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Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. This version is designed for PCs that need a new license for Windows [...]

Daniel Horwitz - who has fought plenty of free speech battles for Tennesseans - has secured an extremely quick victory for his client, Lakeland resident Julie Pereira. According to the complaint [PDF], which was filed June 6 of this year, the city of Lakeland took offense to a sign Pereira had placed in her yard. [...]

The Supreme Court issued a recent ruling that could take an absolute wrecking ball to everything from consumer protection and environmental reform to public safety. It was a ruling that dismantled decades of precedent and puts nearly all regulatory enforcement efforts at risk, yet it somehow barely warranted much coverage by a largely disinterested, billionaire-owned [...]

I don't often praise law enforcement agencies, generally because they rarely do anything praise-worthy. And the Chicago PD is so fraught with problems and problematic tactics that it's difficult to give it credit even when credit is due. But here we are, doing the difficult thing. After years of fighting to keep this information secret [...]

Here we go again. The Streisand Effect has become so noticeably prevalent these days that I quite often hear the term being discussed in all manner of media. Hell, I came across it on a local Chicago sports radio broadcast a couple of weeks back. If the term and its implications aren't being taught in [...]

Have we considered giving Supreme Court justices their own blogs in which they can vent their ill-informed brain farts, rather than leaving them to use official Supreme Court order lists as a form of a blog? Justice Clarence Thomas has been the absolute worst on this front, using various denials of certiorari on other topics [...]

The US Postal Service has been retaining metadata on snail mail for years. Back before mass scanning of every piece of mail was a reality, law enforcement requests had to be a bit more targeted. Investigators had to put in requests that required the postal service to log information about any mail sent to/from certain [...]

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Just when you thought the internet was safe from the meddling minds of the Supreme Court, the Justices have decided to take another crack at reviewing whether or not a new set of state regulations of the internet violates the First Amendment. And this time, it has a but won't you think of the children [...]

Things aren't too exciting if you're a telecom executive right now. All the hype in tech is singularly fixated on the more headline catching, stock fluffing, and usually very broken aspects of AI." 5G, hyped as a transformative world changing tech by overly eager telecom marketing departments, wound up being a consumer dud that users [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about clarifying robots.txt in the age of AI crawlers: As I understand it, the crux of the debate is that AI tools are not making bulk requests to servers. They're making very limited requests to specific pages based [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the Wall Street Journal came out with an op-ed in defense of Section 230, while we wrote about implementation questions around the few good parts of the EU Copyright Directive. A California college decided to start targeting its own student newspaper with public records requests, and a Massachusetts [...]

It's no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That's in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice [...]

Showing yet again that you can lead a cop to a court order but you can't make them follow it, Matthew Petti reports for Reason that the Baltimore PD apparently barely paused its scraping of seized cell phones following a court order telling it to get its warrant particularity house in order. Less than a [...]

Perplexity is an up-and-coming AI company that has broad ambition to compete with Google in the search market by providing answers to user queries with AI as its core technology. They've been in the news because their news feature repurposed content published on the Forbes website in an investigative article, which severely annoyed the Forbes [...]

The House Oversight Committee is investigating NewsGuard, a private company, for supposed censorship" for the crime of... offering its own opinions on the quality of news sites. The old marketplace of ideas seems to keep getting rejected whenever Republicans find that their ideas aren't selling quite as well as they'd hoped. Up is down, left [...]

All facial recognition tech is flawed. Some offerings may be less flawed than others, but the underlying problems (mainly, the inability to be as accurate when identifying minorities and women) remain. In Detroit, the problems became problematic fairly quickly and dramatically. Hundreds of US law enforcement agencies utilize facial recognition tech, but the Detroit PD [...]

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 [...]

I guess I should start this out by noting that I like Tim Wu quite a bit, and always felt like I learned something in the past when I spoke with him. He was even one of the people who reviewed and provided feedback on my big protocols, not platforms" article months before it was [...]

Four years years ago AT&T, a company that for years cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber,effectively stopped selling DSL. While that's understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a [...]

When it comes to policy decisions generally, and with technology platforms specifically, all we can really ask is that a policy be coherently stated and implemented in a uniform fashion. You may dislike said policy, but at a minimum it should be legible and enforced sensibly. Take, for instance, Apple's updated policy on allowing emulation [...]

There is still hope that California's perilous, protectionist legislation for news could be reformed, but not without effort. I just returned from Sacramento, where I was invited to testify (video below) in opposition to an Assembly bill by Buffy Wicks, which I analyzed in depth inthis paperand latercriticizedas amended. It has passed the Assembly and [...]

The Supreme Court's opinions in the NetChoice/CCIA cases have been leading to some bizarre interpretations, as many people try to read into it things they wanted to see but just aren't there. Cathy already covered some of the oddities of Justice Alito's concurrence (which Justices Thomas and Gorsuch signed onto), but I wanted to dig [...]

Things are not looking great for SoundThinking, which hasn't been able to outrun the reputation it earned when it was still known as ShotSpotter. More and more major cities are choosing to ditch the technology because it simply does not appear to be worth paying for. What lots of cities are finding out is that [...]

