Martial law still appears to be the plan. The rollout has been limited, but the wholly unnecessary deployment of military troops to California sent a message our performative president wanted to get across. Trump sent an even more explicit one days later, following up on DHS boss Kristi Noem’s quasi-declaration of war on this “democrat” […]
Techdirt has always made it very clear that broadband usage caps on fixed-line broadband are bullshit. The costly and confusing restrictions serve no legitimate technical function. They don’t help your ISP “manage congestion.” They exist simply as a way for giant companies like Comcast to nickel-and-dime captive customers in uncompetitive broadband markets. Market failure created […]
Sheriff Christina Corpus is on the cusp of being an ex-sheriff and the first sheriff removed from office in San Mateo County via a county board vote. But her term as sheriff started a lot more promisingly. Running as a reformer, Corpus won the primary and the job, defeating Carlos Bolanos, who had definitely done […]
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 […]
Washington State recently became the eighth U.S. state to pass new right to repair legislation making it cheaper and easier to repair technology you own. At this point, roughly one-third of Americans now live in a state where some form of right to repair law has been passed, usually with broad, bipartisan, overwhelming public support. […]
It’s been interesting to watch the current administration and its GOP backers contort themselves into logical pretzels to explain to Americans why their policies, which are clearly either steeped or tinged with racist elements, are not in fact racist. Immigration policies and practices that are conducted without such annoyances as due process are waved off […]
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey just sent threatening letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, claiming their AI chatbots violated Missouri’s consumer protection laws. The crime? When asked to rank presidents on antisemitism, some of the AIs had the temerity to suggest Donald Trump might not be great on that front. Yes, you read that […]
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Like far too many states in the current Trump era, Oklahoma has also decided the Constitution is meaningless and that whatever the government wants, it can have. In this case, it means mandating every school classroom contain a Bible that must be “taught” from, as well as expanding the concept of “social studies” to include […]
Have I mentioned lately that the U.S. no longer has functional federal consumer protection and corporate oversight thanks to Donald Trump? And how that should probably be more of a story across journalism? Last fall you might recall that the FTC created a popular new rule that barred corporations from making it annoying or difficult […]
I’ve been an MLB.TV evangelist for some time now. My deep love for the game of baseball has led me to subscribe to baseball’s streaming service, still probably the best in sports, for over a decade now. While the local blackouts are still a nuisance, I really do love the ability to stream almost any […]
It’s not every day you watch a company faceplant so theatrically in public, but Cloud Innovation’s latest stunt deserves a slow clap. Cloud Innovation, which you’d probably never heard of unless you’re neck-deep in African IP registry battles (stay tuned), just managed to make a legal play whose end result should be calling a lot […]
I recently sat through this hour-long interview between New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel. It was honestly a somewhat hypnotic experience for me. And on reflection, deeply disturbing. Not because Thiel said anything overtly monstrous—quite the opposite. He was thoughtful, articulate, intellectually sophisticated. He demonstrated genuine insight into technological stagnation, political decay, and civilizational risk. […]
This week, Elon Musk’s Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, responding with conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and for a brief period telling people to call it “MechaHitler.” The incident perfectly illustrates why Alex Komoroske’s manifesto about the dangers of centralized AI, which we ran less than a month ago, has been making waves. When […]
Lawmakers seem to think they’re capable of solving every perceivable social media problem via legislation. Sometimes, the intents are pure but the execution is lacking. In many more cases — especially recently — the intent is to harm social media companies with legislation, all while pretending it’s about protecting “free speech” or the “children” or […]
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For months, the DOJ has insisted to US courts that it has no jurisdiction over the people it rendered to Salvadoran detention facilities. But when the UN came asking, El Salvador told a very different story: these detainees are “exclusively” under US jurisdiction and legal responsibility. The contradiction is so blatant it’s almost insulting to […]
Trump recently launched a “wireless phone service,” which as we mentioned, isn’t so much a real phone service as it is a quick licensing agreement and a lazy rebranding of other services. He’s also exploiting the presidency by launching a vast array of new, clumsily branded Trump home goods, including a new Trump-branded Instantpot. If […]
Nestle certainly hasn’t been shy about engaging in aggressive trademark enforcement in the past, but this one is something different. We’ve already covered several stories in which a person or company has attempted to trademark the name of a city for a particular market designator. Not use the name of the city in a larger […]
In Trump’s eyes, anything that doesn’t make white people appear to be the saviors of the world is something that should be buried. Whatever the phrase “fake news” won’t make go away is subject to seemingly daily government edicts that declare any recognition of racial diversity or America’s racist past (and present) to be un-American […]
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