Last July the FCC announced it was moving forward with plans that should make unlocking your mobile phone easier than ever. According to the FCC announcement, the agency, with broad and bipartisan public support, has been working on new rules requiring that wireless carriers unlock customers’ mobile phones within 60 days of activation. Wireless carriers, trying […]
It happened again and it has to stop. Back in 2014, we talked about how a UK woman had trouble getting her passport approved because her middle name was “Skywalker” and the UK’s passport office for some reason thought that Disney would have to give its permission to have the passport approved. There is nothing […]
The writing was on the wall, or rather, on the City of Chicago’s Inspector General’s report: The CPD data examined by OIG does not support a conclusion that ShotSpotter is an effective tool in developing evidence of gun-related crime. Kind of a big problem when the tech was acquired specifically to address Chicago’s years-long acceleration […]
Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible job that academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish. We also mentioned there two large-scale archives that are trying to help, Sci-Hub and Anna’s Archive. Legal action by publishers against the former seems to have led to a halt to new items being added […]
If it can be accessed via the internet, it will be. That’s a fact too many entities learn far too late. Amazingly, this wholly expected outcome often comes as a surprise to entities with lots power, money, or expertise — the sort of people you’d think would have considered all possible outcomes before giving a […]
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I’ve covered telecom giants like AT&T for most of an adult life. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the company all but owns most state legislatures, who are happy to pass no limit of terrible, anti-consumer, anti-competitive legislation in exchange for a nice vacation trip or campaign contribution. AT&T lawyers and executives […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to a comment arguing that Cloudflare isn’t very important to the internet: I would like to hear your argument as to why DDoS mitigation is not an essential part of hosting a website in 2024. In second place, it’s an anonymous […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, some investors were getting sick of AT&T’s obsession with mergers, leading the company to think about dumping DirecTV. Nintendo was ramping up its war on ROM websites, while Congress was moving forward with plans to massively increase copyright trolling. The DOJ helped boost Ed Snowden’s memoir by suing […]
As we just talked about the joint lawsuit filed in Japan by Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld, we still don’t have all the details. But one of the strange things about the suit is that is not a copyright or trademark suit, which is what everyone […]
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 […]
MAGA world’s false belief that Joe Biden is “censoring conservatives” on social media may actually kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we mentioned earlier this week, while KOSA has already passed the Senate and advanced in a different form out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there were still big concerns among […]
We all hate data brokers. I mean, those of us who aren’t in law enforcement. Law enforcement tends to love data brokers because they allow investigators to collect a bunch of stuff (including location info) without having to whip up a subpoena or (the horror…) ask a judge to sign off on a warrant. Nope, […]
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Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won. After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, […]
Cable broadband giants like Charter Communications (Spectrum) and Comcast (Xfinity) generally don’t have to try very hard, because they enjoy a monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the U.S. That lack of competition traditionally results in high prices, spotty access, slow speeds, and some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any sector […]
Oh, these “law and order” types. What a joke. The self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate is Donald Trump, a convicted felon and open supporter of those who committed federal crimes during the January 6th raid of the Capitol building. And, of course, he’s earned the endorsement of another “law and order” figurehead, the Fraternal Order […]
The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline. 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic fatalities. And while tech advancements have made life safer for drivers and passengers, the same can’t be true for […]
Well, it took awhile, but we finally got here. Earlier this year, we discussed the game Palworld shortly after its release. It made our pages because the game is clearly partially inspired by the Pokémon series of video games, with some very stark differences. Similarities aside, the characters in the game are certainly different than […]
As California edges closer to enacting SB 1047, the state risks throwing the entire AI industry into turmoil. The bill has already cleared the legislative process and now sits on Governor Newsom’s desk, leaving him with a critical decision: veto this ill-conceived policy or sign away the U.S.’ future in AI. While Newsom appears skeptical […]
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