News

Monday 2026-06-08

06:00 AM

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt [Techdirt]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering a theory about ICE’s addiction to masks:

Let me suggest a different reason…

Let’s say that all of those J6 dumbfucks who livestreamed their crimes, and who now have received pardons for acting like trailer trash are looking to start rebuilding their pathetic lives.

Let’s also say that they feel burned by the Trump administration for letting them hang out to dry for 4 years instead of pardoning them in 2020. I’m assuming he thought of them as ‘contractors.’

I’m suggesting that ICE has a hardon for masks because that’s the reward for the J6’ers who got fucked for 4 years – ICE just let them apply, and blam! You have an ICE agency chock full of the garbage of America who have a boner for revenge, but if anyone compares them to J6 footage, they’d be fucked 6 ways to Sunday.

It’s not like security clearances make any difference to this clown car of fuckups.

Unmask those pieces of shit and let’s start comparing faces. I’ll bet once you dig a little, you’ll start to smell the white trash like the Proud Boys, OathKeepers, and all those other MAGAs with ‘small dick syndrome.’

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone hammering home the most important point about the Bricks and Minifigs saga:

Dear everyone involved with this story:

This could have been a few emails between lawyers.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a reply from dfbomb to the first place winning comment above:

This lines up with my observations that ICE’s behaviors with license plates, car stealing and general fuckery matches the patterns of the Boogaloo and Proud Boys that came to Minneapolis during George Floyd to start a race war.

They even target the same neighborhoods.

Next, it’s Nathan F with a comment about the Supreme Court’s transparently racist double standard on voting rights:

And Roberts still wonders why no one likes the SCOTUS or believes they make good, resonable, well thought out decisions?

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is j with a reaction to our piece on the LEGO dispute:

Wowsers…. There needs to be a length of story warning at the beginning.
I’m used to the normal two to five paragraphs on here. But eighteen page down presses later… just a heads up would be nice.

In second place, it’s Thad raising an eyebrow about one word in a line we wrote about Lindsey Halligan:

Lindsey Halligan — managed to set fire to pretty much everything she touched before deciding to exit to the DOJ.

“deciding”

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous reply to a commenter who spotted a “Luigi” bumper sticker:

Glad that Mario’s brother is finally getting some recognition for helping to take down the evil boss in the mushroom kingdom.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Greg Bovino’s not-so-subtle Nazi salute:

I think there is an innocent explanation for that gesture: Bovino was trying to make himself look taller.

That’s all for this week, folks!

04:00 AM

Take a pause, meditate [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 05 Jun 2026, Week 23

Community News

AirPlay Server, AirPlay receiver implementation with video and audio support, was just added pairing with Mirror for streaming between devices or straight from other AirPlay compatible devices out there.

Bold Bitcoin Wallet has a huge update to 4.0.0, you’ll just have to read for yourself here.

FairEmail was updated to 1.2318 and now it requires Android 6 or later.

Inner Breeze was updated to 1.5.0 as the last version, the upstream source repo was archived. But, the app has a new start, as we’ve included Inner Breeze, yes same name, same developer, but different appid. If you’ve had the app installed before, better switch now to get updates.

MakeACopy – OCR Latin (Best) was archived as MakeACopy, updated to 4.3.0 this week, already covers its use case. One less app to keep installed.

While the Briar apps are in maintenance mode for a while now, another team has built an app on their protocol. The newly included Zerion, Private messaging over Tor. No phone, no email. Now with channels., promises a lot of features. Since we’ve added the latest version you can read the explainer post and maybe peek at the older posts too for more in-depth knowledge.

@shuvashish76 feeds our FOMO:

App Manager celebrates 6 years of existence in a dev post. While we don’t track you, the user, we have some downloads stats (main server only) here or here or here, that might answer some dev questions.

DetoxDroid: Digital Detoxing as Your New Default was updated to 2.4.0 helping you doomscroll less. No, you don’t need AI or the latest greatest phone released yesterday, DetoxDroid can help you take pauses from the digital realm and keep you in control… of you.

Mullvad had a new security assessment of the app with minimal fixes needed.

Prav developers explain how the service is funded and make an appeal for donations to keep the sign-in function alive. If you believe in decentralized, open protocols for communication, built on FLOSS, Prav and its upstream Quicksy, are the entry points for your less tech-savvy friends, and they need your help.

Torrent Search was updated to 0.5.0 with many changes like, torrent details screen, better browser, view markers, better filtering, categories and more.

wallabag was updated to 2.6.0 after a two year pause, with translations updates, fixes and more.

Archived Apps

2 more apps were archived
  • AndroidCrypt: AES Crypt compatible file encryption utility (It use the non-free aescrypt lib)
  • Hermes Agent: Run local AI models with chat, files, voice, and Android tools. (Replacement coming soon!)

Newly Added Apps

36 more apps were newly added
  • 2026 Football Fixtures Widget: 2026 football fixtures and widgets.
  • Acho: Lightweight WebView client for Acho Chat
  • Acoustic: Simple internet radio app
  • Albi: A health tracking app that respects your privacy
  • Android IP Camera: An MJPEG IP Camera app
  • Appstract Icon Pack: Abstract icon pack with 590 hand-designed icons
  • Autu Mandu: Control the income and expenses of your vehicles
  • Backlog Tracker: Calculate, track, and defeat compounding academic backlogs
  • C2K — Couch to 5K & 10K: C25K/C210K running trainer. No Google, no tracking.
  • Collective Club Maze: A game similar to the board game ricochet robots
  • Compound Calculator: Simple offline compound interest calculator
  • duckAssist: Lightweight, privacy-focused WebView wrapper for Duck.ai
  • Extend: Extend is an all-purpose display manager for any physical or virtual display
  • Foldio: A music player that treats folders as playlists
  • Forkgram Classic: A Telegram fork preserving the classic UI from before the Liquid Glass era
  • FoxAppMemo: Track, rate and tag your apps with memos. No internet required.
  • iBeacon Tasker Plugin: Scan iBeacon advertisements from Tasker tasks
  • iSpindle Plotter: Collect and plot fermentation data from an iSpindel hydrometer
  • Magnifica: A magnificent magnifier
  • Mirror: Screen mirroring manager with support for AirPlay, Moonlight, and DisplayLink
  • MobiloSignal: Find the best spot for calls and mobile internet by seeing signal strength
  • Mood Cairns: Private, fully offline mood tracker. No network access. Your data’s yours.
  • NOVA: Open-source client for Unraid® NAS servers
  • Offline Currency Converter: Convert currencies offline with support for 160+ currencies
  • Otoscope: Ad-free viewer for cheap WiFi otoscope cameras
  • Quedalle: Quedalle in ads, tracking, accounts. Just a tile launcher.
  • ShizuWall: Lightweight no root, no VPN firewall solution powered by Shizuku
  • SrednaBG: Real-time average speed inside Bulgaria’s average-speed camera zones
  • UWR Planer: Match planning for underwater rugby – the UWR Planer app
  • Valencia Transit Reloaded: Transit info for the metropolitan area of Valencia and Alicante
  • Vegan Inspector: A barcode scanner that checks if products are vegan or vegetarian
  • Voki Bot: Automation tool
  • Voyager: Material Design 3 file browser with SFTP, FTP, SMB, and WebDAV support
  • WakeUpScreen: Wake your screen gently the moment a notification arrives
  • Weather: Weather app with Material You design
  • WhatsOpen: Open WhatsApp chats with any number, no contact needed

Updated Apps

276 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

12:00 AM

Marketing clerks [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Bookkeepers do important work. But a bookkeeper is not the head of accounting.

Marketers are responsible for anything the organization does that touches the market. But many people with ‘marketer’ in their title simply go to meetings and do tasks after the real work of marketing is already done.

Some tech companies have hundreds of people in their marketing department. Most of them are simply playing catch up, because the engineers are making all the powerful and leveraged marketing decisions.

Who is making the difficult decisions on your team? That’s the person who’s actually in charge of marketing.

      

Sunday 2026-06-07

11:00 AM

Pluralistic: Criticizing the everything machine (06 Jun 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links


A medieval one-man band standing on a crate; his head has been replaced with the head of a killer robot. Observing him are a cluster of critics, who are variously gesticulating wildly, peering disapprovingly, looking on in amusement, etc. The background is a phantasmagoric cloudscape.

Criticizing the everything machine (permalink)

"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.

Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"

I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?

"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."

In 13 minutes.

