I don’t know if it’s the same where you are, but all the pharmacies here in South Seattle have a decidedly… apocalyptic feel. Many shelves are empty. A lot of goods have been locked up to address a retail theft epidemic that didn’t actually happen. And understaffed stores are usually overseen by one fifteen year […]
I’ll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they’re certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We’ve been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d’etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public […]
After several months of pretending this sort of thing just didn’t happen there, the Polish government finally admitted some of its members had abused powerful smartphone malware it had purchased from Israeli spyware firm, NSO Group. This came to light following an investigation that found someone in the government had illegally targeted a Polish government […]
For years, we’ve watched self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” hyperventilate about imaginary government control of social media content moderation. Mysteriously, as I pointed out last fall, these warriors developed sudden laryngitis when social media platform owners Elon Musk and Donald Trump actually took over the US government. Anyone with a functioning brain knew this would eventually […]
A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise. The signs are unmistakable and accelerating: in just the past 48 hours, Elon Musk’s DOGE commission has seized control of Treasury payment systems and gained unauthorized access to classified USAID materials, while security officials who followed protocols were removed. Career civil servants […]
People sometimes think that cybersecurity is just about defending computer systems from remote adversaries. But it’s broader than that; cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them. So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into […]
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During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask; it costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Trump’s Department of Education rolling back anti-book-ban guidance: Remember, kids. If a government is trying this hard to ban books, you should damn well be interested in finding out what those books actually say! In second place, it’s That One […]
It’s February, which means this year’s edition of the public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929, has come to a close. And we got a record-breaking number of entries this time around, with 34 games submitted (edging out the previous record of 31). That means we’ve got a lot of work to do judging […]
One of the more annoying ways that Sony insists on handing itself losses for no reason whatsoever has been its insistance on requiring a PlayStation Network account for cross-platform titles. The company has done this with a bunch of these titles, perhaps most famously so when it did so with Helldivers 2, an early access […]
Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse […]
Last week Techdirt wrote about leading Chinese tech companies being hit with GDPR complaints from noyb.eu concerning the transfer of personal data from the EU to China. More recently, much of the world has been obsessed with another Chinese company, DeepSeek, which operates in the fashionable area of AI chatbots. Most of the discussions have […]
Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has been promising to restore trust in media over the last few months. Instead, he has launched an escalating campaign of editorial interference that accomplishes exactly the opposite. First, he blocked the paper from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Then, he demanded to personally approve all op-ed […]
There’s a particularly insidious and cynical form of censorship gaining prominence in America: the weaponization of “free speech” rhetoric, combined with abuses of the judicial system and executive power, to actually suppress speech. It’s a strategy that turns the First Amendment’s principles inside out, using the language of liberty to justify silencing critics and opponents. […]
The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It’s on sale […]
There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing “thoughts and prayers” statements while standing on children’s graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do. Instead of common sense measures that […]
To be clear: if there’s a policy decision to be made between the consumer interest and big giant shitty telecom monopolies, the Trump FCC is going to always side with the big shitty telecom monopoly. It’s why I find the Matt Stoller-type claims that Trump is a serious anti-corporatist keen on “reining in corporate power” […]
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 […]
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