Whether you’re a seasoned traveler, an international business professional, or simply language enthusiast, the Babbel Language Learning Deal is your passport to fluency. Covering a range of topics that are actually valuable on the road and using time-tested strategies proven by academics from Yale University, City University of New York, and Michigan State University, Babbel […]
Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky. There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how […]
Last year U.S. broadband giant Verizon faced yet another class action lawsuit for sleazy, misleading fees. This latest $100 million class action alleged that Verizon for years ripped off its customers via a $3 (and up) “Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge” that it tacked at the bottom of user bills to help the company falsely […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Stephen T. Stone with a comment about platforms systematically removing a user for making a deck of Most Wanted CEO playing cards: The same people who celebrate this will whine their asses off if someone gets banned from Twitter for saying a racial slur. Can’t […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, an excellent piece in the New York Times looked how years of copyright maximalism were killing pop music. AG William Barr was sparring with Apple over the DOJ’s ability to crack iPhones, and Devin Nunes was extending his legal threats to fellow congressional representatives. We looked at the […]
I suppose this was probably inevitable, but boy do I wonder if it’s smart. We were just talking about the celebrity drama du jour between Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and Justin Baldoni. The very short version of this is that Lively and Baldoni starred in a movie together, Lively sued Baldoni and made a series […]
As the we wrote in our amicus brief (which it appears the justices did not read – guess they didn’t have time…), if the TikTok ban is blessed, it provides a roadmap for how to avoid the Constitution’s prohibition to “make no law” abridging free expression. All the government needs to do is declare that […]
Last year, Kashmir Hill at the New York Times published a major story confirming that automakers collect all sorts of driver behavior data then sell it to a long list of companies — without making that clear to car owners or getting consent. That includes insurance companies, which are now jacking up insurance rates if they see […]
Italy remains pretty fucking weird when it comes to all things Italian. From top prosecutors taking aim at vendors who “debase” respected Italian art by, say, offering products featuring Michelangelo’s “David” (mainly the naked bits, which is all of it) or fining government entities (even those engaged in promoting tourism) for using any other language […]
It seemed pretty obvious from the way the Supreme Court’s oral arguments went regarding the TikTok ban that this would be the outcome: a 9-0 per curiam decision saying “eh, it’s fine to ban TikTok.” There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, […]
Fuse Vint is a retro radio, speaker, and charger all in one! Indulge in the nostalgia of traditional radio broadcasts. Fuse Vint comes equipped with a built-in AM/FM radio tuner. Tune in to your favorite local radio stations and immerse yourself in the charm of traditional frequency-based broadcasting. It also works as a standalone speaker […]
Remember how Zuckerberg was “done with politics”? Remember how he promised that he was going to stop doing what politicians demanded he do? Now it turns out that he not only did his big set of moderation changes to please Trump, but did so only after he was told by the incoming administration to act. […]
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 […]
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 NHL keeps doing this kind of crap to itself. Of all the major American sports leagues, I’d say it’s pretty clear that the National Hockey League trails all the others in terms of getting things right with the internet. The league finally piggybacked onto the MLB Advanced Media platform several years ago to power […]
On December 14, James Harr, the owner of an online store called ComradeWorkwear, announced on social media that he planned to sell a deck of “Most Wanted CEO” playing cards, satirizing the infamous “Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards” introduced by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2003. Per the ComradeWorkwear website, the Most Wanted CEO cards would offer “a critique […]
If you only remember two things about the government pressure campaign to influence Mark Zuckerberg’s content moderation decisions, make it these: Donald Trump directly threatened to throw Zuck in prison for the rest of his life, and just a couple months ago FCC Commissioner (soon to be FCC chair) Brendan Carr threatened Meta that if […]
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As I noted when the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court handed down its original decision back in 2023, I didn’t care much for the plaintiff, but I did care quite a bit about the First Amendment. Less-than-ideal litigants make some pretty good caselaw, and that’s how it went here. The plaintiff challenging Oregon’s surreptitious recording law […]
We’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the TikTok ban case, which is expected to come today or tomorrow. But things are getting increasingly silly. The Biden administration, which actively pushed for the ban and eagerly signed it into law, is now making a last-ditch effort to… keep the app operating, even […]
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