Saturday 2026-07-11
04:00 PM
02:00 PM
His Name Is Lorenzo Salgado Araujo [The Status Kuo]
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke at 5 a.m., just as he had most mornings for the last 35 years. He kissed his wife Maria goodbye, loaded his tools into his work van and drove out to collect the last members of his construction crew before sunrise. Most evenings, he came home to a meal Maria had prepared for him, sat on the porch with his dog and listened to music before doing it all again the next morning.
Salgado Araujo was 52, was applying for a work permit after decades of being undocumented, and had no criminal record. By his family’s account, after filing a year and a half of paperwork, he was near to his goal. “My father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a hardworking Mexican man… has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother,” his son Ronaldo wrote in a statement.
That day, Salgado Araujo didn’t return to his family, his porch or his dog. An ICE agent shot and killed him, adding his name to the growing list of people whose lives have been violently ended by ICE, an agency operating with little transparency and even less accountability. Salgado Araujo’s dream of living and working legally in American was snuffed out. His family, friends, colleagues and community were left grieving, enraged and rightfully demanding answers.
The morning of July 7
Surveillance video places Salgado Araujo’s white van on Canal Street at 6:46 a.m., according to a timeline FOX 26 Houston reconstructed from surveillance footage, bystander cellphone video, family interviews and ICE’s own statements.
A second surveillance clip obtained by CNN shows him driving on Canal Street as a black SUV trails him on his left. Seconds later, another black SUV cuts through a nearby shopping center parking lot, moving toward his van and the first SUV. CNN also reported that video obtained by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) shows Salgado Araujo’s van turning onto Canal Street with a black SUV following. Neither clip shows markings identifying the vehicles as law enforcement.
According to a CNN source familiar with the investigation, ICE vehicles attempted to box in the van, which struck at least one of the ICE vehicles as the stop unfolded. No publicly available footage captures the moments immediately before the shooting. An ICE agent fired at least one shot, striking Salgado Araujo in the abdomen.
Juliet Martinez, A Houston resident, recorded the aftermath. Her video, shared with CNN, shows a wounded man lying face down near a barbershop, with a federal agent kneeling over him while speaking by phone. “He was screaming for help and screaming that he was in pain,” Martinez said. “He yelled, ‘Help me! They shot me!’” Three other men are seen in handcuffs nearby—among them, his family later confirmed, Salgado Araujo’s brother.
Houston Fire Department paramedics arrived within roughly ten minutes, according to video obtained by KPRC 2. Salgado Araujo was taken to Ben Taub Hospital with CPR in progress. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
ICE never contacted his family directly. Ronaldo Salgado learned that his father had been shot from a video circulating on Facebook, recognizing him not by his face but by his voice, crying out from the pavement. He and his brothers later learned of their father’s death the same way: through social media reports, not from any official notification. “They haven’t sent anyone to speak to myself or my family, no contact at all,” Ronaldo said. “We still don’t have any answers. There has been no communication between us and our DHS.”
ICE’s questionable account
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, ICE described the shooting as the outcome of a “targeted enforcement operation.” The agency said officers tried to conduct a traffic stop in the 6800 block of Canal Street at approximately 6:50 a.m. Salgado Araujo, ICE claimed, attempted to flee.
“From information we’re receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense,” ICE said.
But newly obtained footage, analyzed for KPRC 2 by a former Houston police homicide detective, shows Salgado Araujo was struck on the right side of his abdomen. This calls ICE’s account into question, since it is hard to see how an agent who feared being run over would have fired from that angle. Separately, the New York Times reported that ICE’s operation that morning was actually aimed at two individuals from Guatemala who had no connection to Salgado Araujo or his van.
DHS has since acknowledged that Salgado Araujo was not the target of the operation. According to a Homeland Security official, agents had been surveilling a property where they had previously observed two white vans, tied to the two people believed to be in the country without legal status. Salgado Araujo drove a van that resembled the one they were looking for. The agents moved to box him in before confirming that he was the person they were after. Only after the stop was underway did they determine, from the vehicle’s registration, that he lacked legal immigration status.
Neither ICE nor DHS has said whether agents identified themselves as law enforcement before or during the stop.
What’s missing and what contradicts it
There are strong reasons to doubt ICE’s account, as numerous other cases have shown when video or witness evidence directly contradicted the agency’s initial version of events.
More than two days after the shooting, federal officials still have not released any video, photographs or physical evidence supporting their account. No body camera footage exists; DHS claimed in a Thursday statement that the officers involved “had not been issued body-worn cameras due to back-to-back Democrat shutdowns,” and that cameras had been deployed to more than half of ICE’s field offices, with the rest—including Houston’s—expected to receive them within 60 days.
No dash camera video, dispatch logs or photographs of the alleged vehicle damage have been made public either, and that’s a central problem. LULAC says still images taken from witness videos appear to show little or no visible damage to Salgado Araujo’s van. That doesn’t square well with ICE’s account of a van used to ram an agent’s vehicle and then allegedly weaponized against an officer. While CNN’s source did describe some contact with an ICE vehicle during the stop, it did not describe the severity of the collision.
“We need the facts,” said Lupe Torres, LULAC’s national vice president for the Southwest, adding that the organization had not yet reviewed all the evidence.
LULAC national president Roman Palomares underscored the underlying distrust. The immigration crackdown, he said, has created conditions in which it is “open season on Latinos” by officers who believe they can “shoot and explain later.”
That skepticism is warranted. In the March 2025 killing of Rubén Ray Martinez, a U.S. citizen, federal officials claimed he had accelerated and intentionally driven over an agent before he was shot. But video obtained later showed his vehicle stationary or moving at very low speed when agents opened fire.
In January, DHS accused Renée Good of trying to run over and murder an agent before he shot her. The department separately claimed that Alex Pretti had been “brandishing” a weapon during a struggle in Minneapolis. Video in both cases told a different story.
Here, agents reportedly removed Salgado Araujo’s identifying belongings before he reached the hospital, leaving staff unable to register him under his own name. The circumstances prompted commentator Bill Kristol to ask whether they pointed to “a coverup or attempt to manage information” from the outset.
Who Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was
While the ICE agents had tried hard to anonymize his killing, his family and community insisted upon uplifting his humanity.
At a Wednesday news conference, flanked by LULAC, Houston-area members of Congress and Harris County officials, his eldest son, Ronaldo, a teacher, introduced his father to the country that had just taken him. “I want to tell you about my dad,” he said. “He was a hardworking family man who never wanted his name to be known by anyone outside of his family. He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people.”
Salgado Araujo had met Maria when they were teenagers in Mexico. They came to the United States together, and over the decades that followed, built their own home in Houston with help from the men who worked beside him. He spent his career in construction, building homes across the suburbs while raising three sons, all American citizens, and putting each of them through college. He eventually ran his own business, and was known for his work ethic, his fairness and his willingness to help anyone who needed it, according to a GoFundMe page created on his family’s behalf.
He had also completed a biometric scan and fingerprinting earlier this year as part of his work permit application.
His son believes that same care is part of why his father may not have stopped for the vehicles now identified as belonging to ICE. Salgado Araujo had studied, with his lawyers, what to do if immigration agents ever pulled him over. But the agents who approached him Tuesday were driving unmarked vehicles. If his father sped away, his son believes it was more likely from fear that someone wanted to steal his van and his tools—his livelihood—than an attempt to escape federal agents he didn’t know were there.
Three other men were in the van that morning: his brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two employees, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and José Trinidad Rojas Pliego. ICE detained all three at the scene, and they remain in custody.
The consequences of that were immediate. LULAC CEO Juan Proaño said: “There was nothing to identify him when he arrived at the hospital and as a result the hospital took him in as a John Doe. In doing so, it set off a bunch of triggers, a bunch of extra hurdles that the family has had to effectively navigate through.” Officials required a biometric and DNA verification before confirming his identity, and he was not officially declared dead until roughly 24 hours after the shooting. His widow, Maria, was told she must be the one to claim his body. But because she lacks legal status, the family has had to bring in lawyers simply to retrieve him.
The community of Houston has been stirred to action. Hundreds gathered in Magnolia Park on Wednesday evening, marching along Canal Street chanting “ICE out of Houston” and building a memorial of candles, flowers, and handwritten notes at the site where he was killed. Local artist Sarah Fisher spent the day painting his portrait, incorporating dry-cleaning ID stickers into the piece to spell “SOS” and “XOX”—a cry for help, she said, and a symbol of love.
A statement from the family, read at a candlelight vigil that night, asked for three things: a full independent investigation, an end to what the family described as ICE’s ambush-style tactics and for the neighborhood to look after Maria, his widow. U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee, who joined the vigil, connected the case to a pattern he said Houston shouldn’t have to relearn from Minneapolis: “This is not the first time this has happened,” he said, “and every single time they come and they tell us their version of events, but we don’t see any evidence.”
President Sheinbaum of Mexico responds
Salgado Araujo’s killing reached the highest levels of the Mexican government. President Claudia Sheinbaum called it another regrettable death of a Mexican national in the United States, and she said Wednesday that Mexico intends to escalate. “Our objective is to go beyond diplomatic notes and the measures we have already raised before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, because we cannot allow the mistreatment of our fellow Mexicans in the United States,” Sheinbaum said.
By Thursday, that pledge had taken concrete shape. Mexico’s foreign secretary, Roberto Velasco, announced the government will formally request that U.S. state prosecutors and the Department of Justice investigate Salgado Araujo’s killing, and it will pursue separate civil action against the private companies that operate ICE detention facilities. Velasco tied the case to a broader tally: 17 Mexican nationals have now died in the United States in immigration-related cases during the current administration, 14 in ICE custody and three in ICE operations, including Salgado Araujo. Sheinbaum, for her part, said his killing “seems targeted.”
Where things stand
The Harris County Medical Examiner has ruled Salgado Araujo’s death a homicide, caused by a penetrating gunshot wound.
DHS’s Office of Inspector General is reviewing the shooting, while the FBI is separately investigating the alleged assault on a federal officer. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has launched a parallel review, though Houston city officials say the city lacks jurisdiction to investigate federal agents directly.
Per reporting by The New Republic, the three men detained alongside Salgado Araujo are now facing pressure to sign self-deportation orders, according to Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC. Proaño said that relatives in contact with the men confirmed the pressure, and that some of the men may be inclined to sign rather than face longer detention. He called it “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.”
Separately, Cesar Espinosa of the Houston civil rights group FIEL said the men are being told to cooperate with ICE’s version of events, under threat of criminal charges or expedited removal if they refuse.
On Thursday, four Houston-area members of Congress sent a formal letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director David Venturella demanding the release of all video and evidence supporting the agency’s account. So far, none has been made public.
His name is Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
Most people killed by ICE this year have not had cases like Alex Pretti’s or Renée Good’s, which generated national coverage, congressional attention and sustained public outrage. Most were not U.S. citizens. Many were Latino, Black or otherwise nonwhite immigrants whose deaths registered only as local news, if they registered at all.
Salgado Araujo’s case has broken through in a way many others have not. It has drawn national coverage, brought Houston’s congressional delegation to a podium and reached the president of Mexico.
Every name on the list the Mexican government read aloud this week belonged to someone with a Ronaldo and a Maria of their own: people who loved and knew everything about that person, who to them was “el mundo entero,” as Salgado Araujo’s family described him. “The whole world.”
01:00 PM
Xbox Lays Off 20% Of Staff, Cut Studios, Largely Impacting Acquired Devs It Promised It Wouldn’t Layoff [Techdirt]
The long-rumored layoffs at Xbox have come and they are massive. We just recently discussed the mess that Microsoft’s Xbox division has become. An internal email that was sent to staff by CEO Asha Sharma laid out just how bad things were, essentially preparing the staff for the forthcoming staffing cuts. Interestingly, this is the latest in a series of staff cuts, many of which have been at studios that Microsoft recently acquired and told the FTC and the courts that there wouldn’t be layoffs in order to get the acquisitions approved. Those were lies, of course, but there won’t be any punishment for those lies. Regulation is just so un-American, you know.
This round of layoffs will effect over 3,000 staff members eventually, or about a fifth of the Xbox division workforce. The appetizer this past week accounts for about half that number. Working at Xbox right now must be buckets of fun, where you get to try to perform quality work while wondering if your name is on some list somewhere. An email went around again acknowledging the layoffs, as well as several Xbox studios going independent.
This email, shared with Kotaku, says that 1,600 of those layoffs will take place today, while the rest will take place later. Compulsion Games and Double Fine will become independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs “have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3,” though the specifics of that have not yet been disclosed. Arkane Lyon is entering legally required “consultation” in France to review its options, and its fate remains unclear.
Layoffs will also take place in varying sizes across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios, though Sharma stated that none of Xbox’s first-party, publicly announced games or projects are being canceled as a part of these cuts. Mojang and King will now report directly to Sharma.
Again, several of these studios experiencing layoffs were recently acquired by Microsoft and, during regulatory proceedings, Microsoft said that layoffs wouldn’t occur. And, again, there will be no consequences for these lies, other than those felt by these ex-employees who no longer have a job.
Interestingly, these layoffs came along with a message that Xbox was going to start getting real lean on where it focuses its staff and money investments, primarily into “core franchises” in the gaming space. Despite that message, we’re already hearing about how these layoffs will result in the delay of current production of games in those very core franchises.
Speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their careers, current and former staff have told me that job losses across Bethesda Game Studios locations have removed more than 50 employees, including “key, high-performing people in the trenches” building the company’s long-awaited Skyrim successor. This in turn, they say, has shattered morale, raised the risk of future development crunch, and increased the likelihood that the game’s already far-off completion date will be delayed.
