News

Saturday 2025-12-06

12:00 AM

John Oliver Auction Raises $1.5 Million For Public Broadcasting [Techdirt]

Not that long ago, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a good bit on why public broadcasting is important. The segment features a lot of insight from Penn State media professor Victor Pickard, whose work on the (many) problems with modern consolidated U.S. corporate media has always been essential reading:

But Oliver also walked the talk. Oliver and his staff subsequently held an auction for all sorts of notable items from the show’s history, including a Bob Ross painting, a prop replica of former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai’s goofy giant coffee mug, Russell Crowe’s jock strap, a bidet signed by a member of GWAR, and a giant gold-plated re-creation of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s balls:

“All told, the auction raised nearly $1.54 million for the Public Media Bridge Fund, which is assisting local public broadcasters in temporarily finding new funds in the wake of the CPB closure.”

After the White House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a “grift” last April, Republicans successfully pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated the CPB’s entire budget in July. That vote rescinded the $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting during 2026 and 2027, throwing the already shaky U.S. public broadcasting system into complete existential collapse.

As we’ve noted previously, authoritarians loathe journalism. But they really loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the often perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based corporate media.

A corporate media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible corruption and bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times, and countless others). A media that has increasingly stopped serving the public interest in loyal dedication to our increasingly unhinged extraction class.

One of the real harms of the cuts has been to already struggling local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations.

Many of those news stations operated in places where quality, local news is difficult if not impossible to find. Local papers have usually either closed or been purchased by soulless hedge funds that are buying papers, stripping them for parts, and hollowing out and homogenizing their coverage. Most U.S. “local news” is dominated by right wing propaganda pseudo-journalism broadcasters like Sinclair Broadcasting.

U.S. “public broadcasting” was already a shadow of the true concept after years of being demonized and defunded by the right wing, so even calling hybrid organizations like NPR “public” is a misnomer. Still, the underlying concept remains an ideological enemy of authoritarian zealots and corporations alike, because they’re very aware that if implemented properly, public media often provides a challenge to their well-funded war on informed consensus, as Pickard has long explained.

DC lawmakers and regulators (including Democrats) have been an absolute embarrassment on building and maintaining any sort of coherent media reform strategy. The evidence of that apathy has never been less subtle. So a hearty thank you to John Oliver for giving a shit.

Friday 2025-12-05

06:00 PM

Belgium’s Latest Pirate Site-Blocking Order Spares DNS Providers [TorrentFreak]

stop dangerOver the past few months, Belgium has issued several site-blocking orders targeting hundreds of piracy-linked domain names.

These blockades follow a newly instated two-step process. A local court first issues a blocking order, after which a special government body determines how it will be implemented. This process aims to prevent errors and overblocking.

Pirate DNS Blocking

While site blocking is common in Europe, these new Belgian blockades go beyond the typical ISP blockade. Similar to France and Italy , the orders were also directed at third-party public DNS resolvers.

The first implementation order, issued by the Belgian Department for Combating Online Infringement in April, required both ISPs and DNS resolvers to restrict access to pirate sites. Specifically, Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco’s OpenDNS were ordered to stop resolving over 100 pirate sites or face fines of €100,000 euros per day.

This order prompted significant pushback, most notably from Cisco, which ceased operating its OpenDNS service in Belgium soon after the order was announced.

In July, another order by the Belgian authority ordered blockades of shadow library websites, including Libgen, Zlibrary, and Anna’s Archive. This sweeping court order required ISPs to take action and also involved other intermediaries, such as hosting providers, search engines, and DNS services.

The underlying court order also called for a broad blockade of the Internet Archive’s Open Library service. While that was ultimately prevented, the involvement of a broad range of intermediaries caused concern about the escalating scope of the blocking orders.

New ‘Limited’ Piracy Blocking Order

On November 26, the Belgian Department for Combating Online Infringement published a new blocking implementation order. While this effectively adds dozens of new domains to the Belgian blocklist, the scope of this order is surprisingly limited.

Instead of casting a wide net, the order strictly targets Belgium’s five major Internet Service Providers: Proximus, Telenet, Orange Belgium, DIGI Communications Belgium, and Mobile Vikings.

From the order

orderbel

The list of “addressees” no longer includes the DNS resolvers, Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco, which were central targets in the April blocking order. There is no mention of hosting services, advertisers, or other intermediaries either.

The official implementation order does not mention the rightsholder(s) who requested the blocking measures, nor does it mention the targeted sites. However, the blocked domains are published in a separate spreadsheet showing that 1337x, Fmovies, Soap2Day, and Sflix branded domains are among the key targets.

From the blocking spreadsheet

block

Since these pirate targets often switch domain names to evade enforcement, rightsholders can submit a new list of mirror sites or proxies once per week, capped at 50 new domains per week. When these are approved by the Belgian Department, ISPs have five working days to update the blocklist.

Retreat or a Pause?

The decision to exclude DNS resolvers from this latest order is likely not a coincidence. It might very well be a direct consequence of the legal pushback Cisco initiated earlier this year, when it appealed the April blocking order at the Brussels Business Court.

This appeal was not without result, as the court suspended enforcement of that blocking order against Cisco in July, after which OpenDNS became available again in Belgium.

“The OpenDNS service has been reactivated in Belgium following a decision by the Brussels court to suspend enforcement of the order requiring Cisco to implement DNS blocking measures. The suspension of the order is pending a final ruling in the legal proceedings which remain ongoing,” a Cisco representative wrote in a community update.

To find out more about the suspended blocking measures, we reached out to the Belgian Department for Combating Online Infringement, which did not respond to our inquiry. Without further details, we don’t know whether the suspension also applies to other DNS resolvers. Confusingly, the official transparency portal makes no mention of an appeal at all.

It is likely, however, that since the legality of the blocking orders against third-party DNS resolvers is still being litigated, rightsholders have chosen to limit their blocking requests to ISPs. This would suggest that it’s a pause, not a formal retreat.

—

A copy of the latest blocking implementation order, published by the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright and Related Rights Committed Online and the Illegal Exploitation of Online Games of Chance on the 26th of November, 2025, is available here (pdf).

The full blocking spreadsheet, last updated November 26, is available at the Belgian government website.

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

03:00 PM

ACIP Meets To Decide If More Newborns Need To Catch Hepatitis B [Techdirt]

ACIP is meeting this week, which means we all get to clench our sphincters as we await whatever small, medium, or large sized horrors will come out of this panel of clowns.

It wasn’t always this way. ACIP, and the larger CDC, used to be the world standard when it came to government bodies dedicated to fighting infectious diseases. RFK Jr. did away with that earlier this year, when he disbanded every member of ACIP and installed a group mostly comprised of Dr. Nicks from the Simpsons in their place.

The focus of the agenda this week will be the vaccination schedule for hepatitis B, particularly the CDC’s long-held guidance for vaccinations to begin within 24 hours of birth. It’s really, really important to note that CDC guidance on this doesn’t take the form of a mandate. Parents have a choice on the timing of the vaccination. Instead, the CDC guidance does two primary things: it mandates coverage of the vaccine by insurance companies and it informs medical professionals on what to recommend to parents that understandably largely follow their doctors’ advice on the matter.

Because Kennedy has commented in the past that he believes this vaccine is responsible for autism disorder diagnoses, and because ACIP is staffed with his handpicked clowns, the medical community is holding its breath to see what decisions are made this week. Since CDC’s vaccination guidance in 1995, hep B infections among infants have dropped by a great deal and the resulting liver cancer in children has essentially gone away. Despite this, and despite just how brutal hep B is as a disease, Kennedy has been coming out against immunization, wielding misinformation as per usual.

On Tucker Carlson’s podcast in June, Kennedy falsely claimed that the hepatitis B birth dose is a “likely culprit” of autism.

He also said the hepatitis B virus is not “casually contagious.” But decades of research shows the virus can be transmitted through indirect contact, when traces of infected fluids like blood enter the body when people share personal items like razors or toothbrushes.

Hepatitis B causes incredible pain, cancer, and death. In children. And Kennedy is wildly wrong; it is incredibly contagious and particularly resilient on surfaces. And, again, this is a vaccine that is still voluntary by parents at birth. There is no government mandate for vaccination, only the recommended vaccination schedule.

Now, ACIP may be discussing the use of combo shots, as it has done in the recent past. That’s still fairly dumb, but it would be a far cry better than altering the recommendations for the first-24 hours immunization, which is a single vaccine, unpaired with any other. But ACIP is no longer trustworthy.

And that’s not me saying it. Take it from Republican Senator and do-nothing coward Bill Cassidy, who both had a heavy hand in getting Kennedy confirmed to DHS and who can’t be bothered to do more than say words about all the harm that confirmation is causing.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Thursday called a federal vaccine advisory committee “totally discredited” ahead of a vote on whether to change hepatitis B vaccine guidelines, an issue very close to the Louisiana physician. Writing Thursday on the social platform X, Cassidy specifically decried Aaron Siri, a prominent anti-vaccine lawyer who is presenting before the committee this week.

“Aaron Siri is a trial attorney who makes his living suing vaccine manufacturers. He is presenting as if an expert on childhood vaccines. The ACIP is totally discredited. They are not protecting children,” Cassidy wrote.

Neither are you, Senator. If you are interested in doing so, you can introduce articles of impeachment on RFK Jr. today. You’ll have plenty of support from the other side of the aisle, and likely a decent amount from your own.

I write this on Thursday and ACIP has already met. Because everything Kennedy touches is chaos, however, the panel moved its hep B vote to tomorrow, Friday, due to the panel not actually knowing what the fuck it was voting on.

At one point in Thursday’s session, committee member Dr. Joseph Hibbeln said that the group had seen three different versions of questions to vote on in the past 72 hours. A technical issue prevented the new voting language from being put up on slides. The presentation was later moved to the end of the agenda, to be displayed just before the vote. There were questions of how many questions members would be asked to vote on. There were no hard copies of the language available. 

“We’re trying to evaluate a moving target,” Hibbeln said. 

Panel members presented information on the prevalence of acute and chronic hepatitis B, and discussed transmission and safety data. Former board members and liaisons to medical organizations sharply criticized the presentations and said some data was mischaracterized. 

Dr. Jason Goldman, liaison to the ACIP for the American College of Physicians, called the meeting “completely inappropriate” and accused the panel of “wasting taxpayer dollars by not having scientific, rigorous discussion on issues that truly matter.” Goldman also highlighted that the hepatitis B birth dose is not mandated and that parents are encouraged to make decisions in consultation with their doctor. 

Chaos, confusion, misinformation, and so on. This is American health in RFK Jr.’s America. MAHA has become how it sounds phoenetically: a laugh track. A joke. And a deeply unfunny joke at that.

So now we wait for tomorrow to see just what horrors this gravel-voiced Cthulu of healthcare has in store for us. It seems the best we can hope for is probably advocacy for individual vaccines versus combo-shots. But I fear it’s going to be much, much worse than that. I’ve never seen a child writhing in pain as he or she dies from liver complications due to hepatitis B.

And I pray I never have to.

01:00 PM

Four Horsewomen of the GOP Apocalypse [The Status Kuo]

Image courtesy of Yahoo News

Speaker Mike Johnson faces a political apocalypse that could end his House majority and speakership early. And it’s largely thanks to four horsewomen who are busy fomenting disarray and destruction in his conference.

There’s crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of four crucial signatories to the Epstein Files discharge petition who also announced her early retirement, imperiling that narrow House majority.

Riding in her tracks is equally crazy Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also signed the Epstein petition. The attention-loving Mace reportedly told colleagues that she’s sick of Johnson and may resign early, too.

A surprise flank attack came from Elise Stefanik, a member of the GOP House leadership. Stefanik recently launched an ugly public spat and declared Johnson wouldn’t survive a roll-call vote.

Rounding things out is Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who normally sounds batshit crazy but in a moment of lucidity filed yet another discharge petition to ban congressional stock trading.

Like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy, and thanks in part to these four women reps, Speaker Johnson faces huge challenges in maintaining his slim majority, his control of House legislative procedures and the Speakership itself.

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The threat of early resignations

This congressional session, Republicans have consistently held only the barest of House majorities. And their 220 votes in that chamber have felt more like 219 with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) a constant thorn in the side of Speaker Johnson and Donald Trump. Massie has been a consistent “no” on all the major spending bills and was a co-sponsor of the Epstein Files Transparency Act along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

With Greene departing Congress on January 5, 2026, that number will effectively drop to 218. And more early GOP resignations may be in the works, now that Greene has opened the door. The New York Times reported yesterday, for example, that Mace is also eyeing the exits because of Johnson’s leadership:

Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has told people she is so frustrated with the Louisiana Republican and sick of the way he has run the House — particularly how women are treated there — that she is planning to huddle with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress.

After this news came out, Mace denied the report, but there are apparently people who told the Times otherwise.

The threat of early resignations looms especially large now that it’s clear Republicans will have a very tough time holding the majority. The special elections and the general election last month all point toward a Blue Wave with a shift in the double digits. Should that occur, it would even take out many of the more heavily gerrymandered GOP-friendly districts.

Nor is the outlook likely to improve. On the contrary, anger at House Republicans over issues like affordability is only likely to grow once the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA premium subsidies and its huge cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs hit in 2026.

There is even a world where early GOP retirements create an opportunity for the Democrats to retake the majority months before the midterm elections. I don’t want to speculate further here, but with only a handful of seats between the parties, any stampede by the GOP could trigger exactly such a disastrous outcome for Johnson and the current Republican majority.

Challenges to leadership

Short of losing the actual majority, Johnson faces the possibility of a leadership challenge from his own party. That was laid bare by Stefanik during her surprisingly sharp attacks upon Johnson over the past few days.

Stefanik was outraged, or so she says, because a provision she wanted inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act didn’t make it into the draft “four corners” legislation. That provision would have required the FBI to notify a member of Congress anytime an investigation was opened on that member—a curious provision for Stefanik to so publicly insist be jammed into the bill.

She wound up winning that fight with Johnson, but in the process dug some pretty deep claw marks. Stefanik criticized Johnson, calling him an ineffective leader who was losing control his party and its members going into the midterms.

“He certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow,” Stefanik warned in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership. It’s that widespread.”

Stefanik’s threat looms large because she is within the top ranks of Republican House leadership. Indeed, Johnson gave her a largely made-up position after she was put up, then taken down, for consideration to be Trump’s U.N. Ambassador.

Johnson tried to turn down the heat, telling reporters, after the two came to agreement on her NDAA provision being added, that “I never understood what all the disturbance was about.” Johnson attributed their spat to a breakdown in communication.

But the threat to file a motion to vacate is now out there. Johnson’s rubber stamping of everything Trump wants has made the GOP within the House of Representatives nearly superfluous—so much so that they could be on break and absent from Washington for months and he just didn’t care. That’s not what many of these members think they signed up for and ran on.

