We noted earlier this week how Trump had unsurprisingly picked Brendan Carr to head the FCC. We also pointed out how Carr’s “policies” are utterly indistinguishable from the interests of unpopular telecom and media giants like Comcast and AT&T. He’s going to demolish whatever’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, […]
If this sounds familiar, sadly, it is. Three years ago, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court somehow arrived at the conclusion that tasing someone soaked in gasoline — an act of escalation that not only killed the suicidal person officers were supposed to rescuing but also burned the entire residence to the ground — was not […]
Whatever your politics, there can be no arguing that the election of Donald Trump once more to the highest office in the land has served as a permission slip for some of the worst people in the country to behave badly. We’re already seeing this in all sorts of ways, from incel fuckwits telling women […]
Alfred Robert (A.R.) Quinton was an English watercolor artist, famed for his stunning paintings of British landscapes and villages. Following along a professional artist with more than 35 years of experience, the Learn to Paint Course will guide you through painting A.R. Quinton’s Scenes with watercolor and enhancing them using pastel pencils. From the sky […]
Elon Musk’s ExTwitter has filed an important First Amendment lawsuit against California over its unconstitutional law regulating deepfakes. This follows Musk’s earlier successful challenge to the state’s social media “transparency” law. Yes, sometimes Elon Musk actually does file good First Amendment cases that help protect free speech. I’m just as amazed as anyone, but it’s […]
We’re excited to announce the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game: One Billion Users. In this fast-paced and entertaining card game, you take on the role of a social media mogul competing to build the most successful social network. We’ve spent much of this year designing, testing, and refining the game […]
We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of […]
One of the most frustrating aspects in the ongoing conversation around the preservation of older video games, also known as cultural output, is the collision of IP rights and some publishers’ unwillingness to both continue to support and make available these older games and their refusal to release those same games into the public domain […]
Cops like to pretend they’re winning the war on sex trafficking. Whether or not there’s enough sex trafficking to justify law enforcement expenditures is, at best, still an open question. And most sex trafficking operations tend to end with the arrest of the people they’re supposed to be saving: the sex workers. Then there are […]
Earlier this year, California passed SB 976, yet another terrible and obviously unconstitutional bill with the moral panicky title “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act.” The law restricts minors’ access to social media and imposes burdensome requirements on platforms. It is the latest in a string of misguided attempts by California lawmakers to […]
Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation’s top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there’s zero daylight between Carr’s policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of “regulatory capture” as you’re going to […]
Earlier this year, the city of Fontana, California paid a $900,000 settlement to resident Thomas Perez Jr. because a bunch of Fontana PD “investigators” spent 17 hours torturing Perez into confessing to a crime that hadn’t been committed… by anybody. After discovering his father missing, Perez Jr. — who suffers from several health and mental […]
The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt […]
Elon Musk’s recent claims that corporate boycotts of social media platforms are criminal reek of hypocrisy, given his own eagerness to join the #DeleteFacebook boycott just a few years ago. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly supported the #DeleteFacebook campaign, even going so far as to remove the official SpaceX and […]
Culminating a deal that’s been rumored about for the better part of the last twenty years, Dish Network and DirecTV recently consummated a new merger in a doomed bid to try and remain solvent and relevant. The deal involved DirecTV acquiring Dish for one dollar, in addition to $9.75 billion in Dish’s debt. The deal was […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with some pushback on the language we used to describe Marc Andreessen’s hypocrisy and misrepresentation of reality: Stop giving terrible people the benefit of the doubt The word you’re looking for is lie, as in ‘When someone says something that they […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Biden was spreading myths about Section 230, Microsoft was giving the go-ahead to California’s new privacy law, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Google v. Oracle case about APIs and copyright. A copyright troll lawyer faced sanctions and arrest over some courtroom shenanigans, Universal Music was […]
We’ve talked several times about GOG in the past. The video game storefront was born over a decade ago, originally built on a platform of making older games compatible with modern systems combined with its insistence that any game sold on its storefront be DRM free. In the years since, GOG began to also be […]
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 […]
For better or worse, jawboning has been a hot topic recently, and it’s unlikely that interest will fade any time soon. Jawboning, in broad strokes, is when the government pressures a third party to make that third party chill the speech of another instead of going after the speech directly. Because the First Amendment says […]
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