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In a rare win for U.S. consumer privacy, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled unanimously against T-Mobile and its subsidiary Sprint, upholding (for now) a $92 million 2020 FCC fine against the company for selling sensitive wireless customer location data without consumer consent.
For decades now major wireless companies have collected granular customer movement...
As you will recall, a single gunmen opened fire on a CDC campus in Atlanta earlier this month, claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines. The rhetoric he had used prior to the shooting closely aligned with what RFK Jr. had been spouting for years. While Kennedy took nearly a day to even publicly comment on the shooting, more local CDC leadership was fielding questions from the Atlanta team...
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.
This is the second of our special episodes for the month of August. Last time, we talked a bit about the past and...
The UK government has reportedly backed down from its dangerous demand that Apple build encryption backdoors, following pressure from the Trump administration. But the secretive nature of this “mutually beneficial” agreement should make us deeply suspicious about what was actually traded away.
The UK government has backed down on a controversial demand for Apple to build a “back door” into its...
The Trump administration has been described as many things, none of them good. What no one will ever accuse it of being is “competent.” Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, most of them known only for waving the MAGA flag when not hosting shows on Fox or podcasts celebrating the debut of American fascism.
Case in point: SecDef Pete Hegseth, who was previously best known for his multiple...
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Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the top Democrats in the Senate. She could be fighting to protect democracy against fascists. She could be working on a new, better vision for Americans. But instead, she’s focused on breaking the internet.
And now we know why: someone made a stupid satirical video about her, and her response was to write an op-ed demanding new laws to censor it. The video is...
I don’t mean to harp on this, but a central promise of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would “take aim at big tech,” protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even “continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan.” The press was filled with endless stories credibly parroting these sorts of claims, all day, everyday.
Six...
If you’re tired of Techdirt posts about RFK Jr.’s inability to competently lead HHS, I’m tired of him leading that organization, so too bad. The problem is that RFK Jr. represents something of a national health emergency, one that is multi-faceted. The most obvious bucket of fuckery in which he is operating is, of course, when it comes to vaccines, as Kennedy has been a anti-vaxxer for decades...
During the last year of the Trump administration, there was this weird period where the Bill Barr DOJ decided that it could destroy the internet. It came out of Donald Trump declaring that Section 230 was bad for whatever reason Donald Trump thinks anything is bad, and telling his Attorney General to do something about it. This kicked off a weird time where Bill Barr was suddenly criticizing 230...