News

Sunday 2026-02-01

12:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 急 [Kanji of the Day]

急

✍9

小3

hurry, emergency, sudden, steep

キュウ

いそ.ぐ　いそ.ぎ　せ.く

緊急 (きんきゅう) — urgency
急に (きゅうに) — swiftly
急増 (きゅうぞう) — rapid increase
急速 (きゅうそく) — rapid (e.g., progress)
急激 (きゅうげき) — sudden
救急 (きゅうきゅう) — first-aid
急死 (きゅうし) — sudden death
急ぐ (いそぐ) — to hurry
早急 (さっきゅう) — immediate
急いで (いそいで) — hurriedly

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 賄 [Kanji of the Day]

賄

✍13

中学

bribe, board, supply, finance

ワイ

まかな.う

収賄 (しゅうわい) — accepting bribes
贈賄 (ぞうわい) — bribery
賄う (まかなう) — to supply (goods, money, etc.)
収賄罪 (しゅうわいざい) — bribery
贈収賄 (ぞうしゅうわい) — bribery
贈賄罪 (ぞうわいざい) — crime of bribery
賄い (まかない) — boarding
賄賂 (わいろ) — bribe
賄い付き (まかないつき) — with meals
受託収賄罪 (じゅたくしゅうわいざい) — bribery

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

08:00 AM

This Week In Techdirt History: January 25th – 31st [Techdirt]

Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, we looked at the future of net neutrality under the new interim FCC boss, and at how broadband monopolies continued to get money for networks they never fully deployed. Twitter got immunity from a banned user’s lawsuit thanks to Section 230, while dozens of human rights groups were telling congress not to gut Section 230 on their behalf, and we wrote about how revoking 230 would not “save democracy”. This came as House Republicans announced their big, unconstitutional, ridiculous plan to take on Big Tech, and we wrote about how they could actually tackle the sector by just trying to stop being insane.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, the New York Times filed a ridiculous copyright lawsuit over a book mocking the paper for glamorizing war, a writer tried to claim libel and copyright infringement over a screencap of her tweet appearing in an article, and a judge tossed out the silly idea that the monkey of monkey selfie fame could hold the copyright to the photo. Meanwhile, copyright troll Malibu Media trotted out an “expert” witness who appeared to be completely clueless, Pissed Consumer got the go ahead to take on Roca Labs over its bogus DMCA takedowns, and we dedicated an episode of the podcast to looking at just how bad the TPP was.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, the big copyright troll in the news was ACS:Law, as an accounting firm that was helping it collect fines tried to call off the whole thing followed by ACS:Law apparently giving up entirely, but soon there was a new trolling operation on the block involving Paris Hilton’s sex tape, and another with a porn company trying out a twist on the technique, while a copyright troll in Germany was using debt collectors to pressure people to pay up. Meanwhile, IP experts were saying ACTA was inconsistent with EU law, the US government was pushing pro- and anti-privacy internet rules at the same time, and Apple began using its special security screws to prevent people from opening their iPhones.

04:00 AM

The infinite tail [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The Long Tail was a profound cultural insight. When we created YouTube, Amazon, Roon, recipe websites and Netflix, the culture changed. When you give people a choice, they make a choice.

We went from the Top 40 to millions of songs. From Blockbuster to every movie ever made. From the local bookstore to all the books, all the time. Pick what you want instead of what other people picked.

There are still hits, but the majority of what we consume are titles that weren’t even available to us a few years ago.

It’s hard to believe this was a breakthrough idea only 21 years ago.

Now, with LLMs, it’s all going to change again.

That’s because it doesn’t matter how many cookbooks you own… Claude can invent a new recipe for you, one that’s never been seen before. You can do this today, the tech works.

Soon, it won’t matter if you have 400 Grateful Dead albums; AI systems will be able to generate live recordings from 1974 that never happened.

And eventually, Netflix will generate TV shows that no one has ever seen, for an audience of one.

The generative long tail will go on and on and on.

Most of the time, it’ll degenerate into slop and banality. The humanity of the movies, books and recordings it creates will fade, and we’ll be left with mindless airport music.

But that will evolve over time, and the arc will go in the other direction. Things that work, done more often. Combinations and evolving insights that move even faster than we can keep up with.

Slop and magic, in an eternal braid, a lot like the stuff humans have been producing for decades.

A golden road to who knows where.

Just for Skeets and Giggles (1.31.26) [The Status Kuo]

Good morning! If you enjoy these weekly funnies and my political and legal analysis during the week, consider tipping your writer! New voluntary paid subscriptions aren’t keeping up with normal attrition, and I found myself staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m. last night wondering whether I can truly juggle all of this. (Or maybe it was just my daily overdose of the headlines.) If you’re able to buy me a cup of coffee a month as a thanks for my work, I’d be so grateful! — Jay

Subscribe now

Another shout out to the people of Minneapolis for leading the way through these scary times and giving us hope.

We’re all just trying to live our lives, and they keep sending out the goons. This clip made the rounds again as a harbinger of what’s heading our way.

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 click “save preferences” at the bottom. For your sanity, don’t read troll and bot comments boosted by Musk’s algo. Still won’t load? Copy link into a browser and remove “cancel” after the X in the URL to view the original tweet.

This, too, was a warning:

Trump is a liar, but he’s also a hot mess.

On the subject of messes, here’s Jimmy Kimmel on Trump and his regime’s current set of problems.

I’m no fan of Sen. Thom Tillis. But then again, he’s no fan of the regime. Especially Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller.

The White House, along with most of the right, had a head-spinning response to the murder of Alex Pretti, blaming the victim for (checks notes) legally carrying a firearm he never even unholstered. Here’s Jon Stewart on what we all thought of that.

They say that politics is downstream of culture, so when you’ve lost the cat bongo community…

I watched this way too many times.

Cartoonist Rick McKee with the dunk.

Speaking of those Epstein files, the DOJ released another 3mil or so, with plenty still withheld. To access some of the files, you need to affirm that you’re an adult.

And just when you thought the regime might dial back the fascism, it arrests two independent journalists. But don’t worry, Fox News!

Most of the country: WTF ICE?!

JD Vance:

Riley Gaines weighed in and was told to take a seat:

This thing on the right started happening, where they filmed community response in Minnesota and said it must be a conspiracy.

Or, more succinctly,

Keep it going!

Borowitz on the GOP’s spinelessness:

And again with the fire:

Best pun of the week goes to Stephen Colbert:

New T-shirt print just dropped:

The White House is trying to signal that it is de-escalating, even while it continues to conduct immoral and illegal detentions, switching out Bovino foot-and-mouth for the Homan Immunity Virus.

Or as Borowitz put it,

Later, Fascilicia.

It’s just One Battle After Another with these guys. Until it isn’t?

Trump put the guy caught with a $50K bribe in charge of (checks notes) fraud deterrence in Minneapolis?

This took me a minute, and then I felt bad for laughing.

To be clear, it’s not his height but his imagined stature that has always bothered me.

With Bovino out and Miller admitting the CBP may not have been following “protocol,” many had the same thought.

She’s definitely not smarter than a head of lettuce.

Speaking of not so smart, Congressman Brad Finstad posted this.

I guess Brad is just following orders.

Melania Trump released her much awaited (not) documentary. She probably wants Kimmel off the air now, too, for his take on it.

The rest of the world is laughing so hard at us.

My favorite review:

Too soon?

My second plea! Before we move on to the doggos and the kitties, take a moment to become a paid supporter and feel good about sustaining independent reporting!

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Hooray for animals, who are oblivious to our troubles. Sound up for this booty-shaking wonder!

The owner of this dog swears this reel is real, but it’s the audio that makes it superb!

The snow is piled high at my building in NYC, but not quite this high!

The algo has figured out I love animal voiceovers by RxCKSTxR. And I do.

Let me guess, they named him Damian.

Nothing to see, just the blind leading the blinds.

My own cat Shade would last three seconds before bouncing.

A cat-toon of life with a cat.

Maybe the trick to cat-turing the moment is to just leave the video running.

His ambition is as big as his appetite.

Pop culture has its G.O.A.T.s

Speaking of which, are they kidding with this cuteness?

One more time but with voiceover!

What’s the META-for, after all?

I did not know seals made this sound. I won’t be able to think of them again without laughing.

All guys ever talk about are boobies.

A wolverine rescue? And not the handsome kind with knives for knuckles?

While we’re on the subject of unexpected animal encounters,

Okay, just one more animal voiceover. I watched it too many times lol.

On to human foibles. SNL’s humor is appropriate for these times. This is for fans of the new film…

Sausage pic?

The big non-political news affecting hundreds of millions this week was the snow and ice storm across half the country.

Here’s another common experience.

I fell for this one. Amazing.

Watch for the icing with that cake!

A friend sent me this, and I thought, “Oh God, some gay man made this without realizing, didn’t he!”

I’m just gonna leave the top comments here for you. Reader discretion advised! 🤣

This one goes out to my Asian peeps, but it’s universal if you sub in other races, too.

This chicken has the perfect dad joke for the rest of my day.

Have a great weekend!

Jay

02:00 AM

DSA-6117-1 python-django - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6117-1

Saturday 2026-01-31

07:00 PM

DOJ Arrests Journalists Don Lemon & Georgia Fort For Acts Of Journalism, Even After Courts Rejected Arrest Warrants [Techdirt]

Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no.

So the DOJ arrested him anyway.

On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort followed the protesters through the church’s publicly accessible doors to cover the story. They streamed the protest. They asked questions. They committed acts of journalism.

And by this morning they were both in federal custody (though since released).

Organizers of the protest, to the extent they had any real organizational control, were arrested. Pictures of at least one of those arrests were run through one AI platform or another to make those arrested appear to be in more distress than they actually had been.

When that didn’t quench the thirst for cruelty and fascism of this particular regime, Pam Bondi’s DOJ then attempted to go after the journalists themselves. For what crime? Anyone’s guess, honestly. The DOJ attempted to get arrest warrants for Fort and Lemon from the courts, which told them to fuck all the way off. The DOJ then attempted to appeal the rejection without informing the lower court, and attempted to get the Appeals Court to hide the request under seal. That wasn’t successful either.

But rather than admitting that violating the First Amendment rights of journalists was a total stinker of an endeavor, the DOJ convened a grand jury, apparently got an indictment, and then both Lemon and Fort were arrested at Bondi’s direction.

Local Minnesota reporter Georgia Fort, along with former CNN journalist Don Lemon, were arrested by federal agents following their coverage of a protest at a church in St. Paul. Don Lemon’s attorney said he was “taken by federal agents” on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 29, while he was in Los Angeles covering the Grammy Awards. Local independent journalist Georgia Fort was also arrested at her home by federal agents.

A statement from the Center of Broadcast Journalism called the arrest “An assault on press and on the 1st Amendment.”

“Georgia Fort, a trusted and cherished journalist in Minnesota, was arrested in the early morning hours for doing her job by covering a pop-up protest at Cities Church in St. Paul,” the statement read. “It is an outrage that a vetted and credentialed member of the media would be in any way prosecuted for doing her appointed duty in covering news. If the federal government can come for Georgia no member of the supposed ‘free’ press is safe.”

This is incredibly dumb for a variety of reasons. For starters, the Minnesota courts, where any trial will take place, are not going to take kindly to the idea that it told the DOJ its requests for arrest warrants were hot garbage only to have that same DOJ end run around the courts to make those same arrests via a grand jury. It’s a slap in the face to the very court system within which the DOJ will have to operate. Elie Mystal is spot on about this at The Nation.

The arrests of the two journalists are clearly unconstitutional. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to know that arresting journalists for covering the news is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Lemon’s arrest is also flatly illegal. Last week, the Trump administration went to a federal magistrate judge, Douglas L. Micko, to ask for an arrest warrant for Lemon. The judge refused. The Trump administration then appealed and lost that appeal. The legal system literally said the government couldn’t arrest Lemon, but the government arrested him anyway, and they went all the way to Los Angeles (far from Minnesota) to get him.

