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Yesterday we noted how CBS fecklessly tried to prevent Stephen Colbert from broadcasting an interview with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico. Which, as you've probably already seen, resulted in the interview on YouTube getting way more viewers than it would have normally, and Texas voters flocking to Google to figure out who Talarico is: [...]

The Luminar Neo Bundle includes a one time purchase of the software, an introductory course on how to use it, and 6 add-ons. Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different [...]

For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called censorship industrial complex." We were told, repeatedly and at high volume, that the Biden administration flagging content for review by social media companies constituted a tyrannical overthrow of the First Amendment. In the Missouri v. Biden (later [...]

Last week, Denver-area engineer Scott Shambaugh wrote about how an AI agent (likely prompted by its operator) started a weird little online campaign against him after he rejected its code inclusion in the popular Python charting library matplotlib. The owner likely didn't appreciate Shambaugh openly questioning whether AI-generated code belongs in open source projects at [...]

The current measles shitstorm in South Carolina has been burning for several months now, dating all the way back to October of 2025. What started with a bunch of counties that were undervaccinated for measles began spiraling out of control at the start of 2026. The federal tracker for measles cases is at best woefully [...]

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations-including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit-are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine [...]

Support us on Patreon Two weeks ago, we ran a bit of an AMA experiment, with a call on Bluesky for fans of Techdirt to ask Mike any questions they might have. We got lots of great responses and now, as promised, Mike is delivering the answers on this week's episode of the podcast! You [...]

If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go." -Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, September 8, 2025 From that one line, which Anil Kalhan dubbed Kavanaugh Stops," we see story after story of just how disconnected from [...]

The right wing extremist takeover of CBS continues to go just about how you thought it might. CBS is under fire yet again, this time for forcing Stephen Colbert's The Late Show" to cancel a scheduled appearance with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico because it might upset our full-diapered president. Colbert acknowledged the cancellation [...]

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized [...]

We've been covering Australia's monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire [...]

Here we go again. The Trump FTC has threatened Apple and CEO Tim Cook with a fake investigation claiming that Apple News doesn't do a good enough job coddling right wing, Trump-friendly ideology. The announcement and associated letter pretends that Apple is violating Section 5 of the FTC Act (which prohibits unfair or deceptive acts [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about MAGA doing things for the children": If conservatives stopped thinking about children so much, the children would be better off and much safer. In second place, it's an anonymous comment inserting a little optimism into the fear that Section [...]

Five Years Ago As you probably know, we marked the 30th anniversary of Section 230 this week, so it's not surprising that this same week in 2021 we were celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special online event where we were joined by Chris Cox and Ron Wyden. We also wrote about the many reasons [...]

Back in 2023, we talked about a strange trademark dispute out of the UK concerning oat-based milk products. Specifically, Oatly, a large producer of oat milk, applied for a trademark in the UK for its slogan, Post Milk Generation." Dairy UK, a lobbying organization representing dairy farmers in the country, opposed the trademark in the [...]

Copyright owners increasingly claim more draconian copyright law and policy will fight back against big tech companies. In reality, copyright gives the most powerful companies even more control over creators and competitors. Today's copyright policy concentrates power among a handful of corporate gatekeepers-at everyone else's expense. We need a system that supports grassroots innovation and [...]

A California police department is none too happy that its license plate reader records were accessed by federal employees it never gave explicit permission to peruse. And, once again, it's Flock Safety shrugging itself into another PR black eye. Mountain View police criticized the company supplying its automated license plate reader system after an audit [...]

Last fall, I wrote about how the fear of AI was leading us to wall off the open internet in ways that would hurt everyone. At the time, I was worried about how companies were conflating legitimate concerns about bulk AI training with basic web accessibility. Not surprisingly, the situation has gotten worse. Now major [...]

The Trump administration has fired one of the few remaining members of the administration that had even a passing interest in antitrust enforcement. DOJ antitrust boss Gail Slater has been fired from the administration after having repeated contentious run ins with key officials. It's the final nail in the coffin of the log-running lie that [...]

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Judge Boasberg got his vindication in the frivolous complaint" the DOJ filed against him, and now he's calling out the DOJ's bullshit in the long-running case that caused them to file the complaint against him in the first place: the JGG v. Trump case regarding the group of Venezuelans the US government shipped off to [...]

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disasterwas the poster child [...]

At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

For thirty years, internet users have benefited from a key federal law that allows everyone to express themselves, find community, organize politically, and participate in society.Section 230, which protects internet users' speech by protecting the online intermediaries we rely on, is the legal support that sustains the internet as we know it. Yet as Section [...]

Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. Among the more notable exchanges was when Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked some of Jeffrey Epstein's victims who were in the audience to stand up and indicate whether Bondi's DOJ had ever contacted them about their experiences. None of them had heard from the Justice [...]

The DHS and its components want to find non-white people to deport by any means necessary. Of course, necessary" is something that's on a continually sliding scale with Trump back in office, which means everything (legal or not) is necessary" if it can help White House advisor Stephen Miller hit his self-imposed 3,000 arrests per [...]

