This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Canadian YouTuber who was visited by the cops after building a Flock-like camera to track cop cars: If the cops are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide. In second place, it’s a comment about Malcolm Gladwell’s […]

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In all of our coverage of the disastrous tenure RFK Jr. has had as Secretary of HHS, we have not yet discussed a bonkers study the CDC planned to fund in Guinea-Bissau. This hepatitis B “vaccine trial” was supposed to already have been kicked off, but it has been suspended since January instead because of […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them […]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

Remember back when Elon Musk was handed the keys of our federal government with basically zero accountability or oversight? All sorts of bad stuff happened, but one of the lawsuits we’ve been covering was the American Federation of Gov’t Employees (AFGE) along with the Association of Administrative Law Judges and a few individual federal workers […]

The MOGICS Bagel has 5 international AC sockets, dual USB ports, 3ft integrated length-adjustable power cord, and an ergonomic AC plug. Unlike ordinary power strips, the bagel design makes it easier to charge multiple devices giving ample space for each plug. It has a LED power indicator that emits brilliant blue light when power is […]

One of America’s foremost thinkers hasn’t done enough thinking. Instead, he’s delivered a handful of thoughtful-sounding stuff that simply doesn’t hold up the minute readers start actually thinking about what he’s saying. Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about gun violence in the United States. I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on the […]

The Washington Post recently had some interesting additional insight into the various “pay to play” shenanigans related to Trump’s $330 million ballroom. They got a hold of a broader donor list, noting that Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount. As did GOP donor mainstay the Adelson family. Crypto companies are […]

It seems that burying reports because he doesn’t like the data within them is becoming a habit for Donald Trump and his administration. This practice didn’t begin during Trump 2.0, of course. He was burying reports he didn’t like all the way back in 2017. More recently, of course, a lot of the games being […]

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk’s far right wing extremism (and endlessly incoherent behavior) had many countries reconsidering their use of his low-Earth orbit satellite company, Starlink. It was driven by the fact that Musk had restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself […]

On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump “hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government.” Remember, this is the same Donald Trump […]

It’s time you get up to speed with Ruby on Rails! This full-stack web framework is all about letting you build applications quickly. Its elegance, flexibility, and speed make Ruby on Rails a popular choice for businesses, so taking the time to master it can pay huge dividends down the road. In this course, you’ll […]

Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway. As we covered last week, ICE officers […]

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of. Lately Trump has been complaining about […]

Alright, I don’t quite know what to make of what Epic Games is doing with this AI-driven nonsense, but it’s not great. I’ve spent a bit of time trying to argue that new AI technology has some place in this industry, but Epic and its leadership appears to be trying to personify every last thing […]

A quick update on a story we mentioned earlier this month. Much of the attention in the whole Bricks & Minifigs saga has focused on Reckless Ben and his attempts to expose sketchy behavior by the company, but the fight has also put a lot more scrutiny on Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM), including the […]

Sam Altman is not punk. He’s no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn’t make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history. […]

For the past several months, the DHS and DOJ have been pushing hard to make Trump’s illegal voter election conspiracy theories a reality. Trump continues to claim millions of non-citizen voters are participating in federal elections — something he persists in proclaiming despite having won two of the last three presidential races. This isn’t really […]

CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned […]

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, […]

You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it’s clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power. If an agency does things like launch […]

Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we’ve long known was a problem, because we’ve seen it be once before: the Court fails to take up […]

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for free expression. And it keeps improving. As the saying goes, it’s the worst it will ever be. People use it to receive ever-smarter speech and to create ever-better speech of their own. AI is now an important part of the marketplace of ideas—a market that, in America, is […]

It’s never a good idea to just print whatever the government tells you to print, not when you have the First Amendment to rely on. On the other hand, if you’re CBS News, it’s probably in your best interest to run whatever the government says to run because it’s probably going to be the same […]

This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) “No Kings” protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a “get out the (early) vote” campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of […]

We’d all like to learn something new, but long courses or heavy reading can feel too time consuming. Nibble transforms your screen time into short, interactive learning experiences designed to fit your daily routine. With bite sized lessons, quizzes, audio, and games, you can explore knowledge in a way that feels simple and engaging. Whether […]

At best, most Trump administration officials can be called “sycophants.” At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic […]

I’ve documented for years how major media consolidation is simultaneously completely pointless and incredibly harmful. Such deals exist exclusively so that unremarkable rich men with no real ideas can grab some tax breaks, create the illusion of perpetual growth, and pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.” Yet every single time a major media merger is completed the […]