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Over the last year especially, there's been a lot of talk about kid safety online and the role (if any) of social media in all of that. It's a complicated topic that requires nuance, not unproven claims of social media being the cause. Getting this wrong is likely to make kids' lives worse, not better. [...]

A few months ago, Mike wrote about the ways he uses AI tools when writing for Techdirt - not to do any of the actual writing, but to help improve it. The specific tool in question is Lex, a word processor with embedded AI features, and this week Lex founder Nathan Baschez joins Mike on [...]

I am not going to rehash this entire debacle again, but suffice to say a small town police department in Kansas - led by (the now-resigned) police chief Gideon Cody raided the offices of the Marion County Record (along with the home of its co-owners, one of which was 98-year-old Joan Meyer, who died less [...]

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Yesterday, we wrote about EU Commissioner Thierry Breton's preposterously stupid letter to Elon Musk, warning him that Elon had to make sure his Spaces conversation with Donald Trump did not include any harmful content" or it might violate the DSA. He also demanded that Elon tell Eurocrats what ExTwitter was doing to make sure that [...]

AT&T's never been much for worrying about the finer points of reality. This is, after all, a company that spent years lying to its users telling them that capped and throttled wireless service was unlimited." It's also the same company, you'll recall, that tried tricking customers into thinking 4G connectivity was actually 5G by simply... [...]

Re-branding isn't going to save ShotSpotter. While it would prefer to be called SoundThinking," its flagship product is still its acoustic detection tech - something the company claims reliably detects gunshots. Whatever the preferred (and trademarked) nomenclature, the claims the company makes are rarely backed up by facts. Even when it works, it still kind [...]

You might recall that AT&T's $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was supposed to transform the telecom giant into a modern internet video advertising superpower. Instead, after a massive amount of debt and endless bumbling, AT&T wound up laying off more than 50,000 people, closing a bunch of popular brands (like Mad Magazine), [...]

Elon Musk's legal team probably thought they had the perfect strategy: file a SLAPP suit in a court with a judge known for partisan rulings, including rulings benefiting Elon himself in the past. But they didn't count on one thing - the judge recusing himself. Last week, Elon sued GARM and the others, claiming that [...]

[Extremely War Boys voice]: Oh, what a lovely mess! The problem with a story like this is that a recap will run a couple thousand words before you even get into the new stuff. To quote another cult classic movie, Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up." Marion Police Chief [...]

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I know that many Elon Musk supporters assume that my mockery of the many stupid things that Elon does means that I won't give him a fair shake. But when he does something good, I'm happy to highlight it and give him kudos. In this case, he's right (if a bit provocative) in telling EU [...]

Fifth-generation wireless (5G) was supposed to change the world. According to wireless carriers and gear makers, not only was it supposed to bring about the fourth industrial revolution," it was supposed to usher forth amazing new smart cities and help withcancer treatment.Wireless giants routinely portrayed a world full of 5G powered robots givingtattoosor engaging inremote [...]

It was just a few months ago that we had some fun with Logitech over it's amazing, never been done before AI mouse... that was actually just a rehash of a previous mouse that had a button that could be used to launch a ChatGPT prompt. So it wasn't so much an AI mouse, as [...]

We fought a revolution for this?!? This is the new America: a loose confederacy (yes, I'm using that correctly [and pointedly]) of states that desire to see us returned to the harsh reality our founding fathers (and colonists before them) left their homelands to escape. The shift of the so-called conservative movement" to the extreme [...]

For years now, the UN has been trying to strike a deal on a Cybercrime Treaty." As with nearly every attempt by the UN to craft treaties around internet regulation, it's been a total mess. The concept, enabling countries to have agreed upon standards to fight cybercrime, may seem laudable. But when it's driven by [...]

In one of several ongoing campaigns of hate in our country, the Iowa legislature passed a law that not only changed what schools could teach, but what students could be allowed to read. First, let's get to the changes to the state's health curriculum, which is nothing less than the erasure of HIV/AIDS sufferers. The [...]

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It seems to be a rather common phenomenon, but various major newspaper opinion columnists love opining on the First Amendment and free speech without ever bothering to, you know, understand them. Edward Luce, a long-term journalist and commentator, and scion of an aristocratic British family, is currently the chief US commentator" (what a title!) for [...]

Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided toeliminate decades of MTV News journalismand Comedy Central history as part of their ongoing and utterly mindless cost saving" efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous piece-by-piece response to a comment questioning the truth about what happened with GARM: In second place, it's Guiltypanacea with a related comment about Elon's lawsuit: Pretty cute to claim GARM violated antitrust laws while also claiming Twitter is the singular global town [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, free speech defender" Devin Nunes filed more lawsuits against critics and vowed they weren't the last, the New York Times joined the parade of media organizations that were totally and completely misrepresenting Section 230, and the recording industry was reaping what it sowed in the world of copyright [...]

You know, when you've written as much as I have about trademark disputes, there are times when you think you've seen everything, only to have the universe remind you that the depth of silliness around trademarks can always get deeper. The subject of today's conversation is going to be a certification mark. While afforded similar [...]

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 [...]

