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Let’s be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They’re the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people wouldn’t shed a tear if they disappeared...
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 (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.
The FCC E-Rate budget was not...
Last year, Andres Freund, a Microsoft engineer, spotted a backdoor in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility that is found on nearly all versions of GNU/Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Ars Technica has a good report on the backdoor and its discovery, as well as a visualization by another Microsoft employee, Thomas Roccia, of what Ars calls “the nearly successful endeavor to...
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...
When federal judges with decades of experience start publicly mocking the Supreme Court’s lack of clarity, you know the system is broken. This week brought us two remarkable examples of lower court judges who are clearly fed up with trying to parse the Supreme Court’s “vibes-based jurisprudence” from its unexplained shadow docket rulings.
First, we had Senior U.S. District Judge William Young—a...
You don’t often see blackmail victims extending offers to their blackmailers to sit down and discuss political issues, but that’s what happened when CBS — who recently paid off Trump to settle a lawsuit the broadcaster could have won — invited Kristi Noem to talk out of her perfectly coiffed ass for most of an hour last Sunday.
Of course, being graciously hosted by an entity that recently got...
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has apparently decided his latest form of politically motivated lawfare (the thing he insisted he would end once he took over) should be threatening Google over… checks notes… having spam filters that work too well at blocking actual spam. In a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai last week, Ferguson claims the company may be violating the FTC Act because Gmail’s spam...
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Since before RFK Jr. was even confirmed into his position as the head of HHS and American health, I have been pleading for someone to step in and correct this obvious mistake. Everything about his first half a year or so in the role has been a disaster. Layoffs and resignations at HHS agencies have become the norm. Anti-vaxxer propaganda now flows directly from the government agencies that are...
I generally try not to engage in “I told you so,” but I told you so. The Trump administration’s long-percolating plan to use Dish Network as flimsy cover for harmful wireless consolidation is dead, just as I predicted five years earlier. Dish will lumber forward as another lazy MVNO for a while longer, but the Trump administration’s promise of a serious fourth competitor in wireless is...