Techdirt

In the battle between Elon Musk and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the biggest losers are Brazilians. They are now at risk of being stripped of VPNs while facing massive fines if they somehow get around a countrywide ban on ExTwitter. Yesterday, I wrote about the standoff between Elon Musk and Brazil, and [...]

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 [...]

In June of this year, the Supreme Court sent the Murthy case back to the lower courts. The Court argued that the plaintiffs all appeared to lack standing to sue the Biden administration over claims of social media censorship. While the Court focused on the standing issue, the majority opinion also made abundantly clear that [...]

Well, here's some more flavor to add to this horrendous mix of irresponsibility and privilege put in motion by Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina's multiple moving violations earlier this year. Here's a pretty solid recap of the incident, composed by a pretty solid writer, if I may be so bold and self-serving: Let's run this [...]

Was Mark Zuckerberg's cringey spinelessness just an attempt to grovel before Donald Trump to avoid a vindictive criminal lawsuit? Given the timing of the letter coming out just before Trump's new book that threatens to imprison Zuckerberg in a bout of authoritarian vindictiveness, it sounds like the reason Zuck is feeding the MAGA conspiracy theories [...]

As a trusted ally" in the government's vast and unaccountable domestic surveillance programs, AT&T receives oodles of government favors. From broad and often mindless deregulation and massive deployment subsidies to $42 billion in tax breaks in exchange for doing absolutely nothing, the U.S. government adores slathering its patriotic partner with cash. Which makes it all [...]

Let's dial the clock all the way back to 2007 for just a moment. Beyonce was topping the charts with Irreplacable. Nicholas Cage, the greatest actor of all time, helped make National Treasure: Book of Secrets a hit at the box office. And Apple finally settled a years-long lawsuit against a website called Think Secret, [...]

Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the well-known car manufacturer Volkswagen (VW). An article in the German Auto Motor und Sport magazine reports on a major shift in the way that VWFS, and hence VW, wants to operate (all translations by DeepL): Volkswagen Financial Services (VWFS) is planning to introduce a new [...]

There was a long period where journalists writing about failing media ventures loved to imply that these collapses meant online journalism was no longer profitable. In reality, the industry had simply become overly infected by waste and mismanagement at the hands of unqualified, affluent incompetents. Smaller worker-owned outlets are now trying to reverse the trend [...]

In the battle between Elon Musk and Brazil, there are no heroes - only two sides engaged in an epic display of hypocrisy and overreach. You may have heard that Brazil is threatening to ban ExTwitter from the country, possibly by tonight. This comes after Elon said that it was shutting down all operations in [...]

Whew. Not a great look there, Mr. Senatorial Candidate. Wisconsin Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde has launched a lawsuit against several Wisconsin television stations and a Democratic Party aligned PAC for running ads that he claims defamed him. The ad states that Hovde, the CEO and chairman of the board for Sunwest Bank, and his [...]

Step aside Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, there's a new contender in town for who will give us the most batshit crazy opinions regarding the internet. This week, a panel on the Third Circuit ruled that a lower court was mistaken in dismissing a case against TikTok on Section 230 grounds. But, in order to [...]

For years, the cable industry has dreamed of a future where they could use your cable box to actively track your every behavior using cameras and microphones andthen monetize the data. At one pointway back in 2009, Comcast made it clear they were even interested in using embedded microphones and cameras to monitor the number [...]

Some stories just don't end the way you expect, and the way this one supposedly might is fairly surprising. Earlier this year, we discussed how the creator of the Superbabies comic, Scott Richold, filed for cancellation for the trademarked term Super Hero" and several variants, all jointly owned by DC and Marvel with the USPTO. [...]

Just a quick post to note an amazing (to me!) milestone. At some point last week (on Wednesday basically), this site passed over two million comments. That is since the site's commenting feature launched in 1999. If you want the quick history: we started a newsletter 27 years ago on August 23, 1997, and it [...]

The Chicago Police Department continues to give the city, its residents, and its oversight the finger. Officers just want to do what they want to do, without having to respect rules, regulations, state laws, or civil rights. Much like the NYPD, the Chicago PD got itself in Constitutional hot water by indiscriminately stopping pedestrians. Its [...]

