The White House AI framework made official what we already knew: this administration has no interest in regulating AI. Any legislation that contradicts the framework will be a dead end. In this regulatory vacuum, it is instructive to turn to norms developed by libraries and archives through their decades of experience working through the same core issues that are now animating AI debate: understanding copyright law; providing machine access to data; contextualizing information; and adhering to responsible stewardship obligations to communities.
The Google Books Library Project can be instructive. In the mid-2000s, research libraries partnered with Google to digitize and preserve millions of volumes in their collections. To solve the problem of how to store and provide access to a massive number of scanned books, research libraries banded together to create HathiTrust, a secure, searchable repository that remains in use today. Of course, this didn’t happen without legal challenges. Authors Guild separately sued Google and HathiTrust for copyright infringement in what came to be known as the “Google Books” cases. But these cases ultimately established the legal precedent that copying books to create a digital searchable database is fair use. Based on this precedent, research methods such as text and data mining are possible because of mass digitization, and lawful under fair use.
Based on Google Books and other litigation, libraries put a stake in the ground when it comes to copyright law: training AI models on copyrighted works generally is fair use, a position articulated by the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) in 2023, and updated in light of recent court decisions. In two of those decisions, Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic, judges held that training AI models on copyrighted works is transformative and therefore fair use. It’s worth noting that these cases are in a commercial context. It is likely that a court would rule in favor of AI uses in educational, research, and scholarly contexts, as those are favored uses under fair use.
Meanwhile, disagreements over AI safety, harm prevention, bias mitigation, and abuse have held up federal AI legislation in the US. But these are not new problems for libraries, which have developed norms to balance the collection and preservation of sensitive information in archives and special collections with the imperative to provide the broadest possible user access to digitized content. One example is the 2010 ARL principles to guide vendor/publisher relations in large scale digitization projects with special collections, which calls for libraries to make material available to the public while providing context to aid in the understanding of that material. Libraries have also developed frameworks for stewarding materials of vulnerable communities and historically marginalized groups, like the Library of Congress access policy on culturally sensitive materials relating to Indigenous peoples, which includes transparent procedures for controlled access and use of culturally sensitive materials.
Congress has also been legislating in the dark around issues like transparency and provenance in AI training, and many of the proposals we have seen so misunderstand these concepts that they threaten to bring the university-based research enterprise to a halt. Libraries already do what Congress is trying to mandate — authenticating, contextualizing, and documenting collections — but the legislation is too disconnected from this expertise, and as a result unworkable for the institutions that actually practice rigorous provenance.
As AI governance debates continue to stall on Capitol Hill, library norms offer a foundation for approaching AI training and research in a way that is responsible, steeped in library expertise, and advances the public interest.
With gratitude to Betsy Rosenblatt, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University Law School
Katherine Klosek is the Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Runaway selection happens when organizations compete with each other far beyond the point where it’s rational to do so. We see this in species as well–peacocks have ungainly and inefficient feather displays because, as Alice’s Red Queen said, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
In organizations, there’s a desire to do good work. Pressure to outdo the others. And a desire for deniability and certainty. Add those up, and we are left with a quest for more long after it’s helpful.
How many people applied for that good job you just posted? 1,000? Spread the word, more applications must be a good thing. It’s not unusual for digitally-amplified hiring processes to see 5,000 applications arrive in a day. 360,000 people applied for a slot in the Goldman Sachs internship program. Would a million have been better?
And then, let’s use AI to pick the 80 best candidates and interview each via Zoom.
Take the ten best and put them through a series of interviews, rotating through each person on the team, including aptitude tests and real-time projects. In many organizations, there are 6, 7 or even 10 rounds of interviews.
It costs a typical organization more than $14,000 to hire an executive, and the time and emotional cost to applicants is many times that. This all leads to lowered productivity, wasted time and a damaged brand.
What do we get in exchange for this investment? Are the people you hire with this exhausting/exhaustive process adding more value than the ones we found with much less time ten years ago?
And the second question: would your third or fourth choice have worked out just as well, if not better?
If Red Queen hiring actually worked, then we’d see that organizations that spend more time on it would outperform those that don’t. It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t the case–it’s not an investment in the future, it’s a sign of bureaucratic stasis, a quest for deniability, and a thoughtless pursuit of the wrong sort of more. We’ve made it much easier for people to apply for jobs, but done little to improve what happens after the applications arrive.
What if we spent the time wasted on Red Queen maximization doing something useful instead–training and orientation, perhaps. Interview until you find someone who can do the job, then hire them. Then get back to work.
We can’t even ask that question, because it feels like a compromise. Without any data at all, we’ve bought into the Red Queen race that our false proxies, sufficiently polished, deliver better results. In fact, there’s a huge increase in the cost to the applicants and the organization, but no measurable increase in the value created.
Successful fishermen understand that casting an ever-wider net is not always the best way to catch the fish you need.
Last month we noted how tech companies, automakers, and others were trying to kill Colorado’s existing “right to repair” law, which is supposed to make it cheaper and easier to repair the things you own.
More specifically, tech companies like Cisco and IBM were pushing Colorado lawmakers to sign off on SB26-090, the Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair law, which would neuter much of the state’s existing protections under the pretense of making the public safer.
“SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.”
Like many similar efforts, tech companies falsely tried to convince lawmakers that making things cheaper and easier to repair would pose entirely new privacy and security risks, and that independent repair shops would be prone to make constant and dangerous mistakes. Pre-Trump Lina Khan era FTC studies had repeatedly indicated those claims are false.
In this case, IBM and Cisco had tried to use an updated definition of “critical infrastructure” that was so large and vague as to render all the protections meaningless. While they failed this time, they’ll be back. Countless companies, across countless industries, are desperate to boost revenues by monopolizing repair and driving up the cost of ownership for consumers and other companies alike.
Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, not one has actually managed to enforce their new laws despite no shortage of targets, something that gets curiously omitted by most reporting, and indicates the movement has a lot of work left to do.
Just as Hillary Clinton positioned her run as a third term for Obama ("America is already great"), so did Biden (and then Harris) position their campaigns as a second Biden term. As Biden said (in 2019): "Nothing would fundamentally change":
So a vote for Biden would be a vote for another four years of forceful, material support for genocide; another four years of compromise with Democratic establishment on student debt and healthcare gouging; and another four years of a president who was obviously in mental decline.
Harris's campaign was, "A vote for me is a vote for all of the above (minus the cognitive decline)." Actually, it was worse: by conspicuously failing to campaign on the Biden administration's record on reining in corporate power, a vote for Harris was "A vote for all of the above, minus the mental decline and the antitrust."
Whereas a vote for Trump was a vote for change, a vote to give the establishment a black eye. It was also a vote for genocide and racist pogroms and gangster kleptocracy, which is why many voters stayed home, casting a ballot for America's all-time favorite candidate, "None of the above," while any number of furious people and/or vicious racists turned out for Trump.
There's one book that crystallizes my thoughts on this better than any other: Naomi Klein's 2023 Doppelganger, which analyzes our politics in terms of (warped) "mirror images." One of the mirror world pairings that Klein analyzes is the progressive movement, a coalition of liberals and leftists (led by liberals).
Like every coalition, the two main groups that constitute "the progressives" do not agree on many important issues, though they do have common goals. Both groups support equality for people of all genders and races, but for liberals, an equal world is one that fixes the problem that 150 straight white men own everything by replacing 75 of them with racialized people, women and queer people (whereas the leftist fix is abolishing the system in which 150 people own everything).
Biden set himself up as a peacemaker for this coalition, and his "unity task force" divided up the appointments in his administration between the Warren-Sanders leftists and liberals, including those who clearly belonged to the Manchin-Sinematic universe. This meant that his administration worked at cross-purposes to itself, neutering its boldest initiatives, rendering them impotent.
Take Biden's plan to finally allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharma companies, a move that was very long overdue. Before this, the way the system worked was: pharma companies named a price – any price! – and then Uncle Sucker paid it. No other country in the world operates this way, and, of course, the lion's share of pharma R&D costs are already borne by the American public (or they were, until Musk DOGEd the US research budget to death).
So the American public pays more than anyone else in the world to develop these drugs, and then they pay more than anyone else in the world to buy these drugs. This is madness, and putting an end to it is an obvious political win. But Biden found a way to do it that "balanced" the leftist principle of protecting people from capitalist exploitation with the liberal principle of protecting businesses lest the essential function of developing life-saving drugs become a state activity (rather than a market one).
Biden's solution? A "Build Back Better" plan that would allow the federal government to negotiate up to ten drug prices (and as few as zero drug prices), but the new prices would only kick in after the 2024 election, so no one would see the benefit of this in time for the next general election:
This is a solution that pleases no one – and that's the point. Biden and his team viewed the presidency as an institution for making sure everyone was equally unhappy, a philosophy that Anat Shenker-Osorio calls "pizzaburger politics." This is named for a thought-experiment in which half your family wants pizza and the other half wants burgers, so you serve them "pizzaburgers" and make everyone miserable and declare yourself to have the fair-handed wisdom of Solomon (yes, I'm aware that this analogy has a fatal flaw in that pizzaburgers actually sound delicious, but work with me here).
Biden prided himself on running a pizzaburger presidency, in which every move that satisfied the left of his party was neutralized by a concession to the party's right wing establishment:
(Trump enacted mirror-world version of Biden's pharma price controls: TrumpRx, a program that claims to lower drug prices while those prices actually go up):
Biden's pizzaburger compromises made everyone unhappy. He appointed generational talents like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra to run key agencies charged with crushing corporate power, and then gave lifetime appointments to corporate-friendly judges who blocked their rulemakings and penalties:
Of course, it wasn't just Biden's own judicial appointees who stood in his way; from the Supreme Court on down, on issues from student debt cancellation to noncompetes, judges blocked the Biden administration. When this happened, Biden somehow couldn't find his way to his bully pulpit. Rather than working the refs – the way Trump does, in ways that energize his base, stiffens his legislators' resolve and intimidates other judges – Biden tinkered in the margins to find ways to advance half-measures and stayed mum in public.
