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For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk's Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations areharming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimedwould never happen in the first placeis making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can bemitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. And [...]

Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat [...]

Below is the brief, in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, I have been waiting my career to write, to finally tell the Supreme Court that when it comes to platform liability for their users' alleged copyright infringement, we've been doing it wrong. While I've already had a chance to tell the Supreme Court that [...]

Well, the RFK Jr. congressional hearing is now over. And, to the shock of very few thinking persons, it was a complete and total shitshow. I'm sure I will be writing something up on the hearing soon, but the short version is that Congress members on both sides of the aisle went in fairly directly [...]

Trump continues to wield everything he controls like a weapon against his enemies, even when the law says he can't. Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops (and a couple hundred Marines) to Los Angeles to quell nonexistent riots and otherwise get in the way of local law enforcement. Of course, it was nothing but [...]

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Let's be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They're the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people [...]

Last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, theruleallowed schools to leverage the FCC's E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can't [...]

Last year, Andres Freund, a Microsoft engineer, spotted a backdoor in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility that is found on nearly all versions of GNU/Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Ars Technica has a good report on the backdoor and its discovery, as well as a visualization by another Microsoft employee, Thomas Roccia, [...]

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 [...]

When federal judges with decades of experience start publicly mocking the Supreme Court's lack of clarity, you know the system is broken. This week brought us two remarkable examples of lower court judges who are clearly fed up with trying to parse the Supreme Court's vibes-based jurisprudence" from its unexplained shadow docket rulings. First, we [...]

You don't often see blackmail victims extending offers to their blackmailers to sit down and discuss political issues, but that's what happened when CBS - who recently paid off Trump to settle a lawsuit the broadcaster could have won - invited Kristi Noem to talk out of her perfectly coiffed ass for most of an [...]

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has apparently decided his latest form of politically motivated lawfare (the thing he insisted he would end once he took over) should be threatening Google over... checks notes... having spam filters that work too well at blocking actual spam. In a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, Ferguson [...]

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Since before RFK Jr. was even confirmed into his position as the head of HHS and American health, I have been pleading for someone to step in and correct this obvious mistake. Everything about his first half a year or so in the role has been a disaster. Layoffs and resignations at HHS agencies have [...]

I generally try not to engage in I told you so," but I told you so. The Trump administration's long-percolating plan to use Dish Network as flimsy cover for harmful wireless consolidation is dead, just as I predicted five years earlier. Dish will lumber forward as another lazy MVNO for a while longer, but the [...]

The Ryan Walters saga of stupid continues. Walters is the Superintendent of Oklahoma, where he oversees a state education system that ranks near the bottom among states, while also carving out time to lick Donald Trump's boots as thoroughly as possible. Between naked attempts to sell the Trump bible in state schools and attempting to [...]

Kristi Noem made an appearance on Face the Nation" last week, squaring off against Ed O'Keefe of CBS News. CBS, of course, has already engaged in plenty of capitulation. And O'Keefe's interview - while containing some probing questions - didn't contain much push back against numerous bogus claims made by DHS head Kristi Noem. Somehow, [...]

Earlier this month, Dish's Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called mini-subscriptions," allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks [...]

Last summer, when Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated antitrust laws through its search distribution agreements, I was left wondering what the hell any reasonable remedy would look like. The case always struck me as weird-Google was paying billions to Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine because users actually wanted [...]

In September 2023, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk decided it was constitutional for a Texas university (West Texas A&M) to shut down a PG-13" drag show. This was a decision he arrived at despite this being said (on the public record!) by the university official instituting the drag show ban: In thestatementto the WTAMU community yesterday, [WATMU [...]

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It's always fascinating to watch supposed free speech warriors" reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of power. We've been covering the ongoing saga of various COVID contrarians who spent years falsely claiming they were censored" by the Biden administration, only to see the Supreme Court definitively reject those claims in [...]

Back in April, the Trump FCC was sued by Nina Burleigh andFrequency Forward, alleging that Elon Musk's influence in government was creating unmanageable conflicts of interest within the FCC."There's not much debate there; Musk is getting slathered in new taxpayer subsidies via a Republican rewrite of the infrastructure bill, and all inquiries into his companies' [...]

I don't find myself writing about how some combination of the USPTO and the court system gets things right on trademark matters very often, but I certainly did a couple of years ago in a series of posts about a fashion brand owned by Erik Brunetti. The brand was initially denied a trademark for its [...]