And as another continuing resolution to fund the government looms in January, with another partial government shutdown again possible if they cannot cobble the votes together to pass appropriations bills or yet another extension, Johnson may face a full revolt leading to his ouster. It’s not as if the House GOP hasn’t shown itself willing in the past to collapse into rudderless leadership territory.

Loss of control of the floor

Short of losing his majority or his speakership, Johnson is keenly aware that he is losing his grip on what makes it to the House floor. Under normal circumstances, a House Speaker controls the legislative agenda by controlling the powerful Rules Committee, where bills can get voted out and onto the floor with certain “rules” attached, or where they can languish and die.

There are two ways to sink the Speaker’s ambitions, none of which would have ever happened when Nancy Pelosi was in charge.

The first is to take down the rule on a bill sitting in the Rules Committee. We saw this happen multiple times with the far-right House Freedom Caucus, which used to signal its displeasure with House leadership by voting down the rules on bills that Speaker Johnson wanted to move forward.

And we just saw it threatened again, this time by Mace. As Punchbowl News reported at the height of the public spat between herself and Johnson,

Stefanik is so frustrated that she’s prepared to tank the must-pass defense bill — approved by lawmakers every year for more than six decades — if the speaker doesn’t include a provision requiring the FBI to alert Congress if it opens a counterintelligence investigation into an elected official or candidate. Democrats are opposed to this provision.

“I’ll take down the rule,” Stefanik told us in an interview. Stefanik has made this message clear to House GOP leaders as well.

A second way to thwart the Speaker and cause loss of control of the floor is the now infamous Discharge Petition. The one that forced the Epstein Files Transparency Act to the House floor was so embarrassing to Johnson that he actively refused to seat Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who would be the 218th vote on the petition, for over 50 days. When that petition finally did its thing, it precipitated an avalanche of GOP defections that caused Trump to preemptively grant permission to Republicans to vote for the bill, even after he had worked so hard for so long to stop it.

Now representatives like Luna are rubbing further salt in that wound by filing even more discharge petitions. In so doing, Luna is telling Johnson that she doesn’t care what his legislative agenda or timeline is, because she is willing to press ahead with her own.

Johnson: women “can’t compartmentalize”

Johnson recently claimed women “can’t compartmentalize” their thoughts. He probably regrets saying this and infuriating his detractors even more.

The possible resignations, challenges to leadership and blatant procedural bypasses of Johnson are collectively converging to cast him as ineffective, vulnerable and out of touch. This will make the task of holding the Republican Party together as they face the storm of next year’s midterms extremely challenging.

And Johnson is learning in real time that, despite the mental shortcomings he claims they have, Republican women apparently can direct their anger just fine.

11:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Stuck In The Middleware With Youth [Techdirt]

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

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Ben is joined by Vaishnavi J, former head of youth policy at Meta and founder and principal of Vyanams Strategies, a product advisory firm that helps companies, civil society, and governments build safer age appropriate experiences. Prior to founding Vys, she led video policy at Twitter, built its safety team in APAC and was Google’s child safety polciy lead in APAC. Together Ben and Vaishnavi discuss:

09:00 AM

08:00 AM

Like Apple, Google’s AI News Tech Misinterprets Stories, Generates Gibberish Headlines [Techdirt]

Despite all the recent hype about “AI,” the technology still struggles with very basic things and remains prone to significant errors. Which makes it maybe not the best idea to rush the nascent technology into widespread adoption in industries prone to all sorts of deep-rooted problems already (like say, health insurance, or journalism).

We’ve already seen how news outlets have gotten egg on their faces by using AI “journalists” who completely make up sources, quotes, facts, and other information. But earlier this year, Apple also had to pull their major news AI system offline after it repeatedly couldn’t generate accurate headlines, and in many instances just fabricated major events that never happened (whoops!).

Google has recently also been experimenting with letting AI generate news headlines for its Discover feature (the news page you reach by swiping right on Google Pixel phones), and the results are decidedly… mixed. The technology, once again, routinely misconstrues meaning when trying to sum up news events:

“I also saw Google try to claim that “AMD GPU tops Nvidia,” as if AMD had announced a new groundbreaking graphics card, when the actual Wccftech story is about how a single German retailer managed to sell more AMD units than Nvidia units within a single week’s span.”

Other times, it just produces gibberish:

“Then there are the headlines that simply don’t make sense out of context, something real human editors avoid like plague. What does “Schedule 1 farming backup” mean? How about “AI tag debate heats”?

Google has already redirected a ton of advertising revenue away from journalists who do actual work, and toward its own synopsis and search tech. Now it’s effectively rewriting the headlines editors and journalists (the good ones, anyway) spend a lot of time working on to try and be as accurate and inviting as possible. And they’re doing an embarrassingly shitty job of it.

Not that the media companies themselves have been doing much better. Most major American media companies are owned by people who see AI not as a way to improve journalism quality and make journalism more efficient, but as a path toward cutting corners and undermining labor.

Meanwhile, in the quest for massive engagement at impossible scale, tech giants like Meta and Google have simply stopped caring so much about quality and accuracy. The results are everywhere, from Google News’ declining quality, to substandard search results, to the slow decline of key, popular services, to platforms filled with absolute clickbait garbage. It’s not been great for informed consensus or factual reality.

You’d like to think that ultimately we emerge from the age of slop with not just better technology, but a better understanding of how to use and adapt to it. But the problem remains that most of the folks dictating the trajectory of this emerging technology have no idea what they’re doing, have prioritized making money over the public interest, or are just foundationally shitty human beings bad at their jobs.

06:00 AM

A Surveillance Mandate Disguised As Child Safety: Why The GUARD Act Won’t Keep Us Safe [Techdirt]

A new bill sponsored by Sen. Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Blumenthal (D-CT), Sen. Britt (R-AL), Sen. Warner (D-VA), and Sen. Murphy (D-CT) would require AI chatbots to verify all users’ ages, prohibit minors from using AI tools, and implement steep criminal penalties for chatbots that promote or solicit certain harms. That might sound reasonable at first, but behind those talking points lies a sprawling surveillance and censorship regime that would reshape how people of all ages use the internet.

The GUARD Act may look like a child-safety bill, but in practice it’s an age-gating mandate that could be imposed on nearly every public-facing AI chatbot—from customer-service bots to search-engine assistants. The GUARD Act could force countless AI companies to collect sensitive identity data, chill online speech, and block teens from using the digital tools that they rely on every day.

EFF has warned for years that age-verification laws endanger free expression, privacy, and competition. There are legitimate concerns about transparency and accountability in AI, but the GUARD Act’s sweeping mandates are not the solution.

Young People’s Access to Legitimate AI Tools Could Be Cut Off Entirely. 

The GUARD Act doesn’t give parents a choice—it simply blocks minors from AI companions altogether. If a chat system’s age-verification process determines that a user is under 18, that user must then be locked out completely. The GUARD Act contains no parental consent mechanism, no appeal process for errors in age estimation, and no flexibility for any other context.

The bill’s definition of an AI “companion” is ambiguous enough that it could easily be interpreted to extend beyond general-use LLMs like ChatGPT, causing overcautious companies to block young people from other kinds of AI services too. In practice, this means that under the GUARD Act, teenagers may not be able to use chatbots to get help with homework, seek customer service assistance for a product they bought, or even ask a search engine a question. It could also cut off all young people’s access to educational and creative tools that have quickly become a part of everyday learning and life online.

By treating all young people—whether seven or seventeen—the same, the GUARD Act threatens their ability to explore their identities, get answers to questions free from shame or stigma, and gradually develop a sense of autonomy as they mature into adults. Denying teens’ access to online spaces doesn’t make them safer, it just keeps them uninformed and unprepared for adult life.  

The GUARD Act’s sponsors claim these rules will keep our children safe, but that’s not true. Instead, it will undermine both safety and autonomy by replacing parental guidance with government mandates and building mass surveillance infrastructure instead of privacy controls.

All Age Verification Systems Are Dangerous. This Is No Different. 

Teens aren’t the only ones who lose out under the GUARD Act. The bill would require platforms to confirm the ages of all users—young and old—before allowing them to speak, learn, or engage with their AI tools.

Under the GUARD Act, platforms can’t rely on a simple “I’m over 18” checkbox or self-attested birthdate. Instead, they must build or buy a “commercially reasonable” age-verification system that collects identifying information (like a government ID, credit record, or biometric data) from every user before granting them access to the AI service. Though the GUARD Act does contain some data minimization language, its mandate to periodically re-verify users means that platforms must either retain or re-collect that sensitive user data as needed. Both of those options come with major privacy risks.  

EFF has long documented the dangers of age-verification systems:

  • They create attractive targets for hackers. Third-party services that collect users’ sensitive ID and biometric data for the purpose of age verification have been repeatedly breached, exposing millions to identity theft and other harms.
  • They implement mass surveillance systems and ruin anonymity. To verify your age, a system must determine and record who you are. That means every chatbot interaction could feasibly be linked to your verified identity.
  • They disproportionately harm vulnerable groups. Many people—especially activists and dissidents, trans and gender-nonconforming folks, undocumented people, and survivors of abuse—avoid systems that force identity disclosure. The GUARD Act would entirely cut off their ability to use these public AI tools.
  • They entrench Big Tech. Only the biggest companies can afford the compliance and liability burden of mass identity verification. Smaller, privacy-respecting developers simply can’t compete.

As we’ve said repeatedly, there’s no such thing as “safe” age verification. Every approach—whether it’s facial or biometric scans, government ID uploads, or behavioral or account analysis—creates new privacy, security, and expressive harms.

Vagueness + Steep Fines = Censorship. Full Stop. 

Though mandatory age-gates provide reason enough to oppose the GUARD Act, the definitions of “AI chatbot” and “AI companion” are also vague and broad enough to raise alarms. In a nutshell, the Act’s definitions of these two terms are so expansive that they could cover nearly any system capable of generating “human-like” responses—including not just general-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT, but also more tailored services like those used for customer service interactions, search-engine summaries, and subject-specific research tools.

The bill defines an “AI chatbot” as any service that produces “adaptive” or “context-responsive” outputs that aren’t fully predetermined by a developer or operator. That could include Google’s search summaries, research tools like Perplexity, or any AI-powered Q&A tool—all of which respond to natural language prompts and dynamically generate conversational text.

Meanwhile, the GUARD Act’s definition of an “AI companion”—a system that both produces “adaptive” or “context-responsive” outputs and encourages or simulates “interpersonal or emotional interaction”—will easily sweep in general-purpose tools like ChatGPT. Courts around the country are already seeing claims that conversational AI tools manipulate users’ emotions to increase engagement. Under this bill, that’s enough to trigger the “AI companion” label, putting AI developers at risk even when they do not intend to cause harm.

Both of these definitions are imprecise and unconstitutionally overbroad. And, when combined with the GUARD Act’s incredibly steep fines (up to $100,000 per violation, enforceable by the federal Attorney General and every state AG), companies worried about their legal liability will inevitably err on the side of prohibiting minors from accessing their chat systems. The GUARD Act leaves them these options: censor certain topics en masse, entirely block users under 18 from accessing their services, or implement broad-sweeping surveillance systems as a prerequisite to access. No matter which way platforms choose to go, the inevitable result for users is less speech, less privacy, and less access to genuinely helpful tools.

How You Can Help

While there may be legitimate problems with AI chatbots, young people’s safety is an incredibly complex social issue both on- and off-line. The GUARD Act tries to solve this complex problem with a blunt, dangerous solution.

In other words, protecting young people’s online safety is incredibly important, but to do so by forcing invasive ID checks, criminalizing AI tools, and banning teens from legitimate digital spaces is not a good way out of this.

The GUARD Act would make the internet less free, less private, and less safe for everyone. It would further consolidate power and resources in the hands of the bigger AI companies, crush smaller developers, and chill innovation under the threat of massive fines. And it would cut off vulnerable groups’ ability to use helpful everyday AI tools, further stratifying the internet we know and love.

Lawmakers should reject the GUARD Act and focus instead on policies that provide transparency, more options for users, and comprehensive privacy for all. Help us tell Congress to oppose the GUARD Act today.

Originally posted to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

05:00 AM

How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and Notebooks [Write, Publish, and Sell]

How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and Notebooks

When you design and customize a planner or journal, you open up a new product line that fits almost any niche. From fitness logs to meal planners, from writing trackers to personalized journals, these low-content books let you reach new buyers and build your brand.

Whether that means building a business around selling custom notebooks, supplementing your other products or services by selling planners, or simply making yourself a journal for your own use, this guide will help you understand how to self-publish a planner, journal, or notebook using Lulu.


Why Create a Custom Planner, Journal, or Notebook? 

You could buy a mass-produced planner from the store. But when you design your own, you have full customization and control. You pick the size and layout, add your own prompts, and control your branding. A lot of writers, artists, and creators want their own notebooks and designs for themselves. A custom planner or journal also makes a terrific gift around the holidays.

Unlike store-bought planners, a self-designed planner or notebook can be tailored precisely to your needs or the preferences of your audience. Perfect for individuals with niche content and businesses looking for unique, branded products.  

And with this control comes the opportunity for monetization. For example, if you’re between book releases, you could create a custom planner or notebook. The cover might feature a rendering of your most popular character from past books, and you could include references to your past stories (or previews of an upcoming book) in the planning pages. 

For businesses, this opportunity is even bigger. A simple journal with your company logo and branding makes amazing marketing materials. Likewise, depending on the products you sell, you might offer accompanying notebooks or workbooks (or class creators) or a companion notebook to go with an annual guide or manual.  

Additionally, you can use Lulu’s print-on-demand to create a variety of custom notebook or planner designs:

  • Include themed designs or references tied to your existing work, such as artwork or quotes from your books.  
  • Offer planners as exclusive merchandise to build your brand and your audience’s loyalty.
  • Include personalized or custom elements your customers select while shopping.
  • Offer seasonal or guided content based on your expertise or interests.

You’ve just created an additional means of earning money, marketing to your audience, and keeping your readers happy!

Who Custom Notebooks & Planners Are For

Even with all of our digital notetakers and AI assistants, taking notes by hand is still a common and effective method. Numerous studies over the years have shown that taking handwritten notes leads to better retention and test scores (among students).

Anyone who likes to take notes, create plans, or just journal can use Lulu to print their own custom designs. But these low-content books are most often created by:

  • Teachers or coaches as a structured tool for students or clients.
  • Online course creators who need a physical product to supplement their digital offering.
  • Authors and entrepreneurs who want a companion product for their readers.
  • Businesses that need branded organizers, trackers, or logbooks, either for internal use or to sell.