Last month, we shared the details of a really good Dear Colleague" letter that Senator Rand Paul sent around urging other Senators not to vote for KOSA. While the letter did not work and the Senate overwhelmingly approved KOSA (only to now have it stuck in the House), Paul has now expanded upon that letter [...]

The FBI has been pulled right up to the national security table for years. Having switched from regular law enforcement agency to being a major player in the counter-terrorism field has seen it avail itself of vast collections of data obtained by the NSA. While its own contributions to combating terrorism have been questionable at [...]

Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you're likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself. And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, provided23+ millionlow-income households a $30 broadband discount every month. But the roughly 60 million Americans benefiting from the program are now facing much higher broadband bills because key Republicans - who routinely dole out billions of dollars onfardumberfare-refused to fund a $4-$7 billion [...]

I'll admit, when I've been able to witness some of the fuckery around the use of artificial intelligence in stupid ways, some part of me has always gotten some amusement at those being fooled. I've gotten to witness most of this from afar, after all. It feels a bit different when you write about a [...]

The fallout came fast and hard for New College of Florida and its administrators after multiple videos were posted of books dealing mainly with sexual identity and race found filling a dumpster behind the school library. The immediate reaction from the school's spokesperson, Nathan Marks, was nonsensical. Marks claimed two things, neither of them believable. [...]

There's been plenty of conversation over the past decade about how unprepared the mainstream media was for the shifts that have happened in politics and political discourse, especially when it comes to finding... well... the truth. As we move towards the 2024 election, the challenges of reporting and fact checking are once again in the [...]

Elon sure seems to enjoy making employees humiliate themselves on his behalf. After massively overpaying for Twitter, firing most of the staff, and then making bad decision after bad decision, Elon did promise remaining employees that they would get equity in the new Twitter, now renamed X (even as its valuation kept dropping). Quite some [...]

More and more politicians have decided the only way to make America great is to abandon the things that made America great in the first place. The free and open exchange of ideas is getting shut down. The First Amendment is being remade and remodeled to only protect the ideas those in power are in [...]

The Ninth Circuit appeals court seems to have figured out the best way to reform" Section 230: by pretending it doesn't apply to some stuff that the judges there just randomly decide it doesn't apply to anymore. At least that's my reading of the recent ruling against YOLO Technologies. Now, let's start by making something [...]

For many many years now we've noted how internet-connectivity (and greed) have changed the consumer equation sometimes for the worse, resulting in people no longer truly owning the things they buy. Expensive gadgets can become less useful (or bricked completely) in an instant due to an inconveniently timed merger, company closure, greed, or just rank [...]

It's no secret that Peloton, one of the corporate darlings of the pandemic, has since been viewed as a company in serious decline. While the company has had to contend with several IP disputes, it has also been subject to cybersecurity incidents and product safety recalls due to its treadmills occasionally deciding to eat human [...]

Clearview's status as an international pariah really hasn't changed much over the past few years. It may be generating fewer headlines, but nothing's really changed about the way it does business. Clearview has spent years scraping the web, compiling as much personal info as possible to couple with the billions of photos it has collected. [...]

Is the arrest of Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, a justified move to combat illegal activities, or is it a case of dangerous overreach that threatens privacy and free speech online? We had hoped that when French law enforcement released the details of the charges we'd have a better picture of what happened. Instead, we're [...]

Yet another federal judge has blocked a censorial, vindictive government investigation" into Media Matters for having the temerity to report on seeing ads on ExTwitter showing up next to neo-Nazi content. To recap: in November, Media Matters released an article written by Eric Hananoki. The article detailed an investigation in which they found ads from [...]

It's well-established that students still have Constitutional rights, even if some school administrators clearly believe otherwise. But they are limited, especially when on school grounds. There's a lot of nuance in play. When those nuances are ignored, lawsuits get filed. There's plenty of nuance in this case, but not a lot of subtext. We all [...]

