This Week in 2016

• Snowden Docs Show NSA, New Zealand Spied On Pro-Democracy Activists
• Which Crazy Copyright Holder Took Down Katie Ledecky/Carlos Santana ‘Smooth’ Mashup First?
• Billionaire Backer Of Palantir & Facebook Insists He’s Bankrupting Journalists To Protect Your Privacy
• Donald Trump Says He’ll Turn Off The Internet For Terrorists
• Twitter Suspends Hundreds Of Thousands Of Terrorist Accounts, Gives Everyone Its ‘Quality Filter’
• Recording Industry Whines That It’s Too Costly To Keep Copyright Terms At Life Plus 50, Instead Of Life Plus 70

This Week in 2011

• Could The Internet & Television Be Making Everyone Smarter?
• Dear Musicians: The RIAA Is About To Totally Screw You Over (Again!)
• Waffle House Says Rap Song Called Waffle House Violates Its Trademark
• Dear MPAA: Stomp Your Feet And Repeat It As Many Times As You Want, But Infringement Is Not Theft
• MPAA Calls MPAA Intellectually Dishonest For Claiming That Infringement Is Inevitable
• As Expected, Backpage Is Not Liable For Prostitution Ads

This Week in 2006

• Oh Look, The More Hollywood Attacks, The Further Underground File Sharing Goes
• Cabbies Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Navigation Systems
• Captain Copyright Gets A Rewrite?
• Ignoring Obsolete Analog Technology Is Now Considered Circumventing Copy Protection?
• There Ought To Be A Law… Any Law… To Protect The Children
• Where’s The Checkbox For ‘New FBI Computer System Is So Bad I Plan To Go On A Crime Spree’?

As you’ll recall, RFK Jr., who is totally not checked out of his job at HHS, has managed to sneak in hosting a government sponsored cooking show in between not doing anything about the country’s problems with measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough, and so on.

Well, two episodes are now out, and the reviews are not great. Some have referred the episodes as mere “long, boring political ads,” while others have simply pointed out that the meals so far taste like shit. But while those particular reviews may rely heavily on subjective matters of opinion, the main thrust of Kennedy’s show does not. And that thrust is the promise that American families can feed themselves fresh, wholesome meals for less than $5 a plate. CNN’s Tom Foreman appeared on Erin Burnett’s show and walked viewers through what buying ingredients at the grocery store to make one of Kennedy’s meals would actually cost.

When we started buying ingredients used in the show, even going for the lowest prices at a big competitive chain, the cost heated up fast. This was the cheapest frozen wild-caught sockeye salmon we could find. The closest to what they are using. They priced theirs at $8.99. The cheapest we could find, even with the deal from the store, was more than $24. Now the greens mix, that was about the same cost. So were the eggs on a per egg basis. But that’s the trick here, because they’re only pricing that one egg out of the carton. And that gets worse with other things.

For example, this red onion, they say they only spent eight cents on this because that’s how much they used. Getting the whole onion cost us more than a dollar. And look at this. This is the avocado mayonnaise. They priced this at 40 cents, because they were only using a couple of tablespoons to buy. The whole thing cost us more than $11. They’re only pricing parts of it. And grocery stores don’t sell things that way.

In other words, you can’t associate the cost of buying a meal by portioning out what ingredients you use and how much of it. The total cost of the ingredients has still left your bank account. We’re not talking about restaurants, where marginal costs per plate make all the sense in the world. Those are businesses that buy in bulk and have to calculate a profit into their pricing. These are families. Hungry families and the only profit they’re looking for is healthy caloric intake.

Well, Kennedy lost his shit on the internet over the segment, all because Burnett and Foreman refused to play his particular version of make believe. And, after accusing Burnett of having Trump Derangement Syndrome (does that come from vaccines and chemtrails too?), he did so in a way that perfectly illuminated the fact that he doesn’t understand that homes are not restaurants.

After the report aired, Kennedy hit back on X, trashing the host and accusing her of having “abandoned both common sense and basic arithmetic.”

“CNN wants us to incorporate the full package price of every ingredient, regardless of what is used in the recipe. If you put a squirt of ketchup on your burger, would you be surprised if the restaurant charged you for the whole bottle?” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy argued his show uses “standard recipe costing,” saying “we count what the recipe actually uses,” while “the rest” of each purchased ingredient “stays in the kitchen.”