If you’re interested in how Xbox management is behaving in the midst of all of this turmoil and the obviously negative emotions of the remaining employees, well, it’s been awfully fucking shitty, honestly. Several Bethesda offices saw employees setting up “Celebrations of Service” in common areas, where staff members put up pictures of and messages to ex-coworkers to show their appreciation for all they’d done. That same day Xbox HR ordered that those memorials be taken down, all under the bullshit excuse that you can’t do that sort of thing in a common area.
“Unfortunately, HR made our office manager take this down almost immediately,” posted the union account. “They said because it’s in a common area, it had to be removed. We’ve used common areas for many things as a team, including fan works, but HR seems to believe that a Celebration of Service is inappropriate.”
And, since you can’t have real American capitalism in the modern era without getting a heavy dose of irony to go along with it, Asha Sharma herself was recently named to a task for at the Federal Reserve to advise on “jobs and productivity.” This is a bit like the FDA putting Hannibal Lecter on its advisory panel for a proper nutritional diet.
“The Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor,” Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said in a press release on July 9. “The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution. The goal is straightforward: to ensure the Fed is best positioned to achieve our objectives in this consequential time.”
Maximum employment? What an interesting concept for someone who just instituted historic layoffs to advise on.
So, how are things going at Xbox? Pretty fucking horrible. Layoffs, tone-deaf executives, delayed games, poor morale, and a workforce living in fear that they might be next. And I just can’t help but to return the point that much of this is a result of overextending acquisitions of enormous developers and publishers in the last five years, during which the company promised this very thing would not happen.
09:00 AM
How Google And AI Nearly Made A Seasoned Reporter Spiral [Techdirt]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo.
At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.
Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.
Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story?
“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.
Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, per the website, had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. This was puzzling: Our reporting had led us to believe Calce was struggling to raise enough money for a single project in the U.S., not overseeing a massive, multinational oil storage corporation.
Had we been wrong?
We turned to Google to learn more about the company’s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience at major energy firms. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, “built the company’s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,” according to his bio. But we couldn’t find any trace of either of them online. Chalk it up to common names?
We then Googled one of the more distinct names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had “spearheaded the ‘Future Fuels’ program, preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen.” But, again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.
When we searched the company’s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.
We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead.
We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website.
What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed an odd notation, “This feature isn’t implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”
We checked the site’s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it, and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Appear on Google and AI search automatically.”
Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company’s bona fides:
When I searched for an award the company claimed on its website to have won, the Google AI Overview said that “Recent notable recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oil and terminal operations sector.”
Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is a real LLC. But everything on its website — from its history of the company, to its job postings, a diversity and inclusion policy — appears to be fictional. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the proprietor of the world’s primary research tool, has rolled out AI Overviews that can indiscriminately take in fake material and authoritatively spit it back out as real.
In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: “AI Overviews are rooted in our core Search ranking systems, surfacing reliable and high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there might not be high quality information published that matches the query — and we use these examples to improve our search systems.”
After we reached out to Hostinger, the company pulled down the site. “After receiving your inquiry, we carried out an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we suspended the website and the account behind it in line with our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, The New York Times reported on an analysis that found Google’s AI Overviews were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times, noting that that added up to “tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour” given vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study has “serious holes.” The company has acknowledged that AI Overviews “can make mistakes.”)
A BBC reporter wrote a fictional article naming himself the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs, and Google’s AI as well as ChatGPT quickly picked it up and parroted it back.
And the source material for the AI Overviews also appears eminently gameable, even when not trafficking in actual fiction. “It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests,” ran a recent headline in 404 Media.
The mystery website ended up as just a single paragraph in our story. But the larger implication is obvious: fakes, counterfeits and frauds that would have taken considerable effort to create just a few years ago can now be churned out pretty much instantly.
While preparing this piece, we reached out to Calce asking about the site. An attorney for his company, America First Refining, replied to us with a letter dated June 24 that the attorney sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.
“I write to demand immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to America First’s office address on your website,” the letter said. “As you are aware, America First has no connection or affiliation with the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website and has not authorized the use of its corporate address there.”
I’m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it put up by some malicious actor who simply found the company’s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was it a test site that was mistakenly put online? Or could it have been designed for consumption by someone who was meant to think it was real?
We don’t know, and our emails to the press contact listed on the website, media@brownsvilleenergyterminals.com, bounced back.
06:00 AM
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Sell Me Lies, Sell Me Sweet Meta Lies [Techdirt]
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 Patreon.
In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:
- ‘It’s not like we knowingly have bad ads’: Meta on ad fraud, teen safety, and why AI will not replace agencies (The Media Leader)
- Instagram running ads promoting child sexual abuse material in India (BBC)
- Meta Now Lets Anyone Use Your Instagram Photos in AI Images—Unless You Opt Out (Wired)
- At 17, She Sued Meta and Google, and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story (Bloomberg)
And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:
- Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China’s top AI models, sources say (Reuters)
- Fable 5 Is Back After Anthropic Irons Out Security Concerns With US Government (PC Mag)
- AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share (WSJ)
- Introducing Tokens to the Future: Token Grants to AI Builders (LinkedIn)
- OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake (Financial Times)
Our fun links this week are Roost, the “slow-cial” messaging app, and PlotLines for visualizing classic novels on a map.
If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.
FCC General Counsel Channels Founding Fathers To Falsely Claim First Amendment Allows Banning Porn [Techdirt]
Another senior Trump administration official is gleefully showing off his true colors: The current general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published an opinion column with the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet The Daily Signal calling for stronger obscenity regulation.
From the Founding through most of American history, courts allowed the legislature to control pornographic material. Judicial reactions to internet pornography broke this tradition to our great detriment.
That’s by Adam Candeub, the general counsel for FCC chair Brendan Carr’s censorship regime. Among other things, he was the lawyer who represented the racist Jared Taylor when he unsuccessfully sued Twitter for being moderated. He also was a key player in the first Trump administration’s effort to get rid of Section 230. Lately, he’s been one of the driving forces behind model legislation that helped lead to mass adoption of age verification laws around the United States. Candeub also contributed the section on Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulatory actions for regulating online speech to the public policy treatise for Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 effort.
His resumé aside, Candeub’s latest contribution to wider discussion on free speech, pornography, and obscenity law is replete with culture war talking points of very little substance. He frames his arguments as a patriotic call to action referencing the founding fathers of the United States on the occasion of our country’s semiquincentennial year.
He says they would have “supported” stronger obscenity regulations and a resumption of obscenity prosecutions, echoing recent calls by figures in the religious right and anti-porn movements to do so. It’s easy to claim what people 250 years ago would have said or believed since they’re not around to defend themselves.
But a casual look shows that several of the founding fathers were not particularly pure or morally superior when it came to sex and relationships. Even if you look past their somewhat infamous extramarital affairs, Ben Franklin was famous for both writing and sharing materials that might not even pass the test for obscenity today. Thomas Jefferson expressed deep outrage at the concept of censoring literature based on religious morality tests. Writing to bookseller Nicolas Dufief in 1814 after a magistrate threatened prosecution over a controversial text, Jefferson demanded, “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy?”
These are not the actions of men who would quickly embrace anti-obscenity laws.
I wrote for Techdirt not too long ago about the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, calling pornography a “national security threat” and urging the Department of Justice to resume prosecuting alleged obscenity as a way to fight pornography’s accessibility.
Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana also sent a letter to Trump’s Justice Department in May, arguing that the feds “[ending] obscenity prosecution was a mistake.”
This all matters, given that Candeub is expected to move to a top-level DOJ position soon.
His anti-porn screed is full of nonsense:
“Americans born after the mid-1990s have lived their entire lives in a world awash with hardcore pornography. Never has so much pornography been so available to so many at so little cost. Our laws leave much pornography effectively unregulated. Our technology, especially smartphones, brings portable, private porn shops to everyone’s phone.”
Aside from the clear misinformation about an “unregulated” pornography industry, Candeub proposes a supposed moral restoration of obscenity laws such that anything viewed through the lens of non-traditional sexual expression could be fair game for legislatures to heavily restrict or outright ban.
Much of his column summarizes a report he produced on the topic for the Heritage Foundation, which was published on July 6. The report is aptly titled, “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age.” It is replete with the same talking points from the most extremist elements of the anti-pornography movement who desire to ban all pornography.
He praises the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, which found that Texas could require age verification for online adult content, despite it going against previous Supreme Court First Amendment precedent.
The report also calls for the return of Comstock laws and the patchwork of anti-vice statutes that were historically used to prosecute individuals for “obscene” devices, the transmission of “prurient” content, and other prohibitions that lasted into the 20th century.
Most alarming, he views the high court’s 6-3 decision in the Paxton case as an optimistic but quite unclear step to modern Comstock prosecutions in state-level courts:
“Paxton may signal the reinvigoration of a dual-track approach to the regulation of obscenity: States can require oversight for minors, and mostly anything goes for adults. At the least, it is unclear what effect, if any, Paxton will have on obscenity for adults.”
He adds:
“The most optimistic result under current law would be a reinvigorated Miller with the national government again able to regulate the transmission of obscenity. The case’s flexible terms could allow for obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission. Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity.”
The bolded text is Candeub’s silver bullet. By his interpretation of the current Comstock law, the incumbent FCC’s general counsel is essentially calling for criminal prosecution for transmitting “obscene” web content across state lines because, well, the internet exists and it transcends borders.
This is exceptionally problematic for two reasons. First, Candeub works for the FCC and is backing a legal strategy that’s been used, historically, to aggressively prosecute women, LGBTQ+ individuals, entire communities of color, consensual sex workers, and pornographic and non-pornographic publishers for their speech.
This is the FCC presenting itself as the morality speech police.
Second, Candeub’s advocacy in this report and column conforms to Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s call for the prosecution of “pornographers” who spread “the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography.”
We’ve seen this idiocy before.
Candeub’s arguments are about far more than pornography. He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity. All of this is done in the guise of “restoring public morality” and “protecting children” from a supposed cultural decay.
Coming from the lead attorney for Trump’s FCC, one of the architects of Project 2025, and a likely to be senior DOJ official, this signals a terrifying push forward towards a public policy agenda to enable greater and greater censorship by dubbing things like LGBTQ+ content and legal adult pornography as something that can be banned.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
Daily Deal: The All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle [Techdirt]
The All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle has 10 courses designed to teach you about video editing, animations, photography, design, and more. Courses cover popular Adobe products like Lightroom, After Effects, Photoshop, and Adobe XD. The bundle is on sale for $30.
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04:00 AM
Adults Broke The Internet, And They’re Trying To Fix It By Kicking Kids Off [Techdirt]
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of developmental psychologist Candice Odgers. I’ve mentioned her and her work on the site many times, and she was a guest on my podcast as well. She actually has expertise and has done the work to look at the impact of social media on kids. In many ways she’s the anti-Jonathan Haidt with actual facts, not made up nonsense (which is why when she debated Haidt, he came out of it looking pathetic).
Odgers gave a TED Talk recently, which is now online. It’s worth watching in its entirety (only about 12 minutes) as she details how the moral panic about kids and social media is bullshit, and how banning kids from social media will do way more damage to their mental health:
A few choice quotes (though, again, watch the whole thing). First, she points out that on many important metrics (including the metrics many teenagers were judged by in past generations), we’re doing incredibly well:
in the past 20 years, we’ve had some major wins.
Rates of teen violence, alcohol use, pregnancy have plummeted to historic lows.
You are looking at the most educated generation ever in terms of high school graduation. Young people are inventors. They’re activists. They’re leaders. They’re amazing singers. They’re Olympians. They’re amazing.
And, yes, in some cases they’re more anxious and sadder about the world. Though, some of that may just be the state of the world today. And while she doesn’t say this, I know I’ve heard her talk about it before: some of her work from way back started from the premise that the reason kids were stressed out and anxious was because of social media, but repeated studies failed to find any indication of that (some of which we’ve reported on).
As Odgers points out, the reality is that it’s the adults that are the problem. There’s a mental health crisis among adults, and much of it may be driven by issues like the opioid epidemic:
Now, since 2008, we’ve seen an uptick in youth suicide risk. But perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, because adult suicide has been increasing dramatically in the United States since 1999.
Remember when I said that adult mental health and caregiver mental health is the most important predictor of child mental health? Well, with that in mind, I want to take a look at this slide.
This graph here shows you that between 2011 and 2021, the rate of overdoses due to drug use among parents more than doubled. People ask me all the time: what could have happened during this period other than social media coming online?
The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying.
And, she points out that the data suggests no significant impact for young boys, and for young girls the correlation is reversed. Those who are facing mental health problems and don’t have support go online more — not the other way around.
She also discusses how adults keep closing off spaces for kids to be kids, and banning them from social media just takes away yet another space for kids to be a part of a community.
We are punishing victims.
We’re kicking them out of the spaces they go to be with friends, to consume youth culture, and yes, sadly, many times to escape people that are harming them offline.
We’ve already kicked teenagers out of public spaces.
In the US, we’ve created a society where firearms are the number one killer of our children, and now we’re telling our kids that we’re going to take away the spaces that they’re going to virtually gather and create community, because adults broke that, too?
Yeah, I’m saying adults broke the internet and they’re trying to fix it by kicking kids off.
So a social media ban might feel good for the adults in the room, but teens tell me, and I believe them — it’s not going to work.
It’ll push them into less safe and less regulated spaces, and it will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them be well.
And, no, contrary to some of the YouTube comments on the video, she’s not giving a talk in support of social media platforms. She admits that there are issues there, but notes that kicking kids off doesn’t solve them. It also makes it more difficult to fix the actual underlying societal problems. She comes up with a list of solutions which I won’t spoil, but it involves taxing some of the tech companies to pay for better support for children.
It’s a 12-minute TED talk, so it’s designed to be quick and straightforward, without going too deep into the data and the science, but given how those in favor of banning social media have taken over the narrative, it’s good to have the counter narrative out there.
