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Every report delivered by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division can be described as scathing" or damning." There are simply no exceptions to this rule. It's not like the Civil Rights unit picks a US law enforcement agency out of the hat and then initiates an investigation. (Maybe it should? I mean, I'm sure there's plenty [...]

Last Halloween, thousands of users for U.S. broadband provider Windstream began complaining online about the fact that their routers simply stopped working. At the time, Windstream (one of the worst ranked ISPs in the country) sent users replacement routers, but couldn't be bothered to transparently inform customers what was happening. More than half a year [...]

Clearview was probably its healthiest when it was still flying under the radar. It courted billionaires with a new facial recognition tech plaything - one capable of searching millions (and, ultimately, billions) of images for a match for any uploaded photo. The dirty secret? All of the images and data had been scraped from the [...]

You know those lawsuits where you kinda hope everyone can lose? Yeah. This is one of those. Some crypto bros are suing the world's most hated pharma bro, who jacked up prices on some essential pharmaceuticals before eventually being arrested and sentenced to jail. And the lawsuit is about a Wu-Tang album that almost no [...]

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Sheriffs answer to no one but voters. Consequently, they often answer to no one. Voters tend to gravitate towards names they recognize. Sheriffs count on this form of loyalty" to ensure years or decades at the helm of a county law enforcement agency. And this loyalty continues to pay off even when sheriffs are less [...]

We've noted more than a few times that for all of the government's talk about wanting to bridge the digital divide," it's consistently struggled to even map where broadband access is or isn't available. The government has spent more than $400 million on trying to map broadband access to date, and while there certainly have [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply to someone comparing Black History Month to white power celebrations: Black people: celebrating overcoming slavery and other historical injustices Nazis: celebrating having white skin, and committing historical injustices Idiots on the internet: these are the same thing" In second place, it's [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at the two-sided political attacks on Section 230, while an appeals court issued a strong but easily-misrepresented Section 230 ruling, and the law was also used to begin smackin down a lawsuit from Craig Brittain. A prominent copyright troll ran away when finally challenged, the NY [...]

We know cops kill dozens of dogs every day. This much has been verified by the US Department of Justice, which called it an epidemic." It's not just anecdotal evidence generated by a handful of court cases. We also know most cops who kill dogs get away with it, even though multiple courts have ruled [...]

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 [...]

Whether intentional or not, the process for tech companies to fall to the process of enshittification seems to be a very real trend. The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, describes the process by which once good and useful technology platforms devolve to become worse and less useful as the owners of those platforms move on [...]

Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time. [...]

For not the first time, the Supreme Court seems to regard the First Amendment as secondary when it comes to cases involving some form of intellectual property. This has happened all too frequently. Perhaps most famously, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Court more or less said that the First Amendment gets a pass in copyright [...]

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Certain government agencies are of the opinion that records requesters shouldn't even be able to pry the documents they're seeking from their cold, dead fingers. Long after anyone could be affected and long after the people who've created the documents have passed on to the Great Bureaucracy in the Sky, agencies are still refusing to [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for years in both theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of Big Tech" paying Big Telecom" billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a free ride" on the Internet, [...]

There seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a sports league or group and the degree to which that same entity will jealously protect" anything to do with its intellectual property. The International Olympic Committee is probably the apotheosis of this theory, though both FIFA and the NFL are strong showings as [...]

Here comes a little more bad news for a company that's seen quite a lot of it lately. SoundThinking, which formerly did business as ShotSpotter, is seeing another high-profile, would-be customer walk away from the table after determining the costs would outweigh the benefits. As Matt Markovich reports for KIRO News, Seattle has decided to [...]

A suggestion for Elon: next time you take over a company and decide to immediately fire three-quarters of the staff, maybe hold onto a few of the payroll staff before you do. It might help you avoid some mistakes. You may recall that early on Musk laid off well over half of the staff at [...]

A lot of laws have been passed in Europe that regulate the content American companies can carry. Most of these laws were passed to tamp down on speech that would be otherwise legal in the United States, but not so much in Europe where free speech rights aren't given the same sort of protections found [...]

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Forget everything you think you know about Mark Zuckerberg and his army of lobbyists blocking any attempt to regulate social media. The truth is more nuanced (but perhaps less complicated). Meta is actually happy with internet regulations: they keep down competitive threats. I've been trying to make this point for a while: while politicians and [...]

Canadian Regulators are leaning on new authority built into the 2023 Online Streaming Act to impose a new 5 percent tax on streaming TV and music services like Netflix and Spotify; funding that the regulator says will then be used to help fund Canadian broadcasting. According to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announcement, [...]

It will come as no shock to regular readers here when I remind you all that Nike is a notoriously aggressive actor when it comes to policing its intellectual property, including for trademarks it holds. The reason that reminder is important as a matter of throat-clearing in this case is that one of the worst [...]

The problems and unfairness of the copyright system are so manifest that many would like to adopt alternative approaches. But that's a big step, and one that undoubtedly requires a certain courage. Every example that shows how the move worked for others is important, since it not only demonstrates that alternatives exist, but that they [...]

Plenty of people don't care for all the forms of immunity the government has granted itself. And they don't care for qualified immunity, which is a thing the Supreme Court cooked up on its own. These multiple forms of immunity have tended to become get-out-of-lawsuit-free cards for government employees, rather than the general encouragement to [...]

