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Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at the loss of Aereo and its impact on policy, and also dedicated the first of two episodes of our podcast to dissecting the FTC's Facebook settlement. The Wall Street Journal had Dennis Prager peddling complete nonsense about Google censorship", a Fox News commenter was calling [...]

It was just a few weeks ago that we were discussing how an update Apple made to its rules for its App Store allowed for some retro-console game emulator apps, but not retro-PC game emulator apps for some reason. When Apple made the policy change, developer Chaoji Li submitted his app, iDOS, for consideration, only [...]

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 a while, we've been pointing out how terrible KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act) is. Our main concern is that the bill would fundamentally lead to the suppression of all kinds of speech. That's because the duty of care" provision, while limited, would allow officials (mostly at the FTC, which can get partisan) to [...]

I, for one, would welcome an opportunity for the inmates to run the asylum. It can't possibly be any stupider than this bit of news, which emanates from what I consider to be my hometown (I spent 15 formative years living here, beginning at age 5), El Paso, Texas. An El Paso middle school is [...]

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A challenge for the mainstream media: can you stop saying that Elon Musk is a free speech absolutist? Over the past few years, we've had a number of posts highlighting just how laughable it is that Elon Musk claims that he's a free speech absolutist." He never has been. Remember that even before he took [...]

Last June scientists warned that low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites constantly burning up in orbit could release chemicals that couldundermine the progress we've made repairing the ozone layer. Researchers at USC noted that at peak, 1,005 U.S. tons of aluminum will fall to Earth, releasing 397 U.S. tons of aluminum oxides per year to the atmosphere, [...]

One of the common excuses companies give when enforcing their trademarks in a way that is far more ham-fisted than is actually required is: Hey, we have to police our marks or else we risk losing them." This excuse often exaggerates that requirement, of course, as there is no need to police marks when there [...]

We learned earlier this year, it's not just the FBI targeting extremely vulnerable people with the intent of radicalizing them into arrests on terrorism charges. The FBI has been a world leader in this particular category, apparently incapable of being shamed (or sued) into altering its tactics, which often appear to be on the wrong [...]

You may recall that RFK Jr.'s nonsense-peddling anti-vax organization Children's Health Defense" (CHD) sued Meta back in 2020 for the apparent crime of fact-checking and limiting the reach of the anti-vax nonsense it posted. Three years ago, the case was tossed out of court (easily) with the court pointing out that Meta is (*gasp*) a [...]

Utah's plans to erect a theocracy within the United States continue uninterrupted. While it's always been more of a religious conclave than a US state for years, thanks to the outsized influence of the Mormon church, the past eight years have seen a much more dramatic drift to the far right of the political spectrum. [...]

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Would you believe that Elon suing former advertisers for no longer advertising on ExTwitter isn't magically making advertisers want to come back and is, instead, driving them further away? A quick timeline: Many people, quite reasonably, called out the absolute absurdity of Elon basically suing advertisers for not wanting to advertise on his site. However, [...]

Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry hassome of the worst privacy practicesof any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn't secured, often isn't encrypted, [...]

It almost always takes a lawsuit to force the government to give up information that doesn't present it in the best light. That's the case here, where litigation has finally forced ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to hand over ICE use of force records. There are plenty of reasons to deeply dislike ICE and/or desire [...]

Over the last year especially, there's been a lot of talk about kid safety online and the role (if any) of social media in all of that. It's a complicated topic that requires nuance, not unproven claims of social media being the cause. Getting this wrong is likely to make kids' lives worse, not better. [...]

A few months ago, Mike wrote about the ways he uses AI tools when writing for Techdirt - not to do any of the actual writing, but to help improve it. The specific tool in question is Lex, a word processor with embedded AI features, and this week Lex founder Nathan Baschez joins Mike on [...]

I am not going to rehash this entire debacle again, but suffice to say a small town police department in Kansas - led by (the now-resigned) police chief Gideon Cody raided the offices of the Marion County Record (along with the home of its co-owners, one of which was 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died less [...]

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Yesterday, we wrote about EU Commissioner Thierry Breton's preposterously stupid letter to Elon Musk, warning him that Elon had to make sure his Spaces conversation with Donald Trump did not include any harmful content" or it might violate the DSA. He also demanded that Elon tell Eurocrats what ExTwitter was doing to make sure that [...]

AT&T's never been much for worrying about the finer points of reality. This is, after all, a company that spent years lying to its users telling them that capped and throttled wireless service was unlimited." It's also the same company, you'll recall, that tried tricking customers into thinking 4G connectivity was actually 5G by simply... [...]

Re-branding isn't going to save ShotSpotter. While it would prefer to be called SoundThinking," its flagship product is still its acoustic detection tech - something the company claims reliably detects gunshots. Whatever the preferred (and trademarked) nomenclature, the claims the company makes are rarely backed up by facts. Even when it works, it still kind [...]

You might recall that AT&T's $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was supposed to transform the telecom giant into a modern internet video advertising superpower. Instead, after a massive amount of debt and endless bumbling, AT&T wound up laying off more than 50,000 people, closing a bunch of popular brands (like Mad Magazine), [...]

