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Forget defund the police." Let's just get rid of the sheriffs. Or, at the very least, change how the job is handled. Sheriffs are elected, which means a lot of sheriffs are less interested in providing good law enforcement than ensuring they've catered to their voting bases enough that they'll be re-elected. And since it's [...]

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In this stupid partisan world we live in, the MAGA world has decided that simply accurately explaining that the First Amendment does not allow for the suppression of speech (which is a good thing!) is somehow a call for abolishing the First Amendment. This isn't even blaming the messenger." It's misinterpreting the messenger and demanding [...]

Analysts (and Musk himself) had beenquietly notingfor a while that Starlink satellite broadband service would consistently lack the capacity to be disruptive at any real scale. As it usually pertains to Musk products, that analysis was generally buried under product hype. A few years later, and Starlink users are facingobvious slowdownsand a steady parade of [...]

There's that well known adage that if you want to teach a child not to touch a hot stove, just let them touch it once and that will be all the teaching needed to have them never do so again. Whoever came up with that saying obviously has never met my children, for starters. And [...]

Well, I hope it was worth it, Rudy. You sold out completely, offering up every last bit of your integrity for the chance to push election conspiracy theories in court on behalf of a man who won't even bother to look in your direction now that you've professionally disgraced yourself on his behalf. No matter [...]

I don't think I've ever seen quite as much hype about a state bill as California's SB 1047, a pretty terrible AI Safety" bill. Its supporters were a really weird combination of AI doomers, AI haters (not the same as the doomers), technically illiterate concern trolls... and a few people with legitimate interests about how [...]

It seems so long ago that people weretrying to stopthe worst aspects of theEU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) recounts in detail. The final legislation was passed in March 2019, but it is important not simply to accept what happened and move [...]

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It probably will not shock you to find out that big tech's promises to never again suppress embarrassing leaked content about a political figure came with a catch. Apparently, it only applies when that political figure is a Democrat. If it's a Republican, then of course the content will be suppressed, and the GOP officials [...]

As we've mentioned a few times, $42.5 billion in taxpayer-funded broadband subsidies will soon start hitting the states next year courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill's Broadband, Equity And Deployment (BEAD) program. Efforts to expand affordable fiber access don't get all that much press attention in the AI hustlebro era, but the impact will be [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are invocations of established maxims. In first place it's an anonymous comment about people flipping opinion of hacked materials between Hunter Biden and JD Vance: How many times must I tap the sign? Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we learned more about how easy it was to buy access to people's movements from companies gathering license plate data, while AT&T was proclaiming that it could not be sued for selling customer location data just as readily. A big EU ruling thankfully said the right to be [...]

Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations being built by Amazon, Starlink, and AT&T pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue. Back in 2022, scientistsdeclaredStarlink satellite constellations an existential threat for astronomy," noting that the reflection and light pollution (Musk [...]

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 [...]

PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week. Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws. The PEN [...]

This would seem like a truly extraneous nail in the coffin of ShotSpotter deployment in Chicago, but there are far too many city council members still willing to prop up under-performing tech with faith-based arguments. And there's the company itself, which has shifted narratives (along with redoing the company letterhead) over the past several months [...]

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It's been all of [checks calendar] one freaking day since we wrote about Elon Musk's hypocrisy on free speech compared to the old Twitter regime, and he has to go and make another example. Twitter, under old management: Briefly limits sharing of (at the time) unverified Hunter Biden laptop story. Elon: Outrageous censorship!" and possibly [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to force internet companies to pay them billions of extra dollars for no coherent reason. These efforts, routinely dressed up as serious adult policy, usually involve false claims that tech companies are getting a free ride" on the Internet, and should therefore [...]

TheGates Foundationis one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is thesecond largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around$75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important. An article in Chemical & Engineering Newsexplains that hitherto the Gates [...]

Here's a phrase I have to use but hate doing so: let's go back to the 2020 presidential campaign. During what was essentially a multi-year advertisement for just how absolutely petty, stupid, and disingenuous a political system could possibly be, the 2020 American presidential election also featured a video sent out by the Trump campaign [...]

Remember DoNotPay"? They were the company, run by Joshua Browder, claiming to be the world's first robot lawyer." There were all sorts of sketchy things going on, some of which dated back to DoNotPay's" earliest days. But things really came to a head last year when legal investigator extraordinaire, Kathryn Tewson, started digging in and [...]

One of the most horrific acts of police brutality has now resulted in two DOJ investigations. The first concerned the torture of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker by six white deputies who referred to themselves as the Goon Squad" for their willingness to break rules and violate rights. The first investigation involved the incident itself [...]

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Among the key reasons Elon Musk insisted he had to buy Twitter were (1) that it was too political in how it was managed and how content moderation was done, (2) the company was not as transparent as it should be, and (3) it was too quick to censor. Since taking over, Elon has been [...]

Two years ago, Techdirt's Copia Institute released a report discussing how open access fiber networks were a potential path toward boosting fiber competition in the United States. Such networks, sometimes community owned, involve collaboratively building a centralized fiber infrastructure that multiple competitors can come in and compete over. In instances where this has been successfully [...]

