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The American people have spoken. And they've chosen to hand the full power of our military, the nuclear codes, and the courts to a petty, vindictive man who wants to punish anyone who disagrees with him. I'm not going to say much directly about the election this week, because what is there that I can [...]

For years we've noted how U.S. broadband isexpansive, patchy, and slowthanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, andcity-owned utilitiesbuilding their own, locally-owned broadband networks in a bid forbetter, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, or AT&T could [...]

Here we go again. We've been discussing the iterative changes in Japanese copyright law for some time now. Those changes have been largely targeted rather than sweeping, though those targeted changes are arguably extreme in nature. First and foremost was moving copyright infringement largely out of the realm of civil law and into a criminal [...]

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that [...]

It remains incredible to me that we sometimes have to rely on the nutty Fifth Circuit to correct the even nuttier MAGA favorite" judges who issue the stupidest decisions in court cases. But now they've done it again, as the Fifth Circuit has pointed out that, no, RFK Jr. does not appear to have standing [...]

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This is tentatively welcome news. I mean, it can't result in anything worse than the original decision the Fourth Circuit handed down in the Chatrie case, which said there's nothing constitutionally wrong with searching every Google user's location info in hopes of finding the suspect law enforcement is actually looking for. (via FourthAmendment.com) The Appeals [...]

Recent Supreme Court rulingshave thrown most U.S. regulatory enforcement into operational and legal chaos. Thedismantling of Chevron,with the Loper Bright ruling in particular, now dictates that regulators can't implement new rules or reforms without the explicit approval of Congress. Two problems: one, regulators ideally have very specific subject expertise Congress doesn't have (think about Ted [...]

Those of you who are video game fanatics like me know the feeling. There's a brand new gaming console on the way and every couple of days you do some googling for updates, release dates, or any kind of news on it. The manufacturers of these consoles often do a drip campaign when it comes [...]

Here's a final election day story. This time, it's about an election integrity" app being used by MAGA folks to spread absolute nonsense about the election, but also to confess their own illegal voter suppression schemes. And thanks to their crap security, it's now being reported. At a time when the facts-optional GOP likes to [...]

Bad people make good case law. That's just how our criminal justice system works. And so it is here in this decision, which flows from criminal charges that, in turn, flow from proactive efforts meant to thwart the sharing of child sexual abuse material. In this case, Ryan Maher was convicted of CSAM possession. Having [...]

When it comes to Section 230, we've seen a parade of embarrassingly wrong takes over the years, all sharing one consistent theme: the authors confidently opine on the law despite clearly not understanding it. Each time I think we've hit bottom with the most ridiculously wrong take, along comes another challenger. This week's is a [...]

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Like a bunch of other states run by people who hate the people they serve (except for the people who harbor the same hatred), Tennessee has decided it should get into the book-banning business - years after literal Nazis made this sort of thing politically untenable. Or so we thought. Now, before the pedants step [...]

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a giant U.S. telecom monopoly has been ripping off a federal program designed to help the country's low income residents. AT&T last week quietly struck a $2.3 million consent decreewith the FCC for falsely inflating the number of people it was helping under a COVID-era program designed [...]

For half a decade now, we have followed along with the war that Nintendo decided to wage on its own fans' celebration of what is admittedly great music coming from Nintendo games. Starting in 2019, Nintendo has continuously ramped up its war efforts, particularly against YouTubers and their accounts. It started with the takedowns of [...]

RT, formerly Russia Today, has appeared a few times here on Techdirt. As the long article about RT on Wikipedia explains, the TV channel has morphed from an attempt to create a state-supported international news network along the lines of the BBC or France 24, but one that offered a Russian perspective on the world, [...]

Donald Trump just took his war on the free press to a new level of absurdity, filing an FEC complaint against the Washington Post for - wait for it - promoting its own reporting. Apparently, Bezos' attempt to appease the MAGA crowd with his endorsement cop-out didn't do the trick. We had warned Jeff Bezos [...]

I have no particular interest in the British royal family, but nevertheless I'll be forever grateful to Princess Kate for telling the world about her cancer. It was probably not easy, nor likely her preference, to be so public at such a difficult moment. But whether she knows it or not, by sharing her story [...]

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As we head into the election tomorrow, there has been some general talk about how many people think that Donald Trump is somehow better on things like free speech and the economy. It's pretty clear that that is wrong. On the economy, it's evident he has no clue what he's talking about and his plan [...]