You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:

https://bsky.app/profile/petermiles.eurosky.social/post/3mnffjqczjs2t

Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"

In 800 words:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/04/ai-is-the-greatest-money-wasting-scheme-humanity-has-ever-i/

I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."

Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.

What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves

AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/uber-ceo-says-other-execs-are-lying-about-ai-they-say-it-ll-be-fine-publicly-but-privately-admit-millions-of-jobs-are-gone/ar-AA1Z9QMv

Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.

AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/

So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?

This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.

Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.

Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.

My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Shortly after writing it, I turned it into a lecture:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK Parliament report damns DRM, calls for limits https://web.archive.org/web/20060615115510/http://www.openrightsgroup.org/2006/06/05/launch-of-the-apig-report-on-drm/

#20yrsago Colbert’s Knox College commencement speech https://web.archive.org/web/20111228135413/http://departments.knox.edu/newsarchive/news_events/2006/x12547.html

#15yrsago Counterfeiting can be good for luxury goods sales https://web.archive.org/web/20110602061646/http://www.slate.com/id/2294927/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a Joule Thief and get all the power you’ve paid for https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Joule-Thief/

#15yrsago School suspends student for refusing to remove personal animation from YouTube, threatens other students for petitioning on his behalf https://web.archive.org/web/20110603041200/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/student-cites-freedom-of-speech-after-suspension-for-online-videos/article2043954/

#5yrsago Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/05/lean-back/#lean-forward

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Just for Skeets and Giggles (6.6.26) [The Status Kuo]

A note to readers: On Monday, Facebook cut off my team’s ability to monetize our content, with no explanation or warning. We’re appealing but haven’t heard back. Meanwhile, we’re scrambling to make up for the sudden shortfall without having to make staffing cuts. I’m taking no salary while we try to recover from this blow.

I hate being under the thumb of these billionaire oligarchs and their AI algorithms that treat content creators like garbage. Your financial support of our work gives us greater independence from the big platforms and allows us to keep our content free for readers on fixed income or disability.

If you’ve been meaning to become a paid supporter, this would be an amazing time to upgrade and help. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks for the vote of confidence! My team will make it through this tough period, but we deeply appreciate any support readers can provide.

Subscribe now

Sleepy Don was back as a theme this week, especially after Marco Rubio testified under oath that he’s never seen the president fall asleep. This was just the other day in the Oval Office:

Image.heic

New portrait for the $250 bill just dropped.

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Speaking of that new bill, Seth Meyers had some thoughts on it and the rest of this week’s news.

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Note: Xcancel links mirror Twitter without sending traffic. Some GIFs may load; just swipe them down. Issues? Click the gear on the Xcancel page’s upper right, select “proxy video streaming through the server,” then “save preferences” at the bottom. For sanity, don’t read the comments; they’re all bots and trolls. Won’t load? Paste the link into your browser and remove “cancel” after the X in the URL.

This is an old meme, but my friend sent it to me and I still laughed, so here it is again.

att.odbeShE-HkXPWxl3rhdJ8ZBDoTEegHSzMNEWscQlAbw.jpeg

Jimmy Kimmel’s all out of Fs to give, and it’s pretty glorious. Here’s a recap of the week, and really these 16 months in hell too.

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The cancellation of the Freedom 250 concert after most the musical acts backed out was highly embarrassing for the President, as I wrote earlier with this header image, if you missed it:

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Instead of Milli Vanilli, may I suggest this pair.

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Gurl, we know it’s you.

A frustrated Trump even said he’d do the concert himself.

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And he gave us a quote for the ages, which fairly sums up the last decade:

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Speaking of dumb things, it came out that part of the deal being negotiated with Iran includes a possible $300 billion reparations tab, to be paid by us. The public’s reaction:

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A theme soon emerged from this revelation.

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Give him the Nobel, stat.

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In other revelations, Trump has been trading stocks in un-presidented amounts since taking office, while pumping the ones he owns in speeches and on social media—and paying $200 for failing to disclose his trades on time.

We don’t know how much he made, but it feels like this:

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Movies pretty much have all the right references for times like these.

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Or television.

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Or viral clips:

IMG_1231.jpeg

It wasn’t all terrible news. A judge ordered Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And it might just be the start of taking it off everything.

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If we don’t stop him soon, all of Washington, D.C. will begin to bear his mark.

IMG_1297.jpeg

That UFC ring though…

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Let’s not forget what he wants us all to stop thinking about.

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Trump said he would nominate Todd Blanche as the permanent AG, and Blanche got straight to work.

Image.png

While Pete Hegseth has been blocking promotions for women and minorities, he showed us what real men running things look like.

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We have a possible explanation for why he embarrassed himself in this fashion.

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Not to be outdone, Kash Patel had another use for government property.

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Texas GOP voters chose someone even more compromised than Trump as their Senate nominee.

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In this age of obsequiousness and gross flattery, Pixar went political without saying it was going political.

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But Dem leaders know how to make us really smile.

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I wrote about The Odyssey recently, and I guess the right, including Elon Musk, is up in arms about (checks notes) a Black Helen of Troy. Jimmy Kimmel on that meltdown:

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Honestly, it explains why they were so mad about the Black Little Mermaid, too.

Subscribe now

This did not go as I’d expected, but I completely get it!

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Trust is learned over time. So far, my corgi, Windsor, remains skeptical, but these doggos are all in!

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Like I said, trust must be earned.

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I couldn’t stop laughing at the conversation here.

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Some pups are just natural conversationalists.

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I have not attempted this ring toss with my corgi yet, but given that I can barely get her harness on due to all the wriggling, I do not think it would go well.

IMG_1339.jpeg

I also have not attempted this toss with my dog.

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I was transfixed by this moment, even though I knew how it would end. ❤️

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Too soon for an R. Kelly reference with this kitty?

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Oh, wait, someone actually made an R. Kelly reference for this aerialist. (Kitty is fine, just a bruised ego.)

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So I guess this was just a tit-for-cat interaction?

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Oh, you sneaky bastard.

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This precious baby!

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This was like a physics lesson.

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Fascinating creature, hilarious caption.

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I didn’t even know they sneezed!

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This was a sharp dig at humans.

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Speaking of humans and their documentary devices:

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Dionne Warwick has game.

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France prevailed in the game but still rioted in the streets… in a unique way.

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From closer up:

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People nowadays.

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If this is AI, it’s really good AI, but after some digging, I still think it’s real and quite something.

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My sister sent me this.

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The end times are nigh.

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Many readers here will sympathize.

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One of the better uses of the technology I’ve seen.

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Grammar. Very important.

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I debated including this, but come on.

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Placement is everything.

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This would totally be me.

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I agree! My kids’ laughs are a balm for the soul. Try not to smile at these!

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The clip of the week goes to Samuel, who has devoted himself so fully to this art form that he is likely the best in the world at it. Yay, Samuel!

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I didn’t come across a great dad joke to end this collection. The omission is ap-parent.

Have a great weekend!

Jay

09:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 課 [Kanji of the Day]

課

✍15

小4

chapter, lesson, section, department, division, counter for chapters (of a book)

カ

課題   (かだい)   —   subject
課長   (かちょう)   —   section manager
課税   (かぜい)   —   taxation
放課後   (ほうかご)   —   after school (at the end of the day)
課程   (かてい)   —   course
課金   (かきん)   —   charges
総務課   (そうむか)   —   general affairs section
非課税   (ひかぜい)   —   tax-exempt
企画課   (きかくか)   —   planning section
日課   (にっか)   —   daily routine

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 辱 [Kanji of the Day]

辱

✍10

中学

embarrass, humiliate, shame

ジョク

はずかし.める

雪辱   (せつじょく)   —   vindication of honor
屈辱   (くつじょく)   —   disgrace
侮辱   (ぶじょく)   —   insult
屈辱的   (くつじょくてき)   —   humiliating
雪辱戦   (せつじょくせん)   —   return match
侮辱罪   (ぶじょくざい)   —   defamation (i.e., slander, libel)
恥辱   (ちじょく)   —   disgrace
辱める   (はずかしめる)   —   to put to shame
国辱   (こくじょく)   —   national disgrace
陵辱   (りょうじょく)   —   insult

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

05:00 AM

02:00 AM

Saturday 2026-06-06

11:00 PM

Real artists… [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Real artists do all the painting themselves, not like Rembrandt

Real artists use brushes, not technology like Cartier-Bresson

Real writers write it out by hand, not like Jack Kerouac

Real musicians record it live, not like Steely Dan

Real singers sing without processing, not like Kanye West and Daft Punk

Real directors do the prep without AI, not like Martin Scorsese

It turns out that real artists have always used technology. What they have in common is intent, responsibility, and the ability to create a feeling in the audience.

