Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

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In this special episode, Mike and Ben reflect on 100 episodes of the podcast, followed by an important announcement: we’re launching a Patreon and making some changes to Ctrl-Alt-Speech!

Starting on May 28th, Patreon members will get early access to extended weekly episodes with in-depth coverage of an extra major story. The free episodes will continue here on this feed, just slightly shorter and released one day later. 

You can become a member now at one of two levels: Supporters get early access to the extended episodes, and for a limited time Founders get that plus the opportunity to send us news stories that you think we should cover each week. After the new episodes begin at the end of May, the Founder tier will become the Insider tier with all the same benefits at a slightly higher price, so act now if you don’t want to miss out (you’ll also get bragging rights as a founding member!)

We’re immensely grateful to the incredible audience we’ve found over these past 100 episodes, and this is our way of helping make the podcast sustainable for the next 100!

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is dfbomb with a comment about the insane charges being brought against adults who assist students during anti-ICE protests:

These fucking assholes terrorized our schools.

They approached our people observing schools during morning and afternoon drop offs, pretending to be locals. We saw through them.

They staged next to Liam’s school just to be intimidating. They staged at my kid’s school.

These fucking ICE roared through the back alleys of family neighborhoods at 50mph with garages less than 6 inches on either side of their giant rented SUV mirrors, which had stolen license plates on them. They did this to try to lose observers.

They terrorized Roosevelt school after Renee was shot, just to assert dominance after the shooting in the neighborhood.

Fuck ICE. Charge me you assholes. See you in court where I tell the stories of how ICE agents have threatened, beaten and harassed my neighbors and I. The stories of how they cried in their coffees each morning because their feelings were hurt everyone hated their NAZI bullshit.

Mike, I wonder if Ken White would take the case if I managed to be perp-walked with middle fingers akimbo?

Fuck ICE. Fuck this ethnic cleansing and flex of power in defense of ethnic cleansing.

NAZI PUNKS: FUCK OFF.

In second place, it’s Rocky with a reply to a comment that aimed to dismiss expert opinions on age verification technology on the basis of some dubious claims about expert opinions on past issues:

Which experts? Have you actually educated yourself on what happened and when?

This is the sequence of events:
1. Hunter Biden (unverified) drops off a laptop for repair
2. No one comes to pick up the laptop for months
3. The owner of the repair shop starts tinkering with the laptop and pieces together a copy of the hard drive
4. The owner peruses the content, then tries to fob it off to various republicans
5. The owner also sends a copy to the FBI
6. A copy of the drive is passed around among Republicans and gets altered and modified several times
7. It finally ends up with Rudy Giuliani who sends a copy to the New York Post
8. NYP posts a story about the contents but no one at the paper wants to put their name on the byline
9. Links to the NYP story is posted on social media
10. Some links to the story is then removed on social media under the rule “hacked material”
11. A bunch of butthurt idiots scream censorship because surfing to the NYP article is impossible, only links on social media can work!
12. Social media companies walk back the decision to remove links.
13. After a lot wailing and gnashing copies of the drive eventually ends up with people that has knowledge of computer forensics
14. All examinations of the copies say some of the content appear to be authentic but there are signs of tampering and other content added, but no one can determine if the drive actually comes from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden
15. Mac Isaac, the repair shop owner, finally approaches CBS News with a “clean copy” because he didn’t like lies being flung around about the “Hunter Biden Laptop”. This drive is examined by a reputable third party which determines that the drive in all likelihood comes from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden
16. That’s it.

So these 51 experts you mentioned, did they examine the clean copy or the tampered copies?

“Hundreds of doctors and scientists wrote that covid obviously came from bats in a wet market“

No, what most said was that the virus in all likelihood came from bats that spread it to other animals which in turn ended up in the wet market. Do you understand the concept of zoonotic spillover and how bats are often carriers of very nasty viruses.

