President Trump’s highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government’s warrantless mass spying power must be reformed. Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues. Section […]
Support us on Patreon » The concept of “enshittification” has helped illuminate why companies and their products so often get worse over time, but the causes of this process are complex and multifaceted. In his new book Incorruptible, author Eric Ries presents a related but contrasting take on how good companies go bad, and how to […]
In the last three months I’ve had people forward me four separate examples of a CEO losing his or her mind over AI. What’s been striking to me is the similarity in each case: It would be an “all hands” email in which the CEO talks up how amazing LLM tools are and saying that […]
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Trump has loved “travel bans” since his first term in office. It has nothing to do with making America safer or better and everything to do with making America whiter. People were opposed to Trump’s blanket bans all the way back in 2017, when the heads of tech companies managed to collectively grow enough spine […]
So last week we noted how Meta’s AI support assistant doled out access to high-profile Instagram accounts after hackers simply asked for it. Outside of using a VPN to match the account holder’s region, the hackers didn’t have to do literally anything of note to convince the Meta AI chatbot to provide access, suggesting like […]
Back in March of 2025, when Elon Musk was spearheading his bullshit DOGE non-agency and running around cutting funding to all kinds of government programs under the notion that they were a blatant waste of taxpayer money, the cuts were so obviously haphazard and ill-informed that it was making everyone’s head spin. Then, after cuts […]
In totally sane and not-crazy anti-pornography activism news, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) considers online pornography a national security threat. This may be the stupidest thing NCOSE has ever claimed in its decades’ long fascistic fight against sexuality. The group’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, wrote for the Washington […]
Scott Pelley just gave an interview to the NY Times that reveals two damning things at once: Bari Weiss tried to get him to falsely describe a shooting victim as driving toward the officer who killed her — and Pelley had already bent over backwards to make protesters look as bad as possible before she […]
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There’s hardly anyone left in the Justice Department that has any deeper desire than just giving Trump what he wants. The few lawyers Trump didn’t purge resigned soon after it became clear the DOJ would be little more than personification of Trump’s vengeful whims. Lawyers with decades of experience were replaced with Trump loyalists, former […]
A quick refresher: There was originally $42.5 billion in taxpayer-funded broadband grants headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents). Last election season, Republicans (with Ezra Klein’s help) made a giant stink about how this program, the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering a theory about ICE’s addiction to masks: Let me suggest a different reason… Let’s say that all of those J6 dumbfucks who livestreamed their crimes, and who now have received pardons for acting like trailer trash are looking to start […]
Full disclosure: this post is going to pose way more questions than answers. That’s because the story of the Tomb Raider remake being produced by Crystal Dynamics and its inclusion of an AI disclosure on Steam makes no sense to me. So, let’s start at the beginning. Crystal Dynamics is making an updated version of […]
ICE never needed officers to disguise themselves with masks and strip themselves of identification before Trump took office for the second time. What ICE is doing now isn’t what ICE was doing during Trump’s first term, even though it’s the same hateful bigot sitting behind the Resolute Desk he thinks should be covered in gold […]
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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]
Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you’re not […]
It’s time you get up to speed with Ruby on Rails! This full-stack web framework is all about letting you build applications quickly. Its elegance, flexibility, and speed make Ruby on Rails a popular choice for businesses, so taking the time to master it can pay huge dividends down the road. In this course, you’ll […]
MAGA got itself a martyr when Charlie Kirk was killed. The “violent left,” etc. as they say. One of it’s own practiced what he preached and his life was ended prematurely by someone practicing what Kirk preached. I mean, this is a direct quote of Charlie Kirk: Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns […]
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