“Here, I made this.”

      

YouTube Processed 2.5 Billion Content ID Copyright Claims in 2025 [TorrentFreak]

sad tubeTo protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report.

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system. Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a few thousand formally approved rightsholders.

2.5 Billion Claims

YouTube’s latest Transparency Report shows that the number of automated claims continues to rise. In 2025, the platform processed 2,502,941,368 Content ID claims, up 14% from 2.2 billion the year before.

Of the approved 7,626 rightsholders who currently have access to the system, 4,454 actively used it. These numbers are both slightly down from last year. YouTube doesn’t provide a specific reason, but notes that access can be revoked as part of regular evaluations.

“To keep the ecosystem safe, we regularly evaluate partners’ access to CID to ensure they demonstrate an ongoing need for scaled rights management. In some cases, these evaluations may result in removing a partner’s access to Content ID and matching them with a more appropriate copyright management tool,” the transparency report reads.

usage

As clearly shown above, the number of rightsholders participating in the Content ID system pales in comparison to the 295,531 rightsholders who filed removal requests through the standard webform, or the 173,338 that used the automated Copyright Match Tool.

Nonetheless, Content ID’s 4,454 active rightsholders were responsible for 99.48% of all copyright actions on the video streaming platform. Compared to earlier years, the automated Content ID takedowns continues to increase, both relatively in percentages and in absolute numbers.

Takedown actions per tool

actions by tool

Millions of Disputed Claims

As with any takedown tool, uploaders and third-party rightsholders are not always in agreement. In fact, there are millions of Content ID disputes every year.

YouTube reports that of all Content ID claims, uploaders have disputed 12,840,608, or 0.51% of the total. That’s a relatively small percentage but still a rather large absolute number. For comparison, uploaders appealed 9.9% of all webform removals, which translates to little over 267,000 counter-notices.

appealsIn 2024, uploaders won 70% of disputes. In 2025 that figure dropped slightly to 67.42%. However, those who decided to challenge the rejection though YouTube’s process, won their appeal 75% of the time.

The flow chart on the right illustrates the full appeals process.

Not all disputes are resolved though YouTube’s internal Content ID process. If uploaders persist that their content was erroneously claimed, while rightsholders argue the opposite, YouTube will reinstate the video, at which point rightsholders have to take the matter to court.

In 2025, 10,698 claims reached this stage, but fewer than 1% of these resulted in a lawsuit, YouTube notes.

Outside the Content ID system, YouTube also flags abuse of its DMCA takedown webform as a problem. In 2025, more than 6% of all these removal requests were believed to be “a likely false assertion of copyright ownership” by YouTube’s review team.

“The attempted abuse rate through the webform was more than 10 times higher than the attempted abuse rate across all other copyright removal tools,” the transparency report notes.

A $12 Billion Revenue Machine

While YouTube’s Content ID can be a significant source of frustration for uploaders, it has become a substantial revenue stream for rightsholders. Instead of removing infringing content, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims in 2025.

YouTube reports that cumulative ad revenue paid to rightsholders through Content ID has now exceeded $12 billion since the system launched. That figure includes data up to December 2024 and will likely be billions higher today.

It is clear that not being present on YouTube at all is no longer an economically wise decision. On the contrary, for some rightsholders a viral infringing upload is no longer a problem, but a revenue opportunity intstead.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

01:00 PM

‘Tomb Raider’ Remake Developed Using Some AI, Everyone Freaks, Crystal Dynamics Responds, And I’m Confused [Techdirt]

Full disclosure: this post is going to pose way more questions than answers. That’s because the story of the Tomb Raider remake being produced by Crystal Dynamics and its inclusion of an AI disclosure on Steam makes no sense to me.

So, let’s start at the beginning. Crystal Dynamics is making an updated version of the first Tomb Raider game and it looks pretty great from what I’ve seen. But, as gamers are now accustomed to doing, the public came to notice that the game’s Steam page included one of Steam’s mandatory AI disclosure notices. It reads thusly:

AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content. Any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team.

And from there, because, of course, everyone freaked out. Comments from all the corners of the internet began flooding in, swearing off ever touching this game because it was developed using AI. What AI? We don’t know. How much was it utilized? No real content there, either. But is the game going to be good? It doesn’t fucking matter, because AI was used and that’s all you need to know in order to know that this game is going to be artless pap fit only to be mocked and laughed at.

Even some gaming journalists have gotten into the habit. This is from Kotaku:

GenAI slop potentially showing up in Tomb Raider is disappointing but maybe less surprising than it should be. Phil Rogers, CEO of Crystal Dynamics’ parent company, Embracer Group, last year called genAI a “powerful technology” for “driving efficiency.” Crystal Dynamics has also undergone several rounds of layoffs, completing three just last year and one earlier in 2026.

Here you have a writer who has already reached their conclusion while having almost zero information on which to base that conclusion. They haven’t played the game. They’ve barely seen the content in the game, save for some trailers. They don’t know thing one about how AI was used, where, and in what way. But it’s probably going to be “GenAI slop”. As if there is simply no other possible outcome.

But it gets at least slightly stranger with Crystal Dynamics having responded to some of those concerns over at Eurogamer.

“At Crystal Dynamics, we leverage AI tools to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted. Our goal is to empower the creativity and flexibility of our developers to deliver the highest-quality experiences for players everywhere.”

This is where I get confused. If all of the content that is going to make it into the final product is “human-crafted,” then they shouldn’t even have needed to add the disclosure to their Steam page. Back in January, Steam updated its rules around its AI disclosure such that a game with an AI disclosure must have AI-generated content that is either in public marketing materials for the game or in the final product and with which the player of the game interacts in order to require the disclosure.

In its submission form, Valve now specifies that game publishers must disclose pre-made generative AI assets only when used in marketing materials or content that “ships with your game, and is consumed by players.”

In other words, Steam’s disclosure requirement is not concerned with generative AI tools used behind the scenes for efficiency gains (presumably including coding helpers) or office work, but with things like final art, sound, and writing.

Now, I’ll just note that there is a subtle difference in the disclosure notice and Crystal Dynamics’ statement. The former indicates that the game may include AI-generated assets that were then iterated upon by a human developer. The latter seems to say the opposite, where everything in the final game will be “human-crafted”. So… which is it?

As I said from the start, more questions than answers is all I have at the moment. But if the gaming public is going to freak out at the mere mention of some AI being used in some way, somewhere within every new video game that comes out, then this is going to be a very annoying time in which to be a gamer.

11:00 AM

Pluralistic: Refining humanity (05 Jun 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links


A 1960s classroom. A teacher in a blue dress stands at a blackboard in the background; in the foreground, a child works at a desk. The child's head has been replaced with the head of a killer robot. The blackboard is covered in printed circuits.

Refining humanity (permalink)

One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction.

There's a great bit in Rowan Atkinson's historical sitcom Blackadder that illustrates this principle. In "Ink and Incapability" Blackadder and friends have accidentally burned the only copy of Samuel Johnson's original dictionary of the English language. To cover up their mistake, they decide that they will recreate the dictionary themselves. However, they founder on the first word they try to define, "A":

Blackadder: Let's start at the beginning, shall we? First: 'A.' How would you define 'A'?

Prince George: Ohh…'A' (continues this in background). Oh, I love this! I love this! Quizzies! Erm, hang on, it’s coming. Ooh, crikey, erm, oh yes, I’ve got it!

B: What?

PG: Well, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?

B: Good. So we're well on the way, then. "'A'; impersonal pronoun; doesn't really mean anything."

I mean, what does "A" mean? The Oxford English Dictionary has more than a dozen definitions, and just the first one runs to more than 1,500 words:

https://archive.org/details/the-oxford-english-dictionary-all-volumes_202208/The%20Oxford%20English%20Dictionary%20Volume%201%20-%20A%20to%20B/page/n25/mode/2up

Now, normal life involves a lot of explaining things to other people. You have to explain your problems to customer service reps, who have to explain why they can't solve those problems to you. You need to explain to your loved ones why you want to leave your toothbrush in the shower, and they have to explain why they hate having your toothbrush in the shower. These explanation-exchanges teach you as much as they teach the person you're locked in dialog with. The reasons for leaving your toothbrush in the shower may seem totally obvious to you, and your partner's inability to understand this reveals the assumptions you've never even considered.

