News

Friday 2026-04-24

04:00 PM

Record Labels Drop Piracy Lawsuits Against Altice and Verizon in Wake of Cox Ruling [TorrentFreak]

pirate-flagWhen the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cox Communications last month, it was immediately clear that the decision would also reach other ISP piracy cases.

Many of the same record labels that fought Cox, also have active cases against other ISPs. This includes high-profile cases against Verizon and Altice.

These cases were already paused last year, awaiting the Supreme Court decision. This week, it became clear that both sides have agreed to dismiss the cases. In both cases, the parties filed joint stipulations voluntarily dismissing the lawsuits.

According to the legal paperwork, the dismissals are with prejudice, meaning the claims cannot be refiled. In addition, all parties will pay their own costs and expenses.

“[All parties] hereby jointly stipulate to dismissal of all claims in this matter with prejudice under Fed. R. Civ. P. Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii), with each side bearing its own costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees,” the filings read.

Billions of Dollars at Stake

The Verizon case, filed in July 2024, is particularly noteworthy as the record labels requested more than $2.6 billion in damages in that case alone.

In that lawsuit, UMG, Warner Music, Sony Music, and ABKCO, accused Verizon of burying its head in the sand by ignoring hundreds of thousands of copyright infringement notices. This includes more than 500 subscribers for whom the ISP received more than 100 notices each.

Joint stipulation

joint stipulation

The Altice lawsuit was filed in December 2023 by Warner Records, Sony Music Entertainment, and dozens of affiliated labels and publishers. The complaint also accused the ISP of not doing enough to stop piracy, with potential damages exceeding $1.6 billion.

In both cases, the music companies argued that the ISPs’ knowledge of the infringing activity, combined with their failure to act, was sufficient to be held liable for contributory copyright infringement. However, the new Supreme Court ruling narrowed this standard.

In Cox, the Supreme Court stated that contributory liability requires proof that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can only be shown in one of two ways. Either the provider actively induced infringement, or the service is one that is tailored to piracy without substantial non-infringing uses.

The Cox Fallout Spreads

The Altice and Verizon dismissals are the most concrete sign yet that the labels see the post-Cox landscape as unfavorable terrain for this type of lawsuit. They are not the only fallout, however.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court also vacated the Fifth Circuit’s $46.7 million verdict against Grande Communications, sending the case back for reconsideration in light of Cox.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s X Corp. cited the Cox decision within days of its release in its bid to dismiss the music publishers’ “weaponized DMCA” lawsuit.

Interestingly, however, not all ISP lawsuits appear to be ready for dismissal yet. The record labels still have an active case against Internet provider RCN in New Jersey. In that case, RCN recently informed the court of the impact of the Cox ruling, but there is no mention of a potential dismissal in that docket yet.

—

A copy of the Joint Stipulation of Dismissal filed by the labels and Altice in Texas federal court is available here (pdf). The joint stipulation filed by the labels and Verizon in New York federal court is available here (pdf).

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

01:00 PM

RFK Jr. Wipes His Hands Of This Whole Measles Outbreak Thing [Techdirt]

In the year 2,000 (cue the Conan O’Brien music), America had so successfully defeated measles as a disease that we were awarded elimination status for the disease. Then Trump was elected to a second term, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, after which RFK Jr. somehow was confirmed as the Secretary of HHS. Almost simultaneously, a massive measles outbreak began in Texas, spreading to most of the other states in the union, with particularly bad outbreaks in Arizona, Utah, and North Carolina. The reason for the outbreak is clear in the CDC statistics: falling vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine allowed the disease to gain a foothold and spread. Meanwhile, Kennedy offered up confused and confusing messaging to the public as to what do about it, oscillating between muted calls for vaccinations, musing that everyone should just get measles for natural immunity, and declaring out loud that measles victims were at fault for not being healthy enough.

Because of his inept leadership on the matter, measles in 2026 is going to be even worse than 2025. We’re on pace to blow past last year’s numbers and, again, it’s because not enough people are getting vaccinated.

Kennedy is, of course, the living avatar of the anti-vaxxer movement. He didn’t create it, but he has worked very hard to propel it into popularity and, now, into government policy. He has everything to do with the current outbreak. But he recently faced Congress and said with a straight face that it has nothing to do with him. Instead, it was those dirty immigrants that are to blame.

But despite Kennedy being the most vocal source of vaccine misinformation, the secretary tried to blame the outbreaks entirely on immigrants who come to the U.S. from countries where measles is not eliminated — framing the issue as a global epidemic rather than a national public health crisis.

“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”

So, a couple of things to say here, both equally important. The scapegoating of immigrants over disease outbreaks is an American tradition going back centuries. It’s stupid, it’s wrong, and it’s plainly racist. I have no doubt that diseases can be spread through foreign visitors, as they can be by domestic travelers as well. But the desire to blame immigrants for whatever the outbreak du jour happens to be is so reliable and predictable that it’s silly. And if you don’t believe that this happens as a result of bigotry, well, you’re just plain wrong.

The other item on which to take note is the complete failure of leadership exhibited by Kennedy. In his remarks, Kennedy went into full CYA mode. He said he’s not anti-vaxx, but he absolutely is. He said the measles outbreak isn’t his responsibility, but he’s the fucking Secretary of Health and Human Services, and it absolutely is. He said dropping vaccination rates are due solely to how the American government responded to COVID-19, but that isn’t remotely the full story, given that vaccination rates experienced declines long before 2020, after which they fell sharply.

And the question that remains for Kennedy is a simple one: what are you doing about all of this? What do you even plan to do about all of this? The job doesn’t end by saying it’s immigrants at fault and then we move on. The disease still has to be combated and, right now, nobody is fighting the fight at the federal level. Instead, we’re talking about curtailing vaccine schedule guidance even further, or eliminating childhood vaccines altogether. Even if Kennedy sincerely wants to help in all of this, his messaging is so muddled and misguided that it isn’t getting through to the public.

Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) expressed concern to Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaxxer, over the rising number of infectious disease cases such as measles and polio.

“Every patient, every child with measles should be treated with compassion. But I had seven cases just in the last couple of weeks in my county. The contagious spots have been grocery stores and colleges, you can’t stop it,” Dingell said of measles, the highly contagious disease that U.S. officials announced they eliminated in 2000.

“I’ve met with the family of one of them, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you get immunized?’” she continued. “And they said, ‘We’re listening to our government. Our government tells us not to.’”

Even if you wanted to argue that those people are wrong, they’re not making up lies when they say this. The message they’re getting from HHS is to not vaccinate. This is why public health policy needs to be very clear and in a language the average person can understand. These are life and death situations we’re talking about.

Kennedy’s comments read like an abdication of his responsibility. I can’t think of another way to describe his hand-washing of our current measles fiasco. And that’s one of many reasons he has to go.

09:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Celebrating 100 Episodes & Launching Our Patreon [Techdirt]

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

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

In this special episode, Mike and Ben reflect on 100 episodes of the podcast, followed by an important announcement: we’re launching a Patreon and making some changes to Ctrl-Alt-Speech!

Starting on May 28th, Patreon members will get early access to extended weekly episodes with in-depth coverage of an extra major story. The free episodes will continue here on this feed, just slightly shorter and released one day later. 

You can become a member now at one of two levels: Supporters get early access to the extended episodes, and for a limited time Founders get that plus the opportunity to send us news stories that you think we should cover each week. After the new episodes begin at the end of May, the Founder tier will become the Insider tier with all the same benefits at a slightly higher price, so act now if you don’t want to miss out (you’ll also get bragging rights as a founding member!)

We’re immensely grateful to the incredible audience we’ve found over these past 100 episodes, and this is our way of helping make the podcast sustainable for the next 100!

James Cameron Is A Weird Hypocrite When It Comes To Giant Hollywood Mergers [Techdirt]

Back when Netflix was proposing a takeover of Warner Brothers, you might recall that director James Cameron had no shortage of critical things to say.  

Cameron went so far as to write a heavily publicized letter to Senator Mike Lee, lamenting the Netflix Warner Brothers merger (and only the Netflix merger) as “disastrous to the motion picture business.” In the letter, Cameron calls himself a “humble movie farmer,” and repeatedly insisted Netflix would shorten the 45-day theater-to-streaming window (Netflix repeatedly stated the opposite).

Here’s the weird thing: Cameron had absolutely no criticism to offer of the alternative (and now reality) $108 billion Ellison family merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers, despite the deal being exponentially worse across every possible metric.

As we’ve noted previously, the massive debt load, and the numerous structural parallels between the studios, means the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger will result in significantly more layoffs than the Netflix deal would have seen. And that’s before you get to the dodgy Saudi and Chinese money backing the bid, or the Ellson family’s ties gushing enthusiasm for corrupt authoritarianism.

Cameron at first was dead quiet as the Netflix deal faded and the Paramount merger came into view. But now he’s increasingly becoming gushingly supportive of the transaction (quite the contrast to the 3,700+ Hollywood insiders coming out against the deal):

“I know David quite well. And I know that he really cares about movies. And he’s a natural born storyteller and thinks like almost an old school entrepreneurial producer that was a storyteller that loves storytelling and loved putting on spectacular shows,” Cameron said. “He’s the right man for the job to run a major studio, and now it looks like he’s going to have two of them, you know, swept under his leadership, which doesn’t bother me at all.”

So basically Cameron likes the deal, and is willing to overlook the massive layoffs looming just over the horizon due to unprecedented consolidation, because he personally likes the Ellison family. And the Ellison family promised him that they won’t touch the 45 day delay between theatrical runs and home release.

The problem (for James and everyone else) is that pre-merger promises are utterly meaningless. Every single time Warner Brothers has merged (now four times over 20 years) it’s been an abject disaster, preceded by all sorts of empty promises about amazing new synergies. The AT&T merger alone resulted in 50,000 layoffs, and there are indications that AT&T executives could be viewed as immeasurably competent compared to what we’re seeing out of Ellison-owned Paramount and CBS News.

It’s “funny” because in Cameron’s letter to Lee, he offers this observation about Netflix:

“What administrative body will hold them to task if they slowly sunset their so-called commitment to theatrical releases?”

But the exact same applies to the Ellison family promises. It’s potentially worse given the Ellisons’ close ties to the administration, which will not only mean rubber-stamped federal merger approval, but less accountability later down the line (in a country where Trump has already guaranteed that corporate regulators lack the ability to do this or any other job).

It seems likely that the Ellisons promised other things to Cameron. Time will tell.

But Paramount’s debt from the CBS, MMA, and now Warner Brothers deals is so historically massive, it’s simply inevitable that this results in all manner of layoffs and corner cutting to service it. Denying that this is coming is like trying to debate physics, or have a fist fight with a river. This sort of consolidation is uniformly harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. We literally just went through all of this.

David Ellison is telling anybody who’ll listen that this merger will be different and will magically result in a bigger, bolder Hollywood, but there’s simply no historical evidence to believe a single word he’s saying. Every Warner Brothers merger to date has been pointless and awful, but this one has the potential to be historically so.

08:00 AM

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering [The Business of Printing Books]

📘
TL;DR
Ordering and delivering books in bulk is time-consuming and expensive. Many times, a large order must be parsed out so books can be delivered to many addresses; a time-consuming and expensive practice. So we fixed that. 
In this post, I’ll explain:
- How to set up your project on Lulu for large volume ordering
- Importing your customer’s order information
- Finalizing your order
How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Successful creators have an audience. Period. That audience, of course, comes from consistently offering great products, content, or services. Brand trust and followers don’t just happen. It’s a long, hard road to build that audience. 

Then comes monetization. It’s great to have a thousand email subscribers or LinkedIn followers, but unless you can convince at least some of them to buy something from you, they’re just idle observers. 

One of the key innovations for individual creators and small businesses needing to monetize their audience is crowdfunding models. We’ve all heard of Kickstarter. Crowdfunding offers a relatively safe way to gauge interest and secure funds before you actually produce your products.

Understanding how valuable crowdfunding can be—both for new creators and established businesses launching a new product—we built a tool that helps enable fulfilling book orders en masse. 


Lulu’s Order Import Tool

The Order Import tool is Lulu’s solution for creators and authors using crowdfunding, pre-sales, and direct bulk sales. It lets you upload a list of orders for various buyers and fulfill all of them at once, in one transaction. This is a huge time saver if you need to send 50 or 100 orders out and don’t want to enter each one individually. 

But I’m not here to sell you on why the Order Import tool is so useful. Instead, I want to break down the nuts and bolts of actually using the thing. 

Order Import Tool | Lulu
Place bulk import orders for your book using Lulu’s free Order Import tool. Have bulk orders printed-on-demand and drop shipped.
How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk OrderingLulu
How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Steps to Using the Order Import Tool

First things first, we’ve got a great in-depth article in our Knowledge Base that breaks down the entire process. If you get stuck while creating your order, this is the resource I recommend.

We’ve also got this short video that runs through the process. 

Okay, here’s my breakdown, starting from the very beginning.

#1 Your Lulu Account & Project

If you’re new to Lulu, the first step is always to create a free account and sign in. Then you’ll need to create a book. Before you jump into importing your orders, you have to create and publish all the books you need to ship.

This is important, as the Order Import tool only allows you to select from published projects in your account. Note that you can publish a book using Lulu and keep it private to your account. It won’t be listed on our bookstore or through retailers, but you can still include a private access book in your order import. 