This compromise-oriented meekness carried over into Biden's relationship with Democratic lawmakers who sold out the American people. Rather than campaigning for the primary opponents of monsters like Fetterman, Sinema and Manchin, Biden worked behind the scenes to broker compromises, delivering yet another inedible pizzaburger (and acting hurt and bewildered when no one thanked him for it). The alternative? Constitutional hardball:
It's not clear whether Harris's abbreviated campaign could have made the public case that she would govern in a more muscular fashion as befitted the polycrisis facing the nation, but she didn't even try. A couple Democratic Party insiders of my acquaintance tell me that Biden only agreed to step aside on the condition that Harris not criticize his record. I don't know if that's true, but even within that hypothetical constraint, Harris hardly presented herself as an avatar of change. She carried on Biden's tradition of conspicuously failing to campaign on the significant achievements of Biden's own trustbusters, and put her brother-in-law, the lawyer who helped Uber crush labor rights in California, in charge of her campaign:
The point of all this is that the American people have, on two occasions, comprehensively rejected the "America is already great"/"Nothing would fundamentally change" politics of a liberal-dominated left/liberal progressive coalition. The senior partners in that coalition have driven the country into a ditch, letting Trump stage a fascist takeover that has us fighting not to win another election, but just to have another one.
Americans are sick of being told that their politicians can't do anything because "they're not the Green Lantern:"
America isn't already great. If we are to have more elections – much less win them – we will need to mobilize millions of people. You don't do that by telling them to oppose Trumpismo – you get them out in the streets by giving them something to support. That was Mamdani's winning message: "I know what a politician can do, and I will do it":
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Lately, we’ve been a tad preoccupied with our own debacle of a war in Iran to pay much attention to another major war nearby. But we really should, because it sure seems like Russia is starting to lose that war to Ukraine.
Putin ordered an all-out attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Against all odds, that initial assault failed, as I explained in 50 days of reporting on the first part of that war. Four years later, Russia’s quest to defeat its far smaller and poorer neighbor is failing in ways that the numbers make impossible to ignore.
With so many terrible headlines to digest these days, it’s encouraging to see real evidence that a small, tenacious and adaptable country, through its valiant people and leaders, can stand up to a brutal dictator and prevail.
Russian casualties.According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russian forces have sustained roughly 1.34 million casualties—killed or wounded—since February 2022. That’s a staggering figure, but the recent numbers are even worse. President Zelenskyy reported in March that Russia had lost nearly 100,000 soldiers in just the first three months of 2026—roughly 33,000 per month—with 90 percent of those casualties attributed to Ukrainian drones. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, put the ratio at roughly six Russian losses for every Ukrainian one. As Euromaidan Press reported in early May, Russia is now losing soldiers faster than it can replace them for the fifth consecutive month.
The Russian economy. The Moscow Times reports that Russian GDP growth has slowed to around one percent, down from above four percent just two years ago, a figure initially fueled by war spending. Recession is now a realistic possibility. The Bank of Finland’s economic bulletin found that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the financial cushion built up over decades of oil revenues, has lost more than half its value since the invasion began. Taxes are increasing, social spending is falling, and Russia’s central bank is warning of a severe labor shortage. Putin himself publicly admitted that Russia’s GDP shrank in the first two months of 2026.
Russia’s oil woes. Russia Matters publishes a war report card, and last week it documented that Ukrainian drone strikes have forced roughly 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity offline. According to Bloomberg, in early 2026 Ukrainian forces hit the Baltic export terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk five times in ten days, cutting oil flows to just a third of normal and costing Russia more than a billion dollars in a single week. The New York Times assessed that the campaign has damaged or destroyed approximately 20 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity since 2024.
This isn’t 20th century warfare
How could all this be happening at once? There are several contributing factors, but one overarching theme emerges from military analysts covering the war. Russia has been fighting a 20th-century war, but Ukraine is waging a 21st-century one.
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on the Russian military, has argued that the conventional metrics of battlefield success obscure what’s really happening. Kofman wrote that “territory changing hands is a lagging indicator for what’s happening” inside the two forces—and that “gradually then suddenly” transitions are possible as a result. And what is happening inside Russia’s forces is apparently a slow-motion collapse.
When Putin first ordered the invasion, Russian military doctrine rested on a familiar model: mass, hierarchy and firepower. He sent in columns of tanks. The command structure was centralized. Industrial-scale logistics flowed through a controlled supply chain.
Putin and his generals might be forgiven for thinking this was the way to go. After all, it was the doctrine that won World War II and that crushed Chechnya. The assumption was that Ukraine—outgunned, outnumbered and facing the second-largest military in the world—would fold in days.
Ukraine’s response, as the Center for European Policy Analysis documented in a recent report, was something Russia’s top-down system did not anticipate: a wartime “innovation culture” comprising small Ukrainian companies, front-line engineers, small military units and private developers. Together, following that initial shock, they began collaborating to produce a wartime loop of design, battlefield test and rapid iteration. Through this system, Ukraine weaponized commercial technology into military systems faster than traditional defense procurement cycles could.