For the past four decades, an increasing proportion of the population have spent an increasing proportion of their lives explaining things to machines that have no assumptions or shared context: computers. What we call "programming a computer" is really "breaking down a thing that seems obvious to you into increasingly simple instructions that will be followed to the letter."

Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.

To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").

I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.

But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."

Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

From "names of people" and "street addresses"; from "prices" to "time"; from "email addresses" to "phone numbers"; the "awesome falsehoods" lists are awesome because they reveal how much subtlety and complexity is lurking in these seemingly simple and intuitive concepts. This subtlety and complexity might never emerge through the process of trying to teach a person about them, but when you try to teach a computer about them, you have to confront them in all their awesome fuggliness.

That's because humans have context, agency and flexibility. Sure, the person who designs a form with a blank for "name" might never have met a Malagasy person whose first name is Randriamananjararadofabesata, but in the pre-digital world, when Madagascar Slim met a public official who had to transcribe his name onto a paper form, that official could simply draw an arrow in the margin next to the "name" blank, turn the form over, and write out all 28 characters on the reverse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Slim

Computers can't do this. If the programmer doesn't know about Malagasy first names, the computer doesn't know about them either, and the only person who can "teach" the computer about these names is a programmer with access to the code for the database, who has to manually alter the code, compile it, and distribute it to everyone who uses it.

This is partly why digitization has been accompanied by a rise in people asserting that they exist on spectrums rather than in binaries. There were always people whose names, genders, races, and other biographic "immutables" changed, or failed to fit within the blanks on the forms. When those people's realities ran up against failures in the system's abstractions, they could petition a bureaucrat to turn the paper over and write an explanatory note, or to write really small to fill in a blank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Getting a human official to turn the paper over and write something that didn't fit in the blank is a personal challenge. It requires that a subject convince the person who controls the form to make an exception. This isn't always easy, but officials on the front lines necessarily deal with reality, and they can't get their jobs done unless they're capable of interpreting the necessarily incomplete procedures they operate under to fit things as they really are.

But a computer doesn't have any agency or context or flexibility. If the computer says your name isn't valid, you can't argue the computer into accepting it. The only way to get a digital world to acknowledge your existence is to campaign for systemic change. A trans person might (with great difficulty, to be sure) convince the regional registrar to white-out an old X on one "gender" box and mark a new X in the other box. But the only way to make that change in a software system that has been programmed to treat the "gender" field as immutable is to change society itself.

In this way, computers are machines for teaching us what we don't know about ourselves. They require that we interrogate and faithfully recreate our personal tacit knowledge, and they require that our societies interrogate their tacit presumptions as well. When you are forced to turn your tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, you're also forced to confront how many broken assumptions lurk inside your reasoning. At best, it's a clarifying process.

Computers don't just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are. There are lots of things that we have supposed that a computer would never do, because we believed that these things required something that only humans could do.

Take chess: there are more possible chess games than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe, so brute-forcing chess by running all possible games is a technological impossibility. The best human chess players do something we don't quite understand, mixing their recollections of previous games with rules-of-thumb about the best strategies, with "creativity" (whatever that is) that lets them spontaneously develop new strategies. We can easily get a computer to memorize all the known-good chess sequences and all the rules of thumb, but we don't know what "creativity" is, so we can't encode it as a series of instructions.

But thanks to breakthroughs in machine learning and its successor, "deep learning," we have created chess-playing software that can beat every human, partly by assaying gambits that we would term "creative" if they originated with a human player.

What we make of this new fact is controversial. For many people (myself included), this is a refinement: it tells me that behaviors that are indistinguishable from "creativity" can, at least some of the time, be created by mechanical processes, and the mere fact that a machine does something that appears "creative" doesn't mean that machines are human.

For others, the fact that a mechanical system can evince a behavior that we would call "creative" in a human doesn't mean that we defined "creativity" too broadly, it means that we defined "human" too narrowly, and now we have made a machine that is, at least partially, a person.

I think this is the wrong conclusion to draw, for reasons that Ted Chiang sets out with luminous brilliance in a recent Atlantic article entitled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious":

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/

(If you're hitting the paywall on that one and you're on Firefox, you can try my favorite trick: switch to "Reader Mode" and hit "reload" – your mileage may vary.)

For all the reasons Chiang articulates, I think that drawing the "personhood" line to include machines is a technical mistake, but it's worse than that. Admitting machines to the "personhood" club is a tactical mistake, on par with the mistake we made when we admitted corporations to the personhood club. We should absolutely consider expanding personhood to incorporate living things, including animals and ecosystems, but at the same time, we must purge these dead, artificial constructs from the club:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/#moral-consideration

There is a way in which the recognition of new capabilities in machines parallels the recognition of new capabilities in animals other than ourselves. When those animals manage to do things that we once thought were the exclusive province of humans, we (should) take that as an opportunity to refine our conception of humanity. We're not "the animals that use tools" or "the animals that make plans" or "the animals that recognize themselves in mirrors," because there are other animals that do those things. We are an "animal that uses tools"; not the animal that does so.

Likewise, if we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity – not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not "a thing that requires a human mind," they're "things that can be done by human minds and by machines."

Edsger Dijkstra once famously asked "can a submarine swim?"

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html

Submarines and fish and humans and dolphins all propel themselves through water by different means. But when an animal swims, it does something that is different from what a submarine does. The submarine has no intention, while (complex multicellular) animals swim to pursue goals. Building machines that propel themselves through water is very useful, but it's not the same thing as creating life. In some ways, it's better than creating life: for one thing, we owe other living things moral consideration that is not due to machines. Harnessing a machine to accomplish our own goals is more morally clear than controlling living things to achieve those goals. By the same token, creating machines that can do some of the tasks that we ask of other humans can be the superior moral course. I'd rather have a machine remove mines from a minefield than getting humans to do it.

But beyond this moral relief, creating machines is a fantastic way to learn more about ourselves – making explicit our tacit knowledge, our implicit social assumptions, and the limitations of our conception of what sets us apart from the rest of the universe.

One way in which AI is exceptional is in how it undermines this principle. Conventional software techniques struggled to produce a program that could identify objects in photographs. It turns out that defining all the visual correlates of "cat" is even harder than defining the letter "A." Deep learning techniques solved this previous insoluble problem by relieving us of the job of making explicit all the implicit factors that we deploy when distinguishing an image of a "cat" from an image of a "dog" or a "tiger" (or a "tractor").

Instead of forcing humans to engage in introspection until we'd made a list of every factor we use to identify cat pictures, we simply identified pictures of cats and fed them to a program that tried to find the commonalities among them. The more pictures we fed to that program, the better it got at identifying cats. Today, we have programs that can reliably distinguish an image of a cat from an image of a tiger cub!

This represents a major breakthrough in the power of computers to perform useful work for us, but it's also a huge regression in computers' role in forcing us to make our tacit thought processes explicit through systematic introspection. That's probably fine: we didn't create computers to make us introspect, we created them to do useful work for us. All things considered, it might be better to have genies who grant our wishes according to the spirit of our words, not their letter.

AI may not force us to render our implicit thoughts as explicit instructions, but it absolutely forces us to reconsider and narrow the realm of the numinous. Our own creativity is still delightful and important, but the fact that this squishy, amazing process can (sometimes) be replicated by procedural machines changes the definition of living things. We're "a thing that can produce creative outcomes" but not "the things that can produce creative outcomes." The machines aren't being creative (any more than a submarine is swimming) but they're outputting things that we used to only achieve by means of creativity.

An AI that does something that used to require creativity is fulfilling my favorite of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has not done before":

https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

Just as bosses fantasize about AI bringing about a worksite without workers, and Zuckerberg is trying to build social media without socializing, and politicians want a bureaucracy without bureaucrats, we can sometimes use AI to produce creative outcomes without creativity:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/27/unnecessariat/#rubbuts-stole-my-jerb

That isn't to say that AI art is any good. AI may produce things that are aesthetically interesting, but it can't produce things that mean anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/02/must-we-pretend/

But art isn't the only realm that we apply creativity to. There are plenty of outcomes that we've always believed we couldn't bring about without applying creativity. AI – like all software – is making us realize that an ingredient we once deemed uniquely essential turns out to have substitutes. AI can sometimes accomplish things without us explaining how we do them. That relieves us of a useful but difficult chore – but in so doing, it forces us (yet again!) to revisit what sorts of things are needed to do the things that matter to us, and therefore, what makes us special.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago GNU Radio: the universal, software-defined radio https://web.archive.org/web/20060613062355/https://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70933-0.html

#15yrsago France bans “follow us on Twitter” from newscasts https://web.archive.org/web/20110606035424/http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/france-bans-facebook-and-twitter-from-radio-and-tv/1559

#5yrsago Aaron Swartz, vindicated https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#cfaa

#5yrsago Capitalism's crooked refs https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming 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/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Their Blind Fealty Isn’t Just Disgraceful. It’s Dangerous. [The Status Kuo]

Photo of Bill Pulte, acting DNI, courtesy of The Washington Post

What does blind fealty to Donald Trump get you?