Georgia Fort is a prominent Black journalist based in Minnesota. She was out front in covering the George Floyd protests, and expertly covered the trial of his killer, Derek Chauvin. I have little doubt that this prior reporting is among the reasons she was targeted by the Trump administration.

Add to that the very open question, based on the law that the DOJ is citing here, whether any of this actually violates a statute, by anyone involved in this at all. I would very much argue that it does not, by plain reading of the law. As Quinta Jurecic at the Atlantic notes, the legal argument is garbage.

The indictment itself makes for a strange read. No attorneys other than political appointees appear on the filing—a hint that career Justice Department employees might not have wanted to be involved. The government treats Lemon and Fort as co-conspirators of the protesters without acknowledging any protections afforded by their role as journalists. Both charges derive from the FACE Act, a 1994 law meant to prevent anti-abortion protestors from restricting access to reproductive-health clinics. Here, though, the Justice Department is leveraging a lesser-known portion of the statute that provides similar protections for freedom of religion in places of worship. Kyle Boynton, who recently departed from his position as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, told me that this provision of the FACE Act has never been used—probably because “it’s plainly unconstitutional” as an overreach of Congress’s authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause. Boynton, who prosecuted FACE Act cases and crimes committed against houses of worship while at the Justice Department, was unimpressed with the legal reasoning in the indictment. “I think it’s very likely to face dismissal,” he said. Not only might courts find the statute unconstitutional, but Lemon and Fort could also contest the charges on First Amendment grounds, and the indictment doesn’t clearly show a FACE violation to begin with.

But it’s even dumber than that. As Dan Froomkin points out, part of the indictment tries to argue that the “overt acts” needed to prove a “conspiracy” is… that these journalists… interviewed the pastor. Or, as the DOJ says, “peppered him with questions.”

My goodness. How dare he commit acts of journalism?

Separately, you can watch the Don Lemon stream footage. He makes it very clear that he is there in his capacity as a journalist. He is not actually interrupting services. He is there covering the story. The same is true of Fort.

Both arrested journalists are Black. The head of the DOJ’s “civil rights division,” Harmeet Dhillon, celebrated by retweeting Republican operative Mike Davis calling Lemon “a klansman.”

Davis, for those unfamiliar, went on a right-wing fabulist’s podcast before the 2024 election and promised that if Trump won, opponents would be “hunted.” He promised “retribution.” He said: “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious…. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

That guy is now calling a Black journalist a “klansman” for doing journalism, while the head of Civil Rights retweets it approvingly.

It’s not just Davis and Dhillon joyfully cheering on this blatant attack on the First Amendment. The White House itself posted a black and white photo of Don Lemon cheering on his arrest, calling it (ridiculously) the “St. Paul Church Riots” (there were no riots) and tweeting “When life gives you lemons…” along with chain emojis.

That will likely go right into Lemon’s filing for vindictive prosecution.

Courts have already ordered both Lemon and Fort released, though they’ll be back in court. In Lemon’s case, the judge refused to issue the requested $100k bond the government asked for. The court also will allow him to travel internationally on a pre-planned trip, even though the government demanded he hand over his passport. All of this seems clearly designed for blatant intimidation over media coverage.

The DOJ is now treating journalism as conspiracy, questions as overt acts, and coverage as crime. Courts told them no and they did it anyway—gleefully celebrating the end of the rule of law, openly gloating about punishing the President’s critics for their speech.

Search Engines, AI, And The Long Fight Over Fair Use [Techdirt]

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.

Courts disagreed. They recognized that copying works in order to understand, index, and locate information is a classic fair use—and a necessary condition for a free and open internet.

Today, the same argument is being recycled against AI. It’s whether copyright owners should be allowed to control how others analyze, reuse, and build on existing works.

Fair Use Protects Analysis—Even When It’s Automated

U.S. courts have long recognized that copying for purposes of analysis, indexing, and learning is a classic fair use. That principle didn’t originate with artificial intelligence. It doesn’t disappear just because the processes are performed by a machine.

Copying that works in order to understand them, extract information from them, or make them searchable is transformative and lawful. That’s why search engines can index the web, libraries can make digital indexes, and researchers can analyze large collections of text and data without negotiating licenses from millions of rightsholders. These uses don’t substitute for the original works; they enable new forms of knowledge and expression.

Training AI models fits squarely within that tradition. An AI system learns by analyzing patterns across many works. The purpose of that copying is not to reproduce or replace the original texts, but to extract statistical relationships that allow the AI system to generate new outputs. That is the hallmark of a transformative use.

Attacking AI training on copyright grounds misunderstands what’s at stake. If copyright law is expanded to require permission for analyzing or learning from existing works, the damage won’t be limited to generative AI tools. It could threaten long-standing practices in machine learning and text-and-data mining that underpin research in science, medicine, and technology.

Researchers already rely on fair use to analyze massive datasets such as scientific literature. Requiring licenses for these uses would often be impractical or impossible, and it would advantage only the largest companies with the money to negotiate blanket deals. Fair use exists to prevent copyright from becoming a barrier to understanding the world. The law has protected learning before. It should continue to do so now, even when that learning is automated.

A Road Forward For AI Training And Fair Use

One court has already shown how these cases should be analyzed. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that using copyrighted works to train an AI model is a highly transformative use. Training is a kind of studying how language works—not about reproducing or supplanting the original books. Any harm to the market for the original works was speculative.

The court in Bartz rejected the idea that an AI model might infringe because, in some abstract sense, its output competes with existing works. While EFF disagrees with other parts of the decision, the court’s ruling on AI training and fair use offers a good approach. Courts should focus on whether training is transformative and non-substitutive, not on fear-based speculation about how a new tool could affect someone’s market share.

AI Can Create Problems, But Expanding Copyright Is the Wrong Fix

Workers’ concerns about automation and displacement are real and should not be ignored. But copyright is the wrong tool to address them. Managing economic transitions and protecting workers during turbulent times may be core functions of government, but copyright law doesn’t help with that task in the slightest. Expanding copyright control over learning and analysis won’t stop new forms of worker automation—it never has. But it will distort copyright law and undermine free expression.

Broad licensing mandates may also do harm by entrenching the current biggest incumbent companies. Only the largest tech firms can afford to negotiate massive licensing deals covering millions of works. Smaller developers, research teams, nonprofits, and open-source projects will all get locked out. Copyright expansion won’t restrain Big Tech—it will give it a new advantage.

Fair Use Still Matters

Learning from prior work is foundational to free expression. Rightsholders cannot be allowed to control it. Courts have rejected that move before, and they should do so again.

Search, indexing, and analysis didn’t destroy creativity. Nor did the photocopier, nor the VCR. They expanded speech, access to knowledge, and participation in culture. Artificial intelligence raises hard new questions, but fair use remains the right starting point for thinking about training.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Bari Weiss Pauses Her Pathetic Podcast To Focus Full Time On Ruining CBS [Techdirt]

If you’ve been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to be “restoring trust in journalism.”

It’s… not going well.

Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps — and the network’s decision to air a story lying about the ICE murder of Nicole Good — has spurred a revolt among the CBS journalists that haven’t quit yet.

Weiss has, as all fail-upward media brunchlords do, repeatedly tried to blame her staffers for both her incompetence and for not doing more to coddle her public image. Things have gotten so heated at the crumbling CBS that Weiss has had to “pause” her “Honestly” podcast to put out fires at CBS:

“Thursday morning on her Free Press platform, Weiss said that taking on CBS News is a “huge responsibility,” before continuing, “So here is the news: ‘Honestly’ is taking a little bit of a pause. I know it is hard to hear that, it’s definitely hard for me to do that because I love doing this show. But I think and I hope that you will understand why.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not forever; we’ll be back in just a few short months,” she added.”

There’s a dash of hubris there for Weiss to think that she can fix the problems at CBS in “just a few short months.” There’s every indication Weiss not only has absolutely no idea what she’s doing, but that she lacks the introspection to be able to realize that she’s the problem and to adjust accordingly. That likely means she continues to flounder until she’s inevitably replaced by somebody even worse.

As we’ve noted previously, the problem for Weiss isn’t that she’s bad at journalism (though that’s certainly true). The problem for Weiss is that she’s bad at ratings-grabbing propaganda, the primary function she was hired for. If you’re going to create noxious state race-baiting propaganda, you have to at least make it entertaining — something Roger Aisles understood well.

Weiss’ incompetence is trouble for a CBS/Paramount parent company that has not only seen ratings in free fall at CBS, they’ve watched their stock drop 40 percent since Larry Ellison’s clumsy hostile takeover attempt of Warner Brothers (and CNN, HBO).

Ellison, fresh off his new co-ownership stake in TikTok, clearly wants to dominate both old and new media and to create a modern version of state television. The sort of thing we’ve seen in countries like Russia and Hungary, where autocrats have hollowed out what was left of media and turned it into an extension of the state (something we’ve already seen across much of U.S. corporate media and Fox News):

If there’s any bright spot to this mess, it’s that absolutely nobody in this chain of dysfunction, from the trust fund nepobaby son of Larry Ellison, to the weird contrarian culture war trolls they’re hiring to spread agitprop, have the slightest idea what they’re doing.

If U.S. media and democracy is saved from these zealots, it won’t be thanks to competent media reforms by the opposition party (which pretty broadly don’t exist in the United States, yet), it will be thanks to the raw, blistering hubris and incompetence of folks like Bari Weiss and David Ellison.

Need A Friday Night Challenge? Whip Up A Quick Game For The Public Domain Game Jam! [Techdirt]

We’ve been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it’s always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that’s worth keeping in mind today as we’re just a little more than 24 hours away from the deadline for the latest installment, Gaming Like It’s 1930! The ticking clock doesn’t mean you’ve missed the boat, it means now is the perfect time to get creative, whip up a simple game, and make your submission!

There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. In past years, we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display in even the most basic of games, so if you don’t have anything to do tonight, why not try your hand?

Head over to the game jam page on Itch, read the full rules, and get some ideas about works you might use. Submissions close at midnight tomorrow, January 31st, and after that we’ll be diving in to choose winners in our six categories. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

We’ve already had some excellent submissions, and we can’t wait to see what else comes in tomorrow night. Your game could be one of them!

Tom Homan To Minneapolis: Look, I Warned You If You Weren’t Nice, We’d Have To Kill Again, And Look What You Made Us Do [Techdirt]

A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about “border czar” Tom Homan’s ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they’d just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex Pretti, Homan was shipped off to Minneapolis to replace fascist-fashion lover Greg Bovino, and he gave a speech Thursday morning that the press so desperately wanted to portray as him “de-escalating” the mess in Minneapolis.

So much of the coverage is about the supposed “drawdown” of federal troops in Minneapolis:

But, if you listen to his actual words, he’s still the same old Tom Homan, and this is all for show. He talked about how he supposedly “begged” for the toning down of rhetoric:

Hey Tom, gonna be bloodshed from who?

From who, Tom?

Because last I checked, the bloodshed has been entirely one-sided. Citizens of Minneapolis haven’t shot anyone, Tom. Your agents have.

But, instead, Homan only wants the “de-escalation” to go in one direction, saying he demands that the rhetoric against law enforcement be toned down, not the demonization of people throughout the Minneapolis / St. Paul region:

Where are the calls to de-escalate the dangerous, hateful language against Somali immigrants? Or asylum seekers? Or anyone exercising their First Amendment rights? Those don’t count, Tom?

And, as Radley Balko points out, Homan has been at the front lines of encouraging violence:

So, look, if we want to “tone down the rhetoric” and stop the “bloodshed,” that is entirely on the federal government and people like you, Tom Homan, to do.

But this is Tom Homan. And he can’t help himself. When asked how many ICE & CBP agents are on the ground, he talked about how 3,000 of them are “in theater.” That’s a freaking military term, Tom. You’re admitting that ICE & CBP is an invading force.

As for the complaint that they “can’t eat in restaurants,” maybe that’s because they’re dining in restaurants, and then kidnapping the staff. Maybe don’t do that?

Also, when asked why they needed 3,000 thugs to invade a city, he lied again, and claimed “because of the threats of violence.”