Create Your Own Planner, Journal, or Notebook

Low-content books share some basic features—blank or lined pages, maybe trackers or prompts. But because you’re designing them, you can tailor everything: layout, branding, line spacing, dot grid or blank pages, and anything else you can imagine. In short, you’re creating a product you can sell.

If you want a planner, it can be daily, weekly, or monthly. And it might have columns for the days or use a full page for each day. You might have specific events (like dinner, going to the gym, birthdays, and holidays) pre-set. Or it might be a blank slate, ready for your fans to fill in.  

Likewise, you might create a journal specifically for sleep tracking or meal planning. Notebooks can be blank, lined, dot grid, or some combination of the three!

Here’s a quick guide to building your first custom planner, journal, or notebook using Lulu.

1. Use Templates for Design 

The best way to build your project is to start with a template. You can find lots of free planners, journals, and notebook pages on Lulu’s Resources page. We start with simple designs that you can download for free. These versatile starter designs can be easily tailored to your specific needs. 

Simple designs are best because you can customize them to fit your needs. This means you’ll need a platform for editing and customizing your pages.

2. Choose a Design Platform 

You can find an array of tools that will help you customize your planner, journal, or notebook pages (and design your cover when the time comes!). Here are my top four picks for easy-to-use design software:

  1. Adobe InDesign - This is the top-tier, most versatile, and most complex option. InDesign is widely considered the most powerful page layout tool. If you’re good with graphic design or have a complicated notebook design in mind, InDesign is the way to go.
  2. Affinity Publisher - Affinity’s suite of design software is a lower-cost alternative to Adobe’s options. Publisher isn’t quite as robust as InDesign, but for most notebook designs, you’ll be able to achieve everything you need. I’m a big fan of Affinity and use it for my personal projects.
  3. Canva - When it comes to free design tools, Canva is the top choice. They have been offering easy-to-use, free design tools for years and continue to innovate their platform. Canva does keep some of their features behind a paid plan, but you can still create basic customizations for your notebook pages.
  4. Adobe Express - Adobe’s free alternative to Canva, Adobe Express is a comparable tool that is similarly limited by being free to use. You’ll have just about the same options as Canva, so choosing Express is more about personal preference than functionality. 

3. Customize Your Pages 

Once you’re set up with a template and design platform, you’re ready to create custom pages! For notebooks, planners, and journals, there are a few common designs that consumers tend to be interested in.

  • Page Layouts - Plan for daily, weekly, or monthly views depending on the planner's focus. If your planner has a theme, you might look for similar planners and see if they use a daily, weekly, or monthly format.
  • Special Sections - Add notes, trackers, or quotes. Think about your audience and what they might find useful or interesting. If you’re an author, you might include references to your books. A fitness journal might have goal tracking or exercise notes sections. 
  • Graphics - While notebooks and planners are meant to be used, an eye-catching cover is a big selling point. 

4. Export a Print-Ready PDF 

Export your final custom design as a PDF. Always look for ‘print-ready’ or other high-quality print settings. This will ensure your file meets Lulu’s print requirements and looks amazing once printed. Here’s an InDesign tutorial we created to show you how to set up and export your files for printing on Lulu. 

5. Upload and Publish with Lulu

Once your print-ready PDF is ready, sign in to your Lulu account. Create a new project and select ‘Print Books’ for the project type.

How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and Notebooks

Add some information about your notebook, like a title and language. If you intend to sell on the Lulu Bookstore or use Lulu’s retail distribution, you’ll add copyright, ISBN, and other metadata too. 

On the Design step, you’ll choose your trim size, binding, and paper type. Upload your interior file and cover. Set up your description and keywords (important for discoverability), and add payees if you’re using Lulu’s retail options. Then, please, for the love of everything paper and ink, order a proof copy. 

If you’re happy with the print, your custom planner is ready to sell on Lulu, through retailers, and on your own site with Lulu Direct.

Customizable Planner, Journal, and Notebook Ideas

I love notebooks. I’ve written about this before, but taking notes by hand is one of my favorite things to do. And I love planners, even if I’m terrible at committing to one and using it every day (like I should). 

With so many free templates and the ease with which you can customize your project, you basically have endless options. And if you can’t find one that suits your needs, you can always create your own!

To help you create, here are a few of my favorite print-on-demand planner, notebook, and journal ideas.

Create a Custom Journal, Notebook or Planner | Lulu
Free online tools to create, sell & print custom notebooks, journals, & more. It’s easy to make a personalized notebook to sell with print-on-demand.
How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and NotebooksLulu
How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and Notebooks

Daily Writing Journal

Create a daily planner where you can include your page count goals, notes about the scene you’ll be working on, and motivational quotes. Writing journals takes a lot of forms, but a planner or task manager is not one you see often.

Exercise Planner

One of the more common planner designs, you can create a journal and planner with exercises built in. If you’re a fitness instructor or just passionate about physical health, an exercise planner might be the perfect way to share your routine!

Curriculum Calendar

Not that I want to suggest teachers do any more work than they already do, but the opportunity to facilitate learning with a custom planner is huge. Each student could have a planner in hand with lesson details and assignments already included. Particularly with digital and distance learning becoming more common, having a clear view of the semester and the assignments is vital. If you want extra credit, you could even personalize each planner with the student's name.

Diet & Meal Planner

Every week, I sit down with my wife, and we put together a meal plan for the week, then a shopping list for groceries. And every week, I think to myself, ‘this would make a great little notebook.’

If you’re dieting or on a restricted diet, a planner might even be a necessity. So, why not craft one unique to your needs?

Hobby & Skills Tracker

Maybe you just took up a new hobby. Or you’ve decided to learn German. Or the trombone.

Whatever skill or hobby you’ve taken up, you can create a custom tracker, planner, and practice calendar. It’s a great way to stay on top of learning that new skill and to document your growing abilities.

Create a Custom Journal, Notebook or Planner | Lulu
Free online tools to create, sell & print custom notebooks, journals, & more. It’s easy to make a personalized notebook to sell with print-on-demand.
How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and NotebooksLulu
How to Create and Sell Personalized Planners, Journals, and Notebooks

How to Sell Your Custom Planner, Notebook, or Journal with Lulu

Once your project is complete, you’re ready to start selling. Lulu offers three simple paths:

Sell on Lulu.com

Publish your planner in the Lulu Bookstore and share the link with your audience.

This is the easiest way to start selling immediately. Your fans can buy from a dedicated sales page on Lulu, and you’ll earn 80% of the revenue. We manage all of that for you, paying you out via check or PayPal.

Sell on Your Own Website with Lulu Direct

If you want full control over pricing, branding, and customer experience, connect Lulu Direct with:

  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce (WordPress)
  • Wix

When you use Lulu Direct, your customers order from your own store, and we handle the printing and shipping—with white label packing slips to keep your brand front and center. You’ll earn all of the revenue from each sale and have better access to your customers’ data for future marketing efforts.

This is the best setup for creators running a planner or notebook business or adding a print-on-demand planner to their existing products.

Sell Personalized Planners with the Lulu Print API

If you want to offer customized planners—user names, start dates, variable content, custom layouts—the Print API automates everything. For each unique planner, you’ll create a custom PDF using your own developer. Lulu’s API creates a product SKU for that design and matches that to your chosen size, binding, ink, and paper needs.

After that, we print and ship for you, offering a fully automated shopping experience for your customers. 

The API connection is free to use and great for:

  • Apps and SaaS platforms
  • Customized fitness or coaching programs
  • Subscription models that refresh each quarter
  • Personalized journals

Benefits of Selling Custom Planners, Journals, and Notebooks 

Creating custom projects isn’t just a creative outlet—it’s a business opportunity. Custom planners, journals, and notebooks are a popular trend right now. If you’ve got an audience who might use a planner, journal, or notebook, offering your own is a great way to supplement your income. And it gets your brand out there, potentially leading to new customers.

Journals and planners are popular and unique ways to take advantage of print-on-demand. Along with the relative ease in creating a custom planner, printable planners offer a terrific opportunity to establish additional revenue streams for your publishing (or other) business.

EU’s Top Court Just Made It Literally Impossible To Run A User-Generated Content Platform Legally [Techdirt]

The Court of Justice of the EU—likely without realizing it—just completely shit the bed and made it effectively impossible to run any website in the entirety of the EU that hosts user-generated content.

Obviously, for decades now, we’ve been talking about issues related to intermediary liability, and what standards are appropriate there. I am an unabashed supporter of the US’s approach with Section 230, as it was initially interpreted, which said that any liability should land on the party who contributed the actual violative behavior—in nearly all cases the speaker, not the host of the content.

The EU has always held itself to a lower standard of intermediary liability, first with the E-Commerce Directive and more recently with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which still generally tries to put more liability on the speaker but has some ways of shifting the liability to the platform.

No matter which of those approaches you think is preferable, I don’t think anyone could (or should) favor what the Court of Justice of the EU came down with earlier this week, which is basically “fuck all this shit, if there’s any content at all on your site that includes personal data of someone you may be liable.”

As with so many legal clusterfucks, this one stems from a case with bad facts, which then leads to bad law. You can read the summary as the CJEU puts it:

The applicant in the main proceedings claims that, on 1 August 2018, an unidentified third party published on that website an untrue and harmful advertisement presenting her as offering sexual services. That advertisement contained photographs of that applicant, which had been used without her consent, along with her telephone number. The advertisement was subsequently reproduced identically on other websites containing advertising content, where it was posted online with the indication of the original source. When contacted by the applicant in the main proceedings, Russmedia Digital removed the advertisement from its website less than one hour after receiving that request. The same advertisement nevertheless remains available on other websites which have reproduced it.

And, yes, no one is denying that this absolutely sucks for the victim in this case. But if there’s any legal recourse, it seems like it should be on whoever created and posted that fake ad. Instead, the CJEU finds that Russmedia is liable for it, even though they responded within an hour and took down the ad as soon as they found out about it.

The lower courts went back and forth on this, with a Romanian tribunal (on first appeal) finding, properly, that there’s no fucking way Russmedia should be held liable, seeing as it was merely hosting the ad and had nothing to do with its creation:

The Tribunalul Specializat Cluj (Specialised Court, Cluj, Romania) upheld that appeal, holding that the action brought by the applicant in the main proceedings was unfounded, since the advertisement at issue in the main proceedings did not originate from Russmedia, which merely provided a hosting service for that advertisement, without being actively involved in its content. Accordingly, the exemption from liability provided for in Article 14(1)(b) of Law No 365/2002 would be applicable to it. As regards the processing of personal data, that court held that an information society services provider was not required to check the information which it transmits or actively to seek data relating to apparently unlawful activities or information. In that regard, it held that Russmedia could not be criticised for failing to take measures to prevent the online distribution of the defamatory advertisement at issue in the main proceedings, given that it had rapidly removed that advertisement at the request of the applicant in the main proceedings.

With the case sent up to the CJEU, things get totally twisted, as they argue that under the GDPR, the inclusion of “sensitive personal data” in the ad suddenly makes the host a “joint controller” of the data under that law. As a controller of data, the much stricter GDPR rules on data protection now apply, and the more careful calibration of intermediary liability rules get tossed right out the window.

And out the window, right with it, is the ability to have a functioning open internet.

The court basically shreds basic intermediary liability principles here:

In any event, the operator of an online marketplace cannot avoid its liability, as controller of personal data, on the ground that it has not itself determined the content of the advertisement at issue published on that marketplace. Indeed, to exclude such an operator from the definition of ‘controller’ on that ground alone would be contrary not only to the clear wording, but also the objective, of Article 4(7) of the GDPR, which is to ensure effective and complete protection of data subjects by means of a broad definition of the concept of ‘controller’.

Under this ruling, it appears that any website that hosts any user-generated content can be strictly liable if any of that content contains “sensitive personal data” about any person. But how the fuck are they supposed to handle that?

The basic answer is to pre-scan any user-generated content for anything that might later be deemed to be sensitive personal data and make sure it doesn’t get posted.

How would a platform do that?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is no way that this is even remotely possible for any platform, no matter how large or how small. And it’s even worse than that. As intermediary liability expert Daphne Keller explains:

The Court said the host has to

  • pre-check posts (i.e. do general monitoring)
  • know who the posting user is (i.e. no anonymous speech)
  • try to make sure the posts don’t get copied by third parties (um, like web search engines??)

Basically, all three of those are effectively impossible.

Think about what the court is actually demanding here. Pre-checking posts means full-scale automated surveillance of every piece of content before it goes live—not just scanning for known CSAM hashes or obvious spam, but making subjective legal determinations about what constitutes “sensitive personal data” under the GDPR. Requiring user identification kills anonymity entirely, which is its own massive speech issue. And somehow preventing third parties from copying content? That’s not even a technical problem—it’s a “how do you stop the internet from working like the internet” problem.

Some people have said that this ruling isn’t so bad, because the ruling is about advertisements and because it’s talking about “sensitive personal data.” But it’s difficult to see how either of those things limit this ruling at all.

There’s nothing inherently in the law or the ruling that limits its conclusions to “advertisements.” The same underlying factors would apply to any third party content on any website that is subject to the GDPR.

As for the “sensitive personal data” part, that makes little difference because sites will have to scan all content before anything is posted to guarantee no “sensitive personal data” is included and then accurately determine what a court might later deem to be such sensitive personal data. That means it’s highly likely that any website that tries to comply under this ruling will block a ton of content on the off chance that maybe that content will be deemed sensitive.

As the court noted:

 In accordance with Article 5(1)(a) of the GDPR, personal data are to be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject. Article 5(1)(d) of the GDPR adds that personal data processed must be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date. Thus, every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay. Article 5(1)(f) of that regulation provides that personal data must be processed in a manner that ensures appropriate security of those data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing.

Good luck figuring out how to do that with third-party content.

And they’re pretty clear that every website must pre-scan every bit of content. They claim it’s about “marketplaces” and “advertisements” but there’s nothing in the GDPR that limits this ruling to those categories:

Accordingly, inasmuch as the operator of an online marketplace, such as the marketplace at issue in the main proceedings, knows or ought to know that, generally, advertisements containing sensitive data in terms of Article 9(1) of the GDPR, are liable to be published by user advertisers on its online marketplace, that operator, as controller in respect of that processing, is obliged, as soon as its service is designed, to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures in order to identify such advertisements before their publication and thus to be in a position to verify whether the sensitive data that they contain are published in compliance with the principles set out in Chapter II of that regulation. Indeed, as is apparent in particular from Article 25(1) of that regulation, the obligation to implement such measures is incumbent on it not only at the time of the processing, but already at the time of the determination of the means of processing and, therefore, even before sensitive data are published on its online marketplace in breach of those principles, that obligation being specifically intended to prevent such breaches.