As Odgers herself said about this talk when she posted it to Bluesky, the kids can be alright. “This isn’t an anxious generation, it’s a resilient one. Let’s start treating them that way.”
The real work, then, is making sure kids have the tools, spaces, community, and knowledge to be safe in the world — both online and off.
02:00 AM
Riff-o-matic [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]
More than 345 riffs, worthy of a calendar, all in one place. They don’t fit in a blog post, so I made a page of them. Hit the refresh above to see another one, or see them all, and vote on your favorites, at sethsriffs.com
On the riffs page, you can click the ? icon and launch a search of the blog for more details and discovery. Share links are also there.
Kanji of the Day: 永 [Kanji of the Day]
永
✍5
小5
eternity, long, lengthy
エイ
なが.い
永遠 (えいえん) — eternity
永田町 (ながたちょう) — Nagata-cho (Japan's political center; equiv. of Downing Street)
永住 (えいじゅう) — permanent residence
永久 (えいきゅう) — eternity
末永く (すえながく) — forever
永世 (えいせい) — eternity
永続的 (えいぞくてき) — permanent
永の (ながの) — long
安永 (あんえい) — An'ei era (1772.11.16-1781.4.2)
永徳 (えいとく) — Eitoku era (of the Northern Court) (1381.2.24-1384.2.27)
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Kanji of the Day: 沈 [Kanji of the Day]
沈
✍7
中学
sink, be submerged, subside, be depressed, aloes
チン ジン
しず.む しず.める
沈黙 (ちんもく) — silence
沈没 (ちんぼつ) — sinking
沈む (しずむ) — to sink
沈静 (ちんせい) — stillness
地盤沈下 (じばんちんか) — land subsidence
沈痛 (ちんつう) — grave
浮き沈み (うきしずみ) — ups and downs
撃沈 (げきちん) — sinking (a ship)
沈着 (ちんちゃく) — composure
沈める (しずめる) — to sink (e.g., a ship)
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンス2026 [OpenStreetMap Japan]
# OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンス2026 ## テーマは「ファースト」 初めての出会い、初めての一歩が、未来の可能性をひらくきっかけに。 初心者も経験者も、それぞれの“初めて”にチャレンジする一日にしましょう！ OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンスは、OpenStreetMapに関心のある人たちが集まり、交流し、学び、アイデアを共有するカンファレンスです。 OpenStreetMapを初めて知る方、地図づくりに興味がある方、地域活動やまちづくりに地図を活かしたい方、オープンデータの活用事例を知りたい方など、どなたでも歓迎します。 ## 主な内容 ### OpenStreetMapに関わる人たちの交流の場 普段オンラインで活動している方、地域で地図づくりをしている方、これから関わってみたい方が、関西でゆるやかにつながる機会をつくります。 ### 様々な
Interview with Nara Oliveira, Free Software Artist [GIMP]
GIMP is Free and Libre Open Source Software, but none of it is possible without the people who create with and contribute to it. Our project maintainer Jehan wanted to interview the volunteers who make GIMP what it is, and share their stories so you can learn more about the awesome people behind GIMP!
Early interviews from co-maintainer Michael Natterer and Michael Schumacher were published shortly after the first Wilber Week. The remaining interviews from this event, about Simon Budig and Øyvind Kolås were published years later as a revival of the series. While these interviews are a bit old and reference outdated versions and features of GIMP, we believe they still have value and show the evolution of our community.
This next interview is the first one recorded at the 2017 Libre Graphics Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The subject is Nara Oliveira, co-founder of Estudio Gunga. She is a Brazilian artist and advocate who uses free software exclusively to develop professional works in many fields, including design, illustration, and animation.
This interview took place over April 21 - 23, 2017. In addition to Jehan and Nara, Simon Budig, and Aryeom Han were also involved and asked questions.
Jehan: Hello Nara. Can you introduce yourself to the people?
Nara: My name is Nara Oliveira. I am a Brazilian designer. I am from Brasília, the capital. The city name is Taguatinga. I study design and today I work with free software. I have my own company with some partners and we work in audio, video, design, and animation.
Jehan: What is the name of your company?
Nara: Gunga. Gunga is an instrument from Capoeira. We have the berimbau with the “calabash”, I think – it’s an instrument from Capoeira.
Jehan: Okay. From what we understood, you mainly use free software
Nara: Yes.
Jehan: Mainly, or only?
Nara: Only.
Jehan: And which ones in particular?
Nara: I use GIMP, Inkscape, MyPaint, sometimes Krita – I’ve tried it – Scribus, FontForge, FontMatrix, and others like everybody uses.
Jehan: Do you use Linux?
Nara: Yes, Arch Linux.
Jehan: So full free software from start to end! Okay, and why do you do this?
Nara: When I heard about free software and Linux, I was working in a cultural space. I was working with theater and with drawing, and we already have that culture of sharing things and sharing knowledge. So when I met these guys in free software, they told me about what GNU and Linux were and the philosophy – and when I heard about it I fell in love with it. Because I already think that way, and so free software is applying what I think is right onto software and onto technology. So for me it just makes sense.
So I started to use this software. In the beginning it was difficult to make the transition, but with some time I got into it.
Jehan: So you made a transition from proprietary software?
Nara: Yes, from proprietary software to Linux.
Farid: When was this?
Nara: When? Ah, let me count…
[group laughter]
I was not finished studying then, so like around 2006 or 2007 I started. I really started to use Linux and everything for working in 2008, for everything.
Jehan: So you studied design in university?
Nara: Yes, in university.
Jehan: With proprietary software?
Nara: Yes, with proprietary software only. But my university was not so focused on software. In five years of studying, we only had one class about software. And as the class went on, everyone already knows how to use it! So it’s like a class that has to be on the curriculum, but it’s not like you have to use – it’s more like conceptual.
Simon: Something I do a lot is that - I’m a software developer mainly, so I do a lot of my own tool development. Like I have a specific problem and I know there is an algorithm in my mind that I know would solve the problem (or might solve the problem), so I start implementing my own tools for very specific, very weird tasks, because I can’t do it with GIMP.
Nara: I would like to do that!
Simon: So this is what I wanted to ask – do you have programming experience? Do you have an idea of what it means to develop software?
Nara: No, but I think I have an idea – but I do not develop programs. I’ve studied a little, but it’s not like I can do something. I can see the code lines and know more or less what’s happening, but I can’t write lines by myself.
Jehan: You’ve told me that sometimes you will see some scripts and guess what it can be, and change the numbers…
Nara: Yeah, but more in insights and not in the programming itself.
Jehan: Since we’re doing this interview for gimp.org, what can you tell us about GIMP? How do you like it? How do you hate it? Tell us everything!
Nara: [Laughing] The first thing is, I like GIMP. I use it a lot. My work and style is more vector, but I use GIMP a lot and I like it.
When I made the transition to free software, until today one thing I didn’t like is that you don’t see the effects. You have do something, turn back, “Oh no!” - I have to change two, three points here, then I have to undo and do it again and come back. For me, it’s one of the things that makes the work not fluid.
I’m so happy to see GEGL on-canvas effects.
[Editor’s note: This feature was already implemented in the development version of GIMP 2.10, officially released about a year after this interview.]
Jehan: So, some other comments on GIMP?
Nara: Yeah, I really like it but, for example, I have some problems with my tablet. When I bought my first tablet, it simply didn’t work on GIMP. And I think it’s because of that, I use MyPaint. Because I have to work, and I have to work right now and the pressure doesn’t work, so what can I do with my tablet – so I found MyPaint, and I started to work with MyPaint, and it’s because of that I use it. Not because I think it’s more powerful than GIMP – it’s just because of that. At the time I liked it, and today I still use it.
[Editor’s note: GIMP 3.0 improved many issues with tablet support that were mentioned here.]
Jehan: So MyPaint is your main software?
Nara: For drawing, yeah. Because I am a designer, but I’m an illustrator too. So for illustration I use MyPaint, just for that. For small drawings, I use vectors in Inkscape, and so on.
I use GIMP more for photos, for editing, composing, correcting photos.
Jehan: Yesterday when we spoke, you had this nice example of a job you did with Scribus. Like your first job with free software, I think?
Nara: No, my first book.
Jehan: Ah, your first book, not your first job with free software. Could you tell it again, now that we’re recording?
Nara: I was called on to make a big book, like three hundred pages. There was little time to do it, like three, two weeks. I am from Brasília, and they said you have to do it here with us to get it quicker. I traveled to Bahia to do it, and when I arrived there, there were two other designers. It was funny because I worked in Scribus, one worked in Corel Draw, and the other one in InDesign. So you had three designers, three different software.
Jehan: And three different operating systems.
Nara: Yeah, and three different operating systems, and we had to do one book, the same book!
So we met each other and said “Okay, let’s do it!”. We separated the book into pages, so I would do the first one to 100, the other designer would do 101 to 200, and so on. And we together figured out how the design of the book would be, and the rules to make each part feel like the same book.
So we started, and just like that, I finished first! I was worried, because I had not used Linux for too long, and if there was something wrong in the software or in the distribution, I would not know how to fix it. One of the designers had Mac and the other had Windows and I was so worried.
But it went well and I finished first – and it was very encouraging for me. It’s just a tool you know? I can do it, he can do it, she can do it – everyone can make it, so I was very happy. Because in the beginning I was worried about everything going wrong, and that there would be problems when I saved the PDF and printed it, but it was all okay.
The book was about experiences with, we call it here “apprentice to Griô”. It’s from the French language, because it came from Africa but a country that speaks French.
It’s like an old master who teaches the people around them, the community, something – knowledge about herbs, which can be medicinal herbs, or teaches about techniques about how to construct instruments, or make music, or dancing – like masters of Brazil, of all Brazil. So it’s because of that it’s a big book!
Years later, in the north of Brazil, when the waters came and filled the houses in the city – a flood. I was seeing that on the TV there was an old lady with her flooded house beside her, everything destroyed. And she had that book in her hand. She was crying because her house was destroyed, but she had the book, and she was happy she still had the book even though she didn’t have her house anymore.
So it was a meaningful project, and it was the beginning of my using Scribus.
Jehan: Are there things sometimes you feel you are not able to do with free software? You already answered this yesterday, so I’m just asking again to hear you saying it.
Nara: When I see art – art is everything, design is everywhere – I can’t see something and think about “I can’t it do with free software”. I can do it – maybe I can’t do it because of my creativity or because I don’t think about it, but technically I can do it, you know. We have the tools to do it. We have other ways, but we have the tools I think – in my area of design.
Simon: What would interest me is, you mention that you use quite a lot of different tools, like GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Scribus -
Nara: Blender not yet, though I started animating in the timeline. In the movie that we showed, the first one that was in 2D, I animated parts of that.
Simon: But there are a lot of different tools that you and your colleagues use. When you start a project, do you pick one of the tools and stick to it, or is more like you start using one tool then transfer the result to a different tool?
Nara: Yes, it was like each tool was like a room of a house. I live in the house, there’s a lot of rooms, and sometimes I’m in the living room, other times I’m in the bed room, other times I go to the kitchen. It’s like I have a bottle, and I take the bottle here and there.
I don’t choose the software. I plan the project, I think about it, and think “How am I going to make this?” So I will start drawing in MyPaint. But I need it to be a vector, so I save it, open in Inkscape and add a vector. But ah, I need an image in the background. So I open the image in GIMP, I work with the image there, then import into Inkscape, okay. But oh, now I have to print it. So I save what I can save in vector I save in vector, and what I can’t save, I export. And I go to GIMP, transform it and edit it, and I take everything, go to Scribus, put them together, and make a PDF. More or less like this. I’m always going back and forth between the programs.
I think it’s very complicated, but for me it’s very simple. But when I teach things like that it sounds very complicated.
Jehan: Do you have any questions, Aryeom?
Aryeom: I feel like I am in her head. I totally understand – I work the same way. Maybe later if I have any questions I’ll ask.
Nara: I learned everything by myself. So I don’t like tutorials, you know?
Aryeom: You don’t like tutorials?
Nara: Yeah, I don’t have the mind to read or watch them. I learn all by myself. I think my way of working is just my way, because I learn by myself. And sometimes I get in touch with people who use the software too, I like to watch them because people do things very different that I do, and things more easily. And sometimes I teach the software to someone, and in two weeks or three, I go to see what the people are doing. “Oh my God, I’d never think of that way!”. It’s very fun because of this.
I don’t like to do workshops because of that. I think my style of work is very crazy. But we can talk about it!
Jehan: So right now you have a big animation project. So maybe can you speak about it?
Nara: Well, Farid is the director. He writes the script. I am the art director, but I also help him with the script and doing all the storyboards. I do it in MyPaint. I was a little worried because I’ve never done a storyboard before. So I study a little, see other’s storyboards, and make it for the animation. And we are talking with people who want to work with us on the animation – and I was happy because people always say “You have a beautiful storyboard!”. I was worried about that.
I think we are, I don’t know, opening ways. Because we are not a 3D studio but we want to do 3D animation, so we have to contact on a lot of other people in Brazil and Latin America, and even in Europe. It’s been like a dream to make it. And we want to make it very fine, very good, because today if you are seeing bad 3D, then you don’t watch it. Because you have Pixar, you have Disney, you have a lot of others. I don’t think that we’ll be like Pixar, but we have to do something very good and great to be seen, you know? I think this is our goal. We want to make something very nice, very good that everyone wants to see.
We’re telling Brazilian history of Quilombo, when there was slavery. Some slaves ran away and made a tribe, a community of their own and lived there. And these communities survive until today. And some of them have a lot of different cultures. It’s like they’re isolated. And the story is about one of these communities. In Brazil the agriculture is taking the lands of these people, because they have a paper that says “We own these lands”, but actually these peoples have been there for 300, 400 years.