There has been little violence from citizens of Minneapolis. Just federal officers crashing cars, tear gassing people for no reason at all, kidnapping, beating, and disappearing people. Oh, and shooting at least three people so far. The “threat of violence” came entirely from your forces. Don’t gaslight America and say they had to come because of threats of violence.

You are the threats of violence.

As for the news headlines about a “drawdown,” that’s bullshit as well. In the video above, Homan says the pace of any “drawdown” is dependent on the “hateful rhetoric” stopping. Way to admit to a blatant First Amendment violation, Tom: “the beatings will continue until you’re nicer to us” is a violation of basic fundamental rights.

Homan also admitted that federal thugs will only leave one they get “cooperation” from the city and state governments, getting help in further kidnapping and disappearing more residents.

And, so far, the people of Minneapolis are not impressed and have seen no evidence of any such drawdown or de-escalation.

Tom Homan wasn’t sent to de-escalate anything other than all the negative press attention from federal thugs murdering people in the Twin Cities. And most of the media ate it right up.

The story of Minneapolis is not a story of “threats of violence.” It’s a story of violence, murder, and mayhem entirely from federal officers. The story of the people of Minneapolis is a story of a community banding together to help each other and support each other in the face of such unhinged and unnecessary violence.

The Casual Cruelty Of The GOP’s Migrant Purge [Techdirt]

Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief.

Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts to kidnap people who are just trying to follow the law by performing their required check-ins. The sweeping up of anyone in the area who looks a little bit foreign any time federal officers are actually engaged in a “targeted” arrest.

There’s so much of it happening every day that it’s easy to lose sight of all the victims of this administration’s cruelty. There’s a human cost that never factors into the administration’s calculations because, well, most of the upper echelon ghouls don’t actually consider these people to be “human.”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has been tracking thousands of immigration cases since the anti-migrant surge began. What he’s collected — and this is only a small part of it — should make your blood boil. After all, you still have some pumping through your veins, even if the administration seems to be able to function on bile alone.

Consider the case of Sonik Manaserian, a 70-year-old Iranian refugee who fled religious persecution in her country, arriving in the United States in May of 1999. Her asylum request didn’t work out and she was given an order of removal in October 1999. However, she was not deported and has lived here for the past 18 years under an Order of Supervision and Unsupervised Parole (OSUP) after she was picked up by ICE in 2008. In other words, as long as she continued to check in with the immigration court, she could stay indefinitely.

That ended once Trump took office and sent his goon squads out to remove pretty much anyone he felt didn’t belong here. ICE officers arrested her at a check-in last November, without any prior notice or warrant for arrest. The government has already admitted it doesn’t really have any way to deport her to Iran since our government has no diplomatic relationship with the country for obvious reasons. ICE can’t deport her, but it also won’t release her. She’s been stuck in a detention center since this arrest — a place where she can’t receive the medical help she needs. On top of that, ICE lost the medication she had on her when she was arrested and denied her an opportunity to attend a pre-scheduled medical appointment.

Why? Because it can. Even the government can’t explain why it’s doing this to her, instead assuming it can continue to do what it wants as long as it keeps tapping the 26-year-old order of removal. The California judge handling her petition lays this all out in devastating fashion:

Respondents do not contest either of these claims—or, indeed, any of Petitioner’s other claims. Respondents’ Answer to the Petition consists of three sentences, two of which recite the procedural history of this case. The remaining sentence reads, in full, “[a]t this time, Respondents do not have an opposition argument to present.” They have not denied or contested any of the factual allegations in the Petition. They have not offered any additional facts or defenses. They have not argued that different statutes or regulations should govern this case. They have not lodged any relevant documents, despite being ordered to do so.

These are the actions of a government that feels it’s above the law. It can’t even be bothered to fake something up that might be taken as a counterargument. Instead, it hands in three sentences and moves on to address the outcome of another violation of rights in similarly cavalier fashion. Look at these assholes, the court says without actually using any of those words:

Thus, it appears that Respondents arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.

Further, having acknowledged that they have no opposition to present to Petitioner’s habeas petition, have they voluntarily released her? No. Thus, Petitioner remains in custody, and her counsel, and the Court, are required to expend resources and effort to address a matter that Respondents either cannot be bothered to defend or realize is indefensible.

That’s the other “fuck you” this administration uses. There’s the overt stuff that makes headlines and whips up the frothy loyalists. Then there’s stuff like this where the government doesn’t even care enough about the people it’s illegally locking up to even toss a few paragraphs of boilerplate into the mix. This is just part of the dehumanization process: the administrative shrug. A collective GOP “so what” when confronted about the violations of the law.

“Worst of the worst” always meant “people the bigots in charge don’t like.” This ruling deals with a Mexican man who has lived here since 2006 with his wife, raising three children and, like most migrants, working hard, paying taxes, and living clean. When asked about this, the administration shrugs again — a shrug that prompts an order for his release:

Respondents make no suggestion that Audberto J. has a criminal history, and the Court concludes he has none.

There’s more in that thread and it’s all awful. There’s the Minnesota man who was arrested and tossed in a detainment center despite having active refugee status. Or how about the mother with a 5-month-old baby and recently discovered heart condition who was arrested and sent to a detention center 1,100 miles away from her child and her primary physician? Are you cool with that, Trump voters? The court certainly isn’t.

Ms. Lah has already lost important bonding and nursing time with her baby. While the Court recognizes that many families are suffering due to Operation PARRIS and other ICE actions in the District of Minnesota, there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.

It is craven. This is the government’s shrug in response to a judge asking why it sent Lah to a detention center in Houston, Texas almost immediately after arresting her.

On January 14, 2026, Respondents filed their one-page Response to Petition For Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion to Transfer but it did not actually respond to the Petition nor follow Judge Davis’s Order to Show Cause. Respondents assert that Ms. Lah was transferred to Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026, within hours of Ms. Lah’s arrest, “due to local detention bed space shortage.” Respondents’ Motion asserts that the transfer occurred before the Court’s Order to Show Cause enjoining removal. Respondents submitted the Declaration of Angela Minner in support of their Motion and purportedly attached documents in support. No documents were attached, and no support was otherwise provided.

In any normal world, the people handing in this sloppy work would be reprimanded by their superiors and perhaps even taken off immigration cases. That will never happen here. Not bothering to do the job right is just an easy way to do what you want while providing a minimum amount of lip service to any notions of the federal rules of procedure. If it destroys lives, harms people, or actually deports them to places where they’ll end up dead, so be it. They were never considered people by this administration in the first place.

Daily Deal: Cable Blocks Magnetic And Weighted Cord Organizers [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.

Trump Demands $10 Billion From Taxpayers For Leaked Tax Returns; His Own Lawyers Get To Decide What He Gets [Techdirt]

Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something:

I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.

Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just filed a lawsuit against his own IRS, demanding that taxpayers pay him $10 billion.

Ten. Billion. Dollars.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Miami, claims that Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization were grievously harmed when IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica back in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was caught, prosecuted, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence—the system worked, justice was served, case closed. But apparently that’s not enough for a man whose appetite for grift has no discernible ceiling.

Before we dive into why this lawsuit is weapons-grade insane, let’s establish some context that the complaint conveniently glosses over.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Every major party nominee since Nixon had done so voluntarily. Trump’s excuse? He was being audited and would release them after the audit was complete. Somehow, nearly a decade later, those returns were never officially released. There’s no clear evidence the audit ever existed. The whole thing had the distinct aroma of a man who had something to hide.

In 2020, the New York Times obtained 17 years of Trump’s tax records from Littlejohn. The reporting revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely by reporting chronic business losses. The House Ways & Means Committee later obtained and released some of his returns through proper legal channels.

And the result of all this exposure? Trump won the 2024 election and his net worth has skyrocketed in such an obvious way that, contra Karoline Leavitt’s statement, it would be difficult to find anyone who legitimately believes that Trump isn’t profiting off his Presidency.

According to Forbes, Trump’s wealth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, driven largely by his crypto ventures and the value of Trump Media and Technology Group. So grievous was the harm from this leak that Trump is now richer than he’s ever been.

Which brings us to the lawsuit. Trump is demanding $10 billion—more than his entire current net worth—from the federal government. The federal government he controls and which he’s stocked with cronies.

I need to repeat that. Donald Trump is trying to more than double his personal wealth by simply demanding that the IRS, which he controls, give him $10 billion in taxpayer funds. This goes beyond corruption. You need a different word for this altogether.

Let’s break down the multiple levels on which this is absolutely batshit:

The President is suing his own government. Think about this for a moment. Trump controls the executive branch. The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. The Department of Justice—which would normally defend the government in such lawsuits—is currently headed by an Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General who previously worked as Trump’s personal lawyers and who have repeatedly made it clear that they view their current jobs as still being the President’s personal lawyers. The idea that Trump can file a lawsuit against agencies he controls, staffed with loyalists who seem to believe they work for him personally rather than the American people, is so blatantly corrupt that it puts pretty much all past corruption to shame.

As I wrote last year when Trump demanded a mere $230 million in a similar scheme, this creates a situation where Trump’s own lawyers get to decide whether Trump’s claims should be successful—and potentially how much taxpayer money flows directly into his pocket. The fact that it’s now more than 40 times that amount just demonstrates that his corruption has no upper bound.

The damages claimed are laughable. The complaint lists the horrifying “harm” Trump suffered. Hold onto your hats:

ProPublica published at least 50 articles as a result of Defendants’ unlawful disclosures, many of which contained false and inflammatory claims about Defendants’ confidential tax documents.

And:

Because of Defendants’ wrongful conduct, Plaintiffs were subject to, among many others, at least eight (“8”) separate stories in the New York Times which wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history

Eight. Stories. In the New York Times. That’s apparently worth $10 billion in damages. From the US taxpayer. Trump has probably generated more negative headlines in a single weekend of Truth Social posts.

And if the stories were really defamatory (note: they weren’t) sue those publications for defamation and… see how that goes. Because Trump’s defamation lawsuits have a remarkable track record of getting laughed out of court.

But here—clever, clever, clever—this case need never go to court. The IRS and the DOJ (both run by Trump loyalists) can just “settle” and hand over however much taxpayer money Trump wants.

The complaint undermines itself. In a truly galaxy-brained move, Trump’s lawyers included this gem from Littlejohn’s deposition:

When asked, “so you were looking to do something to cause some kind of harm to him?” Mr. Littlejohn responded, “Less about harm, more just about a statement. I mean, there’s little harm that can actually be done to him, I think. . . He’s shown a remarkable resilience.”

They put this in their own complaint. The guy who leaked the documents, when asked under oath whether he intended to cause harm, essentially said “nah, you can’t really hurt that guy.” And Trump’s lawyers thought this helped their case.

Or… they knew that it doesn’t matter how bad the complaint actually is because Trump is effectively playing both sides, and that means the side the benefits Trump personally (at the expense of the American taxpayer) is almost certain to win out.

Isn’t it great the Roberts Supreme Court said there’s nothing the courts can do to stop this?

The legal theory is absurd. The complaint argues that the IRS should have known Littlejohn would leak documents because… the Treasury Inspector General had warned about “security deficiencies” in the IRS’s data protection systems. By this logic, any time any government system has any vulnerability, taxpayers should be on the hook for billions if that vulnerability is ever exploited. It’s malpractice dressed up in legal formatting.

The complaint also leans heavily on politicized language that has no place in a legal filing:

From May 2019 through at least September 2020, former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, who was jointly employed by the IRS and/or one of its contractors, illegally obtained access to, and disclosed Plaintiffs’ tax returns and return information to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other leftist media outlets.

“Leftist media outlets.” In a legal complaint. Filed by a sitting president. Against his own government. Demanding $10 billion. This is a political document, rather than a serious legal complaint. Because, again, the legal stance here makes no difference. There is no adversarial process. Only Trump’s insatiable desire to take people’s money.

This is especially rich given everything else happening. This lawsuit lands at a time when Trump’s administration is gutting the IRS’s enforcement capabilities, when the DOJ has been transformed into Trump’s personal law firm, and when the government is lurching from shutdown to shutdown. But sure, let’s cut Donald Trump a check for ten billion dollars because reporters wrote stories about his taxes—taxes he refused to release voluntarily despite decades of precedent (and which also, once leaked, didn’t appear to do him the slightest bit of political damage).