No more anonymity allowed:

As regards, in the second place, the question whether the operator of an online marketplace, as controller of the sensitive data contained in advertisements published on its website, jointly with the user advertiser, must verify the identity of that user advertiser before the publication, it should be recalled that it follows from a combined reading of Article 9(1) and Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR that the publication of such data is prohibited, unless the data subject has given his or her explicit consent to the data in question being published on that online marketplace or one of the other exceptions laid down in Article 9(2)(b) to (j) is satisfied, which does not, however, appear to be the case here.

On that basis, while the placing by a data subject of an advertisement containing his or her sensitive data on an online marketplace may constitute explicit consent, within the meaning of Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR, such consent is lacking where that advertisement is placed by a third party, unless that party can demonstrate that the data subject has given his or her explicit consent to the publication of that advertisement on the online marketplace in question. Consequently, in order to be able to ensure, and to be able to demonstrate, that the requirements laid down in Article 9(2)(a) of the GDPR are complied with, the operator of the marketplace is required to verify, prior to the publication of such an advertisement, whether the user advertiser preparing to place the advertisement is the person whose sensitive data appear in that advertisement, which presupposes that the identity of that user advertiser is collected.

Finally, as Keller noted above, the CJEU seems to think it’s possible to require platforms to make sure content is never displayed on any other platform as well:

 Thus, where sensitive data are published online, the controller is required, under Article 32 of the GDPR, to take all technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security apt to effectively prevent the occurrence of a loss of control over those data.

To that end, the data controller must consider in particular all technical measures available in the current state of technical knowledge that are apt to block the copying and reproduction of online content.

Again, the CJEU appears to be living in a fantasy land that doesn’t exist.

This is what happens when you over-index on the idea of “data controllers” needing to keep data “private.” Whoever revealed sensitive data should have the liability placed on them. Putting it on the intermediary is misplaced and ridiculous.

There is simply no way to comply with the law under this ruling.

In such a world, the only options are to ignore it, shut down EU operations, or geoblock the EU entirely. I assume most platforms will simply ignore it—and hope that enforcement will be selective enough that they won’t face the full force of this ruling. But that’s a hell of a way to run the internet, where companies just cross their fingers and hope they don’t get picked for an enforcement action that could destroy them.

There’s a reason why the basic simplicity of Section 230 makes sense. It says “the person who creates the content that violates the law is responsible for it.” As soon as you open things up to say the companies that provide the tools for those who create the content can be liable, you’re opening up a can of worms that will create a huge mess in the long run.

That long run has arrived in the EU, and with it, quite the mess.

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Trump Administration Stops Fucking Around On Immigration, Hangs Official ‘Whites Only’ Sign [Techdirt]

A recent shooting involving a former Afghani US counter-terrorism asset who worked with the CIA (!!!) has become the tragedy the Trump administration apparently needed to go from “consistently racist” to “openly racist.” The wounding of two National Guard troops led directly to the president spending the holiday doing what he always does on holidays: ranting about a bunch of shit rather than just wish the people he supposed to serving a happy Thanksgiving.

Trump went on a multi-day Truth Social bender, beginning with multiple invective-filled posts on Thanksgiving that led to a marathon 158-post (!!!) barrage over a three-hour period starting late Monday (December 1) night.

Trump dropped back-to-back “bangers” on Truth Social, both loaded with bigoted language that made it clear the US — under Trump — is only interested in importing white people.

This post first blamed Biden for some stuff before moving on (within the space of a sentence) to declaring the termination of asylum/visa applications from nations Trump considers to be unworthy of entering the former Land of Opportunity.

I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.

It appears the administration will decide which countries fit the “Third World” descriptor on a case-by-bigoted-case basis. This means the ten countries considered too inherently dangerous to be allowed to be part of the migration ecosystem are (lol) in the minority. If you’ve been paying attention, the original list of countries whose residents are forbidden from entering the US contains a lot of countries this administration wants to send deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to, despite much-friendlier countries (Costa Rica, for example) offering to take Garcia off the US government’s hands.

Mr. Trump’s June proclamation imposed a near-total restriction on the entry of people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. 

Another 19 countries have been added to Trump’s list of presumable “shit holes” — a list that includes many of his current infatuations:

The Trump administration has halted all immigration applications filed by people from 19 countries, its latest move to restrict legal immigration pathways following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., last week, according to internal government guidance and a source familiar with the move.

[…]

It also partially suspended the entry of travelers and immigrants from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

The latest proclamation means all 19 of these countries are on Trump’s shit list. The limitations are now effectively a complete ban on migration. And former residents of the listed nations can expect to be deported ASAFP. (“Feasibly.”)

That’s not even the end of it. The day after Trump’s thumb-wrecking Truth Social posting spree, DHS dog-killer-in-chief stepped up to the mic to promise even more racism and pain.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is recommending that the Trump administration’s travel ban list include between 30 to 32 countries, marking an increase from the current list of 19 countries, according to a source familiar with the matter.

[…]

Noem said Monday that, following a meeting with President Donald Trump, she recommended a “full travel ban” on “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

Huh. Will the US of A be added to that list, considering it generates plenty of “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” on its own? The simple fact is that immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more than their share of taxes, and generally do everything they can to stand on their own two feet, even when the government insists on depriving them of their bootstraps every time a bunch of bigots seize an inordinate amount of power.

And that leads us back to what’s always been propelling this mass deportation surge: the GOP’s racism, currently embodied by an aged, obese man with bad hair who has never wanted for anything in his life: Donald Trump.

His immediate follow-up (one [1] minute later [!!]) to his pseudo-Thanksgiving well-wishing was this post, which immediately attacked political opponents not just because they opposed him, but because they were not as white as Trump is (current level of spray tan notwithstanding).

I’m going to quote quite a bit of it (for which I kind of apologize) because you have to see all of this for yourself and ABSOLUTELY KNOW this has all been written by a man who currently holds the office of the President of the United States. (All emphasis mine.)

YOUR WALL OF TEXT AWAITS.

The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form. They put up with what has happened to our Country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.). As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…

Yeah. This is “racist grandpa” shit except that it’s being said by perhaps the most powerful man in the world. There are lies about the costs immigrants create, followed by a bunch of stereotypes, the casual use of the word “retarded” to describe another politician, and the well-past-the-point-of-insinuation claims that Ilhan Omar not only married her brother but comes from a country that shouldn’t even be considered a country.

And if you think that’s the worst thing Trump said about Somalia or Somalians within just the past three days, I have the sort of bad news you knew I’d be delivering when you first starting reading this sentence:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.

[…]

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

[…]

Trump also renewed his criticism of Omar, whose family fled the civil war in Somalia and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the U.S.

“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

Man, I can only hope that when the face-eating leopard party really starts stripping faces off the MAGA faithful, their asylum requests will be rejected with the same callous shrugging about how these people are “garbage” that shouldn’t be allowed to enter other countries because the United States “stinks” and their pasty white nationalists “contribute nothing” to the world at large. And I also hope these little Mussolini wannabes the GOP caters will take a look at history and wonder whether it’s truly worth it to be the worst Americans imaginable just because it plays well with the Nazis.

Kanji of the Day: 益 [Kanji of the Day]

益

✍10

小5

benefit, gain, profit, advantage

エキ　ヤク

ま.す

利益   (りえき)   —   profit
収益   (しゅうえき)   —   earnings
営業利益   (えいぎょうりえき)   —   operating profit
損益   (そんえき)   —   profit and loss
不利益   (ふりえき)   —   disadvantage
売却益   (ばいきゃくえき)   —   profit on sales
公益法人   (こうえきほうじん)   —   public-service corporation
国益   (こくえき)   —   national interest
有益   (ゆうえき)   —   beneficial
公益   (こうえき)   —   public interest

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 貫 [Kanji of the Day]

貫

✍11

中学

pierce, 8 1/3lbs, penetrate, brace

カン

つらぬ.く　ぬ.く　ぬき

一貫して   (いっかんして)   —   consistently
貫く   (つらぬく)   —   to go through
中高一貫校   (ちゅうこういっかんこう)   —   combined junior high and high school
一貫   (いっかん)   —   consistency
貫禄   (かんろく)   —   presence
一貫性   (いっかんせい)   —   consistency
貫通   (かんつう)   —   passing through (of a tunnel, bullet, etc.)
裸一貫   (はだかいっかん)   —   having nothing except one's body
貫入   (かんにゅう)   —   penetration
貫き通す   (つらぬきとおす)   —   to go through

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

01:00 AM

Simple and obvious… or nuanced and complicated? [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Some choices seem obvious, while others demand care and insight.

And some offerings are simple, while others have depth and multiple variables.

As you’ve probably guessed, the choices that are simple and obvious tend to do best in the mass market.

Where did you get your cup of coffee this morning? Did you visit a drive through Dutch Bros. or did you use a lever pull at home to pull a shot with beans you roasted and brewed yourself?

Most successful politicians and movements start in the bottom left and move their way toward simple and obvious.

Successful social media platforms race to the top right hand corner, but the most interesting and generative content online is probably not there…

Choose your quadrants carefully.

      

12:00 AM

The ‘Trump Phone’ Is An Unsurprising No Show Months After Promised Launch Date [Techdirt]

Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a “phone company” was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.

What was supposed to set the venture apart was a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone.

To pitch the phone to unsuspecting rubes, the original press release had a badly photoshopped rendition of the device, peppered with claims the phone would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.”

It didn’t take long for the folks behind the phone to pull all the made in America claims from the website. And while originally the phone was supposed to launch in August or September, not long ago it was delayed until October 31. As November drew to a close, there’s still no sign of the device.

Even the Trump Mobile service doesn’t appear to be all that functional. The Verge has found that “Trump Mobile” can’t competently ship out promised SIM cards:

“Let’s say I don’t fully trust the Trump Organization to be great stewards of my credit card information, so I used a virtual number provided by my bank. Once I’d handed over the virtual money, I got this message: “Thank you for your order of a Physical SIM, we’ll ship next business day via First Class USPS mail, no separate tracking number will be sent.” Just what I was looking for with my wireless service: a sense of mystery! Fast-forward two weeks, and that SIM card is still on its way.”

Customer service appears to function (The Verge did manage to get a refund), but again, this is likely just outsourced to the support centers for existing MVNOs, since “Trump Mobile” technically doesn’t really exist.

NBC journalists pre-ordered the Trump phone, and have found themselves strung along for weeks now, with one call center rep blaming the government shutdown. Despite this effort clearly having nothing to actually do with the government:

“That date passed without an update, and when NBC News followed up with the call center, an operator said the delivery would now be in the “beginning of December,” with no specific date.

The operator cited the government shutdown as a reason for the delay, without further explanation.”

One gets the sense that, like most things the Trump Organization does, there wasn’t much thought put into this whole affair. It was just another in a long line of lazy lifestyle branding cash grabs attempting to monetize the presidency, that nobody in Trumpland put much thought into.

In that sense, it’s perfectly representative of Trump and his supposed business acumen. Just a lazy, hollow simulacrum of a real thing, targeting an audience that’s consistently too dim to notice the difference.

Thursday 2025-12-04

11:00 PM

Court Empowers Hollywood in Race to Block “Wicked: For Good” Piracy [TorrentFreak]

mpa-eyeWhile Australia’s site-blocking mechanism has made few enemies since 2018, it hasn’t been known for being fast.

As discussed earlier this year, accuracy has traditionally been favored over speed, which is contrary to less cautious approaches taken in other countries.

After an unprecedented request and cooperation from the Federal Court, Australia will now step up several gears and show whether it can achieve both.

Not Just Another Blocking Order

When Justice Halley handed down his order in Universal City Studios LLC v Telstra Limited [2025] FCA 1390 on November 12, in most respects it was much like any other issued in recent years.

Member studios of the MPA – Universal, Disney, Paramount, Columbia, Warner Bros., Netflix and Apple (plus Viacom) requested an injunction under Section 115A of the Copyright Act, requiring around 50 local ISPs (operating as Telstra, Optus, Vocus, TPG Telecom, Aussie Broadband and Superloop) to block 52 overseas-based pirate streaming sites.

The copyright works applicants aim to protect necessarily play a key role in blocking proceedings. The difference in this case was the emphasis placed on the Universal Pictures movie Wicked: For Good and its inevitable appearance on high-traffic sites using familiar branding: HydraHD, Hurawatch, Braflix, Soap2Day, MyFlixer, HiAnime, OnionPlay, 123movies, SolarMovies, Gomovies, Fmovies – the list goes on……and on.

With Wicked: For Good‘s international release scheduled for November 17, Australian ISPs agreed to take all reasonable steps to disable access to 23 sites as a matter of urgency, with the remaining 29 to be blocked within the usual span of 15 business days.

In order to have a fighting chance against adaptable piracy platforms, a dynamic blocking order was issued, meaning that new domains and IP addresses could be added to deal with the inevitable countermeasures. Under normal circumstances, that can take time but for Wicked: For Good‘s theatrical release in Australia, time was already running out.

Additional Urgent Access Means

Less than two weeks after handing down the initial order, Justice Halley was handing down a second. Dated November 25, the order reveals that studios filed an urgent application for an order to tackle countermeasures deployed by the sites.

Operating from new domains, described in the order as “Additional Urgent Access Means”, the sites were already illegally distributing Wicked: For Good which was set to continue playing in theaters in Australia until the end of 2025.

New domains, IP addresses, and/or URLs are normally reported by rightsholders to the ISPs, who are then expected to respond within seven working days. If neither the respondent nor the court requires the matter to be relisted, the ISPs have a further 15 working days to disable access.

The prospect of the movie being distributed unhindered for free until Christmas Eve was considered unacceptable.

Urgent Additional Blocking Order

On November 28, just over two weeks after handing down the initial blocking order, Justice Halley authorized a second.

In response to the studios’ calls for urgency, Universal City Studios LLC v Telstra Limited [2025] FCA 1485 targeted the ‘Additional Urgent Access Means’ (new domain names/IP addresses/URLs) deployed by the sites to circumvent the previously implemented blocks.

The court recognized that standard procedures, which require notification and then a response period, would allow the sites to operate unhindered for at least 22 days.

“This would have the consequence that those sites would remain accessible for the majority of the theatrical release period for the film ‘Wicked: For Good’ which would have the likely effect of reducing the commercial success of the film as infringing copies of the film would be available without charge from the Additional Urgent Access Means,” Justice Halley noted in his order.

Rapid Response

To combat this, the new order required the ISPs to disable access to the new means of access, whether domain names, IP addresses, or URLs, by 4.00 pm on Friday, November 28, 2025. As far as we’re aware, a response time this short is unprecedented in Australia.

The ability to quickly respond to blocking countermeasures is crucial. For Australia, this is new territory but shouldn’t be unnecessarily difficult. However, as months of delay have decreased to weeks and now just days, rightsholders elsewhere in the world – especially in the live sports arena – still aren’t satisfied, even when blocking takes place within hours. In some areas, rightsholders consider 10 minutes to be reasonable.