So we are telling the story of a girl who lived in a community like this. And they’re being pressured to go out and leave their lands. The story is a fiction, but it’s based on real facts. This is the history. It’s going to be like 10 minutes, it’s a short one, but it’s a real movie and after it’s finished, we want to continue it. Make like episodes or a long movie – it’s just like a pilot. But we need the pilot to get a bigger step.
Aryeom: I feel so moved, because our ZeMarmot project is also like this.
Nara: Here in Brazil there’s a law, I’m not quite sure, that for free television and private television, 50% of programs have to be Brazilian programs. Because it’s all foreign programs, so the government says that 50% have to be produced here in Brazil. So I have a lot of opportunities in that way for animated series.
Jehan: So you plan to distribute on TV.
Nara: Yeah.
Aryeom: Why did you choose 3D? Why not 2D?
Nara: Because we love it! We really love 3D, we’re really passionate. We started using Blender, even for 2D, but we want to go to 3D you know. We have some experiences, and we like the visuals of the movie – we actually don’t work with 3D, but we want to. A lot of people do that – I think 2D is less expensive and -
Jehan & Aryeom [in unison and laughing]: I don’t think it’s less expensive!
Nara: No? We like 3D. We want to make it – it’s so popular for the kids, for everyone. We want this movie not to go to the festivals and stay there. A lot of good films here are made this way. The very good films go to the festivals, earn their prizes, and no one’s ever seen the movie. “Oh you’ve seen that movie? No!”. It will never go to the cinemas.
We want it to have the chance to become popular, you know, a lot of people really watching it. And 3D has this affection, people really like these.
Jehan: I know you said you also appreciate Creative Common licenses and stuff like that, so is this movie going to be under such a license?
Nara: Yes, it’s going to be an open movie! You can take the characters and make another animation by yourself. If you want to take everything, the characters, the background, everything, and animate another story, you can do this.
Jehan: Which license?
Nara: We haven’t thought about it yet, but the kind of license where you can make anything.
Simon: You said 3D. I sometimes have the impression that 3D in some way is more limited in what you can do artistically compared to 2D.
Nara: Yes, it is.
Simon: So this is not a factor for you?
Nara: No. Because in 3D, it’s like you said. If you’re doing a 2D animation, I don’t know, you can do a lot of types of techniques. Like it can be black & white, it can be color, or so many types – it’s like art in stop motion. 3D is different – you have a character, and you have the scenery, and the scenery is just the scenary. You can make some tricks with lighting and shading and colors, but it stops there. It’s an artistic limitation, I agree with that.
Aryeom: In your team, no one had any experience making 3D animations?
Nara: I animate, but I know how to take the characters and make them move. But I’m not an expert. Farid knows that too and know how to make a 2D animation in Blender. But 3D is a new challenge for us.
Jehan: I think also the question was, you are a designer so you usually work in 2D. So we would expect something who draws would want this drawing to come to life, than just doing the drawing and give it to someone else to make the actual final thing.
Nara: I have difficulties with this. I get tired of drawing very quickly. I can’t imagine myself drawing the same character more than, I don’t know, 10 times. I think I would die if I did that.
Aryeom: Haha, I’m dying!
Nara: It’s like my style. This book was difficult to me, because I had to draw the characters the same. They have to look the same every time I draw it. I don’t like that. I like to do one drawing and it’s over. They have to repeat and be the same. I like the work, but the process of doing the same thing is difficult for me.
Jehan: So you prefer to just draw something and let someone else repeat it again and again.
Nara: Yes, like the computer!
Aryeom: To make a series, an episodic drama, it’s easier to make in 3D. For long form, it’s good I think.
Jehan: Yes, for long form, but for short movies it takes longer due to preparations.
Nara: So it’s not my kind of thing.
[Nara hands out a book]
Nara: It’s by a friend of mine who wrote the story and he asked me to make the drawings. I don’t do a lot of kid stuff, but I like it. And it invites kids to draw at the end of it. It talks about what city do kids want to live in, and what city we want for ourselves. We have a lot of problems in the cities here, and I like the idea of book, to let kids dream about the city because we want that dream to come true.
Aryeom: What about Gunga’s future?
Nara: Ehh, I expect in the future that we have more people working with us. And we have more companies work with us with free software, you know. I’d like to get larger but not too larger. Because I want my life too!
Aryeom: Wise!
Nara: But I’m happy now because last year two new people joined the studio, and it’s a lot more fun to work with more people. We exchange experiences, and I think I want to grow in that way, to get a little bigger and get more partners. And work with more cinemas! It’s more difficult because it’s expensive to work with cinemas, working with animations. We like to do more for ourselves. We make a lot of productions, videos for other companies, for the government, so we’d like to do more for ourselves – like our stories, less for them, more for us.
Jehan: Okay, maybe the last question unless someone has something. Do you have any requests for GIMP developers? Other than on-canvas preview because we already have it!
Nara: I will see the new version you talked about after this.
No, I’m okay. I think I’ve used it for such a long time that I’m so adjusted to it. In the beginning I had a lot of issues – if you gave me a paper then I would fill it with “I want this, I want that! Why do I have this? I can’t believe it!”
But today it is so natural to me that I had to think about it before coming here, because I’ll be meeting people that I want to talk about it with. And I think well, there are little things I want to change in the software. But I think that I have this because I’ve been using it for so long. People are always comparing it with propriety software, and I don’t compare it anymore because it’s been such a long time since I’ve opened something like Photoshop.
So, I’ll think about it.
Jehan: But in the end it just works!_
Nara: Yeah. I’ve written some*, but not for GIMP, for Inkscape, Scribus…
[Editor’s note: Jehan misheard the word “some” here as “song”]
Jehan: Ah! A song for everyone but us?
Nara: I used an earlier version of Inkscape which had a lot of bugs. They just changed it and so I have just bugs for Inkscape. Bugs are bugs.
Jehan: Ah, it’s bugs, not a song!
Nara: Yes, for Inkscape. For Scribus, I have some issues with development.
Aryeom: So you have bugs for them, but you have requests for us. So it’s good!
Jehan: Ah, okay. I thought you’d wrote a song.
Nara: No no – I know my letters are beautiful but it’s not a song.
And I’m happy to meet you! Very happy. I don’t go to a lot of events like here in Brazil. I don’t have a lot of time to do that. And it’s like an investment to travel here because it’s very expensive and the country is too big, haha. So my involvement with free software is like in my community. On our street where we work, a lot of people use Linux because of us. It’s like a center, you know? Time to time, someone goes there, “Oh, I bought a new notebook, I want to install Linux, let’s do it together”.
I think my part in this is more local than global – in the community. I feel better like this. Real connection, offline. I’m not so close to the development here and the other artists. And most of them, they’re just show artists. They don’t really work with design, they don’t really live from this, you know? I tend to know people who live from free software. Most of them are professionals, who are really good at one software, but they don’t put food on the table with it. It’s a little different. I learn from them, but I want to know people who have real issues.
Because when you don’t work with it, you just experiment, you make your own goals. Like “I’m going to make this girl have make-up on her face”, and then you do that. When you work, another person puts a goal on you. Like, “Make this girl have a guitar”, and you have to find a way to do that. And the process when you make a goal versus when another person makes a goal you have to achieve, it’s very different when you’re working with the software. Because you have to go somewhere you’ve never went before. And it makes you use the software in a different way.
You understand what I’m saying? Because when I see the workshops, people are very good at doing something they always do. I want to see people doing very good things they’ve never done before. These things show the real potential of the software.
Jehan: And the potential of the artist.
Nara: Yes, and the potential of the artist. Because you can show me, Inkscape or GIMP is doing this new thing. But maybe I’m not going to use it just because it’s in the software. I’m only will use it if I need it. So, there are a lot of people who are experts in the tools and what the tools can do – to make it, you have to use all the tools combined. It’s different, it’s another level.
Jehan: Well, I think that’s a good interview. Thank you Nara!
Nara: Thank you!
12:00 AM
FTC Strikes Settlement With John Deere On ‘Right To Repair’ [Techdirt]
To be clear, the FTC under Donald Trump and new boss Andrew Ferguson has been a dangerous embarrassment. Whether it’s the firing of both Democratic Commissioners, the politically motivated investigations, the extremist attacks on trans people, the agency’s useless attacks on porn, or its efforts to undermine free speech, the Trump FTC has largely been a hot and painful mess that looks nothing like the “extension of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy” promised by Republicans last election season.
That said: stopped clocks and all that.
The agency appears to have actually done something useful in striking a new settlement with agricultural giant John Deere to address the company’s longstanding “right to repair” abuses. According to an FTC announcement, the settlement to the joint lawsuit brought by the FTC and five states requires that the FTC spend at least ten years trying to make repairing its tractors easier:
“The FTC’s settlement requires Deere—for the next 10 years and under the supervision of the FTC and plaintiff states—to provide farmers and independent repair providers with the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities, that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers.”
As is often the case, whether this actually sees any meaningful enforcement will remain an open question. But right to repair advocates like U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor say the settlement is a meaningful one, and a step up to the agreement John Deere made when recently settling a different right to repair class action lawsuit for $99 million.
“The agreement between Deere and the FTC is much better than the deal secured in a similar class action lawsuit,” Proctor said. “For example, it protects independent mechanics from anti-competitive practices in the repair marketplace.”
As we’ve covered for years, John Deere went out of its way to acquire smaller, independent repair centers to force users to use more expensive John Deere dealership repairs. Then it went out of its way to make tools, manuals, and parts as difficult as possible to get. In short they worked tirelessly, for years, to create a monopoly on repair — dramatically driving up costs for consumers.
John Deere’s behaviors had one positive net benefit: they directly sparked a nationwide and bipartisan right to repair reform movement that sparked Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington to pass state level right to repair laws. All 50 states have considered such laws, and several (like Maine and Ohio) have gotten close in recent years.
More recently, John Deere had been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agreed to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s original complaint noted.
It’s worth reiterating that since passage not a single state has actually enforced the laws despise no shortage of offenders, so a lot of work needs to be done on the enforcement front. And again, a settlement with the FTC is also only as good as enforcement; not exactly the Trump administration or U.S. government’s strong suit when it comes to standing up to consolidated corporate power.
Friday 2026-07-10
10:00 PM
Android Developer Vindication [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]
This Week in F-Droid
TWIF curated on Thursday, 09 Jul 2026, Week 28
F-Droid core
Last week we skipped our weekly post as we got busy with more pressing tasks around F-Droid, hence the lists below grew a bit more. What did we do instead?
On the client side, we are polishing
version 2.0 as we come close to a stable release to be offered to everyone.
This means we get more eyes on changes, weight decisions and their impact, visit
and close old issue, ping users that reported bugs to get one last feedback loop
going and more. If you’ve been reading past TWIFs you’re mostly up to date, but
we’ll include more fixes and improvements over alpha10 when ready.
We also had our own board member Marc Prud’hommeaux analyze the latest Google announcement and the timeline pertaining to the Android lock-down. Since we’ve been writing about this for the last 10 months we hope everyone understands already how their actions and plans are affecting F-Droid and the whole FLOSS Android ecosystem by now. In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Malware” (already translated in 4 more languages) he explains how the developers are asked to give Google a carte blanche when agreeing to their vague terms. Cui bono?
A fresh category was added, Volume, Manage volume setting and two new apps: Dhwani - Volume Control, Restore system volume controls on devices with broken volume buttons and Granular Volume: Quiet Dial, Make any app quieter than your phone’s minimum. A floating fine volume dial.
The website Category listing is a huge long page now, luckily contributors started porting the meta categories design from the 2.0 client update, so this will be improved soon.
Community News
The Bryant Review serves us two new interviews. First with DocWolle, that you already know as the prolific woheller69 (how many apps? wow), in “F-Droid and the Future of Open-Source Android; An Interview with DocWolle” they cover the human behind the nickname, app development, the AI rise and the Android changes to come. Second with PranshulGG, creator of WeatherMaster (not yet in F-Droid, but in the IzzyOnDroid repo), in “WeatherMaster, Open Source, and the Future of Android; An Interview with Pranshul” they talk about the ease to build for Android, open-source, privacy and the future of app stores.
The second intro is particularly interesting:
When I recently interviewed DocWolle about his work on open-source Android, one thing became immediately clear: some of the most interesting developers aren’t working inside giant companies or chasing millions of downloads. They’re building software because they genuinely want to solve problems, share their work with others, and make Android a better place for everyone
We hear Google repeating that the Android lock-down is appreciated by everyone, while (you) our users and the FLOSS apps developers fought for a free Android, against the Google changes, since day one.
Google pushed its own app verification app to 4 billion devices, but we already have app verification at home, AppVerifier BG was updated to 0.6.1, and it fulfills our needs: FLOSS, decentralized and driven by the community. No gate-keepers needed nor wanted!
Bangle.js Gadgetbridge and Gadgetbridge were updated to 0.92.1 adding more supported devices, per device features and fixes.
evcc - solar charging was updated to 1.3.3 with a key change. The nature of the tools used to build the app makes it hard, for now, to successfully build reproducible apps. Hence, the developer, after many tries, decided to switch the app to the F-Droid signature. If you’ve installed the app before June 26, please uninstall and reinstall it.
Featherline: HRT Tracker, Private medication tracker for HRT routines — plans, reminders, personal logs, was just added, a first in F-Droid. It’s local, encrypted, lockable and easy to visualize.