First off, this is a mostly misleading bit of pushback. While Foreman’s segment did tally up the grocery bill needed in order to make Kennedy’s meal, because that’s how shopping works, that wasn’t the only cost discrepancy he uncovered. For some items, the cost difference was in the marginal quantity of the ingredient used in each meal, that wasn’t the case with every ingredient, such as the fish itself.

So Kennedy’s claims in his show, like most everything he claims, are built on funny math and lies. It’s simply not how grocery shopping for a family works. It’s not how meal planning works. What could be interesting would be for the show to demonstrate from start to finish how to plan out a family’s meals for a week, shop for the ingredients for those meals in a way that you can double up on them to make full use of their cost, and build a recipe list around that and then see what the per-meal cost is.

But that would be way too much work for Kennedy and would place him way outside the cushy, entitled, wealthy experience he has had his entire life as a Kennedy.

We’re not going to do a full rehash of the whole Reckless Ben / Bryan Mansell / Bricks & Minifigs saga here. We’ve already got a bunch of stories on it, and there are many other sources. But there is some news in the form of Bricks & Minifigs (BAM) “settling” with Mansell — and there’s a lot more to the story, including that Mansell has assigned whatever claims he might have against the former franchisees to BAM, though it’s unclear who actually has those rights, since early on in this saga it was reported that Mansell had given them to Reckless Ben. There’s also the fact that Ben himself is still facing civil claims and criminal charges, neither of which seem legit. Especially on the civil side, given that BAM admitting that it did in fact owe Mansell money completely undercuts their civil claims against Schneider that he was running a shakedown scheme.

First a very, very condensed and incomplete summary: The short version is that Mansell asked a local BAM franchise to do consignment sales of his father’s vast Lego collection, and somewhere in the middle of everything, BAM corporate kicked out the previous owners of that franchise (Chrystal Law Gorman & Ben Gorman), promised that they were taking control over the consignment deal, and then insisted that they legally now owned the remaining Mansell Lego sets and that the consignment thing wasn’t real or wasn’t allowed. There was a lot more nonsense as well, involving multiple police departments doing shady shit.

But a fairly thorough accounting by the investigative YouTuber known as Coffeezilla suggested (yet again) that just about everyone here bears some of the blame. It showed it was quite likely that BAM corporate and the two friends they handed the franchise to (Josh Johnson & Brandon Best) had misled everyone regarding which of Mansell’s Lego sets were still in their possession. But also that the Gormans likely owed the Mansells money for sets that had already sold. The Gormans have suggested that they couldn’t pay Mansell what was owed because the receipts were taken over by Johnson/Best/BAM corporate. Oh, and also, the Lego sets in question probably weren’t worth quite as much as everyone made them out to be.

Also, as we detailed, everyone started suing everyone. The Gormans sued BAM corporate. BAM sued everyone, alleging RICO. There’s also a criminal case against Reckless Ben, whose main crime seems to be the somewhat bumbling way he actually brought attention to all of this (though bumbling around to bring attention to injustices seems to be his entire oeuvre).

The news from earlier this week is that BAM corporate has “settled” with the Mansells. This is a good step, and one that should have happened ages ago. We found it bizarre that BAM corporate’s CEO Ammon McNeff kept claiming he wanted to make Mansell whole… at the very same time he filed a RICO lawsuit against Mansell. Eventually settling was always the most sensible move. That it took this long — while doing nothing but damage to the Bricks & Minifigs brand — is pretty much entirely on McNeff’s stubbornness, and thinking he could talk his way out of the hole he had dug previously.

The details here matter though:

Bricks & Minifigs (BAM)… today announced that it has reached a comprehensive and amicable resolution with the Mansell family regarding the dispute surrounding a LEGO Star Wars collection originally consigned to a former franchise owner of the Bricks & Minifigs Salem/Keizer, Oregon store.

The agreement resolves the disputes between BAM, its leadership and the Mansell family and follows an extensive legal and mediation process in which the parties exchanged records and information that provided a more complete understanding of the circumstances surrounding the original consignment arrangement.

Again, all of this could have (and really should have) been sorted out as soon as BAM took over the franchise. The fact that they refused to do so and made a bunch of false and misleading claims, and then stuck to their guns when called on it, means the damage to BAM’s brand is entirely self-inflicted.

