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On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store calledComradeWorkwear, announced on social media thathe planned to sella deck of Most Wanted CEO" playing cards, satirizing the infamous Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards" introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Perthe ComradeWorkwear website, the Most Wanted CEO cards would offer a critique [...]

If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg's content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck in prison for the rest of his life, and just a couple months ago FCC Commissioner (soon to be FCC chair) Brendan Carr threatened Meta that if [...]

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As I noted when the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court handed down its original decision back in 2023, I didn't care much for the plaintiff, but I did care quite a bit about the First Amendment. Less-than-ideal litigants make some pretty good caselaw, and that's how it went here. The plaintiff challenging Oregon's surreptitious recording law [...]

We're still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the TikTok ban case, which is expected to come today or tomorrow. But things are getting increasingly silly. The Biden administration, which actively pushed for the ban and eagerly signed it into law, is now making a last-ditch effort to... keep the app operating, even [...]

There have been very few times I've encountered something in life that feels like it was absolutely made specifically for me. The Deadpool movie series is one of those few things. For my sensibilities, they're just about perfect. And one of my favorite aspects of the films is the fourth-wall-breaking nature of the main character. [...]

We're at the halfway point of January, and that means we're at the halfway point of the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! As in past years, we're celebrating the entry of new works into the public domain by calling on game designers of all stripes and levels of [...]

Mark Lemley is one of, if not the biggest names in IP law. So when Lemley makes a move, it's worth paying attention. And that's exactly what happened this week when he announced that he has fired Meta as a client." There are various lists that come out from time to time about the most [...]

A new Consumer Reports study unsurprisingly finds that popular exercise equipment makers collect way more data on users than is necessary, then sell access to that data to a wide variety of dodgy and largely unregulated data brokers and middle men, who in turn generally play fast and loose with it. Consumer Reports studied ten [...]

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In what is almost certainly a case of too little, too late, the SEC on Tuesday sued Elon Musk for failing to file a public announcement about his secretive Twitter equity position. The lawsuit, coming nearly three years after Musk's alleged violations, highlights the billionaire's brazen flouting of disclosure rules and the SEC's glacial pace [...]

Even though corrections officers seem to feel these devices will help them more than they will hurt them, the Colorado Department of Corrections has decided it's not going to equip officers with body cameras. This is a pretty terrible outcome, especially since the DOC has spent a couple years and half-million dollars on build-up before [...]

It's no secret that the world of live sports is becoming increasingly complicated due to the fractured nature of broadcast and streaming rights. Between leagues like the NFL making sure their own streaming services aren't terribly useful and that finding any particular game requires Sherlock-ian investigative efforts, these new and complicated deals that major sports [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got another cross-post episode this week! Recently, Mike appeared on The Dynamist podcast from the Foundation for American Innovation for the second entry in a four-part series about copyright and artificial intelligence. He's joined by Alex Winter and Tim Hwang, and host Evan Swarztrauber, for a discussion about how artists, [...]

Great job, US government. You went so overboard with your TikTok is an evil Chinese app" and deciding to ban it that you're pushing kids to go even deeper into the Chinese app ecosystem. The US government's ham-handed attempt to ban TikTok on national security grounds is not only a troubling attack on free speech [...]

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Hitch yourself to a wagon and see what you get. Area dog-killer/current governor/possible DHS head Kristi Noem boarded the Trump Train when it first passed through town nearly a decade ago. Since then, she's won the loyalty of a bunch of fascist-adjacent dipshits who don't care how much they vote against their own interests, as [...]

As streaming video chipped away at traditional cable TV subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded byraising pricesand being difficult. When confronted with growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting theTVcord but keeping broadband and streaming TV) was a growing trend, most of these same executives spent years firstdenying cord cutting [...]

This one is from a couple months ago, but I finally had a chance to catch up on some older stories. In late 2023, we wrote about one of the most egregious SLAPP suits we'd ever seen. In a case that seems to defy both law and basic human decency, King Vanga, a Stanford student, [...]

There but for the grace of whatever god goes any of us. Who among us is worthy to judge the actions of someone who has the power to do right, but uses it to do wrong? Apparently, none of us. Not even the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. (h/t Short Circuit) We like to believe [...]

This was inevitable, ever since Donald Trump and the MAGA world freaked out when social media's attempts to fact-check the President were deemed censorship." The reaction was both swift and entirely predictable. After all, how dare anyone question Dear Leader's proclamations, even if they are demonstrably false? It wasn't long before we started to see [...]

On Friday I attended the oral argument in the TikTok ban case in person, seated in the second row behind the table where the government's lawyers were sitting, and only about 15-20 feet away from the justices themselves. There's something kind of profound about being a normal human distance from them, instead of just in [...]

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Ohio residents pay for the cops. They pay for the cameras. Now, they're expected to pay for the footage generated by cops and their cameras. Governor Mike DeWine, serving no one but cops and their desire for opacity, recently signed a bill into law that will make it much more expensive for residents to exercise [...]

We've noted for several years how the race to 5G" was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager tosell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it's more of an evolution than a revolution. But that's not what telecom giants [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Mark Zuckerberg's pathetic deference to Trump: I've said it before, but what's even the point of having that level of wealth if you're just going to debase yourself for somebody like Trump? For what will it profit a man [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the libel tourism of Devin Nunes was continuing to highlight the problems of weak anti-SLAPP laws. A patent troll got smacked down by an appeals court, while there was a twist in Oracle's attacks on Google, and Apple became the latest company to up the ante in abusing [...]