Under those demands, Australia’s traditional accuracy would face challenges, with or without a reduction in overall piracy rates. Right now, despite aggressive worldwide blocking measures, piracy continues to trend up.

The orders dated November 12 and November 28 are available here and here

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

03:00 PM

RFK Jr., CDC Vaccine Guidance, A New Deputy CDC Director, And Measles In South Carolina [Techdirt]

Part of what makes it difficult for the importance of so much of what is happening in the Trump administration to break through to the public mind is that it’s all chaos, all the time. Moving layers deeper to get at specifics can actually make the problem worse, in fact. Take all of our coverage of RFK Jr., for instance. Recall all the topics on him alone that we’ve covered: his anti-vaxxer stances, his failures to advocate for his staff at HHS and its child agencies, his war on Tylenol, his swimming in a creek rife with human waste, his thoughts on sperm counts, his thoughts on circumcision, his hiring and firing practices at HHS, measles, ACIP, and goddamned chemtrails. How are you supposed to focus on anything meaningful in that cornucopia of chaos?

The problem is that it’s all interrelated. The overarching theme is that Kennedy is an anti-science ignoramus who espouses eugenic tendencies and puts his beliefs into practice as a matter of public policy and/or guidance, all of which leads to adverse impacts on the American public.

Let’s put some examples to that theme. We talked recently about how the CDC changed its webpage advising the public on concerns about vaccines and autism such that it now informs the public that there may indeed be a link. Its stated reason for doing this is, essentially, because a link between the two has not been “disproven”. As I mentioned in my post, that isn’t how science works. You don’t have to prove a negative in science. The onus of evidence is on the party making a claim. If there is no valid evidence to support a claim, the default is null, or to behave as if the claim is not true.

And now we know that Kennedy personally directed the change to the website.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. personally directed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update its website to contradict its longtime guidance that vaccines don’t cause autism, he told The New York Times in an interview published Friday.

“The whole thing about ‘vaccines have been tested and there’s been this determination made,’ is just a lie,” Kennedy said in the interview, which was conducted Thursday.

Again, this isn’t how science works. It’s not a “determination” that’s been made. It’s that the claim that autism and vaccines are linked has not been demonstrated through evidence and science and therefore is not considered a valid claim. If researchers want to do more peer-reviewed research, following good scientific methodology, have at it. More good data is always good. But we no more have to make a “determination” that vaccines don’t cause autism currently than we would need to make a “determination” that chocolate milk causes autism. A link has simply not been established, so we behave as though there is no link. That’s how this works.

Couple that with the even more recent news that Kennedy’s new Deputy Director of the CDC is Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham. Abraham himself has espoused many of the anti-vaxxer views that he shares with Kennedy.

Under Abraham’s leadership, the Louisiana health department waited months to inform residents about a deadly whooping cough (pertussis) outbreak. He also has a clear record of anti-vaccine views. Earlier this year, he told a Louisiana news outlet he doesn’t recommend COVID-19 vaccines because “I prefer natural immunity.” In February, he ordered the health department to stop promoting mass vaccinations, including flu shots, and barred staff from running seasonal vaccine campaigns.

While he doesn’t support lifesaving vaccines, he is a big fan of using the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the de-worming drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19, despite studies finding both ineffective against the viral infection. In his newsletter, Faust notes that in 2021, Abraham was the seventh-highest prescriber of ivermectin out of 12,000 practicing physicians in the state. This fits with his longer record of troubling prescriptions. In 2013, he was one of the top opioid prescribers.

So, Kennedy publicly puts anti-vaxxer talking points on display as public guidance via the CDC website, not to mention all the words that manage to tumble from his mouth, and continues to put anti-vaxxer and anti-medicine officials to lead HHS and its child agencies. What’s the result? Pertussis is on the rise. America is about to lose its elimination status of measles.

And, if you want to put a local lens on all of this, communities in South Carolina, that have essentially behaved as Kennedy would wish, are suffering from outbreaks of measles and still people won’t get vaccinated.

South Carolina’s measles outbreak isn’t yet as large as those in other states, such as New Mexico, Arizona, and Kansas. But it shows how a confluence of larger national trends — including historically low vaccination rates, skepticism fueled by the pandemic, misinformation, and “health freedom” ideologies proliferated by conservative politicians — have put some communities at risk for the reemergence of a preventable, potentially deadly virus.

“Everyone talks about it being the canary in the coal mine because it’s the most contagious infectious disease out there,” said Josh Michaud, associate director for global and public health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “The logic is indisputable that we’re likely to see more outbreaks.”

10% of children enrolled in Spartanburg County do not meet the vaccination requirements, including for the MMR vaccine. Many have religious exemptions, which are laughably easy to obtain and don’t require any affirmative description of what religion we’re even talking about. And the drop from 95% vaccinated status, the percentage in which a community will obtain herd immunity, happened in the last five or so years. Right when Kennedy became a nationally public figure. Go back a decade and its even worse.

The number of students in South Carolina who have been granted religious exemptions has increased dramatically over the past decade. That’s particularly true in the Upstate region, where religious exemptions have increased sixfold from a decade ago. During the 2013-14 school year, 2,044 students in the Upstate were granted a religious exemption to the vaccine requirements, according to data published by The Post and Courier. By fall 2024, that number had jumped to more than 13,000.

Public health officials are putting on mobile vaccination clinics in the area, but very few people are showing up. Misinformation, it seems, is more powerful than watching your fellow neighbors get infected with measles.

This all looks like chaos. And to a large degree it is chaos. But you can draw a straight line between the national bullshit that Kennedy and his cadre of sycophants are engaging in and the illness that is taking hold in places like Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Do not mistake one as being separate from the other. They are in direct relation.

Unlike the many causes Kennedy has claimed for autism.

01:00 PM

Pluralistic: A year in illustration (2025 edition) (03 Dec 2025) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


An artist at an easel, wearing a smock and holding a palette. The head of the artist and the subject in the oil painting have been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' which has angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth.

A year in illustration (2025 edition) (permalink)

One of the most surprising professional and creative developments of my middle-age has been discovering my love of collage. I have never been a "visual" person – I can't draw, I can't estimate whether a piece of furniture will fit in a given niche, I can't catch a ball, and I can't tell you if a picture is crooked.

When Boing Boing started including images with our posts in the early 2000s, I hated it. It was such a chore to find images that were open licensed or public domain, and so many of the subjects I wrote about are abstract and complex and hard to illustrate. Sometimes, I'd come up with a crude visual gag and collage together a few freely usable images as best as I could and call it a day.

But over the five years that I've been writing Pluralistic, I've found myself putting more and more effort and thought into these header images. Without realizing it, I put more and more time into mastering The GIMP (a free/open Photoshop alternative), watching tutorial videos and just noodling from time to time. I also discovered many unsuspected sources of public domain work, such as the Library of Congress, whose search engine sucks, but whose collection is astounding (tip: use Kagi or Google to search for images with the "site:loc.gov" flag).

I also discovered the Met's incredible collection:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search

And the archives of H Armstrong Roberts, an incredibly prolific stock photographer whose whole corpus is in the public domain. You can download more than 14,000 of his images from the Internet Archive (I certainly did!):

https://archive.org/details/h-armstrong-roberts

Speaking of the Archive and search engine hacks, I've also developed a method for finding hi-rez images that are otherwise very hard to get. Often, an image search will turn up public domain results on commercial stock sites like Getty. If I can't find public domain versions elsewhere (e.g. by using Tineye reverse-image search), I look for Getty's metadata about the image's source (that is, which book or collection it came from). Then I search the Internet Archive and other public domain repositories for high-rez PDF scans of the original work, and pull the images out of there. Many of my demons come from Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, an 18th century updating of a 11th century demonolgy text, which you can get as a hi-rez at the Wellcome Trust:

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cvnpwy8d

Five years into my serious collage phase, I find myself increasingly pleased with the work I'm producing. I actually self-published a little book of my favorites this year (Canny Valley), which Bruce Sterling provided an intro for and which the legendary book designed John Berry laid out fot me, and I'm planning future volumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

I've been doing annual illustration roundups for the past several years, selecting my favorites from the year's crop:

2022:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/25/a-year-in-illustration/

2023:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/21/collages-r-us/

2024:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/

It's a testament to how much progress I've made that when it came time to choose this year's favorites, I had 33 images I wanted to highlight. Much of this year's progress is down to my friend and neighbor Alistair Milne, an extremely talented artist and commercial illustrator who has periodically offered me little bits of life-changing advice on composition and technique.

I've also found a way to use these images in my talks: I've pulled together a slideshow of my favorite (enshittification-related) images, formatted for 16:9 (the incredibly awkward aspect ratio that everyone seems to expect these days), with embedded Creative Commons attributions. When I give a talk, I ask to have this run behind me in "kiosk mode," looping with a 10-second delay between each slide. Here's an up-to-date (as of today) version:

https://archive.org/download/enshittification-slideshow/enshittification.pptx

If these images intrigue you and you'd like hi-rez versions to rework on your own, you can get full rez versions of all my blog collagesin my "Pluralistic Collages" Flickr set:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720316719208

They're licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, though some subelements may be under different licenses (check the image descriptions for details). But everything is licensed for remix and commercial distribution, so go nuts!

A male figure in heavy canvas protective clothes, boots and gauntlets, reclining in the wheel-well of a locomotive, reading a book. The figure's head has been replaced with the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' whose mouth is covered with a black, grawlix-scrawled bar. The figure is reading a book, from which emanates a halo of golden light.
All the books I reviewed in 2025

The underlying image comes from the Library of Congress (a search for "reading + book") (because "reading" turns up pictures of Reading, PA and Reading, UK). I love the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of Enshittification and I'm hoping to get permission to do a lot more with it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/02/constant-reader/#too-many-books

A 1950s image of a cop with a patrol car lecturing a boy on a bicycle. Both the cop's head and the boy's head have been replaced with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The ground has been replaced with a 'code waterfall' effect as seen in the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies. The background has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The cop's uniform and car have been decorated to resemble the livery of the Irish Garda (police) and a Garda logo has been placed over the right breast of the cop's uniform shirt.
Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta

Mark Zuckerberg's ghastly Metaverse avatar is such a gift to his critics. I can't believe his comms team let him release it! The main image is an H Armstrong Roberts classic of a beat cop wagging his finger at a naughty lad on a bicycle. The Wachowskis' 'code waterfall' comes from this generator:

https://github.com/yeaayy/the-matrix

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

The classic Puck Magazine editorial cartoon entitled 'The King of All Commodities,' depicting John D Rockefeller as a man with grotesquely tiny body and a gigantic head, wearing a crown emblazoned with the names of the industrial concerns he owned. Rockefeller's head has been replaced with that of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar. The names of the industrial concerns have been replaced with the wordmarks for Scale AI, Instagram, Oculus and Whatsapp. The dollar-sign at the crown's pinnacle has been replaced with the Facebook 'f' logo. The chain around Rockefeller's neck sports the charm that Mark Zuckerberg now wears around his neck.
The long game

In my intro to last year's roundup, I wrote about Joseph Keppler, the incredibly prolific illustrator and publisher who founded Puck magazine and drew hundreds of illustrations, many of them editorial cartoons that accompanied articles that criticized monopolies and America's oligarch class. As with so much of his work, Keppler's classic illustration of Rockefeller as a shrimpy, preening king updates very neatly to today's context, through the simple expedient of swapping in Zuck's metaverse avatar.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here

A tuxedoed figure dramatically shoveling greenish pigs into a tube, from whose other end vomits forth a torrent of packaged goods. He has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's 'metaverse' avatar. He stands upon an endless field of gold coins. The background is the intaglioed upper face of the engraving of Benjamin Franklin on a US$100 bill, roughed up to a dark and sinister hue.

Facebook's fraud files

I love including scanned currency in my illustrations. Obviously, large-denomination bills make for great symbols in posts about concentrated wealth and power, but also, US currency is iconic, covered in weird illustrations, and available as incredibly high-rez scans, like this 7,300+ pixel-wide C-note:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._hundred_dollar_bill,_1999.jpg

It turns out that intaglio shading does really cool stuff when you tweak the curves. I love what happened to Ben Franklin's eyes in this one. (Zuck's body is another Keppler/Puck illo!)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/08/faecebook/#too-big-to-care

A club-wielding colossus in an animal pelt sits down on a rock, looming over a bawling baby surrounded by money-sacks. The colossus's head has been replaced the with EU flag. The baby's eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Staney Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech

This is another Keppler/Roberts mashup. Keppler's original is Teddy Roosevelt as a club-wielding ("speak softly and carry a big stick") trustbusting Goliath. The crying baby and money come from an H Armstrong Roberts tax-protest stock photo (one of the money sacks was originally labeled "TAXES"). This one also includes one of my standbys, Cryteria's terrific vector image of HAL 9000's glaring red eye, always a good symbolic element for stories about Big Tech, surveillance, and/or AI:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

A black and white image of an armed overseer supervising several chain-gang prisoners in stripes doing forced labor. The overseer's head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The prisoners' heads have been replaced with hackers' hoodies.
When AI prophecy fails

The chain-gang photo comes from the Library of Congress. That hacker hoodie is a public domain graphic ganked from Wikimedia Commons. I love how the HAL 9000 eye pops as the only color element in this one.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

A 1950s delivery man in front of a van. The image has been altered. The man's head has been replaced with a horse's head. The man is now wearing an Amazon delivery uniform gilet. The packages are covered with Amazon shipping tags, tape and logos. The van has the Amazon 'smile' logo and Prime wordmark. Behind the man, framed in the van's doorway, is the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
Checking in on the state of Amazon's chickenized reverse-centaurs

Another H Armstrong Roberts remix: originally, this was a grinning delivery man jugging several parcels. I reskinned him and his van with Amazon delivery livery, and matted in the horse-head to create a "reverse centaur" (another theme I return to often). I used one of Alistair Milne's tips to get that horse's head right: rather than trying to trace all the stray hairs on the mane, I traced them with a fine brush tool on a separate layer, then erased the strays from the original and merged down to get a nice, transparency-enabled hair effect.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles

The Earth seen from space. Hovering above it is Uncle Sam, with Trump's hair - his legs are stuck out before him, and they terminate in ray-guns that are shooting red rays over the Earth. The starry sky is punctuated by 'code waterfall' effects, as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.
The mad king's digital killswitch

The Uncle Sam image is Keppler's (who else?). In the original (which is about tariffs! everything old is new!), Sam's legs have becoome magnets that are drawing in people and goods from all over the world. The Earth-from-space image is a NASA pic. Love that all works of federal authorship are born in the public domain!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

A 1989 black and white photo of the Berlin Wall; peering over the wall is Microsoft's 'Clippy' chatbot.
Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall!

