The fucking maniacs did it. We talked yesterday about how newborn vaccinations for hepatitis B were on the agenda for this latest meeting at ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. You likely know all this already, but RFK Jr. fired all ACIP panel members earlier this year, replacing them with hand-picked anti-vaxxer quack-jobs who are […]
So Netflix has announced that it’s buying Warner Brothers Discovery (including HBO) for a whopping $82.7 billion. As we’ve well covered, it’s the latest in a long series of pointless Warner mergers stretching back to the 2001 AOL acquisition, which all resulted in oodles of chaos, price hikes, layoffs, and generally a steady erosion in […]
Support us on Patreon » Earlier today, we joined in announcing the Resonant Computing Manifesto: a call for restoring a culture of technology that empowers users and enriches their lives. The manifesto was created by a group led by Alex Komoroske, and today Alex joins the podcast for a deeper dive into what “resonant computing” means […]
A cofounder of a Bay Area “Stop AI” activist group abandoned its commitment to nonviolence, assaulted another member, and made statements that left the group worried he might obtain a weapon to use against AI researchers. The threats prompted OpenAI to lock down its San Francisco offices a few weeks ago. In researching this movement, I […]
The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it’s willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulings against the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence. Like it or not, MAGA […]
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Everyone’s pissed at the tech industry. And for good reason. The term enshittification is super popular for many valid reasons. Companies that used to provide real value, are now focused on extracting more value from users, rather than improving their products and services. People used to be excited by new innovations. There was a time […]
Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from UPenn media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading: But Oliver also walked the talk. […]
ACIP is meeting this week, which means we all get to clench our sphincters as we await whatever small, medium, or large sized horrors will come out of this panel of clowns. It wasn’t always this way. ACIP, and the larger CDC, used to be the world standard when it came to government bodies dedicated […]
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 […]
Despite all the recent hype about “AI,” the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism). We’ve already […]
A new bill sponsored by Sen. Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Britt (R-AL), Sen. Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Murphy (D-CT) would require AI chatbots to verify all users’ ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. That might sound reasonable at first, but behind […]
The Court of Justice of the EU—likely without realizing it—just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content. Obviously, for decades now, we’ve been talking about issues related to intermediary liability, and what standards are appropriate there. I am an […]
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A recent shooting involving a former Afghani US counter-terrorism asset who worked with the CIA (!!!) has become the tragedy the Trump administration apparently needed to go from “consistently racist” to “openly racist.” The wounding of two National Guard troops led directly to the president spending the holiday doing what he always does on holidays: […]
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a “phone company” was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just […]
Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States. “The Tates will be free, Trump is […]
First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his […]
Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear — on more than one occasion — that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations. That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the […]
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