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Forgive me for this digression. I know it's usually left to Mike Masnick to lift us up from our collective doldrums when things seem even more hopeless than they did last year. His New Year's posts are never wrong. There are always silver linings, even if the filigree is more difficult to detect with each [...]

Elon Musk is desperate to dominate the Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband market. So is Jeff Bezos. And now the two billionaires are engaged in proxy fights at Trump's FCC over who'll get the honor. Amazon's LEO offering, Project Leo, is significantly behind Musk's Starlink, and has been rushing to build out its LEO satellite constellation. [...]

After RFK Jr. found himself getting a rebuke from the court system over his ACIP reorganization from last year, in which the courts issued a preliminary injunction on the vaccine schedule changes ACIP recommended and staying further work from the panel, I've been waiting for the government to appeal the order. That appeal has not [...]

There'sa meaningful push afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, whileall fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. Passage can [...]

Never underestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. When things could just be left alone and everything would turn out OK, officers insist on inserting themselves into the equation, ensuring maximum pain and humiliation for everyone involved. In this case, a Fairhope, Alabama officer decided he couldn't simply do nothing when coming across a grandmother at [...]

Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the Disinformation Governance Board" and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the Ministry of Truth." It was government speech police." It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher [...]

Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you'll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, [...]

The courts keep pounding the nails home. What this government is engaged in is illegal, on multiple levels. If you subtract the pro-MAGA Fifth Circuit and 6/9ths of the Supreme Court, you have a judicial quorum that says rights are still rights, despite this administration's claims otherwise. DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or [...]

A federal judge has ruled that President Trump's executive order last year defunding PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, and has issued a permanent injunction insisting that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it. But the ruling may come too late to save what was left of U.S public media. The original executive orderresulted in [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of [...]

The Supreme Court has now issued its decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. This was a case where Cox, a broadband provider, had been held liable for the alleged copyright infringements of its users, in this case via filesharing. It appealed, arguing that such secondary liability was not something that copyright law allowed. [...]

Support us on Patreon We've written at length about the dangers of the recent court rulings in California and New Mexico that say social media companies can be held responsible for certain uses of their platforms via product design liability. Recently, Mike joined FIRE's So to Speak podcast hosted by Nico Perrino to discuss the [...]

Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week - the AI-powered" telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a $1.8 billion company" supposedly run by just two brothers - I've had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: Can you [...]

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Leave it to the president that makes us nostalgic for Nixon-era corruption to claim that a law Nixon made necessary is no longer a law. The Presidential Records Act was summoned into existence by Nixon's resignation and his subsequent efforts to destroy records generated by his office as he was fumbling his way towards impeachment. [...]

MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony America first!" rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but havesuddenly gone mysteriously quietnow that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. The Wall Street Journal (Reuters [...]

Every relevant court that has looked at this question - including the Supreme Court - has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the [...]

You're never safe when you're working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump's first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump. This time [...]

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week's House of Lords debate on the topic, we're getting you situated with a primer on what's been happening and what it all means. What was the last vote about? On 9 March, the House of Commons [...]

Before we get into this, let's set the scene a little: The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies. Let that [...]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for [...]

Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone's book contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her [...]

The Supreme Court's latest recap of its relative inactivity (Trump administration emergency" appeals aside) has delivered yet more evidence of this court's indifference to rights violations committed by the government. Other cases involving alleged rights violations that should have - at the very least - been handed over to jury for further consideration were tacitly [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering an additional resource on our post about the White House's new app: The other half of the story The analysis by thereallo" covers the Android version; there's a dissection of the iOS version at Security Analysis of the Official White [...]

It's time for the second in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! We've already covered the Best Adaptation winner, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Deep Cut: CARAMENTRAN by RedSPINE and poymakes. Sometimes, we get entries [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. They asked nicely at first. After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who'd recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they'd done in [...]

The Supreme Court's decision last year in U.S. v. Skirmetti, upholding a law depriving young trans people the healthcare they need, is insupportable, rendering people unequal in a way the Constitution cannot possibly suborn. But its new decision in Chiles v. Salazar regarding the First Amendment standard to use regarding Colorado's law regarding conversion therapy [...]

Most of the discussions about the impact of the latestgenerative AIsystems on copyright have centered on text, images and video. That's no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this kind of creativity. But there's [...]

The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for [...]