Lulu’s Publishing Steps in 1 Minute

Next, you’ll navigate to the Order Import tool page, found under My Stores. Now you’re ready to download and complete the orders spreadsheet.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

#2 Creating an Order Spreadsheet

This is the trickiest part for most. Download the template. Here’s a sample spreadsheet that’s worth having on hand as well. 

The spreadsheet has 15 columns, with the first row including a description of what goes into each column. Some of them are pretty obvious, but I’m going to describe each one.

  1. Channel_Order_ID - This must be a unique ID for each recipient, either one that you create for your order or one that is provided from your crowdfunding platform.
  2. Channel_Item_ID - You can create the Item ID or use one supplied by your crowdfunding platform, just like the Order ID. You’ll use this Item ID in the next step.
  3. Quantity - The total number of the book this customer should receive.
  4. Shipping_First_Name - Your customer’s first name…
  5. Shipping_Last_Name - …and their surname.
  6. Shipping_Organization - This is an optional column for your business name.
  7. Shipping_Street_Line_1 - The shipping address, up to 30 characters, including spaces. 
  8. Shipping_Street_Line_2 - Second line for additional shipping info, like suite or apartment number. 
  9. Shipping_City - The city the order is being delivered to.
  10. Shipping_State - The state, province, prefecture, or region.
  11. Shipping_Postal_Code - The postal code (where applicable).
  12. Shipping_Country - The 2-character country code. 
  13. Contact_Email - The contact email for your customer.
  14. Contact_Phone_Number - The contact phone number for your customer.
  15. Recipient_Tax_ID - The Tax ID for your customer (where applicable).

Not all fields are required (such as the Tax ID or State), but you will need to include the first three columns for every customer. You also need to do a separate row for each unique book. That means if you’ve got one customer who bought two different books from you, each book needs its own row, even if all the customer and shipping information is the same.

#3 Uploading Your Order Spreadsheet

Before you upload your completed order spreadsheet, you’ll have to complete two additional steps.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

The first is to select or create an order channel. This is entirely for you and has no impact on your order or your customers. It’s just a way to organize your orders within your Lulu account. For example, if you have a subscription magazine that you send to your subscribers monthly, the Order Import tool is an outstanding way to simplify sending the physical magazine. You might want to create a specific channel—like Monthly Magazine Subscribers—and use that for each monthly order. 

The second option involves order shipment emails. You can have us send those for you, or you can opt out and handle that on your side. If you’re using an ecommerce platform like Shopify to collect your orders, you may want to use Shopify’s features to send your customers shipping notifications. 

Once you’ve made these two selections, you’re ready to upload your order spreadsheet.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

When you click the ‘Map Your Products’ button, we’ll run a check on your CSV or XLSX file to ensure you’ve included all the necessary information and in the right format. If we find errors, you’ll see this message:

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

If you download the order sheet from the error message, you’ll get a copy of the exact file you uploaded with an additional ‘errors’ column that calls out the issue. In this example, I entered ‘USA’ instead of ‘US’ for the country code. The error message is tied to the exact row with the error and calls out the problem for you to fix.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Make updates to your spreadsheet and upload the corrected version to move on to mapping your products!

#4 Mapping Your Products

On this screen, you’ll select a published project in your Lulu account for each row in your order spreadsheet. This is how we know which books to send to each of your customers. It’s also where your Channel_Item_ID is helpful. If you’ve got three different books that you’re sending, you might assign them Item IDs like this:

  • Book #1 = Item ID 101
  • Book #2 = Item ID 102
  • Book #3 = Item ID 103

Now you know which book to assign to each order based on the Item ID.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

You’ll need to map a project to each of your orders before we move on to shipping.

#5 Selecting Shipping Options

On this step, you’ll select the shipping method for all orders going to each country. That means, if you have 10 orders going to addresses in the US, you’ll select one shipping method for all of them. You won’t be able to select Mail for some and Ground for others.

If you have orders going to multiple countries, you’ll see the available shipping options per country.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

For the shipping costs, you’ll see Starting At for the pricing. This is the shipping cost for a single book, but if a customer is receiving multiple books, the cost may increase slightly.

#6 Review & Payment

We’re almost done! 

At this point, you’ve uploaded your customer’s information, selected the books each customer should receive, and assigned shipping methods for each country. 

All that’s left is to give your order a review.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

You can download your order details here for close review and backup to change shipping options if you need to. Otherwise, you can move on to checkout and complete your order!

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering
Lulu's Order Import tool was originally codenamed Project Octopus, for obvious reasons.

Simplified Bulk Ordering & Dropshipping

That’s it. The Order Import tool is built for that one purpose. It’s ideal for bulk orders from crowdfunding campaigns, a book launch pre-sale, and subscription orders. But really, you can use it for any situation that involves sending multiple people copies of your books!

Lulu will package and ship each book just like we do for orders through our bookstore. If you opt into our shipping emails, we’ll automatically send updates to your customers as well, ensuring they know where their order is and when to expect it.

How to Use the Order Import Tool for Easy Bulk Ordering

Your Free Lulu Account

Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world

Create a Free Account

Kanji of the Day: 売 [Kanji of the Day]

売

✍7

小2

sell

バイ

う.る　う.れる

発売   (はつばい)   —   sale
販売   (はんばい)   —   sales
発売日   (はつばいび)   —   day something goes on sale
読売   (よみうり)   —   Yomiuri (newspaper, etc. group)
売り上げ   (うりあげ)   —   amount sold
売り   (うり)   —   sale
売却   (ばいきゃく)   —   selling off
売上高   (うりあげだか)   —   sales
売買   (ばいかい)   —   crossing (shares)
売る   (うる)   —   to sell

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 艦 [Kanji of the Day]

艦

✍21

中学

warship

カン

戦艦   (せんかん)   —   battleship
イージス艦   (イージスかん)   —   Aegis-class cruiser
軍艦   (ぐんかん)   —   warship
潜水艦   (せんすいかん)   —   submarine
艦隊   (かんたい)   —   fleet
護衛艦   (ごえいかん)   —   escort vessel
艦船   (かんせん)   —   warships and other vessels
艦長   (かんちょう)   —   captain (of a warship)
旗艦   (きかん)   —   flagship
艦載機   (かんさいき)   —   ship-borne plane

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

07:00 AM

Consumers outnumber producers [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

New technology often upends the careers of experienced professionals.

When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, they understood why it was called a ‘case’ and they knew how to kern. The typographers warned us that we’d soon be inundated by ugly, careless or even unreadable type, and everything would get worse. They were half right.

There was a lot of bad typography, but some great innovations as well. And the typographers who stuck it out ended up with far more opportunities (and more creative outlets) than they originally had.

When digital photography arrived, the skilled craftspeople who understood Bokeh and f-stops warned us about the same thing. People took their own pictures anyway. Many were lousy. Some changed the art form. And there are still professional photographers, even if the workaday gigs have mostly faded away.