The numbers are extraordinary. CEPA reports that Ukraine is now producing roughly eight million first-person view (FPV) drones per year. These are small, unmanned, cheap and agile single-use aircraft that have effectively replaced artillery as the dominant tool of the battlefield. Zelenskyy’s data showed Ukrainian drones hitting 33,000 Russian troops in December 2025 alone, up from 16,000 in July. Importantly, and to the consternation of Russia’s military planners, that monthly toll rose every single month through the second half of 2025.
I had the same question you may have at this point. How did Ukraine succeed in beating mighty Russia in the “drone wars”? Weren’t Russian drones the ones wreaking havoc on Ukrainian cities and military positions? When I looked into it, I learned something rather astonishing: Ukraine’s edge in drone warfare is based on something so simple it’s nearly absurd: a fishing reel made of glass.
How to defeat a military superpower’s jammers
Standard FPV combat drones communicate by radio. The remote operator sends control signals through the air, and the drone responds in real time. That sounds great, but there’s a problem. Radio signals can be jammed. When Ukraine began to deploy drones at scale, Russia responded with electronic warfare, and for a period it effectively countered Ukraine’s drone threat.
Ukraine’s answer, as documented by GIS Reports journalists who visited front-line drone workshops in January 2026, was to eliminate the radio entirely. It did so using fiber optic cable.
The idea sounds too crazy to work, but fiber-optic drones actually carry a spool of ultra-thin cable as they fly. As a drone moves toward its target, the cable unspools behind it, like a kite on a very long string, maintaining a hardwired connection to the operator. The signal travels as pulses of light through glass, not as radio waves through air. It’s as if the operators are playing a deadly game of “telephone” with a bomb-packed drone on the other end.
Because of this direct connection, there is no frequency to jam, no signal to intercept. As one Ukrainian combat veteran told GIS Reports: “A fiber-optic drone is not designed to conduct 30 to 40 sorties per day. It is intended for a single sortie and a precise strike. Countering it is extremely difficult—so far, only physically shooting it down works.”
This work-around solution emerged out of necessity, through trial and error. As a Carnegie Endowment analysis noted, front-line operators and engineers in workshops near the fighting identified the issue and iterated until they solved it, building “an entirely new category of unmanned weapon.”
To be sure, Russia has copied the technology. But what it cannot copy, as GIS Reports’ analysis put it, is the strategic culture gap. “Russia capitalizes on its scale, whereas Ukraine harnesses innovation through continuous improvement.” Once Russia validates a concept, it can mass-produce it. But the next concept will already have come from Ukraine.
The fleet that “constantly hides”
The same dynamic produced a dramatic result at sea for Ukraine, which had no meaningful navy. Russia had the formidable Black Sea Fleet, one of its most powerful and symbolically important forces, anchored in occupied Crimea.
So Ukraine built naval drones instead.
The Magura V5, a surface drone costing roughly $250,000 per unit, began striking Russian warships costing hundreds of millions of dollars in 2023. By early 2024, as the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings documented in September 2025, Magura drone boats, armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, had sunk multiple warships, destroyed a Russian helicopter and badly damaged another, and even shot down two Su-30 fighter jets. The Russian Black Sea Fleet has lost an estimated $500 million in assets and now barely operates, venturing at most 25 miles from port to fire missiles before retreating.
As the commander of Ukraine’s naval drone operations told the Washington Times: “They constantly hide.”
Russia tried to build its own naval drone counteroffensive for 2026. But as Euromaidan Press reported just days ago, SpaceX, at Ukraine’s request, blocked Russian access to Starlink satellite communications, and its new drone program collapsed entirely. (Perhaps Elon Musk finally realizes which side he needs to be on.) It turns out, Russia’s naval drones were wholly dependent on commercial Western infrastructure that could simply be switched off. Ukraine’s systems, built from the ground up, exhibit no such dependency.
Two caveats, and a lifeline
Ukraine knows that Russia is not standing still. Ukraine’s own commanders, including the head of the 3rd Assault Brigade, acknowledged last fall that Russia had actually outpaced Ukraine in raw FPV drone numbers by 2025. In short, Russia copies what Ukraine invents and scales it massively. The advantage Ukraine holds is in the speed of the next iteration. This is a real edge, but it’s one Russia is actively working to close.
Importantly, Ukraine’s innovation culture doesn’t run entirely on its own ingenuity. Chatham House’s analysts noted that Ukraine’s adaptability is partly a function of being plugged into a global technology ecosystem that Russia has been progressively cut off from by sanctions.
And then there is the lifeline the United States inadvertently extended. Chatham House assessed that by early 2026, Western sanctions were finally working: Russian oil export revenues had fallen, the economy was contracting and Putin appeared to face genuinely painful choices about sustaining the war. Then the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran sent oil prices soaring as Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Russia, as a major energy exporter, got a massive windfall it did nothing to earn. The Trump administration also temporarily eased sanctions on Russian oil, handing Moscow further relief at exactly the wrong moment. Russia Matters reported that Russia’s budget revenues from oil extraction nearly doubled in March 2026 relative to the month before.
Whether that reprieve holds may prove the pivot point on which the next chapter of this war turns.
A lesson we should take to heart
There is a lesson in all of this that America might wish to apply. We are currently in the thick of our own war, bringing the most expensive, technologically sophisticated military in human history to bear against a far weaker, less sophisticated adversary. Iran cannot match our firepower.
