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Last month I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how Republicans had hijacked the Biden-era infrastructure bill to redirect billions of dollars away from next-generation fiber, and instead funnel it into the pockets of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - in exchange for congested, expensive, satellite broadband service they'd already planned to deploy. [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Concerns surrounding young people's screen time are widespread. Australia became the first country toban social media for users under 16in December 2025, andDenmark,Franceand the U.K.have since announced similar restrictions to begin this year. In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

We've written in the past that people online often get way too excited about theoretical pending discovery" in frivolous lawsuits filed by bad actors. Because while there are certainly a few cases where (1) a frivolous case even reaches discovery and (2) some elements of that discovery are revealed to the public, in the vast [...]

You'd think that watching multiple lawyers get caught red-handed using AI to file briefs full of made-up citations would cause everyone in the legal profession - especially prosecutors - to double-check their own. You would, of course, be wrong. And the latest offender is not just some random lawyer. It's the DOJ itself, which cited [...]

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Former DHS head Kristi Noem got permanently sidelined for being unable to do two impossible things at once: be the anti-migrant hardliner Trump appointed her to be and massage the message when shit went sideways. Two murders in less than a month in Minneapolis may have made plenty of administration figures secretly happy, but once [...]

You might recall how the press and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers suffered a four-year embolism about the purported privacy and national security threat of TikTok, before fixing" the problem by ultimately offloading TikTok to Trump's billionaire friends. You know, the exact sort of authoritarian-friendly people keen on doing everything critics had previously accused ByteDance [...]

Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book's last chapter offers one solution in the form oftrue fans. These are people who love [...]

Reversing course, Flock Safety-the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network ofautomated license plate readers-has announcedthat it will end a pilot for itsacoustic gunshot detection devicesto identify signs of human distress." In October 2025,EFF warned the publicthat Flock was rolling out a new feature called Distress Detection" that would be deployed through their [...]

You may recall that at the end of last year and very beginning of this year there was a big story over Elon Musk's LLM tool Grok being willing to produce non-consensual images of people (including children) in bikinis or otherwise stripped down in objectifying ways. Elon played into and promoted this trend" at one [...]

The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don't have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary - losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees. While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment's existence, the rest of nation's courts have [...]

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Earlier this year Border Czar" Tom Homan, with an apparently straight face, told the media that if Democrats didn't stop calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed, then they would have no choice but to murder more people. A few weeks later, when ICE did murder another person, he doubled down and blamed people [...]

Paramount has been forced to pause consummation of its controversial $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers after a state antitrust lawsuit resulted in the courts granting a 14-day restraining order. There's a not insubstantial chance that the pause could prove fatal for the deal. California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit [...]

There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn't played [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness. What happens to these spaces when adults are [...]

Over the last few months especially, there has been renewed attention to the sheer scale of Donald Trump's ability to profit off the presidency. The efforts to do so only become more brazen every week. Leaving aside the crypto business that he got a ton of people to fund, the free airplane from a foreign [...]

Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they'll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to. Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration's attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to [...]

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We - and plenty of others - have been warning that the global rush to mandate age verification wouldn't stop at let's make sure kids can't see porn" or even just keep kids off of social media." It would inevitably expand into treating anonymity and privacy tools themselves as the enemy. Australia is now proving [...]

Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what's left of the country's already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what's left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president's ass. [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a simple comment about the judicial smackdown of Trump's IRS settlement: Bar referrals. Finally. In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone with a comment about J. K. Rowling threatening to sue Amnesty International: Transphoba destroys an otherwise normal person from the inside [...]

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I don't think it's terribly controversial to say that this second Trump administration has never shown much concern for the Hatch Act. If you're not familiar with that particular law, it makes it illegal for most of the members of the executive branch of the federal government, and some state representatives, to engage in partisan [...]

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune. Two weeks before this year's primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud. Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

JK Rowling has spoken about how she wrote the first Harry Potter book while she was employed at Amnesty International and how much that experience influenced her writing, and how she learned the power of human empathy" from working there. Rowling was also, you'll recall, one of the high profile signers of the infamous Harper's [...]

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You might have heard that Donald Trump gave a weird, rambling, nonsense speech last night full of misinformation and lies, trying to spread distrust in our electoral process ahead of the 2026 midterms - so that when Republicans likely lose some of the power they currently wield across the government, Trump and his allies can [...]