And many doctors don’t want you to google your symptoms. Because it can lead to bad outcomes, and because it undermines their status and authority… but it has also saved countless lives. There are more patients than doctors, and so we go ahead and do what feels good to us, not to them.

A copywriter might say that it’s never okay to have an AI do your writing, but that same person uses AI to retouch photos or do the first pass on their spreadsheets… They even use a spellchecker instead of a human editor. You’re a producer some of the time, but also a consumer, and the consumer in you wants the best available option, regardless of how it was made.

These technological changes often have negative side effects. They don’t always make things better. But they happen when consumers insist. Mass production, factory farming, frozen food–they replace craft with accessibility and efficiency.

The market doesn’t care that much about the hard-won expertise of those that came before. And the shifts create muck and slop and then, over time, quality and taste and expertise often find their footing again.

The best way to complain is to make good stuff.

      

Pluralistic: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (23 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


The surface of Mars. In the foreground are a gnu and a giant pump-magazine killer robot whose head is being piloted by Tux the penguin. At their feet lies a dead robot, its head smashed in.

The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software (permalink)

Here's an interesting stunt: a project called Malus.sh will take your money, and in exchange, it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:

https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

Malus was co-created by Mike Nolan, who "researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations." Nolan told 404 Media's Emanuel Maiberg that he shipped Malus as a real, live-fire business that will exchange money for an AI service that destroys the commons as a way to alert the free software movement to a serious danger.

As Maiberg writes, Malus relies on a legal precedent set in 1982, in which IBM brought a copyright suit against a small upstart called Columbia Data Products for reverse-engineering an IBM software product. IBM's argument was that Columbia must have copied its code – the copyrightable part of a work of software – in order to reimplement the functionality of that code. Functions aren't copyrightable: copyright protects creative expressions, not the ideas that inspire those expressions. The idea of a computer program that performs a certain algorithm is not copyrightable, but the code that turns that idea into a computer program is copyrightable.

Columbia's successful defense against IBM involved using a "clean room" in which two isolated teams collaborated on the reimplementation. The first team examined the IBM program and wrote a specification for another program that would replicate its functionality. The second team received the specification and turned it into a computer program. The first team did handle IBM software, but they did not create a new work of software. The second team did create a new work of software, but they never handled any IBM code.

This is the model for Malus: it pairs two LLMs, the first of which analyzes a free software program and prepares a specification for a program that performs the identical function. The second program receives that specification and writes a new program.

The Malus FAQ performs a "be as evil as possible" explanation for the purpose of this exercise:

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems.

This business about "attribution" and "copyleft" is a reference to the terms imposed by some free software licenses. The purpose of free software is to create a commons of user-inspectable, user-modifiable software that anyone can use, improve, and distribute. To achieve this, many free software licenses impose obligations on the people who distribute their code: you are allowed to take the code, improve the code, give it away or sell it, but you have to let other people do the same.

Typically, you have to inform people when there's free software in a package you've distributed (attribution) and supply them with the "source code" (the part that humans read and write, which is then "compiled" into code that a computer can use) on demand, so they can make their own changes. This system of requiring other people to share the things they make out of the code you share with them is sometimes called "copyleft," because it uses copyright, which is normally a system for restricting re-use to require people not to restrict that use.

Companies love to use free software, but they don't like to share free software. Companies like Vizio raid the commons for software that is collectively created and maintained, then simply refuse to live up to their end of the bargain, violating the license terms and (incorrectly) assuming no one will sue them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

Malus's promise, then, is that you can pay them to create fully functional reimplementations of any free/open source software package that your company can treat as proprietary, without any obligations to the commons. You won't even have to attribute the original software project that you knocked off!

This is the risk that Nolan and his partner are trying to awaken the free/open source community to: that our commons is about to be raided by selfish monsters who serve as gut-flora for the immortal colony organisms we call "limited liability corporations," who will steal everything we've built and destroy the social contract we live by.

This is a real problem, but not because of AI. We already have this situation, and it's really bad. Most of the foundational free software projects were created under older licenses that did not contemplate cloud computing and software as a service. The "copyleft" obligations of these licenses are triggered by the distribution of the software – that is, when I send you a copy of the code.

But cloud services don't have to send you the code: when you run Adobe Creative Cloud or Google Docs, the most important code is all resident on corporate servers, and never sent to you, which means that you are not entitled to a copy of the new software that has been built atop of our commons. In other words, big companies have "software freedom" (the freedom to use, modify and improve software) and we've got "open source" (the impoverished right to look at the versions of these packages that are sitting on services like Github – itself a division of Microsoft):

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/libreplanet-2018-keynote

Then there's "tivoization," a tactic for stealing from the commons that wasn't quite invented by Tivo, though they were one of its most notorious abusers. Tivoization happens when you distribute free software as part of a hardware device, then use "digital locks" (sometimes called "technical protection measures") to prevent the owner of this device from running a modified version of the code. With tivoization, I can sell you a device running free software and I can comply with the license by giving you the code, but if you change the code and try to get the device to run it, it will refuse. What's more, "anti-circumention" laws like Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act make it a felony to tamper with these digital locks, so it becomes a crime to use modified software on your own device:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments

There's no question that the tech industry would devour the free software commons if they were allowed to, and the AI threat that Nolan raises with Malus seems alarming, but while there's something to worry about there, I think the risk is being substantially overstated.

That's because copyleft licenses – and indeed, all software licenses – are copyright licenses, and software written by AI is not eligible for a copyright, because nothing made by AI is eligible for copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Copyright is awarded solely to works of human authorship. This fact has been repeatedly affirmed by the US Copyright Office, which has fought appeals of this principle all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. That's because the principle that copyright is strictly reserved for human creativity isn't remotely controversial in legal circles. This is just how copyright works.

Which means that the "be evil" version of Malus's business model has a fatal flaw. While the code that Malus produces is indeed "legally distinct" with "no attribution" and "no copyleft," it's not true that there are "no problems." That's because Malus's code doesn't have "corporate-friendly licensing." Far from it: Malus's code has no licensing, because it is born in the public domain and cannot be copyrighted.

In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount. There's nothing you can do to stop me, any more than you could stop me from giving away the text of a Shakespeare play you sold me. You can't stick a license agreement or terms of service between me and the product that binds me to pretend that your public domain software is copyrighted – that's also not allowed under copyright.

Does that mean that Malus is a meaningless stunt? No, because this automated reimplementation does create some risks to our software commons. A troll who doesn't care about selling software could clone every popular free software project and make public domain versions that would be confusing and maybe demoralizing. Combining these clean-room reimplementations with cloud software or tivoization could create hybrid forms of commons-enclosure that are more virulent than the current strains.

