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It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have [...]

At a time when Section 230 has become one of the most politically divisive tech policy issues, our final episode of the Otherwise Objectionable podcast brings together an unusual panel for a roundtable discussion" between myself, Jessica Melugin of CEI, Charles Cooke from the National Review, and Dave Willner (well-known trust & safety expert who [...]

Today Microsoft shut down Skype, a company that helped revolutionize phone calls online. To commemorate the death of Skype, we're running a recent Pessimist's Archive" article on the history of internet calls, and how it almost wasn't allowed. If you're not already, you should subscribe to the Pessimist's Archive. It used to cost money to [...]

In an unprecedented 102-page ruling that methodically dismantles the Trump administration's executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, Judge Beryl Howell has issued a permanent injunction that goes far beyond her initial temporary restraining order. The ruling represents a stark rebuke of what the court calls an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain [...]

Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government. The basics of the playbook are as follows: As Charlie Warzel [...]

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Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and [...]

Washington will soon become theeighth statein the country to pass Right to Repair legislation. While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the right to repair" movement - making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own - continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bruce C. with a reply to a comment that attempted to downplay the recent behavior of federal agents: Even plain clothes officers are required to carry their badge. If they were undercover officers they shouldn't be presenting themselves as officers to civilians unless they [...]

As we announced last week, our recently-Kickstarted card game One Billion Users is about to enter production, which means this is your last chance to secure a copy for yourself. The Kickstarter campaign is accepting late pledges from now through the end of Wednesday, May 7th. We recently received our proof copy, and it looks [...]

This is the fourth in our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and today we're looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: Calder's Circus by David Harris. Regular followers of [...]

One of things we've talked about repeatedly is how much better it would be for content producers, instead of immediately defaulting to behaving like IP protectionists, to treat their fans in a human and awesome way. There are times when the need for protecting IP makes sense, but there are far more times when creative [...]

The free, independent state of Texas continues to make it clear it only respects certain rights and freedoms and only those that adhere to the Holy Trinity of guns, God, and, um... Nazi-adjacent Cybertruck manufacturers. A number of efforts have been made to remove books from schools and public libraries in recent years. None of [...]

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusualspike in potentially sensitive data flowing outof the agency's network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency's databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Securitygained accessto Internal Revenue Service [...]

Bizarrely buried near the bottom of NY Times article about the chaos behind the renditioning of people to a Salvadoran gulag is an important detail: the US and El Salvador have already brought back eight people who were mistakenly" sent there: In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele's confusion about whom [...]

This comes as no surprise. Pretty much everything about Trump's extrajudicial rendering of undocumented migrants to a foreign hellhole prison has been awful, but rarely lawful, to twist a phrase that's already pretty twisted. Resurrecting a law last used to justify the mass incarceration of migrants during World War II, Trump 2.0's acceleration of his [...]

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Well look who else thinks Trump's plan to use a centuries-old law to vanish people to El Salvador is batshit crazy: one of his own judges, Fernando Rodriguez Jr. I'm sure the admin will be out there calling him a far-left radical Marxist before long. Let's be clear about how absolutely unhinged this whole thing [...]

In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, data suggests that wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition). Recently, T-Mobile imposedanother $3-$5 per month price hike on most of its plans- including customers who believed they were under a [...]

RFK Jr.'s tenure at HHS must be put to an end. We already have ample evidence for that necessity, both in the form of his complete mismanagement of a ballooning measles outbreak that continues to expand, his vaccine skepticism that has led to him stating that he's going to have the origin of autism all [...]

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 [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency's dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found. Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-oldDepartment of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the [...]

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a state legislature, caught up in the moral panic about social media, passes yet another clearly unconstitutional bill that will waste taxpayer money on doomed legal battles. This time it's Colorado, whose legislature passed a ridiculously bad social media regulation bill (SB25-086) that looks suspiciously similar to [...]

Back in 2021, Apple mostly won the antitrust case that Epic brought against it, and the Ninth Circuit largely agreed. The court rejected most claims about Apple's App Store being an illegal monopoly. The company just had to make one small change: let developers tell users they could make purchases elsewhere. Simple enough. Instead, Apple [...]

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Radley Balko's post on Substack details an ordeal, however brief, Texas appellate lawyer Clayton Jackson suffered through recently. A longer one possibly awaits, thanks to his employer firing him shortly after he went public with his recounting of this unwanted interaction. Balko's opening paragraph explains why the Trump Administration has hit law firms and universities [...]