We've talked a great deal about the trademark adventurism of famed burger chain In-N-Out. While In-N-Out has shown itself to be a happy trademark bully in several ways, most of our posts on the company have to do with the trademark tourism it engages in. This is the process by which the company puts up [...]

Efforts in Congress to ban the use of AI in political ads have largely stalled. So, naturally, the White House is attempting an end-around through the Federal Communications Commission. While not an outright ban, the FCC's proposal to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in political ads is an example of Washington bureaucrats not understanding [...]

This is pretty harrowing all the way through. No one's getting away with anything, so there's that small comfort. But what motivates a well-liked sheriff of a small county in Kentucky to cross every possible line and kill a judge in his own chambers? The facts, as they were first presented by numerous sources, did [...]

One of the reasons that today's copyright is such a bad fit for the modern digital world is that its roots lie deep in 18th-century law and analogue objects like books. This fact has created a kind of legislative drag that means copyright is always decades behind the latest technological developments. A case in point [...]

In my time covering internet speech issues, I've seen some truly ridiculous arguments regarding Section 230. I even created my ever-handy Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act" article four years ago, which still gets a ton of traffic to this day. But I'm not sure [...]

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Well, it worked. We'll have to see how this plays out in the lawsuit WhatsApp brought against NSO Group, but it has managed to shed one litigant thanks to intervention from the home team: the Israeli government. In July, documents obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) revealed the desperate measures NSO Group deployed to [...]

Back in 2017, the Trump administration signed new rules banning Russian-based Kaspersky software on all government computers. Last June, the Biden administration took things further and banned distribution and sale of the software, stating that the company's ties to the Russian government made its intimacy with U.S. consumer devices and data a national security threat. [...]

I don't know why the press feels the need to provide cover for law enforcement officers who screw up so badly they injure innocent people and their own coworkers. But they do. It's not even the view from nowhere." It's the view mostly likely to exonerate cops by the end of the headline." And since [...]

Agree with them or not, the folks behind Cards Against Humanity certainly do have a penchant for flair. As you may recall, back during the Trump presidency, when we were still hearing about how a border wall would be built and then billed back to a sovereign nation that was absolutely never going to pay [...]

Elon Musk's superpower does not appear to be rocket science or electric cars-it's an uncanny ability to misunderstand why ExTwitter's features exist. The clear takeaway from the book Character Limit" about his Twitter takeover was that he only views the platform's features through the lens of whether or not he, the richest man in the [...]

Tennessee's government cranks out a lot of stupid laws. It's been doing it for years, but things have accelerated recently as the state's legislators seek to curtail rights for, well, pretty much everyone but white men. It has enacted book bans, anti-trans laws, and the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision triggered its long-dormant anti-abortion law. But [...]

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I do not understand why California Governor Gavin Newsom thinks he has to be the Democratic equivalent of Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, signing obviously unconstitutional laws for the sake of winning culture war arguments. It's really shameful. It's cheap political pandering, while disrespecting the rights of everyone he's supposed to [...]

Last July the FCC announced it was moving forward with plans that should make unlocking your mobile phone easier than ever. According tothe FCC announcement, the agency, with broad and bipartisan public support, has been working on new rules requiring that wireless carriers unlock customers' mobile phones within 60 days of activation. Wireless carriers, trying [...]

It happened again and it has to stop. Back in 2014, we talked about how a UK woman had trouble getting her passport approved because her middle name was Skywalker" and the UK's passport office for some reason thought that Disney would have to give its permission to have the passport approved. There is nothing [...]

The writing was on the wall, or rather, on the City of Chicago's Inspector General's report: The CPD data examined by OIG does not support a conclusion that ShotSpotter is an effective tool in developing evidence of gun-related crime. Kind of a big problem when the tech was acquired specifically to address Chicago's years-long acceleration [...]

Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about theterrible jobthat academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish. We also mentioned there two large-scale archives that are trying to help,Sci-HubandAnna's Archive. Legal action by publishers against the former seems to have led to a halt to new items being added [...]

If it can be accessed via the internet, it will be. That's a fact too many entities learn far too late. Amazingly, this wholly expected outcome often comes as a surprise to entities with lots power, money, or expertise - the sort of people you'd think would have considered all possible outcomes before giving a [...]

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I've covered telecom giants like AT&T for most of an adult life. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the company all but owns most state legislatures, who are happy to pass no limit of terrible, anti-consumer, anti-competitive legislation in exchange for a nice vacation trip or campaign contribution. AT&T lawyers and executives [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to a comment arguing that Cloudflare isn't very important to the internet: I would like to hear your argument as to why DDoS mitigation is not an essential part of hosting a website in 2024. In second place, it's an anonymous [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, some investors were getting sick of AT&T's obsession with mergers, leading the company to think about dumping DirecTV. Nintendo was ramping up its war on ROM websites, while Congress was moving forward with plans to massively increase copyright trolling. The DOJ helped boost Ed Snowden's memoir by suing [...]