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Over the last few years, politicians in Utah have been itching to pass terrible internet legislation. Some of you may forget that in the earlier part of the century, Utah became somewhat famous for passing absolutely terrible internet laws that the courts then had to clean up. In the last few years, it's felt like [...]

Over the next six months, states are poised to receive more than $42.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies to help fund broadband rollouts around the country. A lot of this money is getting dumped into the laps of big telecom monopolies with a lousy track record of follow through. But a lot of it is also [...]

Performers and ordinary humans are increasingly concerned that they may be replaced or defamed by AI-generated imitations. We're seeing a host of bills designed to address that concern - but every one just generates new problems. Case in point: the NO FAKES Act. We flagged numerous flaws in a discussion draft"back in April, to no [...]

Earlier this year, we wrote about how Judge Kevin Newsom, on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, had explored how ChatGPT might actually be useful for a particularly narrow use in a court. Specifically, in judging whether or not the ordinary meaning" of a phrase matched with what a party in the court argued was [...]

Well, here's even more ugliness from America's penis. The state of Florida - currently presided over by a bootlicker wearing boot lifts - has decided the best way to protect its war on women is to harass and intimidate residents who support reproductive rights. Florida is reportedly sending police officers to the homes of people [...]

The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, [...]

Over the last few years, it's felt like the age verification debate has gotten progressively stupider. People keep insisting that it must be necessary, and when others point out that there are serious privacy and security concerns that will likely make things worse, not better, we're told that we have to do it anyway. Let's [...]

The most powerful entity in New York City isn't the Mayor. Or City Hall. It has always been the NYPD, which has never been overseen by anyone who could remotely be considered capable, much less willing, to hold the department accountable, at least not in my lifetime. The chain of succession at City Hall over [...]

Well, well, well. Is the Fifth Circuit finally going to start redeeming itself? Just recently, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court bucked the appellate trend (well, what there was of it...) by declaring geofence warrants unconstitutional. That ran counter to the expectations of this court, which has often chosen to treat the Constitution as a set [...]

Regular readers here will know we are no strangers to talking about Dungeons & Dragons or moral panics. Those two topics are often interrelated, given the moral panic history of the tabletop game itself, as well as how it should inform us in our reaction to more modern moral panics. After all, where once some [...]

We live in a world where there are often both analog and digital versions of a product. For example, we can buy books or ebooks, and choose to listen to music on vinyl or via streaming services. The fact that digital goods can be copied endlessly and perfectly, while analog ones can't, has led some [...]

Link taxes are bad, m'kay? They harm the public. They harm the open internet. And they harm the news orgs themselves. There is no reason to support them at all. But, many (thankfully not all!) media organizations and politicians love them. Media orgs like them because they think it will bring them free money (though, [...]

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The Chinese government wants the money that flows through Hong Kong. It has no desire to put up with the freedom and democracy Hong Kong has enjoyed since being freed of its colonialist overlords. The UK government exited Hong Kong only to see the Chinese government replace it as the new colonialists. The Chinese government [...]

We've noted for years how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it's smart home hardware that becomesuseless paperweightswhen the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that activelymake your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will be the same product tomorrow. Now a coalition of [...]

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to the Second Circuit's ruling against the Internet Archive. In first place, it's MrWilson with some thoughts on libraries: The vast majority of authors face an issue with obscurity in the vast sea of available works that is the book market. Libraries [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Apple bowed to some pressure from the right to repair movement, while Sony was continuing to battle with Vita tinkerers despite the device being discontinued. The EU copyright industry was continuing to demonize internet companies while we looked at how Section 230 enabled Pinterest's content moderation efforts, and [...]

I absolutely hate it when I have to write yet another trademark bullying works" post. For the better part of a decade now, we have been writing about disputes between the Ravinia Festival Association, which operates the large outdoor concert venue and eatery north of Chicago, and Ravinia Brewing, a brewery based out of the [...]

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 [...]

Elon Musk's Twitter takeover was supposed to be a slam dunk. It was famously revealed during his legal fight to get out of the deal that Elon was getting overwhelmed with people texting him, willing to casually offer hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars, in support of his takeover. But some of them [...]

The FBI keeps telling anyone who will listen that it wants more responsibilities. Despite having failed to end organized crime or to even slightly diminish the power of international drug cartels, the FBI is always asking for more to do, especially if it means more funding and surveillance powers. It set itself up to be [...]

The Six Sigma Green and Yellow Belt Training Bundle has 2 courses to help you learn the ins and outs of Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a detail-orientated crafted set of tools and techniques that help improve processes within an organization. You will receive an introduction to the tools and methods that are necessary to [...]

Everything's bigger in Texas, including the legislature's willingness to pass laws that clearly violate the First Amendment rights of websites. In the last three years, this is now the third law directed at website moderation practices to be thrown out by a district court as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. You'd think maybe [...]

Tell me if you've heard this one before: a major U.S. regional telecom monopoly is looking to buy another major U.S. regional telecom monopoly in a massive transaction that both companies insist holds vast benefits for American consumers. This time it's Verizon stating it intends to purchase Frontier in a massive $20 billion deal that [...]

