Katie Couric recently claimed that repealing Section 230 would help combat online misinformation. The problem is, she couldn’t be more wrong. Worse, as a prominent voice, she’s contributing to the widespread misinformation around Section 230 herself. A few years ago, for reasons that are unclear to me, Katie Couric chaired a weird Aspen Institute “Commission […]
For the better part of the last thirty years, telecom giants and “free market” libertarian think tanks have told anybody who’d listen that gutting regulatory oversight of the U.S. wireless and broadband markets would result in near-Utopian outcomes across innovation and competition. Instead, the reduction in both competition and real oversight resulted in regional telecom […]
A few years back, Karl Bode wrote about YouTube TV’s 2020 price hike, going from $50/month for its base package, to $65/month. The framing of that post was spot on: Google was behaving much like that of a cable company, with the exact customer-angering actions being taken that drove so many people into YouTube TV’s […]
If you’ve ever wondered how the right-wing media ecosystem operates and why it’s effective, try viewing it as a form of improvisational theater or improv. In the wake of the 2024 U.S. elections, everyday people and political pundits alike have been trying to make sense of the results and the related observation that many Americans […]
Quite famously, snarkier-than-thou music review site Pitchfork posted a brief, incisive review of Australian band Jet’s second album in 2006. The review contained nothing more than the 0.0 score and this embedded video: This, my friends, epitomizes the legal travails of Mr. Jason Fyk, a “self-made millionaire” who leveraged Facebook’s reach to turn his websites […]
Earlier, Karl wrote about a bill from Senator Ron Wyden which would put pressure on big telcos to actually protect our privacy (following the news of Chinese hackers abusing backdoor access to our wiretapping systems to spy on tons of people). Sadly, despite the obvious need in the wake of this massive privacy breach, that […]
Demand for Python is booming in the job market and it is a skill that can help you enter some of the most exciting industries, including data science, web applications, home automation, and many more. The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle has 7 courses to take you from beginner to expert in no […]
This week, the United Nations General Assembly is set to adopt the UN Cybercrime Convention, almost exactly five years after it approved a resolution to launch its negotiation. The Convention text has been widely panned by digital security experts, human rights organizations, industry, even the UN’s own human rights office, among many others. Yet still […]
We’ve noted for decades that U.S. telecom security and privacy standards aren’t great. T-Mobile has been hacked so many times in the last five years it’s easy to lose count. AT&T not long ago had a breach impacting the data of 73 million users it initially tried to pretend hadn’t happened. Telecoms have lobbied relentlessly […]
It’s a big week for anonymous commenters. We start out with our first place winner on the insightful side, an anonymous reply to an irrelevant comment: Speaking of bad actors, will you stop acting like your pet issue justifies spamming unrelated comments? In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about those who pledge to protect […]
If you’ve been following the Kickstarter campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, then you know we’re not quite on track on to hit our goal — but we haven’t given up! We’ve now passed the halfway mark in funds raised, and we’re doing everything we can to make a final push before […]
Those of you who still believe the nation’s courts are capable of handling the constitutionally-guaranteed redress of grievances, prepare to be disabused of those notions. While the courts may occasionally care about rights, they’re far more willing to protect the government status quo than allow mere citizens to upset the status quo apple cart. We’ve […]
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 […]
The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida thinks (or, at least, thought) it could make a dent in crime by engaging in “broken windows policing” by way of an Excel spreadsheet. I wish I was making this up but I’m absolutely not. The end result of this ad hoc “predictive policing” program was… well… predictable. […]
There are lots of ways for an individual person or entity to err when it comes to intellectual property enforcement such that it negatively impacts a website or business. But if you want to get really frustrated, what you need is several entities demonstrating complete incompetence in how they do business and making a victim […]
Whether you’re a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote […]
There are few Senators quite as pathetic as Richard Blumenthal. He has a long history of an ignorant vendetta against tech companies (even pre-dating his time in the Senate), and he never ever bothers to actually understand the underlying policy issues or the implications of the legislation he passes. In his latest cynical ploy, Blumenthal […]
Four years years ago AT&T, a company that, for years, cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a […]
Confidential informants (CI) are considered useful to law enforcement investigations, so society is just expected to bear the burden of criminal acts committed by informants in (dubious) furtherance of public safety goals. CI’s are just criminals with more immunity than most — even when they happen to be some of the worst criminals imaginable. In […]
It’s been the biggest year for elections in human history: 2024 is a “super-cycle” year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also the first AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, […]
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