You might recall that, back in February, Senator Ron Wyden’s office revealed how a data broker named Near Intelligence had collected the data of women visiting abortion clinics, then sold that data (via a proxy) to right wing activists. Those activists then turned around and used it to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Jim Jordan demanding major ad companies explain why they won’t advertise on Truth Social: Far right: we support free speech and free markets!Businesses: We’ve decided it’s not in our best interest to advertise on this far-right website.Far right: Advertise there […]
And here we are! We’ve arrived at the end of our series of posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and […]
It is often said that “ignorance of the law is no defense.” But the corollary of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people can find them, read them and obey them. Secret laws, or laws that are hard to access, undermine the ability and thus the willingness of citizens to […]
The saga of former Hamilton County Deputy Daniel Wilkey is incredible, in all the worst senses of that word. A law enforcement officer simply doesn’t start doing these sorts of things at the beginning of their careers. The stuff detailed in multiple lawsuits (and 44 criminal charges!) against Deputy Wilkey shows someone who just kept […]
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 […]
Jim Jordan, who heads the House Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on “the weaponization of the federal government,” continues to use “weaponize the power of the federal government” to punish his enemies and support his friends. He’s done this before. Many times before. The latest seems particularly pathetic. You would have to be particularly wedded […]
On February 8, François-Philippe Champagne, the Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced Canada would ban devices used in keyless car theft. The only device mentioned by name was the Flipper Zero—the multitool device that can be used to test, explore, and debug different wireless protocols such as RFID, NFC, infrared, and Bluetooth. While it is […]
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There is something amazingly humorous in watching Elon Musk work his way ass-backwards and blindly to recreating (but much worse) the mostly-functional systems he destroyed blindly upon taking over Twitter. As we’ve been pointing out since basically day one, Musk never understood the whole verification concept. Early on, before he’d even taken over the company, […]
Countless sectors are rushing to implement “AI” (undercooked language learning models) without understanding how they work — or making sure they work. The result has been an ugly comedy of errors stretching from journalism to mental health care thanks to greed, laziness, computer-generated errors, plagiarism, and fabulism. NYC’s government is apparently no exception. The city […]
We’ve had a couple of posts about Ohio State University’s theories on trademark law over the past couple of years, with all of them centering on the school’s application, ultimately somehow granted by the USPTO, to trademark the word “the.” The whole thing was so absurd that even noted college football cheerleader Kirk Herbstreit thought […]
In a bizarre turn of events over the past few weeks, Spain’s high court ordered a ban on Telegram because some users (gasp!) used the tool to share copyright-protected content. The judge then suspended his own order a few days later after receiving a lot of criticism. Then, the judge asked the police to investigate […]
Last week we noted how AT&T was being rather cagey about the leak of the personal data of 73 million AT&T customers to the open web. The data, which includes customer social security addresses, names, phone numbers, and email addresses, first popped up back in 2021 after a hacker somehow obtained the data, encrypted it, […]
Remember Nick Sandmann? He was the dude who became something of a Rorschach Test for how much your political beliefs (in any direction) influence your views of a short video, when EVERYONE HAD OPINIONS on his MAGA-hat wearing encounter with a Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips. Also, everyone magically became experts in reading body language […]
Just recently, we covered a case involving a bogus raid of someone’s home based on nothing more than a ping from Apple’s ‘find my device’ feature. The Denver (CO) PD’s SWAT team raided the home of 77-year-old Ruby Johnson, destroying her garage door and some ceiling panels (?) in the process. The raid was predicated […]
It’s been a few years since I last did a “Let me rewrite that for you” post. This idea was first suggested by the brilliant press critic Dan Froomkin. Basically, when he finds a bit of journalistic malpractice, he rewrites it the way a good journalist would, to show why the original was so wrong. […]
The FCC has announced that it will vote to restore the net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump administration during an agency meeting on April 25. A reminder: net neutrality rules prevent giant telecoms from abusing their market power to disadvantage competitors and consumers alike. Either by degrading the performance of a service that […]
I’m going to kick this post off by stipulating to a couple of facts. First, the primary subject of this post is YouTuber Andrew Callaghan. Callaghan has both something of a checkered past as a YouTuber, having had his most recent channel briefly taken down over claims of spreading COVID-19 misinformation, but in which he’s […]
It appears the New Jersey Department of Health still believes the state’s residents are better served by giving law enforcement another way to dodge the Constitution. The Department of Health was sued two years ago by the state’s Office of the Public Defender (OPD). That lawsuit targeted the state’s peculiar practice of holding on to […]
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