Link taxes are bad, m’kay? They harm the public. They harm the open internet. And they harm the news orgs themselves. There is no reason to support them at all. But, many (thankfully not all!) media organizations and politicians love them. Media orgs like them because they think it will bring them free money (though, […]
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The Chinese government wants the money that flows through Hong Kong. It has no desire to put up with the freedom and democracy Hong Kong has enjoyed since being freed of its colonialist overlords. The UK government exited Hong Kong only to see the Chinese government replace it as the new colonialists. The Chinese government […]
We’ve noted for years how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it’s smart home hardware that becomes useless paperweights when the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that actively make your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will be the same product tomorrow. Now a coalition of […]
This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to the Second Circuit’s ruling against the Internet Archive. In first place, it’s MrWilson with some thoughts on libraries: The vast majority of authors face an issue with obscurity in the vast sea of available works that is the book market. Libraries […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Apple bowed to some pressure from the right to repair movement, while Sony was continuing to battle with Vita tinkerers despite the device being discontinued. The EU copyright industry was continuing to demonize internet companies while we looked at how Section 230 enabled Pinterest’s content moderation efforts, and […]
I absolutely hate it when I have to write yet another “trademark bullying works” post. For the better part of a decade now, we have been writing about disputes between the Ravinia Festival Association, which operates the large outdoor concert venue and eatery north of Chicago, and Ravinia Brewing, a brewery based out of the […]
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 […]
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover was supposed to be a slam dunk. It was famously revealed during his legal fight to get out of the deal that Elon was getting overwhelmed with people texting him, willing to casually offer hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars, in support of his takeover. But some of them […]
The FBI keeps telling anyone who will listen that it wants more responsibilities. Despite having failed to end organized crime or to even slightly diminish the power of international drug cartels, the FBI is always asking for more to do, especially if it means more funding and surveillance powers. It set itself up to be […]
The Six Sigma Green and Yellow Belt Training Bundle has 2 courses to help you learn the ins and outs of Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a detail-orientated crafted set of tools and techniques that help improve processes within an organization. You will receive an introduction to the tools and methods that are necessary to […]
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the legislature’s willingness to pass laws that clearly violate the First Amendment rights of websites. In the last three years, this is now the third law directed at website moderation practices to be thrown out by a district court as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. You’d think maybe […]
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a major U.S. regional telecom monopoly is looking to buy another major U.S. regional telecom monopoly in a massive transaction that both companies insist holds vast benefits for American consumers. This time it’s Verizon stating it intends to purchase Frontier in a massive $20 billion deal that […]
As we’ve covered the era of cord-cutting from traditional cable television packages and the rise of streaming platforms, one of the areas I have focused on is the world of live sports. And in the world of sports, the NFL is king. If you were to look up the most viewed broadcasts on any given […]
Over the past year, two dozen AI-related lawsuits and their myriad infringement claims have been winding their way through the court system. None have yet reached a jury trial. While we all anxiously await court rulings that can inform our future interaction with generative AI models, in the past few weeks we have suddenly been […]
You might recall how Gannett, which owns USAToday (and probably the half-assed remains of whatever’s left of your town’s local newspaper), spent much of last year mired in a major “AI” scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a good idea to use half-cooked automation to create fake journalists and lazy clickbait without telling […]
What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but they wouldn’t bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from a library? You’d probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the […]
Far too many states have decided to engage in censorship, urged on by an alarmingly large voting bloc that truly appears to be on the side of fascism, so long as that fascism appears to be on their side. Since this is, for the moment, still the United States of America, home of several enshrined […]
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We’ve explored multiple times now why Elon Musk is no friend to free speech. He has regularly threatened and sued others for their free speech, and indeed, he has an ever-growing list of such lawsuits. But every once in a while, he gets one right, and this time, he’s helped get a bad California law […]
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