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The festival of bad ideas continues. Despite facial recognition having proven over and over again it's not really the solution to speedy ID verification that far too many people think it is, government agencies (along with retailers, sports arenas, and bored billionaires) seem to believe the real problem is that there just hasn't been enough [...]

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We mentioned recently that the only remaining Democratic commissioner at the FCC (and the only remaining Dem commissioner across both the FCC and FTC since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC Commissioners) has started calling out FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's attacks on free speech. In a speech yesterday, she went even further: calling out the [...]

Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump's mindless quest to dismantle most U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory independence. Yet at the same time he wants to bully companies for not being racist [...]

Fresh off of his Mother's Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts that have and are proposed further for HHS, and an explanation for why some programs are [...]

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 [...]

For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the [...]

You might recall that the first Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb planto cover up the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they'd help Dish Network create a new 5G network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was [...]

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey apparently thinks he gets to be editor-in-chief of every social media platform. In his latest attack on free speech rights, Bailey has announced a first-in-the-nation rule" that would force social media companies to let users choose third-party content moderators rather than using the platforms' own moderation systems. There's just one [...]

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Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking into your reputation. Clearview's tactics have gotten it banned, fined, and sued and it doesn't [...]

We've well documented by now how the AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless business deals" ever conceived by modern man. The mergers resulted in bottomless layoffs, the closure of numerous valuable and popular brands and shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward executives shifted the company's [...]

Though we haven't discussed the lawsuit between Palword creator PocketPair and Nintendo and The Pokemon Co. so far this year, this turd of a suit is still going on. To the uninitiated, Palworld has long been described as Pokemon with guns". Due to that, lots of folks thought that PocketPair would eventually get sued by [...]

The federal government is usingsocial media surveillancetotargetstudent visa holders living in the United States foronline speechthe Trump administration disfavors. The administration has initiated this new program, called Catch and Revoke," in an effort to revoke visas, and it appears to be a cross-agency collaboration between the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and [...]

Behind effective accelerationism's techno-optimist smile lies a familiar and dangerous impulse: subordinating human dignity to a technological imperative framed as inevitable. Theeffective accelerationismmovement (e/acc) presents itself as an enlightened embrace of technological progress, especially artificial general intelligence. Led by figures likeGuillaume Verdonand embraced by venture capitalists likeMarc Andreessen, the movement claims humanity faces a binary [...]

The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership's response is... to help them? Earlier today, Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal joined MAGA Republicans to reintroduce the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) - a bill that Heritage itself has proudly proclaimed as central to its strategy [...]

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Our long national nightmare is over. More lives have been saved than have possibly ever lived. And that's just since earlier this year. Using the same drug math that turns a couple of kilos into something with tens of millions of dollars of street value," Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly claimed Trump's return to office [...]

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule providing portable Wi-Fi hotspots to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, theruleallowed schools to leverage the FCC's E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can't afford broadband) [...]

Look, folks, I have to admit that I'm running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let's just do this quickly. He's a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy, is letting the current measles outbreak expand for no good reason, has promised to have the [...]

Buried in the House GOP's massive budget reconciliation bill is a seemingly simple provision about AI regulation. The idea appears straightforward enough: stop states from regulating AI companies for the next decade. To do this, they quietly added language preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems." This is, [...]

Support us on Patreon We've written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last [...]

It's hardly a secret that Meta is an unpleasant company. That's reflected both in terms of what happens behind closed doors, and its actions in the market. Some of its attempts to bully nations or even large economic blocks are well documented. But its threats outside Western markets are just as reprehensible, though less well [...]

Progressive streamer Hasan Piker's recent detention by CBP at the Chicago airport has generated widespread outrage - and rightfully so. No US citizen should be interrogated about their political beliefs when re-entering their own country. But while CBP's behavior was egregious, Piker's response was potentially even more dangerous: he chose to engage in a two-hour [...]

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We'll have to see if NSO Group has this sort of cash just laying around. Seems unlikely, what with its financial backers pulling out in response to a steady stream of negative headlines, as well as the company considering exiting the highly-profitable offensive malware market. Sure, this will be appealed and NSO will try to [...]