But the larger mess continues. First, part of the agreement is that Mansell has apparently transferred any claims he has for his sets to BAM corporate:

As part of the resolution, the Mansell family has been made whole by BAM for the losses associated with their consignment arrangement with the former franchise store owner, including an assignment to BAM of Mansell’s claims arising from the original consignment contract, and the Mansells have agreed to provide relevant records should BAM elect to pursue those claims against those responsible.

So this is pretty clearly signaling that BAM intends to use those claims against the Gormans, who are the other party to the “original consignment contract.” The Gormans’ own lawsuit against BAM was recently “upgraded” to include RICO claims of their own — so now everyone in this dispute is accusing everyone else of racketeering. But, as is almost always the case, the RICO claims seem incredibly weak. As much as people want it to be RICO, it’s almost certainly not RICO, even if BAM did do other sketchy things.

But now BAM can (in theory) use Mansell’s “claims” against the Gormans as part of any counterclaim they may file.

There is a separate issue that I haven’t seen much coverage of, which is that in some of the Reckless Ben videos, it was clearly stated that Bryan had sold off his interest in these claims to Ben, for the sake of Ben trying to use his ownership of the claims in some of his many stunts to try to get the money back. It’s possible that Ben returned the claims to Bryan, but if that’s not the case, it’s not clear if Bryan has any claims to give to BAM. I imagine that if the case moves forward, time will be spent determining who actually holds what claims.

The bigger issue, though, is that BAM still has its silly RICO case going against Schneider. There’s a decent chance that will settle as well (most lawsuits end in settlement, because it’s too expensive and too wasteful not to have them end that way). But if BAM were actually serious about fixing its very tarnished reputation, it should have tried to settle all these cases in one shot.

Instead, it looks like they paid the Mansells (though the amount remains secret) and are dropping Bryan from their case. But their legal fights with the Gormans and Ben Schneider remain.

But the settlement alone also undermines their case against Schneider. After all, BAM has insisted they wanted to pay Mansell what they owed all along, but there’s documentation showing otherwise, including an email to Mansell saying that Best and Johnson “have no legal obligation to return any of the LEGO product” and “We consider this matter closed and will not be returning any LEGO products to you.” Yet, now they have agreed to pay Mansell. And the only thing that changed in the interim was the widespread negative attention BAM got… via Schneider.

So it’s a bit rich for them to still be claiming that Schneider’s actions were a conspiracy to “shake down” BAM:

As evidenced in the 5/21/26 YouTube Video and Publications, beginning in early 2025 and continuing to the date hereof (i.e., over a substantial period of time) and with the direct and indirect support and encouragement of Bryan, Chrystal and Benjamin, Schneider and the Schneider Group began targeting the Baker Salem store, and BAM, to unlawfully shake them down and extort monies demanded.

Now they’re admitting directly that they did, in fact, owe Mansell money, which they have now paid off. And which they absolutely said they weren’t going to do until Schneider drove attention to the whole thing.

So it’s good that Mansell has been paid and dropped from the lawsuit. But it seems unlikely that Bricks & Minifigs’ reputation gets much better so long as it’s still engaged in this questionable lawsuit against Schneider. Hopefully the settling of the Mansell portion means that they’re equally willing to and in the process of working out a deal with Schneider as well. BAM’s press release does note that “separate mediation efforts between BAM and Ben Schneider regarding related pending matters remains ongoing” which is both expected and good. But if you’re already at the table with him, and you’ve now conceded that you did, in fact, own Mansell money for his sets, what exactly is there left to be negotiating with Schneider about? You’ve already admitted that the main “shake down” claims are largely bogus, because you did, in fact, owe Mansell money that you later denied.

Assuming they do eventually settle, for transparency’s sake, it would be better if the terms of such a deal were public, rather than kept under wraps like the Mansell settlement.

