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One of the more annoying ways that Sony insists on handing itself losses for no reason whatsoever has been its insistance on requiring a PlayStation Network account for cross-platform titles. The company has done this with a bunch of these titles, perhaps most famously so when it did so with Helldivers 2, an early access […]

Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse […]

Last week Techdirt wrote about leading Chinese tech companies being hit with GDPR complaints from noyb.eu concerning the transfer of personal data from the EU to China. More recently, much of the world has been obsessed with another Chinese company, DeepSeek, which operates in the fashionable area of AI chatbots. Most of the discussions have […]

Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has been promising to restore trust in media over the last few months. Instead, he has launched an escalating campaign of editorial interference that accomplishes exactly the opposite. First, he blocked the paper from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Then, he demanded to personally approve all op-ed […]

There’s a particularly insidious and cynical form of censorship gaining prominence in America: the weaponization of “free speech” rhetoric, combined with abuses of the judicial system and executive power, to actually suppress speech. It’s a strategy that turns the First Amendment’s principles inside out, using the language of liberty to justify silencing critics and opponents. […]

The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It’s on sale […]

There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing “thoughts and prayers” statements while standing on children’s graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do. Instead of common sense measures that […]

To be clear: if there’s a policy decision to be made between the consumer interest and big giant shitty telecom monopolies, the Trump FCC is going to always side with the big shitty telecom monopoly. It’s why I find the Matt Stoller-type claims that Trump is a serious anti-corporatist keen on “reining in corporate power” […]

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 roundup of the latest news in online […]

So it appears we haven’t covered this up to the present, but back in 2020 Francesca Gregorini sued Apple and M. Night Shyamalan for copyright infringement. At issue was a series for Apple TV called Servant and, according to Gregorini, the manner in which the first three episodes of the show copied from Gregorini’s movie, […]

Lawmakers show no sign of slowing down with laws to limit minors’ use of social media. State and federal legislation mandating that sites verify users’ age and adjust their social media experiences accordingly are still popular, despite the fact that they have repeatedly failed court challenges. As of late, policymakers have turned to a different model where parents […]

It’s not the first time. It certainly won’t be the last. But every time, we’re expected to hang back and assume the FBI is on the right side of history. Something the FBI has tried a couple of times previously is back in the news: the remote access of thousands of computers containing foreign spyware […]

Transform any speech into written words with an impressive accuracy rate of up to 99% in just three simple steps using Voicetapp, an AI-driven voice to text transcription tool. Voicetapp harnesses the capabilities of a deep learning method called automatic speech recognition (ASR), backed by leading platforms like AWS and GCP. It supports over 170 […]

In what looks increasingly like a protection racket, Meta has agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that multiple courts had already indicated was completely meritless. The settlement, which directs $22 million toward Trump’s presidential library, comes after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly told Zuckerberg this needed to be […]

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband […]

While most of our conversations about Nintendo recently have focused on the somewhat bizarre patent lawsuit the company filed against Pocketpair over the hit game Palworld, traditionally our coverage of the company has focused more on the very wide net of IP bullying it engages in. This is a company absolutely notorious for behaving in […]

As we mentioned on Saturday, this is the final week of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! The clock is ticking, and now there’s just barely more than two days left to get your entries in. The jam closes at this Friday, January 31st, when the clock hits midnight Pacific Time. We’re […]

Well, we can go ahead and erase “perhaps” from this not-all-that-prescient-actually-given-the-circumstances headline: DOJ Issues Perhaps The Last Law Enforcement Investigation Report We’ll See For The Next Four Years It was inevitable. Trump’s DOJ kicked the Civil Rights Division to the curb faster than Trump cycled through Attorneys General during his first term. Trump promised the […]

While “AI” (language learning models) certainly could help journalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, and badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait. As a result we’ve seen an endless number of scandals where companies use LLMs to create entirely […]

After years of Meta insisting its content moderation was essential for platform health, Zuckerberg’s sudden embrace of fake “free speech” is having exactly the consequences anyone paying attention would expect. Just as advertisers fled ExTwitter when Musk decided “brand safety” was for wimps, Meta’s advertisers are getting nervous about their own brands being associated with […]