But reimplementation itself is not a risk to free software. Reimplementation is the bedrock of free software. GNU/Linux itself is a reimplementation of AT&T Unix. Free software authors re-implement each other's code all the time, often because they think the license the original code was released under sucks. Literally the coolest free software thing I've seen in the past 12 months included a reimplementation of Raspberry Pi's PIO module to escape from its bullshit patent encumbrances:

https://youtu.be/BbWWGkyIBGM?si=vO5zLH3OG5JLW7OP&t=2253

Reimplementation is good, actually. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast new commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?

(Image: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, GNU FDL; modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago PimpMySnack: homemade, gigantic versions of snack food https://web.archive.org/web/20060421034050/http://www.pimpmysnack.com/gallery.php

#20yrsago Thieves discover abandoned Soviet missile silo full of cash https://web.archive.org/web/20060411021047/http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/07/moneyfound.shtml

#15yrsago Victorian house’s facade converted to a folding garage-door https://web.archive.org/web/20110423213819/https://www.blog.beausoleil-architects.com/2011/03/architectural-magic.html

#15yrsago Xerox’s first successful copier burst into flame so often it came with a fire-extinguisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914

#15yrsago MPAA: “democratizing culture is not in our interest” https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-democratizing-culture-is-not-in-our-interest-110420/

#15yrsago Mail Rail: London’s long-lost underground postal railroad https://web.archive.org/web/20110805130854/http://www.silentuk.com/?p=2792

#10yrsago Kindle Unlimited is being flooded with 3,000-page garbage books that suck money out of the system https://web.archive.org/web/20160421055052/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/20/amazon-unintentionally-paying-scammers-to-hand-you-1000-pages-of-crap-you-dont-read/

#10yrsago America’s wealth gap has created an ever-increasing longevity gap https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/21/the-death-gap/

#10yrsago Why is Congress so clueless about tech? Because they fired all their experts 20 years ago https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/

#10yrsago Why Internet voting is a terrible idea, explained in small words anyone can understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

#10yrsago VW offers to buy back 500K demon-haunted diesels https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-usa-idUSKCN0XH2CX/?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

#10yrsago Printer ink wars may make private property the exclusive domain of corporations https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/eff-asks-supreme-court-overturn-dangerous-ruling-allowing-patent-owners-undermine

#5yrsago Some thoughts on GWB's call for truth in politics https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#seriously-fuck-that-guy

#5yrsago What's wrong with EU's trustbusters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#eu-antitrust

#5yrsago Hawley and Taylor Greene faked their donor-surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#jan-6-fraud

#5yrsago The Observatory of Anonymity https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/21/re-identification/#pseudonymity

#1yrago Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/21/trumpflation/#andrew-ferguson

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

How The Shadow Docket Came To Be [The Status Kuo]

I’m writing for The Big Picture today to share some broader thoughts on a breaking story. For 10 years, the Supreme Court has been using the “emergency docket” to weigh in early on important cases, issuing orders that aren’t backed up by any meaningful discussion or reasoning. Critics began to call it the “shadow docket” because of this corruption of the emergency docket’s original purpose—namely, to handle true emergencies. Now SCOTUS, under this radical majority, has used the shadow docket to greenlight many of Trump’s worst policies with virtually no public accountability.

It didn’t use to be this way. Everything changed in 2016 when the Court first got the Clean Power Plan case challenging the Obama administration’s signature climate change initiative. Thanks to reporting by the New York Times, we now know what happened in those five fateful days, and how everything changed after Chief Justice John Roberts opened the gates to a new fresh hell.

This is an important piece that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. I finally decided to pen my thoughts on it, following the Times’s blockbuster reveal of documents, ones we thought we’d never see! I’ve tried to keep most of the legalese out so that anyone can understand the monster Roberts created, one that is still smashing its way through our legal system today.

If you’re already subscribed to The Big Picture substack, you’ll receive it in your inbox later this afternoon. If you’re not already subscribed, you can do so below. All my content there is offered for free and without a paywall, but we always appreciate our paid subscribers who also gain access to our popular news summaries and Week in Wins features!

Subscribe Me To The Big Picture!

I’ll be off tomorrow leading parts of the Human Rights Campaign Equality in Action conference and emceeing our big fundraiser for JoAnna Mendoza, but I’ll share a brief update on how much we’ve raised so far!

Jay

05:00 AM

France Keeps Breaking the Internet to Stop Piracy, Even Though It’s Not Working [Techdirt]

Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet works. It would have massive collateral damage. It would undermine security protocols designed to protect users from exactly the kind of DNS manipulation that the bill proposed. And it wouldn’t even stop piracy, because anyone who actually wanted to get around DNS blocking could do so easily.

Congress, to its rare credit, actually listened to the technical experts (and widespread protests) and shelved the legislation. But the entertainment industry never gave up on the idea. They just went jurisdiction-shopping. And France, which has never met a maximalist copyright enforcement scheme it didn’t love, has been more than happy to oblige.

As recently reported by TorrentFreak, a Paris Court of Appeal validated DNS blocking orders requiring Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers. This goes beyond traditional ISP resolvers, which France has been ordering blocked for years — this targets third-party resolvers — the ones that millions of people specifically choose to use because they offer better privacy, better security, and better reliability than their ISP’s default DNS.

But, of course, in France (and to the usual crew of Hollywood lobbyists), “better privacy, security, and reliability” can only mean one thing: used for piracy.

The court rejected all five appeals, and in doing so, articulated a legal principle so sweeping that it has no natural stopping point.

In this case, French pay-TV provider Canal+ went to court under Article L. 333-10 of the “French Sport Code,” which lets rightsholders request “all proportionate measures” against “any online entity in a position to help” block access to pirate sites. Canal+ argued that because users were simply switching to third-party DNS resolvers to circumvent ISP-level blocking, those resolvers should be conscripted into the blocking regime too.

Cloudflare and Cisco pushed back, arguing that their DNS resolvers serve a “neutral and passive function” — they translate domain names into IP addresses and that’s it. They compared their role to a phone book. The court’s response boiled down to: we don’t care.

The DNS resolution service allows its users, via the translation of a domain name into an IP address, to access websites on which sports competitions are broadcast in violation of rights-holders’ rights, and in particular to circumvent the blocking of those sites by ISPs.

The court found that the “neutral and passive” nature of DNS resolvers is “simply irrelevant to Article L. 333-10.” The law isn’t about liability at all — it only cares whether a service can help block access to pirate sites, which DNS resolvers clearly can. If you are technically capable of blocking access, you must.

Google, meanwhile, tried a different argument: that DNS blocking through third-party resolvers isn’t effective because users can just switch to a VPN or yet another resolver. The court wasn’t moved by that either:

Any filtering measure can be circumvented, and this possibility does not render the measures in question ineffective.

As long as DNS blocking stops some subset of users from reaching pirate sites, the court ruled, it’s “proportionate.” Under that line of thinking, any measure that inconveniences even a fraction of would-be pirates is legally justified, no matter how much collateral damage it causes for everyone else.

