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I’ve written for years about how U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That’s resulted in a growing number of pissed off towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband...
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Jeff Bezos shutting down the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. In first place, it’s a simple anonymous summary:
Yep.
The message he sent is that he will control what is or is not published.
In second place, it’s another anonymous comment about his mention of the fact that newspaper endorsements...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, Comcast was putting on an innocent act regarding consumer privacy, while we looked at one Idaho town that was doing broadband competition right. India was looking to get into the mass facial recognition game, while NBC was facing legal threats for reporting on a company’s facial recognition tech being used against Palestinians. We wrote about the content...
If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people simply don’t like having a giant chunk of sweaty plastic strapped to their face.
The...
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...
Quick test: should saying “Hitler, not a good guy” cause you to be banned from your social media account? Seems simple enough. But apparently not for Meta, the largest social media company on the planet.
I’ve talked about the Masnick Impossibility Theorem and the idea that content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Part of that explains why there will be a near constant stream of “...
Very few states laws can be considered to be “famous.” Almost any state law immediately recognized by people in other states can only be described as “infamous.” The Wiretap Law enacted in Massachusetts is definitely infamous.
For years, this statute was abused by law enforcement officers and other state employees to punish or prosecute residents who recorded them performing their public duties...
Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function according to pre-defined requirements. Courses cover the basics, Bugzilla, JIRA, testing techniques, Java TestNG, and more. It’s on sale for $60.
Note: The...
As we head into next week’s election, it is worth taking a step back and realizing how absolutely ridiculous it is that we spent five or six years with people insisting that Facebook and Twitter absolutely needed to be punished for supposedly engaging in biased content moderation (something they did not do).
While any private media entity has a First Amendment right to use its editorial...
A new U.S. News And World Report survey of 2,500 Americans across the five most populous U.S. states (PA, TX, NY, CA, and FL) found that U.S. broadband prices continue to soar for most users. Most of the survey’s findings aren’t surprising; broadband access costs are reaching $100 for most users, and Americans continue to pay some of the highest rates for access in the developed world.
As usual...