For all the talk about cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the president himself is attempting to walk off with enough taxpayer money to fund the entire National Endowment for the Arts for the next 60 years.

And the most galling part? Every other presidential candidate in modern history released their tax returns willingly. Trump’s entire complaint rests on the premise that he was harmed by the public learning information that every other candidate simply… disclosed. The audacity of claiming $10 billion in damages for being forced into a transparency that was voluntary for everyone else is genuinely breathtaking.

Littlejohn broke the law. He knew it, he did it anyway, and he’s paying for it with five years of his life. Some have argued he was a whistleblower serving the public interest; others say a law is a law. But none of that matters here, because what Trump is doing has nothing to do with justice or compensation for actual harm.

This is a sitting president attempting to use the legal system to transfer $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury—which belongs to the American people—into his personal bank account. The case will be litigated by a Justice Department stuffed with his former personal attorneys. The damages he claims are fantastical. The harm he allegedly suffered resulted in him getting richer than ever and winning re-election.

So yes, Karoline, you’re right: this is absurd. Just not in the way you meant.

06:00 PM

Piracy Crackdown in Italy Shuts Down IPTV Services Ahead of Winter Olympics [TorrentFreak]

No other country in Europe generates as much noise around physical anti-piracy crackdowns as Italy, where ‘boots-on-the-ground’ operations have become a regular occurrence.

While the number of affected users doesn’t always seem to add up, it is clear that Italy can and is willing to take action, where other countries do not see IPTV as a priority.

This week, the local authorities announced another major crackdown. Led by the District Prosecutor’s Office of Catania and the Italian Postal Police, “Operation Switch Off” involved raids in 11 Italian cities and 14 countries, including the UK, India, Canada, and Romania.

Operation Switch Off

With support from Eurojust, Europol, and Interpol, the operation dismantled a global network allegedly generating between €8 million and €10 million in illicit revenue every month. Authorities say that they identified 31 key suspects and reportedly disconnected more than 125,000 users in Italy alone, with millions more affected globally.

Video: Polizia di Stato

While the police press release does not mention any names, several sources confirm that the popular IPTV services IPTVItalia, DarkTv, and migliorIPTV are affected. In addition, reseller panels and associated Telegram accounts have been taken offline.

A “Preventive” Strike for the Winter Olympics?

The timing of the raids is also worth highlighting. While the police do not mention the Olympics, this preventive strike a week before the opening ceremony certainly does not hurt.

Coincidence or not, the crackdown can also be seen as a proactive measure to secure the broadcasting market. Italy’s Minister for Sport and Youth, Andrea Abodi, directly connected the operation to the Olympics.

“I thank the State Police, the Catania Prosecutor’s Office, and the international authorities for the results achieved by this raid, which is particularly significant less than ten days before the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics,” Abodi said.

While this week’s actions are new, the evidence is not. According to Italian tech outlet DDay.it, the investigation was fueled by forensic analysis from “Operation Taken Down” in November 2024.

Investigators spent over a year mining data from the seized devices, tracking cryptocurrency flows, and monitoring communication channels. This eventually resulted in a good overview of the broader organization, which led to the crackdown and arrests throughout this week.

International Tentacles

In addition to hardware in Italy, including a SIM farm in Naples that was used to create Telegram bots, the operation also relied on servers elsewhere. This reportedly included six servers strategically placed across Eastern Europe and an unnamed African country to evade law enforcement.

In Kosovo, a local report from Telegrafi confirms that raids also hit Pristina and the village of Zaplluxhë, where police seized computers and hard drives belonging to a suspect identified only as “P.B.”

All in all, Operation Switch Off is yet another successful Italian crackdown. Understandably, the actions received praise from local and international rightsholder groups, including ACE, which sees it as evidence that sustained cross-border cooperation in the fight against piracy pays off.

—

Update: After publication, Sky Italia shared the following response from its CEO, Andrea Duilio, with us.

“I would like to thank the Catania District Prosecutor’s Office and the Postal Police for Operation ‘Switch Off’, which once again confirms how piracy is an integral part of organized criminal systems on an international scale,” Duilio says.

“This investigation clearly shows how users of these illegal services, in addition to risking identification and sanctions, fuel criminal businesses and expose themselves to cybersecurity threats of which they are often unaware.”

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

11:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 打 [Kanji of the Day]

打

✍5

小3

strike, hit, knock, pound, dozen

ダ　ダース

う.つ　う.ち-　ぶ.つ

二塁打 (にるいだ) — two-base hit
安打 (あんだ) — safe hit
本塁打 (ほんるいだ) — home run
打撃 (だげき) — blow
打線 (だせん) — batting line-up
打者 (だしゃ) — batter
三塁打 (さんるいだ) — three-base hit
打ち上げ (うちあげ) — launch (of a rocket, satellite, etc.)
適時打 (てきじだ) — timely hit
打球 (だきゅう) — hitting (a ball with a bat, racket, golf club, etc.)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 寝 [Kanji of the Day]

寝

✍13

中学

lie down, sleep, rest, bed, remain unsold

シン

ね.る　ね.かす　い.ぬ　みたまや　や.める

寝る (ねる) — to sleep (lying down)
寝室 (しんしつ) — bedroom
昼寝 (ひるね) — nap
就寝 (しゅうしん) — going to bed
寝たきり (ねたきり) — bedridden
寝屋 (ねや) — bedroom (esp. one used by a married couple)
寝不足 (ねぶそく) — lack of sleep
寝返り (ねがえり) — turning over in bed
寝具 (しんぐ) — bedding
寝泊まり (ねとまり) — staying the night

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

GIMP @ FOSDEM 2026 [GIMP]

Our very own Ondřej Míchal will be making a presentation on GIMP at FOSDEM 2026! The conference will be held this weekend, January 31st and February 1st in Brussels, Belgium. If you’re not already familiar, it is described as:

[…] a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don’t need to register. Just turn up and join in!

GIMP developer Ondřej Míchal will be speaking at FOSDEM'26 on Sunday, February 1st

Ondřej will be sharing his experiences as a GIMP developer, as well as discussing GIMP 3.2’s development and what lies ahead. His talk is scheduled for Sunday, February 1st at 10:40 (UTC + 1). If you can not attend the event live, there will be a livestream linked in the schedule.

If you’re able to attend the conference, Ondřej may have some Wilber stickers to give out. While supplies last!

We look forward to a great talk from Ondřej, and we hope you all will attend!

08:00 AM

My Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 72: “Confronting AI in Higher Education”, with decent primary source data on the harm being done to universities — by enabling students in the Social Sciences to cheat. [debito.org]

Excerpt: I teach Political Science, and have an express zero-tolerance policy towards the use of AI in students’ submitted assignments. Two semesters ago, my policy was to give zeros on assignments in the first instance and Fs in the course for repeat offenders. But last semester, this became untenable as AI reached the event horizon. AI went from something students were still discovering to being a regular part of their toolbox. Colleges were suddenly even encouraging them to use it. What this has signaled to students nationwide that they now have an alternative to doing the fundamental work of doing research—i.e., formulating a research question, gathering evidence to answer it, and presenting it for review in a coherent and convincing manner. Now you could ask a computer to do all that. And then copy-paste. I have a strict rule against using AI in classes. Zero tolerance. Why? Because if I don’t enforce that, the flood gates open. Students who actually do their own work will grumble about being graded via demanding rubrics, while students who cheat their way through college will get away with high grades on something they didn’t create. This gives incentives for everyone to cheat, because why bother putting the effort in? And that in term moots the development of fundamental college skill sets of researching and writing. It also cheapens students' degrees. Like getting a degree from a ‘party school,’ if the college becomes known as a degree from an ‘AI school,’ employers and the academy will discount student credentials even if they put in the work to get them. Guilt by association. Despite some colleges short-sightedly adopting AI as a tool, I see AI technology now undermining the very act of getting an education. AI is not seen as cheating in all fields. For example, Math and Computer Sciences are all-in and don’t see it as a threat—more as a competitive advantage. AI saves them a lot of time and work, especially for computer programmers writing code or training to be cybersecurity analysts. But for us in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where we are trying to teach skills essential to basic critical thinking, AI is generally seen as a short-circuit. This divisiveness is why it’s been difficult for universities to come up with an official policy regarding AI use. So professors are left to decide their own policies. And zero tolerance is mine. This column gives statistics from teaching hundreds of students a semester to assess how effective this policy is at stemming the tsunami of cheating.

04:00 AM

See you at FOSDEM [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 29 Jan 2026, Week 5

F-Droid core

F-Droid Basic was updated to 2.0-alpha1 fixing little things:

Show issue for apps we had installed with different signer

Manual repo update icon now is ‘Sync’

Fix some changelog logic, pick better

Don’t show issues for apps with incompatible signer installed by other stores

Show signer of installed version and version code to tech details, make them all selectable

Fix a start issue for those upgrading from version 1.x

We are seeing your feedback (yes, even those that say: “the old one was better”) and we’ll polish the client more as going forward. Fun fact: our last major Client UX overhaul was almost 10 years ago, and was met with the same reactions at its introduction.

That being said, we will take a break, between January 30 and February 4, as we’ll be traveling and attending FOSDEM. Did you look up and bookmark our presentations? Do plan to reach our booth(s)!

Community News

Snikket was updated to 2.19.8r2+free. This Conversations fork is tailored for your Snikket instance with a fancy color theme. This update brings almost 2 years of missed features and improves not only the looks. We can excuse the team as they are few and have a lot of work to do on their multiplatform SDK, server and beyond.

@kitswas announces their “F-Droid App Badges” that tracks monthly download and search statistics based on F-Droid metrics. This feature was asked for a long time, as the privacy veil of F-Droid might leave developers in the dark about how well are their apps are received and how many people are enjoying them.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed

Cfait: Powerful, fast and elegant TODO / task manager. (CalDAV and local)
Taler Cashier: Take cash and give out electronic cash (The app is not intended for mainstream usage, most people will withdraw digital cash via wire transfer or bank integration. It can also confuse people who are looking for the wallet or PoS applications. If you need it you can still get it from the Taler Nightly repo)

Updated Apps

145 more apps were updated

(expand for the full list)

