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 […]
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover was supposed to be a slam dunk. It was famously revealed during his legal fight to get out of the deal that Elon was getting overwhelmed with people texting him, willing to casually offer hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars, in support of his takeover. But some of them […]
The FBI keeps telling anyone who will listen that it wants more responsibilities. Despite having failed to end organized crime or to even slightly diminish the power of international drug cartels, the FBI is always asking for more to do, especially if it means more funding and surveillance powers. It set itself up to be […]
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Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the legislature’s willingness to pass laws that clearly violate the First Amendment rights of websites. In the last three years, this is now the third law directed at website moderation practices to be thrown out by a district court as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. You’d think maybe […]
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a major U.S. regional telecom monopoly is looking to buy another major U.S. regional telecom monopoly in a massive transaction that both companies insist holds vast benefits for American consumers. This time it’s Verizon stating it intends to purchase Frontier in a massive $20 billion deal that […]
As we’ve covered the era of cord-cutting from traditional cable television packages and the rise of streaming platforms, one of the areas I have focused on is the world of live sports. And in the world of sports, the NFL is king. If you were to look up the most viewed broadcasts on any given […]
Over the past year, two dozen AI-related lawsuits and their myriad infringement claims have been winding their way through the court system. None have yet reached a jury trial. While we all anxiously await court rulings that can inform our future interaction with generative AI models, in the past few weeks we have suddenly been […]
You might recall how Gannett, which owns USAToday (and probably the half-assed remains of whatever’s left of your town’s local newspaper), spent much of last year mired in a major “AI” scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a good idea to use half-cooked automation to create fake journalists and lazy clickbait without telling […]
What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but they wouldn’t bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from a library? You’d probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the […]
Far too many states have decided to engage in censorship, urged on by an alarmingly large voting bloc that truly appears to be on the side of fascism, so long as that fascism appears to be on their side. Since this is, for the moment, still the United States of America, home of several enshrined […]
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We’ve explored multiple times now why Elon Musk is no friend to free speech. He has regularly threatened and sued others for their free speech, and indeed, he has an ever-growing list of such lawsuits. But every once in a while, he gets one right, and this time, he’s helped get a bad California law […]
Last November, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to consumers and third-party independent repair shops. But like so many […]
Techdirt has been reporting on the rotten state of academic publishing for more than ten years. Abuses include publishers willing to publish anything for a fee, and the sale of nonsense papers so that they can be used to bulk up an academic’s CV. But the world moves on, and Nature has a report about […]
Confirmation bias. It’s expensive. Just ask David Love, who has written out a $100,000 check to two drag performers for defamatory comments he made — more than once! — while supposedly serving his constituents in his position as a New Hampshire state rep. New Hampshire residents Robert Champion, who performs under the stage name Monique […]
Earlier this year, we discussed an example of the Streisand Effect in action when a large home builder, Taylor Morrison, petitioned the Arizona Board of Technical Registration to discipline Cy Porter, a home inspector who has built up a large online following by posting videos of his inspections. He does that to educate Arizona homebuyers […]
Can the fear of students using generative AI and the rise of questionable AI “checker” tools create a culture devoid of creativity? It’s a topic that is curiously one worth delving into a bit more deeply, in part because of something that happened this weekend. Earlier this year, we had a post by Alan Kyle […]
Having completely shit the bed in its handling of a recent ransomware act, the city of Columbus, Ohio has decided the person who must be silenced — and, hopefully punished — should be the person who informed city workers and residents their PII was available on the dark web. The messenger hasn’t been shot quite […]
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