Maybe the real artificial intelligence was the baseless lawsuits we filed along the way. In March, we wrote about Elon's patently ridiculous lawsuit filed against OpenAI, claiming a contract violation of a contract that didn't actually exist. The whole thing was silly. Elon was mad about the ways in which OpenAI had changed since the [...]

While AI" (language learning models) certainly could help journalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, and badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait. As a result we've seen an endless number of scandals where companies use LLMs to [...]

Color is everywhere and, with the innovative Nix Mini 2, you can now capture and recreate it anywhere you go. This compact, portable, and highly sophisticated device is designed for those who find color inspiration in everyday life. Now, you can harness the power of technology to bring color into your creative, professional, or personal [...]

These lawsuits don't work. They just don't. And yet, they're filed seemingly all the time. When YouTube decides as a private company it would rather you take your stupid shit elsewhere, it's allowed to do so. Its terms and conditions contain a phrase found pretty much anywhere: or for any other reason." That means that [...]

Back in May, Microsoft announced that it was bringing a new feature to Windows 11 dubbed Recall." According to Microsoft's explanation of Recall, the AI" powered technology was supposed to take screenshots of your activity every five seconds, giving you an explorable timeline of your PC's past," that Microsoft's AI-powered assistant, Copilot, can then help [...]

Nearly two years ago, we wrote about a trademark opposition conflict in the UK between macro-distillery Campari and a tiny, one-man beer brewery operation called Dark Sky Brewery. Steve White, the owner/operator for Dark Sky Brewery, filed to trademark the name of his business. On the very last possible day of the objection window, Campari [...]

There's a lot of book banning going on right now in the Land of the Free. It's mostly localized to certain areas of the country - states and cities overseen by bigots who finally feel they're allowed to let their freak flag fly (instead of, or on top of the American flag which may or [...]

There's a broad legislative push for rules that would (supposedly) protect kids online. But as we've written about at length, while the concern for teen mental health might be genuine, the legislative response is highly problematic and based on a misdiagnosis of the underlying problems. This week, we're joined by UNC's Alice Marwick, one of [...]

So on Monday you probably saw that Apple announced it was more tightly integrating AI" into its mobile operating system, both via a suite of AI-powered tools dubbed Apple Intelligence, and tighter AI integration with its Siri voice assistant. It's not that big of a deal and (hopefully) reflects Apple's more cautious approach to AI [...]

We've written a few times about New York's preposterously bonkers SAFE for Kids Act" (SAFE standing for Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation"). It's an obviously unconstitutional bill that insists, without any real evidence, that basically all social media algorithmic feeds are somehow addictive and problematic. Last week we posted a letter by a NY-based parent to [...]

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Retailers have increased their reliance on cameras over the years to cut down on retail theft. In more recent years, they've been adding more tech to their surveillance arsenal, including automatic plate readers in their parking lots and facial recognition capabilities to their existing CCTV networks. And yet, the nation is inundated with (mostly anomalous [...]

In 2023, Mozilla released a report noting that modern cars had theworst security and privacy standards of any major technology industry the organization tracks. That was followed by a great NYT report by Kashmir Hill earlier this year showing howautomakers routinely hoover up oodles of consumer driving and phone info, then sell access to that [...]

The idea/expression dichotomy strikes again! There is a misconception among some as to how copyright works, specifically in terms of what is protected under copyright and what is not. This has been distilled down to the afore-mentioned dichotomy, where general ideas do not enjoy the protection of copyright, whereas specific expressions do. So, an anthropomorphic [...]

Odor of marijuana" still remains - even in an era of widespread legalization - a favorite method of justifying warrantless searches. It's an odor, so it can't be caught on camera, which are becoming far more prevalent, whether they're mounted to cop cars, pinned to officers' chests, or carried by passersby. Any claim an odor [...]

There's a type of marginally frustrating reporting where a reporter searches social media for [insert bad thing], finds some examples of said [bad thing], and writes a story about This Platform Allows [Bad Thing]" followed by lots of public commentary about how the platforms don't care/don't do enough, etc. etc. Let me let you in [...]

Very few governments and government agencies value the transparency and accountability that robust open records laws create. It took an act of Congress to even establish a presumptive right of access to government records. And all across the United States, state governments are always trying to find some way to limit access without getting hit [...]

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Would you freak out if you found out a judge was asking ChatGPT a question to help decide a case? Would you think that it was absurd and a problem? Well, one appeals court judge felt the same way... until he started exploring the issue in one of the most thoughtful explorations of LLMs I've [...]

I've noted more than a few times that the primary problem with U.S. journalism is the fact that most major media outlets are owned by out of touch billionaire brunchlords who genuinely don't understand the modern media environment, can't see their own gender, race, or class biases, and often have absolutely no earthly fucking idea [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump threatening ProPublica, and our point that he remains exhibit A" for why anti-SLAPP laws are needed: The funny thing is, this statement could apply to a lot of situations: SLAPPs, campaign finance fraud, attempting to overthrow [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the FCC was remaining in denial about the lack of broadband competition, while we asked why all the antitrust attention was focused on Big Tech but not Big Telecom. Officials in Germany were pushing for encryption backdoors while Facebook was considering going ahead and undermining its own encryption [...]

Here we are again, with yet another in our series of posts describing how in these here modern times you simply don't actually own the things you've bought. This sort of thing takes many forms, of course. Sometimes the digital media you bought" gets disappeared by a platform after a licensing deal runs out. Sometimes [...]