You may have heard that Elon Musk and the UK are fighting. And both of them are looking ridiculous. Riots are happening across the UK in response to the stabbing deaths of three children. The background for the riots is that a bunch of shitlord agitators used Telegram to organize further nonsense on other social [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

The Detroit PD - or at least a few of its investigators - managed to be the absolute worst at using facial recognition tech. Despite being told by their tech provider that a match" was never to be considered probable cause for an arrest on its own, multiple PD investigators decided a match - no [...]

Up is down, left is right, day is night. And now, to Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, clear, direct government censorship is, apparently, free speech." This isn't a huge surprise, but on Thursday, the World Federation of Advertising shut down GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, in response to legal threats from ExTwitter and [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth of growth's sake" megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions- all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in [...]

I can't believe this, but it happened again. Almost exactly a decade ago, Tim Cushing wrote about a bonkers story out of the UK in which a passport applicant who's middle name was Skywalker" was denied the passport due to purported trademark or copyright concerns. The question that ought to immediately leap to mind should [...]

Texas is one of eight states that have enacted laws that force adults to prove their age before accessing porn sites. Soon it will try to persuade the Supreme Court that its law doesn't violate the First Amendment. Good luck with that. These laws are unconstitutional: They deny adults the well-established right to access constitutionally [...]

Pretty much any gang database" is a vehicle for abuse. While there's some investigative value in maintaining a database of affirmed gang members, most of these data collections are run without oversight or guardrails, allowing officers to add almost anyone they want to the collection, so long as they happen to live, work, or travel [...]

What if you found an antitrust violation... and almost all of the remedies wouldn't actually do much to fix things? That might be the situation we're in with Google's antitrust loss this week. It's not a good situation by any means, but it's not clear what to do about it either. The DOJ's historic antitrust [...]

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Yesterday we posted our latest podcast, with guest Don McGowan, former board member at NCMEC (the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children) and former general counsel or chief legal officer at Bungie and the Pokemon Company (where he would sometimes disagree with our coverage). In the podcast, he goes into great detail about why [...]

We just noted how several Trumplican lawmakers recently killed a popular program that helped deliver a $30 discount off of the broadband bills of low income Americans. The FCC's Affordable Care Program (ACP) was implemented during peak COVID, and proved immensely helpful to 22 million Americans, many of whom are now being booted off the [...]

Michigan has long been terrible in terms of asset forfeiture. I mean, it's a problem everywhere, but in Michigan, cops took cars as often as they took cash. Cars were taken from people simply because they happened to pass through areas known for prostitution." Cars were taken from people simply because passengers or other drivers [...]

As you will no doubt be aware, on July 19th cybersecurity company CrowdStrike did an oopsie in an update it pushed to its Falcon Sensor software that took down millions of computers around the world. The result was chaos, with everything from hospitals to airlines to banks impacted by computers and servers that went into [...]

We've had several episodes and posts lately all about NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, looking at both the great work it does and some of the problems that plague it. One thing we've often been especially concerned about is the center's advocacy efforts, such as pushing for FOSTA and KOSA. This [...]

Remember when Elon told advertisers not to advertise on ExTwitter? Remember how he told them to go fuck" themselves? Well, now he's suing those companies for the serious crime (he claims it might be RICO) of not wanting to advertise on his site. Oh, and it's even dumber than that. Because, as we detailed, just [...]

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One of the things that's supposed to separate us from the animals is the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Supposedly, that's also one of the traits that puts cops on one side of the Thin Blue Line and the rest of us on the other side. But, when given the opportunity, it often [...]

While it tends to get buried by the press, one thing is very true: the U.S. is too corrupt to pass a federal privacy law. For as long as the internet has existed, policymakers have prioritized making money over the common good and public safety. The end result is exactly what you'd expect: a steady [...]

Well this is a real punch in the gut. For years, we have been talking about a strange lack of interest within the video game industry when it comes to game preservation. In far, far too many cases, both single player and multiplayer video games that rely on backend checks to start the game, or [...]

It hasn't been a fun few years for once-respected tech news outfit CNET. After being purchased by private equity backed marketing firm Red Ventures in 2020, the company has been in a downward spiral due to brunchlord mismanagement, facing scandal after scandal surrounding everything from softening its coverage to please advertisers, to using fake AI" [...]

What began as an attempt to challenge the constitutionality of the DMCA's terrible anticircumvention provision has now backfired. A court ruling will limit our rights to fair use and free expression in favor of Hollywood's ability to lock stuff down with digital locks. It's not great. I had thought we had gotten past the era [...]

Election security is still an issue that demands close attention. Unfortunately, the political rhetoric in this country has been controlled by Republicans who continue to insist the last election was stolen," despite a complete lack of evidence. This isn't helping anything. And raiding the Capitol to overturn election results accomplished little else than allowing people [...]

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I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world. In the nearly three decades that I've been writing Techdirt I've been writing about what [...]

We recently noted how the telecom industry,with the help of the recent Chevron ruling, was gearing up to deliver what it hoped would be the killing blow to popular net neutrality protections (read: broadly popular FCC rules designed to prevent telecom monopolies from abusing their market power to screw customers and competitors). AT&T, Comcast, Verizon [...]