Creating surveillance backdoors for law enforcement is just asking for trouble. They inevitably become targets for hackers and foreign adversaries. Case in point: the US just discovered its wiretapping system has been compromised for who knows how long. This should end the encryption backdoor debate once and for all. The law enforcement world has been […]
The EU Commission is the definition of insanity. It has tried for years to convince all EU members the best way to fight crime is to undermine the security and privacy of millions of EU residents. And, for years, it has failed to make an argument capable of convincing a majority of the 27 European […]
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How quickly do you think we’d be having Congressional hearings about “election interference” if Mark Zuckerberg so much as posted a “Harris/Walz” lawn sign in front of his house? Yet, Elon Musk is now directly tweaking the site he owns to push his favored political candidate, even seizing people’s accounts to promote Trump. One of […]
Though Republicans are the worse of the two offenders, neither Democrats nor Republicans have cared all too much about preventing media consolidation. As a result, U.S. journalism and media has increasingly fallen into the hands of a handful of wealthy corporations and billionaires; and it’s routinely reflected in terrible journalism (especially political journalism) and bumbling […]
It’s not just the Rankin County (MS) Sheriff’s Office being scrutinized by the US DOJ. While that’s the main concern following the conviction of six deputies of a self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” who spent hours brutalizing and torturing two black men, the rest of Mississippi apparently isn’t in great shape either. This recently-released report [PDF] details […]
In the process of enshittification, it seems that the process will not stop until the customer has been well and truly pissed off. It was merely earlier this year that we discussed Amazon taking its Prime Video offering, after gobbling up a huge number of adopters, and suddenly introducing everyone’s favorite thing about television: advertisements! […]
You know how little kids sometimes play a game where they claim they’ve changed their name, and you can no longer blame them for what they did under their previous name? You know how that never actually works? Well, about that… Elon seems to be trying a corporate version of that trick in Australia, and […]
Cheap thrills? Perhaps not so much. A report from Joseph Cox for 404 Media not only points out there’s no such thing as a free meal AI-generated deepfake nude, but that this is exactly the sort of thing Vice Media would have been all over if it hadn’t been burnt to the ground by string […]
You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across […]
Hillary Clinton has no clue how Section 230 works. She seems to think that repealing it will make websites more likely to remove misinformation (which is backwards). But what law do we need repealed to stop Clinton from spreading misinformation about Section 230 (and social media)? In April, we wrote about some comments from Hillary […]
Lina Khan has most certainly faced some growing pains as the head of the FTC, occasionally filing some undercooked cases and raising the hackles of some staff (some grumbling about real missteps, some simply grumbling about reform). At the same time, she’s the closest the U.S. has gotten to a competent antitrust enforcer any time […]
This week, both top spots on the insightful side were taken by similar comments from That One Guy. In first place, it’s a comment about the subject of free speech in the Vice Presidential debate: Broken finger vs Severed arm I mean, neither came out looking great with regards to the first amendment but whereas […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, a big new study showed once and for all that net neutrality did not hurt broadband investment, while telcos were teaming up with Rupert Murdoch to lob antitrust accusations at Google, because apparently Comcast felt qualified to give lectures on monopoly power. A court said the FCC can’t […]
A couple of years back, we discussed a win in the courts for the U.S. Dairy Export Council against both French and Swiss consortiums that had attempted to trademark the word “Gruyere” in America. Both of those groups were jointly attempting to get a PDO/PGI trademark for the term, arguing that gruyere cheese should only […]
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 […]
Going back many, many years, we’ve written about how the public narrative that the large social media networks engage in “anti-conservative bias” in their content moderation policies is bullshit. Because it is. And now we have yet another scientific study to prove this. The first time we covered it was in response to a ridiculous […]
The Detroit PD is a case study in misuse of powerful surveillance tech. The department is notable for being involved in no less than three wrongful arrests, due to misuse/abuse of its facial recognition tech. The city has already paid out a $300,000 settlement in one of these cases. Worse, two of the three cases […]
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In recent weeks there has been a flurry of laws, regulatory proposals, and lawsuits regarding “deepfakes,” along with the usual rising levels of concern in the media about how the world won’t be able to handle this. For some perspective, the Pessimist’s Archive just published a story highlighting how a nearly identical fear gripped the […]
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