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You never think the worst thing imaginable can actually happen. But sometimes it does. And when it does there is not a moment to lose coming to terms with it so you can start to do what needs to be done to deal with it. Because whether you are suddenly facing being diagnosed with a [...]

The Party of Mooks has ascended to the top tier yet again. We're all going to pay the price for this, even the mooks that think electing mooks will elevate them from their own mook-hood. Republicans have spent most of the past decade complaining about things like diversity, inclusion, and equitable treatment of American residents [...]

Look, I'm no rocket-building super-genius*, but I have this weird idea that if you want to make an organization more efficient, you might start by talking to the people who are... already making it efficient? A crazy idea, I know. (*Neither are some other people who pretend to be). But Elon Musk had a different [...]

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Well, this didn't last long. For a state as staunchly conservative as South Dakota, this is somewhat of a surprise. But less than a week after a bill mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms was forwarded to a vote by the House committee, the South Dakota House rejected this odious [...]

The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called theUniversal Service Fund. The program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town. Driven by a fake right wing consumer group called Consumers' Research," theTrumplican-stackedFifth Circuit court [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about US Attorney Ed Martin's apparent personal intimidation campaign against Trump/Musk rivals: Note the direct association of putting America first" with the act of adhering to a presidential executive order that can only apply to government employees. Sycophantry to authoritarianism [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a court finally dumped one of Devin Nunes' ridiculous lawsuits only for him to immediately promise to file another, while Public Citizen weighed in on why the famous cow's information should be protected under the First Amendment and a watchdog group asked the Congressional Ethics Office to investigate [...]

A couple of years back, we talked about how Ubisoft handled its own accidental leak of the Beyond Good & Evil remaster to its subscribers. Months before it was due to be released, a technical error resulted in an incomplete version of the game suddenly being available on Ubisoft+. Some people grabbed copies of it, [...]

Last November, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released Steam-Powered Hate, accusing Valve's game launcher, Steam, of fostering extremism. The report dropped just before Senator Mark Warner, a SAFE TECH Act proponent, threatened Steam's owner, raising concerns about the political motivations behind the ADL's claims. The ADL analyzed over one billion data points, flagging just 0.5% as [...]

During peak COVID lockdowns, New York State passed a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents (and low income residents only) a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn't much like that, but their multi-year effort to kill the law, first passed in 2021, recently fell apart [...]

You shouldn't need a permission slip to read a webpage-whether you do it with your own eyes, or use software to help.AI is a category of general-purpose tools with myriad beneficial uses. Requiring developers to license the materials needed to create this technology threatens the development of more innovative and inclusive AI models, as well [...]

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The rule of law" folks (who also have a sizable overlap with the party of free speech) are at it again. Around the nation, legislators emboldened by the Republican party's embrace of bigotry have been passing bills banning books (or, worse, subjecting librarians to criminal charges). Almost as often as a law gets passed, it [...]

The first Trump FCC tried to give Musk nearly a billion dollars to deliver expensive Starlink access to sometraffic medians and airport parking lots. The Biden FCCclawed back most of those subsidies, (correctly) arguing that the service couldn't deliver consistent speeds, and if we're going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, more future-proof and less [...]

In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed anexpansion of the state's right to repair" law.The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that all new vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops [...]

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 [...]

It's a familiar playbook. When Donald Trump receives backlash from the public or the press for some action he's taken, say barring AP News from White House press briefings and events because it won't bow to his desire to rename parts of a large body of water, he doesn't shrink. He doubles down. Every single [...]

Look, sometimes you make mistakes. Maybe you send an email to the wrong person. Maybe you accidentally buy the wrong kind of pasta sauce at the grocery store. Maybe you accidentally dismantle critical global health infrastructure. These things happen! At least, that's what Elon Musk wants us to believe. At yesterday's first official Musk/Trump administration [...]

Lots of states have been passing performative, rights-violating bills that mandate sites hosting porn start performing age verification or suffer the consequences. The consequences can be severe, with fines being multiplied per access by unverified users on top of legal actions brought by state prosecutors. Most of these follow the same problematic blueprint. Even if [...]

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Look, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post a decade ago, people worried that a billionaire owner might interfere with the paper's editorial independence. For years, those fears seemed overblown - Bezos appeared content to let journalists do journalism while he focused on more pressing matters (like building rockets and not paying taxes). But it [...]

It's understandably not going to get the same attention as thedismantling of numerous government agencies at the hands of rich unelected manbabies, but the Trump administration is also taking aim at all the promising parts of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Especially as it relates to broadband. TheInfrastructure Investment and Jobs Act(IIJA) contained a whopping $42.5 [...]

Here's another appellate anomaly. Most circuits (including this one!) have concluded destroying someone's home and property while engaging in law enforcement activity is just the sort of thing citizens are supposed to abide with good grace in exchange for living in a society. The Ninth Circuit isn't most circuits. It covers a lot of ground [...]

We've seen this sort of thing before, but it never really works. One of the symptoms of the permission culture we've built for ourselves, largely in the Western world, is that people or organizations think they can game otherwise legitimate systems in order to silence others. Intellectual property is one of those systems, where we've [...]

How do you win the global AI race? If you asked Elon Musk or his supporters in the Trump administration, they'd probably talk about deregulation, or getting government out of the way, or maybe something about GPU clusters and massive power consumption. What they probably wouldn't mention is USAID, the US government's primary foreign aid [...]

