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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 [...]

Another senior Trump administration official is gleefully showing off his true colors: The current general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published an opinion column with the Heritage Foundation's news outlet The Daily Signal calling for stronger obscenity regulation. From the Founding through most of American history, courts allowed the legislature to control pornographic [...]

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It's no secret that I'm a fan of developmental psychologist Candice Odgers. I've mentioned her and her work on the site many times, and she was a guest on my podcast as well. She actually has expertise and has done the work to look at the impact of social media on kids. In many ways [...]

To be clear, the FTC under Donald Trump and new boss Andrew Ferguson has been a dangerous embarrassment. Whether it's the firing of both Democratic Commissioners, the politically motivated investigations, the extremist attacks on trans people, the agency's useless attacks on porn, or its efforts to undermine free speech, the Trump FTC has largely been [...]

One of the key tools in the tool belt of the anti-vaxxer has long been VAERS, the voluntarily reporting system for adverse events following vaccinations. People who don't really understand how any of this works often get very, very confused about what VAERS is and is not. It does not contain confirmed outcomes caused by [...]

Bari Weiss is seeking out friendly interviewers at the New York Times to try and calm the firestorm engulfing her leadership of CBS News." By leadership" of course they mean censoring stories critical of the president, letting Benjamin Netanyahu pick his own interviewer (who he knows won't press him on war crimes), firing a bunch [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. The 2026FIFA World Cupis thelargest sporting eventin history. It's also the most surveilled World Cup ever. If you're visiting or traveling around host cities, then you and your face, behavior, movement and devices are being monitored by governments and private companies. The [...]

It's hard to believe that the same people who spent the Biden years screaming that Democrats were socialists" out to destroy free market capitalism are now cheerfully handing the federal government ownership stakes in private companies. And yet here we are. Just as Trumpists have decided that their go-to strategy for trying to rile up [...]

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ICE has already been operating like a paramilitary kidnapping squad. Officers roam through neighborhoods, stake out hardware store parking lots, and even occasionally enjoy some ethnic food just so they can raid the source of hospitality later. It's nasty, disturbing, and definitely doesn't resemble any of the things that have made America great. Now, the [...]

Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk's Colossus xAI data centers in Memphisdisproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. Ajoint lawsuitby SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn't bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines [...]

Sony just gave the world another lesson in how they don't actually own the content they've bought digitally generally, and particularly not through Sony's digital storefronts. Instead, as readers here will largely know, what is actually being bought is a temporary license to download and play these games, movies, music, whatever. Sony has done this [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one of the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the [...]

For a while there, you might remember how giant telecom monopolies, running out of new subscribers, all decided to get into the media business. But because terrible telecom monopoly executives can't innovate and generally don't know how competition works, it never really goes that well. The various Yahoo/Tumblr/Verizon/AOL exploits were a legendary mess, only outshined [...]

For over a decade, a particular argument keeps resurfacing from well-meaning progressives: the rise of authoritarianism around the globe is a good reason to pass laws suppressing speech. The idea is that somehow, magically, without free speech, authoritarians and fascists would never come to power in the first place. This is historically illiterate. It's also [...]

The Premium Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Super Bundle is a twelve-course digital toolkit designed to take you from coding novice to AI architect. The curriculum breaks down complex data science concepts into actionable steps, guiding you through hands-on projects using Python, data analysis tools, and advanced neural networks. Whether you want to automate everyday tasks, [...]

Good news!(?) It's good news of sorts, so we'll go with a qualified good news!" here. There's a little table setting that needs to be done to explain why it's better now than it was before the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court continued ingratiating itself to race-motivated tyranny. I realize that's not a great pitch in [...]

Back in February, Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr launched a fake investigation" of ABC because the network's comedians and daytime talk show hosts hadn't adequately kissed Republican ass. Five months later and ABC's The View is wimping out when it comes to hosting politicians at all, for fear it will upset the country's mad idiot [...]

As we mentioned previously, the Stop Killing Games movement has come to America and there is currently an effort to get some legislation based on the movement's goals on the books in California. The movement hit a snag recently when the written version of the bill failed to make it out of committee on a [...]

Last week marks four years sinceDobbs v. Jackson Women's Health OrganizationoverturnedRoe v. Wade's constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight [...]

Oh boy do the Nazi-esque dudes running rampant in our country hate being called Nazis. They love the Nazi chic and the Nazi talk about securing the nation for white, blue-eyed males, but they hate being compared to the thing(s) they resemble most, even when they're promoting people for actively generating these comparisons. Like any [...]

For many, many years on Techdirt we've bemoaned the fact that federal court documents are not available for free as they should be. Instead, we have PACER, a bloated, expensive, difficult to use system that charges you for every page" it loads up for you (including search results). The whole thing is a sham. Indeed, [...]

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. You receive licenses for MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, [...]

Yet another way Trump was going to make America great again was by giving one of his pool boys a no-bid contract to make the Lincoln Reflecting Pool even greater than it always had been. Rather than allow it to remain - at the very least - serviceable, Trump insisted the bottom needed to be [...]

Earlier this yearI noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules that would have made it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after decades of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days [...]

As you will recall, the combination of RFK Jr.'s announcement that he'd find a root cause for all this autism going around combined with Donald Trump's idiotic claim that there must be some external environmental cause of all this autism going around resulted in both of these clowns telling America that pregnant women taking Tylenol [...]

