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The collapse of our democratic institutions isn't unstoppable. Saving them requires understanding what we're fighting for-and how human freedom actually works in our technological age. Truth isn't complicated. It lives in simple principles we all understand: People deserve a voice in decisions that shape their lives. Our ability to think and choose depends on accurate [...]

Last week, we highlighted how the richest person on the planet - Elon Musk, who currently appears to have unparalleled, Constitutionally-violating control over the US government - was running around repeating every confused 4chan dipshit's conspiracy theory about USAID, all of which were easily debunked if you... understood how reality worked. Now it turns out [...]

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Early Saturday morning a judge imposed an emergency temporary restraining order in response to the State of New York v. Trump litigation. This particular lawsuit was brought by several (blue) state attorney generals against Trump, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and the Treasury department itself. The order, in short, tells DOGE to get out [...]

A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we're in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They're right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority - agencies that Congress explicitly created and funded - we're watching in real-time as our system of checks and balances crumbles. Yet supporters of the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the assault on the idea that laws have any meaning at all: A lot of people-especially in right-wing circles-tend to forget that the process of civilization is the process of everyone forgetting that they can grab a [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Facebook paid out a hefty settlement in a facial recognition lawsuit in Illinois, which looked like bad news for the also-just-sued new kid on the block: Clearview AI, about whom we were learning lots of disturbing new things. In an ongoing attempt to avoid its own similar problems, [...]

Last June, Louisiana became the third state to decide the US Constitution was subservient to cops' wishes that they not be filmed while performing their public duties. Arizona had already tried this twice, starting at 25 feet before trimming the halo" to an 8-foot diameter. It didn't matter. A federal court permanently blocked the law [...]

And there you have it. It was a mere couple of weeks back that I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs potential to reach the Super Bowl and go for a third straight title and how that would mean you'd start hearing a whole lot about Pat Riley. I don't want to say I told [...]

A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) topass a new state right to repair lawdesigned to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical datato consumers and third-party independent repair shops. [...]

In a stunning escalation that confirms our worst fears, the UK government has finally shown its true hand on encryption - and it's even worse than we predicted. According to a bombshell report from Joseph Menn at the Washington Post, British officials have ordered Apple to create a backdoor that would allow them to access [...]

After years of screaming save the children" while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory. I'm one of those people who doesn't think you can (or should) call most people inherently [...]

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Marine vet Stephen Lara's lawsuit against the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) and forfeiture abuse in general in that state has paid off. Not just for Lara, whose $86,900 was returned to him shortly after he filed this lawsuit, but for all residents of the state, who are now less likely to see cops walk off [...]

For a long while there it was good to be a lumbering U.S. cable monopoly. Companies like Comcast and Charter pretty much enjoyed a monopoly on broadband at next generation" speeds (over 100 Mbps) in most towns. So while they were losing traditional cable TV customers to streaming (or piracy), they could still extract their [...]

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 [...]

Sycophants do sycophantic things, that much is known. But the level to which newly-minted FCC chairman Brendan Carr has voluntarily debased himself purely to achieve his current station is extraordinary. We knew during the campaign season that Carr was eager to be America's chief censor of any content the Dear Leader disliked. That the same [...]

News moves fast... While this post was getting finalized came news that Marko Elez has resigned after his racist tweets were found and publicized. Nevertheless, the point made herein still stands. Amidst all the news today is news suggesting that Musk and his lackeys have had their access to the federal government's payment systems limited. [...]

A mirror returns exactly what stands before it. No amount of wealth can bribe it, no volume of threats can intimidate it, no technological innovation can reprogram it. A billionaire's reflection shows the same unaltered truth as a beggar's. This fundamental democracy of reflection-this absolute fidelity to physical reality-makes mirrors uniquely immune to power. They [...]

In 1872 California enacted a law declaring that every one who offers to the public to carry persons, property, or messages, excepting only telegraphic messages, is a common carrier of whatever he thus offers to carry." In 2022 the Republican National Committee sued Google, alleging that, by shunting GOP fundraising emails into Gmail spam folders, [...]

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Remember when Donald Trump and the MAGA universe wanted to lock her up!" over Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server for State Department business? Let's be clear, we found Clinton's use of a personal email server, which she claimed to have used for convenience", deeply problematic but pretty clearly not criminal. And, as [...]

It's understandably not going to get the same attention as the dismantling 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. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained [...]

It's very rare to see a cop charged with any crime in a shooting, much less charged with murder. It's even rarer to see a cop convicted. It's been happening a bit more recently, but that may just be recency bias now that more of the country is actively involved in combating police violence. In [...]

It has long been clear that the GOP, as it is today, has a death wish for our Constitutional order, but that's a subject for another post. What's more relevant is that, at this point, one could easily construe that Democrats would like our Constitution to die too. In part because of how enfeebled they [...]

