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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.

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem compared antifa to the transnational criminal group MS-13, Hamas and the Islamic State group in October 2025, she equated a nonhierarchical, loosely organized movement of antifascist activists with some of the world’s most violent and organized militant groups. “Antifa is just as dangerous,” she said. It’s a sweeping claim that ignores crucial distinctions […]

Donald Trump, who presents himself as a free speech champion, sure loves suing the media for their First Amendment-protected speech. CNN is a favorite target of his though these lawsuits don’t do particularly well. Back in 2022, he sued CNN for calling Trump’s lies about the results of the 2020 election “The Big Lie.” Two […]

“Flock Safety” may be the brand name, but this company’s earliest sales successes had nothing to with safety. Its target audience was homeowners associations and people running gated communities in upscale neighborhoods. The purpose of the cameras (and, eventually, the attached license plate reader tech) was to make sure people who were plenty safe already […]

StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today’s most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you’ll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life. Whether you’re looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses […]

Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart. In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, […]

After four years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, and a year after the app was to be banned from app stores via an act of Congress, TikTok remains widely available. The Trump administration insists they hashed out a deal with Bytedance to sell the app to Trump’s billionaire buddies […]

There are lots of ways things play out when it comes to fans of multiplayer video games building out their own host servers to play them. Sometimes fans set those servers up simply because they can do it better and more securely than the publisher… and then the publisher takes them down because of intellectual […]

You’ve heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there’s a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it. This story comes via a […]

When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”. Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television. He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that […]

Let’s say, hypothetically, you want to gerrymander some congressional districts to help your party win more seats. Here are a couple of options: Which do you choose? If you said “obviously option 1,” congratulations, you understand the law better than the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. Because the Trump administration just got legally smacked down […]

The Complete Superstar Photographer Bundle has 11 courses to help take your photography skills to the next level. Two course start you off with the basics of photography and how to take advantage of your DSLR camera. Other courses focus on lighting and posing techniques, how to photograph landscapes, food, portraits, and groups, night photography […]

This won’t matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation’s allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government. But it […]

Last week we noted how the BBC has been tripping over itself to apologize to Donald Trump for some edits made to a BBC documentary. Admittedly the edits weren’t the best idea; they effectively cobbled together two different parts of Trump’s January 6 speech 54 minutes apart not to misrepresent, but to make it more […]

It was only a few weeks ago that we wrote about a trademark dispute in the UK between a deli shop owner and a book publisher over the use of the word “sabzi.” Kate Attlee is the founder of Sabzi, the name of her deli, while Bloomsbury published a cookbook by Yasmin Khan called Sabzi: […]

Amazon Ring’s upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned […]

This isn’t even the end of the fallout, but it’s a lot of it. A small Kansas town that basically conspired to silence local journalists who were asking too many questions continues to face the consequences of its actions. That’s a relief. Far too often, power gets abused and the justice system sides with the […]

A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are “very likely infringing,” which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem. The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in […]

Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security. This administration pretends everything is a “war,” even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to […]