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

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Chris Messina, inventor of the #hashtag in social media, who has worked on internet and social media efforts for decades. Together they discuss:

• Oakland Unified Announces New Cell Phone Policy Now in Effect; Policy is Based on New State Law Requiring Cell Phone-Free School Days (Oakland Unified School District)
• In conversation with Jonathan Haidt, author of ‘The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness’ (Left to Their Own Devices)
• French court blocks social media ban for under 15s (Politico)
• Whistleblower Arturo Béjar leads testimony in landmark trial against Meta (NPR)
• Discord halts livestreams in Brazil after watchdog cites child safety failures (ABC News)

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

• AI Companion Legislation in the United States (Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law)
• In China, treatment for mental-health problems is a luxury (The Economist)
• I Don’t Trust A.I. But I Told it Everything (NY Times)

Our fun links this week include Berd, the open source anthropomorphic agent management tool from Jack Dorsey and Block, and Dopamine Shop, Fake Eats, and other places to shop without shopping.

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

Age verification (laws and regulations requiring platforms and websites to assure or estimate that a user seeking to use an online service is of a certain age) is everywhere. At the time of writing, about half the states in the US have some internet age verification law in place, and dangerous proposals, from the KIDS Act to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), have been advancing at the federal level. European Union member states are moving toward having age verification in a centralized app by the end of this year. Australia famously now has one extremely broad restriction in place.

Most age verification laws tend to fail at their primary goal of barring kids from being online or from entering only specially designated zones, not to mention they pose a significant threat to everyone’s privacy. Some proponents of these age-based internet restrictions think they’ve found the silver bullet: Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). We wrote about ZKP’s when they were first rolled out in the age verification context last year. However, more recent examples show our concerns weren’t just conjecture; ZKP-focused AV schemes are gameable, hackable, and not the cure-all some may claim.

ZKPs in Age Verification Would Only Centralize Power and Create More Harms

Before we jump into how these systems work, it must be said: creating a single point of failure for internet access contradicts the very idea of a free and open internet. 

The mechanisms underlying ZKPs pose an existential threat to everyone’s digital rights, not just kids. The idea behind ZKPs is that you are issued a “token” that vouches for your age every time you log in, creating a constant link back to the entity that verified you. The issuer of the tokens these AV schemes rely on could track every time that credential is used, creating a dangerous trail of metadata on any user they wanted to target. The issuer itself could be pressured by authoritarian governments to remove a user’s access to a service, essentially removing that person’s access to the internet entirely. Without oversight of who has authority to implement and operate these systems, this approach centralizes critical internet infrastructure in the hands of very few actors. 

How ZKPs Work

ZKPs are mathematically impressive cryptographic tools—but they weren’t developed with age verification in mind. Essentially, they let a computer quickly attest to the validity of a given question asked by another computer without divulging any underlying private data. 

Computer A (such as the device operated by a person trying to access a website) is able to prove to Computer B (such as the server for the website that person is trying to access) that something is true without actually sharing the contents of that information itself. Computer A locks in a “commitment” to the information it needs to convey. Computer B, which wants to verify that information, generates mathematical “challenges” that can be answered correctly only if the information is true. Traditionally, this happens over many different “challenges” until there is no room for doubt that Computer A’s “commitment” is true.

Since that kind of lengthy back-and-forth process would drastically slow things down over the internet, there’s a shortened version of this exchange that’s “non-interactive.” In that case, the ZKP is verified instantly. The answer itself is hashed (mathematically converted into a fixed, shorter string of characters), and the resulting hash is theoretically unpredictable and tamper-resistant. This shortened version of the ZKP exchange is called “zk-SNARK,” which is the current preferred method for age verification.

In the ideal scenario, this means that ZKP’s are able to attest to a person’s status as an adult or a child without actually giving away any other private information about that person. In other words, only one entity would collect that private information, typically on the user’s device, instead of every website or app that needs the user’s age attested to. Unfortunately, recent real-world testing of these systems prove that ZKP’s aren’t the silver bullet that proponents of AV laws were hoping for.

EU’s AV Rollout Reveals How Broken It Is

By the end of 2026, the 27 states within the European Union are expected to have infrastructure in place to do age verification within a “mini-wallet” app that will live inside the EUDI (European Digital Identity) Wallet. This is being met with plenty of warranted criticism from digital rights experts. The “mini-wallet” version is already being rolled out, with promises that the ZKPs are in working order. But recent insights show that the ZKP features aren’t yet turned on except for the closed demo/prototype build (not the version of the app people are using “out of the box”), which the vast majority of everyday users can’t access. 

Worse still, a security researcher found they could bypass the app’s system using a quickly built Chrome extension that tricked the app into repeatedly accepting the same “over-18” token. It did so without ever asking for fresh verification. 