It's 2025 and we're still stuck with legislators who wish it was still 1725. Or possibly any year with B.C appended. Clearly unconstitutional laws are being crafted with alarming frequency these days. Those that aren't trying to legislate morality or criminalize sexual preferences are trying to infuse government entities with state-approved religion. A lot of [...]

Back in 2022, former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends launched a new media company namedSemaforon the back of$25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization's launch events didn't go particularly well: a trust in news" event that somehow didn't see the problem with platforming and amplifyingmillionaire propagandist Tucker [...]

Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk's DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury's payment infrastructure - a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually. It seems reasonable to call it one of the most dangerous [...]

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There are twenty-four hours in a day. This isn't a matter of political opinion or technological disruption-it's as immutable as the fact that two plus two equals four. No amount of genius, innovation, or reality distortion can create a twenty-fifth hour. This basic truth, so obvious it seems almost foolish to state, exposes something profound [...]

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 conspiracy 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 CEO. [...]

At this point, we have built up enough stories on bad YouTube takedowns to fill up a small library. Because of a combination of automated systems that are spectacularly imperfect, the desire by some bad actors to abuse and commit fraud using the notice and takedown system, and a general deference towards the alleged copyright [...]

As recently noted, New York State now has a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn't much like that, but their efforts to kill the law, first passed in 2021, fell apart when the Supreme Court refused to hear [...]

There's a coup underway in the federal government. Across the rest of the nation, people seeking to endear themselves with President Trump or his supporters are doing the same sort of thing at the state level. Refusing to even acknowledge long-standing rights or court precedent, legislators are becoming the Project 2025 they want to see [...]

The hazard with landing upon a legal solution that seems too good to be true is that it often is. So as you read this post it is important to keep in mind that I may have overlooked something, and there can always be defenses. Few things are guaranteed in law, and even in the [...]

In George Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate act of rebellion comes when Winston Smith insists that two plus two equals four, defying a system that demands he accept whatever reality the Party declares. The Party doesn't just want him to say two plus two equals five-they want him to believe it. This demand that citizens deny [...]

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When even the Wall Street Journal's reliably pro-Trump opinion page starts sounding alarm bells about the administration's policies, something significant has shifted. When even the thinkers" at the most MAGA of think tanks are calling what Elon is doing in the government a true constitutional crisis," we're beginning to see cracks in the snow globe [...]

I don't know if it's the same where you are, but all the pharmacies here in South Seattle have a decidedly... apocalyptic feel. Many shelves are empty. A lot of goods have been locked up to address a retail theft epidemic that didn't actually happen. And understaffed stores are usually overseen by one fifteen year [...]

I'll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they're certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We've been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d'etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public [...]

After several months of pretending this sort of thing just didn't happen there, the Polish government finally admitted some of its members had abused powerful smartphone malware it had purchased from Israeli spyware firm, NSO Group. This came to light following an investigation that found someone in the government had illegally targeted a Polish government [...]

For years, we've watched self-proclaimed free speech warriors" hyperventilate about imaginary government control of social media content moderation. Mysteriously, as I pointed out last fall, these warriors developed sudden laryngitis when social media platform owners Elon Musk and Donald Trump actually took over the US government. Anyone with a functioning brain knew this would eventually [...]

A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise. The signs areunmistakable and accelerating: in just the past 48 hours, Elon Musk's DOGE commission has seized control of Treasury payment systems and gained unauthorized access to classified USAID materials, while security officials who followed protocols were removed. Career civil servants [...]

People sometimes think that cybersecurity is just about defending computer systems from remote adversaries. But it's broader than that; cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them. So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into [...]

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Remember the Twitter Files? That carefully orchestrated expose" where incredibly gullible hand-picked journalists were given selective access to internal documents to manufacture misleading outrage about Twitter's content moderation? Get ready for the government edition. If you want to predict what's coming next in Elon Musk's governmental power grab, look no further than his Twitter takeover [...]

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn't a huge ask; it costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Trump's Department of Education rolling back anti-book-ban guidance: Remember, kids. If a government is trying this hard to ban books, you should damn well be interested in finding out what those books actually say! In second place, it's That One [...]

It's February, which means this year's edition of the public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929, has come to a close. And we got a record-breaking number of entries this time around, with 34 games submitted (edging out the previous record of 31). That means we've got a lot of work to do judging [...]

One of the more annoying ways that Sony insists on handing itself losses for no reason whatsoever has been its insistance on requiring a PlayStation Network account for cross-platform titles. The company has done this with a bunch of these titles, perhaps most famously so when it did so with Helldivers 2, an early access [...]