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Few things seem to push government officials to become officious faster than the mild irritation of people making a slight mockery of government machinery. In the grand scheme of things, the scofflawishness is almost imperceptible. But it's the scoffing part that bothers these officious entities the most. And that is almost always greeted with a [...]

I've noted for years how the U.S. is simply too corrupt to pass a modern internet-era privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers. So we are subjected to a parade of privacy and security scandals thanks to numerous industries that over-collect your data, fail to properly secure it, then sell access to any random asshole [...]

Funny enough, it was only a few weeks back that we last discussed Dr. Keith Bell and the slew of lawsuits he has filed over depictions and/or retweets on social media of a passage he wrote, referred to as The Winning Isn't Normal" passage. These suits, which largely are over retweets of the passage, are [...]

Copyright is built on a lie that most people seem to accept: artists can make a decent living from the current system of rewards that copyright provides. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) explores, all the data about artist remuneration shows that isn't true. Alongside such dry statistics, it's good to hear [...]

There's usually only one reason government officials use personal email accounts: to dodge FOIA requests. The excuses offered by those caught doing it are never credible. And those who do opt for personal email - especially at the federal level - are putting themselves in peril. There are also practical security reasons for using government [...]

While Congress still can't get its act together to pass an anti-SLAPP law, the Ohio legislature has stepped up and done so in the Buckeye state. Most of the reporting on this has noted that it passed unanimously, and the expectation was that Governor Mike DeWine would sign it, though his big list of bills [...]

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WhatsApp has scored a limited win in its lawsuit against NSO Group. The allegations were that NSO used WhatsApp's servers - located in California - to deliver its malware to targeted devices. NSO argued several things and failed in almost every case, including the deployment of diametrically-opposed assertions. First, it argued it couldn't be held [...]

During peak COVID in 2021, when everybody was freaking out about how shitty and expensive U.S. broadband was for telecommuting and home education, NY state officials had an idea: what if we pass a law demanding that ISPs try to provide cheap broadband (a piddly 25 Mbps for $15) to low income families. Some particulars [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side That One Guy with a comment about Congress ignoring bills to protect the press: Gee, I wonder why they'd fear honest reporting so much... When the head of your party is a convicted felon and a core pillar of said party is that any criticism [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the biggest copyright trolls were facing some issues in court and trying new strategies, while the Sons of Confederate Veterans were sued over a bogus DMCA takedown and we analyzed the choice of venue. We also saw some particularly insane copyright damages against Cox. Avast was downplaying its [...]

We're still waiting for the lawsuit in Japan between Nintendo, The Pokemon Co., and Pocketpair to get rolling, but that doesn't keep the dispute out of the news. The patent lawsuit, itself a surprise as everyone thought it would be a copyright gambit that Nintendo would try, centers around several patents that all relate to [...]

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 [...]

At some point, I'll have time to write more thoroughly about how the wonderful and supportive Bluesky community effectively willed One Billion Users over the funding threshold, but it's quite amazing. We were around 50% of the funding threshold just a few days before the campaign was set to close (which generally means the campaign [...]

A second appeals court has now said that Section 230 doesn't protect Salesforce, the online software giant, from being held liable for sex trafficking, because Backpage... used Salesforce's software. If all of this sounds a bit crazy, buckle up. First, you need to understand the background here, before we can get into the details of [...]

It often seems that when people have no good ideas or, indeed, any ideas at all, the next thing out of their mouths is maybe some AI?" It's not that AI can't be useful. It's that so many use cases are less than ideal. Enter Axon, formerly Taser, which has moved from selling modified cattle [...]

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, [...]

We've been warning for years that the UK's Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or shilling" for Big Tech. But as we've long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law's immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would [...]

For many many years, experts have warned about massive longstanding flawsin Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signaling System 7), a series of protocols hackers can exploit totrack user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. Governments and various bad actorsroutinely exploit the flaw to covertlyspy on wireless users around the planetwithout them [...]

I'll preface this post by saying a part of me hates writing posts like this. We recently talked about a trademark lawsuit brought by KFC against Church's Chicken centered on Church's advertisements of a return to its original recipe" for some of its chicken. Powering the suit was the trademark KFC has on the term [...]

The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximizing profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions - museums, art [...]

Update: We did it! The threshold has been passed and the game will go into production! You can still back the campaign through midnight tonight, but thank you to everyone who backed us! I know I posted earlier today about a lovely review of One Billion Users, our exciting new social media card game which, [...]

TikTok is famous for its short attention span theater aspect of just watching some very short videos, without often having the time to go all that deep. The Supreme Court, however, is more known for being slow and methodical. However, the Supreme Court surprised many people yesterday by embracing its inner vertical screen dance moves, [...]

You may have heard that the US government has a bit of a mess on its hands after House Speaker Mike Johnson worked out a somewhat carefully crafted compromise continuing resolution funding plan to keep the government open, only to have it collapse after Elon Musk screamed about how bad it was and how anyone [...]

