Sheriffs answer to no one but voters. Consequently, they often answer to no one. Voters tend to gravitate towards names they recognize. Sheriffs count on this form of “loyalty” to ensure years or decades at the helm of a county law enforcement agency. And this loyalty continues to pay off even when sheriffs are less […]
We’ve noted more than a few times that for all of the government’s talk about wanting to “bridge the digital divide,” it’s consistently struggled to even map where broadband access is or isn’t available. The government has spent more than $400 million on trying to map broadband access to date, and while there certainly have […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply to someone comparing Black History Month to white power celebrations: Black people: celebrating overcoming slavery and other historical injustices Nazis: celebrating having white skin, and committing historical injustices Idiots on the internet: “these are the same thing” In second place, it’s […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at the two-sided political attacks on Section 230, while an appeals court issued a strong but easily-misrepresented Section 230 ruling, and the law was also used to begin smackin down a lawsuit from Craig Brittain. A prominent copyright troll ran away when finally challenged, the NY […]
We know cops kill dozens of dogs every day. This much has been verified by the US Department of Justice, which called it an “epidemic.” It’s not just anecdotal evidence generated by a handful of court cases. We also know most cops who kill dogs get away with it, even though multiple courts have ruled […]
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 […]
Whether intentional or not, the process for tech companies to fall to the process of enshittification seems to be a very real trend. The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, describes the process by which once good and useful technology platforms devolve to become worse and less useful as the owners of those platforms move on […]
Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time. […]
For not the first time, the Supreme Court seems to regard the First Amendment as secondary when it comes to cases involving some form of intellectual property. This has happened all too frequently. Perhaps most famously, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Court more or less said that the First Amendment gets a pass in copyright […]
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Certain government agencies are of the opinion that records requesters shouldn’t even be able to pry the documents they’re seeking from their cold, dead fingers. Long after anyone could be affected and long after the people who’ve created the documents have passed on to the Great Bureaucracy in the Sky, agencies are still refusing to […]
Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for years in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a “free ride” on the Internet, […]
There seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a sports league or group and the degree to which that same entity will jealously “protect” anything to do with its intellectual property. The International Olympic Committee is probably the apotheosis of this theory, though both FIFA and the NFL are strong showings as […]
Here comes a little more bad news for a company that’s seen quite a lot of it lately. SoundThinking, which formerly did business as ShotSpotter, is seeing another high-profile, would-be customer walk away from the table after determining the costs would outweigh the benefits. As Matt Markovich reports for KIRO News, Seattle has decided to […]
A suggestion for Elon: next time you take over a company and decide to immediately fire three-quarters of the staff, maybe hold onto a few of the payroll staff before you do. It might help you avoid some mistakes. You may recall that early on Musk laid off well over half of the staff at […]
A lot of laws have been passed in Europe that regulate the content American companies can carry. Most of these laws were passed to tamp down on speech that would be otherwise legal in the United States, but not so much in Europe where free speech rights aren’t given the same sort of protections found […]
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Forget everything you think you know about Mark Zuckerberg and his army of lobbyists blocking any attempt to regulate social media. The truth is more nuanced (but perhaps less complicated). Meta is actually happy with internet regulations: they keep down competitive threats. I’ve been trying to make this point for a while: while politicians and […]
Canadian Regulators are leaning on new authority built into the 2023 Online Streaming Act to impose a new 5 percent tax on streaming TV and music services like Netflix and Spotify; funding that the regulator says will then be used to help fund Canadian broadcasting. According to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announcement, […]
It will come as no shock to regular readers here when I remind you all that Nike is a notoriously aggressive actor when it comes to policing its intellectual property, including for trademarks it holds. The reason that reminder is important as a matter of throat-clearing in this case is that one of the worst […]
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