And if you think that principle has any limit, Canal+ has made it quite clear that they don’t think it does:

Canal+ said in a statement that the rulings are “more than a victory,” forming part of “a global approach that will be reinforced by the progressive deployment of complementary measures, including IP blocking.”

Canal+ has already been getting courts to order VPN providers to block as well. So now we have ISP DNS blocking mandated, third-party DNS resolver blocking mandated, VPN blocking mandated — and, per the TorrentFreak article, direct automated IP address blocking is coming too. They will not stop until the entire internet is broken.

Each step reaches further down the internet stack, breaks more of the internet for more people, and stops fewer actual pirates, because the people who are determined to pirate content are always one technical maneuver ahead. The people who get caught in the collateral damage are ordinary users who happen to use Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 or Google’s 8.8.8.8 for perfectly legitimate reasons like speed, reliability, and privacy.

Cisco, rather than comply with the original order, simply pulled its OpenDNS service out of France entirely. That’s the kind of collateral damage we’re talking about. French users who relied on OpenDNS for entirely lawful purposes completely lost access to the service. Because a copyright holder decided that the DNS layer was the right place to play whack-a-mole with pirate sites.

When Cisco argued on appeal that implementing geo-targeted DNS blocking would require 64 person-weeks of engineering work, the court waved it off, saying the estimate was “not supported by any objective evidence” and pointing out that Cisco already offers DNS filtering to enterprise customers. The fact that enterprise DNS filtering for corporate networks is a fundamentally different thing than mass geo-targeted blocking of domains at the resolver level for an entire country’s users apparently did not register as a meaningful distinction.

The court’s core reasoning — that any entity technically capable of blocking must do so, that circumvention doesn’t make blocking disproportionate, and that the “neutral and passive” function of an intermediary is irrelevant — creates a legal framework that can reach basically anything. If a DNS resolver can be conscripted because it’s “in a position to help,” what about browsers? What about operating systems? What about CDNs, or cloud hosting providers, or certificate authorities? The logic has no brake pedal. Every layer of the internet stack is, in some sense, “in a position to help” block access to content. The question the court’s reasoning cannot answer is: where does it end?

Under this reasoning, what’s to stop a rightsholder from arguing that browsers should block pirate URLs directly? Or that operating systems should refuse to resolve them at all?

That seems bad!

Of course, this kind of maximalist copyright enforcement is something of a French specialty. This is the same country that brought us HADOPI, the graduated response agency that cost French taxpayers €82 million over a decade while imposing a grand total of roughly €87,000 in fines. A staggering return on investment — if the goal was to light money on fire while accomplishing nothing. France has also been at the forefront of copyright exceptionalism that risks undermining the EU legal system more broadly, pushing interpretations of copyright law so aggressive that they threaten to distort the legal frameworks of neighboring countries.

France keeps doing the same thing over and over again: spend enormous sums, conscript more and more intermediaries, break more and more of the internet’s infrastructure, accomplish almost nothing in terms of actually reducing piracy, and then conclude that what’s really needed is… more of the same, but harder. The entertainment industry’s refusal to learn from twenty years of evidence that enforcement-maximalism doesn’t work is genuinely remarkable. Every study and every natural experiment shows the same thing: the most effective anti-piracy tool ever invented is convenient, reasonably priced legal access to content. But that requires adapting your business model, and it’s apparently much more satisfying to get courts to break the internet for you instead.

The ruling’s real danger is the template it sets. Other countries with similar legal frameworks will look at this appeals court validation and think: we can do that too. The “any entity in a position to help” standard, combined with the “doesn’t have to be perfectly effective” standard, combined with the “we don’t care about your neutral role in the architecture” standard, adds up to a legal toolkit for conscripting nearly any internet infrastructure provider into a copyright enforcement apparatus. And the costs get externalized onto those providers (and their users), while the rightsholders collect the benefits.

The engineers who fought SOPA warned about exactly this: DNS blocking breaks things, creates collateral damage, pushes enforcement into layers of the stack never designed for it — and doesn’t actually stop piracy, because the actual pirates just route around it while everyone else suffers. France apparently decided all of those concerns are, to quote the court, “simply irrelevant.” And now they’ve moving on to IP blocking.

At some point, you run out of layers of the internet to break. But apparently we’re going to have to find out where that point is the hard way.

Daily Deal: The 2026 Complete Godot Stack Development Bundle [Techdirt]

Dive into Godot – a rising star in the game engine world – with the 2026 Complete Godot Stack Development Bundle. You’ll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you’ll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation – giving you the ultimate techniques to customize your projects. It’s on sale for $25.

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

03:00 AM

US Going Deeper Into The Red Now That The IRS Is Sharing Tax Data With ICE [Techdirt]

The government needs more funding than ever, which is kind of hilarious when you realize the Tea Party of the Obama era was the predecessor of this Big Government version of the GOP.

The DHS can’t even get itself a budget at the moment. Sure, it will get some money thrown to it sooner or later and the administration won’t let the lack of tax revenue offsets stop it from feeding billions more into its Bigotry Machine.

But that’s not all. Behold our all-but-officially-declared war in Iran, currently headed by the Department of Defense War Little Excursion, which is adding billions of dollars weekly to the national deficit. After all, as right-leaning libertarians like to point out, the government doesn’t actually “make” anything. The private sector builds the bombs and missiles. And unlike TSA agents, they expect to be paid.

You know who could help this country offset some of its insane expenditures? It’s the same people we’re spending billions to remove from the country:

Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.

More succinctly, immigrants out-punch their weight class when it comes to erasing budget deficits:

Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.

[…]

Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.

But that help is apparently no longer welcome. The Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating the firewall between the IRS and ICE, allowing ICE agents to use this data to hunt down taxpayers who work harder and pay more taxes than the white, natural-born citizens that this administration pretends make America great.

That’s going to cause even more problems for an administration that is spending far more liberally than any “liberal” it blames its current budget problems on. Here’s how that looks on the ground as Tax Day has come and gone in the United States:

By the time Tax Day rolls around every April 15, accountant María José Solís usually has more to do. More clients. More paperwork. More phones ringing, more emails and WhatsApp messages pinging.

But this year, she said, more than 550 of her regular clients have disappeared. That’s about 15 percent of her customer base at Toro Taxes, the bilingual firm in Wheaton, Maryland, that Solís runs.

There’s your anecdote, albeit one that’s being repeated around the nation. Here’s the data:

The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the IRS stands to lose between $147 billion and $479 billion over the next decade as migration to the U.S. declines, deportations increase and immigrants of various statuses disengage from the formal economy for what some experts say may be an extended period.

That estimate will likely be low if the Trump administration continues to purge migrants at the rate it has since Trump returned to office. It will definitely be lower if another similarly bigoted GOP lawmaker succeeds him as president.