Over 400 security researchers signed an open letter stating that age assurance checkpoints, even if implemented with privacy in mind, would cause more harm than good. A primary focus of their concern, which we share, is the fact that a centralized identity verification system creates a single point of failure that is extremely vulnerable to both cyberattack and authoritarian overreach.

Once the “mini-wallet” version of this is fully integrated into the EUDI Wallet, it will replicate these same failures, perhaps more, but at a much larger scale. At that point, the failures will involve many more pieces of sensitive information that the EUDI Wallet contains: passports, driver’s licenses, travel information, financial information, to name a few.

ZKP’s Aren’t The Magic Bullet

As we’ve said time and time again, no method of online age verification is privacy-protective, fully accurate, and capable of guaranteeing universal coverage without introducing severe security risks. 

Lawmakers concerned about the privacy failures of age verification mandates must understand that ZKPs are not a magic bullet. They do not solve the age verification paradox; they simply push the burden of trust down the road, relying on technical ignorance and magical thinking about how the internet actually functions.  

Mandatory online age verification of any kind is a dangerously flawed idea. Tell your lawmakers we said so.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

The Plantum app is a digital tool that helps to identify plants, diagnose plant diseases, and improve plant care. The app can identify over 40,000 plant species, assess their health, and give specific care advice. Plantum offers a suite of digital tools that help users improve plant care by considering light conditions, soil, water schedule, appropriate temperature, and more. Plantum collaborates with professional botanists worldwide. In-house experts answer users’ questions about plant care and help treat sick plants in the most challenging situations. Moreover, the app functions as a plant encyclopedia and includes many articles and videos on how to improve plant care routines. Users will appreciate the ability to set up reminders for watering, misting, feeding, and rotating plants, and to receive alerts if weather conditions change significantly. Plantum is a personal assistant for plant lovers and anyone who wants to care for indoor or outdoor plants without worry, and to implement the most relevant approaches for every plant pet. It’s only available for iOS users and is on sale for $20.

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

This news will come as no surprise to anyone. Those who have been following police misconduct revelations for years have seen this happen time and time and time and time again. Those who are in the business of engaging in police misconduct have known for years that it’s easy to do and it seldom gets punished.

While Flock Safety is currently hoovering up most of the negative headlines about tech-enabled stalking by law enforcement officers, it’s a relative newcomer. Cops (and federal officers) have been exploiting database access for years to do everything from harass complainants to stalk their exes to dig up info on people they’d like to coerce into a sexual relationship.

The documents obtained by Wired come from the DHS OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility). The last time we saw a DHS-adjacent OPR take any action, it was to open investigations into people opposed to ICE, rather than limit itself to the confines of its office: investigating complaints about ICE officer misconduct. So, it’s nice to know the DHS OPR isn’t completely compromised. On the other hand… well…

Internal records obtained by WIRED reveal how, for years, United States Customs and Border Protection employees and contractors were accused of abusing sensitive government databases for reasons that had nothing to do with their jobs. The records contain hundreds of allegations of misuse of law enforcement databases, including federal agents querying data to look up romantic interests, monitor family members, expose various personal information and, in some cases, provide intelligence to suspected smugglers or drug-trafficking organizations.

Acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the records reveal the breadth of alleged database abuse by CBP employees spanning more than a decade. 

It is as it is everywhere. If you give someone access to tons of personal data and tracking information and then simply trust that they’ll do the right thing, you’ll always be disappointed. If you wouldn’t trust AI with this access, why would you trust humans? Their goals are far more simplistic, banal, and perverse.

And yet, this is what we’ve been doing for decades: allowing officers to access tons of personal info and providing them tech that can convert digital voyeurism into physical acts of stalking. The databases may be a necessary part of government functionality. But once you add license plate readers, facial recognition tech, and expensive algorithms to the mix, a bit of click-wrap is never going to be enough to deter officers (and government contractors) from using this wealth of information to um… enhance their personal lives.

In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a “heated divorce.” And yet another DHS employee allegedly used controversial ad-tech-derived location data to track several coworkers’ cell phones—which appears to be the first known internal abuse case involving DHS use of ad-tech-derived mobile location data.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. What’s seen here is just what’s been caught and documented. But everyone who wants to do this sort of thing learns stuff from those who have been caught. And it’s not just officers doing the expected ex-stalking. According to the documents, DHS employees and contractors have been caught supplying inside info to drug traffickers and other criminals.