Clippy makes a perfect element for posts about chatbots. It's hard to think that Microsoft shipped a product with such a terrible visual design, but at the same time, I gotta give 'em credit, it's so awful that it's still instantly recognizable, 25 years later.

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

A massive goliath figure in a loincloth, holding a club and sitting on a boulder; his head has been replaced with the head of Benjamin Franklin taken from a US $100 bill. He is peering down at a Synology NAS box, festooned with Enshittification poop emojis, with angry eyebrows and black grawlix bars over their mouths.
A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage

Another remix of Keppler's excellent Teddy Roosevelt/trustbuster giant image, this time with Ben Franklin's glorious C-note phiz. God, I love using images from money!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/10/synology/#how-about-nah

A squadron of four heavily armed riot cops with batons in their hands. They wear visors, Oakleys and gaiters. Their badges have been replaced with chromed Apple logos. In the background is an Apple 'Think Different' wordmark. Looming in the foreground is Trump's candyfloss hair.
Apple's unlawful evil

Alistair Milne helped me work up a super hi-rez version of Trump's hair from his official (public domain) 2024 presidential portrait. Lots of tracing those fine hairs, and boy does it pay off. Apple's "Think Different" wordmark (available as a vector on Wikimedia Commons) is a gift to the company's critics. The fact that the NYPD actually routinely show up for protests dressed like this makes my job too easy.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/06/rogue-capitalism/#orphaned-syrian-refugees-need-not-apply

A US $100 bill, tinted blue. Benjamin Franklin has been replaced with the bear from the California state flag.
Blue Bonds

Another C-note remix. One of the things I love about remixing US currency is that every part of it is so immediately identifiable, meaning that just about any crop works. The California bear comes from a public domain vector on Wikimedia Commons. I worked hard to get the intaglio effect to transfer to the bear, but only with middling success. Thankfully, I was able to work at massive resolution (like, 4,000 px wide) and reduce the image, which hides a lot of my mistakes.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/04/fiscal-antifa/#post-trump

A Zimbabwean one hundred trillion dollar bill; the bill's iconography have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and a stylized, engraving-style portrait of Sam Altman.
The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

Another money scan, this time a hyperinflationary Zimbabwean dollar (I also looked at some Serbian hyperinflationary notes, but the Zimbabwean one was available at a higher rez). Not thrilled about the engraving texture on the HAL 9000, but the Sam Altman intaglio kills. I spent a lot of time tweaking that using G'mic, a good (but uneven) plugin suite for the GIMP.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

A club weilding giant in a loincloth whose head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' He is glowering at a defiant worker in overalls and a printer's folded hat, who wears a food delivery bicyclist's square, day-glo orange backpack, and stands next to a pennyfarthing. The sky behind the scene is faded away, revealing a 'code waterfall,' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.
Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine

This one made this year's faves list purely because I was so happy with how the Doordash backpack came out. The belligerent worker is part of a Keppler diptych showing a union worker and a boss facing off against one another with a cowering consumer caught in the crossfire. I'm not thrilled about this false equivalence, but I'll happily gank the figures, which are great.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps

A rooftop solar installation. Behind the roof rages a blazing forest fire. Reflected in the solar panels is the poop emoji from the cover of my book 'Enshittification,' which has angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-filled bar across its mouth.
The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)

I spent a lot of time tweaking the poop emoji on those solar panels, eventually painstakingly erasing the frames from the overlay image. It was worth it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Narcissus staring into his reflection; his face and the face of the reflection have been replaced by the staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
AI psychosis and the warped mirror

One of those high-concept images that came out perfect. Replacing Narcissus's face (and reflection) with HAL 9000 made for a striking image that only took minutes to turn out.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/#paranoid-androids

A business-suited figure seen from behind, climbing a tall, existential white stone staircase that rises to infinity. His head has been replaced with a horse's head. The background has been replaced with a shadowy panel of knobs and buttons.
Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

An oil painting of a jury; all the jurors heads have been replaced with Karl Marx's head.
Radical juries

Another high-concept image that just worked. It took me more time to find a good public domain oil painting of a jury than it did to transform each juror into Karl Marx. I love how this looks.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire


LLMs are slot-machines

It's surprisingly hard to find a decent public domain photo of a slot machine in use. I eventually started to wonder if Vegas had a no-cameras policy in the early years. Eventually, the Library of Commerce came through with a scanned neg that was high enough rez that I could push the elements I wanted to have stand out from an otherwise muddy, washed-out image.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias

Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.
Zuckermuskian solipsism

The laborers come from an LoC collection of portraits of children who worked in coal mines in the 1910s. They're pretty harrowing stuff. I spent a long plane ride cropping each individual out of several of these images.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

A black and white photo of a massive crowd (a 1910s Mayday parade); matted into the background of the photo are the three wise monkeys, posed before a cloud-shrouded capitol building.
Good ideas are popular

The original crowd scene (a presidential inauguration, if memory serves) was super high-rez, which made it very easy to convincingly matte in the monkeys and the Congressional dome. I played with tinting this one, but pure greyscale looked a lot better.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

The Gadsen 'DONT TREAD ON ME' flag; the text has been replaced with 'THERE MUST BE IN-GROUPS WHOM THE LAW PROTECTS BUT DOES NOT BIND ALONGSIDE OUT-GROUPS WHOM THE LAW BINDS BUT DOES NOT PROTECT.'

By all means, tread on those people

Another great high concept. The wordiness of Wilhoit's Law makes this intrinsically funny. There's a public domain vector-art Gadsen flag on Wikimedia Commons. I found a Reddit forum where font nerds had sleuthed out the typeface for the words on the original.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

A kid bouncing on a pogo-stick in front of a giant, onrushing vintage black sedan, with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' behind the wheel. The background is a fiery, smoky hellscape.
AI's pogo-stick grift

The pogo stick kid is another H Armstrong Roberts gank. I spent ages trying to get the bounce effect to look right, and then Alistair Milne fixed it for me in like 10 seconds. The smoke comes from an oil painting of the eruption of Vesuvius from the Met. It's become my go-to "hellscape" background.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/02/inventing-the-pedestrian/#three-apis-in-a-trenchcoat

An Android droid mascot rising from a volcanic caldera, backed by hellish red smoke. The droid is covered with demons froom Bosch's 'Garden of Earthly Delights.
The worst possible antitrust outcome

The smoke from Vesuvius makes another appearance. I filled the Android droid with tormented figures from Bosch's "Garden of Early Delights," which is an amazing painting that is available as a more than 15,000 pixel wide (!) scan on Wikimedia Commons.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

A carny barker at a podium, gesticulating with a MAGA cap. He wears a Klan hood, and his podium features products from Nu-skin, Amway and Herbalife. Behind him is an oil-painted scene of a steamship with a Trump Tower logo, at a pier in flames.
Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes

Boy, I love this one. The steamship image is from the Met. The carny barker is a still of WC Fields, whose body language is impeccable. It took a long-ass time to get a MAGA hat in the correct position, but I eventually found a photo of an early 20th C baseball player and then tinted his hat and matted in the MAGA embroidery.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

A moody room with Shining-esque broadloom. In fhe foreground stands a giant figure the with the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; its eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eyes of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and has the logo for Meta AI on its lapel; it peers though a magnifying glass at a tiny figure standing on its vast palm. The tiny figure has a leg caught in a leg-hold trap and wears an expression of eye-rolling horror. In the background, gathered around a sofa and an armchair, is a ranked line of grinning businessmen, who are blue and flickering in the manner of a hologram display in Star Wars.
Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed

These guys on the sofa come from Thomas Hawke, who has recovered and scanned nearly 30,000 "found photos" – collections from estates, yard-sales, etc:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=foundphotograph&user_id=51035555243%40N01&view_all=1

The Shining-esque lobby came from the Library of Congress, where it is surprisingly easy to find images of buildings with scary carpets.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-breach-by-design/#bringing-home-the-beacon

A Renaissance oil-painting of the assassination of Julius Caesar, modified to give Caesar Trump's hair and turn his skin orange, to make the knives glow, and to emboss a Heritage Foundation logo on the wall behind the scene.
Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives

Another great high-concept that turned out great. I think that matting the Heritage Foundation chiselwork into the background really pulls it together, and I'm really happy with the glow-up I did for the knives.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales

A 19th century engraving of fiendishly complex machine composed of thousands of interlocking gears and frames (originally an image of a printing press, but modified so that it's just all gears and things), colored dark blue. It bears Woody Guthrie's guitar sticker, 'This machine KILLS fascists. To one side of it stands an image of Ned Ludd, taken from an infamous 19th century Luddite handbill, waving troops into battle. King Ludd's head has been replaced with a hacker's hoodie, the face within lost in shadow.
Are the means of computation even seizable?

I spent so long cutting out this old printing press, but boy has it stood me in good stead. I think there's like five copies of that image layered on top of each other here. The figure is an inside joke for all my Luddite trufan pals outthere, a remix of a classic handbill depicting General Ned Ludd.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/14/pregnable/#checkm8

A portrait of a bearded, glaring Rasputin. His face has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar; the pupils of the avatar's eyes have been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)

I was worried that this wouldn't work unless you were familiar with the iconic portrait photo of Rasputin, but that guy was such a creepy-ass-looking freak, and Zuck's metaverse avatar is so awful, that it works on its own merits, too.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Three men playing cards and having a drink. The men are dressed in long trousers and shirts. One man passes a card to another player with the card between his toes under the table, unbeknownst to the third player. The card-passer has Trump's hair and orange skin. The card-receiver wears a MAGA hat. The background is a heavily halftoned, desaturated, waving US flag.
Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you

The original image was so grainy, but it was also fantastic and I spent hours rehabbing it. It's a posed, comedic photo of two Australian miners in the bush cheating at cards, rooking a third man. The Uncle Sam is (obviously) from Keppler.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

A naked, sexless pull-string talking doll with a speaker grille set into its chest. It has the head of Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, and a pull string extending from its back. A hand - again, from a Zuckerberg metaverse avatar - is pulling back the string. The doll towers over a courtroom.
Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case

This one got more, "Wow is that ever creepy" comments than any of the other ones. I was going for Chatty Cathy, but that Zuck metaverse avatar is so weird and bad that it acts like visual MSG in any image, amplifying its creepiness to incredible heights.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

An engraved illustration from a 1903 French edition of HG Wells's 'War of the Worlds.' It shows a shadow street scene in which revelers are spilling out of a nightclub, oblivious to the looming 'tripod' Martian at the end of the block. It has been modified. The Martian's eyes now emit two beams of brown light that strike the revelers, who have been tinted red, making it appear as though they are being cooked by lasers. Behind the skyline looms a giant poop emoji.
Machina economicus

The image is from an early illustrated French edition of HG Wells's War of the Worlds. I love how this worked out, and a family of my fans in Ireland commissioned a paint-by-numbers of it and painted it in and mailed it to me. It's incredible. If I re-use this, I will probably swap out the emoji for the graphic from the book's cover.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

A vintage photo of a fisherman in an old-fashioned, one-piece bathing suit holding aloft a long fishing rod from which dangles a fish. The image has been tinted. The fisherman's head has been replaced with a cliched 'hacker in a hoodie' head. Beneath the fish is a rippling pond made up of the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.
How the world's leading breach expert got phished

I don't understand how composition works, but I know when I've lucked into a good composition. This is a good composition! I made this on the sofa of Doc and Joyce Searles in Bloomington, Indiana while I was in town for my Picks and Shovels book tour.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

Sigmund Freud's study with his famous couch. Behind the couch stands an altered version of the classic Freud portrait in which he is smoking a cigar. Freud's clothes and cigar have all been tinted in bright neon colors. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' His legs have been replaced with a tangle of tentacles.
Anyone who trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined

I worked those tentacles for so long, trying to get Freud/Cthulhu/HAL's lower half just right. In the end, it all paid off.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

The Columbia University library, a stately, columnated building, color-shifted to highlight reds and oranges. The sky behind it has been filled with flames. In the foreground, a figure in a firefighter's helmet and yellow coat uses a flamethrower to shoot a jet of orange fire.
You can't save an institution by betraying its mission

The "fireman" is an image from the Department of Defense of a soldier demoing a flamethrower (I hacked in the firefighter's uniform). I spent a lot of time trying to get a smoky look for the foreground here, but I don't think it succeeded.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it

Trump loves Big Tech

The two guys in the jars (John Bull and a random general I've rebadged to represent the EU) come from an epic Keppler two-page spread personifying the nations of the world as foolish military men. While many of the figures are sadly and predictably racist (you don't want to see "China"), these guys were eminently salvageable, and I love their expressions and body-language.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america

A magnified image of the inside of an automated backup tape library, with gleaming racks of silver tape drives receding into the distance. In the foreground is a pile of dirt being shoveled by three figures in prisoner's stripes. Two of the figures' heads have been replaced with cliche hacker-in-hoodie heads, from which shine yellow, inverted Amazon 'smile' logos, such that the smile is a frown. The remaining figure's head has been replaced with a horse's head. Behind the figure is an impatiently poised man in a sharp business suit, glaring at his watch. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'
The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers

The background is a photo of the interior of a tape-robot that I snapped in the data-centre at the Human Genome Project when I was out on assignment for Nature magazine. It remains one of the most striking images I've ever captured. It was way too hard to find a horse's head from that angle for the "reverse centaur." If there are any equestrian photographers out there, please consider snapping a couple and putting them up on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next

A 19th C illustration of a crying baby about to crawl out of a bathtub. The baby's face has been replaced with Elon Musk's. A Canada goose flies overhead. The baby's bare bum has a giant splat of birdshit on it.
Gandersauce

I'm not thrilled with how the face worked out on this one, but people love it. If I'm giving a speech and I notice the audience elbowing one another and pointing at the slides and giggling, I know this one has just rotated onto the screen.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

photo of an orange Telemation acoustic coupler next to an avocado-green German 611 dial phone, whose receiver is socketed to the coupler in what Neal Stephenson memorably described as 'a kind of informational soixante-neuf.' The image has been modified to put a colorized version of Woody Guthrie's iconic 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS' hand-lettered label on the side of the coupler.
Premature Internet Activists

I spent a lot of time cleaning up and keystoning Woody Guthrie's original sticker, which can be found at very high resolutions online. Look for this element to find its way into many future collages.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/#are-human-rights

wo caricatures of top-hatted millionaires whose bodies are bulging money-sacks. Their heads have been replaced with potatoes. The potatoes' eyes have been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' They stand in a potato field filled with stoop laborers. The sky is a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.
It's not a crime if we do it with an app

The two figures come from Keppler; the potato field is from the Library of Congress. Putting HAL eyes on the potatoes was fiddly work, but worth it. Something about Keppler's body language and those potato heads really sings.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

