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The ten year war over Iceland is over and Iceland has come out the victor. If you don't know what I'm talking about, be prepared to listen to a whole bunch of stupid. In 2016, we wrote about Iceland Foods, a UK grocer, which had somehow convinced the EU to give it a trademark for [...]

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid's experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron-a story about a dystopian society that enforces equality" by handicapping anyone who excels-and the AI detection tool [...]

Republican lawmakers in Utah have long been on the cutting edge of shitty policymaking when it comes to regulating the internet. The latest chapter in that legacy is a proposed tax on porn and adult content purchased in the state's digital space. Originally proposed by a pair of Republican lawmakers in the Utah state legislature [...]

We've been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump administration's attempt to destroy Anthropic for the sin of having modest ethical guidelines around its AI technology. The short version: Anthropic said it didn't want its AI making autonomous kill decisions without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by declaring the company a supply chain [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, [...]

ICE has been telling itself all it needs to do is write its own paperwork and it can do whatever it wants. Memos - passed around secretively and publicly acknowledged by no one but whistleblowers - told ICE agents they don't need judicial warrants to arrest people or enter people's homes. All they need - [...]

You might recall that Paramount and CBS had only just started to lay off workers in the wake of the merger with David Ellison's Skydance. Now, after Ellison (or more accurately his dad and the Saudis) dramatically overpaid for Warner Brothers ($111 billion plus numerous incentives), the overall debt load at the company is so [...]

We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they're not too busy perforating innocents? Let's use images from Pokemon [...]

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 a special episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Ben and Mike discuss [...]

In less than a week, the Pentagon blacklisted an AI company for having ethics, declared it a supply chain risk, watched its preferred replacement face a massive user revolt, and then sat down to amend the replacement's contract to address the very concerns the blacklisted company had been raising all along. Meanwhile, the blacklisted company [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem misled Congress on Tuesday about the powers of her controversial top aide Corey Lewandowski, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and four current and former DHS officials. Lewandowski has an unusual role at DHS, where he is not a paid government [...]

Yet another one to add to the it's OK if we do it" file for the Trump administration. This administration is cool with censoring speech, nationalizing elections, seizing the means of production, and blackmailing law firms and universities. It would be heated AF if any other administration did these things, but since it's the one [...]

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Section 230 remains one of the most misunderstood laws in America, and that misunderstanding keeps producing policy proposals that would make the internet worse, not better. Last year, I wrote a lengthy response to reporter Brian Reed's claims about Section 230, and this week Sam Seder brought us both onto The Majority Report to hash [...]

Hey look everyone! More of that famous populism Trump rode into power on! The Trump FCC has announced they're rubber stamping the approval of a merger between two of the nation's biggest cable companies (Charter, Cox), creating the biggest cable company in the U.S. Struggling Americans were surely clamoring in support of their local shitty [...]

It was plainly obvious when RFK Jr. decided to fully remake ACIP, the CDC committee that advises the nation on immunization schedules and practices, that it was done so to place Kennedy sycophants that would enact his batshit theories on vaccinations. ACIP, now chockablock with anti-vaxxer, anti-science grift-gremlins, has been slowly chipping away at decades [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year's midterms. According to videos, photos and social media [...]

We've been pointing out the fundamental contradiction at the heart of mandatory age verification laws for years now. To verify someone's age online, you have to collect personal data from them. If that someone turns out to be a child, congratulations: you've just collected personal data from a child without parental consent. Which is a [...]

Of course, we'll see what comes of this, but it's starting to look like this administration won't outlast this level of judicial scrutiny. It may have bullied its way past courts during Trump's first year back in office, but now lines are being drawn. Whether or not those lines matter is an open question. But [...]

Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you'll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, [...]

We've said it over and over again on this site: when you stand up to the bully, the bully backs down. When you capitulate, you get nothing but a permanent stain and an invitation for more abuse. And here we are again. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration plans to abandon [...]

We've noted repeatedly how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been abusing the FCC's equal opportunity" (or equal time") rule to try and threaten daytime and late night talk shows with government retribution if they refuse to enthusiastically coddle Republicans. Late night shows had historically been exempt from the dated rules, which required that any [...]

It's a tale as old as time, assuming time began a decade or two ago. A music artist who just wants to make and perform their craft gets on the internet and performs the song he or she created, only to receive some version of a copyright notice or warning, confusing the hell out of [...]