And it’s not going to get better any time soon. Most officers are allowed to resign rather than face discipline or criminal charges. And the private sector’s revolving door just means contractors abusing their access will move on to other jobs in the same field, because surveillance tech companies are similarly uninterested in punishing employees for abusing access to surveillance tech and government databases.

Will this revelation result in meaningful change? Obviously, it won’t. Previous revelations have done little in terms of accountability or oversight. And this administration in particular is deeply opposed to accountability and oversight. Trump himself is openly supportive of law enforcement misconduct. That means the most likely response will be re-tasking the CBP Office of Professional Responsibility to align more with ICE’s bastardized version. The focus will no longer be internal. Instead, the OPR’s power and personnel will be redirected to target Trump critics and amplify the administration’s narratives. The only thing CBP officers and contractors will learn from this is: “Don’t get caught.”

I’ve spent the better part of a lifetime studying and writing about the way corrupted lawmakers and U.S. telecom giants work hand in hand to erode U.S. broadband standards and mapping so they can obscure the way corruption and monopoly result in limited broadband competition — resulting in shitty, expensive, spotty, and slow U.S. internet access (check out my Techdirt/Copia paper about it).

The Trump administration has certainly been no exception. After some modest improvements in broadband mapping and standards made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Trump administration has been working overtime to revert things right back to the status quo (read: shitty and broken).

Case in point: this week the administration abandoned the FCC’s goal to nudge broadband connectivity toward 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) downstream and 500 megabit per second (Mbps) upstream, a dramatic improvement to the FCC’s current base definition of 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream.

FCC boss Brendan Carr falsely claimed in a statement that this downgrade was necessary because the faster standard was not “technologically neutral,” and having higher standards would be an overreach for the agency:

“As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report,” the order said. “A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.”

I hope you’ll notice that Brendan Carr has absolutely no problem violating or ignoring the law when it comes time to censor free speech or destroy U.S. media consolidation limits, but when it comes time to push giant U.S. telecom monopolies to try harder, or to enforce any meaningful consumer protections (like net neutrality), Carr is always suddenly concerned with taking things too far.

The downgrade was part of the FCC’s annual Section 706 Report (required by Congress), in which the captured agency unsurprisingly declares that U.S. broadband deployment is great and there’s really nothing that needs fixing.

Why is Carr suddenly concerned about having high standards? Well, a 1 Gbps goal would cause problems for Elon Musk, whose increasingly-congested Starlink low-Earth orbit satellite broadband system will struggle to reach that goal. While Starlink is great for remote users with no other options, it’s generally too congested to scale and is too expensive for people most in need. It’s also run by a white supremacist.

That hasn’t stopped Republicans from hijacking huge swaths of the $42.5 billion set aside for broadband access and redirecting it to Elon (see my feature at The Verge from last June). A lot of that money is being redirected away from better, faster, community-owned fiber networks or cooperatives, and toward a billionaire in exchange for much slower and more expensive LEO satellite service he planned to deploy anyway. Musk is poised to see a multi-billion dollar windfall for doing nothing differently.

The FCC’s abandoned gigabit speed goals is also of benefit to giant cable monopolies like Comcast, whose lack of network investment has long resulted in dated upstream speeds.

I’ve long covered how even pushing the FCC to adopt the faster 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up speed standard took more than a decade due to lobbying pressure. Big ISPs have also endlessly undermined efforts to more accurately map U.S. broadband access, well aware that better data would only serve to highly monopoly domination and private telecom market failure.

Of all the things I thought the Trump administration would cause to enter the public lexicon, I certainly did not have screwworms on my list. If you somehow haven’t heard of this, screwworms are actually a fly that lays its eggs by burrowing into the flesh of other animals. Those animals are mostly cattle, sometimes household pets, and even occasionally humans. It’s a horrific experience and can lead to death in a few weeks. We used to have an international monitoring program in Mexico through USAID designed to stop the problem at the source before it ever gets to America, but Elon Musk’s DOGE did away with that program, citing it as unnecessary. Well, now screwworms are back in Texas and surrounding states, and they put at risk $2 billion in potential damage to the Texas economy alone. It’s bad enough that this particular administration has decided to pull drones from patrolling the southern border for scary illegal brown people to instead hunt for evidence of screwworm infection in domestic cattle.

