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We've noted repeatedly that in the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, 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 [...]

Another lobbyist win over common sense, it seems. Earlier this year, we discussed a group of video game preservationists, led by the Video Game History Foundation, seeking DMCA exemptions that would allow groups to curate, preserve, and make available for streaming antiquated video games for purposes of study. The chief opposition to the request came [...]

When the government shuts down a protest because both protesters and counter-protesters are physically attacking each other, it's not a heckler's veto." It's just common sense, even though there was very little of that on display during the protest, nor during law enforcement's belated response to the violent confrontation. But Warren Balogh thinks only his [...]

The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts havechronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynical moves from the academic publishing industry in order to retain theirfabulous profit margins. As a [...]

What are the odds. Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone - including its investors - that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn't exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people [...]

The Speed Reading Mastery Bundle has 6 courses to help you learn to absorb new information faster by learning speed reading methods used by top universities and Guinness World Record holders. These skills will not only help you with your everyday tasks, but open doors to take on any new interest or career. Within minutes, [...]

You may recall last December when we wrote about the somewhat shocking news that an Indian court had ordered Reuters to take down an entire article investigating a company, Appin and its founder Rajat Khare, that were accused of running a giant hacking for hire" operation. Ten months later, that article is back online with [...]

To be very clear: SpaceX's Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription and up front hardware costs. But contrary to what [...]

It's that time of the year in the Midwest, when the skies darken early and the temperature drops. And that means it's pho season. As a lover of pho, allow me to educate anyone that hasn't heard of it. It's a soup of sorts, with rice noodles, spices, and meat. And it's considered the national [...]

Well, a wrong has been righted. Kind of. And for how long, no one really knows. Texas is on the leading edge of book censorship in the United States - you know, the land most famous for its freedoms, one of which is the famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) First Amendment. It's only second [...]

The release of a bipartisan draft of the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) reinvigorated the effort to pass a federal consumer privacy law, only to sputter and stall amid concerns raised from across the political spectrum. All that is gone, however, is not forgotten: it is only a matter of time before Congress returns its [...]

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool [...]

Donald Trump and the politicians that either think like him, or think saying things like this might make him like them, continue to pretend major US cities are besieged by violent criminals. While there have been a few spikes in certain cities, for the most part, crime rates are returning to their normal, historic lows [...]

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Hey Jeff, Since I know you'll never actually read this, I figured the best way to set this up as an open letter. One that you should read, but never will. It appears that your stupendously cowardly decision to block the Washington Post from publishing its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the [...]

Earlier this month the FTC announced it was modifying some existing rules to crack down on companies that make it extremely difficult to cancel services. The agency's revamp of its 1973 Negative Option Rule"requires companies be completely transparent about the limitations of deals and promotions, requires consumers actively consent to having read terms and deal [...]

There must be something about the alcohol business that creates silly trademark disputes over geographic terms. We've seen this several times in the past, such as in the whole Ravinia Festival dispute, or the time two breweries fought over a trademark for the neighborhood one of them operated out of. While these don't always turn [...]

Considering how to increase competition in the search space without damaging end users is a trickier question than it seems at first. Many of the suggestions that people have tossed out have tended to focus on ideas that are purely punitive to Google, but which would also have negative impacts on users (and even some [...]

As Mike and others have pointed out, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have utterly failed the public. While it is of course their right to endorse, or not endorse, anyone they choose, the refusal to provide any such endorsement in an election with such high stakes abandons the important role the press plays [...]

Well, this is certainly one of the more entertaining decisions I've ever read, even though most of it deals with the more boring side of civil rights litigation, i.e., questions of standing and mootness. I mean, those can be interesting but they're far less interesting than seeing a court dig into cases where the either [...]

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The NY Times has real difficulty not misrepresenting Section 230. Over and over and over and over and over again it has misrepresented how Section 230 works, even having to once run this astounding correction (to an article that had a half-page headline saying Section 230 was at fault): A day later, it had to [...]

After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022announcedthat it would start politely asking the nation's lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of nutrition label" on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the legality of Elon Musk's vote-buying scheme: My trainers say it's illegal (volunteer voter registrar) We were taught that under no circumstances could we induce or attempt to induce anyone to register to vote, let alone to vote, let alone [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, congress rushed to pass a bill empowering copyright trolls to shake people down, while Ajit Pai was complaining about the state-level net neutrality laws he helped create. Donald Trump was threatening to sue CNN for its coverage based on a dumb legal theory, while we wrote about how [...]

Newspaper presidential endorsements may not actually matter that much, but billionaire media owners blocking editorial teams from publishing their endorsements out of concern over potential retaliation from a future Donald Trump presidency should matter a lot. If people were legitimately worried about the weaponization of government" and the idea that companies might silence speech over [...]

Over a decade ago, we wrote about how the flurry of trademark lawsuits seen at that time over competitors buying up Google Adwords to get their company ads displayed when competitors are searched might finally be coming to an end. While these types of suits have certainly reduced in number based on anecdotal evidence, they [...]

The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world ofgenerative AIthrough a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed previously on Walled Culture. We now have ourfirst decisionin this area, from the regional court in Hamburg. Andres Guadamuz has provided anexcellent detailed analysisof a ruling that is important [...]