AAAAXY was updated to 1.6.338+20260127.3956.3f4e8fdb
Amber was updated to 4.1.1
ANeko Reborn was updated to 1.5.1
Anx Reader was updated to 1.11.0
Apollo was updated to 1.7.3
App Lock was updated to 2.2.1
baresip was updated to 76.3.1
baresip+ was updated to 64.1.1
Bim! was updated to 14
Bimba was updated to 3.12.0-beta.1
Birthday Adapter was updated to 3.10.5
Butterfly was updated to 2.4.3
Calibre-Web-Companion was updated to 1.8.4
Capy Reader was updated to 2026.01.1188
Catima — Loyalty Card Wallet was updated to 2.41.6
CClauncher was updated to v10.5.2
Ciyue was updated to 1.21.0
CleverKeys was updated to 1.2.8
CoMaps - Hike, Bike, Drive Offline with Privacy was updated to 2026.01.24-5-FDroid
Conversations was updated to 2.19.9+free
Cuscon was updated to 4.0.8.5
DobbyVPN was updated to 1.1.6
Einstein Launcher was updated to 0.3.9-alpha
Findroid was updated to 1.0.2
floccus bookmark sync was updated to 5.8.6
Flux News was updated to 1.11.2
Forkgram was updated to 12.3.2.0
FOSDEM 2026 Schedule was updated to 1.74.2-FOSDEM-Edition
Fulguris Web Browser was updated to 2.0.8
Geo Share was updated to 5.13.0
GeoWeather was updated to 1.1.3
geteduroam was updated to 2.1.7(2680)
getgovroam was updated to 2.1.7(2680)
Goals Tracker 24/7 - timeto.me was updated to 2026.01.27
Goguma was updated to 0.9.1
GraphHopper Maps was updated to 2.6.0
Gurgle was updated to 1.34
Hammer was updated to 2.1.3
Harp was updated to 1.3.5
Healthy Battery Charging was updated to 2.1.2
HFUT-Schedule was updated to 4.19.3.2
hwloc lstopo was updated to 2.13.0rc1-1-1.6.1
Immich was updated to 2.5.1
Immich Uploader was updated to 2.0.3
Inure App Manager (Trial) was updated to build106.5.0
Jami was updated to 20260123-01
Jass board was updated to 4.2.1
Jiyi was updated to 1.0.1
Just Delete Me was updated to 0.4
KashCal was updated to 21.1.6
Knock on Ports was updated to 2.0.15-beta01
Komelia was updated to 0.18.4
Kvaesitso was updated to 1.39.3-fdroid
Launch - Minimalist Launcher was updated to 5.3
Librera Reader was updated to 9.3.35-fdroid
Linux Command Library was updated to 3.5.3
Linwood Butterfly Nightly was updated to 2.4.3
Lissen: Audiobookshelf client was updated to 1.8.8
Litube was updated to 2.0.2
LogFox was updated to 2.1.0
MakeACopy was updated to 2.5.0
MateDroid was updated to 0.12.3
Medical Calendarlog was updated to 2.0.2
MedTimer was updated to 1.21.11
Memories: Photo Management for Nextcloud was updated to 1.15
Messages was updated to 1.0.7
Middor was updated to 0.1.6
MIFARE Classic Tool was updated to 4.3.1
Mill was updated to 7.2.4
Nextcloud was updated to 3.35.2
Nextcloud Dev was updated to 20260128
Nextcloud News was updated to 0.9.9.94
Nextcloud Notes was updated to 4.5.3
NextTraceroute was updated to 0.1.6
NFC Radio was updated to 0.11.2-fdroid
Nora was updated to 0.5.7
nospeak was updated to v0.10.2
NotiFilter was updated to 3.4.0
Nunti was updated to v2.9.0
Oblivion was updated to 1.0.4
Oinkoin was updated to 1.3.0
Organic Maps・Offline Map & GPS was updated to 2026.01.26-11-FDroid
Orgro was updated to 2.0.7
P.CASH Crypto Wallet was updated to 0.51.4
Parcel - Pickup code was updated to 1.0.47
PennyWise AI was updated to 2.15.45
Persian Calendar was updated to 10.1.1
personalDNSfilter was updated to 1.50.59.0
PipePipe was updated to 4.7.8
Podcini.X - Podcast instrument was updated to 10.8.0
Polymarket Viewer was updated to 1.32
Privacy Flip was updated to 2.1.2
QRAlarm was updated to 2.7.7
Quicksy was updated to 2.19.9+free
Quotes.app was updated to 4.1
Read You was updated to 0.16.0
Really Basic Vocab was updated to 3.4.9
Recurring Expense Tracker was updated to 0.19.5
Repertoire was updated to 4.6.0
Ricevapp Documento Commerciale was updated to 1.4.2
Ringdroid - Ringtone editor was updated to 2.9.1
Ruffle was updated to 0.260126
Rush - Lyrics App was updated to 5.5.2
Schulrechner was updated to 1.14.0
Screen Time was updated to 1.3.0
SFTP-SAF was updated to 0.2.12
Share to folder was updated to 0.1.3
Shattered Pixel Dungeon was updated to 3.3.4
ShikiApp was updated to alpha-0.4.8
SicMu Neo was updated to 2.4.4
Simple Keyboard was updated to 6.3
Simple Notes Sync was updated to 1.7.0
SimpleXray was updated to 1.10.12
SimpMusic was updated to 1.0.2
SiYuan was updated to 3.5.4
Sound Toggle was updated to 1.3.0
Super Productivity was updated to 17.0.6
SwatchIt was updated to 0.6.0
Taler Point-of-Sale Terminal was updated to 1.3.1
Tasks.org: Open-source To-Do Lists & Reminders was updated to 14.9
Termux Hub was updated to 2.1.1
The Battle for Wesnoth was updated to 1.19.20+dev
The Light was updated to 3.99
Thumb-Key was updated to 5.1.0
Thunderbird Beta for Testers was updated to 16.0b4
tmtLauncher was updated to 1.2.1
ToLoShare was updated to 1.0.9
Tomato was updated to 1.8.3
Track & Graph was updated to 9.0.1
Traffic Light was updated to 2.9
trale was updated to 0.15.0
Tranquil Stopwatch was updated to 1.11.0
Tuner was updated to 1.57
Twili Recipes was updated to 0.2.9
Unciv was updated to 4.19.9
Urik Keyboard was updated to 0.16.0-beta
Urn was updated to 1.5.4
Webview Kiosk was updated to 0.26.0
WHPH • Work Hard Play Hard was updated to 0.20.4
Wiki Fronted was updated to r/50565-r-2026-01-12
Wikipedia was updated to r/50565-r-2026-01-12
Working Time Account was updated to 2.11.009
XiVPN was updated to 1.8.0
Xtra was updated to 2.53.3
Zulip was updated to 30.0.270

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Proof Without Content [xkcd.com]

03:00 AM

AI ads are neither [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Neither AI nor ads.

The problem started with search, and was weaponized by Amazon.

Display ads go back at least 100 years. A century ago, the idea was simple: Show up in a place where people are offering up attention and tell a story. The advertiser pays the media for the attention they’re using, and the consumer may find interest, amusement or, at the very least, tolerance for the fact that the media cost them less than it would without the ads.

Direct Marketing, named by the late Lester Wunderman, took the idea much further. This is action advertising. Measured. Direct marketing keeps score, and quickly evolves into something targeted and far more useful. Classified ads are direct, as is effective non-junk mail.

Google built an empire on this idea. When you do a search for left-handed widgets, the sellers of those widgets know that this is a great place to invest in running an ad. Google built an effective measurement tool, and soon, $1 ad buys became million-dollar ad buys. If it works, do it more.

But Amazon turned this into a tax. By incorporating barely concealed ads as search results, they corrupted the value of their shopping search engine. They confused consumers at the same time they stole margin from suppliers and ultimately increased the price that everyone pays for just about everything. Amazon sellers don’t want to buy more ads. In fact, they only do it because they have no choice.

When AI starts to incorporate ads, the corruption and lack of trust will only increase.

Permission marketing is the idea that we can deliver anticipated, personal and relevant ads to the people who want to get them. When I built this idea in 1992, it recognized that attention was precious and that trust was at the heart of every sustainable business. When you burn trust to get attention, you end up with nothing of value.

AI and search ads are about confusing and tricking users, burning trust and ultimately taxing any entity that is willing to pay money for attention–particularly those that feel they have no choice. The AI won’t recommend the best choice–it’ll point to the highest bidder. And the more they conceal that fact, the more money they’ll make. For a while.

AI companies say they are trying to be a trusted, independent tool. Ads are optimized when we benefit from the stories they tell. AI ads ruin both.

It’s unlikely that this will be regulated any time soon, but AI brands that want to earn the benefit of the doubt would be wise to do what early magazines, modern TV and even the Yellow Pages did–make it crystal clear that the ads are the ads. They work best when we know what they are and we want them there–and worst when we forget that search is a tool, not another chance to hustle customers.

Of course, with alternatives just a click away, they’re not going to have much luck clearly labeling the ads as ads. That’s why Google ultimately corrupted their clear division between the two–every time you make the line more blurred, revenue goes up.

We don’t need more hustle. We need more trust.

Pluralistic: Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity (30 Jan 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity: Move fast and break kings.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Frank Chu; MPAA x TSA; Flint truths; Pastel Q; Bernie meme.
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity (permalink)

OG App is the coolest app you've never heard of. Back in 2022, two teenagers unilaterally disenshittified Instagram by making an "alt-client" that restored all the parts of Insta that made it a success and blocked all the antifeatures that Meta crammed down users' throats after they had them locked in.

Here's how OG App worked: first, it popped up a browser window and loaded the Instagram login screen. Then, after you'd logged into Insta, it stole the "session key" (the cryptographic proof that you were logged into your account). That let it impersonate you to Insta's servers, and slurp down the whole feed that Insta had queued up for you.

After grabbing your feed, OG App deleted all the ads, all the slop, all the boosted content, all the months-old clickbait that The Algorithm (TM) had surfaced. What was left was pristine: the posts from people you followed, in reverse-chronological order. To make this all even sweeter, OG App sent no data back to Meta as you used it, except for the likes and comments you intended to transmit to the company. All the other data that Meta's apps gather got blocked: everything from your location, to which posts you slowed down your scrolling on, to accelerometer readouts that revealed minute changes in how you hold your phone from second to second.

Boy did people like this! By the end of the day, OG App was in the top ten charts for both Google and Apple's app stores. By the next morning, it was gone. Meta sent a takedown notice to the app store duopoly and they killed OG App on its behalf (there is honor among thieves):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-free-instagram-feed/

The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook's improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn't matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.

Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).

This was very successful! Users didn't have to choose between their friends on Myspace and the superior design and privacy policies of Facebook. They got to eat their cake and have it, too.

This is actually a very old and important pattern in tech. It's what "move fast and break things" looks like when it's actually disrupting sclerotic and decaying companies that lock us in, take us for granted, and treat us like shit. It's what Apple did when they cloned the MS Office file formats and released iWork, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote let Microsoft users escape from the prison of Windows and bring their documents with them:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

But like every pirate, the tech companies dreamed of being admirals. Once they'd attained the admiralty, they announced that when they did this stuff, it was progress, but if anyone does it to them, it would be piracy.

What's more, they were able to take advantage of a metastasizing blob of IP laws that the US Trade Representative spread around the world (with threats of tariffs for noncompliance). Soon, nearly every country had enacted laws that made it a literal crime for their entrepreneurs and technologists to fix America's defective tech exports by adding privacy tools, bridging old services into new ones, or reading and writing America's ubiquitous proprietary file-formats:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

For decades, this system was immovable. The world couldn't afford tariffs on its exports to the USA, and it was able to maintain the pretense that America's platforms were trustworthy neutral parties, that would not be weaponized against their own national interest at the behest of the American state.

Obviously, that is dead now. Donald Trump, debilitated by white matter disease and his endemic incontinent belligerence, has flipped the table over in a poker game that was rigged in his favor because he resented having to pretend to play (TM November Kelly):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

EU member-states are minting new "digital sovereignty" ministries as fast as they can print up new business cards, the EU itself has just appointed its first "Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy" czar:

https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/henna-virkkunen_en

They're building the "Eurostack," a fleet of EU-based data centers that will host free, open, auditable, trustworthy equivalents to the US tech giants' offerings:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

But Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's own Copyright Directive, which prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied hard for, winning the day by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (a promise Trump has now broken):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

So long as Europe continues to hold up its end of this one-sided bargain, it will not be able to create the reverse-engineering based tools to let EU companies, governments and households get their data out of US tech silos, let alone let them build and enjoy successors to OG App, which will make it easy for them to leave US social media without sacrificing contact with the people who matter to them.

Which brings me to Threads, Meta's latest social media network. Threads is built on Activitypub and Mastodon, these being open/free, auditable and trustworthy protocols, designed to support "federated" social media. That's social media that runs on servers managed by lots of different entities, whose users can all connect to one another no matter which server they use. Meta was clearly excited by the prospect of enclosing and conquering this open upstart, but also nervous at the prospect that its users would find, in federation, an easy path to escape from Meta's clutches.

After all, if you can leave Threads and join a non-Meta Mastodon server without losing contact with the people you followed and were followed by on Threads, then why wouldn't you leave? Mark Zuckerberg's users don't like him – they just hate him less than they love the people they are in community with on Zuckerberg's platforms.