Last week, I wrote about why the social media addiction verdicts against Meta and YouTube should worry anyone who cares about the open internet. The short version: plaintiffs' lawyers found a clever way to recharacterize editorial decisions about third-party content as product design defects," effectively gutting Section 230 without anyone having to repeal it. The [...]

This may not be an actual Wyden siren," but it still has his name attached to it. What's being said here isn't nearly as ominous as this single sentence he sent to CIA leadership earlier this year: I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express [...]

A quick refresher: there was originally $42.5billionin broadband grants headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yetroutinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But after taking office this second time, the Trump administration rewrote the grant program's guidance toeliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology. [...]

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 [...]

There is a familiar media failure in which opposing viewpoints are presented as equally valid, even when the evidence overwhelmingly supports one side. It's called Bothsidesism. This false balance phenomenon legitimizes misinformation and undermines public understanding by giving disproportionate weight to baseless claims. Why bring this up? Because the new AI Doc film is based [...]

Back in October, Meta announced that its new Instagram Teen Accounts would feature content moderation guided by the PG-13 rating." On its face, this made a certain kind of sense as a communication strategy: parents know what PG-13 means (or at least think they do), and Meta was clearly trying to borrow that cultural familiarity [...]

Opusonix is the workflow-first platform built for music producers and engineers who are tired of endless email chains and scattered files. By centralizing feedback, versions, and tasks in one structured workspace, it helps you cut email traffic by up to 90% so you can focus more on creating and less on chasing approvals. From time-coded [...]

Trump's do everything all at once approach to immigration enforcement is starting to go off the rails. Trump's plainly stated hatred of shithole countries" and their inhabitants manifested in early wins for his bigoted remove the brown people" programs. Then Stephen Miller (the man who answers the what if a lightbulb had eyebrows and was [...]

Last election season the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would rein in big tech," and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time,that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway by a lazy U.S. press [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In late 2024, the federal government's cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft's biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant's lack of proper detailed security documentation" left reviewers with a lack of confidence in assessing the system's overall security posture," according to an [...]

Because South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden is forever obligated to serve Kristi Noem and Kristi Noem is forever obligated to serve Donald Trump, he and his GOP buddies are making America MAGA again, starting with his home turf. Non-citizens have never really disrupted voting. But they're the convenient scapegoat for a party that's justifiably worried [...]

Last week, the European Parliament voted to let a temporary exemption lapse that had allowed tech companies to scan their services for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without running afoul of strict EU privacy regulations. Meanwhile, here in the US, West Virginia's Attorney General continues to press forward with a lawsuit designed to force Apple [...]

Last month Walled Culture wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union, (CJEU), the EU's top court, that could determinehow VPNs can be usedin that region. Clarification in this area is particularly important because VPNs are currently under attack in various ways. For example, last year, the Danish government [...]

The Modern No-Code Creator Bundle is an extensive online curriculum specifically developed to enable individuals to construct professional websites, applications & automated workflows without the necessity of writing any code. It has five courses, covering leading no-code platforms and tools like ChatGPT, Mendix, and Tabnine. It is ideally suited for novices and non-technical professionals, empowering [...]

This is big. This is going to cause a whole lot of problems for the administration in the hundreds of ICE-related lawsuits it's defending itself against. It's a Perry Mason moment, albeit one that implicates the entity delivering it, rather than the other way around. (h/t Chris Geidner on Bluesky) As we are all painfully [...]

Right wing broadcasters are having a very good time under Brendan Carr, who has looked to destroy all remaining media consolidation limits to let them merge. Such companies, like Sinclair, Nexstar, and Tegna, don't do journalism so much as they do soggy, right wing propaganda and infotainment, usually with endless fear mongering about drugs, homelessness, [...]

I'm going to trust that most of our audience will have some idea of what McCarthyism was in the 1950s. To summarize very briefly, it was an anti-communist campaign that spread into becoming equally anti-leftist throughout the country, with a specific focus on driving the supposed communist influences out of major media in America, such [...]

We've been saying for years now that Jonathan Haidt's crusade against social media and kids is a moral panic dressed up in academic robes, and that the evidence simply does not support the sweeping claims he's been making. A new piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff drives that point [...]

Support us on Patreon In the conversation about online speech, most of the attention tends to fall on the big social media platforms, while other intermediaries get overlooked - especially payment processors and other financial intermediaries. But that very thing is the focus of a new book coming out next week, Rainey Reitmans Transaction Denied. [...]