“But lol, no one cares about “letters from experts”. They probably never did, but they SURE AF don’t now.“

Willful stupidity is ignoring what knowledgeable people say. The right course of action is to listen, then actually determine if what they say is correct which may require people to learn new things that can contradict their beliefs. The latter makes the lotus eaters uncomfortable, because the apathy of belief is such a comfort in a complicated world.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the dangers of losing Section 230, both replying to claims that 230 is just a gift to the internet giants. First, it’s MrWilson responding to the idea that startups competing in the social media space is already impossible:

You seem stuck in a perspective that the purpose of every social media platform is to become as popular as Facebook has been at its peak. Alternative platforms are often niche ones that aren’t interested in becoming that popular and statistically can’t because their target audience either isn’t large or doesn’t grow much.

They deserve to survive despite your lack of imagination in how these attacks could affect them.

Next, it’s blakestacey on the protections more generally:

The law doesn’t just apply to billion-dollar companies. It protects Wikipedia. It protects Bluesky. It protects Dreamwidth. It protects individual Mastodon instances. It protects TechDirt. It protects personal blogs. It protects you.

Acting as though the Internet is synonymous with two or three giant corporations is an excellent way to get laws and rulings that only giant corporations have the resources to survive. Zuckerberg, Musk and the Ellison family win, while you and I lose.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is HT Pythons with a comment about Trump’s defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch being tossed out:

Into The Pit

What is your name?

• Donald Trump

What is your quest?

• To seek $10 billion dollars

What is the definition of actual malice?

• Huh? I don’t know that. (whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…..)

In second place, it’s Pixelation proposing a new multi-purpose maxim:

“For every human problem there is a Trump solution — one that is direct, obvious, and wrong.”

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from Pixelation, this time about RFK Jr.’s recently-announced podcast:

He should name his podcast, As The Worm Turns.

Finally, it’s Strawb with a comment on our post about the Trump phone, in which we referred to Trump’s organization as “fraud-prone”:

Which, in this case, would make them the fraud-phone Trump organization.

That’s all for this week, folks!

We’re past the halfway point in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals winners, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Remix: Lilac Song by Autumn Chen.

There were fewer interactive fiction submissions in this year’s jam than there often have been in past editions, but even if the field had been more crowded, Lilac Song would have undoubtedly stood out. It’s a somber, thoughtful story that casts the player as a servant to Prussian Minister-President Otto Braun during the last few years of the Weimar Republic. It revolves around and intriguing and fitting premise: the servant has been designing a simulation game about power and politics in Germany, from which she aims to draw insights that could preserve democracy and prevent the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.

The story is far more than a cursory look at these events: it’s clearly rooted in robust historical knowledge about this critical time and place, with myriad details about the specifics of the political situation as well as an additional exploration of gender politics and transgenderism in the era. But what’s especially notable for this jam is the way it weaves in a wide variety of artistic and musical works from 1930, which form the backdrop of its setting and the game itself. Amidst the story unfolding (and careening towards its inevitable ending) the player wanders the halls of Braun’s house and chooses paintings to admire and music to listen to. These works (by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Felix Mendelssohn, and more) become the wallpaper and soundtrack of the game.

Though the story takes center stage, the careful selection and use of these public domain works lend verisimilitude to the story and polish to the game design, resulting in more immersion than the text alone could achieve. For employing a curated combination of newly-public-domain works that elevates the interactive fiction without overtaking it, Lilac Song is this year’s Best Remix.

Congratulations to Autumn Chen for the win! You can play Lilac Song in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!

As we work our way towards a better future for the internet, the most encouraging and exciting part is the people out there building towards that future. Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler is one such person, and his new company Metalabel has some extremely interesting projects in the works, including the Dark Forest Operating System. This week, Yancey joins the podcast to talk all about his projects and their role in building a better internet.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

This week, we’ve got a double-winning comment from Shannon Vanshoon that took first place on the insightful side and second place on the funny side. It’s a response to a particular passage in our post about the scammy AI company that fooled the New York Times:

Or in other words…

“So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people.“

Or, to quote my partner, ‘I’d be rich if I was just a little more evil.’

In second place on the insightful side, it’s a comment from Thad about the depths of dysfunction in American government and beyond:

I forget who said it, but I once saw it framed as “If you want to know whether this is a Trump problem or a GOP problem, consider that the two most pro-Trump justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by the Bushes.”

