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Here we go again. Back in February, the FTC wanted to dive back into its battle with Microsoft over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to Microsoft announcing thousands of jobs worth of layoffs, including many developers from Activision Blizzard. When the FTC had asked for an injunction to block the sale, Microsoft made two [...]

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 [...]

Mobile phones are currently banned in all Australian state schools and many Catholic and independent schools around the country. This is part of aglobal trendovermore than a decadeto restrict phone use in schools. Australian governments say banning mobile phones willreduce distractions in class, allow students tofocus on learning, improvestudent wellbeingandreduce cyberbullying. But previous research has [...]

No matter how you might feel about constitutional rights or which ones are your favorites, the fact remains that it's often people with the least amount of cultural cachet and/or the most to lose who make the best case law. And so it is here, where we're dealing with a sex offender who tried to [...]

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Do you now, or have you ever, worked with TikTok to help defend its rights?" That McCarthyism-esque question is apparently being asked by members of Congress to organizations that have been working with TikTok to defend its Constitutional rights. Does anyone think it's right for Congress to threaten to punish organizations from working with TikTok? [...]

By now it's been made fairly clear that the bedazzling wonderment that is AI" doesn't come cheap. Story after story have highlighted how the technology consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, and we're not really adapting to keep pace. This is also occurring alongside a destabilizing climate crisis that's already putting a capacity and [...]

This didn't go the way anyone (other than cops and their unions) wanted it to, but first let's acknowledge the fact that the city of Denver is actually trying to make things better for both cops and the people they serve. Here's how that's going: In its first three months, STAR handled 350 calls - [...]

We've been talking a lot about video game mods recently, typically not for happy reasons. There is a spectrum out there when it comes to how developers and publishers react to organic modding communities that spring up around their games. On one end of the spectrum, typically inhabited by larger companies, are those that somehow [...]

As California (and possibly Congress) are, again, revisiting instituting link taxes in the US, it's worth highlighting that our prediction about the Canadian link tax has now been shown to be correct. It didn't harm Meta one bit to remove news. The entire premise behind these link taxes/bargaining codes is that social media gets so [...]

Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group spent years making good money selling to bad people. Its only concern for the longest time was how long it would take nearby autocrats and totalitarians to start targeting Israeli citizens. To be fair, the Israeli government shares at least some of the blame. Surrounded by entities that would love [...]

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Holding social media companies solely responsible for the mental health challenges faced by today's youth is not only misguided-it's dangerous. Misdiagnosing the problem means your solutions are going to be actively harmful. I know that, these days especially, it seems that the thing everyone across the political aisle seems to agree on is that the [...]

Before the Biden FCC restored net neutrality, there was concern that the new net neutrality rules weren't as tough as the ones discarded by the Trump administration. While the draft rules did require ISPs be transparent about the limits of your broadband connection, and barred big ISPs from blocking or throttling competitors, there were concerns [...]

Every once in a while you get a trademark bullying story that meets a just and proper end. Almost a year ago, we discussed how Louis Vuitton, famous maker of luxury fashion products and infamous trademark bully, did its bullying thing when it opposed the trademark application for a company in the UK called L [...]

Despite the best efforts of automakers and companies like Apple, states continue to push forward with popular right to repair" reforms that make it easier and more affordable for consumers to repair tech they own. While they vary in potency, New York, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota have all now passed some flavor [...]

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court has a particularly antagonistic relationship with long-held constitutional rights. It is, without argument, the most cop-friendly circuit in the nation - one that has managed to surpass even the generous immunity-or-else guidelines set down by the Supreme Court often enough that the nation's top court has had to roll back [...]

If you were to ask someone to state the birthday of someone else, and the person asked just made up a date, which was not the actual birthday, would you argue that the individual's privacy had been violated? Would you argue that there should be a legal right to demand that the person explain how [...]

Well, things certainly suck for cops looking to hassle minorities and/or engage in roadside fishing expeditions in California. And the cops have no one to blame but themselves. Five hundred thirty-five agencies conducted a total of 4,575,725 stops from January 1, 2022 toDecember 31, 2022. Black individuals were stopped 131.5 percent more frequently than expected, [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a phone stand for FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, and [...]

We keep pointing to research that suggests the narrative around social media is bad for kids" is simply not supported by the data. Over and over again, we see studies that suggest that adults are overreacting to a few limited cases. Sometimes, problematic social media use seems to be due to a lack of systems [...]

For years, big ISPs have made it abundantly clear that they dream of being able to abuse their gatekeeper power over telecom markets to tilt the playing field in their favor. Whether it was Verizon's early attempts to force you to buy their GPS apps and mapping services, to AT&T's later-year efforts with sponsored data" [...]

While I'm still waiting for TikTok to release its 30-second long dancing interpretation of why the TikTok ban is unconstitutional, at least it's now going to court to make the argument for real. It took maybe a week or so longer than expected, but TikTok and ByteDance have now officially filed their lawsuit challenging the [...]

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Childrens CyberTipline is a central component of the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, but there have been a lot of questions about how well it truly works. A recent report from the Stanford Internet Observatory, which we've published two recent posts about, provides an extremely [...]

