It seems to be a rather common phenomenon, but various major newspaper opinion columnists love opining on the First Amendment and free speech without ever bothering to, you know, understand them. Edward Luce, a long-term journalist and commentator, and scion of an aristocratic British family, is currently the “chief US commentator” (what a title!) for […]
Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism and Comedy Central history as part of their ongoing and utterly mindless “cost saving” efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous piece-by-piece response to a comment questioning the truth about what happened with GARM: In second place, it’s Guiltypanacea with a related comment about Elon’s lawsuit: Pretty cute to claim GARM violated antitrust laws while also claiming Twitter is the singular “global town […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, “free speech defender” Devin Nunes filed more lawsuits against critics and vowed they weren’t the last, the New York Times joined the parade of media organizations that were totally and completely misrepresenting Section 230, and the recording industry was reaping what it sowed in the world of copyright […]
You know, when you’ve written as much as I have about trademark disputes, there are times when you think you’ve seen everything, only to have the universe remind you that the depth of silliness around trademarks can always get deeper. The subject of today’s conversation is going to be a certification mark. While afforded similar […]
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 […]
You may have heard that Elon Musk and the UK are fighting. And both of them are looking ridiculous. Riots are happening across the UK in response to the stabbing deaths of three children. The background for the riots is that a bunch of shitlord agitators used Telegram to organize further nonsense on other social […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll […]
The Detroit PD — or at least a few of its investigators — managed to be the absolute worst at using facial recognition tech. Despite being told by their tech provider that a “match” was never to be considered probable cause for an arrest on its own, multiple PD investigators decided a match — no […]
Up is down, left is right, day is night. And now, to Jim Jordan and Elon Musk, clear, direct government censorship is, apparently, “free speech.” This isn’t a huge surprise, but on Thursday, the World Federation of Advertising shut down GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, in response to legal threats from ExTwitter and […]
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in […]
I can’t believe this, but it happened again. Almost exactly a decade ago, Tim Cushing wrote about a bonkers story out of the UK in which a passport applicant who’s middle name was “Skywalker” was denied the passport due to purported trademark or copyright concerns. The question that ought to immediately leap to mind should […]
Texas is one of eight states that have enacted laws that force adults to prove their age before accessing porn sites. Soon it will try to persuade the Supreme Court that its law doesn’t violate the First Amendment. Good luck with that. These laws are unconstitutional: They deny adults the well-established right to access constitutionally […]
Pretty much any “gang database” is a vehicle for abuse. While there’s some investigative value in maintaining a database of affirmed gang members, most of these data collections are run without oversight or guardrails, allowing officers to add almost anyone they want to the collection, so long as they happen to live, work, or travel […]
What if you found an antitrust violation… and almost all of the remedies wouldn’t actually do much to fix things? That might be the situation we’re in with Google’s antitrust loss this week. It’s not a good situation by any means, but it’s not clear what to do about it either. The DOJ’s historic antitrust […]
Project Management is global. This is one of those professions similar to being an accountant, where your skills and talents can be applied to any industry in any place. The 10-course Complete PMP Training Bundle provides a comprehensive training path for all things project management, including the most update to date courses including PMP 6th […]
Yesterday we posted our latest podcast, with guest Don McGowan, former board member at NCMEC (the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children) and former general counsel or chief legal officer at Bungie and the Pokemon Company (where he would sometimes disagree with our coverage). In the podcast, he goes into great detail about why […]
We just noted how several Trumplican lawmakers recently killed a popular program that helped deliver a $30 discount off of the broadband bills of low income Americans. The FCC’s Affordable Care Program (ACP) was implemented during peak COVID, and proved immensely helpful to 22 million Americans, many of whom are now being booted off the […]
Michigan has long been terrible in terms of asset forfeiture. I mean, it’s a problem everywhere, but in Michigan, cops took cars as often as they took cash. Cars were taken from people simply because they happened to pass through areas “known for prostitution.” Cars were taken from people simply because passengers or other drivers […]
As you will no doubt be aware, on July 19th cybersecurity company CrowdStrike did an oopsie in an update it pushed to its Falcon Sensor software that took down millions of computers around the world. The result was chaos, with everything from hospitals to airlines to banks impacted by computers and servers that went into […]
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