But it may not need to.
Asymmetric warfare follows consistent rules. The weaker side survives by being nimble, cheap and tapped into systems that don’t depend on the infrastructure the stronger side can target. The stronger side struggles because its overwhelming capabilities were built for a different kind of war.
Russia learned this the hard way. It sent its best conventional forces to fight an adversary that had given up on fighting conventionally. The mismatch didn’t show up immediately, as Russia made early gains, held conquered territory and sustained its war narrative for months. But the structural disadvantages for Russia have compounded. Four years later, the tanks are gone from parades in Moscow and its sovereign wealth fund is half empty.
The U.S. of course is not Russia. Our military is more capable, more adaptive, and more technologically sophisticated. But the core lesson of Ukraine is not about any specific weapon or tactic. It’s about what happens when a massive, top-down military machine meets an adversary fighting a fundamentally different war—and whether the big war machine can adapt fast enough to matter.
Russia is failing that test. And as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, with gas and fertilizer prices soaring and no easy way out of the war Trump started, we may be failing it, too.
Small waterfall on Gunung Lambak, one of several along the stream that flows next to the main path up the mountain. This is a focus stack of 2 photographs, and a neutral density filter was used to allow a long exposure time of 2 seconds.
Kash Patel is one of the rare Trump political appointees who actually has some experience that might be useful in his current position. But it wasn’t his past experience as a federal public defender and prosecutor that prompted Trump to elevate him to the post of FBI Director. Instead, it was his willingness to engage in politically motivated investigations, along with his willingness to host pro-MAGA podcasts when their original hosts were in prison on federal charges.
Patel serves at the president’s pleasure, as all political appointees do. But Trump’s pleasure is more unpredictable than most. Perhaps realizing his time frame for making hay is extremely short, Patel has done very little in terms of leadership, preferring to spend his time (allegedly) partying it up when not (allegedly) failing to gain the trust and respect of the Bureau.
When not saying stupid things on social media or during press conferences, Patel likes to leverage his position to do things like… hang out in the US Olympic hockey team locker room as they celebrated their gold medal win.
Consequently, plenty has been published about Patel’s (alleged) inability to stay sober and/or do his damn job. A shocking expose of Patel’s (alleged) constant insobriety prompted Patel to respond in the fashion he’s been accustomed to during his tenure as FBI Director. He filed a libel lawsuit against The Atlantic over its reporting on his months of (allegedly) unprofessional behavior.
Hilariously, Patel and his lawyers relied on a previous lawsuit he had filed against MSNBC for its earlier reporting on pretty much the same subject, taking particular objection to this statement made by reporter Frank Figliuzzi:
Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.
Perhaps he should have waited until his first lawsuit had been fully litigated. The lawsuit he used as part of his arguments in favor of “actual malice” was dismissed, with the judge finding in favor of MSNBC and Figliuzzi.
So, this is one the things Patel seems to be involved in daily, which isn’t actually a part of his day-to-day duties as FBI Director. The other thing he seems to be doing on a regular basis is ensuring the people who still work for him won’t want to work for him for much longer.
FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.
[…]
The director has also avoided meeting this week with some key operational leaders of the bureau, the people said, raising concerns inside the FBI about Patel’s ability to stay abreast of pressing threats and investigations in order to make the best decisions.
Will this reporting prompt another lawsuit from Kash Patel? I would hope his lawyers are smarter than Patel appears to be, because going back to the same well so quickly following a libel lawsuit loss might add sanctions to the humiliation of another public loss in a federal court.
The funniest thing about this reporting is that the FBI official spokesman, Ben Williamson, refused to deny the use of polygraph tests, instead deciding to deny the assertion that Patel isn’t regularly attending meetings with key FBI officials. It’s not like Williamson couldn’t have just lied about the polygraphs. This is an administration that is willing to lie about pretty much anything at any time. Having their lies exposed doesn’t regularly result in firing, which means blatantly lying has nearly no professional consequences. But Williamson just decided to ignore a question he didn’t want to answer.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.
Those were the (alleged) facts on the ground as of July 2025. Since then, Patel hasn’t done much to distance himself from allegations of misusing his position for personal gain, whether it’s trying to get special treatment from the Bureau itself, or crashing Olympic celebrations just because he can.
I find it hard to believe even Patel himself thinks he’s actually leading the FBI. After all, this is the same guy who (allegedly!) thought he’d been fired when he bungled one too many login attempts. But he’s the perfect guy for the Trump administration: someone who spreads falsehoods, yells “fake news” whenever publicly criticized, files lost-cause lawsuits against people protected by the First Amendment, and will quietly accept his dismissal whenever Trump decides to turn on him.
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As you’ll recall, when Elon Musk first started buying up Twitter stock, before he officially decided to buy the whole company, he blew past the SEC-mandated deadline to reveal publicly that he had accumulated over 5% of the stock. Indeed, Musk waited until he held nearly 10% of the company’s stock before revealing his position at all. Many shareholders were rightly pissed off about this, because it likely diminished the value of their shares. There’s a reason the law says you need to disclose crossing that 5% line.
