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 […]
Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation. There’s a certain desperation creeping […]
Early last year, when America’s measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in […]
Flock Safety doesn’t seem to care about anyone. Not its customers, not those captured by its cameras, not even the legislators trying to find a balance between safety and privacy. Flock started out by pitching its cameras — with built-in license plate readers — to the kind of people with money to blow on unproven […]
It seems hardly a day goes by when another state doesn’t try to keep young people off the Internet. These attempts not only violate their First Amendment rights to interact with lawful speech, but everyone else’s as well, because the things platforms would need to do to comply with these laws inevitably impinge on everyone […]
In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read “Facebook: against every unjust.” Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power. That contrast […]
The Luminar Neo Bundle includes a one time purchase of the software, an introductory course on how to use it, and 6 add-ons. Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different […]
History is written by the winners, they say. But it can also be written by losers. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In response, he told everyone the election had been rigged, if not actually stolen. He said some of this to his faithful MAGA followers the morning the election results were to be certified. […]
There’s just an exhaustingly long list of reasons why the $111 billion planned acquisition of Warner Brothers by Larry Ellison and Paramount is very, very bad. Bad for consumers, bad for labor, bad for journalism, bad for democracy, and bad for markets. For one thing, it’s financed by a bunch of murderous overseas autocrats. The […]
While we’ve focused a great deal on RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines in America, it’s worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We’ve already discussed Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, […]
There were some rumors earlier this week that, as it was facing a lot of pushback in court, in the media, and even among (a few) fellow Republicans in Congress, Donald Trump was going to drop his blatantly unconstitutional, illegal, and corrupt $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA insurrectionists. And now it’s… sorta officially dead… […]
Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison hired blogtroller Bari Weiss to turn what was left of CBS News into a right wing safe space for oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu. If the patient died during surgery, I don’t think Ellison would lose any sleep. But I do think Ellison hoped that Weiss could at least […]
Discover the innovative Smart Car Kit, a versatile robot equipped with 4WD omnidirectional movement, FPV (First Person View), app-based remote control, RGB lighting, and a durable metal frame. Powered by an Arduino Uno-compatible main board, this all-in-one kit delivers multi-functional capabilities, including obstacle avoidance, line tracking, IR remote control, face detection, gesture recognition, voice recognition, […]
The Supreme Court’s conservatives have spent years systematically dismantling the Voting Rights Act, but the last seven months have been something else — a rapid-fire series of emergency docket rulings, procedural maneuvers, and carefully worded opinions that, taken together, make it effectively impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. Not difficult. Impossible. And Justice Alito, in particular, […]
404 Media reports that hackers were simply able to ask Meta AI for access to high-profile Instagram accounts, and the AI agent simply… well… obliged: “Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with […]
When Russia kicked off its war of aggression against neighboring Ukraine for completely made up reasons, there were global efforts to isolate Russia as a result. Many of those efforts have waned in the years since, unfortunately. You may recall that there was a small effort among video game companies and platforms to deny sales […]
After public outrage, California lawmakers are moving closer to exempting open-source operating systems from the sweeping age-bracketing regime mandated by last year’s Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043). Nonetheless, the current bill still jeopardizes internet users’ speech, privacy, and security. While the open source exemption, if passed, would improve the law, the remaining amendments proposed […]
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