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. Ben and Mike are technically off this week, but we [...]

Not all cops are terrible people, but a whole lot of terrible people seem to be cops. For some reason, a police officer (who has not been officially identified by the district) has a side gig as a substitute English teacher. I don't know what qualifications this officer brings to that job, but absolutely none [...]

Charge your device or illuminate your desk with this innovative 6-in-1 Wireless Charger. It's easy to use with its touch buttons and Qi wireless charging for Qi-enabled devices. Beautifully made with a modern look, it can quickly charge your device and is touch-sensitive allowing you to show the digital clock. This charger comes with an [...]

What do you do when the misinformation is coming from inside the house? In the recent book Character Limit, about Musk's takeover of Twitter, there's an anecdote that is in the introduction. A data scientist who worked at the company (and had survived the early purge), who was horrified at how Musk had fallen for [...]

At no point has the cable industry or its executives been particularly keyed in to the cord cutting" threat. As streaming video chipped away at their subscriber bases, most cable giants like Spectrum and Comcast responded byraising prices and being difficult. When confronted by growing evidence that cord cutting (defined as cutting theTVcord but keeping [...]

It was only a few weeks ago that we were discussing how, thanks to how fractured streaming has become, watching NFL games is becoming more and more an expensive and complicated process. It's gotten so bad that ESPN has released an app designed specifically just to help viewers find where to watch the NFL game [...]

You probably remember Redbox, the DVD-rental kiosk company that went went bankrupt last June. The story behind the bankruptcy is interesting, in case to you missed it. The company failed to pivot to streaming (you might recall the failed joint venture with Verizon), and the bankruptcy has been profoundly ugly in a scorched Earth kind [...]

Axon - having apparently exhausted the market for Tasers - has moved on to hawking body cameras to police departments. The cameras are the loss leaders. The real money comes from perpetual service contracts and access fees. With every new feature added to Axon's line of products, the difficulty level of switching manufacturers and service [...]

Elon Musk's SLAPP suit against Media Matters has hit a roadblock, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals-not exactly known for its progressive rulings-has granted a stay on Judge Reed O'Connor's order compelling the nonprofit to reveal its donor information. These days, the Fifth Circuit is where good law goes to die, but apparently even [...]

Sometimes, people who think they know things about defamation pursue their own lawsuits, making fools of themselves because they so very firmly believe anything said about them that they don't like must be libel. Then there are the lawyers who do the same thing. They should know better. Even if they don't specialize in defamation [...]

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Recently, Karl had a post taking FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to task for a painfully misleading Wall Street Journal article that attacked Kamala Harris. The article claimed that her policies resulted in the lack of new broadband deployments under Joe Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Bill that put aside $42.5 billion in broadband grants for underserved communities. [...]

Back in February, the Biden administration issued an executive order preventing the large-scale transfer" of Americans' personal data to countries of concern." The restrictions cover genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, and financial data, with the goal of preventing this data from being exploited by foreign intelligence agencies. This week the administration [...]

When it comes to comedy, there is a principle that a physical gag will be funny if done 3 times, but then will stop being funny on any further attempts unless it reaches a much higher number, like 9. To see this in action, you need only look at this clip of the classic gag [...]

Excited delirium just won't go away. No medical association recognizes this condition as factually true. And no cop shop will ever move away from using it as a handy excuse for in-custody killings, at least not until forced to by state legislators. Excited delirium actually pre-dates its current status as the go-to excuse for cops [...]

One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm forgenerative AIis the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where before publishers thought they had successfully locked down more or less everything digital with copyright, they now find themselves confronted with deep-pocketed companies - both established ones like Google [...]

I'm not sure I've ever seen a government official go from sending a clearly censorial First Amendment-violating threat letter to quitting his job to telling a court, I was pressured to do that and I resigned so that I wouldn't do that again" so quickly. Last week, we wrote about the fairly notable ruling in [...]

People are censoring books all over the country, thanks mainly to a new wave of hatred encouraged and blessed by a failed businessman and marginal golfer who somehow managed to be elected president for a single term. These book ban laws encourage activists with conservative views" (you know which ones) to challenge" any content they [...]

uTalk can help you start speaking like a native within minutes. Using the uTalk learning App you can listen to real native speakers to help you navigate through your next vacation or business trip.With more than 2,500 words and phrases to learn in each of our 140+ languages, the app gives you a running start [...]

I talk a lot about confirmation bias here because it's at the heart of many of the debates and discussions regarding disinformation. It's something we can all fall prey to, at times. But lately, I've been thinking a lot more about what makes one more susceptible to confirmation bias, and I'm increasingly coming around to [...]

Back in July, the Biden FCC voted to make unlocking your phone easier. As a result, the agency is now crafting new rules that would require that wireless carriers unlock customers' mobile phones within 60days of activation, even if you're still under contract. Wireless giant T-Mobile, which used to have a consumer-friendly reputation until its [...]

As they say, the wheels of justice grind slowly. The presumed upside is that they grind finely, which means every periodic iteration should produce better outcomes. And maybe that's true in some cases. (Cases handled in the Fifth Circuit, not so much.) This one's in the Fifth Circuit but at least hasn't suffered the possible [...]