So Threads never really joined the Fediverse. You can't quite follow and be followed by Mastodon users, and you can't quite migrate your account off Meta's servers and onto a better one. Zuck and his lieutenants are keenly attuned to any design that drives high "switching costs" for leaving their services, and they exploit these switching costs to figure out just how much pain they can inflict on users without risking their departure:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

So now they've started to turn the screws on Threads users. They just announced a global program of Threads enshittification, with a promise to cram ads into the eyeballs of every Threads account:

https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-threads-ads-go-global/

This represents a hell of an opportunity for the EU and Eurostack. Meta's ads are wildly illegal in the EU, violating Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. The only reason Meta gets away with its flagrant lawbreaking is that it has captured the Irish state, and uses legal tricks to force all GDPR enforcement into Irish jurisdiction:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta

People hate ads. More than half of all web users have installed an adblocker (which also protects their privacy). It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But no one has ever installed an adblocker for an app, because reverse-engineering apps and the mobile platforms they run on is illegal under laws like Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. As a result, tech companies – especially US giants, who can violate EU law with impunity – love to enshittify their apps, because they know that no one can do unto them as they did unto their own rivals (like Myspace).

Meta's new ad strategy for Threads is the perfect cue for a European repeal of Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. Procedurally, this is a great moment for it, as the EU is finalizing the Digital Fairness Act, which could include an exemption to EUCD 6 for privacy-enhancing technologies:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-protecting-our-democracy-upholding-our-values/file-digital-fairness-act

Giving Europeans an effective way to push back against Meta's wholesale violation of their rights is a way that the Eurostack can score popular support right now – not in five years when the new data centers come online. It's a way of improving the lives of Europeans in immediate, concrete ways, rather than asking them to be grateful that some ministry has changed cloud providers – an important change, sure, but one that has no real impact on their daily lives.

What's more, legalizing jailbreaking for the purpose of making Threads alt-clients wouldn't just give Europeans a better social media experience – it could bootstrap European social media services. Remember, Threads was able to achieve instant scale by moving Instagram users onto Threads wholesale, maintaining their Insta follows and followers when they created their Threads accounts.

Europe – like everywhere else – is full of entrepreneurs who are trying to get national, independent social media platforms off the ground, hoping to woo users by promising them a more privacy-respecting alternative. They've got the same problem Zuck had when he tried to compete with Myspace: users love their friends more than they hate being spied on, so merely offering a better service is insufficient.

To get users off the old platforms, you have to lower their switching costs – you have to let them bring their friends to the new network, even if those friends are still stuck on the old network. Legalize jailbreaking in the EU and you'll make it possible to do "on-device bridging" – where a new social media app is able to break open the data storage of the Threads app on the same device and move that data into its own feeds. And because the EU has the GDPR, they have the privacy framework needed to police the privacy violations that breaking into other apps' data storage can lead to.

Meta will squawk. They'll say Europe is legalizing the violation of its corporate rights. But Meta violates Europeans' rights at scale, and the "rights" that I'm talking about taking away from Meta are rights the EU gave it in the first place, in exchange for a broken promise of tariff-free access to the USA.

Adblocking isn't stealing. Adblocking is bargaining. Without adblocking, the companies don't sell us services in exchange for our privacy – they plunder all the private data they can get, and dribble out services at whatever level they think we deserve. If ad-supported media was a restaurant, it'd be one where you got thrown up against a wall, relieved of your wallet, fed a handful of gruel, and then got kicked in the ass and sent on your way:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Every time Donald Trump threatens the EU, he makes the case for the Eurostack, but still, he can't help himself. Likewise, every time Zuckerberg enshittifies his services, he makes the case for repealing Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, and he can't help himself either.

Threads' inexorable enshittification is an opportunity: an opportunity to make the case for the Eurostack, an opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Europeans, and an opportunity to break through the walled gardens that keep the people we love stuck on legacy social media platforms.

When they did it to us, that wasn't progress. When we do it to them, it's not piracy.

Hey look at this (permalink)

EFF to Close Friday in Solidarity with National Shutdown https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/eff-close-friday-solidarity-national-shutdown
Let's Make Hope Normal Again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxt4HCjd7VA
Detecting Dementia Using Lexical Analysis: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Tells a More Personal Story https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/16/1/94
How is Inventing the Renaissance an SFF-Related Work? https://www.exurbe.com/how-is-inventing-the-renaissance-an-sff-related-work/
The Good, the Pretty, and Fear Itself https://catvalente.substack.com/p/the-good-the-pretty-and-fear-itself

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Frank Chu explainer http://www.12galaxies.20m.com

#20yrsago Kerouac curator invents copyright laws to keep photographers away https://thomashawk.com/2006/01/open-letter-to-myra-borshoff-cook-tour.html

#20yrsago EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation

#20yrsago CD DRM software players are amateurish and easy to trick https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/01/31/cd-drm-attacks-player/

#20yrsago MPAA puts TSA goon in charge of enforcement https://web.archive.org/web/20060209035921/http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_01_31.pdf

#20yrsago US-VISIT immigration system spent $15 million per crook caught https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/the_failure_of_1.html

#20yrsago Law firm fires clerk for personal opposition to DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060203030500/http://www.freeculturenyu.org/2006/01/31/drm-fired/

#15yrsago Free excerpt from Jo Walton’s brilliant Among Others https://web.archive.org/web/20110204214337/http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/01/excerpt-among-others

#15yrsago Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/huge-isps-want-per-gb-payments-from-netflix-youtube/

#15yrsago Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante https://reactormag.com/batman-plutocrat/

#15yrsago Another copyright troll throws in the towel https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/01/31

#10yrsago Ten hard truths about the Flint water atrocity https://www.ecowatch.com/michael-moore-10-things-they-wont-tell-you-about-the-flint-water-trage-1882162388.html

#10yrsago Watch: AMAZING slam poem about policing women’s speech habits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4_QwmaNoQ

#10yrsago Congress wants to know if agencies were compromised by the backdoor in Juniper gear (and where it came from) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-juniper-networks-congress-idUSKCN0V708P/

#5yrsago Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#paranoid-style

#5yrsago Mashing the Bernie meme https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/31/rhymes-with-pastel-q/#bernie-3d

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/
Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/
Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo
Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/
Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0
Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/
Enshittification with Plutopia
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

Latest books (permalink)

"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026
"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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 (1048 words today, 18579 total)

"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.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

So What’s Up With ICE Funding? [The Status Kuo]

If you’re confused about the funding fight over the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, don’t feel bad. Procedurally speaking, it’s very unusual, and the situation is fluid and rapidly evolving.

Also, don’t feel despondent. There’s an understandable tendency to view any deal between Democrats and the White House with suspicion. But in this case, as I lay out below, Dems do in fact have the upper hand. They are remarkably united, while Republicans are scrambling in disarray.

This piece addresses a few common critiques I’ve seen in discussions and comments online. One set of these criticisms misunderstands the state of the funding fight and, as a consequence, misdirects anger and frustration at Democrats for failing to stop new ICE funding.

Another critique is that the list of demands for ICE reform, while a necessary first step, simply does not go far enough. Many argue the whole agency needs to be shut down, not just reined in.

At the risk of praising Democratic leadership, particularly given its too-slow response to the crises ICE has provoked, as of yesterday they have put the White House on the defensive, splintered the GOP and achieved far more than most believed they could. The fight isn’t over, but the first rounds have gone to the Democrats.

Subscribe now

ICE funding was never really on the table

There’s a baseline assumption that many critics of ICE funding, including me, got wrong. Indeed, I got it so wrong that I had to issue a mea culpa when I understood what had really happened. So please don’t feel bad, or get on anyone’s case, for misunderstanding the amount of leverage that Democrats actually have, or for being angry at the Democrats for not doing more.

Here’s the short version of what happened. The 2025 GOP budget (the ironically entitled “One Big Beautiful Bill”) carved out a sweeping exception for ICE when it came to funding. The agency received $75 billion in funding through 2029, but more importantly, the money was appropriated within the bill itself. That skirted the normal appropriations process, which is subject to the Senate filibuster. For example, here’s what the OBBB provided for ICE “transportation and removal operations”:

See that first word? “Appropriation”—meaning it’s already ICE’s money to use. In practical terms, that means that when the government shut down in the fall, ICE still operated because it had money. And if the government shuts down in this fight, it will still have that money.

Democrats didn’t clearly explain this at the time the OBBB passed and ICE got its big beautiful blank check. It would have been helpful to know this before we started demanding our elected officials not fund ICE through the appropriations process.

This is what people mean when they say the Democrats have a messaging problem.

That part is behind us, so the question now is, if ICE is already funded, what are we talking about today?

DHS funding is separate from ICE funding

Even though ICE got $75 billion through 2029 that doesn’t have to pass through the appropriations grinder, the rest of DHS funding still does. That means that, without a bill to fund it, DHS operations outside of ICE would still shut down unless Congress agreed to a funding package specifically for that.

The GOP understood this, so it tried to make any cut-off in DHS funding politically unpalatable. The GOP House passed a bill that included DHS funding in what’s called a “mini-bus” funding bill. That mini-bus also funded five other departments: Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Energy.

In short, the GOP tried to jam Democrats by forcing them to choose between DHS funding or shutting down half the government. It was an all or nothing offer.

In response, Senate Democrats demanded that funding for DHS be stripped out of the mini-bus. That was a non-starter for Republican lawmakers, so Democrats went to the White House to do a deal. After negotiations, and to the dismay of House Speaker Mike Johnson, the White House agreed that DHS could come out of the mini-bus bill.

If that agreement holds, the Senate can vote to fund the other five departments while punting on funding for DHS, in this case for two weeks, while negotiators work through Democratic conditions and demands for ICE reforms. Democrats can hold up funding for DHS as long as it takes to get the reforms they want (even though ICE can still operate). And should those negotiations fail, Democrats can still walk away, shutting down just Kristi Noem’s department, and not half the government.

That is a much more targeted and politically popular move, and it prevents government workers outside of DHS from being held hostage by either side.

What reforms are on the table?

The above discussion answers, at least in part, the second set of criticisms: that ICE should be shut down now and not just reformed. If ICE’s funding were still contingent on an appropriation bill covering DHS, I would agree. But it’s not. So Democratic leaders believe they have to do what they can now to rein ICE in and limit the worst of its abuses. (The time to defund ICE will come later when Democrats are back in charge of government and can close the entire agency or even the whole of DHS, which is something they should seriously consider.)

As Simon Rosenberg noted in his piece today,

The Senate Dems have coalesced around a plan that would ban masks, require use of body cameras, require ICE agents to show ID and identify themselves, establish clear use-of-force and a uniform code of conduct, require judicial warrants, require coordination with state and local law enforcement, require independent review of killings and other serious incidents.

Critics charge that this is simply requiring ICE to behave like any other U.S. law enforcement agency. But that’s exactly how they should behave, and if we need a law making that crystal clear, then we should pass it now while Trump is in the mood to sign it given the collapse in public support for ICE. That will give far more teeth to courts to enjoin ICE going forward should it fail to follow these procedures.

There are also important reform proposals from progressive members of the House that include demands that ICE immediately stop terrorizing American cities like Minneapolis and depart from them immediately; ensure full and transparent investigations of shootings; stop targeting sensitive locations such as churches, shelters, schools and courthouses; and establish baseline standards of care at detention centers. I support all of these, but I also understand that we don’t always get everything we want when the other side actually controls Congress. But it doesn’t mean we stop insisting on them.

From where I sit, the Senate proposals feel like common sense reforms that everyone should be able to support. But even some of the more “moderate” voices within the GOP are already balking at some of the proposals. For example, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is a frequent critic of the Trump regime, does not believe ICE should be required to conduct its operations without masks. “I’ve seen people dox me. I’ve seen people take pictures and identify law enforcement officers and then put their families at risk,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “So, I think that’s a step too far.”

Maybe if ICE would stop acting like criminals, there would be no need to publicly name and shame them. Just a thought, Sen. Tillis.

It’s unclear what proposals for reforms will ultimately make it into a proposed DHS funding bill, or if there will be later amendments when it reaches the House. But at least now there is a mechanism for insisting on such changes and holding up DHS funding (even if not ICE funding specifically) until they are included.

A Graham of doubt

Even though the White House and Senate Dems came to a tentative deal, it still isn’t done. The Senate would have needed unanimous consent to fast track the bill to a vote, but Senator Lindsey Graham objected to it. His issue? As Punchbowl News reported,

Graham railed against the funding package over a House-passed measure repealing a provision tied to senators whose phone records were obtained by the Justice Department as part of its 2020 election probe.