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BREAKING NEWS: Florida's Attorney General says the Supreme Court unanimously sided with her in a case where they unanimously ruled against her arguments. Perhaps there's a reason that Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is so vigorously defending a Florida law that would block social media companies from diminishing the reach of disinformation: she loves spreading [...]

For decades there has been endless policy wrangling over whether unlocking your phone" (removing restrictions allowing you to take the device with you to another carrier) should be allowed. Giant carriers have generally supported onerous phone locks because it hampers competition by making it harder to switch providers. Consumer rights groups and the public broadly [...]

You know, rather than paying out thousands or millions in lawsuits for retaliatory arrests, maybe states should just spend more money on skin thickening for their police officers. It's not like case law isn't pretty much completely established at this point. Flipping the bird to a cop is protected speech. So is complaining, however profanely, [...]

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.

I was worried after oral argument in the NetChoice cases that we were going to get a mess of a decision. Maybe it would give us the right result (the Florida and Texas laws remaining canceled), but with dicta that pulled its punches and gave future would-be censors some cover for their continued attacks on [...]

We keep pointing out that, contrary to the uninformed opinion of lawmakers across both major parties, laws that require age verification are clearly unconstitutional*. * Offer not valid in the 5th Circuit. Such laws have been tossed out everywhere as unconstitutional, except in Texas (and even then, the district court got it right, and only [...]

If you had an extra $100k on hand and happened to be on eBay at the right time, you could have become the proud(?) owner of tech that was once so secretive and controversial, both the manufacturer and the FBI would make you sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements just to purchase one. A lot has changed [...]

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Today, the Supreme Court made it pretty clear that websites have First Amendment rights to do content moderation as they see fit, but decided to send the cases challenging laws in Florida and Texas back to the lower courts to be litigated properly, effectively criticizing the litigation posture of the trade groups, NetChoice and CCIA, [...]

You might recall that way back" in 2007 Comcast here in the U.S. was caught throttling BitTorrent uploads and subsequently lying about it. Since BitTorrent was popular, hoovering up network resources, and posed a threat to traditional cable TV, Comcast execs thought their best approach would be to make an entire file transfer system less [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come to our post about the media's widespread misrepresentation of the Supreme Court's ruling in the Murthy case. In first place, it's Drew Wilson, who shares our frustration with this kind of thing: In second place, it's Rocky with a response to the claim that Mike [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, an Australian court ruled that media companies could be held liable for Facebook comments on their news stories, the Indian government used a national security law to block Twitter accounts all over the world, and the EU Intellectual Property Office released an utterly ridiculous propaganda film. Josh Hawley's [...]

For a long time we've been pointing out just how dangerous it is to turn over school discipline problems to cops. Sure, there are reasons schools might need a police response to an incident, but putting cops on staff has allowed administrators to abdicate their duties and turn incidents that could be resolved by educators [...]

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 [...]

Law enforcement will always get more than a fair shake from the Fifth Circuit. No circuit is more apt to award immunity or otherwise refuse to punish officers for coloring outside of the constitutional lines. And that apparently includes officers' dogs, who probably enjoy a fair shake as much as anyone. Who's a good boy?!? [...]

As more and more governments try to pass more and more laws requiring age verification, some of us keep pointing out that age verification will cause a ton of harm. For all the talk of how it's necessary to protect the children," the only way to verify ages is to collect a ton of private [...]

This is one of the stupidest things ever in terms of public records lawsuits. And that's saying a lot, considering how often this site has covered public records lawsuits. This traces back to April of last year. Ben Camacho, a Los Angeles journalist who contributes to sites like Knock LA, sent out a records request [...]

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It's just like adults to be constantly diagnosing the wrong thing in trying to save the children." Over the last couple of years there's been a mostly nonsense moral panic claiming that the teen mental health crisis must be due to social media. Of course, as we've detailed repeatedly, the actual research on this does [...]

You might recall that Elon Musk claims tohate taxpayer subsidies. They should all be deleted." Except for the subsidies given to his companies (sometimes for doing nothing), of course. Back in 2020, Musk's satellite broadband venture, Starlink, gamed a Trump-era FCC subsidy program to try and grab $886 million in taxpayer dollars. It was a [...]

The Supreme Court on Wednesday was 1-and-1, with one good decision, in Murthy v. Missouri, and one doozy in Snyder v. US, where it somehow read a statute criminalizing corruption to... not actually criminalize corruption. But this post is about the one that, happily, the Court got right. Not just because it got the result [...]

Meta is actually making moves to live up to its promise to integrate Threads into the open ActivityPub standard used by a variety of fediverse" platforms such as Mastodon and Pixelfed. It's a fundamental boost to the concept of protocols over platforms, but it's still not entirely clear how open" Meta is really going to [...]

Well, we'll see how long ShotSpotter/SoundThinking will keep making that New York money. The outlook is not good. A lot of this will depend on how well the NYPD can defend the useless product it's spending millions on, but at the end of the day, the city still holds the purse strings and it has [...]

In the wake of a Supreme Court case built on grifters peddling nonsense evidence, it's only fitting that some media reporting is buying into the same fantasy-land narrative at the heart of the case. You would hope that professional journalists would do better, but apparently that's too difficult. Earlier this week, we covered the Murthy [...]

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