Here’s a puzzle: How do you write a law that’s so badly designed that (1) the people it’s meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act. The bill started with […]
When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don’t quite say “we want to censor speech” (after all, they pretend to be the party that “brought free speech back.”) Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it’s got nothing to do with the content, even as they can’t hide their true intentions and […]
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Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn’t want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? […]
State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction of a new “right to repair” law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRG note that all 50 U.S. states have now at least introduced such bills. But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Oregon have actually […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a failed “fact check” by another commenter: Hey twinkle farts, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to authorize the government to detain enemy aliens. Further, the executive order didn’t need to […]
It’s time for the third in our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix and Best Deep Cut, and today we’re looking at the winner of the Best Visuals category: A Warning by DigNZ. One of the requirements for […]
Bethesda has something of a history of embracing its modding communities. This has historically included not being aggressive on matters of IP against modders, attempting to build an economy around the modding community itself, and even being quite tolerant of fan-made expansions and the like of the publisher’s titles. This was all well and good […]
Gavin Newsom’s characterization of the Abrego García deportation as a “distraction” represents a catastrophic failure of moral clarity and constitutional understanding. This isn’t a distraction. This is the constitutional foundation of our Republic hinging on a single case. Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s at stake: The Supreme Court has issued a unanimous 9-0 order demanding that […]
This post is about two things: that it looks like DOGE has violated an injunction, at least in spirit if not letter, and why it matters. The injunction in question arose in the hybrid case, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration, which named both DOGE and agency officials […]
The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just… helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not “they won’t let me tweet slurs” censorship, but literal “we’re going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship” censorship. It’s painfully stupid, but that’s just what we get with the folks running the government these days. This […]
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What could possibly go wrong? Operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumented immigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social […]
A few days ago I talked about how the Trump administration is desperate to present the illusion it still cares about consumer protection and “antitrust reform.” Via executive order, regulatory capture, DOGE cuts, and a rightward-lurching court system, Trump 2.0 really is taking an absolute hatchet to consumer protection, labor rights, corporate oversight, environmental law, […]
Leaks can be both embarrassing and aggravating for any content producer, though we often see the most anger over this sort of thing coming from large corporate interests. The video game space is lousy with examples of this, but there is perhaps no more notoriously draconian respondent to leaks than Nintendo. The company has unsurprisingly […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s 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 […]
Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas. A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing […]
There are a few ways to think about Elon Musk’s announcement this week that he’s stepping back from DOGE. The first is that he’s leaving a job he officially doesn’t have. The second is that he’s returning to a job (Tesla CEO) that he’s supposedly been doing this whole time. The third, and perhaps most […]
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Gang databases are just handy racism. They’re a way for cops to harass, arrest, or otherwise make minorities’ lives more miserable. Very little in the way of logic or evidence is required to allow officers to add people to these databases. That’s why victims of gang violence and the occasional infant have been labelled “gang […]
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