That comment was a reply to Heart of Dawn‘s comment raising the subject, so we’ll start with that comment for our first editor’s choice on the insightful side:

What gets me is not the pedophile war monger’s unhinged rant, crashing of the global economy, or taking a sledgehammer to America’s status as an ally to the West and a global superpower- it’s that despite all this, he still has full support of Congress, the Supreme Court, and 30% of the US population.

The country has a rot to it’s very core that won’t be removed by ousting Trump alone.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about the limits of the DMCA and the companies that go beyond them:

But, as bad as the law is, it doesn’t actually allow for takedowns of references to copyright infringement (unless perhaps judges invented such a requirement via case law). Google apparently chose to allow people to use notices that way, despite a lack of any legal basis. And other search engines kind of copied from them. Maybe the film companies applied pressure as advertisers.

By contrast, in the old days, I don’t think anyone ever had their phone number removed from the phone book, or disconnected altogether, based purely on unproven accusations of illegal activity (like maybe a video store that was a little shady regarding copyright law). I’m not sure that was even an option after a court found someone guilty or liable.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is MrWilson with another comment about Medvi and the New York Times:

I’m half expecting an announcement that Elizabeth Holmes has endorsed MEDVI from her cell and is being given a seat on the board.

We’ve already had our second place funny winner above, so we’ll head straight on to the editor’s choice, starting with That One Guy and a comment passing on a famous book passage that suits Congress’s latest attempt to put the law behind a paywall:

‘Publicly acessible’ doesn’t mean ‘Publicly accessible in a usable format’

And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency.

” …You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anyone or anything.’

‘But the plans were on display…’

‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’

‘That’s the display department.’

‘With a torch.’

‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’

‘So had the stairs.’

‘But look you found the notice didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of The Leopard”.’ –Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams.

Finally, because someone had to say it, it’s an anonymous comment about the prosecutors who are still trying to convict a 62-year-old woman for wearing a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis costume to a protest:

Somehow isn’t the biggest dick of this story.

That’s all for this week, folks!

It’s time for the third in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation and Best Deep Cut winners, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Visuals: As I Lay Flying by Geouug.

In a first for these game jams, Geouug is a double winner, having taken the prize in two different categories with two different games. As I Lay Flying is the more ambitious submission of the two: it’s a challenging physics-based game based on William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying, which tells the story of the Bundren family’s effort to return their recently deceased aunt’s body to her hometown. In the book, it’s a journey of diverse trials and tribuilations; in the game, it’s a slapstick adventure about launching a wagon through the sky.

It’s a fun if slightly finnicky challenge that’s easy to understand but hard to master. There’s more than just the core physics gameplay too: progressing requires purchasing upgrades using the money you earn with each attempt, and the selection of these upgrades is crucial to finishing each stage.

The resource management layer turns As I Lay Flying into a complete game, and it was a strong competitor for Best Digital Game. But even more than that, the game stands out for its graphical ambition, completeness, and attention to detail. Everything is designed to fit into the style and setting, and no interface element is left plain and generic: they are rendered in wood and paint and cloth, with little touches like period-appropriate stamps to mark purchased upgrades. During the main gameplay there are parallax-scrolling backgrounds and physics-based animation of the wagon and its occupants, and the levels are bookended by dialogue and narration scenes illustrated with photos and original character portraits.

Though most of the graphics are composed of very simple pieces (stock grass textures and vector tree silhouettes abound), the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. No corners are cut and nothing feels overlooked. For achieving such a comprehensive graphical style that ties together every element of the game, and with some fun gameplay to boot, it’s this year’s winner for Best Visuals.

Congratulations to Geouug for the win! You can play As I Lay Flying in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!

We’ve written at length about the dangers of the recent court rulings in California and New Mexico that say social media companies can be held responsible for certain uses of their platforms via product design liability. Recently, Mike joined FIRE’s So to Speak podcast hosted by Nico Perrino to discuss the rulings and the concerns they raise, and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering an additional resource on our post about the White House’s new app:

The other half of the story

The analysis by “thereallo” covers the Android version; there’s a dissection of the iOS version at Security Analysis of the Official White House iOS App

It’s just as bad and sheds additional light on why this is a security and privacy disaster.

In second place, it’s a reply from Rocky to a commenter who was angrily getting everything wrong about the Murthy ruling:

What’s pathetic clownboy, is that you think you understand legal matters.

