Earlier this month we noted how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr thinks he can have it both ways. Carr desperately wants to please dear leader, and be part of Trump’s mindless quest to dismantle most U.S. corporate oversight and regulatory independence. Yet at the same time he wants to bully companies for not being racist […]
Fresh off of his Mother’s Day swim in a literal shit creek, RFK Jr. sat before House and Senate committees to answer questions about the impact of the proposed Trump budget on Health and Human Services (HHS), the cuts that have and are proposed further for HHS, and an explanation for why some programs are […]
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 […]
For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the […]
You might recall that the first Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to cover up the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d help Dish Network create a new 5G network out of vibes and twine. As we noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was […]
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey apparently thinks he gets to be editor-in-chief of every social media platform. In his latest attack on free speech rights, Bailey has announced a “first-in-the-nation rule” that would force social media companies to let users choose third-party content moderators rather than using the platforms’ own moderation systems. There’s just one […]
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Maybe Clearview got it all wrong. Scraping the web for tens of billions of records for free sounds like a good business model, but that model only works if you can keep the malodorous funk of your work from soaking into your reputation. Clearview’s tactics have gotten it banned, fined, and sued and it doesn’t […]
We’ve well documented by now how the AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive and pointless “business deals” ever conceived by modern man. The mergers resulted in bottomless layoffs, the closure of numerous valuable and popular brands and shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward executives shifted the company’s […]
Though we haven’t discussed the lawsuit between Palword creator PocketPair and Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. so far this year, this turd of a suit is still going on. To the uninitiated, Palworld has long been described as “Pokémon with guns”. Due to that, lots of folks thought that PocketPair would eventually get sued by […]
The federal government is using social media surveillance to target student visa holders living in the United States for online speech the Trump administration disfavors. The administration has initiated this new program, called “Catch and Revoke,” in an effort to revoke visas, and it appears to be a cross-agency collaboration between the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and […]
Behind effective accelerationism’s techno-optimist smile lies a familiar and dangerous impulse: subordinating human dignity to a technological imperative framed as inevitable. The effective accelerationism movement (e/acc) presents itself as an enlightened embrace of technological progress, especially artificial general intelligence. Led by figures like Guillaume Verdon and embraced by venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, the movement claims humanity faces a binary […]
The Trump administration is methodically implementing every element of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 censorship playbook, and Democratic leadership’s response is… to help them? Earlier today, Chuck Schumer and Richard Blumenthal joined MAGA Republicans to reintroduce the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) — a bill that Heritage itself has proudly proclaimed as central to its strategy […]
With the How to Hack from Beginner to Ethical Hacking Bundle, you’ll learn how to diagnose different kinds of cybersecurity attacks and how to defeat them. You’ll practice all the skills and techniques in real-time using an ethical hacking lab so you can put your learning to the test. Courses cover basic scripts and beginner […]
Our long national nightmare is over. More lives have been saved than have possibly ever lived. And that’s just since earlier this year. Using the same drug math that turns a couple of kilos into something with tens of millions of dollars of “street value,” Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly claimed Trump’s return to office […]
Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule providing portable Wi-Fi hotspots to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) […]
Look, folks, I have to admit that I’m running out of ways to open these posts about RFK Jr., so let’s just do this quickly. He’s a vaccine skeptic with a ton of bad ideas on public health policy, is letting the current measles outbreak expand for no good reason, has promised to have the […]
Buried in the House GOP’s massive budget reconciliation bill is a seemingly simple provision about AI regulation. The idea appears straightforward enough: stop states from regulating AI companies for the next decade. To do this, they quietly added language preventing states from regulating “artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems.” This is, […]
Support us on Patreon » We’ve written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last […]
It’s hardly a secret that Meta is an unpleasant company. That’s reflected both in terms of what happens behind closed doors, and its actions in the market. Some of its attempts to bully nations or even large economic blocks are well documented. But its threats outside Western markets are just as reprehensible, though less well […]
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