This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is frankcox with a comment about the horrifying abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk: Masked abductors? The people doing this are obviously ashamed of themselves because they are wearing masks to prevent anyone from identifying them. That adds another level of terror to this sort of thing. […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the pandemic news continued. Some people were attempting to leverage it to call for longer patent terms, while we were calling for loosening the intellectual property reins, and the DOJ was using it to justify indefinite detention of arrested people. Libraries were looking to become pandemic broadband havens […]
Clearview saw an opening in the facial recognition market and took full advantage of it. While most tech firms offered face-matching tech of dubious accuracy, Clearview went further, matching its AI to the billions of records it has harvested for free from the open internet. (And while this effort certainly wasn’t free, it definitely was […]
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 […]
The fallout over several Trump administration officials, all of them high-ranking, discussing military operations of a sensitive nature in a Signal chat and inadvertently welcoming a journalist to that chat is ongoing. The administration’s attempts to hand-wave this all away as unimportant doesn’t appear to be getting much traction, thankfully. The entire episode is a […]
Is it a flag on your porch? A sense of pride during the national anthem? A particular vision of freedom or prosperity? Perhaps it’s a story you tell yourself about who we are and what we stand for. Whatever it means to you, I want you to hold that meaning close as you read what […]
This hasn’t been a good week for those who believed that Donald Trump would bring in the “best, most competent” people around. Fresh off the revelation that a bunch of the top cabinet and security officials were accidentally sharing classified info with a journalist using Signal on their private phones (rather than, you know, secure […]
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Trump — just like the last time he was in office — is still pretending his bigoted anti-immigrant policies are only in place to ensure the US can rid itself of dangerous foreign criminals. But no one really believed that last time. And with his return to the Oval Office, any pretense of fairness or […]
If you hadn’t noticed, consolidated corporate media hasn’t been meeting the challenges of the current moment very well. There’s generally two reasons: one, these media outlets tend to reflect the interests of generally white, older, male, right wing ownership, which broadly thinks authoritarianism is a fair price to pay for some tax cuts, deregulation, and […]
The reemergence of measles, a disease once declared officially eradicated in the United States, didn’t start with the second Trump presidential term. It didn’t even begin with Trump’s first term. Instead, it started through an unholy alliance between far-right, often religious groups that have pitched the vaccines as either unnecessary or dangerous combined with a […]
You probably recall Ajit Pai, Trump’s first FCC boss. Pai took a mindless hatchet to broadband consumer protection and media consolidation limits with no shortage of scandal. Like that time he turned a blind eye as the telecom industry used dead and fake people to generate fake support for shitty policies (like killing net neutrality). […]
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just made a move that will protect bad patents at the expense of everyone else. In a memo released February 28, the USPTO further restricted access to inter partes review, or IPR—the process Congress created to let the public challenge invalid patents without having to wage million-dollar court battles. […]
For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes. This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy […]
The beatings will apparently continue, whether or not morale improves. The Trump Administration’s latest move from far-right towards open fascism involves, unsurprisingly, the gutting of more government components tasked with ensuring the federal government doesn’t treat civil rights like privileges only afforded to those who can afford them… or anyone else willing to lick the […]
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When the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed this week that senior White House officials had accidentally added him to their Yemen bombing planning session on Signal, he did something remarkable: he actually protected operational security better than the officials themselves did. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others now insist “Nobody was texting war plans,” the […]
When Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr was selected last November, I was quick to point out that the U.S. press was completely disinterested in what this meant for stuff like broadband consumer protection. Outlets at the time were quick to push quotes about what a “nice guy” Carr was. Few could be bothered to mention […]
Were it not so obviously the product of something nefarious, it would be entertaining to watch how private companies react to the Trump administration’s declaration of the end of all things DEI. The truth is that Trump’s reach for this sort of thing simply doesn’t extend past the federal government, legally speaking. That doesn’t mean […]
Imagine an internet where every website faced an impossible choice: either carefully review every single post before it goes live (making them essentially TV stations), or allow absolutely everything with zero moderation. This nightmare scenario wasn’t hypothetical — it was exactly what the infamous Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy ruling threatened to create, before Section 230 […]
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