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Last month, we discussed NVIDIA's demo video for its forthcoming DLSS 5 technology and the controversy surrounding it. While I'm going to continue to be of the posture that an injection of nuance is desperately needed in the reaction to AI tools and the like, our comments section largely disagreed with me on that post. [...]

The Trump administration's AI policy is two-faced, torn between deregulation and despotism. In March, the administration released its National AI Legislative Framework, directing Congress to prevent the United States government from coercing technology providers, including AI providers, to ban, compel, or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas." This policy against government interference with [...]

In case you've been asleep, what appears to be an increasingly mentally unstable Donald Trump has further destabilized the middle east with a war nobody asked for or wanted. Most U.S. media coverage of Trump's disastrous Iran war hasn't been great, but they've still occasionally managed to communicate the pointlessness of the endeavor to the [...]

First, some of the good news: certain AI models-currently Anthropic's Mythos, but surely others are well on their way if they haven't already arrived-turn out to be really good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities. As Anthropic itself reported: During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in [...]

Luminar Mobile is your all-in-one creative companion designed for iOS, Android OS, and Chrome OS. Powered by an intuitive, touch-responsive interface, it lets you enhance photos effortlessly-anytime, anywhere. Whether you're adjusting lighting, perfecting portraits, or adding artistic flair, Luminar Mobile delivers pro-level results in the palm of your hand. It's on sale for $20. Note: [...]

I'm not here to cut the Trump administration any slack or engage in both-sides bullshit, but this is something that has always been true: we treat anyone imprisoned or detained as less than human. The dehumanization begins with something we call processing" - a word that separates a human from their humanity by making them [...]

A little over a year ago, we wrote about a fairly silly lawsuit filed against Netflix (and Warner Bros.) by Pepperdine University in California for trademark infringement. At issue is the Netflix show Running Point, which is a fictionalized story of a female executive thrust into ownership of a professional basketball team, inspired by 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. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity. Too often, it's used to extract payouts from others. Higbee & Associates, a law firmknown for sending copyright demand lettersto website owners, targeted May First Movement Technology, accusing it of infringing a photograph owned by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The claim was baseless. May First didn't post the photo. [...]

We've talked for years about how the DMCA's notice-and-takedown system is ripe for abuse. The legal structure of the law practically begs for such abuse: send a notice, content disappears, and the target has to fight through a slow counter-notice process to maybe get it back. The system rewards speed of takedowns over accuracy because [...]

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Forgive me for this digression. I know it's usually left to Mike Masnick to lift us up from our collective doldrums when things seem even more hopeless than they did last year. His New Year's posts are never wrong. There are always silver linings, even if the filigree is more difficult to detect with each [...]

Elon Musk is desperate to dominate the Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband market. So is Jeff Bezos. And now the two billionaires are engaged in proxy fights at Trump's FCC over who'll get the honor. Amazon's LEO offering, Project Leo, is significantly behind Musk's Starlink, and has been rushing to build out its LEO satellite constellation. [...]

After RFK Jr. found himself getting a rebuke from the court system over his ACIP reorganization from last year, in which the courts issued a preliminary injunction on the vaccine schedule changes ACIP recommended and staying further work from the panel, I've been waiting for the government to appeal the order. That appeal has not [...]

There'sa meaningful push afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, whileall fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. Passage can [...]

Never underestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. When things could just be left alone and everything would turn out OK, officers insist on inserting themselves into the equation, ensuring maximum pain and humiliation for everyone involved. In this case, a Fairhope, Alabama officer decided he couldn't simply do nothing when coming across a grandmother at [...]

Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the Disinformation Governance Board" and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the Ministry of Truth." It was government speech police." It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher [...]

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The courts keep pounding the nails home. What this government is engaged in is illegal, on multiple levels. If you subtract the pro-MAGA Fifth Circuit and 6/9ths of the Supreme Court, you have a judicial quorum that says rights are still rights, despite this administration's claims otherwise. DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or [...]

A federal judge has ruled that President Trump's executive order last year defunding PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, and has issued a permanent injunction insisting that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it. But the ruling may come too late to save what was left of U.S public media. The original executive orderresulted in [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of [...]