Fennec F-Droid was updated to 152.0.4. Major version 152 has brought a lot of UI fixes, security fixes, PDF sharing and page zoom performance improvements, but it’s not trouble free. Some users, with a diverse mix of devices and Android versions, seem to not be able to even start the app. If you encountered as such you can try this one weird trick: open a URL by sharing it from another app. When the app starts, go to Settings, Home Page, and toggle off all the items (shortcuts, privacy report, etc) and test. Some testers were able to enable them back and fix Fennec, but results can vary. We are tracking this issue here.
ObtainX, A supercharged Obtainium: get app updates straight from the source, was just added. A fork of Obtainium, also updated to 1.5.2 last week, it adds a lot of nice things on top, too many to list here. An interesting one concerning F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid, is App Verification support straight from our repos, you can get the details here. Fun fact: Obtainium will get a refresh to Material Design 3 in the next version.
pyLoad was updated to 0.4.2 modernizing the app after a 5 year pause with better themes, exceptions handling, latest Android support and more.
Saracroche was updated to 5.0.0 with many changes under the nice interface. Les Numeriques magazine has an interview (in French) with the developer here.
ShizuCallRecorder just got switched from the F-Droid signer to the upstream developer one. If you’ve installed it before July 6 you’ll need to uninstall and reinstall the new version.
Tor VPN Beta was updated to 1.8.0Beta polishing the experience. We’ve skipped 1.7.0Beta and the x86 and x86_64 architecture builds for now as reproducibility verification was failing.
@shuvashish76 brings a bag of goodies:
App Manager was updated to 4.1.0 after one year. Now we have ADB data backup, filter-based profiles, app usage barchart, more installer options, better performance, nicer UI & accessibility and more.
Rocinante was updated to 1.1.0 with fixes. Last week the developer talked about the experience of adding the app in F-Droid, this week, in line with Marc’s post mentioned in the opening, the developer is pondering (in Spanish) the future of app distribution.
Traffic Light was updated to 3.0.1 adding data plans enhancements, persistent notifications and more.
FLOSS developers are doing a great job, but they need help to be able to work, fix and enhance. Apps that depend on hosted services, like wallabag, need people to administer servers, incurring a cost. The wallabag.it, paid services, will directly fund development work contributed back to the project, helping to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Archived Apps
Contributor @Maxwell.s-demon got a shiver to ponder the future of apps whose code was archived, took time to visit many of them and report which should be marked as “archived”. As usual we encourage you to (expand the list and) see if you need to replace any app with one that’s still developed. NOTE: If you are using the latest client version 2.0-alpha10, you will be informed about these in the MyApps -> Issues section.
58 apps were moved to the Archive repo
(expand for the full list)- 10,000 sentences: Learn new words in foreign languages
- aTox: aTox, a beautiful and modern Tox client
- Aurora: Non-official Library Genesis mobile client
- AutoDark: Utility to schedule system dark mode
- Avare: Aviation map
- BBS: Monitor battery behaviour with Better Battery Stats
- BikeComputer: BikeComputer
- Bookland: Track all of your book readings
- Calculator-inator: Calculator & Converter
- Chip8: Chip8 emulator
- Chiver: Minimalistic theCHIVE galleries browser
- Cooky: Recipe manager: import or create your favorite recipes
- Cyrillic to Latin: Transliterator for Latin to Cyrillic and vice versa
- DigiPaws - Digital Wellbeing and App Blocker: Monitor and Cut Down Your Screen Time Effectively
- Disable Battery Warnings: Disable the annoying low battery warning popup and sound
- Dogecoin Wallet: Store digital currency
- EasyRSS: RSS reader compatible with Google Reader API
- FairSpeed: A lightweight, privacy-focused network performance monitor
- Foreground: Task manager app, supporting syncing with Taskwarrior
- GApps Browser: Sandbox for web apps
- Gelli: Native music player for Jellyfin
- GrowTracker: Help record data about growing plants
- Ionic Notes: A simple notepad app
- Mealient: Unofficial client for the self-hosted recipe manager Mealie
- Mindful Notifier: A mindfulness bell with configurable text notifications, scheduling, and sound
- Minimalistic Price Converter: Minimalistic app converting prices of fiat shitcoins and Bitcoin
- Mint Calculator: A simple calculator and converter app with Material Design 3
- mpvKt: MPV based media player: A media player based on the popular commandline media player mpv
- mTPMS: Read tire pressure sensor
- NeuroLab: App for the Neurolab Open Hardware platform
- Nex Notes: Taking quick notes
- NowiPass: A password manager where you are the only one who has access to your passwords
- Olauncher Clutter Free: Forked from Olauncher, -clutter, +features
- OpenLynx: Public transport companion providing real-time data
- OpenTapasReader: Read Tapas.io comics (with offline support)
- Pazzword - Password Evaluator: The most intelligent password evaluator app
- PhotoSphereGallery: Gallery and viewer for spherical photos (360°)
- Pjuu: Access the Pjuu social network
- Play Music Exporter: Export music from Play Music
- PSIAndroid: Monitor phpSysInfo
- Public IP: App and Widget allowing user to find its current public IP address
- RadarWeather: Lets you watch the weather for cities and locations you are interested in
- Scoop: Catches a stack trace when an app crashes unexpectedly
- Seasonal Foods Calendar: Your practical helpling for seasonal/regional foods!
- Secure File Manager Beta: File manager for keeping your files in safe
- Sensors2Pd: Use sensor data in Puredata patches
- Share to Pinboard: An app with a single purpose: to send URLs to Pinboard without a fuss
- SubHub: Subtitles downloader
- SUSI.AI: Susi AI is an intelligent personal assistant
- SyncPlayer: Unofficial syncplay client
- TermBot: SSH client for use with smart cards
- Tinte Webcoms: Reader for selected webcomics
- Trekarta: Simple, responsive map for your trek
- Vectorify da home!: Minimal app to apply wallpapers from vector images :)
- Voxtral: Live voice input based on Mistral Voxtral
- WhatSave: Save WhatsApp statuses in the easiest way
- WhereYouGo: Whereigo client
- Wirebug: Enables or disables debugging over Wi-Fi
Newly Added Apps
72 more apps were newly added, maintaining the balance
- Activity Trace: Search notifications, accessibility and files on-device
- Anywherelan: Peer-to-peer mesh VPN to connect your devices directly, no central servers
- AuraOrbit: Interactive 3D sphere live wallpaper with Fibonacci app distribution
- Brick Blast: Turn-based brick breaker: aim, shoot, bounce and clear the bricks
- BuzzKill: Powers off your phone after inactivity, only inside a nightly kill zone
- Camera Silencer: Reduce camera audio only while a camera is active
- ChemSearch: Search compounds, structures, references, and chemistry tools
- Clench Wallet: Bitcoin-only non-custodial on-chain wallet
- Coppelia: Beautiful, native Jellyfin music player
- Cosmovisor: Spot satellites overhead in augmented reality
- CryptoSafe: Offline AES-256-GCM text encryption with Argon2id
- Crystalpad: A simple notepad, no tracking or ads, just your notes
- Daily Wallpapers: Daily Bing wallpapers for your home and lock screen
- Debug Mode Widget: Home screen widget showing USB and wireless ADB debug status at a glance
- EbookConverter: Ebook converter — 20+ input, 18 output formats. No Calibre needed.
- FairSpeed - Speed Tester: A lightweight, privacy-focused network performance monitor
- FinTrack - Count Every Penny: Keep track of your daily expenses
- FitForge: Offline fitness & nutrition tracker with optional AI coaching
- Gem Wallet: Bitcoin, USDT, BNB: Secure crypto wallet for 100+ blockchains: Bitcoin, USDT, ETH, Solana, and more
- Ghost Rain: Digital-rain live wallpaper with a configurable system HUD
- GPXIT: Find train connections home during your bike ride
- Hackover 2026 Schedule: Programm App für das Hackover.
- Health Connect Shortcut: A shortcut to Health Connect
- Inkcast: The companion app for Xteink X4 CrossPoint Reader
- IPTV Mine Pro: Watch live TV channels, movies, and shows from M3U playlists
- Lembra: Reminders for recurring alerts: insurance, inspections, vaccines and more
- Libellus Potionis: Privacy-friendly alcohol tracker: limits, BAC estimate, PDF reports
- Mapple: Redirect Apple Maps: Open Apple Maps links in your default maps app
- MarkReader - Markdown Reader: Offline markdown and code reader with syntax highlighting
- MoldQueen: Drive Mould King building-block RC toys over Bluetooth
- Mushotoku: A private, fully-offline productivity app for focusing on what matters
- My Sensor: Air quality monitoring from public sensor.community data
- MyFastingApp: Fully offline fasting tracker with a widget
- MyFinanceMate: Privacy-first expense tracker via SMS parsing
- NCarousel: Nextcloud wallpaper carousel (WebDAV)
- Notification Vault: A private, secure, open-source notification logger and history manager
- Offline Web Search: Search curated websites, blogs, and RSS feeds completely offline and privately
- OmegaPlayer: Better and easier video playback Music player Private Vault with biometric
- OpenArcade: An open-source game arcade
- Openshelf: Personal library manager and book tracker
- OpenWOL: A simple, private and efficient Wake-on-LAN app
- Paper Loop: Grow your turf and slice rival sneks’ tails — an offline territory game
- Paper Loop 2: Grow your turf and slice other sneks’ tails — a free-movement territory game
- Password Store (Passkey Edition): Manage your passwords
- PGPony: OpenPGP encryption with hardware security keys and password-store support
- Picocrypt-NG: Paranoid, offline file encryption with XChaCha20 and Argon2id
- Pipes: A numberlink-style game
- PitchVis: Real-time visualization of musical pitches from live audio
- PlayTube: Feature-rich YouTube client, fast and secure with Material 3 design
- Pocket2FA: Secure 2FA code client of 2FAuth server that works offline
- Queens: Challenging crown-placement logic puzzle. Infinite levels. No tracking & ads.
- Remail: A clean, high-fidelity Gmail-inspired client for Resend.com
- Remember: Notes & Reminders: Persistent recurring reminders that return if accidentally dismissed
- rsend: Push phone folders to a home SSH host with rsync over SSH
- Rufid: Write and recover bootable USB media
- Secluso: Private home security for Raspberry Pi and Secluso hardware
- ShelfDroid: Audiobookshelf client with playback, downloads, and server management
- Six Shooter: Western revolver drum spinner — pick a winner among up to six players
- Socks5 Proxy: Socks5 client based on VPN
- SuperShopaholic: An infinite shopping cart in an infinite mall: a satire on consumerism
- SwiftSlate: System-wide AI text assistant — type a trigger, get instant text transformation
- Tabata Xtreme: Tabata-style workout timer with a sneaky little twist - a variable time base!
