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At least Florida'sSB 868/HB 743, Social Media Use By Minors" bill isn't beating around the bush when it states that it would require social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena." Usually these sorts of sweeping mandates are hidden behind smoke and mirrors, but this time [...]

Last month Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced his DELETE, DELETE, DELETE" initiative. It's basically a plan to lobotomize FCC corporate oversight and consumer protection at the behest of industry giants, dressed up as very serious, very efficient adult policymaking. Carr's trying to pretend this is a serious democratic process, so he opened a public [...]

Some people just don't know how to take the L" I suppose. We've been following a silly trademark case in Australia between pop singer Katy Perry and fashion designer Katie Perry for some time now. As in previous posts on this topic, I will revert to using first names in attempt to avoid any confusion. [...]

While politicians from both parties race to dismantle Section 230, we're missing a crucial part of the story: how this uniquely American law helped US internet companies succeed globally. In the latest episode of Otherwise Objectionable, I explore with legal scholar Anupam Chander what might seem paradoxical - how a domestic liability shield became America's [...]

Support us on Patreon Many people don't think of reproductive health and reproductive rights as tech issues, but they very much are - moreso than ever in a post-Dobbs America. The internet is vital to communication and spreading information around reproductive health care, while abortion drugs are changing the very nature of what reproductive rights [...]

In what appears to be the latest move in this administration's total incompetence with regards to critical government tech infrastructure, MITRE announced yesterday that funding had run out for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system, the fundamental framework that basically everyone in cybersecurity relies on to keep computer systems safe. After the entire cybersecurity [...]

Having turned little-known Venezuelan gang Tren de Agagua (TdA) into the new MS-13 with a few viral videos and extremely questionable assertions, the Trump Administration is now injecting the same artifice into its TdA membership determinations. ICE is not only along for the ride, but it's helping drive. Despite guidance warning against using tattoos to [...]

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As the US government trotted out its latest excuses for illegally trafficking Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran torture camp, the district court overseeing the case has made it clear that she's had enough of the government defying her orders. In hearing followed by an order granting discovery, Judge Paula Xinis has made it clear [...]

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 those subsidies, (correctly) worrying that the service couldn't deliver consistent speeds, and arguing (also correctly) that if we're going to spend taxpayer money on broadband, affordable fiber [...]

We've well established that theAT&T->Time Warner->Discoveryseries of media mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived by the extraction class. The utterly senseless saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than50,000+ people lose their jobs, killed off numerous popular brands, createdoceans of animosity among creatives, and resulted in [...]

The first few months of the Trump administration have seen a quick divergence between those who are quick to bend the knee to unconstitutional, authoritarian, censorial demands from Donald Trump, and those with the spine to actually stand up and say fuck that." While it's important to call out and shame those who cave, it's [...]

The Trump administration has just claimed an astounding new power: the ability to deport lawful permanent residents based on their expected beliefs" (including perfectly lawful" expected beliefs). This isn't speculation or hyperbole - it's the explicit thought-police justification Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave in immigration court documents for trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a [...]

Away goes more talent. And away goes another obstacle standing in the way of Kristi Noem's DHS and Donald Trump's plans to rid this country of as many immigrants as inhumanely possible. One acting commissioner - one with 38 years experience - has already resigned because of the DHS's desire to use tax records as [...]

With the How to Hack from Beginner to Ethical Hacking Bundle, you'll learn how to diagnose different kinds of cybersecurity attacks and how to defeat them. You'll practice all the skills and techniques in real-time using an ethical hacking lab so you can put your learning to the test. Courses cover basic scripts and beginner [...]

The Trump administration has settled on a terrifying new legal theory: they can declare anyone a terrorist," ship them to an offshore torture camp without due process, and courts can do nothing about it because it's foreign affairs." This isn't speculation - it's the actual argument they're making to justify their accidental" trafficking of Abrego [...]

Back in March Trump illegally fired the Federal Trade Commission's two Democratic Commissioners. With a captured Supreme Court and a 3-2 agency majority, Trumpism could have already done whatever it wanted at the FTC, so firing the two Democratic Commissioners was just scorched Earth; like applying napalm on the site of a nuclear strike. Real [...]

It's just three months since the Chinese company DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model. In that time, its global impact has been dramatic: An article in Fortune magazine described how DeepSeek had erased Silicon Valley's AI lead and wiped $1 trillion from U.S. markets." It also immediately raised serious privacy issues in the EU. The [...]

Warning bells should have been going off in your head long before RFK Jr., a noted vaccine skeptic for several decades, was confirmed as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. We're in the first few months of Trump's second term, but already there are several health issues stemming from Kennedy's efforts. There [...]

Here's a law no one has ever needed, being offered up by a legislator no one needs. Authored by TexasRep. David Lowe(R- North Richland Hills), the bill-HB 3958-would give the Texas Attorney General the ability to seek hefty penalties for museums that are deemed to promote obscene material. The bill defines obscene material" based on [...]

In a stunning White House appearance that should alarm anyone who cares about constitutional rights, democracy, the rule of law or anything of the sort, Donald Trump and Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele openly defied a Supreme Court order while discussing plans to expand El Salvador's notorious detention system to imprison US citizens without due process. [...]

In an unforced error that will only burnish ICE's reputation for being a brawn operation that's talked itself into believing it's a brains operation, ICE briefly let the American public know it was no longer willing to let illegal ideas to enter (or even exit) the United States. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's job is to [...]

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For a brief moment last week, Donald Trump acknowledged what everyone already knew - that the US government could bring Abrego Garcia home from the El Salvador torture facility known as CECOT, where he was wrongly sent in what the administration claims was an administrative error." But within days, Trump's administration was back to mocking [...]

