Let’s just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they’re currently at the top of Trump’s shitlist. Prior to last month’s escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s possible ICE would […]
Remember last summer when everyone was freaking out about the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material? The New York Times ran a piece in July with the headline “A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet.” NCMEC put out a blog post calling the numbers an “alarming increase” and a “wake-up call.” […]
Trump’s going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his “be the despot you wish to see in the world” efforts. His top appointees are […]
Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone unlimited subscription for all languages. Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking a new language with confidence in no time. Get access […]
We called bullshit when Republicans tried to order websites to carry content. We’re calling bullshit now when Democrats are trying to do the same. We spent years explaining to politicians across both parties why the government can’t dictate how private platforms moderate content. During the Biden admin, GOP governors seemed most aggressive about trying to […]
We’ve long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband grants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn’t without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access. But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Raphael with a comment about Trump demanding billions from the IRS: This reminds me, Trump loves to rant and rave about how poorly and dysfunctionally the countries of origin of many migrant to the USA are run, and how bad things look like there. […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we looked at the future of net neutrality under the new interim FCC boss, and at how broadband monopolies continued to get money for networks they never fully deployed. Twitter got immunity from a banned user’s lawsuit thanks to Section 230, while dozens of human rights groups were […]
Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no. So the DOJ arrested him anyway. On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. […]
Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued. Courts disagreed. They recognized that […]
If you’ve been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to […]
We’ve been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it’s always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that’s worth keeping in mind today […]
A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about “border czar” Tom Homan’s ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they’d just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex […]
Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief. Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts […]
Keep your workspace neat and clutter-free with this premium magnetic cable management system. The latest version of Cable Blocks is almost twice as heavy as the original version with only a slight increase in size. Featuring three connectable silicone blocks, each double-weighted to hold cables in place securely, Cable Blocks prevent annoying cable drops and […]
Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something: I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just […]
According to new data from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That’s compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services. Of course BLS doesn’t explain why streaming video prices are […]
I’ve been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on […]
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 roundup of the latest news in online […]
We always knew the narrative was false. The administration’s insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow — just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison. For months, it’s been clear the intelligence doesn’t back the claims made by the deliberately stupid […]