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Last week I noted how Elon Musk saw fit to inject himself in the middle of the Helene hurricane disaster by falsely claiming that hurricane victims died because the FCC refused to give Starlink a billion dollars in subsidies. I explained at length why that claim was grotesque and incorrect, in part because the subsidies [...]

The Fifth Circuit seems to love nothing more than creating more distance between cops and accountability. But, every so often, it finds a law enforcement member that even it is not willing to redeem. That's how far Louisiana state trooper Kasha Domingue went off the rails in the incident leading to this lawsuit. The ruling [...]

It shouldn't be news to any regular readers here that Warner Bros. has been a ridiculously jealous protector of all things intellectual property when it comes to the Harry Potter franchise. Harry Potter themed fan festivals? That's banned magic, according to Warner Bros. Want to make a parody condom called Harry Poppers"? Here comes Warner [...]

Sometimes it feels like every story we see these days about kids and the internet is all about how it's evil, making them depressed, and a huge problem for society. We keep trying to remind people that the actual science on this finds no support of the internet being so horrible. Indeed, the research suggests [...]

Call a right enshrined" all you want, but if a judge decides it's better to protect law enforcement officers from their own actions than to allow the public to view killings performed in the name of public safety," the public gets nothing. Neither do the people serving the public and providing them with information, like [...]

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, [...]

You may have seen the news yesterday about 14 attorneys general filing lawsuits against TikTok. It was covered in a bunch of places, including Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and more. And, bizarrely, none of them seemed to include links to any actual complaint. It took me a little while [...]

U.S. wireless giant T-Mobile gets hacked a lot. In fact, the company has been hacked eight times in the last five years, with several of the intrusions exposing the sensitive personal data of millions of T-Mobile customers. The last hack, revealed in a 2023 SEC filing, exposed the names, addresses, social security numbers, and other [...]

So by now, assuming you've spent any decent amount of time reading Techdirt, you likely know that Nintendo has a reputation for being aggressive and litigious when it comes to intellectual property enforcement. Someone makes a game that is inspired by Pokemon, but does not directly copy it? Lawsuit. Mods for that same game make [...]

Trumpist Republican outrage (most of it manufactured) over being spied on by the US government almost led to significant reforms to Section 702 surveillance powers, specifically the loophole the FBI abuses to search for Americans' communications in the NSA's foreign-facing haystack. But that all got scuttled during the infighting and increasing desperation to just give [...]

Though the current popular narrative about social media seems to be that it is harmful and has little or no redeeming value, the truth (which a lot of people know) is that it also has a lot of value, and the potential to be even better. A recent research report from New_Public finds some ideas [...]

Creating surveillance backdoors for law enforcement is just asking for trouble. They inevitably become targets for hackers and foreign adversaries. Case in point: the US just discovered its wiretapping system has been compromised for who knows how long. This should end the encryption backdoor debate once and for all. The law enforcement world has been [...]

The EU Commission is the definition of insanity. It has tried for years to convince all EU members the best way to fight crime is to undermine the security and privacy of millions of EU residents. And, for years, it has failed to make an argument capable of convincing a majority of the 27 European [...]

The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle has 12 courses to help you get the most out of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

How quickly do you think we'd be having Congressional hearings about election interference" if Mark Zuckerberg so much as posted a Harris/Walz" lawn sign in front of his house? Yet, Elon Musk is now directly tweaking the site he owns to push his favored political candidate, even seizing people's accounts to promote Trump. One of [...]

Though Republicans are the worse of the two offenders, neither Democrats nor Republicans have cared all too much about preventing media consolidation. As a result, U.S. journalism and media has increasingly fallen into the hands of a handful of wealthy corporations and billionaires; and it's routinely reflected in terrible journalism (especially political journalism) and bumbling [...]

It's not just the Rankin County (MS) Sheriff's Office being scrutinized by the US DOJ. While that's the main concern following the conviction of six deputies of a self-proclaimed Goon Squad" who spent hours brutalizing and torturing two black men, the rest of Mississippi apparently isn't in great shape either. This recently-released report [PDF] details [...]

In the process of enshittification, it seems that the process will not stop until the customer has been well and truly pissed off. It was merely earlier this year that we discussed Amazon taking its Prime Video offering, after gobbling up a huge number of adopters, and suddenly introducing everyone's favorite thing about television: advertisements! [...]

You know how little kids sometimes play a game where they claim they've changed their name, and you can no longer blame them for what they did under their previous name? You know how that never actually works? Well, about that... Elon seems to be trying a corporate version of that trick in Australia, and [...]

Cheap thrills? Perhaps not so much. A report from Joseph Cox for 404 Media not only points out there's no such thing as a free meal AI-generated deepfake nude, but that this is exactly the sort of thing Vice Media would have been all over if it hadn't been burnt to the ground by string [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

Hillary Clinton has no clue how Section 230 works. She seems to think that repealing it will make websites more likely to remove misinformation (which is backwards). But what law do we need repealed to stop Clinton from spreading misinformation about Section 230 (and social media)? In April, we wrote about some comments from Hillary [...]

Lina Khan has most certainly faced some growing pains as the head of the FTC, occasionally filing some undercooked cases and raising the hackles of some staff (some grumbling about real missteps, some simply grumbling about reform). At the same time, she's the closest the U.S. has gotten to a competent antitrust enforcer any time [...]

