Feed Items
There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was also a flurry of talk claiming (misleadingly) that Jack had endorsed ExTwitter.
As with many things...
There was more contention than usual prior to the most recent reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance powers. The blame for the multiple fights leading up to a clean renewal lies entirely at the feet of the FBI, which has constantly abused its access to NSA collections to perform warrantless searches targeting US persons’ communications.
Normally, this sort of thing would require a warrant. I...
The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing...
Section 230, the legal backbone of the internet, is under attack again. This time, it is from a bipartisan pair of legislators who seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the law works and what the consequences of repealing it would be.
We’ve talked about plenty of attempts to reform Section 230, and why all of them would be problematic. But, now we have a bipartisan attempt to repeal it outright...
Long before TikTok histrionics took root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei.
The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. Congress then proposed a solution: it would...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson, with a comment on our post about ChatGPT and privacy rights in Europe, specifically in response to someone who raised the issue of “false light” torts:
False light is a privacy tort in the US. We’re talking about Europe. But also, false light typically requires the defendant to publish the information widely rather than just...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, there was a legal fight over whether it’s protected speech to flash your headlights to warn of hidden cops. We looked at how little the FCC had done to police wireless location data scandals, and how it was doubling down on bogus claims about broadband availability, as well as hiding details about fake net neutrality comments, and ignoring phone companies ripping...
Here we go again. Back in February, the FTC wanted to dive back into its battle with Microsoft over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to Microsoft announcing thousands of jobs worth of layoffs, including many developers from Activision Blizzard. When the FTC had asked for an injunction to block the sale, Microsoft made two claims. First, it indicated that the injunction wasn’t needed as...
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 speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben...
Mobile phones are currently banned in all Australian state schools and many Catholic and independent schools around the country. This is part of a global trend over more than a decade to restrict phone use in schools.
Australian governments say banning mobile phones will reduce distractions in class, allow students to focus on learning, improve student wellbeing and reduce cyberbullying.
But...