If you’re Todd Blanche, it gets you promoted from personal defense attorney to nominee for attorney general of the United States, despite a confirmation fight that will likely relitigate your handling of the Epstein files, your laundering of a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump’s allies, and two months of embarrassingly obsequious groveling to curry Trump’s favor.

If you’re Bill Pulte, it gets you command of the nation’s intelligence apparatus as acting director of national intelligence, despite no intelligence background whatsoever and a history of weaponizing whatever agency you’re handed against whoever Trump wants punished. Pulte will get to keep that acting position for at least 210 days—a period, by no small coincidence, that includes Election Day on November 3, 2026.

But fealty to Trump is never just a reward; it’s also a contract. In return for elevating them, Trump expects his chief law enforcement official to protect him from accountability and his spy chief to help manufacture justifications for federal interference in the midterms. In short, by filling the vacancies left by Pam Bondi and Tulsi Gabbard with other proven loyalists, Trump has reinforced critical pieces of the political apparatus that could help him remain in power.

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From personal defense lawyer to attorney general of the United States

When Trump needed a lawyer to defend him against 34 felony counts in a Manhattan courtroom, he turned to Todd Blanche—a former Southern District of New York prosecutor who had left government for private practice, switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican in 2024, and staked his professional reputation on keeping Trump out of prison. Blanche lost the case, but Trump won the presidency anyway. The reward came in March 2025: a 52-46 party-line Senate confirmation as deputy attorney general, with no Republicans opposed.

When Trump fired Bondi in early April, Blanche stepped in as acting AG and immediately made clear his loyalty and priorities. Blanche declared that Trump has the “right” and “duty” to have his enemies investigated “using all of the resources we can.” When asked whether he’d want the permanent job, he volunteered that if Trump chose someone else, he would say, “Thank you very much. I love you, sir.”

The internet, briefly, had a field day.

On Wednesday night, at a private White House Rose Garden dinner, Trump made clear that he intends to make Blanche’s appointment permanent. “Tomorrow I’m instructing Dan and everybody else that’s involved in that very complicated process, which is going to go, I think, very quickly, that we are going to make him permanent attorney general,” Trump said in the video. Blanche received the news with ardor. “Anytime President Trump nominates you,” he told NewsNation, “it’s an honor, the honor of a lifetime.”

Two months of auditions

Blanche’s brief tenure as acting AG reads like an extended audition for the permanent role. He moved to revive prosecutions of New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey. He announced a sweeping indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging it had been manufacturing the very extremism it claimed to oppose. He rolled back gun control measures. He appeared at CPAC.

And then there was the Anti-Weaponization Fund. That’s a $1.776 billion compensation scheme, loosely tied to Trump’s IRS “settlement,” to hand payouts to those who claimed they were wrongly prosecuted under the last administration. Blanche announced it without congressional authorization and without, apparently, a firm grasp of whether it would survive contact with Senate Republicans. Faced with a growing revolt from his own caucus, Blanche told lawmakers the DOJ was “not moving forward with the fund, period”—while Trump, asked the same day, said he wasn’t so sure.

Epstein’s shadow

Then there’s the Epstein files. When Bondi finally appeared before the House Oversight Committee, she made one thing conspicuously clear: Whatever had gone wrong with the Epstein files, Todd Blanche was responsible.

“He was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files,” Bondi said flatly. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) summarized Bondi’s testimony with characteristic bluntness, noting that every question got one of three answers: “Not to my recollection,” “I am not talking about Donald Trump,” and notably, “Talk with Todd Blanche; I don’t know anything about it.”

Blanche’s record on the Epstein files covers the most egregious aspects of the ongoing cover up:

At a May Senate hearing, 18 Epstein survivors accused Blanche of lying under oath, claiming he testified that he had met with them when he never had. Asked at that same hearing whether the DOJ had any open Epstein-related investigations, Blanche replied sharply: “He’s dead.”

Democrats have announced they intend to subpoena Blanche on the Epstein matter. That subpoena will be pending when his confirmation hearings begin.

The real estate heir in charge of national intelligence

When Trump needed someone willing to use the machinery of a federal agency to go after his enemies, he found Bill Pulte.

Pulte, 38, is the grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the country’s largest homebuilders. He worked his way into Trump’s orbit by posting friendly content online and befriending Eric Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He and his wife contributed nearly $1 million to Republican candidates in 2024.

Trump appointed Pulte to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte used his access to mortgage records to mine old loan applications and file criminal referrals against Trump’s political enemies, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Pulte posted more than 100 times on social media demanding Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s resignation. He then presided over the firing of Fannie Mae officials who tried to investigate his own conduct.

As Sen. Adam Schiff told The New York Times. “Pulte is not being chosen for his experience.” He added, “He is being chosen because the president views him as willing to violate law and ethics to go after his enemies.”

According to the Times, Trump was initially leaning toward naming Aaron Lukas, the top ODNI deputy, for the number one position and had already named him interim DNI. Then Pulte lobbied hard for the job, and Trump spent the weekend calling allies to vet the idea before awarding it to Pulte.

In naming him acting DNI, Trump handed Pulte oversight of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, even while he continued running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Notably, Pulte has no known background in national security. At a Senate hearing, when Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent whether Pulte even had a security clearance, Bessent said he didn’t know.

The 210-day window

Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, Pulte can serve as acting DNI for up to 210 days without Senate confirmation. Gabbard’s departure takes effect June 30. That puts the term’s expiration in late January 2027, well after Election Day on November 3, 2026. Pulte will be sitting atop the nation’s intelligence apparatus for the entirety of the midterm election cycle, and that is not an accident.

Trump said as much himself. When walking back Pulte’s permanent nomination to an acting role on Thursday, Trump told reporters, “He’s a very smart guy, and you may find out some things about the rigged elections, etc., etc.”

That comment connects Pulte directly to a broader operation already underway. As Politico first reported and NBC News confirmed, Trump directed the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies to provide classified election-related intelligence to Kurt Olsen, a former campaign lawyer and election denier who worked on the Stop the Steal movement. The goal was for the intelligence agencies to support a probe into whether the 2020 election was stolen, even though every credible election expert and judge who has ever looked at these claims has concluded they are baseless.

Despite the wholesale debunking of such election fraud claims, a CIA spokesperson confirmed that the agency is cooperating. The FBI’s Fulton County search warrant affidavit stated that the search “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen.” One source told Politico that Olsen “will find some super classified report, say it’s evidence of fraud, but really it’s just completely out of context.”

It was no coincidence that Tulsi Gabbard was present in Fulton County, Georgia when the FBI raided election offices there. Now that she is gone, Pulte sits directly above all such operations. He oversees the CIA and NSA, two agencies Olsen has been working closely with. Meanwhile, the White House has dismantled the safeguards against actual foreign election interference, including the National Security Council’s election security group and the Foreign Malign Influence Center, the federal office created in 2024 to track and counter Russian, Chinese and Iranian interference.

Pro-Trump activists coordinating with the White House have circulated a 17-page draft executive order claiming China interfered in the 2020 election. It’s a baseless claim designed to provide the pretext for declaring a national emergency and seizing federal control of the midterms. The draft would require all voters to re-register, mandate color photo ID and proof of citizenship, effectively eliminate vote-by-mail, and establish a national voter registry. Trump denied any knowledge of the order, but the pattern of conduct surrounding it suggests otherwise.

Sen. Warner put the threat in direct terms. “What I’ve been concerned about for ages is: will the Trump administration or people inside it try to manipulate our elections this fall?” he said on MS NOW. “We already saw that with the prior DNI, in terms of Tulsi Gabbard, grabbing these ballot boxes in Fulton County. If I was concerned about Tulsi Gabbard, Bill Pulte raises those concerns tenfold.”