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You may have heard last week that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt went to Washington DC and gave a short speech at an event put on by Senator Dick Durbin calling for the sunsetting of Section 230. It's a short speech, and it gets almost everything wrong about Section 230. Watch it here: Let me first say [...]

Trump 1.0 took a 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 surge inright wing propaganda outlets pretending to [...]

I want to say a little something upfront in this post, so that there is no misunderstanding. While I've spent a great deal of time outlining why I think RFK Jr. and his cadre of buffoons at HHS and its child agencies are horrible for America and her people's health, I do understand some of [...]

Artificial intelligence promises to change not just how Americans work, but how societies decide which kinds of work are worthwhile in the first place. When technological change outpaces social judgment, a major capacity of a sophisticated society comes under pressure: the ability to sustain forms of work whose value is not obvious in advance and [...]

Peter Mandelson-the former UK cabinet minister who was just sacked as Britain's ambassador to the United States over newly revealed emails with Jeffrey Epstein-has found a novel way to avoid answering questions about why he told a convicted sex offender your friends stay with you and love you" and urged him to fight for early [...]

Technically - TECHNICALLY! - we still have a system that relies on three co-equal branches to ensure that any single branch can't steamroll the rest of the system (along with the nation it's supposed to serve) to seize an unequal amount of power. Technically. What we're seeing now is something else entirely. The judicial branch [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, [...]

Over the years, we've written approximately one million words explaining why Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is essential to how the internet functions. We've corrected politicians who lie about it. We've debunked myths spread by mainstream media outlets that should know better. We've explained, re-explained, and then explained again why gutting this law [...]

We told you this was coming months ago. The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) says it has initiated a broad investigation of Netflix's business practices and it's planned $82.7 billion merger with Warner Brothers. The Trump DOJ's pretense is that they're just suddenly really concerned about media consolidation and monopoly power (you're to ignore the [...]

EFFis againstage gating and age verificationmandates, and we hope we'll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented. But mandates arealready in effect, and every day many people are asked to verify their age across the web, despiteprominentcasesof sensitive data getting leaked in the process. At some point, you may have been faced [...]

Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino has been sent back to the border after making himself the Nazi scum face of the Trump administration's brutal efforts to purge this country of as many non-white people as possible. Bovino made it clear what team he really wanted to play for before Trump was even sworn in for [...]

Support us on Patreon In the last few years, the Supreme Court has been paying a lot more attention to the internet than it ever has before, and the cases keep on coming. This is already having a big impact on how the internet functions, and it doesn't look likely to stop any time soon. [...]

We live in a stupidly polarizing world where nuance is apparently not allowed. Everyone wants you to be for or against something-and nowhere is this more exhausting than with AI. There are those who insist that it's all bad and there is nothing of value in it. And there are those who think it's all [...]

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I don't understand sycophancy. Never have. I don't know what it gets you in the long run other than a reputation for subservience. That's worth nearly nothing in the open market. The only people who will hire you are people most people would never want to work for. And yet, that is pretty much the [...]

Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales from Texas went on Face the Nation on Sunday and said a lot of silly things, doing his best as a loyal Trump foot soldier to defend the indefensible, to make sense of the nonsensical, and to lie about all the rest. However, I wanted to focus on one bit of [...]

FCC boss Brendan Carr is back with yet another fake investigation" of media outlets he deems insufficiently deferential to radical (and increasingly unpopular) right wing ideology. This time it involves Carr launching a phony non-investigation of ABC's The View. The crime? They apparently didn't kiss MAGA Republican ass with enough zeal: The Federal Communications Commission [...]

Way back in 2018, a series of events in Samoa brought about the country's worst measles outbreak in years. It started in July of that year when two 1-year old children who were given a measles vaccine subsequently died. While anti-vaxxers around the world gleefully jumped into action to blame the vaccine for those deaths, [...]

Trump and his supporters clearly believe migrants have no constitutional rights. But that's simply not true. They have the same rights as citizens for one truly obvious reason: a government could choose to declare certain people non-citizens in order to strip them of their rights. That would be highly problematic in a nation that's almost [...]

If you watched NBC's prime time broadcast of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony on Friday, you saw Vice President JD Vance in the stands at San Siro Stadium in Milan with his wife, Usha. The commentary team said JD Vance" and moved on. Pleasant enough. But if you were watching literally any other country's broadcast-or [...]

This past weekend Section 230 turned 30 years old. In those 30 years it has proven to be a marvelous yet misunderstood law, often gravely, as too many, including in Congress and the courts, mistakenly blame it for all the world's ills, or at least those that happen in some connection with the Internet. When [...]

Here's what's strange about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that made the open internet possible: Both sides of the traditional political spectrum hate it. But for opposite reasons. That, alone, should highlight that something is wrong in their analysis. Republicans hate it because they say it lets websites censor conservative speech. [...]