One of the things upon which I spend a lot of time pondering: watching right-leaning, but otherwise intelligent people in my life look at Donald Trump's systematic destruction of constitutional government and see just mere incompetence, but generally normal politics. These aren't people force-fed reactionary propaganda in media bubbles. These are sophisticated observers who, if [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got a cross-post episode this week, with Mike's recent appearance on the Computer Says Maybe podcast hosted by Alix Dunn. The discussion starts out looking at decentralization and Bluesky, then goes way beyond that into the early days of the internet and the concept of the Eternal September. You can [...]

You can't do mass deportation without being indiscriminate. That's how things are working out in Trump's second term in office, with ICE, etc. entirely abandoning any pretense of just trying to rid this country of dangerous criminals who are here in the country illegally. Raiding Home Deport parking lots to round up people just looking [...]

When you read about Adam Raine's suicide and ChatGPT's role in helping him plan his death, the immediate reaction is obvious and understandable: something must be done. OpenAI should be held responsible. This cannot happen again. Those instincts are human and reasonable. The horrifying details in the NY Times and the family's lawsuit paint a [...]

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We're all familiar with what grand juries should be able to do to the proverbial ham sandwich. But in Washington DC - the unwilling host of Donald Trump's martial law test run - federal prosecutors can't even get an indictment to stick the person throwing the sandwich. Federal prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to persuade [...]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn't going very well. There have been justcountless exampleswhere affluent media ownersrushed to embrace automationand LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) withdisastrous impact, resulting inlots of plagiarism, completelyfalse headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess. As U.S. news outlets [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is BernardoVerda passing along a quote about a specific speech issue that has (ridiculously) been put back up for discussion: In second place, it's MrWilson with a comment about the ousting of the CDC Director for not being aligned with the president's agenda": It makes [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the Secret Service joined the list of law enforcement agencies using data brokers to dodge warrant requirements for location data, much like the CPB was still doing via a broker being investigated by congress, while other agencies were throwing tax dollars at junk science - but at least [...]

When people use the term Orwellian," it's not a good sign. It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power. It's a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both [...]

There's a particular kind of person who cheers when the president deploys military forces against American cities over the objections of their elected leaders. They call themselves patriots. They wrap themselves in the flag while applauding the systematic demolition of everything that flag once represented. They claim to love America while celebrating the transformation of [...]

The CDC has plunged into chaos. Dr. Susan Monarez, the newly minted CDC Director, a role she held for a matter of mere weeks, has been fired by the Trump administration. We actually wrote about Monarez previously, as she was engaged with both the CDC team that was the target of an attempted mass shooting [...]

Congress has absolutely zero constitutional authority to investigate a private website for its editorial decisions. Zero. None. This is First Amendment 101. Yet House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Cybersecurity Subcommittee Chairwoman Nancy Mace have decided otherwise. In a letter to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander, these two Republicans are demanding that Wikipedia hand [...]

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Trump's desire to punish, oust, and eject anyone who isn't white and/or MAGA enough from this country means the preferred outlets for his aggression are running out of manpower. Tons of federal officers have already been rerouted to immigration enforcement, leaving those left with the unenviable task of actually catching the kinds of criminals Trump [...]

Back in 2021, Congress passed both the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the infrastructure bill. While getting the latter right has taken a lot of time (causing no limit of whining by election-season Republicans and some segments of the abundance" set), ARPA has already funded a lot of amazing stuff, from local community centers [...]

I'm starting to think that American is suffering from some sort of collective amnesia. Look, whatever your opinions on how the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its early days, I would hope we can all agree that it sucked. Think the government was far too restrictive, or lacked nuance in how it put [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi's name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site's owner and the world's richest man, [...]

If you've read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws.As of July 1st,South DakotaandWyomingenacted laws requiring any website that hosts any sexual content to implement age verification measures.These [...]

So I've noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper). I've also explained in detail why that's [...]

It's no secret that most publishers (though not us!) hate ad blockers. The idea that ad blockers are illegal or an attack on free speech" get trotted out every so often, and they're always silly. You should have control over how your own browser on your own computer works. That's an important freedom. And that [...]

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This was pretty much inevitable. While the Trump's band of bigots struggled mightily to expel brown people from this country, the rest of his sycophants are doing everything they can to prevent non-white foreigners from entering the country. It's counterproductive, especially when the end goal is at least 3,000 ICE arrests per day. If you [...]

During Trump 1.0, his FCCtook at absolute hatchetto media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely-owned) competitors underfoot. The result of their destruction has been a rise inlocal news deserts, a lot of right wing [...]

One of the more frustrating things about content streaming has been how quickly we went from having a conversation about cord-cutting to the realization that all of the streaming services that enabled said cord-cutting have morphed into the very cable providers that people wanted to escape. You can see this in a variety of ways. [...]