I’ve been warning people since the beginning of the year to expect the Trump regime to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government and now we’re seeing exactly that play out. Trump is facing a bunch of pushback over the Jeffrey Epstein nonsense, so he needed some big new distraction quickly. Director of […]
In a lead up to the last Presidential Election, one of the lies circulated by the Trump camp to befuddle plebs and rubes was that Trump 2.0 was going to be “serious about antitrust reform.” You didn’t have to look far for some baseless claims in the press (or by supposed experts like Matt Stoller) […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about the behavior of Grok and LLMs in general: LLMs are just bias engines. That’s literally what they do. That’s how they work. They find patterns (biases) and replicate them. Not all biases are bad. Sometimes you want a machine […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we saw a new breed of scammers start abusing the DMCA on YouTube, and a new evolution of copyright trolls abusing the DMCA to take down social media accounts and demanding money to reinstate them. We also saw the debate following the Harper’s letter reach new heights of […]
Back when the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out, to the surprise of nobody intelligent, fraud schemes around vaccination cards began to pop up. Groups, including some doctors, were illegally handing out vaccination cards without actually vaccinating anyone. One of those doctors, according to charges brought by the DOJ, was Michael Kirk Moore Jr. in […]
Donald Trump admitted yesterday that he called Rupert Murdoch and demanded the Wall Street Journal kill its story about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. When Murdoch couldn’t deliver, Trump promised to sue the media company and gleefully looked forward to putting Murdoch on the witness stand. Update: Just as this story was going live, it […]
This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological […]
The DHS has been hyping assault stats for weeks, making it sound like there’s an actual war on ICE officers. The reality was much more underwhelming: the 700% increase touted in press releases reflected a mere 69 more assaults on officers than during the same period in 2024. Hardly worth remarking on, especially since ICE […]
We’ve written before about how attacks on free speech often start with unpopular speakers who lack political power. That’s why a new dissenting opinion from Trump-appointed Judge Paul Matey should set off alarm bells for anyone who cares about the First Amendment. In a case involving an imam’s immigration status, Judge Matey penned a remarkable […]
Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle has 10 courses to help equip you with the skills to design, program, and implement microcontroller-based solutions. Gain hands-on experience with Arduino, PIC, and ESP32, master C programming for embedded applications, and […]
The Trump administration’s maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it. To make things even worse, […]
When last we checked with CBS/Paramount, company executives had just paid Trump $16 million in bribe money to settle a completely baseless lawsuit, effectively purchasing regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. It was arguably one of the biggest acts of corporate cowardice in recent memory, resulting in many CBS journalists and executives […]
Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption […]
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 […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data. ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of […]
Even during the (relatively more sane) first Trump administration, it was clear there just weren’t enough dangerous criminals residing in this country illegally to back up Trump’s bloated, fact-free “invasion” claims. Statistics continually show migrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens while doing other useful things like paying taxes and providing an incredibly reliable workforce. […]
Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train. Yes, there are the big name folks who everyone knows about and who didn’t really surprise anyone—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, […]
Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, […]
T-Mobile has long kissed the ass of the Trump regime. You might recall when the company wanted its competition-eroding merger with Sprint approved, it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump hotel properties. It hired Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski not long after he publicly mocked a child with Down Syndrome. It worked with Trump […]
Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone we’ve witnessed an unprecedented wave of disruption across these platforms. Government workers, locked out of their jobs, struggled to […]
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