There's plenty of news flying around over the past few days after it was reported on Saturday that Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, had been arrested at Bourget airport in France after taking his private plane there from Azerbaijan. Durov, who got a French citizenship in 2021 apparently knew that there was [...]

Popular flight tracking app FlightAware says that they accidentally leaked the personal data of its 10,000 aircraft operators and 12 million users. According to an announcement by the company sent to users, a configuration error" resulted in the company exposing user usernames, passwords, email addresses, names, billing addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, aircraft ownership records, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That Anonymous Coward with a comment about the obvious connection between Tesla and ExTwitter that raises some questions about the judge in the Media Matters laswsuit: What stock was it Elmo was going to have to sell to keep X running again?? In second [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Beto O'Rourke (remember him?) joined the silly parade of politicians looking to destroy Section 230, while the Wall Street Journal was rightly calling out Josh Hawley's nannyish" internet law ideas. A Russian troll farm was taking a second shot at suing Facebook after its first attempt was dismissed [...]

Earlier this year, we discussed a trademark infringement suit in India between two eBike companies. One was Yulu, which operates the kind of eBike rental stations you can find in all kinds of cities throughout the world. The other was Kinetic Green, which sells a line of eBikes that it branded the Zulu" bike. As [...]

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 [...]

Earlier this year, you probably sawthe storyabout how a political consultant used a (very sloppy) AI" generated deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick New Hampshire voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn't particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had [...]

Over the last few years, we've seen a bunch of politicians trying to frame their regulation of the internet as not being about regulating speech, but about design" or process" or some such. But when you scratch beneath the surface, they're always really about regulating speech. Whether it's KOSA or California's Age Appropriate Design Code [...]

No doubt encouraged by the governor and state legislature's hatred of anything not aligned with their hetero-first principles, a Florida college not only shuttered its Gender and Diversity Center, but threw out hundreds of books dealing with, you know, gender and/or diversity. The Stop WOKE Act is likely to blame here, even if it's not [...]

Level up your creative projects with this Adobe Elements Bundle. If you are new to it, or even a seasoned pro, the intuitive tools are designed to edit your photos and videos with precision. Photoshop Elements 2023 allows you to easily combine your photos into a collage, enhance them with artistic effects, and create overlays [...]

Dear California Governor Newsom and Attorney General Bonta: you really don't have to be the opposite end of the extremists in Florida and Texas. You don't have to lie to your constituents and pretend losses are wins. Really. Trust me. You may recall that the Attorneys General of Texas and Florida have taken to lying [...]

The streaming sector has historically been home to no shortage of failures that most people forgot. There was of course Quibi, the $1.75 billion Hollywood streaming project that lasted all of 199 days before executives had to throw in the towel. There was also Verizon's joint streaming venture with Redbox, which lasted about as long [...]

Way back in 2020, Tim Cushing wrote about the Las Vegas police and its habit of running low-resolution images through facial recognition software in order to generate leads when conducting investigations. While his post focused on just how those low-res images were used, and sometimes misused, the important thing to recognize for the purposes of [...]

Back in February, the FCC announced new rules that would prohibit the use of AI-generated deep fake robocalls. The proposal would make such calls illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which it already uses to combat robocalls. It was prompted by that very sloppy AI deep fake that targeted the Democratic Presidential primary [...]

Last week, the NY Times had an article about how Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, is being targeted in a SLAPP suit by a podcaster" who claims Raffensperger defamed her in his book about the 2020 election. (For reasons unknown, the NY Times links to none of the legal filings in the case, [...]

Oh, Fifth Circuit, you crazy, crazy kid. I take back almost all the bad things I've said about you. The cop-friendliest circuit in the nation has done the unimaginable: set up a circuit-on-circuit showdown that can only be resolved by a Supreme Court decision. Until that happens (don't hold your breath), you and your Google [...]

StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today's most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you'll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life! Whether you're looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses [...]

As we head into another Presidential election, one thing has been consistent from the last two such elections as well: the tech policies of both major parties are terrible. The Donald Trump Republican platform for 2025 is beyond crazy with all sorts of nonsense. The tech" part of it is barely worth a mention, but [...]