I’ll admit, when I’ve been able to witness some of the fuckery around the use of artificial intelligence in stupid ways, some part of me has always gotten some amusement at those being fooled. I’ve gotten to witness most of this from afar, after all. It feels a bit different when you write about a […]
The fallout came fast and hard for New College of Florida and its administrators after multiple videos were posted of books dealing mainly with sexual identity and race found filling a dumpster behind the school library. The immediate reaction from the school’s spokesperson, Nathan Marks, was nonsensical. Marks claimed two things, neither of them believable. […]
There’s been plenty of conversation over the past decade about how unprepared the mainstream media was for the shifts that have happened in politics and political discourse, especially when it comes to finding… well… the truth. As we move towards the 2024 election, the challenges of reporting and fact checking are once again in the […]
Elon sure seems to enjoy making employees humiliate themselves on his behalf. After massively overpaying for Twitter, firing most of the staff, and then making bad decision after bad decision, Elon did promise remaining employees that they would get equity in the new Twitter, now renamed X (even as its valuation kept dropping). Quite some […]
More and more politicians have decided the only way to make America great is to abandon the things that made America great in the first place. The free and open exchange of ideas is getting shut down. The First Amendment is being remade and remodeled to only protect the ideas those in power are in […]
The Ninth Circuit appeals court seems to have figured out the best way to “reform” Section 230: by pretending it doesn’t apply to some stuff that the judges there just randomly decide it doesn’t apply to anymore. At least that’s my reading of the recent ruling against YOLO Technologies. Now, let’s start by making something […]
For many many years now we’ve noted how internet-connectivity (and greed) have changed the consumer equation sometimes for the worse, resulting in people no longer truly owning the things they buy. Expensive gadgets can become less useful (or bricked completely) in an instant due to an inconveniently timed merger, company closure, greed, or just rank […]
It’s no secret that Peloton, one of the corporate darlings of the pandemic, has since been viewed as a company in serious decline. While the company has had to contend with several IP disputes, it has also been subject to cybersecurity incidents and product safety recalls due to its treadmills occasionally deciding to eat human […]
Clearview’s status as an international pariah really hasn’t changed much over the past few years. It may be generating fewer headlines, but nothing’s really changed about the way it does business. Clearview has spent years scraping the web, compiling as much personal info as possible to couple with the billions of photos it has collected. […]
Is the arrest of Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, a justified move to combat illegal activities, or is it a case of dangerous overreach that threatens privacy and free speech online? We had hoped that when French law enforcement released the details of the charges we’d have a better picture of what happened. Instead, we’re […]
Yet another federal judge has blocked a censorial, vindictive government “investigation” into Media Matters for having the temerity to report on seeing ads on ExTwitter showing up next to neo-Nazi content. To recap: in November, Media Matters released an article written by Eric Hananoki. The article detailed an investigation in which they found ads from […]
It’s well-established that students still have Constitutional rights, even if some school administrators clearly believe otherwise. But they are limited, especially when on school grounds. There’s a lot of nuance in play. When those nuances are ignored, lawsuits get filed. There’s plenty of nuance in this case, but not a lot of subtext. We all […]
There’s plenty of news flying around over the past few days after it was reported on Saturday that Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, had been arrested at Bourget airport in France after taking his private plane there from Azerbaijan. Durov, who got a French citizenship in 2021 apparently knew that there was […]
Popular flight tracking app FlightAware says that they accidentally leaked the personal data of its 10,000 aircraft operators and 12 million users. According to an announcement by the company sent to users, “a configuration error” resulted in the company exposing user usernames, passwords, email addresses, names, billing addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, aircraft ownership records, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That Anonymous Coward with a comment about the obvious connection between Tesla and ExTwitter that raises some questions about the judge in the Media Matters laswsuit: What stock was it Elmo was going to have to sell to keep X running again?? In second […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Beto O’Rourke (remember him?) joined the silly parade of politicians looking to destroy Section 230, while the Wall Street Journal was rightly calling out Josh Hawley’s “nannyish” internet law ideas. A Russian troll farm was taking a second shot at suing Facebook after its first attempt was dismissed […]
Earlier this year, we discussed a trademark infringement suit in India between two eBike companies. One was Yulu, which operates the kind of eBike rental stations you can find in all kinds of cities throughout the world. The other was Kinetic Green, which sells a line of eBikes that it branded the “Zulu” bike. As […]
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 […]
Earlier this year, you probably saw the story about how a political consultant used a (very sloppy) “AI” generated deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick New Hampshire voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn’t particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had […]
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a bunch of politicians trying to frame their regulation of the internet as not being about regulating speech, but about “design” or “process” or some such. But when you scratch beneath the surface, they’re always really about regulating speech. Whether it’s KOSA or California’s Age Appropriate Design Code […]
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