The administration has burnt the presumption of regularity" to a crispness normally reserved for conquered bridges succumbing to heat death. It is now well known that the Trump administration will do whatever it wants to do, whether or not it's supported by law. And when the courts push back, the administration responds with implicit fuck [...]

The State Department wants US diplomats to fight data localization around the world. The policy position is correct. It's just that the messenger has spent the last few months systematically destroying every reason anyone might listen. Reuters has an exclusive report on a State Department cable ordering US diplomats to lobby against data sovereignty and [...]

The Trump administration is purposefully cruel. That much cannot be argued, not when it has deliberately sent deportees to foreign torture prisons, dumped them in war-torn countries with histories of human rights abuses, and stranded people its has been ordered to release far from home without their IDs, phones, or money. This regime loves to [...]

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We've been writing about Section 230 for a very long time. We've written about why it matters, why the people attacking it are wrong, and why most of the proposed reforms" would make the internet dramatically worse for everyone except the already powerful. And for just about as long as we've been doing that, Senator [...]

You might have noticed that when Netflix was attempting to acquire Warner Brothers, Republicans were suddenly and uncharacteristically interested in media consolidation and antitrust reform. Republican AGs threatened investigation. The Trump DOJ launched a (fake) antitrust inquiry. Senator Mike Lee scheduled a hearing where he'd planned to press Netflix on the competitive impacts of the [...]

We've talked a lot about the resurgence of measles in America over the past 14 or so months, and for good reason. It's a horrible disease of historic significance. Equally historic was America achieving elimination status of the measles 26 years ago, only to see that almost certainly fall away thanks to the incompetence and [...]

In late 2024,Trump Republicans killeda very popular program that provided low-income Americans $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefiting at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they weresimply looking to save money. The real reason the program was [...]

Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments. This confused some people. Why would the Pentagon seek to destroy one company over the [...]

Wow. Imagine if you could just make this shit up. The U.S. military used a laser Thursday to shoot down a seemingly threatening" drone flying near the U.S.-Mexico border. It turned out the drone belonged to Customs and Border Protection, lawmakers said. It is to LOL. Not only did the military friendly fire a CBP [...]

Adobe Lightroom is a cloud-based photo editing and organizing tool designed for photographers of all levels. With an intuitive interface and advanced features, it allows you to create stunning images, manage your photo library, and work seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web. Lightroom Classic provides robust tools for handling large volumes of images, offering precise [...]

Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then: Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, but institutional trust. People need to believe that contracts will be enforced, that property rights will be protected, that the rules won't change [...]

You might recall that when political news website Semafor entered the media industry on the back of $25 million in private money, they made all kinds of promises about how they were somehow going to revolutionize U.S. media. In reality most of their promises were relatively inane, and it didn't take long before the outlet [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is danderbandit with a very straightforward reaction to the fallout from Ring's Super Bowl commercial: Fuck Ring Exactly why I would never own a cloud based camera system. In second place, it's MrWilson with a piece-by-piece reply to a comment about DHS demanding social media [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, Australian news sites were reacting bizarrely to Facebook's withdrawal from sharing news in the country, just before Facebook caved and decided to restore news links. The whole ordeal was surrounded by silly reactions so we pointed to the best summary of everything, and also looked at how it [...]

One of the unfortunate knock on effects of being generally insufferable is that many people don't want to be associated with you in any way. And when you're both insufferable and happen to be the most divisive American political figure in modern history, all the more so. And that is certainly why, during both of [...]

Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here-about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights-is worth [...]

ICE can't keep up with the baseline set by resident ghoul/White House advisor Stephen Miller. Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests per day, which he presented as the minimum he would be satisfied with. To reach this goal, tons of talent from other federal law enforcement agencies have been added to the mix. The results have [...]

Earlier this yearwe noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so [...]

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If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you'd think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it. And yet, here we are. [...]

Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount's latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible: The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder [...]

Measles. Yes, yes, I know you're sick of hearing about it. For that, though, you must lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and this entire administration of clown-tools that isn't bothering to do anything about what has become the worst continuous outbreak of the disease in America in several decades. [...]

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 [...]

I'll take my joy where I can. And this iteration of the Trump DOJ continues to provide bright bursts of schadenfreude-tinted sunshine. Any competent DOJ can close cases. Any barely competent prosecutor can push a case past a grand jury. Any sufficiently slippery solicitor (mixing in some British for the sheer alliteration of it all) [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county's voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback. Lennon, who'd run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the [...]

We wrote recently about the FBI's pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was [...]