Elon Musk's legal team probably thought they had the perfect strategy: file a SLAPP suit in a court with a judge known for partisan rulings, including rulings benefiting Elon himself in the past. But they didn't count on one thing - the judge recusing himself. Last week, Elon sued GARM and the others, claiming that [...]

[Extremely War Boys voice]: Oh, what a lovely mess! The problem with a story like this is that a recap will run a couple thousand words before you even get into the new stuff. To quote another cult classic movie, Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up." Marion Police Chief [...]

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I know that many Elon Musk supporters assume that my mockery of the many stupid things that Elon does means that I won't give him a fair shake. But when he does something good, I'm happy to highlight it and give him kudos. In this case, he's right (if a bit provocative) in telling EU [...]

Fifth-generation wireless (5G) was supposed to change the world. According to wireless carriers and gear makers, not only was it supposed to bring about the fourth industrial revolution," it was supposed to usher forth amazing new smart cities and help withcancer treatment.Wireless giants routinely portrayed a world full of 5G powered robots givingtattoosor engaging inremote [...]

It was just a few months ago that we had some fun with Logitech over it's amazing, never been done before AI mouse... that was actually just a rehash of a previous mouse that had a button that could be used to launch a ChatGPT prompt. So it wasn't so much an AI mouse, as [...]

We fought a revolution for this?!? This is the new America: a loose confederacy (yes, I'm using that correctly [and pointedly]) of states that desire to see us returned to the harsh reality our founding fathers (and colonists before them) left their homelands to escape. The shift of the so-called conservative movement" to the extreme [...]

For years now, the UN has been trying to strike a deal on a Cybercrime Treaty." As with nearly every attempt by the UN to craft treaties around internet regulation, it's been a total mess. The concept, enabling countries to have agreed upon standards to fight cybercrime, may seem laudable. But when it's driven by [...]

In one of several ongoing campaigns of hate in our country, the Iowa legislature passed a law that not only changed what schools could teach, but what students could be allowed to read. First, let's get to the changes to the state's health curriculum, which is nothing less than the erasure of HIV/AIDS sufferers. The [...]

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It seems to be a rather common phenomenon, but various major newspaper opinion columnists love opining on the First Amendment and free speech without ever bothering to, you know, understand them. Edward Luce, a long-term journalist and commentator, and scion of an aristocratic British family, is currently the chief US commentator" (what a title!) for [...]

Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided toeliminate decades of MTV News journalismand Comedy Central history as part of their ongoing and utterly mindless cost saving" efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous piece-by-piece response to a comment questioning the truth about what happened with GARM: In second place, it's Guiltypanacea with a related comment about Elon's lawsuit: Pretty cute to claim GARM violated antitrust laws while also claiming Twitter is the singular global town [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, free speech defender" Devin Nunes filed more lawsuits against critics and vowed they weren't the last, the New York Times joined the parade of media organizations that were totally and completely misrepresenting Section 230, and the recording industry was reaping what it sowed in the world of copyright [...]

You know, when you've written as much as I have about trademark disputes, there are times when you think you've seen everything, only to have the universe remind you that the depth of silliness around trademarks can always get deeper. The subject of today's conversation is going to be a certification mark. While afforded similar [...]

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 [...]

You may have heard that Elon Musk and the UK are fighting. And both of them are looking ridiculous. Riots are happening across the UK in response to the stabbing deaths of three children. The background for the riots is that a bunch of shitlord agitators used Telegram to organize further nonsense on other social [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

The Detroit PD - or at least a few of its investigators - managed to be the absolute worst at using facial recognition tech. Despite being told by their tech provider that a match" was never to be considered probable cause for an arrest on its own, multiple PD investigators decided a match - no [...]

Up is down, left is right, day is night. And now, to Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, clear, direct government censorship is, apparently, free speech." This isn't a huge surprise, but on Thursday, the World Federation of Advertising shut down GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, in response to legal threats from ExTwitter and [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth of growth's sake" megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions- all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in [...]

I can't believe this, but it happened again. Almost exactly a decade ago, Tim Cushing wrote about a bonkers story out of the UK in which a passport applicant who's middle name was Skywalker" was denied the passport due to purported trademark or copyright concerns. The question that ought to immediately leap to mind should [...]

Texas is one of eight states that have enacted laws that force adults to prove their age before accessing porn sites. Soon it will try to persuade the Supreme Court that its law doesn't violate the First Amendment. Good luck with that. These laws are unconstitutional: They deny adults the well-established right to access constitutionally [...]

Pretty much any gang database" is a vehicle for abuse. While there's some investigative value in maintaining a database of affirmed gang members, most of these data collections are run without oversight or guardrails, allowing officers to add almost anyone they want to the collection, so long as they happen to live, work, or travel [...]

What if you found an antitrust violation... and almost all of the remedies wouldn't actually do much to fix things? That might be the situation we're in with Google's antitrust loss this week. It's not a good situation by any means, but it's not clear what to do about it either. The DOJ's historic antitrust [...]

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