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Meet the new year, same as the old year, at least as far as America's measles problem goes. We talked a lot about this disease last year, and for good reason. In RFK Jr.'s first year as Secretary of DHS, America managed to suffer its worst measles infection count since 1991. A direct product of [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The original version has even more horrifying photographs and videos of agents engaging in this kind of behavior. Immigration agents have put civilians' lives at risk using more than their guns. An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold,wrapping his arm around the [...]

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a new budget under the current administration, and they are going on a surveillance tech shopping spree. Standing at$28.7 billion dollars for the year 2025 (nearly triple their 2024 budget)and at least another $56.25 billion over the next three years, ICE's budget would be the envy of many [...]

If you missed it, 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 destroying what little journalism was left at the media giant and creating an alternate-reality safe space for right wing billionaires and their increasingly radical [...]

The Complete CompTIA and IT Exam Prep Bundle has a variety of courses, labs, and exam simulators to help you prepare for certification courses. You'll have access to Cramwise (an exam simulator), DojoLab (labs, practice exams, and PBQs), CodeDirect (beginner Python courses), ExamsDigest (labs and PBQs focusing on CompTIA, Cisco, and AWS), and LinuxPath. It's [...]

Last week, we wrote about how ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. We wrote about how the Trump administration immediately began lying about it despite multiple video angles showing exactly what happened. We wrote about how the media called documented murder [...]

We've always known the ultimate goal was to subject everyone to biometric collections, whether it's at border crossings or international airports. At some point, the tech will move inland and become an annoying part of traveling from Point A to B because national security or whatever the fuck. The acceleration was a bit more limited [...]

Donald Trump is the only president in American history to have been impeached twice. That is a simple fact of history. I can imagine it's a fact that Donald Trump doesn't like very much. He might even be embarrassed over it. But it's a fact that remains no matter what the fragile ego in chief [...]

Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game's male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been [...]

I made the mistake of opening up X yesterday to look something up, and the very first post that appeared in my feed was a perfect, almost pedagogical example of how the game of disinformation telephone" gets played. Let's walk through it, because understanding how this works is important. The game works like this: Someone [...]

Trump's binge-and-purge approach to handling the DOJ definitely isn't working out for him. The administration has been steadily pushing prosecutors out for failing to be MAGA enough, especially when it comes to Trump's steady stream of vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions. Not only are prosecutors finding themselves trumped (pun intended) by grand juries when trying to [...]

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The Trump administration has spent months shrieking about EU censorship" while actively censoring people themselves. While I've long been a critic of parts of the DSA, Americans-particularly MAGA officials-keep crying wolf over the DSA's non-censorial aspects, then turn around and abuse their own power to silence speech they dislike. They seem to get a thrill [...]

ICE activity has increased exponentially since Trump's return to office, bringing with it an exponential increase in rights violations committed by federal officers. Multiple lawsuits have been filed and, without exception, courts have safeguarded the rights of people to peacefully protest and document federal officers as they perform their duties. Meanwhile, the people running DHS [...]

The story of Netflix these past several years has been a fairly consistent one, told primarily across a few main pillars. The company has begun hitting subscriber adoption issues as it raised prices, raised them some more, and then raised them even further, all as the company attempts to gobble up more live content, largely [...]

Whatever the stated reasons for doing this, we all know what this really is: another effort from the Trump regime to put as much distance between it and accountability. Even before DHS head Kristi Noem decided it's now suddenly legal to force congressional oversight to notify ICE of impending inspections, her agency was making public [...]

I support the protests. I want to say this out loud. Isupportthem. If you support the protests, you should tell everyone you know that you support them. Some of us have jobs, commitments, health conditions, or other circumstances that prevent us from marching with our fellow citizens in the streets. But for those of us [...]

ICE killed a US citizen in broad daylight for the apparent crime of not being sufficiently intimidated when surrounded by ICE officers. Renee Good was shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who selectively leaked his recording to a right-wing news outlet in apparent hopes of shoring up the administration's swiftly crumbling narrative. The wagons are [...]

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The murder of Renee Nicole Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has certainly created quite the divide between the reality-based majority of the population who doesn't want masked unaccountable federal law enforcement goons invading cities they have no business being in and shooting people for saying dude, I'm not mad at you" and trying to [...]

We've noted more than a few times how Microsoft's use of AI in journalism has been an embarrassing mess. Microsoft's steadily deteriorating MSN websites have been criticized for years for the lazy use of AI slop, resulting in numerous false headlines, fake stories, and low-quality engagement trash. Like Google and others, the pursuit of impossible [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about the murder of Renee Good by ICE: In second place, it's That One Guy with a comment about culpability for Trump's actions: An entire congress and military worth of collaborators As horrible as Trump is never forget... The republican [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, 60 Minutes aired some pure misleading moral panic about Section 230, while Parler (remember Parler?) was desperately seeking attention by pretending it didn't need Section 230, and Ajit Pai grew a last-minute backbone and refused to move forward with Trump's 230 attack. Lawmakers were complaining about Comcast's expanded [...]

Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy's response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines. The last time we saw this was back in October of last [...]

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 sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw [...]

Fair use is not just an excuse to copy-it's a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That's what wetold a federal courtinChannel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists. Waltham Community [...]

If you want to understand how far MAGA Republicans have strayed from any actual free speech" principles, look no further than this: Congress issued a subpoena to Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp, because he posted on X a publicly available online biography of someone involved in the illegal and unconstitutional kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. There [...]

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This ruling was released in the middle of last month and I really wish I had gotten to it sooner. Let's not pretend this will change anything about how this administration full of white Christian nationalists will treat detained migrants. And it definitely won't change anything about how the American government in general treats anyone [...]

Late last year, most major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed tohack into U.S. communications networks and then spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year completely undetected. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent another year rooting around the ISP networkseven after [...]

When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many [...]

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 the first Ctrl-Alt-Speech episode of 2026, Mike and Ben [...]

Saturday, January 3rd, 2026. The President of the United States stood in his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, andannouncedthat America had toppled Venezuela's government and would now run" the country indefinitely. Not from the Oval Office. Not in consultation with Congress. From Mar-a-Lago, in front of gilded chandeliers and club members, Donald Trump pointed [...]

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Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight, shooting her multiple times at close range in the head. She had stuffed animal toys in the glove box [...]

Last year we noted how the Trump organizationhad cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. It was barely even a phone company"; it was just a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service. The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to [...]

For those who wish to tell Hilton what they think of them, here is a model letter. Dear Hilton: I, as well as many of my friends and fellow citizens (as social media reflects), initially read with patriotic pride the news that a Hilton franchisee in Minnesota had refused service to ICE personnel-at least initially, [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Dr. Kirk Moore had been on trial for five days, accused of falsifying COVID-19 vaccination cards and throwing away the government-supplied doses. The Utah plastic surgeon faced up to 35 years in prison if the jury found him guilty on charges that included conspiracy to defraud [...]

Over the past week, Reuters, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, CNBC, and a parade of other outlets published headlines claiming that Grok-Elon Musk's LLM chatbot (the one that once referred to itself as MechaHitler")-had apologized" for generating non-consensual intimate images of minors and was fixing" its failed guardrails. Grok did no such thing. Grok cannot apologize. [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

Whether the Trump administration likes it or not, the right to a fair trial still exists. And even the person the government is now subjecting to what looks a whole lot like a vindictive prosecution is still a beneficiary of this right. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador's infamous CECOT earlier this year [...]

We've noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to run CBS Newsfor a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power (particularly Trump and Netanyahu), validate and amplify right wing grievance and engagement bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. Even if [...]

The Trump administration's war on vaccines continues, it seems. We've already written extensively about all the bullshit RFK Jr. is pulling when it comes to public health around vaccines. From his dismantling the CDC's ACIP committee and rebuilding it full of anti-vaxxer allies, pulling public funding for research on new and better RNA vaccines, to [...]

One of the most common refrains we hear from age verification proponents is that online ID checks are nothing new. After all, you show your ID at bars and liquor stores all the time, right? And it's true that many places age-restrict access in-person to various goods and services, such as tobacco, alcohol, firearms, lottery [...]

I've criticized Chuck Schumer plenty over the years, generally for being bad on tech policy, but also for not understanding the moment we're living through. Yes, he's the leader of a minority party with zero power, but that doesn't mean he's powerless. Yet he acts as if he is. And if he can't figure that [...]

Donald Trump and his authoritarian friends have successfully destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the closest this country has gotten to having a useful and effective publicly-funded media. The CPB this week voted to officially shut down, just months after Republicans passed a massive billionaire tax cut plan that stripped the organization of more [...]

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Given the recent Supreme Court ruling that (surprisingly!) said Trump did not have the executive power to commandeer National Guard troops to aid and abet law enforcement/deportation efforts in Illinois, this ruling [PDF] from the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court was, perhaps, inevitable. If it's illegal to do it in Illinois, it's equally illegal in California [...]

American right wing propaganda companies are beginning to fight among themselves as a shrinking number of dodgy media companies vie for domination of the Trump-coddled U.S. propaganda market. Newsmax, a right wing propaganda organization pretending to be a cable news company, is upset at the fact that Nexstar Media Group and TEGNA, two right wing [...]

I've come to really appreciate the term Trump derangement syndrome." I've found it incredibly useful, primarily because whenever I hear someone use the phrase unironically, I am comfortable assessing that the conversation with that person will be unproductive and can be ended. It's a rhetorical device, and not a particularly good one, that is trotted [...]