- Teyin: Lightweight, privacy-first file manager designed for speed and simplicity
- Turtle: A Platform with Pythonic language to practice CPU/GPU programming on mobile
- Vetro: Minimal local-first media manager
- Video Screensaver: Displays any of your own videos as a screensaver
- WebInspector: Inspect web pages as in desktop browser Developer Tools
- Whisper Noise: A calming white noise generator for better sleep and focus
- Wolf Gallery: Encrypted, offline photo & video vault with a comfortable gallery
- YAPL — Yet Another Pilot Log: Private, offline flight logbook with EASA/BCAA paper-logbook PDF export
- Zazen Meditation Timer: Zazen meditation timer with multi-section sessions and bell sounds
- Zham: Offline world clock with a home-screen widget and time-zone converter
Updated Apps
401 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list, if you dare)- 39C3 Schedule was updated to
1.77.0 - 3D Geometry Animation was updated to
1.5.0 - Activity Launcher was updated to
2.4.0 - Aerial was updated to
0.2.0 - AI Hub was updated to
3.0.0 - AirGuard - AirTag protection was updated to
3.1.0 - AirPlay Server was updated to
0.0.16 - Aisleron Shopping List was updated to
2026.5.0 - aka Alarm was updated to
1.1.3 - Al-Azan - Prayer Times was updated to
2.0.7 - Albi was updated to
1.4.4 - Alchemist was updated to
v2.5.6 - AliasVault was updated to
0.30.0 - Amber was updated to
6.2.3 - Android IP Camera was updated to
0.6.0 - AniSync was updated to
3.0.0 - ANOTHERpass was updated to
2.2.6 - Arcanum was updated to
1.2.0 - ArchiveKeep was updated to
0.6.1 - Aria for Misskey was updated to
1.5.6 - aShell was updated to
v0.27 - Audio Recorder was updated to
2.1.0 - Audio Visualizer was updated to
1.1.0 - Autasker was updated to
1.2.0 - Auto Auto-Rotate was updated to
0.14.3 - Aves Libre was updated to
1.14.8 - Backlog Tracker was updated to
1.2.0 - Backtalk was updated to
0.3.8 - baresip was updated to
86.1.0 - baresip+ was updated to
75.0.2 - BasicSync was updated to
3.2 - Battery Monitor was updated to
1.1.0 - Be nice was updated to
2.1.9 - Bible Lock Screen was updated to
2.1 - Binary Eye was updated to
1.75.0 - BlockAds: Clean Internet was updated to
6.5.2 - Bluetooth QR & Barcode to PC was updated to
2.3.0 - Braincup was updated to
2.26.0 - Breakout 71 was updated to
29713979 - Broccoli: The Green Recipe App was updated to
1.4.6 - c-beam was updated to
26.07.0 - C2K — Couch to 5K & 10K was updated to
1.1.1 - Calculator M3 was updated to
1.5.2 - Calendar was updated to
v2.5.6 - Calendula was updated to
2.13.0 - Calisthenics Memory was updated to
1.25.1 - CalSync was updated to
1.8.0 - Calyx - Grow Tracker was updated to
1.3.0 - Camera was updated to
v2.5.6 - CAPod - Companion for AirPods was updated to
5.2.0-rc0 - CaptureCap was updated to
3.9.2 - CaptureSposed was updated to
1.1.0 - Cardabase was updated to
1.8.2 - Cartes IGN was updated to
3.5.5 - Casio G-Shock Smart Sync was updated to
42.3 - CastLab was updated to
1.5.0 - Cfait was updated to
1.0.9 - Chocola was updated to
4.3.1 - Chora was updated to
1.31.1 - ciphernotes was updated to
3.6 - CleanShare was updated to
3.1.3 - Clock was updated to
2.31 - Clock by vayunmathur was updated to
v2.5.6 - Cloudbase Predictor was updated to
1.8.1 - CO3 was updated to
B0.0.14 - Coin Collection was updated to
3.8.1 - Competition Radio Trainer (HFLÜ Hessen) was updated to
3.0.1 - Compose Stopwatch was updated to
1.9.1 - Concert Diary was updated to
1.0.5 - Conduit was updated to
1.4.11 - Connect You was updated to
12.0 - Contacts was updated to
v2.5.6 - croc was updated to
10.4.7 - Cube Run was updated to
1.4 - Cuscon was updated to
4.1.0.5 - Daily You was updated to
2.26.0 - Delta Icon Pack was updated to
2.17.0 - Device Connect was updated to
0.12.1 - Dima Defense ⚔️ was updated to
0.8.0 - DJ Edertech was updated to
1.1.1 - DobbyVPN was updated to
1.3.8 - Dooz was updated to
1.0.22 - Drift // Audio was updated to
0.3.1 - Droid-ify was updated to
0.7.3 - DroidStress was updated to
1.6.3 - Drowser was updated to
1.0.9 - DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser was updated to
5.285.0 - DuressKeyboard was updated to
6.6 - DuressKeyboardLite was updated to
11.0 - DuWave was updated to
1.4.3 - e-Passport Reader was updated to
3.4 - Easter Eggs was updated to
5.2.0 - EinkBro was updated to
15.16.0 - Element Classic was updated to
1.6.60 - Element X - Secure Chat & Call was updated to
26.06.4 - Email was updated to
v2.5.6 - Endless Sky was updated to
0.11.1-61 - Entropy’s Defiance was updated to
3.3.0 - EphemeralWorkProfile was updated to
52.0 - Epoch was updated to
1.2.0 - Equalizer314 was updated to
0.0.14-beta - Ewoc was updated to
1.0.3 - Extend was updated to
0.0.25 - F-Droid Build Status was updated to
5.15.0 - FaFa Runner was updated to
3.2.0 - FairEmail was updated to
1.2325 - Fairphone Moments was updated to
0.1.10.3 - FairScan – PDF Scanner was updated to
2.1.0 - FastLog was updated to
1.4.0 - Fatto was updated to
0.8.2 - Fauxx - Privacy Through Noise was updated to
0.5.1 - Fedilab was updated to
3.42.1 - Feeder was updated to
2.21.2 - Feeder (Play version) was updated to
2.21.2 - Felicity Music Player (Trial) was updated to
0.0.25_alpha - Feltbok was updated to
0.13 - Find Family was updated to
v2.5.6 - FitoTrack was updated to
16.2 - FixupXer - URL Enhancer was updated to
1.7.2 - Flash Alert (Calls & SMS) was updated to
2.7.0 - FloatDeck was updated to
0.3.1 - floccus bookmark sync was updated to
5.10.1 - FloFla Cards was updated to
1.0.25 - Flux - Movies, Shows & Anime local player was updated to
1.5.2 - Flux News was updated to
2.2.3 - FMD was updated to
0.16.1 - FMD edge was updated to
0.16.1 - Fokus Launcher was updated to
1.7.0 - Food You - Calorie Tracker & Food Diary was updated to
3.4.9 - Force Stop Helper was updated to
0.12.0 - Forkgram was updated to
12.8.4.0 - Forkgram Classic was updated to
12.8.10.0 - Forkyz was updated to
84 - freeDictionaryApp was updated to
1.8.0 - Futon was updated to
9.7.1 - GeoWeather was updated to
2.1.1 - geteduroam was updated to
2.3.0(2687) - getgovroam was updated to
2.3.0(2687) - Gitling was updated to
1.0.41 - GitNex for Forgejo and Gitea was updated to
14.0.0 - Godot Editor 3 was updated to
3.6.2.stable - Grit was updated to
6.0.4 - Grove was updated to
0.7.2 - Hammer was updated to
3.5.3 - Haven SSH Client was updated to
5.68.2 - Health was updated to
v2.5.6 - HeliBoard was updated to
4.0-beta1 - HiddenProtectedWorkProfile was updated to
80.0 - Holos was updated to
1.13.0 - HomeFeed - RSS Widget was updated to
1.4.1 - Idle Fantasy was updated to
1.10.11 - Immich Uploader was updated to
2.3.1 - Infomaniak Mail was updated to
1.30.0 - Inner Breeze was updated to
1.8.1 - InstaDownload was updated to
2.2.1 - Internet Radio was updated to
0.6.6 - Intra was updated to
1.5.0 - Inure App Manager (Trial) was updated to
build107.0.5 - IR Blaster Remote was updated to
3.3.2 - Jami was updated to
20260702-01 - JetBird was updated to
1.8.3 - jtx Board journals|notes|tasks was updated to
2.16.02.ose - Just Delete Me was updated to
1.1 - K-9 Mail was updated to
20.1 - Kahon was updated to
0.19.8 - Kai 9000 was updated to
2.8.0 - Kakugo was updated to
1.42 - KashCal was updated to
2026.07.05 - Keep Alive was updated to
1.5.1 - Keep Alive Lite was updated to
1.5.1-lite - KISS Launcher was updated to
3.26.0 - Komi Store was updated to
1.9.2 - Kompact Image Compressor was updated to
1.1.0 - Kreate was updated to
2.2.3-fdroid - Kwik EFIS was updated to
8.03 - Kwik EFIS (E-Ink) was updated to
8.03 - Launcher314 was updated to
0.0.20-beta - LeanType was updated to
3.9.1 - Library App VideLibri was updated to
2.959 - Linux Command Library was updated to
4.2.2 - Lissen: Audiobookshelf client was updated to
1.11.4-release - LISTEN.moe was updated to
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08:00 PM
Pluralistic: "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]
->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->
Top Sources:
None
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Today's links
- "Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy: When we were robots in Egypt…
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: Awkward questions for the entertainment industry; ISP v record label death penalty; Coming out on Splash Mountain; Negative Swiss bond yields; Are We Having Fun Yet?
- Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
"Rights for robots" and the AI slavery fantasy (permalink)
While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people
AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove
With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.
Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."
The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain
There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you."
There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave.
Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration.
AI, then, isn't just the fantasy of a world without people – it's the fantasy of a world without people…except for slaves. It's the fantasy of a world where the skilled workers who tell you your ideas are stupid are replaced with pliable chatbots who tell you they're brilliant, and then uncomplainingly do the job to your specifications.
It's a world where the cab driver who has all kinds of shit going on in their life – health problems, family problems, (especially) money problems – is replaced by a "robo-taxi" that is being overseen and (often) driven by a remote worker you can't talk to or see, whose problems you therefore never need consider.
The "AI safety" world is a key piece of the AI hype machine, pulling focus away from the idea that AI has shitty economics, produces substandard goods, and fails to do the jobs it takes from human workers, and shifting that focus to the idea that AI is so powerful that it constitutes an existential risk to the human race. The idea that teaching too many words to the word-guessing program risks creating a "superintelligence" that awakens and converts all into paperclips is absurd, a silly idea akin to the notion that if we breed horses to run ever faster, one of our mares will foal a locomotive. Nevertheless, the elevation of "AI takeoff" from a thought-experiment to an "existential risk" is a powerful marketing tool, because any technology that is indistinguishable from god is also going to be extremely valuable (at least, up to the moment that it turns us all into paperclips):
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds
Once the superintelligence thought-experiment is upgraded to an X-risk, lots of other thought experiments are sucked along in its wake. That's where "rights for robots" comes in, the idea that we should spend time thinking about whether chatbots should have human rights.
The best argument for this is that every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world, we end up treating each other better. Movements to extend moral consideration to animals raised uncomfortable questions about the treatment of humans: slaves, workers, poor people, women, children. The Rights for Nature movement, which seeks to extend legal and moral personhood to watersheds and forests, has been key to winning legal and moral victories to protect the environment, and thus the animals and people who depend on it.
But while extending rights to natural things produces positive spillovers for human thriving and rights, the opposite happened when we extended personhood to artificial constructs. Corporate personhood has been a catastrophe for human thriving, conjuring into existence a new race of immortal, pluripotent colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations" that use us as disposable, inconvenient gut flora even as they consume our environment, our political system, and our lives:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge
There's every reason to think that extending personhood to AI will produce the same outcome as "rights for corporations," which is the opposite of the outcome of "Rights for Nature." Rights for nature come at the expense of corporations. Rights for corporations come at the expense of nature. Humans are part of nature, so we benefit from the former, and suffer under the latter:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration
But here's the kicker: as soon as you start arguing about whether chatbots have rights, you elevate them to personhood, which means that all those chatbots your boss just bought are people. And because they're the kind of people who don't warrant moral consideration (let alone a please or thank you), they are slaves (hence "rights for robots").
The AI sales pitch relies on convincing bosses that we've invented a new kind of slave – a worker who neither deserves nor demands rights or consideration. "Rights for robots" affirms that sales pitch. "Rights for robots" implies that robots are slaves. Wittingly or unwittingly, the transformation of "rights for robots" from a thought experiment to a campaign is a massive convincer for any AI salesman who's hunting for would-be slavers to sell chatbots to.
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Apple held accountable under the DMA – A victory for developers and computer users! https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260708-01.en.html
-
Over Leveraged https://www.todayintabs.com/p/over-leveraged
-
FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/fcc-to-end-biden-era-rule-that-forces-isps-to-list-all-their-fees/
-
Connected and Captured https://democracyatwork.substack.com/p/connected-and-captured
-
Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume 1 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2040521099/locus-anthology-2025
Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Advice for science fiction/fantasy cover artists https://igallo.blogspot.com/2006/07/in-response-to-old-question-what-do-i.html
#20yrsago Embarrassing questions for the entertainment industry https://web.archive.org/web/20060719200608/https://www.eff.org/IP/faq/
#20yrsago UK ISP to British recording industry: get lost https://craphound.com/tiscalibpiresponse.txt
#20yrsago Felten’s paper on the complexities of Network Neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20060719095720/https://itpolicy.princeton.edu/pub/neutrality.pdf
#15yrsago 3D printed hair-clips inspired by Bruce Sterling’s “Kiosk” https://myriadwhimsies.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/jovanicas-hair-toys-3d-printed-hair-clips/
#10yrsago Teen comes out to her family on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/this-teen-came-out-to-her-family-in-the-most-awesomely-funny#.rlDowJe6
#10yrsago On the bewildering regional names for corner stores https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-do-you-call-the-corner-store
#10yrsago Amazon is full of Chinese counterfeits and they’re driving out legit goods https://web.archive.org/web/20160708152442/http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/08/amazons-chinese-counterfeit-problem-is-getting-worse.html
#10yrsago Negative Swiss 50-year bond yields just shattered the global insecurity barometer https://web.archive.org/web/20160708134915/http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/07/investors_are_paying_to_lend_switzerland_money_for_50_years_at_a_time.html
#10yrsago How can the media regain its credibility in reporting on race in America? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/dallas-shooting-racism-and-the-us-media-micah-johnson
#10yrsago Flawed police drug-test kits, railroading prosecutors and racism: the police-stop-to-prison pipeline https://www.propublica.org/article/common-roadside-drug-test-routinely-produces-false-positives
#10yrsago China bans mentions of newly discovered species of beetle from social media https://globalvoices.org/2016/07/11/a-new-species-of-beetle-named-after-president-xi-is-blacklisted-on-chinese-social-media/
#10yrsago Pokemon Go privacy rules are terrible (just like all your other apps) https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-all-the-data-pokemon-go-is-collecting-from-your-phone
#5yrsago Are we having fun yet? https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/11/are-we-having-fun-yet/
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ -
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales -
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ -
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification -
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ -
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn -
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah)
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6 -
Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ -
Lawfare Daily
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g -
How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow -
Breaking Points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
-
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
-
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
- A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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ISSN: 3066-764X
Pearson’s Anti-Piracy Vendor Takes Down Best-Selling Author’s Own GitHub Repo [TorrentFreak]
Paul Deitel is a best-selling programming textbook author whose books, published by Pearson Education, are used by students and developers worldwide.
The author’s personal GitHub account includes a widely referenced repository that hosts the official example code for titles including Java SE 8 for Programmers, C++ How to Program, and Python for Programmers.
These code examples are a key reference, but for a few weeks they have been unavailable due to a DMCA takedown notice. The notice in question was sent in April by Pearson’s anti-piracy vendor Link-Busters, which is the most prolific DMCA takedown sender in recent history.
Apparently, Link-Busters confused the educational code repository with an illegally posted copy of the book, which it clearly isn’t.
Deitel Files Counternotice
While Link-Busters generally has a decent track record, this notice caused clear collateral damage. In a counternotice that was sent to GitHub yesterday, July 9, Deitel requests his repository to be restored.
GitHub redacted his name in the published counter-notice, but the identity of the filer is clear from the context. The author explains that the targeted repo does not contain a copy of the book, but important code examples.
“I am the [private] of the book and [private] [private] GitHub page is where ALL [private] readers worldwide get the example code that goes with [private] books,” the counternotice reads.
“Whoever this [private] organization is has no idea of the damage they’re doing by automated scanning and sending of removal notices.”
“Had they done even the simplest bit of research they would have seen that the book was not posted in [private] GitHub repo and that it was just the supporting materials, and that [private] am the [private] of the book!”
