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 […]
Back in May, we talked about a change that Nintendo made to its EULA that essentially amounted to “We’ll brick your console if we don’t like how you use it.” Now, Nintendo will tell you that the changes were done to protect the company from the threat of piracy. The problem is that’s not what […]
What may be one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important and far-reaching rulings in decades dropped in late May 2025 in an order that probably didn’t get a second – or even first – glance from most Americans. But this not-quite-two-page ruling, as technical and procedural as they come, potentially rewrites a major principle of […]
One recurring theme of our head-first rushed adoption of “AI” is that half-cooked automation routinely reflects the often shitty natures of the companies or individuals installing it. Health insurance companies with a history of being crooks implement Medicare rejection AI with a 90% error rate. Incompetent media company executives implement half-cooked “AI” that plagiarizes, undercuts […]
Brazil’s Supreme Court appears close to ruling that social media companies should be liable for content hosted on their platforms—a move that appears to represent a significant departure from the country’s pioneering Marco Civil internet law. While this approach has obvious appeal to people frustrated with platform failures, it’s likely to backfire in ways that […]
At some point, there’s supposed to 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines added to a volatile mix that already includes peaceful protesters, some not-so-peaceful protesters, definitely-not-peaceful peace officers, and a large migrant community already on edge. Piled on top of this is mindless, harmful rhetoric steadily flowing from the mouths of Donald Trump, Secretary […]
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I’m old enough to remember Republicans claiming that any lawsuit against a Republican was “lawfare” and political persecution. But, as with so many things in the modern MAGA GOP, the reason they said such things was because, given the chance, they would totally seek to engage in actual political persecution and lawfare against anyone who […]
For years we’ve noted how this country’s corrupt inability to protect consumer security, regulate data brokers, or pass even a baseline privacy law was going to have increasingly deadly consequences. Endless signs have been there; from stalkers abusing app and cell phone data to pursue their victims, to right wing extremists using data broker data […]
Here we go again. We have talked for years now about famed burger chain In-N-Out and its strategic, and very bullshit, practice of opening up pop-up locations in countries where it does not, and does not appear to plan to, have any real brick and mortar presence. This sort of trademark tourism is not unheard […]
This is a combo piece with the first half written by law student Elizabeth Grossman about her take on the recent FTC moral panic about the internet, and the second part being some additional commentary and notes from her professor, Jess Miers. The FTC is fanning the flames of a moral panic. On June 4, […]
Support us on Patreon » In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship — and it’s a worryingly effective tactic. But there’s one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. […]
Let’s talk about constitutional hypocrisy so brazen, so comprehensive, so morally bankrupt that it would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous to the republic. I’ve learned something about modern Republicans that crystallizes everything wrong with our current political moment: they care more about the constitutionality of Biden’s student debt forgiveness than they do about […]
When a federal judge ruled last week that Marco Rubio can’t just declare that the US can detain green card holder Mahmoud Khalil based on the Secretary of State’s “vibes check” assessment of his political beliefs, you might think Khalil would finally be free to return to his family. You’d be wrong. The DOJ has […]
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For a brief moment, it looked like real life was finally having an effect on Trump’s “immigrants are inherently evil” fantasies. There was a brief window, last week, where Trump indicated he’d roll back some of his deportation goons because it was going too far. The fact that this moment of realization has arrived at […]
Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit the presidency for a quick and tacky buck, the Trump administration is getting into the cell phone business. Well, sort of: the Trump administration is launching a lazy new MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that piggybacks on existing wireless networks with an added perk: a fake-gold $500 […]
It’s one of those things I don’t discuss on main. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it was my strict religious upbringing, which made discussing anything outside of preferred interpretations of the Bible sacrilegious, if not actually blasphemous. Or maybe it was a concern about being a bit outside of the mainstream, which might result […]
The second most frustrating aspect of RFK Jr.’s performance as the head of Health and Human Services has been just how predictable the actions he’s taken are. When you start with a simple premise, that Kennedy is a vehement anti-vaxxer, the view that measles is less harmful than the MMR vaccine makes sense. The appointment […]
Sam Altman’s vision of a “gentle singularity” where AI gradually transforms society presents an alluring future of abundance and human flourishing. His optimism about AI’s potential to solve humanity’s greatest challenges is compelling, and his call for thoughtful deployment resonates. Altman’s essay focuses primarily on the research and development side of AI, painting an inspiring […]
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