I don't often get a chance to use Chinese communist propaganda posters, but I love working with them. All public domain, available at high rez, and always to the point. It was a lot of work matting those US flags onto the partially furled Chinese flags, but it worked out great.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

A ramshackle, tumbledown shack, draped in patriotic bunting. On its porch stands a miserable, weeping donkey, dressed in the livery of the Democratic Party. To its left is the circle-D logo of the DNC. The sky is filled with ominous stormclouds.
Occupy the Democratic National Committee

I love this sad donkey, from an old political cartoon. Given the state of the Democratic Party, I get a lot of chances to use him, and more's the pity.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#dinosaurs

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits

This one's actually from 2024, but I did it after last year's roundup, and I like it well enough to include it in this year's. I think the smoke came out pretty good!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

(Images: TechCrunch, Ajay Suresh, Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0; Cryteria, UK Parliament/Maria Unger, CC BY 3.0; Bastique, Frank Schwichtenberg, CC BY 4.0; Japanexperterna.se, CC BY-SA 2.0; Ser Amantio di Nicolao, CC BY-SA 3.0; Armin Kübelbeck, Zde, Felix Winkelnkemper, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony Rootkit Roundup IV https://memex.craphound.com/2005/12/02/sony-rootkit-roundup-iv/

#20yrsago How can you tell if a CD is infectious? https://web.archive.org/web/20051205043456/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004228.php

#20yrsago France about to get worst copyright law in Europe? https://web.archive.org/web/20060111033356/http://eucd.info/index.php?2005/11/14/177-droit-d-auteur-eucdinfo-devoile-le-plan-d-attaque-des-majors

#15yrsago UNC team builds 3D model of Rome using Flickr photos on a single PC in one day https://readwrite.com/flickr_rome_3d_double-time/

#15yrsago Schneier’s modest proposal: Close the Washington monument! https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2010/12/close_the_washington.html

#15yrsago Tea Party Nation President proposes taking vote away from tenants https://web.archive.org/web/20101204012806/https://thinkprogress.org/2010/11/30/tea-party-voting-property/

#15yrsago What it’s like to be a cocaine submarine captain https://web.archive.org/web/20120602082933/https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-colombian-coke-sub-former-drug-smuggler-tells-his-story-a-732292.html

#10yrsago A profile of America’s killingest cops: the police of Kern County, CA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/01/the-county-kern-county-deadliest-police-killings

#10yrsago The word “taser” comes from an old racist science fiction novel https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/history-of-word-taser-comes-from-century-old-racist-science-fiction-novel

#10yrsago HOWTO pack a suit so it doesn’t wrinkle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug58yeMqNCo

#10yrsago Newly discovered WEB Du Bois science fiction story reveals more Afrofuturist history https://slate.com/technology/2015/12/the-princess-steel-a-recently-uncovered-short-story-by-w-e-b-du-bois-and-afrofuturism.html

#10yrsago A roadmap for killing TPP: the next SOPA uprising! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/tpp-current-state-play-how-we-defeat-largest-trade-deal

#10yrsago Wikipedia Russia suspends editor who tried to cut deal with Russian authorities https://www.themoscowtimes.com/archive/russian-wikipedia-suspends-editor-who-cut-deal-with-authorities

#10yrsago Vtech toy data-breach gets worse: 6.3 million children implicated https://web.archive.org/web/20151204033429/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacked-toymaker-vtech-admits-breach-actually-hit-63-million-children

#10yrsago Ironically, modern surveillance states are baffled by people who change countries https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/02/ironically-modern-surveillance-states-are-baffled-by-people-who-change-countries/

#10yrsago Mozilla will let go of Thunderbird https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/

#10yrsago Rosa Parks was a radical, lifelong black liberation activist, not a “meek seamstress” https://web.archive.org/web/20151208224937/https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/

#10yrsago Racist algorithms: how Big Data makes bias seem objective https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/can-computers-be-racist-big-data-inequality-and-discrimination/

#5yrsago Nalo Hopkinson, Science Fiction Grand Master https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/02/in-the-ring/#go-nalo-go

#1yrago All the books I reviewed in 2024 https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/02/booklish/#2024-in-review

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

A Political Roundup [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of The Irish Star

If you’re like most normal humans who aren’t part of the MAGA cult, you couldn’t sit through yesterday’s White House cabinet meeting without retching. To spare your stomachs, this roundup will capture the highlights with only limited examples of the ass kissing. We’ll cover a lot of ground in this abbreviated newsletter (I’m in rehearsal today), including

  • Hegseth’s newest explanation for the double-strike

  • Trump’s perfect new ad for Democrats

  • Vance’s finger-pointing on affordable housing

  • How it’s cocaine now, not fentanyl

  • Trump’s racist rant on Somalis

  • Dozing Don and the karma of Biden bashing

Ready? Hold your noses and hang on tight.

Subscribe now

Hegseth’s double-strike explanation isn’t adding up

Yesterday was the first time the press got to question Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly about his orders that led to the killing of two survivors of a destroyed vessel. The order was in apparent violation of U.S. and international law against “no quarter” orders. Hegseth has been busy passing the buck to Adm. Mitch Bradley, tweeting, “I stand by him and the combat decision he has made” (emphasis mine)—as if those decisions were somehow separate from Hegseth’s reported “kill everybody” order.

Hegseth claimed during the cabinet meeting that he watched the first strike live but “did not stick around” because “at the Department of War [sic] we got a lot of things to do.” He claims he learned that the commander had made the decision to sink the boat and “eliminate the threat.”

But this doesn’t add up. As Joyce Vance noted in her newsletter today, citing The Wall Street Journal’s reporting,

Hegseth was the TEA for the operation. TEA stands for Target Engagement Authority and refers to the person in the chain of command with the authority to approve the use of force and fire upon a target. The TEA can also stop the action—for instance, giving an order to hold fire to prevent a war crime from being committed. There is always a specific commander with this responsibility, and the WSJ says that here that it was the Secretary. If the reporting is correct, that makes the claim that he was too busy to “stick around” for the first use of lethal force in the Trump administration’s self-proclaimed war on narcoterrorism tough to believe.

Hegseth claimed he did not personally see the survivors after the first strike because “the thing was on fire” and “this is what is called the fog of war.” (Actually, Pete, the “fog of war” does not refer literally to smoke and fire, but thanks for playing.)

The PBS NewsHour reported, per a U.S. official, “The US military struck the boat on September 2 four times: twice to kill the 11 people who were on board, and twice more to sink the boat.” It defies credulity that the commander in charge would not have told the TEA that there were survivors. It also doesn’t pass the sniff test that Hegseth wouldn’t even wonder if there were or stick around long enough to find out.

The truth will out. Meanwhile, Adm. Bradley is learning how truly expendable his career and indeed his freedom and life are when Hegseth’s own ass is on the line. That self-serving message is currently rocking the Pentagon.

“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls—,” said one military official, who spoke with the Washington Post on condition of anonymity. And after Karoline Leavitt’s official statement left unclear who was going to accept responsibility, there was outrage and shock at the Department of Defense. Per the Post,

One official said of Leavitt’s statement, “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.” Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.

Congressional hearings are being scheduled. Witnesses will be under oath. There are calls for release of all the video evidence. Hegseth is in deep waters here, and it’s unclear whether Trump will ultimately offer him quarter—or double back and sink him.

Trump handed Democrats a perfect ad

Affordability was on the minds of voters in Virginia, New Jersey and New York when Democrats romped in last month’s general election, sailing to double digit victories. The needle moved by double digits yesterday in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District’s special election. So you’d think that Trump and the GOP would start to take high prices on groceries, housing and insurance seriously. But the President was in no mood to hear about it.

“There’s this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about - ‘affordability.’ They just say the word. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it. ‘Affordability.’” He added, “The word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats.”

Trump couldn’t help himself, going back to his greatest hits and labeling the whole question of affordability a Democratic “hoax.”

After all, the “call it a hoax” tactic worked so well with the Epstein files, right? So why not try it again?

Calling all Democratic campaign ad creators: These clips are political gold. The President thinks crushingly high prices aren’t real! Get ready to do your thing.

Vance blames immigrants for lack of affordability

The GOP doesn’t have real answers on affordability because, for starters, the party can’t get Trump to back off his tariffs which are driving up prices on everything. Further, Republicans have no healthcare plan for when ACA premium subsidies go sky high next month for millions of Americans, which will drive everyone else’s insurance costs up, too.

So what’s a future Republican presidential candidate to do? Blame immigrants, of course! During the cabinet meeting, Vice President JD “they’re eating the pets” Vance blamed high housing costs on migrants:

“Why did homes get so unaffordable? Because we had 20 million illegal aliens in this country taking homes that ought by right go to American citizens.”

This isn’t the first time Vance has laid out this bogus theory. Here he is three weeks ago saying basically the same thing in an interview, except he claimed there were 30 million then and 20 million yesterday.

The idea that millions of undocumented workers are taking homes away from young Americans is laughable. New immigrants typically share housing with family members or live in communal housing near farms or industry. According to most experts, the housing shortage we face today resulted primarily from a lack of new homes being built after the Great Recession. Compounding this problem is that housing inventory has been bought up by private equity and hedge funds that are now jacking up rents.

Further, the administration claims that over two million undocumented immigrants have been deported or have self-deported since the beginning of Trump’s second term. But housing prices continue to rise and have not been impacted by the regime’s draconian deportation policies.

Vance’s blame-shifting claims don’t hold up.

They’re finally admitting it’s not fentanyl

I keep beating this drum: If you want to interdict dangerous drugs from entering into the U.S., focusing on Venezuelan “narco terrorists” on small vessels isn’t going to cut it. That’s because the truly dangerous drug is fentanyl, an opioid that comes largely from Mexico via legal U.S. ports of entry.

Blowing up “drug smuggling” boats off the coast of Venezuela at best is going to slow trafficking of cocaine, which originates mostly from Colombia. What’s more, the trafficking of cocaine directly from South America is not directly to the U.S but rather to other parts of the world such as Asia and Europe.

Trump officials are finally starting to change their tune about exactly which drug is being targeted, focusing now on cocaine. But they’re still maintaining their ludicrous claim that this interdiction is saving millions, no wait, tens of millions, no wait! Hundreds of millions of American lives.

Here’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, claiming Trump saved “hundreds of millions of lives” with the “cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.”

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Immigration Council noted, the CDC counts the number of overdose deaths involving cocaine at 34,855 in 2024, a huge increase from 4,681 in 2011. But that was largely due to cocaine being laced with opioids. So if you want to bring that number down, focus on the fentanyl, not the cocaine.

And no, it’s not “hundreds of millions” of deaths, Kristi.

The regime is joyful that food assistance is being cut

There was a ghoulish moment with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that perfectly encapsulated how the Trump White House views the food stamp program and the people it serves.

Rollins boasted that her department had rolled back Biden-era increases to the food stamp program and that, while working with Make American Healthy Again and RFK, Jr., she had “just gratitude and joy for this work.”

Trump launched racist attacks on Somalis

Even by Trumpian terms, the President’s verbal assault upon Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and people from Somalia generally was a disgusting new low.

In a tirade, Trump called Omar and her friends “garbage,” said he doesn’t want “Somalians” here, claimed they contribute “nothing,” and lied by declaring that 88 percent of them are on welfare.

This morning, CNN reported that Somali immigrants in Minnesota are the Trump regime’s next target for detention and deportation actions.

Kristi Noem piled on the hate in a blink-twice tweet summing up her hatred of immigrants. She called them “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” and warned of “foreign invaders” who “slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.”

“WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE,” she added.

This morning, the Trump White House froze immigration applications from 19 different countries. NPR reported,

The ban applied to citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen while the restricted access applied to people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

Donald dozed right while Marco was sucking up to him

Trump once boasted that, unlike Joe Biden, we’d never see him “sleeping in front of a camera.”

That boast came back to haunt his daydreams in a rather hilarious way, just as Secretary of State Marco Rubio was sucking up to him during the cabinet meeting.

Trump’s energy and “anti-woke” posture are slumping along with his approval numbers, now at record lows. This all bodes very badly for the GOP’s prospects in next year’s midterms, but there doesn’t seem to be a way off this sinking ship except by resignation—which we would all be more than happy to see.

I’m in rehearsal this morning for a new play we’re producing called “Relentless,” opening in February at Syracuse Stage. I’m working on a way for folks here to catch it online—more to come! Here’s our poster:

12:00 PM

10:00 AM

The White House Intervened On Behalf Of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During A Federal Investigation [Techdirt]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States.

“The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Tate posted on X before the trip in February — one of many times he has sung the president’s praises to his fans.

But when the Tate brothers arrived by private plane in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they immediately found themselves in the crosshairs of law enforcement once more, as Customs and Border Protection officials seized their electronic devices.

This time, they had a powerful ally come to their aid. Behind the scenes, the White House intervened on their behalf.

Interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.

In his written request, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, Ingrassia chided authorities for taking the action, saying the seizure of the Tates’ devices was not a good use of time or resources. The request to return the electronics to the Tates, he emphasized, was coming from the White House.

The incident is the latest in a string of law enforcement matters where the Trump White House has inserted itself to help friends and target foes. Since entering office for a second term, Trump has urged the Justice Department to go after elected officials who investigated him and his businesses, and he pardoned a string of political allies. Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump. And news of the White House intervention on behalf of the accused sex traffickers comes as Trump is under fire over his ties to notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s recent efforts to stop the public release of the so-called Epstein files.

Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of Tate and his brother, Tristan, caused alarm among DHS officials that they could be interfering with a federal investigation if they followed through with the instruction, according to interviews and screenshots of contemporaneous communications between officials.

One official who was involved and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid facing retribution said they were disgusted by the request’s “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.”

“It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person said. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.”

It’s unclear why law enforcement wanted to examine the devices, what their analysis found or whether Ingrassia’s intervention hindered any investigation. The White House and DHS declined to answer questions about the incident.

But law enforcement experts said it is highly unusual for the White House to get involved in particular border seizures or to demand authorities give up custody of potential evidence in an investigation.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said John F. Tobon, a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations, which typically analyzes the contents of electronic devices after they’re seized by Customs and Border Protection. “For anyone to say this request is from the White House, it feels like an intimidation tactic.”

Tobon said that even if authorities resisted the request from Ingrassia, knowledge that the White House opposed their actions could cause them to be less aggressive than they would normally be: “Anytime somebody feels intimidated or as if they’re not free to follow procedure, that’s going to stay in the back of their mind because of the consequences. In this administration the consequences are different, people are getting fired.”

Samuel Buell, a Duke University law school professor and former federal prosecutor, called the pressure on behalf of the Tates “another data point” in the White House politicizing law enforcement.