In recent years the Garmin line of smartwatches had an advantage over an increasingly crowded smart watch field. Unlike Google/FitBit, they were avoiding hiding a lot of features behind annoying subscription paywalls. Looking to goose quarterly earnings and give investors that impossible, sweet, perpetual growth they crave, Fitbit has been increasingly putting more and more [...]

It's been a while but we've got a double-winner this week from Thad, with a comment that took both first place for insightful and second place for funny, in response to the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling about Abrego Garcia: Wow, I never realized that Thomas, Alito, and all three of Trump's appointees were Marxists. In [...]

Today, we're kicking off our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We'll be going through all six winners in no particular order, starting today with the winner in the Best Remix category: Accoutrements by Nora Katz. Nora Katz is one of our returning winners [...]

Many of you may be familiar with the brilliant writer A.R. Moxon, writer of the excellent The Reframe" newsletter. Last year, he moved The Reframe from Substack to Ghost, and has now written about that experience. It's an interesting read that we thought many here might enjoy as well, and Moxon was kind enough to [...]

Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or telecom and media market competition (you know, his purported job), Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in officeabusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration's ass, or harass telecom companies that aren't sexist or racist enough for [...]

The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, [...]

Abrego Garcia is being held incommunicado in a foreign torture camp. As far as anyone knows, he has no idea that he is the subject of a Supreme Court ruling and a high-profile legal battle to get him home. He likely doesn't even know if his family, or anyone else, knows where he is. We [...]

So you may have noticed that the media red carpet has been rolled out for Ezra Klein's new book, Abundance." I don't think the premise of the book is particularly original or challenging: that government should promise and efficiently deliver big things that genuinely help the public. But as we noted last week, I had [...]

The EU Commission spent most of 2024 getting knocked around by opponents of its anti-encryption efforts. While it did find some support from countries with, shall we say, more authoritarian urges, most countries that still actually cared about security and privacy pushed back, resulting in the Commission putting encryption backdoors on the back burner until [...]

We predicted earlier this week that the Supreme Court would need to weigh in on the Abrego Garcia case. Now it has done so with a striking unanimous order that rejects the DOJ's attempt to wash its hands of what it admits was accidentally" trafficking Garcia to El Salvador - a country he had protected [...]

We've noted for years how the smart" TV sector is at the forefront of enshittification. It's a sector full of companies that have doubled down on annoying ads and surveillance to the detriment of the customer. And while absolutely fixated on monetizing consumer surveillance data, it routinely fails to put anywhere close to the same [...]

SpaceX's Starlink service can be a big improvement for those completely out of range of broadband access. But contrary to what many Republicans andc-tier comedians turned fascism apologist podcasters imply, Starlink isnot magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats. Including the increasingly unhinged behavior and far right political alliances of its conspiratorial, [...]

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.

The current rapid advances in generative AI are built on three things. Computing power, some clever coding, and vast amounts of training data. Lots of money can buy you more of the first two, but finding the necessary training material is increasingly hard. Anyone seeking to bolster their competitive advantage through training needs to find [...]

For four years, Trump supporters regularly exploited the federal judiciary, carefully selecting friendly judges in single-judge districts to block Biden administration policies through nationwide injunctions. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with courts regularly ruling against Trump's executive actions, they're crying foul - claiming an army of radical leftist" judges has secretly [...]

Whether you're a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote [...]

What a surprise. The man who clearly doesn't understand tariffs doesn't understand drug trafficking. President Trump has repeatedly claimed the flow of illicit Fentanyl into the United States justifies hitting countries like Mexico, China, and Canada(???) with super-high tariffs, under the weird assumption that starting a trade war is the best move to make in [...]

During Trump 1.0, his captured FCCtook at absolute hatchetto what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot. The result has been a rise in local news deserts and [...]

Last year, we discussed Baltimore Ravens QB Lamar Jackson's opposition to a trademark application from retired Hall of Fame QB Troy Aikman for the word and number Eight." While these sorts of oppositions don't traditionally see us caping for them, this case was a bit different. Jackson's registered trademarks were not merely for the term [...]

Last week, we told the story of how the Communications Decency Act came to be. On this week's episode of Otherwise Objectionable, we look at how it quickly went down in flames - except, of course, for the all-important Section 230. Episode 5: Blowback, and the Dust Settles Just four months after being signed into [...]

I'm not going to rehash the entire recent history of book bans/book challenges in this nation. Suffice to say that ever since Trump first took office in 2017, there's been a significant increase in the number of suddenly concerned" citizens seeking to remove books from libraries and a corresponding, equally-significant increase in legislation seeking to [...]

A second child has died from measles. And RFK Jr. attended the funeral. Kennedy said in a social media post that he was working to control the outbreak" and went toGaines Countyto comfort the families who have buried two young children. He was seen late Sunday afternoon outside of a Mennonite church where the funeral [...]

For someone who claims he single-handedly brought free speech back," Donald Trump sure spends a lot of time trying to silence speech he doesn't like. His latest attempt just got demolished by one of his own hand-picked judges, as Judge Trevor McFadden ruled against the administration for its blatantly retaliatory ban of Associated Press reporters [...]

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Don't let the White House (or the media!) get away with calling trafficking people they don't like to foreign slave labor camps deportation." As we've noted, deportation involves due process. It also (by definition) means removing a foreigner from a country. As we've covered lately, the government's belief that it can engage in human trafficking [...]

Nearlyevery modernmedical treatmentcan be traced to research funded by the National Institutes of Health: from over-the-counter and prescription medications that treathigh cholesteroland painto protection from infectious diseases such aspolio and smallpox. The remarkable successes of the decades-old partnership between biomedical research institutions and the federal government are so intertwined with daily life that it's easy [...]