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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

This is why having a case dismissed with prejudice is important. Trump's cronies/donors - who were paid millions to do a job they'd never done before - failed to bring the Lincoln Reflecting Pool up to spec by July 4th, preventing Trump from taking sole credit for everyone else's hard work while turning the nation's [...]

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You may have seen news of the recent Fifth Circuit decision, with an opinion written by Judge Andrew Oldham, overturning a lower court ruling, and reinstating highly questionable ID requirements for mail-in ballots. We can debate how this decision blends two great MAGA obsessions, mail-in ballots and voter ID (both overhyped panics designed to suppress [...]

It's always the same routine. Before each giant merger the companies promise that the new combined entity will deliver the sea, moon, and stars. We're told the consolidation will result in untold synergies, massive job growth, and incredible new innovation. Yet in a country too corrupt to have functional antitrust enforcement or working regulators, what [...]

As expected, this didn't take very long. Earlier this week we pointed out that Donald Trump supplanted RFK Jr. as the world's most infamous anti-vaxxer when he vomited out a bonkers executive order that reduced the recommended childhood vaccination schedule for American children, pared down which diseases were recommended for vaccination, and demanded that the [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. For decades, terrorism researchers have generally distinguished terrorism from other forms of violence by one defining feature:the intentiontointimidate a wider audiencebeyond immediate victims. That distinction has shaped both academic research andcriminal prosecutions in the U.S.Yetscholars have long debateda deceptively simple question: Is [...]

The administration has no legitimate justification for this action. It's all about inflicting as much literal pain as possible on anyone ICE officers happen to encounter. Immigrationand Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks intended to gain compliance from combative individuals. ICEplans to spendup to $20 million [...]

It still amazes me that there are people out there who think that Donald Trump is a supporter of free speech. It has never been true. Anyone who looks will note that the Trump administration regularly engages in clearly unconstitutional attempts to suppress speech. But because he and his supporters like to claim he's a [...]

If you're looking for a career in cloud computing, there's no better place to start than with the AWS certification. Whether you want to be an Architect or a Developer, these certifications open doors to incredible opportunities. But how do you get one? You need to use realistic exam simulators that present you with questions [...]

The easiest way to tell that Flock Safety doesn't really care that its massive network of ALPR (automatic license plate reader) cameras is being abused by cops to stalk their exes and harass residents is to judge it by its actions. When confronted with court case after court case detailing these allegations (and those are [...]

One obvious byproduct of letting what's left of U.S. journalism consolidate in the hands of a bunch of giant corporations is the end result winds up being a feckless mess. Generally corporations don't want to upset advertisers, ownership (usually Conservative, white, and male), event sponsors, or potential advertising targets, so their journalism winds up being [...]

The Buc-ee's trademark bullying saga continues! The company, once best known for building ridiculously enormous gas station and convenience store combinations has more recently become nearly as infamous for its bullying and litigious behavior. Buc-ee's has a habit of suing all kinds of other businesses for trademark infringement, so long as those other businesses use [...]

I've been presenting at UC Law San Francisco Lexlab Law and AI certificate program its past several sessions, as well as some law school classes, on whether lawyers' use of AI complies with the rules of professional conduct governing how lawyers must comport themselves or risk losing their licenses. The legal industry is keen to [...]

The reaction to Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500 word AI manifesto, The Future is for Everyone," has been all over the map. Given the messenger and the topic, there's plenty of reasonable skepticism. 404 Media called it deranged." TechCrunch pointed out that Zuck's manifesto is exactly why people don't like AI." But then you have groups like [...]

When Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr isn't trampling free speech or harassing major networks for platforming comedians, he's been illegally taking a hatchet to whatever's left of media consolidation rules and telecom consumer protection oversight. While he's been pretty effective at this, Carr would find it even easier to convene meetings and hold agency votes [...]

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The current president continues to self-destruct. Fortunately for us, he insists on doing this publicly. After handing a donor and an unproven company the massive job of redoing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in American flag blue" in hopes of being able to use it to celebrate himself during America's 250th birthday, everything went tits [...]

For all the talk of reforming" or repealing" Section 230 in Congress, the fact is that the courts over the past three or four years have effectively chipped away so steadily at the law that it's lost a significant chunk of its usefulness. The latest comes from the Ninth Circuit, which ruled earlier this week [...]

When it comes to the bullshit, batshit-crazy anti-vaxxer movement that currently has the United States in its un-scientific grip, I've focused most of my attention on RFK Jr. And, frankly, for good reason. For arguably decades, but definitely for the last five to ten years, RFK Jr. was the most infamous anti-vaxxer in the world. [...]

Police departments across the country are lining up to launch drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs, and hundreds have cleared a necessary hurdle toward making deployment a reality, expanding aerial surveillance and data collection even in areas patrol officers typically can't reach. As of February 2026,over 1,000 public safety agencies-including police, fire, and other emergency management agencies-had received [...]

Support us on Patreon If you know anything about Techdirt, you know we're big fans of the EFF and its decades of advocacy for digital rights and the open internet. Recently, the organization went through a big change in the form of a new executive director: legal expert and long-time leader in the space Nicole [...]

For many, many years now we've been calling out how the entire narrative around the censorship industrial complex" was absolute bullshit, made up by a group of either deliberate misinformation peddlers or confused contrarian" journalists too stupid to understand how basic things work. And I say that as someone who has long been critical of [...]

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Will anyone ever hold an ICE officer accountable for shooting or killing someone? Maybe, but it won't be anyone from this administration - one that has actively blocked state investigators from following up on ICE shootings and even pulled FBI agents from ongoing investigations so ICE can forgive itself for its officers actions. While ICE [...]