Early last year, streaming company Fubo filed an antitrust lawsuit against Disney, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery after the three companies decided to launch their own joint streaming live sports venture. Fubo, in the lawsuit, claims the collective power of the three companies would stifle competition in the sports streaming space, ultimately driving up costs [...]

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 [...]

In a twist that highlights the absurdity of UK libel laws, former Prime Minister Liz Truss is threatening to sue current PM Keir Starmer for saying she crashed the economy" during her chaotic 49 days in office... conveniently forgetting that she made the exact same accusation against an earlier PM herself. That's right, Truss, whose [...]

I don't know what kind of warrant system they're running in Pennsylvania, but it doesn't sound like a good one. Either the system is deliberately broken, or the testifying cops were playing fast and loose with the facts. Whatever the case is, the end result is the loss of the evidence obtained with Schrodinger's Warrant, [...]

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For quite some time now, we've pointed out how Jim Jordan has weaponized the government to suppress speech. Quite frequently, he seems to be doing this in coordination with Elon Musk. And yet, somehow, it felt like we were the only ones calling this out. So many in the media seem fine repeating the lie [...]

In February 2024, AT&T bungled a network update causing a massive outagethat it took AT&T twelve hours to fix. DownDetector lit up with 70,000 problem reports. The outage impacted an estimated 125 million wireless devices, blocked an estimated 92 million phone calls by AT&T customers, and prevented an estimated 25,000 attempts to reach 911. A [...]

Well, I'll give the Ninth Circuit this much: at least when the court is wrong, it is wrong fast. It was just a few weeks back that we discussed Molson Coors' appeal for both the rulings and damages over its trademark fight with Stone Brewing. For those not familiar with the history here, here's a [...]

Last April, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law designed specifically to make it easier for cops to arrest people who film them. While it's generally accepted (without Supreme Court precedent... for some weird reason) by most courts that recording public employees in public while they perform their public duties is protected by the First [...]

Senator Richard Blumenthal is at it again. The long-time Connecticut Senator, who never met an internet regulation he didn't like, is eager to reintroduce his Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) - a bill that would trample all over the First Amendment in a misguided attempt to protect the children." As we've explained countless times, KOSA [...]

Having lost twice in a row, a handful of Missouri state clerks will now be using taxpayers' money to pay a former government employee who had the temerity to recommend a mask mandate during the height of the COVID pandemic. (via Short Circuit) The plaintiff, Tad Mayfield, had been a well-regarded staffer, serving as a [...]

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On Monday, Taylor Lorenz posted a telling story about how Meta has been suppressing access to LGBTQ content across its platforms, labeling it as sensitive content" or sexually explicit." Posts with LGBTQ+ hashtags including #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, #queer, #nonbinary, #pansexial, #transwomen, #Tgirl, #Tboy, #Tgirlsarebeautiful, #bisexualpride, #lesbianpride, and dozens of others were hidden for any [...]

For decades now, U.S. wireless carriers have sold consumers unlimited data" plans that actually have all manner of sometimes hidden throttling, caps, download limits, and restrictions. And every few years a regulator comes out with a wrist slap against wireless carriers for misleading consumers, for whatever good it does. Back in 2007, for example, then [...]

Is it too much to ask for cops to be better? When other government employees get the address wrong, it may mean mail delivery delays or incorrect property tax assessments. But when cops get it wrong, people end up dead. If officers are unfamiliar with the area they'll be serving warrants in, it would make [...]

Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel, is like many dodgy data brokers. The company gleans vast troves of sensitive U.S. behavior and location cellphone data, then generally sells access to that data to a long line of folks. Including the U.S. government, which has increasingly turned to buying data broker data as a quick [...]

As Michael McGrady pointed out in his recent guest post for Techdirt, nearly 41 percent of Americans subject to age verification laws targeting porn and, of course, porn consumers. An emboldened pseudo-theocratic wing of the Republican party is taking everything old and unconstitutional and making it new again, presumably in hopes of sliding it past [...]

A lot of people dunked on the amicus brief Donald Trump filed at the Supreme Court in the constitutional challenge of the law effectively banning TikTok. And there is plenty that is dunkable about it, especially in his tone of entitlement. Trump is no sincere defender of the First Amendment and its critical protections for [...]

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When the NY Times declared in September that Mark Zuckerberg is Done With Politics," it was obvious this framing was utter nonsense. It was quite clear that Zuckerberg was in the process of sucking up to Republicans after Republican leaders spent the past decade using him as a punching bag on which they could blame [...]

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 [...]

Well, there are two possibilities here. Either I've been doing this for too long or all cops are, indeed, bastards. Let me explain. When this rolled through my hundreds of feeds recently... DOJ enters agreement with California police department whose officers allegedly exchanged racist messages ... I was sure I knew which California police department [...]

Surveillance of students that continues even after they've left the campus is nothing new. School-issued tech comes preloaded with spyware meant to prevent students from cheating, accessing inappropriate content, or introducing malware of their own into the school tech ecosystem. But it goes beyond that: it also keeps tabs on anything they do while using [...]