This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump threatening ProPublica, and our point that he remains “exhibit A” for why anti-SLAPP laws are needed: The funny thing is, this statement could apply to a lot of situations: SLAPPs, campaign finance fraud, attempting to overthrow the government…...

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the FCC was remaining in denial about the lack of broadband competition, while we asked why all the antitrust attention was focused on Big Tech but not Big Telecom. Officials in Germany were pushing for encryption backdoors while Facebook was considering going ahead and undermining its own encryption regardless, and...

Here we are again, with yet another in our series of posts describing how in these here modern times you simply don’t actually own the things you’ve bought. This sort of thing takes many forms, of course. Sometimes the digital media you “bought” gets disappeared by a platform after a licensing deal runs out. Sometimes the hardware you bought turns into...

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...

ShotSpotter hasn’t been doing all that well lately. While it’s the market leader in acoustic detection tech for law enforcement, it has seen several large contracts slip through its re-branded fingers in recent months. While ShotSpotter executives and press releases tout the accuracy of its sensors, real-life experience hasn’t been quite as stellar....

A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was more important than privacy. The bad news is that the CJEU has just decided that it is: The Court, sitting...