And, to be clear, this isn’t one of those gray areas of the law. This is a case where Elon pretty clearly violated the law in very obvious ways. But because the Biden admin was so terrified of looking even remotely biased against Elon, the SEC took nearly three years investigating the case (and yes, part of that was Elon trying to ignore investigatory demands) before finally suing him… in the last week of the Biden admin.
I’m somewhat amazed it took this long, but earlier this week, the Trump SEC announced a settlement. Despite the blatant flouting of the rules — which likely cost Twitter shareholders millions of dollars — the settlement requires Elon to pay $1.5 million. That’s basically pocket change to the world’s richest man. It’s not even a slap on the wrist, which might sting a bit.
“I do think that it suggests if you’re wealthy or powerful enough then there aren’t going to be consequences,” said Fagel, who previously led the SEC’s San Francisco office. “The optics of this are terrible.”
Perhaps in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t much matter. No real fine was going to matter much to Elon Musk. He has enough money to be shielded from effectively any monetary punishment — they could fine him 99% of his wealth and he’d still be richer than basically anyone reading this.
But it’s this kind of thing, and the lack of real consequences for it, that undermine our trust in institutions and the rule of law. The message being sent is hard to miss: if you’re wealthy enough and loyal enough to Trump, the rules simply don’t apply to you.
This release is an emergency release to fix a critical security vulnerability
in the Linux kernel, as well as security vulnerabilities in Tor Browser and
in the Tor client.
Changes and updates
Update the Linux kernel to 6.12.86, which fixes Dirty Frag, a vulnerability that could allow an application in Tails to gain administration privileges.
For example, if an attacker was able to exploit other unknown security
vulnerabilities in an application included in Tails, they might then use
Copy Fail to take full control of your Tails and deanonymize you.
We are not aware of this vulnerability being used in practice until now.
More than 4,000 Hollywood insiders recently signed a letter blasting Paramount’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, noting that the massive consolidation will be very historically harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. That’s a very correct observation, especially as it relates to Warner Brothers, which has never been involved in a merger that didn’t result in mass layoffs, higher prices for everyone, and a significantly shittier overall product.
Now a coalition of press groups, including Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and Reporters Without Borders, are pressing Paramount regarding “potentially corrupt acquisitions and deals” they argue could undermine shareholder value by degrading the (already sagging) quality of journalism at CBS News and CNN, while “relinquishing editorial control of major news outlets to the Trump administration.”
The journalism groups make the point that the Ellison family effort to turn CBS into a Trump and Netanyahu-friendly agitprop machine has been disastrous for the company’s share price. And because both organizations are technically shareholders, they’re demanding deeper access to the Paramount books to see what other dodgy bullshit may not have been revealed yet:
“Since Paramount Skydance announced its most consequential Trump-friendly changes at CBS News in October — acquiring The Free Press and appointing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief — the company’s market capitalization has decreased by 40%, wiping out more than $8 billion in shareholder value. Ratings for key programs, like “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil,” have also dropped precipitously. Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, which are both shareholders in Paramount Skydance Corp., are entitled to inspect the company’s books and records related to these developments under Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law.”
They’ve given Paramount five days to respond to their request for more documents and data related to any promises Paramount may have made the Trump administration. I’m not convinced the gambit will go anywhere, but it’s nice to see these kinds of groups (historically absent from many of these fights) suddenly paying closer attention to media consolidation.
Larry Ellison’s interests here are two-fold. He wanted to gift his nepobaby son David with two major Hollywood studios so David can pretend he’s a very big boy doing very serious things. But he’s also keen on dismantling what’s left of journalism at places like CBS News and CNN (already reeling from years of corporate cowardice) turning them into right-wing friendly agitprop mills that are even more friendly to his favorite autocrats (Trump and Netanyahu).
You’ll recall Bari Weiss sold herself to Paramount as an expert who could modernize CBS News through virality and mass audience appeal (despite having no actual experience in journalism). But Weiss, who got her start at the helm of a strange contrarian troll blog, has the instincts and ideas of a 90 year old man, and clearly isn’t capable of generating watchable propaganda in any ratings-grabbing way that actually appeals to anyone (even MAGA folks, who already have no limit of agitprop options).
The Trump administration will certainly rubber stamp the deal. Paramount will likely keep this effort locked up in the courts indefinitely. And the Democrats’ demand for the FCC to investigate the dodgy Chinese and Saudi financing propping up the deal isn’t likely to go anywhere. That leaves a collaborative looming lawsuit by state AGs as the most likely path toward ensuring this deal never gets off the ground.
But even if the deal gets approved, this giant company’s long-term survival is far from guaranteed. Especially given the shaky state of Hollywood, the steady enshittification of streaming, and the fact that there’s very little evidence that the any of the Paramount folks are competent.
There’s a very high likelihood that the combination of Paramount’s massive debt load from both the CBS and Warner deals– and fleeing audience (either bored by bad product or disgusted by the companies’ Trump allegiances) — combines with Larry Ellison’s over-extension on AI to result in some very precarious financial footing.
These major media deals always go terribly for consumers and labor, but execs often benefit from tax breaks, temporary stock boosts, and compensation in no way dictated by competency (see: CEO David Zaslav). But this series of deals is so massive and problematic, it could generate some very significant pain for the extraction class, and make all past merger disasters seem adorable by comparison.
