telling women [...]

Alfred Robert (A.R.) Quinton was an English watercolor artist, famed for his stunning paintings of British landscapes and villages. Following along a professional artist with more than 35 years of experience, the Learn to Paint Course will guide you through painting A.R. Quinton's Scenes with watercolor and enhancing them using pastel pencils. From the sky [...]

Elon Musk's ExTwitter has filed an important First Amendment lawsuit against California over its unconstitutional law regulating deepfakes. This follows Musk's earlier successful challenge to the state's social media transparency" law. Yes, sometimes Elon Musk actually does file good First Amendment cases that help protect free speech. I'm just as amazed as anyone, but it's [...]

We're excited to announce the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game: One Billion Users. In this fast-paced and entertaining card game, you take on the role of a social media mogul competing to build the most successful social network. We've spent much of this year designing, testing, and refining the game [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

One of the most frustrating aspects in the ongoing conversation around the preservation of older video games, also known as cultural output, is the collision of IP rights and some publishers' unwillingness to both continue to support and make available these older games and their refusal to release those same games into the public domain [...]

Cops like to pretend they're winning the war on sex trafficking. Whether or not there's enough sex trafficking to justify law enforcement expenditures is, at best, still an open question. And most sex trafficking operations tend to end with the arrest of the people they're supposed to be saving: the sex workers. Then there are [...]

Earlier this year, California passed SB 976, yet another terrible and obviously unconstitutional bill with the moral panicky title Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act." The law restricts minors' access to social media and imposes burdensome requirements on platforms. It is the latest in a string of misguided attempts by California lawmakers to [...]

Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation's top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there's zero daylight between Carr's policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of regulatory capture" as you're going to [...]

Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD investigators" spent 17 hours torturing Perez into confessing to a crime that hadn't been committed... by anybody. After discovering his father missing, Perez Jr. - who suffers from several health and mental [...]

The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It's on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt [...]

Elon Musk's recent claims that corporate boycotts of social media platforms are criminal reek of hypocrisy, given his own eagerness to join the #DeleteFacebook boycott just a few years ago. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly supported the #DeleteFacebook campaign, even going so far as to remove the official SpaceX and [...]

Culminating a deal that's been rumored about for the better part of the last twenty years, Dish Network and DirecTV recently consummated a new merger in a doomed bid to try and remain solvent and relevant. The deal involved DirecTV acquiring Dish forone dollar, in addition to $9.75 billion in Dish's debt. The deal was [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with some pushback on the language we used to describe Marc Andreessen's hypocrisy and misrepresentation of reality: Stop giving terrible people the benefit of the doubt The word you're looking for is lie, as in When someone says something that they [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Biden was spreading myths about Section 230, Microsoft was giving the go-ahead to California's new privacy law, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Google v. Oracle case about APIs and copyright. A copyright troll lawyer faced sanctions and arrest over some courtroom shenanigans, Universal Music was [...]

We've talked several times about GOG in the past. The video game storefront was born over a decade ago, originally built on a platform of making older games compatible with modern systems combined with its insistence that any game sold on its storefront be DRM free. In the years since, GOG began to also be [...]

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 [...]

For better or worse, jawboning has been a hot topic recently, and it's unlikely that interest will fade any time soon. Jawboning, in broad strokes, is when the government pressures a third party to make that third party chill the speech of another instead of going after the speech directly. Because the First Amendment says [...]

We just warned folks that Donald Trump would be one of the most anti-free speech Presidents in history, and he seems to have no qualms living down to that reputation. Donald Trump's history of frivolous lawsuits against media outlets shows his disdain for free speech, and he shows no signs of stopping. The Columbia Journalism [...]

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Detroit law enforcement officials got a bit of shock last week when some seized iPhones rebooted themselves, despite being in airplane mode and, in one case, stored inside a Faraday bag. Panic - albeit highly localized - ensued. It was covered by Joseph Cox for 404 Media, who detailed not only the initial panic, but [...]

We've noted more time than I can count how the U.S. ban of TikTok (yes, yes I know, it's not a ban, it's a forced divestment ByteDance was never going to agree with) was pointless fucking performance art. Not only was it unconstitutional, it did nothing to actually address the privacy and national security issues [...]