Specifically, the House-passed measure eliminated the giveaway to U.S. Senators that would have allowed them to sue for up to half a million dollars in damages, just for having their phone records investigated by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.

Graham’s self-serving objection and tantrum create a time crunch. Funding technically runs out for six federal departments at midnight tonight. The Senate will have to work to get this all back on track, and there will almost certainly be a lapse in funding, meaning a weekend shutdown. Then the House, which Speaker Johnson once again bafflingly called out of session until Monday night, will still have to vote on the new bill.

The House GOP conference is unlikely to fully support the bill. Far-right Republicans in the Freedom Caucus are opposed to voting in favor of anything that wasn’t their original mini-bus sent to the Senate. And many do not want to see the Democrats attach any conditions on ICE in exchange for funding DHS. Unlike most of the country, they think ICE is doing great work.

That means that, if the measure clears the Senate and comes back to the House early next week, Speaker Johnson (if he wants to please Trump) will once again have to rely on Democratic votes to get the new mini-bus package through.

By now, Johnson should be used to not actually calling the shots or having the votes to get things done without an assist from the Dems. This underscores how the Dems are still largely in charge of much of the important legislation in Congress as they continue to provide a far more united front than the GOP.

One final thought. The proposed DHS funding bill puts swing district GOP House members in a jam. If they vote against the measure, Democratic attack ads will tie them to reviled ICE policies and abuses. If they vote for it, they will alienate MAGA voters who will see them as surrendering to Democratic demands. Indeed, the more sensible and straightforward the ICE reform proposals are, the less room these vulnerable Republicans will have to create excuses for their opposition.

If we really want to end ICE, we need to retake the House and Senate in 2026, then hold those chambers while winning the White House in 2028. For that reason, I can understand a long-game approach on reasonable and popular reforms, one that splinters the GOP now and helps win back congressional majorities in Congress for Democrats. Nothing is more important in the end, even if we must painfully accept that we can’t get every reform we want right now.

12:00 AM

Enshittification Ensures Streaming Prices Soar Faster Than Any Other Consumer Good [Techdirt]

According to new data from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), streaming video subscription prices jumped a whopping 29 percent year over year. That’s compared to the 2.7 percent jump in consumer costs seen more generally across other goods and services.

Of course BLS doesn’t explain why streaming video prices are soaring at such a dramatic rate. It’s something we’ve touched on repeatedly: as giant media companies increasingly consolidate, they’re trying to find new, frequently obnoxious ways to continue to goose quarterly earnings and create the illusion of perpetual growth despite a major slowdown in new subscribers.

That means significantly more ads (even if you pay for no ads). It means higher overall prices despite a decline in quality. It means layoffs, worse customer service, and companies that refuse to even host popular content they paid for because they’re too cheap to pay for residuals. It means new annoying restrictions on what you’re paying for, and companies that harass you for sharing your password with your college kid or elderly relative. It means more lazy, clickbait content catering to the lowest common denominator and less quality, thoughtful art.

It means enshittification.

And it’s going to get worse. The corrupt Trump administration is demolishing whatever is left of U.S. media consolidation limits, ensuring another massive round of harmful “growth for growth’s sake” mergers that temporarily goose earnings, create tax breaks, and badly justify outsized executive compensation, but generally make all of the existing problems in the industry worse (especially for labor and consumers).

According to the BLS, streaming and gaming subscriptions and rentals saw higher “streamflation” (read: price gouging) in 2025 than any of the other industries or services measured. The closest comparison was coffee (28 percent), which is largely soaring due to Trump’s ignorant and pointless tariffs that consumers have to pay for.

If you’re old enough, you’ve already watched this play out with traditional cable (many of the executives screwing up streaming were the same ones that screwed up traditional cable). So you know the pattern: they’ll continue to push their luck on price hikes, driving many people to free alternatives (or piracy), at which point the executives who made out like bandits blame everyone and everything but themselves.

None of this is reflected honestly by any of the media companies that cover this sort of thing, because their tendency toward honest and courageous journalism is being undermined by the same forces. Like check out this Hollywood Reporter breakdown of the issue, which they dub “streamflation.” They amusing hint at the fact there might be causes for this massive surge in pricing, but can’t get around to listing any:

Again, because enshittification doesn’t discriminate, and the same forces making streaming video more expensive and shittier are taking a hatchet to U.S. journalism and truth in service to the almighty dollar. Corporate media is incapable of reporting honesty about corporate media: there’s no money in it.

Friday 2026-01-30

10:00 PM

DSA-6116-1 chromium - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6116-1

08:00 PM

New Release: Tails 7.4.1 [Tor Project blog]

This release is an emergency release to fix critical security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, a network encryption library used by Tor.

Changes and updates

Included software

Update the OpenSSL library to 3.5.4, which fixes DSA 6113-1, a set of vulnerabilities that could be critical. Using this set of vulnerabilities, an malicious Tor relay might be able to deanonymize a Tails user.

We are not aware of these vulnerabilities being exploited in practice.
Update the Tor client to 0.4.8.22.
Update Thunderbird to 140.7.0.

Fixed problems

Fix Gmail authentication in Thunderbird. (#21384)
Add a spinner when opening the Wi-Fi settings from the Tor Connection assistant. (#18594)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

The homepage of Tor Browser incorrectly says you are still using Tails 7.4, even after you have upgraded to 7.4.1. It also links to the release notes for that older version.

If in doubt, to verify that you are using Tails 7.4.1, choose Apps ▸ Tails ▸ About Tails.

Get Tails 7.4.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.4.1.
If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails 7.4.1 on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 7.4.1 directly:

Support and feedback

For support and feedback, visit the Support section on the Tails website.

03:00 PM

Stop Killing Games Gets Over 1 Million Petition Signatures Verified By EU [Techdirt]

I’ve been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on legislating the following rules:

Games sold must be left in a functional state

Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function

The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers

The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements

If you can find fault in any of the above, tell me what that would be in the comments. I personally see no such flaws. I particularly can’t find them in the context of a present reality in which games that people paid very real money for are ripped from their digital hands because publishers simply stop supporting them (online games) or because they were designed with planned obsolescence included (single player games that sunset when they can’t check in with servers (hi there, NBA2K games!)).

In order to compel the EU Parliament to take up the issue in session, the petition needed to achieve 1 million signatures. That happened last summer. Step 2 in the process is a review by the EU to validate those signatures, to be sure there is no shady fuckery in them. And that just happened, with the petition boasting one of the smallest percentage of invalidated signatures in memory.

Stop Killing Games volunteer Moritz Katzner has shared an update on the popular European Union Citizens’ Initiative to its official subreddit. The EU has successfully verified 1,294,188 of Stop Killing Games’ 1,448,270 signatures, easily clearing the one million minimum count it needed to move forward in the process.

In the comments, user MikeyIfYouWanna calculated that about 89% of the submitted signatures were legitimate. Katzner agreed, estimating that Stop Killing Games has one of the top three lowest failed signature rates among EU Citizens’ Initiatives.

“We’re sitting at around 10%, while the best-performing initiatives tend to fall in the 10–15% range, which puts us firmly in the upper bracket,” Katzner wrote. “Some initiatives see failure rates as high as 20–25% and still manage to get over the line, but it’s worth noting that the overall sample size is quite small, only 11 initiatives.”

Now, I will admit that I am no expert in how the EU legislative process works, nor how it interacts with the laws of its member countries. Over on the Stop Killing Games subreddit, where this signature achievement was announced, several commenters appeared aligned on how this works moving forward. Here is the best of them, from user AShortUsernameIndeed.

There’s a few steps. The EU issues regulations (which are EU-wide laws) and directives (which are guidelines for national legislation). Since this initiative is framed as a consumer rights issue, the most that can come out of it on the EU level is a directive (because the EU does not have direct legislative powers on consumer rights). The actual laws will then be written by the legislatures of each member country, separately. So the steps are:

get the EU commission and parliament to decide to legislate, then

lobby them to get a directive that actually does what the initiative wants, then

lobby the parliaments of all 27 member states to get the directive transformed into laws that actually do what the initiative wants.

That’s a few years of work ahead, in the best case. We’ll see what happens.

That looks correct, from my own poking around. And it does indeed mean that there are both years of work ahead before this turns into actual European laws and there are millions of lobbying dollars to overcome. But it’s progress, if only incremental.

And while video game preservation has long been important to me, I will admit I never thought I’d see the day when a governmental body such as the EU Parliament would actually take up the issue. Through the power of the internet, a collective appreciation for the preservation of culture, and volunteer work, however, it appears that will happen at the very least.

02:00 PM

They’re Seizing the Ballots and Voter Rolls [The Status Kuo]

We have a five-alarm fire in Georgia over voting records. And it comes right on the heels of the DOJ’s efforts over the weekend to extort Minnesota out of its voter data.

On Wednesday, the FBI seized paper ballots and voter data from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. Agents carted away some 700 boxes based on a dubious search warrant that claimed, without any apparent factual support, that there was probable cause to believe the records contained evidence of a crime.

Never mind that they were already the subject of an existing civil suit by the DOJ, which had resulted in the judge sealing them. And never mind that the statute of limitations for any “election crimes” has likely already run.

The latest escalation carries grim implications for November’s midterms. The 2020 election in Georgia was ground zero for Trump’s efforts to overturn the national election results. They included Trump’s direct pressure upon Georgia officials to “find” him 11,780 votes. His obsession with having lost that state has now led to yesterday’s dramatic and unprecedented seizure of Georgia’s election materials.

Based on what we already know, we must assume that Trump, with a big assist from the DOJ, intends to use the seized materials to reassert long-disproven claims to lay the groundwork for similar assertions of fraud in this November’s midterms. And we now know the DOJ will assist Trump in seizing voting records going forward, meaning 2026 ballots and voter rolls across the nation are at high risk, too.

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What we know so far about the FBI raid

On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at Fulton County’s elections warehouse—long the site of fantastical right-wing conspiracies over election fraud. The Bureau confirmed it was conducting “court-authorized law enforcement action,” and the warrant indicated the search was part of a criminal investigation into potential violations of federal laws covering the preservation of election records and illegal efforts to defraud voters.

Federal agents were allegedly authorized to seize physical ballots from the 2020 election, along with tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls. The seized materials comprise an extraordinarily broad sweep, targeting the very building blocks of a certified presidential election.

The timing of the raid raises suspicions. The warrant was signed by a federal magistrate judge in Atlanta less than a week after Trump, speaking in Davos, Switzerland, publicly reasserted claims that the 2020 election was rigged. It also occurred on the heels of Pam Bondi’s extortion letter to Gov. Walz demanding Minnesota’s state voter data. And just last week, Kash Patel fired the FBI official, Paul W. Brown, a special agent who was in charge of the Atlanta, Georgia office, though his firing could have been for unrelated reasons.

A Reuters photographer spotted and captured Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI operation in Fulton County. It is fair to ask what Trump’s top intelligence official, who is charged with addressing foreign threats, was doing there at all.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers, including Democratic state Sen. Josh McLaurin, were barred from observing the search. As Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory warned, in my view correctly, this raid and seizure of voting materials are just the beginning of the electoral chaos that will unfold in 2026.

Unpacking the context of the raid

So why are Trump and his DOJ focused on Fulton County, Georgia once more, such that they have taken the extraordinary step of seizing voting records from over five years ago?

For starters, Trump personally has never gotten over his loss in Georgia in the 2020 election. Nor has he ever forgiven Republican officials in that state for confirming Biden’s victory, nor the Fulton County prosecutor’s office for bringing a criminal RICO case against him and his co-conspirators for their attempted election subversion.

A few things should be restated for the record. Trump’s loss in Georgia was confirmed by GOP state officials three times, including in a final hand count. The Trump campaign nevertheless pushed false claims of election fraud using video debunked by Georgia’s own election officials. They even targeted and endangered the lives of election workers, notably Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who later prevailed in their defamation civil suit against Rudy Giuliani.

Two months after that November 2020 election, runoff elections were held for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats, both of which were won by the Democratic candidates, namely Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. This further confirmed that the entire state of Georgia was beginning to shift blue, and that Trump’s easier loss was was consistent with political trends.