At some point in a PR crisis, someone decides the solution is to hire a crisis communications person. The corporation behind Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) is in a bit of a pickle and has apparently reached that point in the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs saga - and their crisis communications person decided the way [...]

In Larry Sanger's recent failed attempt to start a WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", he tried to recruit his followers to help him change Wikipedia's rules around representation of viewpoints, religions, parties, and nationalities (a version of his earlier Nine Theses"). The draft WikiProject was not itself a bannable offense, but his approach broke rules that were [...]

Trump-appointed Louisiana federal judge Terry Doughty has spent years bending over backwards trying to help some MAGA faithful manufacture nonsense claims about censorship" for some grifters getting moderated on social media. As you'll recall, he issued a bizarrely problematic ruling on July 4th three years ago, in which he said of perfectly reasonable, non-coercive communication [...]

The Soundfreaq Sound Spot II combines wireless audio performance, ambient lighting, and relaxing sound features in a compact design built for modern lifestyles. Featuring a Bamboo and White finish with eco-friendly materials, this Bluetooth speaker complements bedrooms, offices, living rooms, and personal spaces while delivering both style and functionality. Engineered with a custom-designed audio driver, [...]

The authoritarianism has been out in the open pretty much since day one with this presidency. Things that leak out around the edges - unaccompanied by official statements, announcements, or randomly-capitalized Truth Social posts - would embarrass any normal administration. But with this administration, new information about new awfulness rarely manages to provoke even a [...]

Despite a lot of pretense, Meta, permanently deadbolted to Mark Zuckerberg's outsized ego, simply isn't an interesting, ethical, competent, or innovative company. They're mostly an ad monopoly pretending to be Apple. They poured untold billions of dollars into their soggy and broadly uninteresting metaverse gambit, now they're pouring untold billions of dollars into their fourth-place [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the German court ruling that Google is liable for false claims in its AI overviews. In first place, it's an anonymous comment about Bruce Schneier's reaction to the ruling: In second place, it's A Guy with the first comment on the post: [...]

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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 [...]

It's been a while since we checked in on the Nintendo patent suit in Japan against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld. If you need a quick refresher, here you go. Pocketpair made a game that was clearly inspired by the Pokemon series of games, but which also did no direct copying of [...]

Qualified immunity - crafted out of thin air by the US Supreme Court - has rarely been anything but an easy way for government employees to duck out of lawsuits before they're actually asked to defend themselves against allegations of rights violations. The Supreme Court has continually narrowed this doctrine, pretty much ensuring that if [...]

In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned would happen when you reduce sector competition). T-Mobile, which once tried to differentiate itself as the consumer-friendly uncarrier," almost immediately began behaving just like AT&T and Verizon, starting with firing 9,000+ people. It's how [...]

Earlier this year we wrote about the ridiculous thin-skinned executives at Palantir suing a small independent Swiss online magazine, Republik, that had reported on the great lengths the company had gone to, trying to get the Swiss government to purchase Palantir's surveillance technology. Palantir knew they couldn't sue for defamation because, you know, everything Republik [...]

The MYNT3D 3D Printing Pen is a handheld creative tool that allows users to draw in three dimensions using heated plastic filament. Instead of printing from a machine, this pen lets you manually create 3D objects by extruding melted plastic that quickly hardens. It uses FDM technology similar to 3D printers and is designed for [...]

Some readers might look at this headline and think there's something off about it. And I'll grant you that. There are several ways music can be played: to, for, not at all. Sometimes though, the only way to describe the playing of music is at." One of Trump's many vindictive surges" targeting cities and states [...]

Last month, SpaceX began making lobbying filings in support of phone unlocking rules making it easier to switch your phone between wireless providers. You might recall that the Biden FCC was on the cusp of installing such rules before the Trump administration, hand in hand with giant telecoms, dismantled them (Trump's FCC will have to [...]

There are bad takes on AI, and then there are bad takes on AI. Some of you think my takes on the use of AI in gaming are bad. Cool, love you, kiss kiss. I think the takes from folks on both extremes, the never-AI-ers and the AI evangelists, are pretty awful most of the [...]

Legal systems have always struggled to keep up with rapid technological change, and things are no different in the world of generative AI. There are still relatively few rulings on the new issues that the roll-out of AI-based services is raising. That makes a ground-breaking judgment from a court in Germany particularly important. It concerns [...]

While we've been discussing a bunch of other Supreme Court end-of-term decisions this week, we should also call out two decisions the Supreme Court thankfully decided not to make. These non-decisions continue to help preserve First Amendment speech protections. First, and most importantly, they rejected Alan Dershowitz's attempt to appeal his laughably embarrassing SLAPP suit [...]

Plenty of people are going to disagree with this headline. But why should I bother defending it when I can let the government dig its own hole? From Executive Order 14367, issued by President Trump last December: Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic. Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount [...]

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 [...]

Look, 5-4 Supreme Court decisions count just as much as 9-0 ones, and a 5-4 decision getting it right is still a win, but for a number of reasons, the 5-4 decision in Trump v. Barbara, regarding the issue of birthright citizenship is terrifying. This isn't a complicated issue. This isn't an issue that should [...]

Last fall, Ezra Klein was getting a lot of attention for his book Abundance, which basically argued that America had become bureaucracy-obsessed and fallen out of love with building things. I thought it was mostly simplistic cack, downplaying or ignoring the fact that the U.S. government has become so blisteringly corrupt, it clearly no longer [...]