津波 (つなみ) — tsunami 津軽 (つがる) — Tsugaru (western region of Aomori Prefecture) 津島派 (つしまは) — Tsushima Faction (of the LDP) 天津 (あまつ) — heavenly 津軽弁 (つがるべん) — Tsugaru Dialect (Tsugaru region of Aomori Prefecture) 興味津々 (きょうみしんしん) — very interesting 大津波 (おおつなみ) — giant tsunami 全国津々浦々 (ぜんこくつつうらうら) — all over the country 国津 (くにつ) — of the land 津波警報 (つなみけいほう) — tsunami warning
In March, a coalition of thirteen major publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a fresh lawsuit against Anna’s Archive.
The publishers allege the shadow library is facilitating “staggering” levels of piracy, including the use of their books as training material for AI models.
This lawsuit follows on the heels of a case various music companies filed against the site a few months earlier. They sprung into action when Anna’s Archive said it would publish material from a Spotify scrape it had obtained earlier.
As a result of the legal pressure and an injunction released in favor of the music companies, Anna’s Archive lost several domain names. Faced with a U.S. court order, the site eventually moved to .GL, .PK, and .GD domains, which remain active today.
The music companies won a massive $322 million default judgment against Anna’s Archive in April. However, while the site reportedly removed the Spotify files that triggered the music case, it continued to offer many millions of books.
The Publishers Seek $19.5 Million Judgment
The books are still being pirated, and widely used as AI training material, so the publishers now seek their own default judgment. This includes a broad permanent injunction targeting the surviving domains.
After Anna’s Archive failed to respond in court, the publishers now ask for the maximum $150,000 per work in statutory damages for 130 works, which adds up to a total of $19,500,000. That’s $1.5 million for each of the thirteen plaintiff publishers.
$19.5 Million
The financial compensation is little more than a footnote, as the site’s operators remain unknown and unlikely to pay anything. The permanent injunction the publishers request is more important, as that could help to take Anna’s Archive’s domains offline.
The music companies already obtained a similar injunction in their case, but that is no longer as effective, since Anna’s Archive stopped actively offering the Spotify files through its website. The books, however, remain available.
Injunction Targets More Than 20 Intermediaries
The publishers ask the court to issue an injunction targeting Anna’s Archive and all domain registries, registrars, hosts, and internet service providers connected to the three remaining domains. The order would prevent the transfer of the domains to anyone other than the publishers or the music companies.
The proposed injunction names more than twenty specific companies, including familiar names from the music lawsuit such as Cloudflare, Public Interest Registry, Tucows, Njalla, the Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, and the National Internet Exchange of India.
The list also adds new entities that are linked to the surviving domains: TELE Greenland/Tusass for .gl, PKNIC for .pk, and Grenada’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission for .gd. Several hosting and registrar companies are also mentioned, including DDOS-Guard, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Hosting Concepts B.V., OwnRegistrar, Neterra, Webglobe, and CentralNic Registry.
The intermediaries
The order would require these parties to permanently disable the domains and authoritative nameservers, cease all hosting services, preserve identifying evidence, and “refrain from frustrating” the judgment.
Will It Work?
Without a formal defense from Anna’s Archive, the chances are high that the publishers will win this legal battle. However, whether they will get the desired result is a different matter.
Even if the permanent injunction is granted, it depends on whether they are intermediaries who will fall under the U.S. jurisdiction, or whether they will comply voluntarily.
The permanent injunction obtained by the music companies, which also targeted the .GL, .PK, and .GD domains, hasn’t reached the desired result yet. Whether a new order targeting more intermediaries will fare any better has yet to be seen.
—
A copy of the publishers’ memorandum of law supporting the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf). The proposed default judgment can be found here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
It’s a multi-win week for MrWilson, who takes both top spots on the insightful side with one serving as a double-winner at the top of the funny side too. In first place for both insightful and funny is a rebuke of a very argumentative commenter who defended John Roberts’s claim that the Supreme Court is apolitical and just following policy:
I’d explain it, but the comments don’t allow for a script that loads a completely different explanation every time you glance at it or respond to it, whatever serves the argument in the moment.
This feels like Robert E. Lee telling slaves that they shouldn’t criticize him for fighting the North so hard in order to preserve the “right” of slaveholders to enslave them.
It’s an inherently patronizing and blatantly bullshit take. He also seems to think unpopular just means “people don’t like it” rather than “it’s actually an unconstitutional power grab.”
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from that post, this time from Berenerd offering another rebuke of Roberts:
Flying flags upside down in solidarity with insurrectionists, overturning decades old precedents including one that there was no real case before the court, but it was seen anyway because Pro-Choice kills babies. I think even on was overturned taking the exact opposite of the text of the law in question but I can’t find it…
Nope, nothing to suggest they are not trying to legislate from the bench.
It’s a clear cut example of sanewashing by the media. Yet, when you point out that it’s obvious sanewashing, the media types will whine about how they are not sanewashing and that they are just “clarifying” or “explaining” what the president meant. Then, the media will turn around and wonder why so few trust them anymore afterwards. It’s all frustrating, but it has also been going on for years now. It’s gotten to the point that this is hardly surprising.
