Over the summer we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism and Comedy Central history as part of their ongoing and utterly mindless “cost saving” efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent […]
Of course, Elon Musk had to take Twitter private. If he had to answer to shareholders, he would have been ousted months ago for his systematic, single-minded destruction of the company’s value. Pretty much every move he’s made has been some level of bad, ranging from confusing to annoying to infuriating to catastrophic. Alienating long-term […]
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When Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994, they were assured by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh that the mandated wiretap backdoors posed no security risks. Fast forward to today, following the news of a massive CALEA hack and Senator Ron Wyden is reminding the DOJ of that history, while urging […]
I’ve written extensively that U.S. broadband is slow, spotty, and expensive thanks to regulatory capture and regional monopoly power. Republicans have propped up this broken status quo at every opportunity, routinely working to undermine state and federal consumer protection, while letting companies like AT&T and Comcast quite literally write terrible state and federal telecom law. […]
There’s no evidence anywhere that even remotely suggests registered sex offenders leverage Halloween to lure victims to their homes. It’s just as untrue and ridiculous as the annual assertions people are lacing (cheap) candy with (expensive) drugs for… well, those reasons go completely unexplored. Sex offenders are already subject to a considerable number of restrictions, […]
We’re coming right up to the election here in America, so it is obviously time for all kinds of intellectual property strife surrounding political campaigns and advocacy groups. We see all kinds of ways these disputes happen, from campaigns making use of music at rallies, to political ads that use music, up to and including […]
As far back as 2017, Techdirt was warning that robot vacuum cleaners represented a threat to privacy. In that instance, it concerned the possibility that iRobot, makers of the robot vacuum Roomba, might sell the data that its device collected about the size and layout of a home. Five years later, it was becoming clear […]
How should we feel when an AI journalist operation falsely accuses someone of murder? How about if the person falsely accused is a public figure? I know there are some questions lately about where liability should land when an AI system hallucinates, but here it seems pretty clear who is at fault: a nonsense peddling […]
A couple of years ago, private prison giant CoreCivic decided it had had enough. It went to court to secure an order blocking noted First Amendment lawyer Daniel Horwitz from talking about it. Horwitz was then currently engaged in multiple lawsuits against the private prison company, the most prominent being his representation of the family […]
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There is a widely believed but totally false claim by Trumpists that the “Biden administration” told Twitter to “censor” the NY Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop four years ago. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump himself accused the Biden administration of doing as much: Of course, in 2020 Donald […]
A favorite tactic of U.S. corporations looking to dismantle consumer protection reforms (or anything they don’t like, really) is to create entirely fake consumer groups custom-built to confuse voters and journalists. Such groups are usually used in combination with think tanks and other pseudo-objective organizations to muddy the waters, confuse constituents, and mislead the press […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is DisgruntledAnonymous with a comment on our post about Elon Musk seizing people’s Twitter accounts to promote Donald Trump: This just solidified my decision to delete and deactivate my accounts (primary and burner) on that site. I would advise those who haven’t fallen into the […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Deupty AG Jeffrey Rosen was complaining about companies like Facebook offering encryption, while FBI Director Chris Wray was deploying straw men arguments about the tech, and the DOJ was conflating the content moderation debate with the encryption debate. We learned more about ICE’s massive surveillance network, and the […]
You all know the playbook when it comes to shady copyright shakedown outfits that work with or for pornography companies. Groups like Malibu Media and others built an infamous reputation for using the legal system to extract IP address-based information on customers whom they then claim downloaded porn illegally, they then mail settlement offers to […]
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 […]
A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and […]
While we still lament the fact that the DMCA’s Section 512(f) has no real teeth to punish people for filing bogus DMCA takedown notices, at least some companies are still trying to use it against the most egregious offenders. Last year, Google went after two people in Vietnam, who Google accused of creating at least […]
Get ready for some more unexpected uses of the world’s most controversial facial recognition tech. Clearview has amassed a 10-billion-image database — not through painstaking assembly but by sending its bots out into the open web to download images (and any other personal info it can find). It then sells access to this database to […]
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