I've written for years about how U.S. broadband isexpansive, patchy, and slowthanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, andcity-owned utilitiesbuilding their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid forbetter, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, Charter, [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Jeff Bezos shutting down the Washington Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. In first place, it's a simple anonymous summary: Yep. The message he sent is that he will control what is or is not published. In second place, it's another [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Comcast was putting on an innocent act regarding consumer privacy, while we looked at one Idaho town that was doing broadband competition right. India was looking to get into the mass facial recognition game, while NBC was facing legal threats for reporting on a company's facial recognition tech [...]

If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people [...]

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 [...]

Quick test: should saying Hitler, not a good guy" cause you to be banned from your social media account? Seems simple enough. But apparently not for Meta, the largest social media company on the planet. I've talked about the Masnick Impossibility Theorem and the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. [...]

Very few states laws can be considered to be famous." Almost any state law immediately recognized by people in other states can only be described as infamous." The Wiretap Law enacted in Massachusetts is definitely infamous. For years, this statute was abused by law enforcement officers and other state employees to punish or prosecute residents [...]

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As we head into next week's election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do). While any private [...]

A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey's findings aren't surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to [...]

This lawsuit could not be more impeccably timed. Whether or not this timing is more fortuitous than impeccable remains to be seen, but there's no denying the bang-bang-bang effect on display here, even if it may just be coincidental. Last week, a Virginia federal court ruled three hits from Flock ALPR cameras wasn't enough to [...]

Here are two things that are not secrets, but play into this story. First, it's known that Google and Russia have had an acrimonious relationship for some time. Between various threats from the Russian government to ban Google and/or YouTube here and there, typically because the country doesn't like Google's decisions over what content to [...]

According to some people (you know the people I mean...), our biggest crisis" is border security. This one guy - a supposed billionaire with multiple bankruptcies under his belt - claimed he could solve the problem if he ever got elected. He would build the wall" and make Mexico pay for it. This is stuff [...]

Sometimes I love a good mashup" story hitting on two of the different themes we cover here at Techdirt. This one is especially good: Alaska legislators relying on fake stats generated by an AI system to justify banning phones in schools, courtesy of the Alaska Beacon. It's a mashup of the various stories about mobile [...]

This is something that should have happened years ago, but I guess we can be grateful it's happening now. And part of the reason it's finally happening is because of the warrant requirement for obtaining historical cell site location info created by the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. One of the many ways the government obtains [...]

We've noted repeatedly that in the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned the Trump administration would happen when you reduce sector competition). Recently, T-Mobile imposedanother $3-$5 per month price hike on most of its plans- including customers who believed they were under [...]

Another lobbyist win over common sense, it seems. Earlier this year, we discussed a group of video game preservationists, led by the Video Game History Foundation, seeking DMCA exemptions that would allow groups to curate, preserve, and make available for streaming antiquated video games for purposes of study. The chief opposition to the request came [...]

When the government shuts down a protest because both protesters and counter-protesters are physically attacking each other, it's not a heckler's veto." It's just common sense, even though there was very little of that on display during the protest, nor during law enforcement's belated response to the violent confrontation. But Warren Balogh thinks only his [...]

The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts havechronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynical moves from the academic publishing industry in order to retain theirfabulous profit margins. As a [...]

What are the odds. Evolv, a gun detection tech firm contracted by the city of New York to handle fare jumping by scanning for guns, told everyone - including its investors - that deploying its tech in NYC subways wasn't exactly a great idea. It made this statement even as Mayor Adams was telling people [...]

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You may recall last December when we wrote about the somewhat shocking news that an Indian court had ordered Reuters to take down an entire article investigating a company, Appin and its founder Rajat Khare, that were accused of running a giant hacking for hire" operation. Ten months later, that article is back online with [...]

To be very clear: SpaceX's Starlink service can be a game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a month subscription and up front hardware costs. But contrary to what [...]

It's that time of the year in the Midwest, when the skies darken early and the temperature drops. And that means it's pho season. As a lover of pho, allow me to educate anyone that hasn't heard of it. It's a soup of sorts, with rice noodles, spices, and meat. And it's considered the national [...]

Well, a wrong has been righted. Kind of. And for how long, no one really knows. Texas is on the leading edge of book censorship in the United States - you know, the land most famous for its freedoms, one of which is the famous/infamous (depending on who you ask) First Amendment. It's only second [...]

The release of a bipartisan draft of the American Privacy Rights Act (APRA) reinvigorated the effort to pass a federal consumer privacy law, only to sputter and stall amid concerns raised from across the political spectrum. All that is gone, however, is not forgotten: it is only a matter of time before Congress returns its [...]

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool [...]

Donald Trump and the politicians that either think like him, or think saying things like this might make him like them, continue to pretend major US cities are besieged by violent criminals. While there have been a few spikes in certain cities, for the most part, crime rates are returning to their normal, historic lows [...]

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