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A cofounder of a Bay Area “Stop AI” activist group abandoned its commitment to nonviolence, assaulted another member, and made statements that left the group worried he might obtain a weapon to use against AI researchers. The threats prompted OpenAI to lock down its San Francisco offices a few weeks ago. In researching this movement, I came across statements that he made about how almost any...
The Trump administration is so sure it can get away with anything that it’s willing to try anything. That misapprehension of the situation has resulted in at least 200 rulings against the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts. Still, the regime persists with its attempts to brute force constitutional rights out of existence.
Like it or not, MAGA faithful, immigrants have rights. They have the...
Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, Sega, and Playstation games and a personal digital assistant using the...
Everyone’s pissed at the tech industry. And for good reason. The term enshittification is super popular for many valid reasons. Companies that used to provide real value, are now focused on extracting more value from users, rather than improving their products and services. People used to be excited by new innovations. There was a time when many people felt more fulfilled after using new...
Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from UPenn media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading:
But Oliver also walked the talk. Oliver and his staff subsequently held an auction for all...
ACIP is meeting this week, which means we all get to clench our sphincters as we await whatever small, medium, or large sized horrors will come out of this panel of clowns.
It wasn’t always this way. ACIP, and the larger CDC, used to be the world standard when it came to government bodies dedicated to fighting infectious diseases. RFK Jr. did away with that earlier this year, when he disbanded...
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 speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined...
Despite all the recent hype about “AI,” the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism).
We’ve already seen how news outlets have gotten egg on...
A new bill sponsored by Sen. Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Britt (R-AL), Sen. Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Murphy (D-CT) would require AI chatbots to verify all users’ ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. That might sound reasonable at first, but behind those talking points lies a sprawling...
The Court of Justice of the EU—likely without realizing it—just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content.
Obviously, for decades now, we’ve been talking about issues related to intermediary liability, and what standards are appropriate there. I am an unabashed supporter of the US’s approach with...