There have been rumblings for a while that America's richest and most annoying white supremacist, Elon Musk, really wants to get into the wireless phone business. His lobbyists have been making noise in support for broader phone unlocking rules, and there've been several IPO-fluffing press leaks over the last few months indicating they're keen on [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Dr. Anthony Fauciinvoked the Fifth Amendmentanddeclined to answer questionsfrom a Senate committeemore than 100 timeson July 29, 2026. TheRepublican-led hearing- convened to scrutinize Fauci's management of the pandemic and the origins of COVID-19 - was thelatest chapter in a political storythat began [...]

When SpaceX filed for its IPO, we went through the S-1 to point out just how far off the mark Elon Musk's predictions about his Twitter takeover turned out to be. Indeed, the failure of Twitter as a business was so catastrophic, Musk had to hide it by merging all his Xs together: he had [...]

We'll see how long US Attorney (and, of course, former Fox News personality) Jeanine Pirro gets to keep her job. I would guess the exit door is only inches away from hitting her ass since she refused to carry out Donald Trump's plan to punish Reflecting Pool visitors for highlighting the failures of his no-bid [...]

Earlier this year, following the initial verdict in the state of New Mexico's case against Meta (arguing that Meta caused harm to children by doing things like encrypting messages), we noted that even if you believe that Meta is a terrible company (as I do), that Mark Zuckerberg cannot be trusted (ditto), and that the [...]

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Flock Safety is happy it's the go-to choice for tons of law enforcement agencies. While it does suffer some occasional bleeding, its supercharged automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) - ones that not only capture plates, but pictures of drivers/passengers and full vehicle images to capture any other distinctive features - are so widely deployed they're [...]

There are so many shitty U.S. companies across tech, energy, and AI that criticism of our massively-unpopular telecom monopolies has fallen out of fashion. It's easy to forget, for example, that Comcast routinely used to make headlines for setting peoples homes on fire, torturing pets, or at times killing people (most of the stories I [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Capital One's stated reasons for shutting down Trump accounts: Would be nice to have some disclosure laws so that if a presidential candidate's had his bank accounts closed for money laundering, we don't learn about it years later in [...]

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Buc-ee's trademark bullying ways continue! This company that has long been famous for its enormous gas station and convenience stores practically dripping in Americana is quickly building a national reputation for itself as a petulant trademark bully. It's lawsuits are typically dumb and usually feature Buc-ee's claim that it somehow owns every cartoon animal mascot [...]

For years, John Deere had actively made repairing their tractors near-impossible for anyone but itself and the few authorized" repair shops-regardless of the ability of its customers to actually visit such shops. Now, in a major win for farmers and right to repair advocates, John Deere must soon provide farmers with not just the tools [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

Well, it looks like investigators better go back to doing actual investigations in the Fifth Circuit, rather than just assuming a little paperwork and a whole lot of assistance from service providers is going to do their work for them. For at least the second time in the same state (Mississippi), federal judges have rejected [...]

The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle has 7 online courses designed to help learners build skills that align directly with industry expectations.The focus is on practical tools and languages used by data professionals: Python for programming, Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation, foundational certification prep and specialized work with Databricks, an industry-standard platform for data engineering [...]

There are many ways to describe the Trump Era, but the executive branch's conviction that it can simply ignore the legislative branch's entire existence has become something close to a governing principle. From impounding funds designated by Congress to launching a war without Congress's authority, Trump has basically decided that the legislative branch is a [...]

Back in May I noted how the Trump FCC had unveiled a brand new plan to stop robocalls." I also noted how the plan doesn'tactually stop robocallsbecause a well-lobbied U.S. government (1) refuses to hold big companies accountable or collect fines, (2) constantly embracesweak rules that make telemarketers and debt collectors happy through endless loopholes, [...]

When Erica Schwartz was first nominated for Director of the CDC, you could almost hear both a gasp of surprise and a collective sigh of relief from healthcare providers throughout the country. Schwartz is well qualified for the role, after all, and many took her nomination as a sign that the White House was attempting [...]

For a while now we've been mocking the Trump White House's plans for an AI framework" that would have the frontier AI labs hand over their top models for an initial review. After all, this was more or less the exact same plan that the Biden admin worked out in 2023, but it was done [...]

Recent reportshaveraised alarmabout the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy concern also deserves [...]

As perhaps a few Elon Musk fans may remember, he got really annoyed at Wikipedia last year and tasked his second-rate LLM, Grok, with recreating it as Grokipedia." Grokipedia, launched nearly a year ago, basically starts by forking Wikipedia and then having its AI generate" more details and more stories. It's... not very good. And [...]

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Flock Safety's automatic license plate readers were first sold as upmarket add-ons for gated communities and HOA curtain-twitchers who wanted to keep tabs on what everyone was doing, whether they lived there or not. Flock soon realized that selling to rich people wasn't as profitable as selling to governments. Law enforcement agencies have always been [...]

I've written a few times now about how the Trump administration hijacked a $42.5 billion broadband investment fund included in the 2021 infrastructure bill, stripped away requirements that the resulting broadband be fairly deployed and affordable, and instead redirected billions of dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in exchange for slower, more expensive satellite [...]

A couple of weeks ago we discussed how the cuts made to HHS and specifically the CDC's FoodNet tracking platform were making it much harder to track and back trace the source of the country's current cyclosporiasis outbreak. You'll have heard about this outbreak in the news by now. It's the one where you begin [...]