“This is not something that would have been viewed as appropriate or acceptable prior to 2025,” Buell said. “There’s a pattern here of severe departure from preexisting norms … that are being tossed aside left and right.”

The Tate brothers’ lawyer, Joseph McBride, said he didn’t know what happened to the devices but that his clients have still not had them returned. He said it’s unclear whether any investigation into their contents is continuing.

His clients, he said, are innocent and there were no illicit materials on their electronics. “There have been multiple investigations against them and nothing has come of it,” McBride said.

Ingrassia worked at McBride’s firm before joining the White House, and McBride acknowledged speaking “to Paul from time to time” but couldn’t recall discussing the seized devices with him. Ingrassia, he said, has never given the Tates special treatment since joining the Trump administration.

The White House declined to answer questions about whether Ingrassia was acting on his own or representing the White House’s wishes.

In a brief interview with ProPublica, Ingrassia denied trying to help the Tates, before hanging up. “There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” he said. “There was nothing.”

Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message: “Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true.”

When questioned about whether Ingrassia had asked authorities to return the devices, even if he did not order them to, Paltzik declined to comment, explaining that “the word ‘ask’ is inappropriate because it is meaningless in this context. He either ordered something or he didn’t. And as I said, he did NOT order anything.”

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the intervention or any impact it might have had on an investigation, only saying in a statement that Customs and Border Protection “performed a 100% baggage examination and detained all electronic media devices when the Tate Brothers entered the country. Electronic media devices were detained and turned over to Homeland Security Investigators for inspectional purposes.”

Ingrassia’s work at McBride’s small New York law firm included helping to represent the Tate brothers. He has praised Andrew Tate’s “physical prowess” on social media along with his “willpower and spirit,” calling him “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence.”

Ethics experts said when government officials take actions to benefit former clients, it undermines public trust.

“The rule of law cannot be carried out if it depends on cronyism,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in the administrations of both parties. “To have a member of the White House interfere when they’ve had a prior client relationship and some sort of personal relationship, that gives rise to questions of impartiality.”

Trump had nominated Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but the 30-year-old lawyer’s chances for Senate confirmation imploded after Politico reported that he had sent a string of racist text messages to fellow Republicans and described himself as having “a Nazi streak.” Paltzik, his lawyer, raised doubts about the authenticity of the texts but said “even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor.”

In a post on X announcing he was withdrawing from his Senate confirmation hearing because not enough Republican lawmakers were supporting him, Ingrassia said he would “continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again.”

Last month, Ingrassia announced he was moving to a new role within the administration, after Trump called him into his office and asked him to serve as deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration.

It’s unclear what prompted authorities to seize the Tates’ property, but the bar for searching electronic devices is significantly lower for those entering the U.S. compared with those already in the country, even if they are citizens.

After the seizure, the contents were examined by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, according to the official involved. A Homeland Security official, who asked for anonymity because they didn’t have permission to speak publicly, confirmed that HSI agents scrutinized the contents.

The Tates left the United States in late March.

No criminal charges have been filed against the brothers in the United States, though a lawyer representing four anonymous defendants sued by them in Florida filed court papers this year suggesting that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were investigating the pair. No other details have become public, and a spokesperson for the prosecutors’ office declined to comment.

In an interview with conservative podcaster Candace Owens soon after landing in Florida, Andrew Tate revealed his devices had been seized, saying they were taken after he refused to give customs officers his passwords.

Tate, who was born in the U.S. but spent much of his childhood in Britain before moving as an adult to Romania, complained that his rights were violated, calling himself “one of the most innocent people on the planet.”

And he said law enforcement officials wouldn’t find anything on his devices: “You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence? You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me.”

In that interview, Tate made no mention of a White House official intervening on his behalf and seemingly misidentified state authorities in Florida as responsible for taking his devices.

Shortly after the Tates landed on Feb. 27, Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that Florida authorities had launched an investigation into the brothers. Uthmeier said his office had “secured and executed subpoenas and warrants” and called the brothers’ behavior “atrocious.”

“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to accept it.”

The status of the Florida investigation is unclear. A spokesperson for the Florida attorney general declined to comment for this article.

Allegations of sexual abuse and violence have swirled around Andrew Tate for almost as long as he’s been in the public eye. In 2016, Tate was booted off the cast of the British version of the “Big Brother” reality series around the time a video emerged of him whipping a woman with a belt. Tate said he and the woman were joking.

Tate’s profile only rose afterward, and he began amassing a following as a self-help guru for young men. He quickly aligned himself with Trump’s then-young MAGA movement.

“The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” he posted on social media after meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2017.

Tate moved to Romania a year after his brief foray in reality TV, in part, he said, because he believed authorities there investigate sex crimes less aggressively.

“I’m not a … rapist but I like the idea of being able to do what I want,” he said.

But in 2023, prosecutors in Romania accused the Tates of operating a criminal group that trafficked women, including some who alleged the brothers led them to believe they were interested in relationships but instead forced them into filming online pornographic videos. Prosecutors also said they were investigating allegations that the Tates trafficked minors. Andrew Tate was charged with rape. The Tates have denied the allegations, and the initial charges against them were sent back to prosecutors by a court because of procedural issues.

The Tates face similar allegations in Britain. Authorities there authorized a raft of charges against the brothers, including rape and human trafficking, based on allegations from three women. In 2024, arrest warrants were issued for the brothers, who have denied wrongdoing, but authorities said they would not be extradited to the United Kingdom until criminal proceedings in Romania were completed.

A woman has also sued the Tates in Florida, accusing them of luring her to Romania to coerce her into sex work. The Tates have denied the allegations, and last month a judge dismissed most of her claims but allowed for her to refile.

This year, Tate derided the allegations against him and compared himself to Trump on X. “Romania? No case UK? No case USA? No case,” he posted on X. “Lawfare? – Im one of the most mistreated men in history beside president Trump himself.”

The intervention on behalf of the Tates was not the first time those around Trump took an interest in legal issues involving the brothers.

In February, Romania’s foreign minister said that presidential envoy Richard Grenell told him at an international security conference in Germany that he remained interested in the fate of the Tates. “I did not perceive this statement as pressure,” the foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, said, “just a repeat of a known stance.” Grenell told the Financial Times that he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu but supported “the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”

08:00 AM

Forget Whether Or Not DOGE Exists: Will Anyone Be Held Accountable For 600,000 Deaths? [Techdirt]

First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his way, enriching his allies, and dismissing any consequences with a wave of his hand.

The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story:

The spokesperson, in response to written questions, confirmed DOGE still exists as a temporary organization within the U.S. DOGE Service, and that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS.

But, of course, most of this is just semantics, just as the “DOGE” name has always been semantics as well. The idea was, from the very beginning, a smash-and-grab job, in which Elon would get access to the fundamental (traditionally highly guarded) systems of the US government and wreak havoc, Twitter-style, in which anything he and his suck-up compatriots didn’t understand would be deemed “bad” and anything that helped enrich him and his friends would be deemed “good,” and any consequences (including destroying life-saving programs around the globe) would be dismissed with the wave of a hand, and no culpability.

“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.

And, as Wired rightly notes, the DOGE bros are now fully embedded throughout the federal government.

“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”

Wired’s report has details on a bunch of DOGE bros with little-to-no relevant experience who are continuing the DOGE grift while employed throughout the federal government, detailing the new (and constantly changing) set of job titles of a bunch of the DOGE crew, almost all of which they seem wholly unqualified for.

But the bigger story may be now that they’re scattered across the bureaucracy without Elon as their shield, some of these DOGE operatives are starting to realize they might actually face legal consequences for the very real and very serious damage they caused. A recent Politico report noted that the younger members of the crew are getting genuinely worried about how this ends:

The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.

As the sun fell on downtown Washington, the displaced dozen joined up with fellow DOGE staffers atop the nine-story GSA building, armed with beer, pretzels and La Croix, and prepared for something akin to a wake. Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.

Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering. Other DOGE leaders were less sanguine. “Guys, seriously,” one warned, “get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”

The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system.

Elon Musk, least of all. In recent interviews, he’s still rejecting the claims that the projects he gleefully cut resulted in any real world harm:

In an interview with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on his WTF Is podcast, Musk denied that DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts and its mandate to target federal “waste” included “stopping essential payments to needy people” in Africa.

“Fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They’re not going to say, ‘Give us the money for fraud,’” Musk said. “They’re going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false.

“It’s going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn’t want to save the baby pandas? They’re adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing, it’s just corruption, essentially.

“And you’re like, ‘Well, can you send us a picture of the panda?’ They’re like, ‘No.’ OK. Well, how do we know it’s going to the pandas?”

This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.

Musk’s condescending little fable about demanding photos of pandas would be merely insufferable if he were actually talking about pandas. But he’s not. He’s talking about programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon.

What’s quite clear now is that DOGE did nothing to reduce government inefficiency. If anything, it created much greater inefficiency by forcing the federal government to try to reestablish essential programs (and rehire haphazardly fired experts) in a mad dash to keep certain aspects of the government from completely falling over. And that’s not to mention all the deaths. As Atul Gawande noted in the New Yorker:

We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.

The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.

The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.

So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build. Those DOGE members nervously telling each other to “get your own lawyer”? They should be.

06:00 AM

Staying ahead of censors in 2025: What we've learned from fighting censorship in Iran and Russia [Tor Project blog]

From internet blackouts in Iran to Russia's evolving censorship tactics, 2025 has tested Tor's anti-censorship tools like never before. These are the moments where the work of Tor's anti-censorship team is more important than ever, to fulfill our mission of preserving connectivity between users in affected regions and the rest of the world.

In this blog post, we want to talk about what we've learned, how we've adapted, and what other internet users can do to keep Tor users connected.

Iran

In June, during the war between Iran and Israel, the censorship in Iran intensified up to a point where internet was disconnected for few days. Presumably to impede espionage-related communication while simultaneously consolidating political power.

Monitoring the censorship landscape

During this period, we were constantly monitoring the situation using our in-region vantage-point system. This vantage-point system is a network of monitoring locations inside Iran that provides more recent and accurate information about censorship than is available from public data.

One clear example is domain-fronting data. Domain-fronting is a technique that makes Tor traffic look like other popular, harder-to-block websites (like major cloud services). To determine which domain-fronting configurations perform best across the most locations, we deployed an automated testing tool that detects and reports the accessibility of the Snowflake broker and the Moat service for each domain-fronting configuration at each of our vantage points. This information is then aggregated by the log collector and subsequently used to monitor the domain-fronting configurations currently in use and to select the configurations to use in the future.

Strengthening Snowflake

Snowflake is the most used network traffic obfuscation tool in Iran. Over the past year we have been working on improving it to ensure that it remains strong and accessible to users.

We have upgraded the web extension to Manifest Version 3 (the latest browser extension standard), to be compatible with modern browsers. We improved the NAT checking logic which helps us figure out what kind of network setup each user has. This way, the proxies are more accurately assigned to the clients depending on their network capabilities. And we enhanced the metrics reported by the standalone proxy, providing better tooling for proxy operators to assist what is happening with their proxies.

Under the hood we have created a staging server for Snowflake, so we have a robust infrastructure to stress test new features making sure they're fit for real deployment. This will help us bring big changes in the coming year to improve the efficiency of the protocol where networks are severely disrupted and to create better mechanisms to prevent censors from blocking Snowflake.

Deploying Conjure

Censorship agencies like those in Iran often attempt to block bridges by obtaining bridge information in bulk and then inputing the network address of these bridges to their censorship gateways to block them. That's why we developed Conjure.

Conjure is a pluggable transport designed to stay ahead of proxy-listing-based blocking by leveraging unused address space within cooperating ISP networks, thereby limiting the damage caused by blocking individual network addresses. Think of it like the act of generating temporary email addresses to avoid spam emails, by making sure the address is temporary and easy to regenerate, anything blocked at that address won't affect your ability to get new ones.

We are working on distributing Conjure in places with strong censorship. To make it hard for censors, we have improved Tor's implementation of Conjure by extending the protocols used both for bootstrapping the connection and transport the data. We added multiple registration methods (DNS and AMP-cache), making the bootstrap of the conjure connection more censorship-resistant and the connection will look as if the user is connecting to widely used service. We also integrated additional transports from upstream (DTLS and prefix) that makes the Tor traffic look like common protocols–meaning regular internet traffic.

Russia

Another region that has experienced many changes this year is Russia. With continued conflict and attrition, internet censorship has intensified, including increased allowlist-based censorship and address-block-based censorship.

Last year, we introduced WebTunnel as a new pluggable transport. We have seen this year how WebTunnel has become a key tool for users in Russia, thanks to its ability to blend into regular web traffic. As the severity of censorship in Russia has increased, WebTunnel has also received several fixes, such as SNI imitation and safe non-WebPKI certificate support with certificate-chain pinning to ensure it can withstand more kinds of censorship, including SNI allowlisting and the rapid blocking of distributed bridges.

Many of these improvements come from volunteers or are shaped by user feedback. Our community of users and supporters makes all this work possible and helps us stay ahead at Tor. Thanks to our Tor community team, we have first-hand insights into what works and what doesn't. This gives us access to the best information in the region. Additionally, through the community team's work with people on the ground, we receive support in testing and identifying the best technology for each censorship scenario.

Experimenting with bridge distribution

When we started distributing WebTunnel bridges in December they were a very useful tool to connect to Tor. They worked well for months, and Tor Browser users got them configured automatically over Connect Assist if they were located in Russia. However, in June, the Russian censors began listing most of our WebTunnel bridges, prompting us to shift strategies.

In recent history, our Telegram distributor has proven to be a useful tool in Russia, as the censor has a harder time extracting all the bridges from it. This is why we have now added support for WebTunnel in our Telegram distributor. We are always trying to meet our users where they are, and while Telegram might not be the safest place for your online communications, many users in Russia already uses it. And is not only useful for Russian users, but also for Iranian ones that are currently using webtunnel bridges distributed over Telegram.

All these fast changes of bridges distribution are possible thanks to rdsys, Tor's new bridge distribution system that we introduced last year. This year we kept improving rdsys adding a staging server, so we can stress-test it in a similar environments to the ones used in production. For our censored users that means that by the time new and updated anticensorship features arrive, we have already been able to fix many stability issues.

Where do we go from here?

Supporting our users to continue fighting censorship is what our work is all about. Making it possible to connect to the Tor network on censored networks–whatever they are. Whether it is your university, your internet service provider, or your government trying to keep you from getting the information you are entitled to. Next year we'll start rolling out Conjure, keep improving WebTunnel,and prepare Snowflake for the next big censorship events.

You too can help us fight censorship today, by sharing your bandwidth and running your own Snowflake. The easiest way is to install a snowflake plugin in your browser to help others access the Tor network. And if you have a website consider running a webtunnel bridge.

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