And it’s not just the losses up front. There’s money leaking out the back as well. It’s a double-dip, because migrants with ITINs (individual tax identification numbers) pay taxes for services they can’t actually access, like Social Security and Medicare. They’re actually subsidizing citizens who pay fewer taxes, work fewer hours, and commit more crimes than they do.

This nation continues to become poorer, not just in terms of financial viability, but in heart and spirit. Migrants made this nation great. Now, a bunch of ungrateful people who hate people who aren’t white are not only driving us deeper into debt, but they’re eliminating a source of income that never asked for anything more than a chance to survive.

12:00 AM

Wireless Giants To Get Off The Hook For Spying On Your Daily Movements For Years [Techdirt]

There’s some endless, curious tensions within the corrupt Trump administration when it comes to their effort to completely destroy the government’s ability to hold corporations accountable for dodgy, nefarious, or even illegal behavior. Their own, lazy, circular logic and bad faith legal interpretations are creating vast new legal minefields we’ll be untangling for decades.

The wireless industry is a prime example.

For decades, major wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile collected vast troves of sensitive user location and movement data, then sold access to any random nitwit with two nickels to rub together. The result was a parade of scandals wherein everybody from stalkers, law enforcement (or people pretending to be law enforcement), car companies, governments (foreign and domestic), and right wing extremists all happily abused the data in myriad, dangerous ways never made clear to the end user.

Though this behavior had been going on for years generating untold millions, it only gained mainstream attention thanks to a 2018 New York Times story showcasing how police and the prison system routinely bought access to this data and then failed completely to secure it. In 2024 the Biden FCC finally proposed fining wireless carriers $196 million ($91 million for T-Mobile, $57 million for AT&T, $48 million for Verizon).

Those fines have been winding through the courts ever since, with wireless carriers (with varying degrees of success) insisting that the FCC lacks the authority to do, well, anything they don’t like. Like most corporations, wireless giants have been broadly helped in that endeavor by Supreme Court rulings dismantling regulatory authority across several different pillars of consumer protection law.

AT&T was also helped dramatically by a 5th Circuit ruling last year declaring that the FCC fines somehow violated wireless carriers’ Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. This was one of several specious arguments telecom lawyers threw at a wall to see which one would satisfy the Trump-addled court system. The 5th Circuit was happy to oblige, vacating the FCC’s long-percolating fines of AT&T.

You were to ignore that AT&T has been at the vanguard of making jury trials impossible for customers through its use of fine print forcing users to pursue binding arbitration, a lopsided system that finds in favor of corporations a vast majority of the time. Or that AT&T spends millions of dollars annually successfully lobotomizing the entirely of telecom oversight, be it congressional, legal or regulatory.

Regardless, these debates are now winding their way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of justices this week expressed some skepticism about the wireless carriers’ claims (that they have to be found guilty via a jury trial in order to be fined by the FCC).

The FCC is kind of defending the Biden era fines (Brendan Carr wants to retain some FCC authority to force corporations to bend the knee to authoritarianism). But here’s the fun thing; even if the justices disagree with the wireless carriers (which can certainly change after a few late night chats with telecom lobbyists), the FCC’s inclined to change the language of their forfeiture orders anyway:

“But even if AT&T and Verizon lose this case, they could get a victory of sorts because the FCC and justices seem to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding and require a court decision to enforce them. A government lawyer told justices that the FCC may change the language of its forfeiture orders to make it clearer that fines don’t have to be paid until after a jury trial.

“It seems like you’ve won on the law going forward, one way or the other,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh told attorney Jeffrey Wall, who represents AT&T and Verizon. “Your reply brief begins, ‘the government’s in retreat.’ That’s absolutely correct.”

With the Supreme Court poking holes in regulatory autonomy across countless fronts (SEC v. Jarkesy, Loper Bright), there’s no limit of options for corporate lawyers looking to avoid regulatory accountability. Nearly any serious attempt by a regulator to hold corporations accountable for pretty much anything can now pretty easily be bogged down in years of litigation, quite by design.

You’d think the broad, dire impact of that would be of more interest to journalists and policy folk.

This whole Ars Technica article by Jon Brodkin is worth a read, and is a good demonstration of (1) how the Trump administration’s legal lackeys have to trip over themselves to pretend they’re engaged in good faith, non-corporatist, non-corrupt interpretation of consumer protection law, (2) how all the weird holes created by Supreme Court rulings aimed at demolishing even basic corporate oversight have created a vast minefield it’s a nightmare for everyone to navigate, and (3) how the press likes to pretend this is somehow normal behavior by a serious country and not a byproduct of abject corruption.

But in short it’s likely that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile will never have to actually pay any fines related to their decade+ decision to spy on users and monetize their sensitive movement data. That’s not only an act of overt corruption (dressed up as serious, furrowed-brow legalese), but also the failure to hold wireless carriers accountable for privacy and security issues will pose a lasting cybersecurity threat.

It genuinely doesn’t get enough attention that the Trump administration (specifically the Trump-friendly Supreme and circuit courts) have delivered a killing blow to the federal government’s already shaky ability to hold corporations accountable for anything. People and the press deny, ignore, downplay, or normalize it, but these choices will range from massively problematic to fatal, and will reverberate for a generation.

Thursday 2026-04-23

06:00 PM

New Release: Tails 7.7 [Tor Project blog]

New feature

Detection of outdated Secure Boot certificates

Since 2023, Microsoft has started replacing the Secure Boot certificates originally issued in 2011. These older certificates begin expiring in June 2026.

Tails now notifies you if the computer that you are using has outdated Secure Boot certificates and needs an update.

Changes and updates

Fixed problems

  • Make the /root folder only readable by the root user. (#21514)

For more details, read our changelog.

Get Tails 7.7

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.7.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails 7.7 on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions.

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

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 7.7 directly:

Support and feedback

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

Sflix, Myflixerz, HDtoday, and other Pirate Sites Go Dark as Backend Infrastructure Fails [TorrentFreak]

megacloudIn piracy circles, names like Sflix, Watchseries, HDtoday, and Fmovies are essentially “zombie” brands.

While the original iterations of these sites were shut down or “retired” years ago, their names remain immensely popular with users.

The pirate streaming sites continue to draw in millions of monthly visitors without much hassle. However, that changed this week when dozens of domains suddenly became unreachable, all pointing to a Cloudflare 521 error.

Web server is down (Error 521)

521 error

The error indicates that the origin web server refuses the connection. This does not mean that Cloudflare intervened. Instead, it suggests that the backend server, which hosts the website, has stopped responding.

None of the affected sites have offered an explanation, nor has any anti-piracy organization claimed credit for a takedown. However, it is clear that these sites were seen as a major threat.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), for example, identified the Myflixerz and Sflix networks as a priority threat in its notorious markets submission to the U.S. Trade Representative last fall. This piracy ring alone was good for 622 million visits in August 2025, MPA reported.