As we've covered the era of cord-cutting from traditional cable television packages and the rise of streaming platforms, one of the areas I have focused on is the world of live sports. And in the world of sports, the NFL is king. If you were to look up the most viewed broadcasts on any given [...]

Over the past year, two dozen AI-related lawsuits and their myriad infringement claims have been winding their way through the court system. None have yet reached a jury trial. While we all anxiously await court rulings that can inform our future interaction with generative AI models, in the past few weeks we have suddenly been [...]

You might recall how Gannett, which owns USAToday (and probably the half-assed remains of whatever's left of your town's local newspaper), spent much of last year mired in a major AI" scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a good idea to use half-cooked automation to create fake journalists and lazy clickbait without telling [...]

What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but they wouldn't bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from a library? You'd probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the [...]

Far too many states have decided to engage in censorship, urged on by an alarmingly large voting bloc that truly appears to be on the side of fascism, so long as that fascism appears to be on their side. Since this is, for the moment, still the United States of America, home of several enshrined [...]

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We've explored multiple times now why Elon Musk is no friend to free speech. He has regularly threatened and sued others for their free speech, and indeed, he has an ever-growing list of such lawsuits. But every once in a while, he gets one right, and this time, he's helped get a bad California law [...]

Last November, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) topass a new state right to repair lawdesigned to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical datato consumers and third-party independent repair shops. But like so many [...]

Techdirt has been reporting on the rotten state of academic publishing for more than ten years. Abuses include publishers willing to publish anything for a fee, and the sale of nonsense papers so that they can be used to bulk up an academic's CV. But the world moves on, and Nature has a report about [...]

Confirmation bias. It's expensive. Just ask David Love, who has written out a $100,000 check to two drag performers for defamatory comments he made - more than once! - while supposedly serving his constituents in his position as a New Hampshire state rep. New Hampshire residents Robert Champion, who performs under the stage name Monique [...]

Earlier this year, we discussed an example of the Streisand Effect in action when a large home builder, Taylor Morrison, petitioned the Arizona Board of Technical Registration to discipline Cy Porter, a home inspector who has built up a large online following by posting videos of his inspections. He does that to educate Arizona homebuyers [...]

Can the fear of students using generative AI and the rise of questionable AI checker" tools create a culture devoid of creativity? It's a topic that is curiously one worth delving into a bit more deeply, in part because of something that happened this weekend. Earlier this year, we had a post by Alan Kyle [...]

Having completely shit the bed in its handling of a recent ransomware act, the city of Columbus, Ohio has decided the person who must be silenced - and, hopefully punished - should be the person who informed city workers and residents their PII was available on the dark web. The messenger hasn't been shot quite [...]

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In today's episode of Won't Someone Think of the Children?!', celebrity attorney David Boies is leading a baseless charge against Meta, claiming Instagram is inherently harmful to kids. Spoiler alert: it's not. This one was filed last month and covered in the Washington Post, though without a link to the complaint, because the Washington Post [...]

Despite the best efforts ofautomakersand companies likeApple, 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 of right to [...]

The fractured entertainment streaming environment we're currently in continues to be a problem. Where's that thing you want to watch? Well, not only could it be in one of a dozen places today, depending on what agreements have been worked out with content owners, but where that content can be streamed might also change in [...]

In the ongoing battle between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Court, it appears that Elon was the first to blink. At least a little bit. What started to shape up as a new front in the battle, with Elon's SpaceX defying the order to block X on its Starlink satellite internet service, crumbled on [...]

When it comes to Judge Reed O'Connor, the only thing more predictable than his partisan rulings is the Supreme Court overturning them. But that hasn't stopped him from giving the green light to Elon Musk's ridiculous SLAPP suit against Media Matters. O'Connor's problematic decision basically means that Elon has won. Even if the eventual case [...]

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit concluded, in Anderson v. TikTok, that algorithmic recommendations aren't protected by Section 230. Because they're the platforms' First Amendment-protected expression, the court reasoned, algorithms are the platforms' own first-party speech," and thus fall outside Section 230's liability shield for the publication of third-party speech. [...]

Well, here's a not-so-fun new twist in the search-and-seizure narrative. Car owners are being deprived of their vehicles just because cops think footage of a crime may have been captured by the car's on-board cameras. Tesla's vehicles carry more cameras than most. Added to the cars as a way to protect owners - either by [...]

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Call me crazy, but I don't think it's a good thing when political leaders go around calling for the arresting or punishing of people for their speech, even when that speech is terrible. But apparently, former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich feels differently. Indeed, it would be nice if the leadership of either major political [...]

Last March Oregonbecametheseventhstate to pass right to repair" legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill's passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York (2023), Minnesota, Maine and California. All told, 30 states are considering [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about Oklahoma revoking the license of a teacher who pushed back against state censorship: The only acceptable political agenda in the classroom is a conservative one!' There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the Ninth Circuit was putting at least some limits on warrantless device searches at the border, while the EFF sued CBP and ICE for refusing to hand over GPS tracking device policies. The judge in one of Devin Nunes's lawsuits asked for the identity of the famous Twitter [...]