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As we mentioned yesterday, our crowdfunding campaign for One Billion Users is in its final hours. Although we're still below the funding threshold, we did get a decent bump yesterday, so there's still a chance we'll reach our goal. And just in time, Adi Robertson at The Verge has written a very nice review of [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

It's the same as it has always been. Some cops do something horrible, the DOJ steps in, the DOJ finds plenty of things wrong with the place housing the cops, the DOJ imposes its will on the cop shop... and years later, no one can really tell that anything happened. Even less will happen now [...]

In our stories about how you don't actually own what you've bought in the digital and IoT world, one of the sub-genres of those stories concern products bought by customers that become entirely or partially useless due to the decisions made by the seller. This itself can take a variety of forms, from video games [...]

Last week, the Senate released yet another version of the Kids Online Safety Act, written, reportedly, with the assistance of X CEO Linda Yaccarino in a flawed attempt toaddress the critical free speechissues inherent in the bill. This last minute draft remains, at its core, an unconstitutional censorship bill that threatens the online speech and [...]

In this new era of censorship - aided and abetted by people who think they can make America great again" by destroying the rights that actually make America great - almost every state is dealing with mass censorship efforts. Most of these involve libraries because motivated bigots have found leverage points to maximize their efforts [...]

Donald Trump has made it quite clear that he views his reelection as not just a vindication of his views, but as a blessing for his plan to bring vengeance on those who disagree with him. His cabinet picks are following in his footsteps on that, with various threats of lawsuits flying this way and [...]

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized [...]

Tomorrow is the last day of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users. We're still beneath the funding threshold, so unless there's a big closing rush, this campaign won't reach our goal. Still, if we can get that big closing rush, we'd love your support for the campaign. At the very least, supporting it now [...]

I've covered the cable TV and broadband industries for a long while, and for the vast majority of that time, U.S. regulators have looked the other way while companies rip consumers off with hidden fees. At some point the U.S. just decided that this type of false advertising was a form of acceptable creativity. And [...]

Monster Energy. Go ahead, I'll wait for your eyes to finish rolling. The trademark bullying company with a side business in making beverages has been the subject of discussion here for years and years and years. Monster Energy is one of the most prolific trademark bullies I've ever come across. It behaves so absurdly in [...]

I apologize in advance for the non-specific nature of this headline. But there's too much going on here to be summed up pithily in a few hundred words or less. No one here gets paid by the word, but we're going to need a whole lot of them to get to the bottom of this [...]

Long beforeTikTok histrionicstook root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. Congress then [...]

As a non-fan, non-supporter of Donald Trump, I don't have much left after discovering a disturbing number of my fellow Americans prefer fascism to liberty. But I still have these things I will forever hold near and dear to my heart: schadenfreude and irony. And, if you're like me, you get both of these things [...]

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Katie Couric recently claimed that repealing Section 230 would help combat online misinformation. The problem is, she couldn't be more wrong. Worse, as a prominent voice, she's contributing to the widespread misinformation around Section 230 herself. A few years ago, for reasons that are unclear to me, Katie Couric chaired a weird Aspen Institute Commission [...]

For the better part of the last thirty years, telecom giants and free market" libertarian think tanks have told anybody who'd listen that gutting regulatory oversight of the U.S. wireless and broadband markets would result in near-Utopian outcomes across innovation and competition. Instead, the reduction in both competition and real oversight resulted in regional telecom [...]

A few years back, Karl Bode wrote about YouTube TV's 2020 price hike, going from $50/month for its base package, to $65/month. The framing of that post was spot on: Google was behaving much like that of a cable company, with the exact customer-angering actions being taken that drove so many people into YouTube TV's [...]

If you've ever wondered how the right-wing media ecosystem operates and why it's effective, try viewing it as a form of improvisational theater or improv. In the wake of the 2024 U.S. elections, everyday people and political pundits alike have been trying to make sense of the results and the related observation that many Americans [...]

Quite famously, snarkier-than-thou music review site Pitchfork posted a brief, incisive review of Australian band Jet's second album in 2006. The review contained nothing more than the 0.0 score and this embedded video: This, my friends, epitomizes the legal travails of Mr. Jason Fyk, a self-made millionaire" who leveraged Facebook's reach to turn his websites [...]

Earlier, Karl wrote about a bill from Senator Ron Wyden which would put pressure on big telcos to actually protect our privacy (following the news of Chinese hackers abusing backdoor access to our wiretapping systems to spy on tons of people). Sadly, despite the obvious need in the wake of this massive privacy breach, that [...]

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This week, the United Nations General Assembly is set to adopt the UN Cybercrime Convention, almost exactly five years after it approved a resolution to launch its negotiation. The Convention text has been widely panned by digital security experts, human rights organizations, industry, even the UN's own human rights office, among many others. Yet still [...]

We've noted for decades that U.S. telecom security and privacy standards aren't great. T-Mobile has been hacked so many times in the last five years it's easy to lose count. AT&T not long ago had a breach impacting the data of 73 million users it initially tried to pretend hadn't happened. Telecoms have lobbied relentlessly [...]