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 […]
For better or worse, jawboning has been a hot topic recently, and it’s unlikely that interest will fade any time soon. Jawboning, in broad strokes, is when the government pressures a third party to make that third party chill the speech of another instead of going after the speech directly. Because the First Amendment says […]
We just warned folks that Donald Trump would be one of the most anti-free speech Presidents in history, and he seems to have no qualms living down to that reputation. Donald Trump’s history of frivolous lawsuits against media outlets shows his disdain for free speech, and he shows no signs of stopping. The Columbia Journalism […]
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Detroit law enforcement officials got a bit of shock last week when some seized iPhones rebooted themselves, despite being in airplane mode and, in one case, stored inside a Faraday bag. Panic — albeit highly localized — ensued. It was covered by Joseph Cox for 404 Media, who detailed not only the initial panic, but […]
We’ve noted more time than I can count how the U.S. ban of TikTok (yes, yes I know, it’s not a ban, it’s a forced divestment ByteDance was never going to agree with) was pointless fucking performance art. Not only was it unconstitutional, it did nothing to actually address the privacy and national security issues […]
It’s not an easy thing to be able to find moments of levity in war, particularly one as lopsided as Russia’s aggressive war on Ukraine. But one moment that fits the bill was when a Ukrainian soldier stationed on an island in the Black Sea responded to Russian demands of surrender with the now iconic […]
The world might be going to hell, but at least activists’ efforts to protect consumers’ rights to affordable and easy tech repair continue to gain steam. Most recently in Canada, where the country’s Copyright Act was amended by two different bills allowing the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if done for the purposes of […]
The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court was somewhat hesitant to bless the 18 months of pole camera surveillance in the Tuggle case back in 2021. The reluctance to state affirmatively this sort of surveillance will always be constitutional shows up in its most recent decision dealing with the same subject matter. Here’s the court expressing its […]
Marc Andreessen, the influential venture capitalist, is exhibiting a startling disconnect between his stated beliefs in free markets and free speech, and his recent authoritarian threats against those who disagree with him. In recent statements, Andreessen has threatened criminal charges against advertisers choosing not to associate with certain platforms and accused an imaginary “government-university-company censorship […]
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Maybe if law enforcement didn’t abuse subpoenas so frequently, it might be a little bit more difficult for criminals to do the same thing. Subpoenas can be used to order companies and service providers to turn over user data and information. But they don’t require law enforcement to run this request past a court first, […]
We’ve noted for years how wireless companies were at the forefront of over-collecting your sensitive daily movement data, then selling access to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together. That resulted in no limit of scandals from stalkers using the data to spy on women, to law enforcement (and people pretending to be law […]
The whole “You don’t actually own what you’ve bought” mantra we have here at Techdirt is really, really frustrating. It’s become such a regular topic that, in my personal life, I regularly respond to news from friends and family about a digital “purchase” they bought by asking if they actually bought it, or have any […]
Always great to see another law enforcement officer weaponize his job by letting his politics motivate his actions. We recently saw this in Ohio, when Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski sent out a Facebook post telling residents to write down the addresses of people with Kamala Harris signs in their yards. I’m not going to call this […]
Support us on Patreon » It’s been a few weeks, but we’re back! Although the podcast schedule is still going to be sporadic for a little while longer (Mike explains further in the intro) we’ve got a couple cross-post episodes lined up, starting with today’s. Recently, Mike joined Ed Zitron on his Better Offline podcast for […]
I get that a lot of people don’t like the big AI companies and how they scrape the web. But these copyright lawsuits being filed against them are absolute garbage. And you want that to be the case, because if it goes the other way, it will do real damage to the open web by […]
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Well, these entities deserve each other. The problem is we really don’t deserve either of them. Trump spent a lot of his campaign touting a logistical nightmare of a policy that sounded a lot like an collapse-of-the-Weimar-Republic sort of thing: the mass detention and deportation of immigrants, whether they’re here legally or not. All that’s […]
Current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has spent much of the last decade positioning himself to be Trump’s likely pick for the next boss of the FCC. He’s likely to get his wish; after spending a lot of time crying about TikTok to get on cable TV and kissing AT&T’s and Comcast’s asses, Carr’s widely considered […]
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