The reaction

When lawmakers heard that Pulte would get the nod for DNI, the alarm was immediate and bipartisan. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said the country needs “professionals” at ODNI, “not a weaponized DNI.” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) called Pulte an “incendiary attack dog” with no path to confirmation, adding that Pulte had been removed from the PulteGroup board and that “his father and aunt disavowed him having any association with their family trust.” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) offered a diplomatic yet devastating assessment: “The best I can tell you is he’s not qualified, but I don’t know anything about him other than that.”

By Thursday, Trump had publicly retreated from any permanent nomination of Pulte as DNI. “It’s an acting position,” Trump said. “He’s not going to be permanent.” Temporary, however, is far from harmless. Pulte can serve through Election Day without a single Senate vote. The intelligence agencies he oversees are already cooperating with Olsen, who is already mining classified files for evidence of a stolen election.

As former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote, the DNI’s portfolio includes advising the president on potential foreign interference in elections, a responsibility that in Pulte’s hands could become something far more sinister. “It’s possible that Pulte could aid with an agenda designed to ensure favorable outcomes — seizing ballots or election equipment, or even offering a rationale for canceling elections with claims of foreign interference.”

In Trump’s White House, fealty is the only credential that matters. Blanche proved his in a criminal courtroom, then as a Deputy AG willing to shield Trump from Epstein and even IRS accountability. Pulte proved his by weaponizing his position in a housing agency to torment Trump’s enemies. Both got the call from Trump to serve in his cabinet.

As distasteful as that quid pro quo is, the consequences of their blind fealty are even more dire, and they will fall on the rest of us. It will take vigilance, from lawmakers and the federal courts, to keep their power in check and prevent Trump from fully exploiting his appointments.

08:00 AM

ICE’s Reliance On Masked Thugs Is Predictably Resulting In Masked Thugs Claiming They’re ICE Officers [Techdirt]

ICE never needed officers to disguise themselves with masks and strip themselves of identification before Trump took office for the second time. What ICE is doing now isn’t what ICE was doing during Trump’s first term, even though it’s the same hateful bigot sitting behind the Resolute Desk he thinks should be covered in gold leaf.

According to the DHS, ICE officers need to look like roving kidnapping squads because they fear for their safety. Supposedly, they’re under attack now more than ever, something not even supported by the DHS’s context-free claims of massive increases in assaults of ICE officers.

ICE has never been popular. People have been calling for ICE to be abolished for far longer than the last 18 months of its existence. But now that ICE behaves like an invading force, rather than an agency involved in immigration and customs enforcement, more people are reacting to its unwanted presence in their neighborhoods.

ICE’s excuses for mask-wearing were [cough] unmasked when ICE was asked to fill in for unpaid TSA agents. ICE officers showed up at airports without masks to stand around and milk the clock, apparently unworried about being “exposed” or subjected to threats to them or their families.

But now that the TSA is as staffed as it’s ever going to be, ICE is returning to American streets, long on masks and short on training. Criminal opportunists know a good thing when they see it. When it’s impossible to tell whether the person assaulting you/demanding access to your home/running off with your valuables is an actual federal officer or just someone with access to ski masks and camo, the criminals have the upper hand.

As of February, Noticias Telemundo had documented at least six cases of impostors posing as ICE agents to rob or harass immigrants. In mid-January, a man broke into a house in Pittsburgh claiming to be an ICE agent and threatening a teen with a knife. In February, police in San Diego said a man allegedly impersonated an officer and wrapped his arms around the neck of a restaurant manager, claiming the manager was in the country illegally and he was going to arrest him.

Sure, some of you may be scoffing at “six cases” since Trump won the election. But that’s only the ones where a (foreign!) news agency managed to put together the pieces to deliver reporting that should have been done much earlier by domestic new agencies.

Here’s the more damning stat:

Of the 31 impersonation cases documented in 2025, 84% involved individuals who claimed to be ICE agents. Others identified themselves as officers from Border Patrol or the Department of Homeland Security.

Thirty-one impersonations. Apparently all of them involved people pretending to be in the business of migrant deportation. And it’s not just the normal crime you’d expect from criminals seeing a flaw in the system and exploiting it. It’s also led to an increase in the sort of crime this administration will likely greet with pardons and payout from the “FUCK AMERICA $1,776 MILLION SLUSH FUND.”

The recorded incidents include intimidation, robbery and sexual assault, as well as so-called “immigration operations” carried out by armed vigilantes against what they describe as an “invasion” of foreigners in the U.S.

This was a problem the FBI recognized months ago, but rarely speaks of now because it’s being led by the only guy who has a chance at drinking Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth under the table. The current “leadership” has nothing to say about giving criminals more opportunities to engage in criminal acts.

Neither DHS nor ICE responded to Noticias Telemundo’s request for official statistics about cases of fake ICE agents. They also did not comment on the trends revealed by this investigation.

Not even the rote “fake news” quasi-rebuttal from this miserable assortment of inhuman asshats. Well, if DHS and ICE won’t speak for themselves, I’ll let this next quote from NBC/Telemundo speak for itself:

“You’re going back to Mexico,” a man told the immigrants in a video recorded from inside their truck. He insulted them for their appearance and for not speaking English, took their keys and snatched the immigrant’s phone when he called his boss. The manager later told the police that the fake agent had claimed to be from ICE and had warned him that all his employees were going to go to “f—–g jail.”

This isn’t fake news. This isn’t implication extrapolated from minimal inference. There are literal recordings of these impersonations.

This isn’t people imagining the worst because they’re politically opposed to the current administration. These are documented instances of the only thing that could be worse than the brutality and bigotry perpetrated by this administration: criminal acts encouraged by this government’s unwillingness to do its dirty work honestly.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Generous To A Default [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 In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It’s co-hosted by Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and Ben Whitelaw (Everything in Moderation).

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

Kanji of the Day: 責 [Kanji of the Day]

責

✍11

小5

blame, condemn, censure

セキ

せ.める

責任   (せきにん)   —   duty
責任者   (せきにんしゃ)   —   person in charge (including a supervisory role for other staff)
責め   (せめ)   —   responsibility
無責任   (むせきにん)   —   irresponsibility
責任感   (せきにんかん)   —   sense of responsibility
説明責任   (せつめいせきにん)   —   accountability
自己責任   (じこせきにん)   —   self-responsibility
責める   (せめる)   —   to condemn
責任を持って   (せきにんをもって)   —   responsibly
最高経営責任者   (さいこうけいえいせきにんしゃ)   —   chief executive officer

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 帽 [Kanji of the Day]

帽

✍12

中学

cap, headgear

ボウ　モウ

ずきん　おお.う

帽子   (ぼうし)   —   hat
脱帽   (だつぼう)   —   removing one's hat
野球帽   (やきゅうぼう)   —   baseball cap
ニット帽   (ニットぼう)   —   knitted hat
烏帽子   (えぼし)   —   eboshi
目出し帽   (めだしぼう)   —   ski mask
ベレー帽   (ベレーぼう)   —   beret
ハンチング帽   (ハンチングぼう)   —   hunting cap
帽子屋   (ぼうしや)   —   hat shop
制帽   (せいぼう)   —   regulation cap

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

340 Local News Outlets Now Blocking The Internet Archive [Techdirt]

Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit’s repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you’re not aware, not very good for the public interest.

Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations:

“Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the “vulture hedge fund” Alden Global Capital.”

Many of these localities are already effectively news deserts, where most real local journalism was hollowed out and replaced by a smattering of local right wing broadcasters (like Sinclair Broadcasting) or a hedge fund run “local newspaper” that doesn’t do much in the way of actual local reporting. That’s generally also been terrible for informed consensus or shedding a light on local corruption.

Some of the outlets blocking internet archive access have legitimate concerns about protecting their hard work from being repackaged and resold without compensation or citation. But an awful lot of the folks grumbling about the Internet Archive were never in the journalism business to serve the public interest in the first place.

Regardless of motivation, hiding whatever local news remains behind paywalls, then blocking it from the Internet Archive, in turn makes it harder for everyone else to do real journalism that relies on the historical record, local journalists tell Nieman Lab:

“I cover news within a larger news desert in New York’s Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets,” wrote B.J. Mendelson, the editor of The Monroe Gazette newsletter, in one recent petition signed by over 200 journalists. “Without the Internet Archive, my [work] would be incredibly difficult to do.”

Trying to address publisher concerns, the folks at the Wayback Machine have highlighted ongoing efforts to minimize abuse of the site, including restrictions on bulk downloading and collaborating with Cloudflare to monitor bot activity.