The counter-notice stresses that access to the GitHub repository is “CRITICAL” as readers worldwide depend on it to access the example code that accompanies the book. Without it, the textbook’s code exercises are effectively inaccessible.
Waiting for Restoration
At the scale Link-Busters operates, sending billions of DMCA takedown notices on behalf of major publishers, mistakes are perhaps unavoidable. However, this example shows that even a minuscule error rate can result in real damage, even for the very people these notices aim to protect.
The contested April takedown notice covered roughly 25 book titles. Most of the targeted repositories did contain unauthorized PDF copies of textbooks, uploaded by students to “books” collections on GitHub. The Deitel companion code repo was the clear outlier.
At the time of writing, Deitel’s GitHub repository is still offline, pointing to the removal notice shown below.
Under the DMCA’s counter-notice procedure, GitHub has to restore the disabled repository within 10 to 14 business days unless Pearson or Link-Busters file a federal lawsuit to keep it offline. Since the takedown appears to be a clear mistake, it will likely be restored soon.
TorrentFreak reached out to Deitel for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. Link-Busters has yet to respond to our request for comment too. We will update this article if responses come in.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
04:00 PM
Mom That Blamed Deaths Of 1 Year Old Twins On Vaccines Charged With Their Murder [Techdirt]
One of the key tools in the tool belt of the anti-vaxxer has long been VAERS, the voluntarily reporting system for adverse events following vaccinations. People who don’t really understand how any of this works often get very, very confused about what VAERS is and is not. It does not contain confirmed outcomes caused by vaccines, it does not provide any medical advice as a result of the reports within it, and it is not a controlled reporting mechanism. Instead, it is a system that is wide open to reports of adverse events by any member of the public or healthcare community. In other words, it’s just a raw reporting tool.
And the problem is that people who report to VAERS can lie, be confused, misreport details, and so on. Anti-vaxxers, for instance, can flood the system with false or misleading reports. And, by some accounts, they do that very thing. The point of all of this very long opening is this: you can’t trust an individual report that claims an adverse vaccine effect to be accurate or true.
Take Andrea Shaw of Idaho, for instance. Shaw has been very public on the internet and podcasts after the death of her two 18 month old twins with claims that they were the result of adverse effects of vaccines. Shaw also reported the deaths in VAERS, claiming an association with several childhood vaccines received a week before their deaths. As a counterpoint to that claim, she also has now been charged with purposefully suffocating her children to death.
The Payette Police Department announced the indictment of 23-year-old Andrea Shaw, formerly of Payette, on two counts of First Degree Murder in connection with the deaths of her 18-month-old twins. Shaw was arrested by Boise Police on June 30th.
The newly released indictment accuses Shaw of suffocating both of her twins to death. Both charges are of Murder in the First Degree, meaning the prosecution is alleging that Shaw deliberately, with premeditation and with malice aforethought, killed both of her children, meaning she will be eligible for the death penalty, though the prosecution has not yet announced whether they intend to seek it.
This is an investigation that’s been going on for nearly a year. While that was happening, Shaw appeared on the podcast for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the disgusting anti-vaxxer organization that RFK Jr. used to head up. Not happy to merely pump out misinformation via podcast, CHD teamed up with Shaw to file a lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, claiming that AAP had misled the public about the safety of vaccines.
The charge is first degree murder for Shaw. I, of course, will not claim that police and prosecutors are perfect when it comes to their work, but the length of the investigation and the charges sure point to a prosecutor who is confident in their evidence. Shaw is, of course, innocent until proven guilty, but anyone with any sense can see where this is most likely headed.
Children’s Health Defense should be ashamed of itself. But it won’t be. In fact, I have little doubt that it, or its fans, will claim that any evidence against Shaw and that her prosecution has been bought and paid for by the vaccine industry. That’s just how they roll.
That’s how they lie.
01:00 PM
From Fuel Shortages to Food Shortages? [The Status Kuo]
I’m writing for The Big Picture today, which is why you haven’t heard from me so far today. Apologies for not checking in earlier, but I’ve been deep in meetings for the Human Rights Campaign. (It’s midterm season!)
If you’ve been following the game-changing strikes Ukraine has launched recently against Russia’s oil infrastructure, you know that they are already causing major fuel shortages and long lines at the pump for Russian motorists. But there’s something else starting to gnaw at the the Kremlin: how these attacks are affecting food supplies and prices.
The response of the Russian government so far also matters. As I explain, it had two basic paths to address the fuel shortages, and the one it picked will wind up having some serious negative downstream impacts.
Look for my piece in a couple of hours in your inboxes if you are a subscriber to The Big Picture. If you’re not yet, you can sign up for free. To help our team keep delivering quality content you can’t get many other places, please consider a paid subscription to help keep us going through these tough times for independent media.
You can subscribe here: https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/subscribe
I’ll be back tomorrow with my regular installment of The Status Kuo.
Jay
09:00 AM
Bari Weiss Is Filling CBS News With British Right Wing Propagandists [Techdirt]
Bari Weiss is seeking out friendly interviewers at the New York Times to try and “calm the firestorm engulfing her leadership of CBS News.” By “leadership” of course they mean censoring stories critical of the president, letting Benjamin Netanyahu pick his own interviewer (who he knows won’t press him on war crimes), firing a bunch of industry veterans, and just generally being an unqualified, fail-upward clod.
As we’ve long explored, Weiss wasn’t hired to do journalism. She was hired to do right wing agitprop. But given she’s not good at that either, CBS just saw its lowest ratings in a quarter century.
Undaunted, Weiss is continuing her efforts to “reshape” CBS into something Larry Ellison and other U.S. oligarchs approve of. As a result she’s apparently accelerated efforts to hire a bunch of right wing Brits, most of them with associations to Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling right wing tabloid empire. Said Brits will, curiously enough, tell you that hiring a bunch of white right wing Brits is a wonderful idea:
“According to several figures familiar with her thinking, however, the hires are no coincidence. “She’s been looking at various Brits that might add a bit of opinion/attitude diversity to US media, instead of the dominant, predictable Columbia Journalism School uniformity. Not a bad idea,” said Andrew Neil, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, who supported her hiring of Phillips.”
Hiring a bunch of white male right wing protectors of the extraction class (and global autocrats) as the pinnacle of “opinion diversity” is a theme you’ll see constantly throughout Weiss’ demolition and repurposing of CBS. Because said British tabloiders sometimes break gossip on politicians and celebrities (often illegally) they’re framed as tough journalists:
“A CBS News source, describing Weiss’s interest in British journalists, said: “They do the kind of things that Bari is looking for; it’s not puff pieces and kid gloves.”
Rupert Murdoch’s longstanding skill wasn’t just to make right wing propaganda, but right wing propaganda that entertained and drew ratings and subscriptions. A soup of agitprop infotainment. To date there’s absolutely zero indication that Weiss and Ellison have any knack for that whatsoever, so they’re attempting to hire Rupert Murdoch adjacent folks who do.
Even then, it’s no longer the same world Rupert Murdoch thrived in. Broadcast TV is dying, social media is ever evolving, and (as we’ve seen at outlets like the Jeff Bezos Washington Post), people aren’t really in the mood for right wing billionaire simping agitprop. With any luck, the “new” CBS will collapse under the load of Warner Bros debt long before Weiss and company figure out the right formula.
06:00 AM
World Cup Propels Surveillance To New Heights [Techdirt]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the largest sporting event in history. It’s also the most surveilled World Cup ever. If you’re visiting or traveling around host cities, then you and your face, behavior, movement and devices are being monitored by governments and private companies.
The U.S. government funneled more than US$1 billion to World Cup security to protect transit hubs, stadiums and surrounding areas; improve tactical operations such as bomb squads and SWAT teams; and add and upgrade equipment. It’s been a bonanza for the private sector.
Much of the investment in surveillance was done in the name of preventing harm from unauthorized drone use. Indeed, protecting against that threat is helping fuel the rapidly expanding government-private sector partnership in surveillance technology development and acquisition, which poses a different risk – to privacy.
As an attorney, author and educator who has worked for decades in privacy and surveillance, I’ve advised law enforcement about using drones and understand that security is critical to keeping people safe. The argument for security, however, is too often the catalyst to fund, develop and increase government surveillance capabilities that erode civil liberties, chill speech and undermine freedom of association.
And in my experience, surveillance-friendly policies and tech systems, once in place, rarely go away.
Cameras, drones and AI
The level of surveillance around this World Cup and changes in U.S. law and immigration policies prompted over 120 civil society groups – including Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union – to issue a travel advisory. They warn that people visiting the U.S. may be subject to harms that breach the country’s legal human rights obligations.
That advisory lists risks of invasive social media screening, searches of electronic devices, racial profiling, arrest, detention, deportation and even death. European governments have issued travel advisories warning of surveillance and profiling as well.
AI-driven surveillance is playing a major role across the World Cup. The stadiums in host cities are equipped with facial recognition cameras that can collect and analyze facial biometrics of people in and around the stadiums. That data can be retained and used in future ways, unknown and uncontrolled by those whose biometric data has been collected.
The proliferation of facial recognition at events reflects a broader global trend normalizing biometric surveillance as these systems expand across cities.
Many states, like New York, are using federal funding for World Cup security to increase the number, capabilities and use of drones by law enforcement. Drones are remarkably capable and powerful surveillance tools easy to load with cameras, microphones, advanced sensors and weapons.
AI-supported autonomous software allows drones to monitor areas, track movement and gather intelligence. The drones can be powerful enough to scan entire cities or zoom in and read a milk carton from 60,000 feet (18,288 meters). They can carry technology that allows them to function like a cellphone tower, permitting law enforcement to determine your location or intercept texts and phone calls. Citywide drone networks could become the new normal.
Cameras are proliferating on the ground, as well. Robot dogs equipped with cameras are prowling in Dallas and New Jersey. And Seattle’s mayor decided to turn on and expand a major closed-circuit television system that had been previously shut down because of biometric privacy concerns.
While Seattle’s mayor said that the city is refining its policies to protect the surveillance data, numerous states and cities – with the aid of federal funding related to World Cup security — are rapidly expanding CCTV systems. Some CCTV systems were installed decades ago in major urban, high-tourism areas, like New York’s Times Square and the National Mall in Washington D.C.
Today, CCTV systems cover much greater areas, and with advances in artificial intelligence software, data analytics and increased technical capabilities, like thermal imaging, far more information can be gleaned from the captured data. CCTV systems can now detect, identify and classify objects, people and even people’s behavior. Government data fusion centers can merge that rich data with other intelligence and analyze it to identify individuals and reveal and predict patterns and behavior.
Surveillance traveling into and around the US
Proliferating government use of advanced AI surveillance tools is just one element of the privacy risk. The absence of comprehensive data privacy laws and changes in U.S. law and executive policies around immigration and gender make traveling into and around the United States a security, safety and privacy risk.
On Sept. 8, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that critics say permits racial profiling in immigration enforcement efforts.
Also, President Donald Trump issued an executive order around gender on Jan. 20, 2025, that mandates federal agencies only recognize male and female sex markers on IDs. European nations, including Germany, have warned their transgender and nonbinary citizens that they may be denied entry to the U.S. because of the directive.
Collectively, these changes affect travel logistics, documentation requirements and border crossings.
What happens after the games?
The real test is what happens after the World Cup ends and visitors go home. There is little oversight or governance around these federally funded, public-private surveillance tech partnerships. It’s difficult for the public to determine what data is being collected, how that data is being used, shared and analyzed, and what will happen to these systems, partnerships and data when the final match concludes.
Federal, state and local legislators have an opportunity to address much of this by creating data privacy and AI systems compliance safeguards and requiring transparency, but in my view, governance efforts to date don’t bode well.
Anne Toomey McKenna is Affiliated Faculty Member at the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Penn State
The Party That Screams About The Evils Of Socialism Wants To Nationalize AI Companies [Techdirt]
It’s hard to believe that the same people who spent the Biden years screaming that Democrats were “socialists” out to destroy free market capitalism are now cheerfully handing the federal government ownership stakes in private companies.
And yet here we are.
Just as Trumpists have decided that their go-to strategy for trying to rile up their base for the midterms is to accuse every left-leaning Democrat of being a “communist” like it’s 1950, those very same Trumpists are taking on a genuinely terrible socialist idea: nationalizing industries.
We’ve already talked about how hypocritical Trump has been in attacking the left as being “socialist” while simultaneously giving his own government stakes in both US Steel and Intel, and now he’s talking about taking ownership of the various big AI companies as well.
US President Donald Trump is planning to meet the bosses of some of the country’s most notable artificial intelligence (AI) companies to discuss the government taking a financial stake in their future.
Speaking on Air Force One, Trump said the goal of the US government investing in AI companies was to “create almost a partnership with the American public”.
And later reporting has suggested that OpenAI is discussing coughing up 5% to appease Trump:
OpenAI has proposed handing the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company, the Financial Times reported Thursday, as the artificial intelligence startup seeks to defuse mounting political pressure in Washington.
A 5% holding would be worth roughly $42.6 billion, after the AI lab closed a record-breaking funding round in March at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
It’s fun to watch the media frame this as “giving the public access to a dividend from the AI companies” rather than “Donald Trump demanding a cut to avoid attacking these companies.” Just look at the NY Times’ framing:
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he would soon host a meeting with the top “12 or 15 executives” in the A.I. industry to discuss the idea of companies’ “giving back something to the public.” He added, “If we do that, the public will become very rich.”
The comments built on Mr. Trump’s remarks on Friday when he was first asked about the U.S. government’s acquiring stakes in A.I. companies. He said then that he wanted to meet with the companies to discuss providing the United States with stakes in their business, which “could be given to the American public.”