Now that Trump is president again, he is determined to press criminal charges based on long-debunked claims of election fraud. Those charges ultimately may not go anywhere, given the amount of time that has passed. But that won’t stop the DOJ under Pam Bondi from drumming up allegations anyway and attempting to tarnish election officials and workers, once again, with bogus and stale allegations.

Indeed, as discussed below, the DOJ, which is now serving Trump’s will and not the people, has a strong incentive to resurrect the notion of “election fraud” and keep it front and center with the public this year.

Laying the groundwork for widespread election fraud claims

In my piece in The Big Picture earlier this week, I raised the following alarm based on the DOJ’s persistent efforts to obtain sensitive voter data from the states:

GOP leaders at the national level, such as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) or Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), could leverage false claims by the DOJ to call into question the validity of key elections and seek to delay the seating of Democrats who prevailed in their states. Meanwhile, election deniers at the state and local level could claim “fraud” while arming themselves with statements by the DOJ that there were fake voters on the rolls, even if that data is wrong or manipulated.
If this seems speculative, recall that this was the actual game plan proposed in late 2020 by a rogue DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to send a letter from the Justice Department to the state of Georgia advising them to call the legislature back into session to nullify the results of the election.

State and local election officials must pay close attention and prepare accordingly. The White House now has physical control over voter data and ballots from Fulton County that it can manipulate to re-litigate the 2020 election. And it would do this with one specific goal in mind: undermining public confidence over the fairness and validity of the midterm elections set for this coming November.

Through this FBI raid, the regime has now demonstrated its willingness to weaponize the DOJ not only to extort states out of their voter data, but to deploy federal agents to seize physical voting records and voter data, even if the justification for the seizure is based on repeatedly discredited claims of fraud. From this we should logically conclude that Trump and the DOJ will attempt the same in advance of, or right after, the November 2026 election.

As I warned in The Big Picture earlier this month, the seizure by federal authorities of states’ voting materials, including voting machines and ballots, presents a unique risk. And it is actually something Trump had considered doing before:

[A] recent statement by Trump hints at one other tactic that could have devastating consequences: the forced seizure of voting machines and ballots.
Trump mulled over this in 2020, and he was egged on by the likes of Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn (a traitor to our democracy if ever there was one). Cooler heads in the White House prevailed, and Trump did not order this to happen.
I do not believe he would hesitate to issue such an order after a decisive GOP loss in November that he would almost certainly claim was fraudulent. He would cite fake reports of election fraud, backed up by his captive Justice Department and some red state officials, to justify this action.

The actual physical seizure of a state’s voting materials was a Rubicon we hoped Trump would not dare cross. But here we are, and it’s only January. Sen. Jon Ossoff warned about Trump and this action yesterday in an interview with Jen Psaki of MS NOW. “This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections,” he said. “He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020.”

Sen. Ossoff is correct. Trump has already told us who he is: a firehose of election disinformation and false election claims. And on January 6, 2021, he showed us how far he will go when he fears losing power.

We would be wise to believe him and to prepare accordingly.

10:00 AM

Affinity by Canva: Simple, Free Page Layout [Write, Publish, and Sell]

We all know that page design and layout are tough. Even a simple book design that only incorporates text requires setting margins, allowing gutter space, and finding the right font, spacing, kerning, and line height. Doing all of this digitally adds another layer of complexity because you won’t know exactly how the book will look until you print a copy.

And the last thing any creator wants is to spend time, energy, and likely money on designing a book, only to get the printed proof and be utterly disappointed with their design choices.

Book design has been (and will continue to be) one of the sticking points for independent publishing and selling. First, you’ve got the contents of your book—content you’ve no doubt worked hard compiling, organizing, and editing. How it appears in print is nearly as important as the content itself. You need your book to reflect you and your brand and to effectively convey your content (whether that’s fiction, nonfiction, photography, art, or whatever).

Software for book layout has always existed in two camps:

Ridiculously expensive, complex software that does everything
Cheap (or free) software that does some things, but not well.

Understanding Book Design Software

Those two kinds of software I just mentioned are exemplified by Adobe InDesign (high-end, high-price) and Microsoft Word (cheaper, less sophisticated). InDesign is the premier design software for just about anything. Books are simply one form of graphic design that Adobe is happy (for a monthly subscription) to offer the best software in the world for.

There’s not even any real argument here. Adobe has built the tool for page layout. It’s expensive, and there’s a steep learning curve. But once you learn it, InDesign is just the best.

The other side of the page-layout coin is Microsoft Word. We’ve had various incarnations of Microsoft’s office suite for decades now, and while Word is pretty good for writing and editing, it’s (at best) mediocre for page layout. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but setting up pages, sections, and margins can (and oftentimes will) cause unexpected shifts in your content.

Alongside these two programs, you can find a wide range of similar products. Scribus is open-source page layout (but again, tough to learn and handle). Google Docs can technically export a PDF, though the actual page layout options will be minimal.

And then there is Affinity Publisher.

The History of Affinity Publisher

Built by Serif, a British software and publishing company, the Affinity suite of tools was released as an affordable alternative to Adobe’s products. Publisher first launched in 2018 and became publicly available in 2019. At the time, the entire design suite (Publisher, Photo, and Designer) was sold through a perpetual license, meaning users paid once for access to the entire suite of tools indefinitely.

In 2020, Serif released their V2 for all three Affinity products, including a ‘StudioLink’ feature that allowed users to switch software on the fly with the same file. For professional designers, this is a huge benefit, allowing them to use Publisher for page layout, switch to Photo to touch up or adjust images, and then go right back to page design. Seamless. And all for that single license you only pay for once.

Then in 2024, Canva bought Serif. Yeah, that Canva, the online design platform with a wealth of free-to-use features. They purchased Serif, and for about a year after that purchase, Affinity users were simply waiting to see what the fate of this design software would be.

In 2025, Canva relaunched Affinity with a new logo. In a fairly surprising move, Canva opted to make Affinity completely free. Anyone can go to Canva’s Affinity site (here: https://www.affinity.studio/) and download the software. All you need is a Canva account to sign in, and all three Affinity tools are yours.

Affinity by Canva: Simple, Free Page Layout

Using Affinity by Canva to Build Book Files

I’ve been a fan of Affinity since it was released, and I’ve used it for all my book projects since then. Which is only a handful of books, but Affinity is perfect for someone like me. I don’t need to give Adobe $20+ a month for a tool I’m only going to need once or twice a year. But I do need the functionality to place images, align text into columns, and build custom page layouts. Things MS Word is really not equipped to do.

Affinity remains the perfect balance. Now with the software available for free from Canva, this is the right time to learn how to make the most of Affinity for your book layout.

I’m not going to give an exhaustive guide to using Affinity by Canva. The Help Center on Affinity’s studio site has specific details for getting started and learning the ins and outs of designing with Affinity.

What I am going to do is run through how to start, design, and export page files for your book.

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Step 1: Using Lulu’s Page Templates

The first step (after installing Affinity, of course) is to head to Lulu’s site and grab a template bundle. Select the bundle based on your page size.

With the bundle folder open, you’ll have a ton of preset files ready to use for your book. You’re going to need to find the IDML files (these are built for InDesign, but Affinity can open them).

Here I’ve noted the Interior Template files in the Spreads and Single Pages folders.

Opening the single-page file in Affinity creates 1 Master page (I’ll explain that momentarily) with some details about margins and bleeds.

The spreads template builds a file with multiple Master pages and inserts placeholder content to help you design your file. This includes copyright text, title and half-title pages, and some body text from Moby Dick as a sample.

I recommend using the Spread template if you’re new to page layout and need some guidance. Just remember to remove or replace ALL of the placeholder content before you export your print files. Anything in your file when you export will be in the PDF and will be printed when you order your proof.

If you’re more comfortable with page layout and designing, the single-page template gives you more freedom to modify and build your own pages with only the margin and bleed information required for your designs.

Step 2: Master Pages & Document Setup

For the most skilled designers, Master pages do a ton of work. The basic idea is that a Master page will include formatting elements that you’ll reuse across multiple pages in your file. Things like the header or footer are usually modified through a Master page, ensuring all pages based on that Master feature have uniform content. Things like page numbering, or the author/book title in the header are very common elements for a Master page.

In the image below, I’ve added a text box just above the safety margin (so in my header) that I’ve inserted a ‘page number’ placeholder. I’ve hidden the Lulu guides + specs information, so you’re just seeing the page with the margins and header text box.

Now, if you look at a page in my document, you’ll see the page numbering starting with 1.

Each subsequent page will have an ascending page number. And if I wanted front matter with no page numbers, I could design a unique Master page and insert it before these. The page numbering would still begin at 1 on the appropriate page, while the front matter would be unnumbered.

The first step of your layout process should always be to prepare your Master pages for each part of your book. Lulu’s design templates ensure you’re getting the right size, margins, and bleed for those Master pages, making it easier to build and export a PDF that will print correctly. For most books, you’ll want 2 Masters: one for the front/back matter and one for the rest of the book. If you’ve got some unique layouts or graphics, you might build a Master page to accommodate those as well.

Step 3: Adding & Designing Your Content

Once you’ve got your Master templates sorted out, you’re ready to add your book’s contents. The best way to do this is to create a text box, paste your text in, and then expand that text box across pages. Here’s a super short video of how this normally works:

0:00

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A short video showing how to manage text placement in Affinity by Canva

Each page contains a text box with your content flowing between them. It’s easy to insert distinct pages for chapter titles, images, graphs, or any other content. The text will still flow across the text boxes, and you’ll have control over the layout from page to page.

As you can see in the image, the text boxes are linked across pages, with the small arrow in each link showing the direct text flows. This allows you to easily edit all of your body text together while isolating specific pieces of text.

In this image, you can see that I added a new text box. When I reduced the size of the linked text box, all the text flowed to the following pages. Managing linked text boxes like this makes it easy to achieve complex layouts like a magazine or textbook design using columns, quotes, and any other content that requires unique formatting.

Step 4: Exporting a Print-Ready PDF

Once you’ve done all the design and layout work, including positioning your text, adding front matter, placing images, and formatting fonts, the final step before you can print your book is to export a print-ready PDF. There are a ton of options and presets you can manage when exporting a file from Affinity.

Here’s the basic export menu:

You’ll need to start by selecting PDF from the left. I recommended the (for print) option to make this easier, but (press ready) is also a fine PDF preset.

Now you’ve got a couple of important tune-ups to do before you export.

First, and this one is crucial, you need to change the ‘Area’ from ‘All Spreads’ to ‘All Pages’. If you neglect to do this, you’ll export a PDF set up with pages facing each other. Lulu’s system can’t accept facing pages—we need your PDF to be single page.

The second thing to adjust is the ‘Color space.’ This will most likely default to ‘As document,’ which will inherit the color space from the document. For Lulu’s printing, it’s advisable to change this to ‘CMYK’ to better match our printers’ hardware.

You should also verify that ‘Include bleed’ and ‘Include printer’s marks’ are both toggled off. Including these marks in your print PDF can be useful for smaller printers that do custom work. For Lulu’s automated printing systems, these marks are unnecessary.

With the export settings adjusted, you’re ready to create your Print PDF and upload it to Lulu!

Using Affinity for Simple, Consistent Page Layout

High-end design software is not cheap. Or at least, it didn’t used to be. As of January 2026 Adobe it still nearly $800 a year for their basic creative cloud, even with the steep discounts they offer (including student discounts and ‘first year’ rates). You could get just InDesign for around $270 for the year.

Or you can use Affinity by Canva for free.

If you’re creating a few books each year and are willing to learn Affinity, it’s really the best option. Far less expensive than InDesign, far more powerful than Word, and far easier to use than Scribus. For a professional designer, InDesign might still be worth it just for the absolute wealth of features (and you probably already know how to navigate InDesign).

For everyone else, Affinity is a clear winner. Page layout is simple and effective; the Vector and Photo tools make graphic and image editing possible without ever leaving the software, and you’ll have all the necessary options to export a PDF that Lulu can easily print.

Your Free Lulu Account

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