It's not an easy thing to be able to find moments of levity in war, particularly one as lopsided as Russia's aggressive war on Ukraine. But one moment that fits the bill was when a Ukrainian soldier stationed on an island in the Black Sea responded to Russian demands of surrender with the now iconic [...]

The world might be going to hell, but at least activists' efforts to protect consumers' rights to affordable and easy tech repair continue to gain steam. Most recently in Canada, where the country's Copyright Act was amended by two different bills allowing the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if done for the purposes of [...]

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court was somewhat hesitant to bless the 18 months of pole camera surveillance in the Tuggle case back in 2021. The reluctance to state affirmatively this sort of surveillance will always be constitutional shows up in its most recent decision dealing with the same subject matter. Here's the court expressing its [...]

Marc Andreessen, the influential venture capitalist, is exhibiting a startling disconnect between his stated beliefs in free markets and free speech, and his recent authoritarian threats against those who disagree with him. In recent statements, Andreessen has threatened criminal charges against advertisers choosing not to associate with certain platforms and accused an imaginary government-university-company censorship [...]

The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, [...]

Maybe if law enforcement didn't abuse subpoenas so frequently, it might be a little bit more difficult for criminals to do the same thing. Subpoenas can be used to order companies and service providers to turn over user data and information. But they don't require law enforcement to run this request past a court first, [...]

We've noted for years how wireless companies were at the forefront of over-collecting your sensitive daily movement data, then selling access to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together. That resulted in no limit of scandals from stalkers using the data to spy on women, to law enforcement (and people pretending to be law [...]

The whole You don't actually own what you've bought" mantra we have here at Techdirt is really, really frustrating. It's become such a regular topic that, in my personal life, I regularly respond to news from friends and family about a digital purchase" they bought by asking if they actually bought it, or have any [...]

Always great to see another law enforcement officer weaponize his job by letting his politics motivate his actions. We recently saw this in Ohio, when Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski sent out a Facebook post telling residents to write down the addresses of people with Kamala Harris signs in their yards. I'm not going to call this [...]

Support us on Patreon It's been a few weeks, but we're back! Although the podcast schedule is still going to be sporadic for a little while longer (Mike explains further in the intro) we've got a couple cross-post episodes lined up, starting with today's. Recently, Mike joined Ed Zitron on his Better Offline podcast for [...]

I get that a lot of people don't like the big AI companies and how they scrape the web. But these copyright lawsuits being filed against them are absolute garbage. And you want that to be the case, because if it goes the other way, it will do real damage to the open web by [...]

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Well, these entities deserve each other. The problem is we really don't deserve either of them. Trump spent a lot of his campaign touting a logistical nightmare of a policy that sounded a lot like an collapse-of-the-Weimar-Republic sort of thing: the mass detention and deportation of immigrants, whether they're here legally or not. All that's [...]

Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent much of the last decade positioning himself to be Trump's likely pick for the next boss of the FCC. He's likely to get his wish; after spending a lot of time crying about TikTok to get on cable TV and kissing AT&T's and Comcast's asses, Carr's widely considered [...]

As the saying goes, the arc of morale judgment is long, but it does bend towards justice. And even if we accept such an optimistic worldview is relevant in this year of our lord, 2024, that certainly doesn't mean we can't bitch about how long that damned arc is. It's been over two years since [...]

The case against Backpage was built on lies, innuendo, and a willful misunderstanding of how the internet works. But that didn't stop the government from destroying the company and its founders' lives. Over the last few years, we've written about how the entire case against Backpage was a travesty of justice. The company actually worked [...]

As Techdirt stories attest, Wikipedia has been attacked in the past for publishing true information that somebody doesn't like. As well as wanting articles to be censored, those behind such attacks often also demand the names of those who worked on the article. Something similar is now happening in India, where the Indian news agency [...]

Never underestimate the amount of effort law enforcement officers will expend to dispense as much cruelty as possible. And never forget these are the people we are expected to believe are actually there to protect and serve. While it's great there's a settlement payment on the way, the fact is that this extremely vindictive and [...]