Here's a short crash course in U.S. telecom policy. Giant and very unpopular companies like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter created regional monopolies that work tirelessly to erode all meaningful competition and oversight, resulting in high prices, spotty service, slower speeds, and abysmal customer service. They also pay a bunch of dodgy pseudo-academic free market" [...]

There's a lot of health news going on in the country right now, in no small part to the absolutely pitiful and pathetic job RFK Jr. is doing heading up HHS. It is a near certainty that by the end of this week, the CDC will have published an updated case count for measles that [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center's opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation's most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center's annual honors gala. The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people [...]

This is probably nothing more than another data point in a deluge, but it's worth pointing out because it's instructive. Cops are using a whole lot of surveillance tech these days. Flock Safety has been especially aggressive in pursuing the law enforcement market, offering cops access to a nationwide network of cameras, including many owned [...]

A few weeks ago, David Lat went on the Serious Trouble podcast and mentioned that things actually hadn't turned out that poorly for the craven big law firms that had caved to Donald Trump's ridiculous attacks on any law firm he didn't like. The law firms that fought back keep winning in court, as it's [...]

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Florida Republicans' bigoted little piece of speech policing - the former Stop WOKE Act" - has already been terminated multiple times by federal courts. Two lawsuits with two sets of plaintiffs have generated the same results: a ruling declaring the law unconstitutional and an injunction blocking the state from enforcing it. The law aims to [...]

Not long after twelve states sued Paramount claiming its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers would harm market competition, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) filed their own lawsuit, warning that the massive debt load from the media industry's latest megamerger will result in an ocean of layoffs for an already reeling U.S. entertainment industry. [...]

In all of our discussions about how the digital revolution has created a system in which people don't actually own the things they think they're buying, I get particularly frustrated by the lack of change in it all. We've spilled much ink complaining that this clearly anti-consumer practice needs to be done away with, where [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court. These decisions, which make [...]

Well, it was fun while it lasted. And even while it still (theoretically) lasts, it's really nothing more than the Fifth Circuit saying rights can violated, but only for 90 days at a time. Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit managed to deliver a very un-Fifth Circuit decision, finding in favor of rights and against [...]

Last year, the Marco Rubio-run State Department announced that it would start denying visas to people who worked in misinformation/disinformation research, content moderation, fact-checking, or other compliance and trust & safety roles. So, yeah, if you were an EU-based person who worked on preventing child sexual abuse material from appearing online, the US government decided [...]

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Donald Trump believes that being elected president means he should never be challenged, never be asked to justify his actions, and never be given less than absolute loyalty and deference. He also clearly believes the office is there to serve him, rather than there for him to serve the public. He's going to make bank [...]

In late 2024 the Biden FTC under Lina Khan passed new click to cancel" rules that made it easier to cancel subscriptions and services, promising to punish the worst offenders. It was a direct response to decades of sleazy behavior from companies (from AOL to the Wall Street Journal) that made cancelling services an overly [...]

Are you currently pooping yourself uncontrollably and want to know why? Well, the CDC made that slightly more difficult last year, but you might just have cyclosporiasis, the unintentional weight loss craze that is gripping parts of the country. The disease - cyclosporiasis - is a foodborne illness caused by a microscopic parasite called cyclospora. [...]

Paramount is now threatening California regulators that they'll be taking their ball and going home (to Texas? Israel?) after California and 11 other states filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company's unpopular $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. Paramount leaked word of the nonexistent move to Semafor, which dutifully parroted the empty threat: Ellison's confidantes [...]

The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) is the growing incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital, online world. The culmination of that process was theEU Copyright Directive, passed in 2019. The Directive was supposed to be transposed into local laws by 2021, but a year after that deadline, many [...]

Well, well, well. Last month we noted that Judge Kathleen Williams had agreed to reopen the incredibly sketchy case where Donald Trump (as President of the United States) sued his own IRS (which he controls) for $10 billion because a contractor (who was caught, tried, convicted, and is currently serving his sentence) had leaked tax [...]

The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle has 7 online courses designed to help learners build skills that align directly with industry expectations.The focus is on practical tools and languages used by data professionals: Python for programming, Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation, foundational certification prep and specialized work with Databricks, an industry-standard platform for data engineering [...]