Marine vet Stephen Lara’s lawsuit against the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) and forfeiture abuse in general in that state has paid off. Not just for Lara, whose $86,900 was returned to him shortly after he filed this lawsuit, but for all residents of the state, who are now less likely to see cops walk off […]
For a long while there it was good to be a lumbering U.S. cable monopoly. Companies like Comcast and Charter pretty much enjoyed a monopoly on broadband at “next generation” speeds (over 100 Mbps) in most towns. So while they were losing traditional cable TV customers to streaming (or piracy), they could still extract their […]
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 […]
Sycophants do sycophantic things, that much is known. But the level to which newly-minted FCC chairman Brendan Carr has voluntarily debased himself purely to achieve his current station is extraordinary. We knew during the campaign season that Carr was eager to be America’s chief censor of any content the Dear Leader disliked. That the same […]
News moves fast… While this post was getting finalized came news that Marko Elez has resigned after his racist tweets were found and publicized. Nevertheless, the point made herein still stands. Amidst all the news today is news suggesting that Musk and his lackeys have had their access to the federal government’s payment systems limited. […]
A mirror returns exactly what stands before it. No amount of wealth can bribe it, no volume of threats can intimidate it, no technological innovation can reprogram it. A billionaire’s reflection shows the same unaltered truth as a beggar’s. This fundamental democracy of reflection—this absolute fidelity to physical reality—makes mirrors uniquely immune to power. They […]
In 1872 California enacted a law declaring that “every one who offers to the public to carry persons, property, or messages, excepting only telegraphic messages, is a common carrier of whatever he thus offers to carry.” In 2022 the Republican National Committee sued Google, alleging that, by shunting GOP fundraising emails into Gmail spam folders, […]
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Remember when Donald Trump and the MAGA universe wanted to “lock her up!” over Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server for State Department business? Let’s be clear, we found Clinton’s use of a personal email server, which she claimed to have used “for convenience”, deeply problematic but pretty clearly not criminal. And, as […]
It’s understandably not going to get the same attention as the dismantling of numerous government agencies at the hands of rich unelected manbabies, but the Trump administration is also taking aim at all the promising parts of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Especially as it relates to broadband. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained […]
It’s very rare to see a cop charged with any crime in a shooting, much less charged with murder. It’s even rarer to see a cop convicted. It’s been happening a bit more recently, but that may just be recency bias now that more of the country is actively involved in combating police violence. In […]
It has long been clear that the GOP, as it is today, has a death wish for our Constitutional order, but that’s a subject for another post. What’s more relevant is that, at this point, one could easily construe that Democrats would like our Constitution to die too. In part because of how enfeebled they […]
It’s 2025 and we’re still stuck with legislators who wish it was still 1725. Or possibly any year with B.C appended. Clearly unconstitutional laws are being crafted with alarming frequency these days. Those that aren’t trying to legislate morality or criminalize sexual preferences are trying to infuse government entities with state-approved religion. A lot of […]
Back in 2022, former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends launched a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization’s launch events didn’t go particularly well: a “trust in news” event that somehow didn’t see the problem with platforming and amplifying millionaire propagandist Tucker […]
Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk’s DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury’s payment infrastructure — a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually. It seems reasonable to call it one of the most dangerous […]
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There are twenty-four hours in a day. This isn’t a matter of political opinion or technological disruption—it’s as immutable as the fact that two plus two equals four. No amount of genius, innovation, or reality distortion can create a twenty-fifth hour. This basic truth, so obvious it seems almost foolish to state, exposes something profound […]
SpaceX’s Starlink service can be a big improvement for those completely out of range of broadband access. But contrary to what many Republicans and c-tier comedians turned conspiracy podcasters imply, Starlink is not magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats. Including the increasingly unhinged behavior and far right political alliances of its conspiratorial CEO. […]
At this point, we have built up enough stories on bad YouTube takedowns to fill up a small library. Because of a combination of automated systems that are spectacularly imperfect, the desire by some bad actors to abuse and commit fraud using the notice and takedown system, and a general deference towards the alleged copyright […]
As recently noted, New York State now has a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn’t much like that, but their efforts to kill the law, first passed in 2021, fell apart when the Supreme Court refused to hear […]
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