Culminating a deal that’s been rumored about for the better part of the last twenty years, Dish Network and DirecTV have struck a new merger in a bid to try and remain relevant. It’s not going to help. The deal involves DirecTV acquiring Dish for one dollar, in addition to $9.75 billion in Dish’s debt. […]
We have a hero in our midst, one that is responsible for freeing up the term “superhero” from its previous trademark imprisonment. If you don’t recall, Scott Richold is a British comic artist who produces the Superbabies line of comic books. Richold applied for a trademark for his comic only to find it opposed by […]
Forget “defund the police.” Let’s just get rid of the sheriffs. Or, at the very least, change how the job is handled. Sheriffs are elected, which means a lot of sheriffs are less interested in providing good law enforcement than ensuring they’ve catered to their voting bases enough that they’ll be re-elected. And since it’s […]
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In this stupid partisan world we live in, the MAGA world has decided that simply accurately explaining that the First Amendment does not allow for the suppression of speech (which is a good thing!) is somehow a call for abolishing the First Amendment. This isn’t even “blaming the messenger.” It’s misinterpreting the messenger and demanding […]
Analysts (and Musk himself) had been quietly noting for a while that Starlink satellite broadband service would consistently lack the capacity to be disruptive at any real scale. As it usually pertains to Musk products, that analysis was generally buried under product hype. A few years later, and Starlink users are facing obvious slowdowns and a steady parade of […]
There’s that well known adage that if you want to teach a child not to touch a hot stove, just let them touch it once and that will be all the teaching needed to have them never do so again. Whoever came up with that saying obviously has never met my children, for starters. And […]
Well, I hope it was worth it, Rudy. You sold out completely, offering up every last bit of your integrity for the chance to push election conspiracy theories in court on behalf of a man who won’t even bother to look in your direction now that you’ve professionally disgraced yourself on his behalf. No matter […]
I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite as much hype about a state bill as California’s SB 1047, a pretty terrible “AI Safety” bill. Its supporters were a really weird combination of AI doomers, AI haters (not the same as the doomers), technically illiterate concern trolls… and a few people with legitimate interests about how […]
It seems so long ago that people were trying to stop the worst aspects of the EU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) recounts in detail. The final legislation was passed in March 2019, but it is important not simply to accept what happened and move […]
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It probably will not shock you to find out that big tech’s promises to never again suppress embarrassing leaked content about a political figure came with a catch. Apparently, it only applies when that political figure is a Democrat. If it’s a Republican, then of course the content will be suppressed, and the GOP officials […]
As we’ve mentioned a few times, $42.5 billion in taxpayer-funded broadband subsidies will soon start hitting the states next year courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill’s Broadband, Equity And Deployment (BEAD) program. Efforts to expand affordable fiber access don’t get all that much press attention in the AI hustlebro era, but the impact will be […]
This week, both our winners on the insightful side are invocations of established maxims. In first place it’s an anonymous comment about people flipping opinion of hacked materials between Hunter Biden and JD Vance: How many times must I tap the sign? “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: “There must be in-groups whom […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we learned more about how easy it was to buy access to people’s movements from companies gathering license plate data, while AT&T was proclaiming that it could not be sued for selling customer location data just as readily. A big EU ruling thankfully said the right to be […]
Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations being built by Amazon, Starlink, and AT&T pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue. Back in 2022, scientists declared Starlink satellite constellations an “existential threat for astronomy,” noting that the reflection and light pollution (Musk […]
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 […]
PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week. Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws. The PEN […]
This would seem like a truly extraneous nail in the coffin of ShotSpotter deployment in Chicago, but there are far too many city council members still willing to prop up under-performing tech with faith-based arguments. And there’s the company itself, which has shifted narratives (along with redoing the company letterhead) over the past several months […]
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