It’s finally time! Once again it took us a little while to get through all the entries this year, but we’ve now selected the winners in the latest installment of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! As usual, we’ve got winners in six categories. Plus, at the end, we’ve got some honorable […]
With RFK Jr. and his version of HHS entirely out to lunch on the ongoing measles issue in America, it’s been left to states and local medical professionals to try to figure out how to do combat with one of the most infectious diseases on the planet. In a sane world with a real, big […]
When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement. “I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone […]
Last June, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld a lower court’s ruling declaring a Louisiana law mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools to be a violation of the Constitution. This decision made immediate sense, given that courts elsewhere in the nation (including the US Supreme Court) had repeatedly ruled that laws […]
We’ve been covering Australia’s under-16 social media ban since before it went into effect, first noting the confusion and obvious implementation problems as pretty much everyone realized it was a total mess, and then documenting how the ban was actively harming kids with disabilities by cutting them off from critical support communities. None of this […]
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Black Lives Matter. All Cops Are Bastards. These are not temporary catchphrases. These are universal and forever. And leave it to a cop to ensure we never forget either of these concepts. A foot pursuit that ended in the shooting of Connecticut resident Dyshan Best would otherwise just be a footnote in cop history if […]
When he’s not busy trampling free speech, crushing the First Amendment, and destroying media consolidation and consumer protection standards, Brendan Carr has other hobbies. Like helping the telecom industry patriotically sell a brutal coming wave of new layoffs caused by the kind of industry consolidation he regularly rubber stamps. Carr recently began circulating plans for […]
There is an old axiom you will have heard of before: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we wanted to boil this down to a math equation, it might be described as something like: 0 < any positive integer. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, typically, until you add […]
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 […]
We’ve all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You’re right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples’ locations, new reporting has confirmed. For years, the internet advertising industry has been […]
There’s a concept in economics known as Goodhart’s Law, often summarized as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The idea, originally about monetary policy, has proven remarkably durable across domains. When you attach high enough stakes to a single metric, people stop trying to accurately reflect reality and […]
Shortly after Trump took office for a second time, his administration made it clear that it felt constitutional rights were merely privileges it would extend only to those who fully supported whatever the hell the administration happened to be doing. At the time, the administration was not only engaged in a full-blown, bigoted war against […]
Discover the innovative Zeus Smart Car Kit, a versatile robot equipped with 4WD omnidirectional movement, FPV (First Person View), app-based remote control, RGB lighting, and a durable metal frame. Powered by an Arduino Uno-compatible main board, this all-in-one kit delivers multi-functional capabilities, including obstacle avoidance, line tracking, IR remote control, face detection, gesture recognition, voice […]
As we wrote just yesterday, the defamation trial brought by seven Adams County, Ohio deputies against rapper Afroman was going about as well for the officers as their original botched raid on his home. Today we can report the inevitable conclusion: the jury sided entirely with Afroman, clearing him of all liability after just hours […]
Brunchlords can only fail upward. It’s physics. Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to get as much as $550 million in compensation and tax reimbursement as the company prepares to be acquired by Larry Ellison’s CBS/Paramount: “Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is set to receive $34.2 million in cash severance; $517.2 […]
It was mere days ago that we were discussing an interesting lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, challenging RFK Jr. and HHS for violating the Administrative Procedures Act in making changes to the CDC’s ACIP panel and immunization schedules. If you’re not up on what the APA is and does, the […]
We’ve been following the saga of Afroman (real name Joseph Foreman) and the Adams County Sheriff’s Office for a few years now, and I’m delighted to report that the defamation trial is currently underway and it is delivering everything you could possibly hope for, starting with this absolutely astounding suit that he’s wearing in court […]
Obviously, this headline owes everything to The Onion, which generated this masterpiece years ago: And so it is here: someone you’d never think would oppose fascism and bigotry deciding to speak up, despite knowing he could have just kept his head down and maintained his position as Sheriff For Life in Polk County, Florida. I’m […]
EFF announced last week that it has stepped in to defend yet another anonymous Jehovah’s Witness critic from having their identity exposed through bogus copyright claims. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society — the organizational arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses — has sent DMCA subpoenas to both Google and Cloudflare seeking information to unmask […]