Even the Canadian media when covering the US president does it. Live footage gets put out with Trump with his usual senile crazed rantings that make no sense at all, then when they cut back to the reporters who “break it down for all of us”, they basically do everything in their power to make Trump look as presidential as humanly possible. Sometimes, they’ll admit that he can be “unpredictable”, but that’s about it. Why the Canadian media contributes to the sanewashing of a president who is actively trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty is something I’ll never fully understand.
Over on the funny side, things are pretty quiet this week. We’ve already had the first place double-winner above, but there wasn’t much activity beyond that, so we’ll forego the editor’s choice and just highlight the second-place winner. It’s a commenter going by Magic 8 Ball in response to a comment suggesting Trump will hire, well, a magic 8 ball to replace the National Science Foundation board:
Adult entertainment is big business on the internet, and several of the largest brands in this niche are owned by the Aylo conglomerate.
Formerly known as Mindgeek, Aylo is the driving force behind free ‘tube’ sites such as Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube. It also owns many adult brands, including Brazzers and Reality Kings, that charge for subscriptions.
Over the years, the company has built an impressive library of more than 40,000 registered copyright works. The company’s enforcement arm, Aylo Premium, protects this content by various means. It has sent many millions of takedown requests and also targets pirate sites in court, hoping to shut these down.
Earlier this year, Aylo won a $90 million default judgment against a porn piracy network that included ‘Freshporno,’ ‘Kojka,’ and ‘PornHeal,’ among others. While that was a major win, at least on paper, plenty of targets remained.
That included Pornhits.com, which Aylo sued in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington last December. The complaint named Anatoly Chernov as the alleged operator, along with twenty unidentified Doe defendants, and accused them of displaying 5,635 of Aylo’s registered works on the site without authorization.
According to Aylo, Pornhits misleadingly suggests that it is a user-generated content platform. The complaint alleges the upload feature visible on the site is “inoperative and illusory,” which means that all infringing content was added by the site’s operator directly. Aylo also said it sent 44,934 DMCA takedown notices, which were all ignored.
Aylo’s $84 Million Demand
As is often the case in these types of lawsuits, the defendant did not appear in court to defend himself. As a result, Aylo requested a default judgment, asking for $15,000 in statutory damages per infringed work, which is less than the maximum of $150,000 per work.
However, with 5,635 works at issue, the total does add up to $84,525,000.
To justify the figure, Aylo pointed to SimilarWeb data showing that Pornhits attracted approximately 1.7 million U.S. visitors in October 2025 alone. If all these visitors signed up for official subscriptions, the company said it would earn roughly $17 million per month.
While pirate views do not directly translate to lost sales, Aylo also referenced that the same court awarded $15,000 per work in near-identical adult content piracy defaults. This includes the Yespornplease case, which was also handled by the same U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle.
“More Than Mere Guesswork”
Last week, Judge Settle granted the default judgment but rejected the damages calculation. Instead of $15,000 per work, he awarded the statutory minimum of $750, bringing the total to $4,226,250.
The order recognizes Aylo’s previous wins in the same court, but it also signals a clear shift in approach.
“The Court acknowledges these cases but determines that, upon further review, a lower award is warranted here,” Judge Settle wrote.
He noted that other district courts have begun requiring more rigorous evidence to support above-minimum awards in these types of cases. That includes evidence of its own lost profits or the infringer’s profit increase, which is clearly not available here.
“Calculating damages is difficult but the Court requires more than mere guesswork. Aylo fails to offer any concrete evidence of lost profits, relying instead upon conjecture as to the effect of Chernov’s piracy on its bottom line,” the order adds.
More than Guesswork
Judge Settle pointed out that Aylo had also failed to estimate the added profits of Pornhits, the number of visitors who might have actually paid for an Aylo subscription, or how much of the Pornhits site is dedicated to Aylo’s content.
“It is unclear to the Court whether Aylo’s works constitute even a substantial portion of pornhits’ overall content. Without such evidence, an award of $84 million would be an inappropriate windfall,” the order reads.
Domain Transfer Granted
The damages reduction clearly stands out, but the practical impact is limited. Chernov never appeared in the case, lives outside the United States, and is unlikely to pay any damages amount, whether $84 million or $4 million.
The injunction that comes with the order, on the other hand, is enforceable.
Specifically, Judge Settle ordered Verisign, the registry operator for the .com top-level domain, to change the registrar of record for pornhits.com to EuroDNS, which has to transfer the domain to Aylo Premium Ltd. The current registrar, Namecheap, was also ordered to cooperate.
The order also includes a ‘dynamic’ aspect, as we’ve seen previously, allowing Aylo to return to court to extend the injunction to additional domains, subdomains, or IP addresses that the Pornhits operator might use to continue or evade the infringing activity.
This permanent injunction is much needed because, at the time of writing, Pornhits.com remains up and running.
— A copy of Judge Benjamin Settle’s order on the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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In March, a coalition of thirteen major publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, 
Adult entertainment is big business on the internet, and several of the largest brands in this niche are owned by the Aylo conglomerate.