The Supreme Court has now issued its decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. This was a case where Cox, a broadband provider, had been held liable for the alleged copyright infringements of its users, in this case via filesharing. It appealed, arguing that such secondary liability was not something that copyright law allowed. [...]

Support us on Patreon We've written at length about the dangers of the recent court rulings in California and New Mexico that say social media companies can be held responsible for certain uses of their platforms via product design liability. Recently, Mike joined FIRE's So to Speak podcast hosted by Nico Perrino to discuss the [...]

Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week - the AI-powered" telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a $1.8 billion company" supposedly run by just two brothers - I've had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: Can you [...]

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Leave it to the president that makes us nostalgic for Nixon-era corruption to claim that a law Nixon made necessary is no longer a law. The Presidential Records Act was summoned into existence by Nixon's resignation and his subsequent efforts to destroy records generated by his office as he was fumbling his way towards impeachment. [...]

MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony America first!" rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but havesuddenly gone mysteriously quietnow that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. The Wall Street Journal (Reuters [...]

Every relevant court that has looked at this question - including the Supreme Court - has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the [...]

You're never safe when you're working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump's first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump. This time [...]

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week's House of Lords debate on the topic, we're getting you situated with a primer on what's been happening and what it all means. What was the last vote about? On 9 March, the House of Commons [...]

Before we get into this, let's set the scene a little: The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies. Let that [...]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for [...]

Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone's book contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her [...]

The Supreme Court's latest recap of its relative inactivity (Trump administration emergency" appeals aside) has delivered yet more evidence of this court's indifference to rights violations committed by the government. Other cases involving alleged rights violations that should have - at the very least - been handed over to jury for further consideration were tacitly [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering an additional resource on our post about the White House's new app: The other half of the story The analysis by thereallo" covers the Android version; there's a dissection of the iOS version at Security Analysis of the Official White [...]

It's time for the second in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! We've already covered the Best Adaptation winner, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Deep Cut: CARAMENTRAN by RedSPINE and poymakes. Sometimes, we get entries [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. They asked nicely at first. After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who'd recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they'd done in [...]

The Supreme Court's decision last year in U.S. v. Skirmetti, upholding a law depriving young trans people the healthcare they need, is insupportable, rendering people unequal in a way the Constitution cannot possibly suborn. But its new decision in Chiles v. Salazar regarding the First Amendment standard to use regarding Colorado's law regarding conversion therapy [...]

Most of the discussions about the impact of the latestgenerative AIsystems on copyright have centered on text, images and video. That's no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this kind of creativity. But there's [...]

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Last week, I wrote about why the social media addiction verdicts against Meta and YouTube should worry anyone who cares about the open internet. The short version: plaintiffs' lawyers found a clever way to recharacterize editorial decisions about third-party content as product design defects," effectively gutting Section 230 without anyone having to repeal it. The [...]

This may not be an actual Wyden siren," but it still has his name attached to it. What's being said here isn't nearly as ominous as this single sentence he sent to CIA leadership earlier this year: I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express [...]

A quick refresher: there was originally $42.5billionin broadband grants headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yetroutinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But after taking office this second time, the Trump administration rewrote the grant program's guidance toeliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology. [...]

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 [...]

There is a familiar media failure in which opposing viewpoints are presented as equally valid, even when the evidence overwhelmingly supports one side. It's called Bothsidesism. This false balance phenomenon legitimizes misinformation and undermines public understanding by giving disproportionate weight to baseless claims. Why bring this up? Because the new AI Doc film is based [...]

Back in October, Meta announced that its new Instagram Teen Accounts would feature content moderation guided by the PG-13 rating." On its face, this made a certain kind of sense as a communication strategy: parents know what PG-13 means (or at least think they do), and Meta was clearly trying to borrow that cultural familiarity [...]

Opusonix is the workflow-first platform built for music producers and engineers who are tired of endless email chains and scattered files. By centralizing feedback, versions, and tasks in one structured workspace, it helps you cut email traffic by up to 90% so you can focus more on creating and less on chasing approvals. From time-coded [...]

Trump's do everything all at once approach to immigration enforcement is starting to go off the rails. Trump's plainly stated hatred of shithole countries" and their inhabitants manifested in early wins for his bigoted remove the brown people" programs. Then Stephen Miller (the man who answers the what if a lightbulb had eyebrows and was [...]