Yeah, sure, the public will become very rich, says the man who has used his position as president to inside trade his way to insane wealth. And how, exactly, will “the public” get back this money? And how will the government ensure that if the currently quite-inflated AI market drops that “the public” isn’t left holding the bag?
And, sure, there are some potentially interesting questions regarding how more people could benefit from the potential wealth that AI companies might generate. But it’s all highly speculative and still massively unlikely. But if there actually is evidence and an idea for actual redistribution of wealth because of AI company dominance, that would involve a way more nuanced, complex, and thoughtful discussion than Donald Trump saying “gimme 5%.”
But, really, what gets me most about all of this is, as I keep pointing out, how many of the AI VC bros during the Biden era, went absolutely apeshit over the Biden admin’s very weak policies on AI, which were basic guidelines and voluntary agreements that had no whiff of nationalizing the industry. But, with Trump talking about literally demanding cuts of these companies… you don’t see any complaining.
Instead, they’re out there whining about how some left-leaning politicians in NY are winning elections and how that’s the coming rise of “socialism.” Literally a couple months ago Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan talking about how these dumb young progressive kids support “socialism” even though “it never works.” Meanwhile, Andreessen was just appointed by Trump to some government policy board. As Trump literally nationalizes parts of the AI industry that Andreessen insisted the prior administration was going to destroy through its woke anti-capitalist policies.
Keep all this in mind the next time you hear Silicon Valley VC bros going around pointing at Democrats and screaming about the “creeping threat of socialist ideology.” If they’re not pointing out that Trump demanding equity from every AI company is way worse than anything that any Democrat has done or even proposed, just know that they’re totally fine with “socialism” where they’re the ones in power.
04:00 AM
ICE Office Of Professional Responsibility Ditches ICE Oversight, Starts Hunting Down ICE Critics [Techdirt]
ICE has already been operating like a paramilitary kidnapping squad. Officers roam through neighborhoods, stake out hardware store parking lots, and even occasionally enjoy some ethnic food just so they can raid the source of hospitality later.
It’s nasty, disturbing, and definitely doesn’t resemble any of the things that have made America great. Now, the rot has spread. It’s not enough for ICE to engage in daylight snatchings on the regular. Now, its internal oversight office has abandoned any pretense of keeping ICE in line. In fact, it has completely gone in the opposite direction, turning this wing of ICE into another set of secret police, as this report from Wired makes clear:
Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter, and calling for his indictment.
The agents at the poll site asked Gonyea to sign a warning notice that said it was unlawful to “threaten to assault, kidnap and/or murder” federal officials or their immediate family members in an effort to impede that federal official’s work. The form also requested that she remove her post “and/or discontinue” her behavior.
“My signature would have been an admission of guilt,” Gonyea says. “I refused to sign it.”
That’s just one person who’s been subjected to the OPR’s decision to stop investigating allegations against ICE officers to focus on allegations of external “threats” to ICE officers. There are more. Many more.
OPR was behind at least one of the flurry of administrative subpoenas sent to tech companies in recent months in an effort to unmask online critics.
[…]
In a court declaration filed in April, an ICE official said that between January 2025 and March 2026, OPR investigated 131 cases involving “incidents of doxing and threats directed towards ICE employees nationwide.”
That’s fucked up. This is definitely not what the Office of Professional Responsibility is supposed to be doing. According to the ICE OPR itself, its purview is limited to investigating ICE.
The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.
To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated. OPR’s role permits the agency to focus on its larger mission of promoting homeland security and public safety.
Nothing in this says the OPR is investigating ICE critics. Nothing in this even minimally suggests the OPR’s directives can be expanded to cover external investigations of US citizens over social media posts, etc.
You have to scroll down the page a bit and expand a few things before you find ICE OPR’s justifications for being America’s ICE-focused Gestapo:
OPR protects the agency by detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating internal and external threats against the agency, ICE senior leaders and ICE headquarters facilities by managing the ICE Insider Threat Program and counterintelligence functions involving ICE personnel.
This is new language, specific to Trump’s version of ICE. It wasn’t there last year. There’s nothing in this December 2018 OIG report on ICE OPR operations that says anything at all about “detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating external threats.” There’s nothing in this 2008 OPR directive that says anything more than that the OPR is tasked with investigating allegations against ICE officers or personnel handling its detention facilities.
So, it’s reasonable to believe this language was added shortly after (March 2026) the OPR was rerouted to hunt down ICE critics, rather than focus on what must be thousands of complaints about ICE officers and/or detention facilities.
And despite these efforts apparently being well underway by April 2026, acting ICE director Todd Lyons made sure he didn’t bring up that part of OPR’s operations up when publicly testifying before Congress.
In written testimony for an April hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, which helps set the budget for DHS, Lyons touted OPR’s work inspecting detention facilities, vetting job applicants, and overseeing the agency’s 287(g) program, but didn’t mention the office’s work investigating online posters. ICE did not respond to questions about why Lyons didn’t discuss that work.
First off, the OPR should not be doing this, full stop. There are plenty of federal law enforcement resources available to be utilized in the rare case where an actual threat exists. Second, the OPR has never done this prior to being run by this administration. Third, this rerouting of OPR’s resources makes it clear the administration is more interested in punishing critics (First Amendment be damned) than engaging in any minimal oversight of ICE’s activities.
And this is bad news for the nation, obviously. If this OPR can be turned into literal speech police, the same can be expected from any other law enforcement agency with an in-house OPR. That’s tyranny. That’s fascism. That’s an entire administration treating Trump like a king and 325 million Americans subjects. It’s not only unacceptable, it’s antithetical to everything America once stood for. And all of this news arrives shortly Trump presided over the Republic’s wake on July 4th. We had a good run, but it’s probably time to stop pretending we don’t have a second King George that needs to be shown the door.
Daily Deal: The Essential MATLAB & LabVIEW Mega Bundle [Techdirt]
The Essential MATLAB and LabVIEW Mega Bundle has 9 courses to help you improve your skills in programming and visualization. You’ll learn the basics of each and then go through hands-on courses building apps, learning about data analysis and visualization, and more. It’s on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
01:00 AM
Generous collusion [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]
The professionals you have the most in common with may be your competition. They wrestle with similar problems and have similar goals.
And you can offer value by sharing what you’ve learned and what you know–and that value will often be reciprocated.
I met Tom Rielly when was running PlanetOut in the 1990s. About forty of AOL’s biggest software partners had been invited to a conference, and Tom hosted a small gathering for a dozen of us in his hotel suite. When we got there, he shared the most interesting parts of his contract with AOL. Many of us did the same. As a result, everyone in that room was able to get a better deal the next time around.
When the acting community shared information about predators in Hollywood, it created progress toward safety, helped apprehend some of the worst offenders, and built connection and trust.
Literary agents regularly talk with each other, and via the living database at Publisher’s Lunch, share insights about genres, editors and authors.
NFL coaching staff, who you would think of as quite competitive, often talk to one another about players, policies, and personnel.
Chefs welcome up-and-coming chefs into their kitchens and share their best suppliers, because a supplier without customers doesn’t stick around for long.
Creative Mornings has changed the lives of thousands of freelance creators, simply by giving them a useful way to connect.
Walmart doesn’t want its suppliers to talk with one another, which is a really good reason for them to do it. Comparing test questions in high school is called cheating. Doing it in real life is a smart way to reclaim power and agency.
The competition isn’t the competition. ‘None of the above’ is the competition. The powerful monopoly is the competition. Loneliness is the competition.
It might be that your industry doesn’t already have a vibrant association of peers. If it doesn’t, start one. There have never been more tools or more upside for doing so.
Kanji of the Day: 卒 [Kanji of the Day]
卒
✍8
小4
graduate, soldier, private, die
ソツ シュツ
そっ.する お.える お.わる ついに にわか
卒業 (そつぎょう) — graduation
卒業後 (そつぎょうご) — after graduation
大学卒 (だいがくそつ) — university graduate
卒業生 (そつぎょうせい) — graduate
大卒 (だいそつ) — university graduate
新卒 (しんそつ) — new graduate
卒業式 (そつぎょうしき) — graduation ceremony
脳卒中 (のうそっちゅう) — stroke
学卒 (がくそつ) — college graduate
新卒者 (しんそつしゃ) — new graduate
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Kanji of the Day: 悦 [Kanji of the Day]
悦
✍10
中学
ecstasy, joy, rapture
エツ
よろこ.ぶ よろこ.ばす
満悦 (まんえつ) — great delight
悦び (よろこび) — joy
愉悦 (ゆえつ) — joy
悦楽 (えつらく) — joy
悦に入る (えつにいる) — to be pleased
法悦 (ほうえつ) — religious exultation
自己満悦 (じこまんえつ) — self-congratulation
目を悦ばす (めをよろこばす) — to feast one's eyes (on)
満悦至極 (まんえつしごく) — highly delighted
欣悦 (きんえつ) — joy
Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.
Thursday 2026-07-09
11:00 PM
MuskCorp Tries To Bribe Memphis With Cheaper Starlink So They’ll Ignore xAI Data Center Pollution [Techdirt]
Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s Colossus xAI data centers in Memphis disproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines powering the system.
As is so often the case, Musk’s “innovation” is quite often just a combination of media manipulation, opportunism, crony capitalism, and openly ignoring public safety. The more you look, the more of a theme it becomes across Musk’s entire post-IPO delusionverse.
Anyway, the lawsuit points out that his Memphis-area data centers are violating the Clean Air Act, funneling all manner of pollutants into minority neighborhoods that already see a disproportionately high number of pollution-caused childhood illnesses:
“xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year.”
Musk also promised to build a next-gen water filtration system so that the xAI data center doesn’t imperil the local water supply, but he simply decided to apparently not do that. Instead, Musk ran crying to the Trump administration, whose DOJ is trying to have the pollution case-dismissed on national security grounds, because the administration sometimes uses Musk’s shoddy fifth-place AI services.
Hoping to quell growing anger in Memphis at the fact he’s openly violating environmental law, Musk is leaning on his other company, Starlink, to try and calm down locals. Starlink announced last week they’d be offering Memphis-area locals half-off the typically expensive Starlink monthly rate for an unspecified amount of time:
“The unique capabilities of the Colossus datacenters could not be accomplished without the partnership and support from the local Memphis community.” SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, wrote on X on Tuesday.
“Happy to bring affordable and great @SpaceX @Starlink connectivity to our neighbors,” Nicolls added.
I’m sure a temporary (these sorts of discounted rates never last) internet access discount will definitely help the kids with formaldehyde-driven asthma. There are a few other layers of irony: one being that data has repeatedly shown that Starlink is routinely too congested to be of help in more densely populated areas like Memphis. Hidden “congestion” fees also ensure the service isn’t really affordable.
Meanwhile, you have guys like Mark Andreessen pretending to be confused why civil rights groups like the NAACP wouldn’t be big fans of discriminatory environmental pollution. As with all (bipartisan) opposition to AI data centers, the very legitimate complaints going on outside of Memphis are being portrayed as unreasonable attacks on innovation by radicals:
These people are, in case you’ve not been paying attention, just foundationally not good human beings, who simply love to engage in phony surprise at the width and breadth of the public backlash to AI.
06:00 PM
Pluralistic: Post-political (09 Jul 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]
->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->
Top Sources:
None
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Today's links
- Post-political: What a "leftist" is.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: MSFT x OSCON; Parental spyware; "Resurrection Man"; Brexit do-over petition; Workplace email spying; Record label internet death penalty; News should be cheap, free and chaotic; "Jughead".
- Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
Post-political (permalink)
There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."
Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
"Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines
Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
"Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement
The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.
Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.
I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated
This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"
Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me
This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:
https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins
But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:
"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp
That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."
If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo
Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796
Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:
As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").
Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.
In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic
"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em
Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807
Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it
Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.
If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:
https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf
If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf
If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.
"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.
Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.
(Image: Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Hell Is Other People https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/
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Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-people-lose-treasured-media-when-prisons-change-tablet-contracts/
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Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive: an Introduction https://pressthink.org/2026/07/jay-rosens-internet-archive-an-introduction/
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Zohran Mamdani on the Promise of America https://jacobin.com/2026/07/zohran-mamdani-independence-day-address
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The official website of Nand to Tetris courses https://www.nand2tetris.org/
Object permanence (permalink)
#25yrsago Why Microsoft was invited to OSCON https://web.archive.org/web/20010701102931/http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconint_0601.html
#25yrsago The Extent of Systematic Monitoring of Employee E-mail and Internet Use https://web.archive.org/web/20010711204804/http://www.privacyfoundation.org/workplace/technology/extent.asp
#20yrsago BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/10/bpi-we-should-be-able-to-cut-off-your-internet/
#20yrsago Technology for parents to spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20060711084212/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/BIGMOTHER.TMP
#20yrsago Dale Bailey's "The Resurrection Man" https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/09/southern-gothic-science-fiction-collection/
#10yrsago A law prof responds to students who anonymously complained about #blacklivesmatter tee https://backspace.com/notes/2016/07/law-professors-response-to-black-lives-matter-shirt-complaint.php
#10yrsago UK government rejects Brexit do-over petition with 4.1m signatures https://web.archive.org/web/20160709101514/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-government-rejects-eu-referendum-petition-latest-a7128306.html
#10yrsago New Zealanders raise millions to buy beach and donate it to the public https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36759321
#10yrsago Jughead: Zdarsky’s reboot is funny, fannish, and freaky https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/10/jughead-zdarskys-reboot-is-funny-fannish-and-freaky/
#5yrsago Biden's Right to Repair will include electronics, too https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/ -
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales -
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/ -
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification -
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/ -
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn -
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/ -
Lawfare Daily
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g -
How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow -
Breaking Points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE -
A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate)
https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat
Latest books (permalink)
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ -
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
- A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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