But even beyond AI scraping, many corporate media owners simply can’t see beyond the narrow interests of paywalled revenue. And corporate power — and authoritarianism — sometimes in collaboration — both tend to benefit from a misinformed electorate that doesn’t have a firm grip on the lessons learned from historical experience, and doesn’t have easy access to the factual record.

As a journalist of several decades, the vast vast majority of my work has been deleted by website owners and companies that simply couldn’t have cared any less about archival history or any sort of permanent record. My explorations of telecom policy have disappeared, but Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast’s version of the historical record generally remains. You can probably see how that’s of benefit to corporate power.

But again, smaller, independent, local news outlets on fixed budgets have particularly legitimate concerns about the tech giants’ plan to hijack and repackage the entirety of their work using AI without any compensation or attribution whatsoever. The Internet Archive folks say they are listening to those concerns, while also trying to train news orgs on archival preservation:

“In December, the Internet Archive partnered with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors to train a cohort of 33 local and national news outlets on how to develop and implement an archiving strategy. The initiative, funded through a Press Forward grant, aims to train 300 newsrooms in digital preservation and in using the Internet Archive’s services by the end of 2027.”

Some other archival efforts exist, but they often involve paywalled access; again a problem when you’ve got an authoritarian corporate coalition driven heavily by free propaganda, while factual reality and what’s left of intelligent U.S. analysis and journalism sits hidden behind a monthly subscription fee.

Daily Deal: Build A Weather App With Ruby On Rails [Techdirt]

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Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

04:00 AM

Former Cop Arrested For Not Being Sufficiently Reverential Of Charlie Kirk’s Corpse Scores $835K Lawsuit Settlement [Techdirt]

MAGA got itself a martyr when Charlie Kirk was killed. The “violent left,” etc. as they say. One of it’s own practiced what he preached and his life was ended prematurely by someone practicing what Kirk preached.

I mean, this is a direct quote of Charlie Kirk:

Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns in many American hands outweighed the costs. Gun deaths were inevitable in such a heavily armed society, he admitted, but the prevalence of firearms allowed citizens to “defend yourself against a tyrannical government”.

“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It’s rational.”

The most charitable reading of this quote suggests that Kirk has embraced Thomas Jefferson — “”The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” — but decided the “patriots” and/or “tyrants” must be, occasionally, innocent people, including elementary school students.

The least charitable reading is this: Charlie Kirk doesn’t care how many of your kids are killed so long as he (and his fellow debate me bro grifters) still have access to firearms. And as for the “second amendment protects the other God-given rights), get the fuck out of here. The last time any of these God, Guns, and Gadsden flag motherfuckers ever went after the government, they did it to fully embrace tyranny while attempting to destroy democracy.

So, when someone says something pointed to say about Charlie Kirk’s live-by-the-gun, die-by-the-gun philosophy, they’re in the right (as in “correct,” rather than being part of the “right”).

Late last year, someone not sufficiently supportive of Kirk’s martyrdom got arrested. Somewhat surprisingly, this person was a former law enforcement officer, which didn’t put him beyond the reach of a current law enforcement official who was a big fan of Charlie Kirk. Perry County (Tennessee) sheriff Nick Weems took it upon himself to take offense on behalf of everyone in his jurisdiction and arrested former cop Larry Bushart for simply quoting Donald Trump in response to Charlie Kirk’s shooting:

One of his posts was a photo of President Donald Trump, along with the quote “We have to get over it,” drawing from his response to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, in 2024. 

Weems pretended that this post caused mass hysteria in Perry County, Tennessee. First, he claimed he was justified in arresting Larry Bushart because Bushart refused to take the post down. “What kind of person just says he don’t care?” asked the sheriff, who apparently thinks the First Amendment only applies to people who care what law enforcement officers say when they’re in the process of violating people’s rights.

Then he lied to everyone — something exposed by none other than Lexington PD officers. He later admitted investigators knew Bushart wasn’t referring to Perry County or its schools in his Facebook post, which meant the post couldn’t possibly hope to satisfy even the vague and expansive contours of a local law that’s supposed to curb school shootings by punishing online threats.

Sheriff Weems claimed “mass hysteria” was the result of Bushart’s post. A public records request to the Perry County School District for documents by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented Bushart in this case) pertaining to this post was met with a “no related records” response, which strongly suggests no parent, student, teacher, or administrator thought Bushart’s post was some sort of threat against local schools or students.

The end result of Weems’ asinine attempt to punish someone for indirectly maligning Kirk’s cooling corpse? A sizable settlement that taxpayers might want to remember the next time Weems is up for election:

A Tennessee man who was jailed for 37 days over a Facebook post he shared after the killing of Charlie Kirk has agreed to a $835,000 settlement with the sheriff who detained him, his lawyers said on Wednesday.

[…]

In the posts, he shared memes that accused Mr. Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, of perpetrating hate and another that included past comments from President Trump about moving past a school shooting. The sheriff’s office in Perry County, Tenn., claimed that with those posts, he had threatened violence.

His bail was set at $2 million, and he remained in jail until the charge against him was dropped.

Check out that last sentence. Voters might also want to keep this in mind the next time local judges are up for election (or, if appointed, the people who appoint these judges are up for election).

Look, even if I didn’t think Charlie Kirk was a terrible person with reprehensible ideas/ideals, I’d still speak up for everyone’s right to treat his death with whatever level of respect they thought it deserved. “Too soon” is in the eye of the beholder, which definitely isn’t the objective approach needed to address cases involving personal expression.

Even if I thought Larry Bushart was extremely careless in his wording or was perhaps trying to tease out an inference that could conceivably be seen as “threatening,” there’s no excuse for what happened here.

“No one should be hauled off to jail in the dark of night over a harmless meme just because the authorities disagree with its message,” Adam Steinbaugh, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech legal advocacy group that represents Mr. Bushart, said in a statement. “We’re pleased that Larry has been compensated for this injustice, but local law enforcement never should have forced him to endure this ordeal in the first place.”

No law enforcement officer worth their paycheck would have engaged in this arrest. (And, indeed, it looks as though the first officers on the scene from the Lexington PD saw this as an unconstitutional attack on someone’s protected rights.) And no judge should have signed off on a $2 million bail request over a post only one person — that being Sheriff Weems — seemed to feel was illegal.

Bushart wins. Tennessee residents also win, but they’re stuck with the bill. Sheriff Weems loses, but unless he’s ousted from office, he’ll learn nothing from this experience, since this won’t be coming out of his own pocket. The First Amendment has been vindicated, but Sheriff Weems (and the people who support him) made it clear it will always be under attack so long as MAGA acolytes remain in positions of power.

12:00 AM

Top Paramount Lawyer Claims Opposition To Warner Brothers Merger Is ‘Antisemitic’ [Techdirt]

Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation.

There’s a certain desperation creeping into their arguments as state regulators send signals that they’re considering filing an antitrust lawsuit. Top Paramount lawyer Makan Delrahim recently sat down for an interview with the billionaire-owned LA Times (non-paywalled alternative), and insisted that opposition to the company’s terrible merger spree is somehow antisemitic:

“Let’s be honest,” he told the Times. “There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction, really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.”

That is, of course, a whole lot of bullshit. Delrahim is trying to pretend that opposition to the deal stems from the fact that billionaire Trump-donor Larry Ellison, who has retooled CBS News to be more friendly to Benjamin Netanyahu, is Jewish. But if there’s any personal ire directed at Ellison as it pertains to the deal, it’s that he has a generational track record of being a foundationally terrible person.

The real-world concerns about the deal have focused on things like the fact it’s heavily financed by Saudi Arabia and China. And there’s fifty years of history showing that deals like this (especially deals involving Warner Brothers) routinely result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and both a shittier company and a less healthy film and television production market.

This sort of mindless consolidation is generally just a shell game performed by the extraction class and the kind of people obsessed with scale that have no genuine, original ideas. It’s utterly senseless, extractive, and destructive, as we all saw with the disastrous AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Brothers mess (and the AOL Warner Brothers mess decades earlier).

Quick refresher: Delrahim was Trump’s DOJ “antitrust enforcer” during his first term. Delrahim “enforced antitrust” by doing things like rubber stamping Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile, which immediately resulted in more than 8,000 layoffs and an abrupt end to what passed as price competition in U.S. wireless.

These are, you’ll be surprised to learn, bad faith actors who aren’t actually interested in the public interest, product quality, happy workers, healthy markets, healthy companies, or much of anything else beyond short-term financial gains, tax breaks, control, and outsized higher-level executive compensation.