The Trump administration has illegally declared the Digital Equity Act of 2021 racist and unconstitutional," and called for it to be dismantled. The grant program had been helping push affordable fiber optic broadband into communities long neglected regions by regional telecom monopolies, be they minority, low-income, rural, suburban, or urban. It's the latest effort by [...]

The nightmare that is Elon Musk's DOGE cuts continues. The program, originally billed as a method for identifying all kinds of waste, fraud, and abuse within government spending, has shown itself to be more about giving Musk's DOGE kiddos access to all kinds of data they shouldn't have and something of a creative writing exercise [...]

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixontried to fire the Department of Justiceprosecutorleading an investigationinto the president's involvement in wiretapping the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. Since then, the DOJ has generally been run asan impartial law enforcement agency, separated from the executive office and partisan politics. Those guardrails are now being severely tested under the Trump [...]

As this post explains, we have issues with the third installment of the Copyright Office's report on AI. The rest of this post discusses them, but we note here that, while the report is due criticism, the criticism does not warrant or justify the firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter from her duly-appointed position. [...]

The mass renditioning of migrants hasn't gone exactly as planned. Sure, it's resulted in extreme amounts of stupid cruelty, which is very much on-brand for Trump administrations, but the mass deportation efforts have also met with considerable resistance from federal court judges. The administration hoped to keep the courts from doing anything to protect migrants [...]

The Trump administration last week fired one of the most respected librarians in America because she allegedly put inappropriate books" in a library that basically gets copies of nearly all books and doesn't even allow children to check out books. Carla Hayden, the astoundingly effective Librarian of Congress for the past nine years, was abruptly [...]

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. The tools within this suite have [...]

You can believe any version of this story you want, but there's no version that makes ICE and the DHS look like heroes protecting themselves from an actual threat. Let's first take a look at the local reporting from where ICE is putting boots on the ground: Newark, New Jersey. Three House of Representatives members [...]

We recently noted how device maker Garmin had decided to follow in the footsteps of Google's Fitbit, and begin putting basic features behind an annoying subscription paywall to goose revenues. Garmin's new premium" Garmin+ tiertakes several features users already enjoyed for free, put them behind a $7 per month paywall, and called it innovation. Users [...]

This week, we've got a double winner taking first place for both insightful and funny. It's Strawb with a comment about Darren Beattie embracing the Twitter Files playbook: Trump: We will stop waste, fraud and abuse in the goverment!" Beattie: Starts a project that wastes government time and money, and creates a fraudulent narrative that [...]

This is a brief detour in our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital [...]

The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump's detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that [...]

Gavin Newsom's rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality. Newsom appears to haveconvinced himselfthat the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding common ground" with an administration actively dismantling constitutional [...]

Correction/Update: In this original article, I included a quote from DHS that I thought was in response to today's order, which implied DHS believed they could still detain Ozturk, but it appears it was in response to the earlier ruling on Wednesday when she was first ordered to be transferred. We have removed that quote [...]

In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recentlyreached an agreementallowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-pagememorandum of understanding(MOU) was exposed in a court case,Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent [...]

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Oh, so we're still doing this, huh. Despite pretty much every effort of this type being rejected by courts as, shall we say, constitutionally-improbable, legislators continue to believe that cops should be protected from the people they serve by laws that allow them to violate the rights of the people they serve. Here's the latest [...]

By now most sentient people realize Trump's tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that's going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There's bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump [...]

I've ranted and raved enough about how RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department are completely fucking up the response to the current measles outbreak enough that I'm confident you all don't need me to rehash the entire thing in this opening. We can leave it at this: we're probably going to lose [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Last month, a Department of Government Efficiency aide at the nation's consumer watchdog agency was told by ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that employees are forbidden from owning - and was advised not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally, [...]

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move [...]

The Intelligence Community just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly how badly Donald Trump and his ODNI chief Tulsi Gabbard misrepresented the laughable supposed invasion" of the US by Venezuelan gangs. And they did it by responding to a Freedom of Information Act request in what may be record time - just six business days. For [...]

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Trump was never about law and order. He cozied up to cops and praised police brutality, but when push came to literal shove, he sat back and watched his supporters attack law enforcement officers and commit federal crimes for the sole purpose of destroying democracy itself. Now that he's back in office, he's back to [...]