Editor's Note: This post was written before TikTok & ByteDance filed a lawsuit challenging the law this morning. So, while it says that no lawsuit has been filed, that's no longer the case. The rest of the article is still relevant, though. We'll have an analysis of the actual lawsuit later (probably tomorrow). Over the [...]

Wars, conflicts, domestic dust-ups, whatever you want to call them... they're sensitive situations, easily made worse by even the most mild fluctuations in the political climate or the public temperament. And while I'm completely aware there's no enshrined rights protecting journalism on par with the First Amendment in Israel, this latest turn of events does [...]

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Jann Wenner, the creator of Rolling Stone magazine, was certainly an early supporter of free speech. But he seems to have reached grumpy old man status, that allows him to whine about free speech online, mostly by not knowing shit about anything. Writing for Air Mail, a publication by Graydon Carter (another Grumpy Old Man [...]

As the streaming sector has consolidated and new subscriber growth has slowed, it has increasingly started chasing the bad habits of the industry it once disrupted: cable TV. Gone is stuff like encouraged password sharing and risk-taking programming. In its place is endless price hikes, weird efforts to nickel-and-dime users, lower-quality programming, annoying new consumer [...]

I think it best to start this post off with an admission: I had no idea that broccolini" was not the name of an actual vegetable, but rather a trademarked brand name. I can't see your faces, obviously, but I imagine some sizable percentage of them also have a look of mild surprise on them. [...]

The harms of deepfakes have been evident for a while. Recent examples include a Biden deepfake designed to influence voters, and the rising use of AI nudification" apps to produce deepfake nudes of students, often female minors. But alongside the application of sophisticated AI programs to produce deepfakes there are other, lower-tech scams, often known [...]

Acompanion billto the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was introduced in the House last month. Despite minor changes, it suffers from the same fundamental flaws as itsSenate counterpart. At its core, this bill is still an unconstitutional censorship bill that restricts protected online speech and gives the government the power to target services and content [...]

This is the sort of dumb shit you do when you feel the only people who will bother responding to your hateful dog whistle are a bunch of dogs (with valid voting registration!) that constantly have one ear cocked towards their master's voice. You leave a web form for comments almost completely unsecured and pretty [...]

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 [...]

Whose job is it to provide consequences when someone breaks the law? It seems like this issue shouldn't be that complicated. We expect law enforcement to deal with it when someone breaks the law. Not private individuals or organizations. Because that's vigilantism. Yet, on the internet, over and over again, we keep seeing people set [...]

AI," or semi-cooked language learning models are very cool. There's a world of possibility there in terms of creativity and productivity tools to scientific research. But early adoption of AI has been more of a rushed mess driven by speculative VC bros who are more interested in making money off of hype (see: pointless AI [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the lawsuit between cops that resulted more than $23 million in damages: They hospitalized a cop, but he's a black guy and they're white so...' The injuries:And he's already secured a settlement from the city for $5 [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Texas began pushing its bill that would allow the state to sue Twitter for banning conservatives, while Facebook filed a questionable lawsuit over fake followers and likes, and a New York saxophonist became the latest to join the bandwagon of suing Fortnite developers. The Supreme Court asked the [...]

Roberto Escobar appears to want to keep banging his head against this particular brick wall for some reason. Roberto, brother to infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, has been trying to assert trademark and other rights to his brother's name for years now. It started in Columbia, in which the country flat out refused to grant [...]

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 [...]

As much as I dislike and distrust Axon (formerly Taser and the leading proponent of the excited delirium" theory of cop exoneration), I just don't think there's much going on here. Sometimes there are actual monopolies. And sometimes, one business is just better at business than its competitors. But that's what a few cities are [...]

Schools have always kept tabs on students using school-issued devices. Prior to the pandemic, this had mostly been limited to filtering software that prevents students from accessing content schools don't approve of. Of course, this has also kept students from accessing content that might be useful to them personally (self-harm prevention, LGBTQ+ content) or scholastically [...]

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It's almost laughable that these two stories happened so close to one another. The Australian government has just announced a pilot program to test an online age verification system: And then, just hours later, it was reported that law enforcement is investigating an apparent breach of club and bar patrons' personal data, which the venues [...]

When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, but that states couldn't either. They got greedy. The courts didn't like that much, repeatedly ruling that the FCC [...]

It's been nearly a year, but I won't pretend that the outcome of this isn't quite satisfying. Last summer, grocerer Trader Joe's filed an absolute bullshit lawsuit against the union for its own employees claiming that the name of and merchandise sold by the union represented trademark infringement and would cause confusion with the public [...]

Because it sells so very well to a certain percentage of the population, ridiculous people are saying ridiculous things about crime rates in the United States. And, of course, the first place to post this so-called news" is Fox News. An independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts claimviolent crimerates are much higher than [...]

Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn't secured, often [...]

Apparently, the world needs even more terrible bills that let ignorant senators grandstand to the media about how they're protecting the kids online." There's nothing more serious to work on than that. The latest bill comes from Senators Brian Schatz and Ted Cruz (with assists from Senators Chris Murphy, Katie Britt, Peter Welch, Ted Budd, [...]

Taser long ago locked down the market for less than lethal" (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition excited delirium" as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its less than lethal" Taser. These days Taser does business [...]