This week, both top spots on the insightful side were taken by similar comments from That One Guy. In first place, it's a comment about the subject of free speech in the Vice Presidential debate: Broken finger vs Severed arm I mean, neither came out looking great with regards to the first amendment but whereas [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, a big new study showed once and for all that net neutrality did not hurt broadband investment, while telcos were teaming up with Rupert Murdoch to lob antitrust accusations at Google, because apparently Comcast felt qualified to give lectures on monopoly power. A court said the FCC can't [...]

A couple of years back, we discussed a win in the courts for the U.S. Dairy Export Council against both French and Swiss consortiums that had attempted to trademark the word Gruyere" in America. Both of those groups were jointly attempting to get a PDO/PGI trademark for the term, arguing that gruyere cheese should only [...]

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 [...]

Going back many, many years, we've written about how the public narrative that the large social media networks engage in anti-conservative bias" in their content moderation policies is bullshit. Because it is. And now we have yet another scientific study to prove this. The first time we covered it was in response to a ridiculous [...]

The Detroit PD is a case study in misuse of powerful surveillance tech. The department is notable for being involved in no less than three wrongful arrests, due to misuse/abuse of its facial recognition tech. The city has already paid out a $300,000 settlement in one of these cases. Worse, two of the three cases [...]

The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You'll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It's on sale [...]

In recent weeks there has been a flurry of laws, regulatory proposals, and lawsuits regarding deepfakes," along with the usual rising levels of concern in the media about how the world won't be able to handle this. For some perspective, the Pessimist's Archive just published a story highlighting how a nearly identical fear gripped the [...]

I know I've argued that not every Elon Musk brain fart warrants its own news cycle, but this one is particularly gross given recent events. We've noted repeatedly how in 2020, the Trump administration tried to give Elon Musk's low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband company Starlink nearly a billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies to connect [...]

Some of our nation's finest Drug Warriors are at it again. And by at it," I mean doing seriously stupid, seriously unconstitutional stuff in hopes of finding drugs or (better yet!) cash that will somehow prove they're doing anything at all to stem the flow of illegal drugs. And yet, they weren't even after a [...]

As someone who has evangelized for the video game industry and how games, long villainized by parents, politicians, and police, are actually either a neutral or positive force for the public and culture, I never shy away from sharing studies that demonstrate this. While a great deal of time has been spent on discussions of [...]

A year ago, we wrote about how a challenge brought by the Free Speech Coalition against Utah's (obviously unconstitutional) age verification law couldn't go forward because the district court noted (regrettably) that the structure of the law prevented FSC from challenging it before it went into effect. The issue is that it's a bounty" law, [...]

The no-fly" list has many problems. Pretty much any fed can nominate" someone for the list. Pretty much everyone on the list has almost zero chance of getting off it other than by filing a lawsuit. And even though the government has been forced by court decisions to offer a venue for challenges, the federal [...]

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Well, things sure move fast in this world of AI regulations. Just last week, we noted that California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a pretty obviously unconstitutional set of laws regarding the use of deepfake imagery around election communications." Then, just hours later, he was sued for it. This week, federal judge John Mendez has already [...]

As noted a few times, recent Supreme Court rulings have thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. The dismantling of Chevron in particular now dictates that regulators can't implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress. Two problems there: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn't [...]

Going all the way back to 2020, we have been discussing one of a series of copyright disputes centered on video games and their faithful depictions of real-life tattoos within them. While the first of these were related to depictions of NBA players in Take-Two's NBA2K series, which the company generally successfully defended, one outlier [...]

The Institute For Local Self Reliance (disclosure: I have done writing and research for them) has released an updated interactive map of every community-owned and operated broadband network in the U.S. All told, there's now 400 community-owned broadband networks serving more than 700 U.S. towns and cities nationwide, and the pace of growth shows no [...]

These days, there's a formula for articles pushing the unproven claims of harm from social media. Start with examples of kids harming themselves, insist (without evidence) that but for social media it wouldn't have happened. Throw some shade at Section 230 (while misrepresenting it). Toss out some policy suggestions without grappling with what those policy [...]

There is no crime apocalypse impending, incipient, or in progress in the United States. But you wouldn't know by listening to Trump and his supporters. Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically [...]

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Well, that was quite the end to last night's Vice Presidential debate. While the overall debate was pretty boring (though hilarious when JD Vance flipped out and whined that the moderators had promised not to fact check him), towards the very end they had what might be the dumbest possible exchange regarding free speech. It [...]

CNN, like most cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you'll most consistently find is a sort of generic drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off. On any given day you'll find a rotating parade of lazy view from nowhere" journalism that doesn't inform so much as it [...]

Taylor Swift isin the news, and not just because she has become themost decorated solo artist of all time. The fact that Taylor Swift has already been mentionedmultiple timeson Walled Culture underlines that she is also an important - if surprising - figure in the world of copyright. That's because Swift has beenre-recording her albumsin [...]

This isn't a good look for the Las Vegas Metro PD, even if it's completely supported by court precedent. No matter how often law enforcement agencies sling around the phrase protect and serve," they have almost no legal obligation to do either of those things. Sometimes a failure to intervene" allegation might undermine a cop's [...]

Culminating a deal that's been rumored about for the better part of the last twenty years, Dish Network and DirecTV have struck a new merger in a bid to try and remain relevant. It's not going to help. The deal involves DirecTV acquiring Dish for one dollar, in addition to $9.75 billion in Dish's debt. [...]

We have a hero in our midst, one that is responsible for freeing up the term superhero" from its previous trademark imprisonment. If you don't recall, Scott Richold is a British comic artist who produces the Superbabies line of comic books. Richold applied for a trademark for his comic only to find it opposed by [...]