So we've established by now that the second Trump administration is attempting to completely destroy regulatory authority, consumer protection, labor rights, and corporate oversight. Whether by precedent-ignoring court ruling, executive order, illegally firing commissioners, cronyism, or regulatory capture, the effort isn't subtle, and is poised to usher forth a new golden age of corruption. That's [...]

Okay, there's a lot to unpack in this story, so hang with me here. For the past month or so, Americans and American businesses have been stuck in tariff hell. Blanket and additional tariffs issued via executive order by Trump have been in a seesaw pattern for a month now. This tariff program was a [...]

Last year, we were thrilled with the success of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users, the Social Media Card Game. In case you missed it at the time, One Billion Users is a fun, fast-paced game where 2-4 players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. Now, the game is about [...]

Support us on Patreon We probably don't need to tell you that the current tariff situation is causing complete chaos in global supply chains, in large part due to the uncertainty - for all we know, the exact rules will have changed since this episode was recorded just yesterday. But we wanted to get some [...]

When last we checked in with CBS, the company was preparing to fold under pressure from the Trump administration, amidst bogus accusations that 60 Minutes had unfairly made Donald Trump look bad. As we've noted previously, the accusations are utterly baseless, but that's apparently not stopping the CBS board from kissing authoritarian ass and throwing [...]

The Party of Free Speech" is at it again. House Speaker Mike Johnson just bragged about using legal threats to remove his opponents' political advertising - perhaps the most constitutionally protected form of speech that exists. And he did it while lying about them lying. As he says in that clip: Do not believe the [...]

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Donald Trump's two terms in office have proven Orwell right. No, not the 1984 is not an instruction manual" thing. The other one. Animal Farm. Some animals are more equal than others. At the top of the heap? The pigs. Trump led off his first term in office by threatening to create a police state [...]

Google is developing a tried and true reputation for buying products people like, making them worse, then pulling the rug out from under users' feet. That's been a particular problem with Google's purchase of FitBit, which has generally resulted in less useful hardware, more paywalls, more annoying nickel-and-diming efforts, and just a more miserable user [...]

Roughly two weeks ago, in a post about how America was risking losing its elimination status for measles as the current outbreak is exploding thanks to the inaction from RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department, I wrote the following paragraph: At the start of April, we were at 483 confirmed reported measles [...]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show. The office of the Treasury Inspector General [...]

USA Today has secured the DOJ's official rules of engagement for mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. (Better yet, it has shared it with everyone, rather than keep it to itself!) Trump's resurrection of a law no one thought the Land of the Free would ever use again is disturbing enough. What's in the [...]

The FTC's politically motivated inquiry into tech censorship" has managed to prove exactly the opposite of what it intended: the government agency is now actively censoring public comments from people complaining about being censored by tech platforms. It's almost too perfect. The FTC, under Chair Andrew Ferguson, launched what it called an investigation into tech [...]

The administration's justification for reviving the justifiably reviled Alien Enemies Act is the literally unbelievable claim that the Venezuelan government has sent Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to the United States to wreak general havoc, something the Trump Administration claims is a literal act of war. It's just not happening. There's no link between [...]

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We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does not [...]

When Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel stepped down, we noted how she couldn't be bothered to even mention that terrible things were brewing at her agency. Same for Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, who recently decided to sheepishly step down without, again, so much as acknowledging the dangerous and radical zealotry Brendan Carr has been [...]

You know, there's stupid, and then there's stupid on a level that is unbelievably dangerous. While RFK Jr. is very busy attempting to ensure that America loses its measles elimination status through a combination of vaccine skepticism, pushing alternative treatments, and generally being unable to present a solid message around the current outbreak, you will [...]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a politician" with the LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois." Barberis, [...]

Oh hooray. Another part of our new normal under Trump 2.0. Here's the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with the gory details: Milwaukee County Circuit JudgeHannah Duganwas charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom. According toa 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused [...]

Here's a puzzle: How do you write a law that's so badly designed that (1) the people it's meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act. The bill started with [...]

When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don't quite say we want to censor speech" (after all, they pretend to be the party that brought free speech back.") Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it's got nothing to do with the content, even as they can't hide their true intentions and [...]

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 [...]

Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn't want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? [...]