Every day Donald Trump seems to implement yet another of the key schemes of Project 2025, despite claiming last summer that I know nothing about Project 2025." According to the Project 2025 Web site, it is organized by the Heritage Foundation, which is also working on what it calls its Oversight Project": The Oversight Project [...]

California taxpayers are now on the hook for $345,576 in legal fees to... Elon Musk. Why? Because Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta ignored warnings about the obvious Constitutional problems with AB 587, their social media transparency" law. The law, which Google and Meta actually supported (knowing full well that they could comply [...]

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This stupid state. These stupid legislators. This goddamn constituency. This is my current home state. And it is painful to be here. Kristi Noem is now the head of the DHS, presumably because she never asked what this country could do for her, but instead asked what can I do for Donald Trump?" She kept [...]

We've noted repeatedly how new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is a Trump bootlicker of the highest order. He's also busy illegally leveraging FCC power to trample the First Amendment and bully media companies that aren't kissing Trump's ass. At least when he isn't busy attacking FCC civil rights reforms or dismantling whatever's left of [...]

While I have no interest in celebrating the demise of a company, one in which very real people had and have jobs that are going to go away, this was also a long time coming. The five year story about how EV trucking company Nikola ended in bankruptcy started in spectacular fashion in 2020, when [...]

I am, unabashedly, a Humean emotivist. Like David Hume, I hold that emotions-notabstract reason-form the foundation of our ethics. Cold logic alone doesn't guide our moral compass; it is shaped by the deep wellspring of human feeling. This isn't a rejection of reason, but a recognition of its limits and its partnership with emotion in [...]

I realize that using the word racist" to describe an ExTwitter account is pretty much redundant at this point, but there's something more to this story. It's not that a racist is using ExTwitter to make racist posts. It's that a prosecutor working for ICE is, and has been, posting racist content for years on [...]

In a stunning display of government overreach, the UK has effectively forced Apple to disable its iCloud encryption for British users. Earlier this month, we wrote about the UK wielding the Investigatory Powers Act - aka The Snooper's Charter" - to demand Apple create a backdoor in its iCloud encryption for all users globally. Despite [...]

It really doesn't seem like too much to ask that legal representatives who are specifically trained to handle legal work actually know what the fuck they're doing when they engage in legal representation. While I understand that not every lawyer's competence will be equal, I don't believe we should be expected to put up with [...]

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Last Friday brought two seemingly unrelated stories: the Associated Press suing White House officials over retaliatory press access restrictions, and Trump's interim DC US Attorney Ed Martin launching what appears to be a personal intimidation campaign against Trump/Musk political rivals - precisely the kind of unconstitutional lawfare" that Trump and Musk themselves have previously denounced. [...]

Last October,Trump sued CBSclaiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been deceitfully edited" to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). AsMike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense. CBS/Paramount is looking for [...]

We have been talking about the problem of ownership in the modern world for some time, particularly as it revolves around how digital or internet-reliant products are sold. It's become such a prevalent problem that there's something of a generic mantra for it: You don't actually own the thing you bought. There's a spectrum to [...]

You might recall Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti as the guy who gutted Buzzfeed's talented news division and fired oodles of human beings back in 2023. As part of that transition, Peretti heavily embraced half cooked AI' technology in the form of generative and interactive AI chatbots he insisted would dramatically boost the site's traffic and [...]

Here was a fun surprise last night. John Oliver just delivered what might be the most accessible and accurate mainstream takedown of content moderation myths we've seen yet. The latest episode of Last Week Tonight" tackled content moderation head-on, while systematically dismantling Mark Zuckerberg's increasingly dubious justifications for Meta's policy changes. In this era where [...]

Blithely ignoring decades of jurisprudence, Mississippi Chancery Judge Crystal Wise Martin issued a temporary restraining order directing a small local paper, the Clarksdale Press Register to remove an op-ed that criticized the city for holding a meeting that was supposed to public without notifying the public about the upcoming meeting. This order was crafted and [...]

Look, there are different ways to manage people. You could, for instance, have regular performance reviews, set clear expectations, and provide constructive feedback. Or... you could send an email late on a Saturday to the entirety of the federal government workforce (even those outside the executive branch) demanding that everyone list five things they did [...]

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This post was written on Saturday before news broke that Elon Musk had commanded every single federal employee-including those in the judiciary!-to send a five things I did last week" email to hr@opm.gov. But even that episode, where Musk and DOGE once again flexed power they don't lawfully have, and in contact with computer systems [...]

The 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) continues to quietly help fund a number of extremely popular community-owned, open access fiber deployments that are challenging entrenched U.S. monopoly power, and driving super cheap, community-owned and operated fiber networks into long neglected towns. New York State, for example, just leveraged ARPA funds to give a $26 [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about DOGE's supposed savings: It's easy to afford a car and house when you don't do any maintenance on it. I've come to the conclusion that right wingers have no concept of short term vs long term costs. In second place, [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the fight around Section 230 was heating up with Mark Zuckerberg suggesting it should go away, Tom Wheeler disappointingly getting it all wrong, and the News Media Alliance coming out against it, while Ron Wyden stepped up to explain why modifying it would give more censorship power to [...]

The Trump DOJ retribution tour has begun, as Ed Martin, Trump's interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, launches a series of politically motivated investigations targeting critics of Trump and Elon Musk. Martin, a former talk radio host and Stop the Steal" supporter with no prosecutorial experience, is transforming what should be an independent [...]