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The Supreme Court this morning took a chainsaw to the First Amendment on the internet, and the impact is going to be felt for decades going forward. In the FSC v. Paxton case, the Court upheld the very problematic 5th Circuit ruling that age verification online is acceptable under the First Amendment, despite multiple earlier Supreme Court rulings that said the opposite.
Justice Thomas wrote the...
In a day full of terrible Supreme Court rulings there was one bit of good news: in their FCC v. Consumers’ Research ruling, the court rejected a bid by radical right wing Republicans to destroy a popular $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural schools and communities to the internet.
The plaintiff in this case, Consumers’ Research, isn’t really a consumers’ group. It’s a right wing...
Last week we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a phone company is generous: It’s basically a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed MVNO effort (Patriot Mobile), which in turn just resells T-Mobile service.
A cornerstone of the supposed company was a new $500 Trump T1 phone. To pitch the phone, the...
ACIP Shitshow: Panel Member Exits Due To Conflict Of Interests, All Childhood Vaccines Up For Debate
Well, RFK Jr.’s reconstructed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), just concluded its first day of meetings in Atlanta. This was over the objection of GOP Senator Bill Cassidy, who confirmed RFK Jr. to his appointment but called for a delay to ACIP’s meeting after Kennedy terminated all 17 panel members weeks ago and replaced them with 8 hand-picked members that have been...
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...
For years, we’ve written about the concept of “soft corruption,” which is the idea that there are certain actions that may not mean the full definition of corrupt practices in the legal sense, but are so obviously corrupt that they make people more cynical towards those who claim to represent our interests in the government.
Lately, of course, it feels like the corruption is becoming more and...
Within days of each other, two federal judges in the same district reached completely opposite conclusions about AI training on copyrighted works. Judge William Alsup said it’s likely fair use as transformative. Judge Vince Chhabria said it’s likely infringing because of the supposed impact on the market. Both rulings came out of the Northern District of California, both involve thoughtful judges...
To call the administration’s “worst of the worst” claims a ruse is to give this administration too much credit. It’s not clever enough to run a con. Going after criminals was never the point during Trump’s first term. And mass deportation was the platform Trump ran on to get back to the Oval Office for this term.
Given the expectations, ICE was always going to fall short of arrest quotas if it...
Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide. The 2025 Complete Splunk Beginner Bundle has 4 courses...
While dozens of AI copyright lawsuits wind their way through courts nationwide, Judge William Alsup’s ruling this week in Bartz v. Anthropic stands out — not just because it’s from one of the most thoughtful tech judges on the federal bench, but because it charts a somewhat nuanced path through the copyright minefield that could define how AI companies operate going forward.
The ruling has...