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 […]
To borrow a phrase famously used by the world class philosophers called Green Day, Elon Musk is something of a walking contradiction. He touts the so-called “Twitter Files” as some kind of damning report on government weaponization against critical content and is then accused of doing exactly the same thing himself. He’s a “free speech […]
For all the hype and warnings about how TikTok is clearly a “national security threat” from China, the Trump administration has effectively kneecapped the investigation into one of the most serious cybersecurity breaches in US history — a genuine, proven threat to national security. In what Team Trump probably thinks is a move to “destroy […]
Despite a lot of bullshit about how Trump is super “populist,” “supports antitrust reform,” and will “carry on the legacy of monopoly busters like Lina Khan,” none of that has ever been true. Trump’s first administration was jam packed with the rubber stamping of plenty of terrible mergers. Streaming, media, and telecom companies are very […]
In Trumpworld, loyalty trumps all — even deeply held beliefs about crime and punishment. Shower Trump with praise and you can get away with murder (or at least drug trafficking). But dare to criticize him, and no punishment is too harsh. Making decisions based on who most inflated your ego may not seem like the […]
The Database Administration Super Bundle has 9 courses to help you go from data novice to expert administrator. You’ll discover how to build and manage databases with MySQL and MongoDB. Courses also cover Microsoft SQL Server, Informatica, Minitab, Tableau, and regression modeling. It’s on sale for $60. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and […]
The government’s next-best argument (after “Third Party Doctrine yo!”) in support of its bulk collection of US persons’ phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it’s just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it’s of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we’re using […]
It’s fairly obvious that Netflix won the first round of the streaming TV wars. Here’s the thing: as subscriber growth becomes saturated, Netflix has to keep providing Wall Street with those sweet, improved quarterly returns at any cost. To do that they’re going to follow directly on the heels of the cable giants (like Charter […]
Like the other major sports leagues in America, the NHL has not been immune from engaging in IP protectionism in the past. The league has been relatively touchy when it comes to local businesses simply cheering on their local hockey teams, for instance, and has also tried to keep apps that report on NHL content […]
Love it or loathe it, there’s no denying that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important piece of data protection law around. GDPR stories are often about big, bad companies failing to respect the legislation, but there’s a small but amusing group of incidents in which the EU itself has been […]
This is probably it for awhile. The DOJ Civil Rights Division most likely will be sidelined for at least the next four years as Trump returns to office and his not-so-latent desires to impose a police state. Notwithstanding his supporters’ apparent willingness to assault officers who stand between them and a “stolen” election, Trump has […]
I’m not crazy about writing about a Supreme Court oral argument if the Court is just going to make a fool out of me by doing something they know is wrong and completely divorced from the argument they heard, which laid before them everything they needed to reach a decision that adhered to constitutional precedent. […]
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, […]
Well, that didn’t take long. A short-lived win for civil liberties and the Free Speech Coalition has been undone by the Sixth Circuit Appeals court. The reasoning behind the roll back of the injunction are questionable, to say the least. The Free Speech Coalition’s case against Tennessee’s age verification law was solid. Or, at least, […]
For years many press outlets (and contrarian engagement pundits like Matt Stoller) tried to argue that the Trump GOP was now “serious about antitrust reform,” “reining in corporate power,” or “holding Big Tech Accountable.” The argument was that because Trumpism claims to be “populist,” it could be convinced to implement serious anti-corporatist antitrust reform that […]
For those of you who are not football fans, we’re coming up on Super Bowl season. And, yes, that will surely mean that we will eventually do some posting on the ridiculous way in which the NFL enforces the trademark rights it has, and indeed some it does not have, for the Super Bowl. But […]
I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly […]
Even though the Supreme Court somehow didn’t agree, the ban on TikTok remains unconstitutional garbage for all the reasons we’ve discussed: its impact on the platform itself, the impact on its users, and its impact on other service providers that help it work. The corrupt scramble we’ve seen to try to keep it going, ever […]
One of the many new executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on Monday was the long-hyped creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE is portrayed as a sort of government efficiency and innovation office, but it’s primarily flimsy cover for the extraction class as they eliminate corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and the social […]
This post was written on Sunday. By the time you read it there may have been 12,492 further unconstitutional TikTok-related hijinks since then, but because this particular kind of unconstitutional violation might well rear its ugly head again, if not with respect to TikTok then with respect to something else, it’s still worth pointing out […]
stLouIST