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Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
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In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined...
As much as I dislike and distrust Axon (formerly Taser and the leading proponent of the “excited delirium” theory of cop exoneration), I just don’t think there’s much going on here. Sometimes there are actual monopolies. And sometimes, one business is just better at business than its competitors.
But that’s what a few cities are claiming in a new lawsuit, first reported by Cyrus Farivar for...
Schools have always kept tabs on students using school-issued devices. Prior to the pandemic, this had mostly been limited to filtering software that prevents students from accessing content schools don’t approve of. Of course, this has also kept students from accessing content that might be useful to them personally (self-harm prevention, LGBTQ+ content) or scholastically (because Wikipedia is...
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It’s almost laughable that these two stories happened so close to one another. The Australian government has just announced a pilot program to test an online age verification system:
And then, just hours later, it was reported that law enforcement is investigating an apparent breach of club and bar patrons’ personal data, which the venues are required to collect by law for people entering such...
When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT...
It’s been nearly a year, but I won’t pretend that the outcome of this isn’t quite satisfying. Last summer, grocerer Trader Joe’s filed an absolute bullshit lawsuit against the union for its own employees claiming that the name of and merchandise sold by the union represented trademark infringement and would cause confusion with the public as to the source of those goods. The court dismissed that...
Because it sells so very well to a certain percentage of the population, ridiculous people are saying ridiculous things about crime rates in the United States. And, of course, the first place to post this so-called “news” is Fox News.
An independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts claim violent crime rates are much higher than figures reported by the Federal Bureau of...
Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn’t secured, often isn’t encrypted, and is sold to a long list of dodgy, unregulated middlemen...
Apparently, the world needs even more terrible bills that let ignorant senators grandstand to the media about how they’re “protecting the kids online.” There’s nothing more serious to work on than that. The latest bill comes from Senators Brian Schatz and Ted Cruz (with assists from Senators Chris Murphy, Katie Britt, Peter Welch, Ted Budd, John Fetterman, Angus King, and Mark Warner). This one...