Ellison and Delrahim don’t have to worry about the Trump DOJ or FCC interfering in the deal. But their desperation suggests they are definitely nervous about negative public perception, European regulatory approval, and the hints being sent by state attorneys general that they’re cooking up a collaborative antitrust lawsuit that could either block or dramatically extend the project timeline.

Friday 2026-06-05

10:00 PM

How to teach marketing [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Trick title. There are at least three kinds of “marketing” we ought to be teaching:

  1. Marketing from the point of view of the consumer. This is something every student should be taught, beginning at a young age. How do marketers manipulate customers? What desires do they amplify? What is surveillance capitalism and how does our quest for convenience get in the way of our happiness? What do we need to understand about debt, status and affiliation to become mindful in a market-ized world?
  2. Marketing as a job in an organization. Going to meetings, creating decks, understanding spreadsheets. Terms of art like lifetime value and market share. The difference between a brand and a logo. Non-profits and corporations spend billions on marketing, and working in that system requires insight and competence.
  3. Marketing as a craft. Strategic marketing. Telling stories that spread. Building an asset. Marketing as a service on behalf of your customers. Owning the responsibility that goes with the leverage that marketers have.

Most organized marketing instruction is about the first or second, with some online courses teaching hustle and hype, which I don’t count as marketing. My best work is about the third kind, the one where it all began.

More here.

      

08:00 PM

Vietnam’s Online Piracy Failures Trigger Section 301 Investigation, Tariffs on the Table [TorrentFreak]

ustrLast month, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) issued its annual Special 301 Report, signaling which countries can make improvements on the IP enforcement front.

In the most recent report, the USTR applied the “Priority Foreign Country” status for the first time in thirteen years, calling out Vietnam for persistent failures to deter online piracy and counterfeiting.

In recent years Vietnamese authorities reportedly helped to shut down several pirate sites, including the massive Fmovies network, which served billions of visitors. However, the criminal prosecution of Fmovies resulted in suspended prison sentences, which lack a serious deterrent effect by U.S. standards. Meanwhile, many piracy operations continue to link back to the country.

Under the Trade Act of 1974, the Priority Foreign Country designation triggers a 30-day window for USTR to decide whether to open a formal investigation. Late last week, Ambassador Jamieson Greer formally made that call.

USTR Opens Investigation

The Section 301 investigation will examine whether Vietnam’s policies and practices related to copyright protection and enforcement are unreasonable or discriminatory, hindering U.S. commerce. Judging from the comments released by the USTR, it believes that Vietnam’s shortcomings are serious.

“While Vietnam has recently taken some steps toward addressing IP concerns that the United States has chronicled over many years in USTR’s Annual Special 301 Report, IP infringement in Vietnam continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators,” Ambassador Greer said.

“We need to see Vietnam resolve these long-standing concerns, including on a range of IP enforcement issues, in a manner that is sustained and that deters future IP infringements,” he adds.

With the announcement of the investigation, USTR also opened a consultation round, asking stakeholders to comment on their trade-related experiences with Vietnam. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which are highlighted as the primary concern in the federal register notice.

Piracy First

The notice mentions that Vietnam’s failure to provide effective enforcement against online piracy is the primary reason why Vietnam is designated as a priority foreign country. The USTR wants to see significant improvement on that front.

“The United States has repeatedly raised strong concerns about Vietnam’s role in online piracy worldwide,” the notice reads.

“Vietnam remains a significant source of online piracy and continues to host popular English-language copyright infringement sites and services that target a global audience. Some of these sites provide piracy services, including extensive libraries of pirated movies and TV shows.”

The USTR notice doesn’t mention any sites and services by name. However, its earlier Notorious Markets report flagged HiAnime, Myflixerz, and MegaCloud as key threats. Interestingly, these sites all went offline in the days and week before the USTR’s Special 301 Report came out.

Whether the operators of these sites are targeted in criminal investigations in unknown. However, USTR’s notice mentioned that pirate site operators in Vietnam have had it relatively easy in recent years.

There have been criminal prosecutions in high profile piracy cases, including the cases against the operators of BestBuyIPTV and Fmovies. However, these resulted in mild suspended sentences with relatively low fines. According to USTR, these lack a proper deterrent effect.

“Despite Vietnam having criminal laws that provide for substantial fines and years of incarceration for copyright infringement, the defendants in recent criminal prosecutions received suspended sentences and were only ordered to pay relatively low financial penalties,” USTR writes.

“The operators of these sites and services likely based themselves in Vietnam because Vietnam’s IP enforcement efforts have historically lacked the follow-through and substantial penalties needed to deter infringement.”

The problem runs deeper than lenient sentences alone. According to the federal register notice, rightsholders face informal pressure from Vietnamese enforcement authorities to file administrative complaints rather than pursue civil or criminal enforcement. These administrative proceedings carry no meaningful deterrent effect.

Tariffs are on the Table

The request for public comments asks stakeholders to weigh in on “what action, if any, should be taken, including tariff and non-tariff actions.” This means that different types of trade sanctions are now on the table.

The USTR must make its final determination within six months and right holders and other parties have a month to submit their comments.

Behind the scenes, USTR will also consult with the Vietnamese government to see if the concerns can be addressed before it makes a decision, in consultation with President Trump. If Vietnam engages, in order to avoid possible sanctions, we might see more enforcement actions taking place in the country.

In that sense, the recent disappearances of Myflixerz and MegaCloud, and the shutdown of HiAnime, may have been a primer for what’s to come.

—

The Federal Register Notice is available here (pdf). The USTR press release can be found here.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

01:00 PM

Study: RFK Jr., Joe Rogan’s Misinformation Campaigns Led To A 38% Increase In Vitamin A Poisoning Last Year [Techdirt]

Early last year, when America’s measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in the last couple of decades while Kennedy has been on his anti-vaxxer crusade, none of this would have happened. We eliminated this disease more than two decades ago. It’s back because of vaccine skepticism and Kennedy, now Secretary of HHS, is perhaps more responsible for that skepticism than any other human being on the planet.

But his misinformation campaign didn’t focus solely on attempts at discrediting a good, effective vaccine against measles. He also spouted bullshit when it came to treatments for the disease. One such example was him touting, in March of last year, a combination of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments for measles. It’s not the first time Kennedy advocated for this, either. He’s been at it since the beginning of the outbreak, and even before. In the wake of his public advocacy for those treatments, others picked up the story and ran with it, notably podcast-bruh Joe Rogan.

The result? According to one study, a massive uptick in Vitamin A poisoning.

The researchers detected two fascinating (albeit alarming) surges in interest. The first occurred in the wake of a March 4, 2025, Fox News interview with Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During the interview, the infamous anti-vaxxer touted cod liver oil supplements and vitamin A as viable treatments for measles. A second series of spikes surrounded two late March podcast appearances by certified physician and noted vaccine skeptic Suzanne Humphries, who promoted the same two questionable remedies. Neither of Humphries’ interviews involved a government official, but one did occur on the chart-topping podcast of Joe Rogan.

“Between January [1] and March [31,] 2025, America’s Poison Centers reported a 38.7% increase in vitamin A exposures,” the new study noted, citing data published by the poison center about 12 days after Humphries’ appearance on Rogan.

Now, the Harvard study focused strongly on the correlation between media mentions of Vitamin A, online searches from the public indicating interest in such treatments, and the uptick in those diagnoses of Vitamin A poisoning. But, frankly, that misses much of the point. It’s been the public advocates like Kennedy who have fueled this fire, leading other charlatans to get spots on media outlets such as Rogan’s, where they get to further disseminate all of this terrible advice. The fish stinks from the head down and, right now, the head of American health is Kennedy.

The study’s authors did at least make mention of how this is all made worse by having untrustworthy clowns in charge of American healthcare, though not by name.

“Our findings underscore media’s influence on health-seeking behavior during public health emergencies like the measles outbreak,” the researchers noted, “which is particularly concerning when guidance from trusted sources is unclear and may encourage detrimental behaviors.”

We’re on pace to break last year’s measles case count by a long shot and it’s exactly because of misinformation peddlers like Kennedy and cavalier media like Rogan’s podcast being willing to signal boost it all that we’re in this mess.

As of this writing, America has had about 86% of the number of confirmed cases of measles this year as we had last year… and we’re only at the midway point of the year. Infectious diseases don’t spread linearly. They typically spread exponentially, which is exactly what happened last year. The public being actively misinformed, on purpose, is why.

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