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 roundup of the latest news in online […]
Despite all the recent hype about “AI,” the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism). We’ve already […]
A new bill sponsored by Sen. Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Britt (R-AL), Sen. Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Murphy (D-CT) would require AI chatbots to verify all users’ ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. That might sound reasonable at first, but behind […]
The Court of Justice of the EU—likely without realizing it—just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content. Obviously, for decades now, we’ve been talking about issues related to intermediary liability, and what standards are appropriate there. I am an […]
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A recent shooting involving a former Afghani US counter-terrorism asset who worked with the CIA (!!!) has become the tragedy the Trump administration apparently needed to go from “consistently racist” to “openly racist.” The wounding of two National Guard troops led directly to the president spending the holiday doing what he always does on holidays: […]
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a “phone company” was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just […]
Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States. “The Tates will be free, Trump is […]
First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his […]
Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear — on more than one occasion — that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations. That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the […]
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If you’ve been following along, you know why independent voices matter right now. The administration has been attacking institutions left and right. News orgs, law firms, philanthropic funders, universities, you name it. Many are capitulating. But not us. Someone needs to step up and keep doing this work without flinching and without compromising. That’s where […]
Last election season you might recall that the Trump administration lied repeatedly and pretended to be really interested in reining in corporate power and shoring up antitrust reform. And while this line was propped up by a lot of useful idiots (like Matt Stoller) who insisted there was common cause to be made with fascists, […]
I suppose we might all be tiring of the whole “the leopard you voted for eventually comes to eat your face” cliche at this point, but when the allegory fits you have to use it. And in this case, it fits so well that it would be comical if not for just how heartbreaking this […]
One can never predict how a court will rule after oral argument. But I do fear that in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment we are on the precipice of getting yet another major copyright decision from the Supreme Court where the words “First Amendment” are not uttered even once—unless, of course, someone like Justice […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, […]
Last week I wrote about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is pushing a rule change that would effectively neuter the inter partes review (IPR) system that reviews already granted patents to make sure they weren’t granted by mistake. Patent tolls and other abusers of the patent system have been screaming about this system […]
For weeks, we’ve been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to “kill” Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting […]
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