But if you don’t think all of that is bad enough of a look for what DOGE and the administration did to cause this, what if we had thousands of dead puppies and kittens in the news instead?

Adoptions are on hold for thousands of dogs and cats in Texas, potentially putting the animals at risk of being euthanized, because of efforts to stop the spread of the New World screwworm, an insect that has crossed the border from Mexico into the United States for the first time in 60 years.

“It’s thrown a wrench into things, for small rescues as well as the bigger shelters,” said Mia Bendixsen, executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network, which promotes animal welfare laws.

The screwworm can lay eggs that hatch into flesh-eating larvae in wounds or mucous on any mammal, and of the dozens of infections in southern Texas and southeastern New Mexico, several have been in dogs. Forty-four states have restricted the movements of pets from infested areas, creating a hardship for shelters from Texas that typically send thousands of animals to other states each year.

There are several factors at work here, combining to risk the live of thousands of good boys and girls at these shelters. The screwworm issue is one of them. Another is that Texas is notorious for having low spay and neuter rates for pets and, specifically, working animals. Dogs in particular tend to be left in their natural state because ranchers somehow think that spaying or neutering them will decrease their drive to work.

Whether that’s actually true or not I can’t really say, but the fact is that sentiment was around long before this year and it’s the screwworms that are causing a major uptick in unadopted animals in Texas. And the euthanizing of thousands of animals would be just one of many consequences of us choosing actively to let screwworms become an American problem again.

Restrictions on animal transports followed efforts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to keep the New World screwworm fly from crossing the border with Mexico.

Those efforts include construction of a $750 million fly factory in southern Texas for breeding billions of sterile males set to open in April 2027. The U.S. had largely eradicated the fly by the early 1970s by breeding sterile males and releasing them from planes to mate with females, who laid eggs that wouldn’t hatch.

Smaller facilities in Texas and southern Mexico have been dispersing sterile flies bred in Panama, and another is planned for Arizona.

When it comes to this particular issue, it’s obvious that there were no taxpayer cost savings due to DOGE’s fuckery. If anything, it seems like we’ll be spending more money to remediate the problem than we did keeping it from becoming one.

And when you layer on the dead bodies of thousands of cats and dogs on top of it all, well, it’s quite a legacy for Musk and his DOGE bros to leave behind.

Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav oversaw years of dysfunction during the last wave of pointless Warner Brothers AT&T and Discovery mergers, which included tens of thousands of brutal layoffs, consistent creative infighting, endlessly higher prices, cancelled programming, and endless chaos.

Unlike most of us, who’d be shitcanned and ostracized, Zaslav is the kind of affluent brunchlord who can only fail upward. He saw $165 million in compensation in 2025, and is poised to cash out with a $550 million golden parachute should the Paramount and Warner Brothers merger succeed.

With the merger postponed due to a 12-state antitrust lawsuit, Zaslav is still finding a way to fail upward either way the wind blows, most recently in the form of a $21.7 million stock sale. Which is on the back of two additional stock sales of $173 million earlier this year:

Zaslav’s latest sale of 773,173 shares of WBD stock, for an aggregate market value of $21,655,292, was handled on his behalf by Fidelity Brokerage Services, according to a company filing with the SEC Thursday. That came after the exec sold $59.47 million of stock in July and $114 million March.

Nice work if you can get it.

Zaslav is among the highest paid executives in media despite having done absolutely nothing to deserve such outsized compensation. He’s seen virtually nothing in the form of meaningful penalties for degrading the brand, derailing countless creative projects, overseeing devastating layoffs across the sector, or generally turning once-premiere brands like HBO into clunky has beens.

Guys like Zaslav aren’t actually building anything useful, nor are they remotely interested in the longevity of the company, its customers, the talent that powers it, or the people who work there. They’re playing with funny numbers to try and perpetually generate the illusion of impossible permanent growth at incredible scale, then cashing out when the check finally comes due for their complicated shell games.

As always, it’s labor and consumers that eat most of the costs at the other end, something that’s likely to accelerate dramatically should Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers survive state antitrust challenge.