You blather on about merit while totally missing the point why they ruled they way they did and it is just mindboggling that you are unable to connect the dots here. It is very simple, it was concluded the plaintiffs suit had no merit, substance or proof of injury (you know, the part you are desperately ignoring) that would trigger Article III standing.

But keep screaming about lies while we point out your stupid clownishness.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from martin1961 deploying an aphorism in response to Virginia’s legally misguided attempts to compel CSAM scanning:

When you come across a man made obstacle, do you
A) dismantle it and carry on, or
B) find out why it was placed there in the first place ?

Next, it’s Drew Wilson pushing back against a commenter who disputed the comparison of the social media moral panic to previous moral panics:

That would be because the comparisons are justified. Video games were supposedly going to corrupt the youth by turning them into murdering psychopaths who would be deadly effective because they train all day on their “murder simulators”. That never played out no matter how many times the media blamed video games for anything violent.

The same is being done with social media. Social media is corrupting the youth because the youth will become distracted or have no sense of morality because they are seeing easily accessible pornography on platforms like YouTube (something that doesn’t even pass the laugh test in my books).

If there are any fundamental differences between the two, I’m not seeing it. There was never really any evidence that video games were going to turn the youth into murder machines and there was never any evidence to say that social media will inherently destroy the youths moral compass, attentiveness, or whatever else the heck that is being fabricated by politicians and the media.

The irony here is that by making your argument, you proved Masnick’s point about someone always insisting that “this time it’s different”.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a comment about RFK Jr.’s struggle to fill the CDC Director position:

Job ad

Needed: Whipping boy. Experience required:Conspiracy theorist.

In second place, it’s Arianity with a quip (plus a nice note) on last week’s comment post regarding the considerable length of one of the winning comments:

Congrats to Azuaron for getting their first article published on TD!

In all seriousness though, that article’s comment section was one of the best I’ve ever seen in terms of people actually productively trying to work through issues and explain their positions, even if I didn’t agree with everything.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad on our post about Pete Hegseth’s war on truth:

It’s not a war, it’s a military operation on truth.

Finally, it’s MrWilson with a good reply to anyone making confidently wrong statements about the law:

Another thorough legal analysis from Trust, Me, Bro, & Associates, all graduates of the Gut Feeling School of Law, magna cum dumbass.

That’s all for this week, folks!

It’s time for the second in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1930! We’ve already covered the Best Adaptation winner, and this week we’re looking at the winner of Best Deep Cut: CARAMENTRAN by RedSPINE and poymakes.

Sometimes, we get entries that were designed for more than one game jam, and this is one of them. In this case, the game was also created for the Themed Horror game jam in which one of the themes was “macabre carnival”. CARAMENTRAN delves specifically into a Provençal carnival tradition from France, in which the “King of Carnival” or Caramentran is put on trial for all the year’s ills then burned at the stake in punishment. As the player, you are Caramentran himself, trying to ward off accusations from the villagers while extinguishing the flames at your feet in a grimy, unsettling horror arcade game.

It’s a fitting premise for a horror game, but what makes it special for this game jam is its visual assets, drawn from a variety of public domain sources. The game’s hauntingly hideous aesthetic comes from a collage of archive images and postcards of actual carnivals in Southern France, combined with figures taken from American magazines, ads, and fashion plates.

Many of the materials are from 1930, while many others are from earlier, and the combination of wildly different styles is viscerally jarring in a way that amplifies the horror. There are no widely recognized images or famous works of art here, only fragments of visual language plucked piece by piece from the vast sea of imagery in the public domain, and for that it’s this year’s Best Deep Cut.

Congratulations to RedSPINEandpoymakes for the win! You can play CARAMENTRAN in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!

In the conversation about online speech, most of the attention tends to fall on the big social media platforms, while other intermediaries get overlooked — especially payment processors and other financial intermediaries. But that very thing is the focus of a new book coming out next week, Rainey Reitman‘s Transaction Denied. With launch events coming up on April 7th in Berkeley and April 9th in San Francisco, Rainey joins the podcast this week to talk all about the book and the vital role of financial intermediaries in online speech.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.