Those domains, including sflix.to, sflix2.to, moviesjoytv.to, myflixerz.to, and hdtodayz.to, are now among those returning 521 errors.

A Shared Backend

Why would so many sites go down simultaneously? They are not necessarily all operated by the same people. However, there is likely a common denominator, which was also cited by the MPA’s report.

Many of the affected sites rely on a shared backend infrastructure, which anti-piracy groups have dubbed “Piracy-as-a-Service” (PaaS). Instead of hosting video files themselves, the front-end piracy sites use services such as MegaCloud and VidCloud that actually serve the streams. And more recently, these PaaS services have also offered website hosting.

The MPA described exactly this setup in its notorious markets recommendation, specifically referring to the Sflix and Myflixerz network:

“These sites rely on their own PaaS infrastructure (formerly known as 2embed[.]to, which ACE took down in June 2023) and despite enforcement, they continue to thrive through alternative domains and backend hosting on platforms such as MegaCloud, VidCloud, and RapidCloud. Unlike the previous CMS model, which explicitly enabled pirate sites to embed movies and monetize streams, this new model functions as a backend hosting network powering popular pirate domains such as those mentioned above. These services act as a media source server, serving video files directly allowing a myriad of sites to provide streams to users.”

If many sites indeed rely on the same backend hosting network, similar Cloudflare errors would appear across all dependent sites if it goes offline. This would explain what we’re seeing today.

Shared infrastructure?

flix

If the backend PaaS infrastructure has indeed been targeted, it would represent one of the most significant blows to the streaming piracy landscape since the original 2embed takedown in 2023.

For now, the cause of this massive outage remains unconfirmed. Whether the affected domain names will make their way back online or if the 521 error is the final curtain call has yet to be seen. However, the “zombie” brands will likely reappear in some shape or form.

—

Below is an example of some of the affected domain names, but there are many more.

– myflixerz.to
– sflix.to
– moviesjoytv.to
– flixhq.to
– hdtoday.cc
– hdtoday.tv
– watchseries.pe
– watch32.sx
– myflixtor.tv
– theflixertv.to
– zoechip.cc
– fmovie.ws
– 9animetv.to
– hdtodayz.to
– fboxtv.com
– freehdmovies.to
– freemoviesfull.com
– actvid.rs
– dopebox.to

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

09:00 AM

Digital Hopes, Real Power: The Rise Of Network Shutdowns [Techdirt]

Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded.

In 2011, when protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond used social media to broadcast their uprisings to the world, many observers heralded a new era of networked freedom. Governments, however, responded quickly by developing and refining systems of control that have only grown more sophisticated over time. Today’s landscape of regulation, blackouts, and degraded networks reflects that trajectory, as early experiments in censorship and disruption have hardened into a durable system of control—what began as an emergency measure has become a normalized infrastructure of control.

A Brief History of Internet Shutdowns

Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown wasn’t the first. Although the government’s heavy-handed response after just two days of protests caught the world’s attention, Guinea, Nepal, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries had previously enacted shutdowns. But Egypt marked a turning point. In the years that followed, shutdowns increased sharply worldwide, suggesting that governments had taken note—adopting network disruptions as a tactic for suppressing dissent and limiting the flow of information within and beyond their borders.

On January 28, 2011, at 12:34 a.m. local time, five of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their networks. At least one provider—Noor, which also hosted the Egyptian stock exchange—remained online, leaving only about 7% of the country connected. 

In the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, rights groups sought to understand how such a sweeping shutdown had been possible—and how future incidents might be prevented. There was no centralized “kill switch.” Instead, authorities leveraged the country’s highly consolidated telecommunications sector, which all operate by government license. With only a handful of ISPs, a small number of directives was enough to bring most of the network offline.

In the years following Egypt’s 2011 shutdown, telecommunications companies—many of which had been directly implicated in enabling state-ordered disruptions—began to organize around a shared set of human rights challenges. Beginning that same year, a group of operators and vendors quietly convened to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights applied to their sector, particularly in contexts where government demands could translate into sweeping restrictions on access. By 2013, this effort had formalized into the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, bringing together major global firms to develop common principles on freedom of expression and privacy and, through a partnership with the Global Network Initiative, engage more directly with civil society. The initiative reflected a growing recognition that telecom companies—unlike platforms—operate at a critical chokepoint in the network. But it also underscored the limits of voluntary approaches: while the Dialogue helped establish shared norms, it did little to constrain the legal and political pressures that continue to drive shutdowns—or to prevent companies from complying with them.

From Emergency Measure to Legal Authority

If the early aughts were defined by improvised shutdowns, the years since have seen governments formalize their power to control networks. What was once exceptional is now often embedded in law.

In India, the 2017 Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules—issued under the Telegraph Act—provided a clear legal pathway for cutting connectivity. The Telecommunications Act, 2023, further entrenched the government’s ability to enact shutdowns, granting the central and state governments, or “authorised officers” the power to suspend telecommunications services in the interest of public safety or sovereignty, or during emergencies. The government has used these measures repeatedly, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir. India’s Software Freedom Law Centre’s Shutdown Tracker shows India as instigating more than 900 shutdowns, 447 of which were in Jammu and Kashmir.

In Kazakhstan, shutdowns have also become common. Over the years, the government has passed legislation that allows state agencies to shut down the internet. The 2012 law on national security enabled the government to disrupt communications channels during anti-terrorist operations and to contain riots. In 2014 and 2016, laws were further amended to expand the number of actors able to shut down the internet without a court decision, and a government decree in 2018 enabled shutdowns in the event of a “social emergency.” 

Elsewhere, governments have built or expanded legal and technical frameworks that enable similar control over information flows. Ethiopia’s state-dominated telecom sector has facilitated sweeping shutdowns during periods of conflict, including the war in Tigray, where the internet was disconnected for more than two years. In Iran, authorities have developed regulatory and infrastructural capacity to isolate domestic networks from the global internet, allowing them to restrict external visibility while maintaining limited internal connectivity. This year alone, Iranians have spent one third of the year offline. And amidst the ongoing war, Iranian officials have made it clear that the internet is a privilege for those who toe the government’s official line.

Even where laws do not explicitly authorize shutdowns, broadly worded provisions around national security or public order are routinely used to justify them. The result is a growing legal architecture that treats network disruptions not as extraordinary measures, but as standard tools for managing populations.

When that authority is exercised over a population beyond a state’s own citizens, the consequences can be even more severe. Israel’s Ministry of Communications controls the flow of communications in and out of Palestine and has used that power to shut down internet access during periods of conflict. Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has experienced repeated outages, and experts now estimate that roughly 75% of its telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged—leaving essential services severely disrupted.

Elections and the Expansion of Control

Historically, most blackouts have occurred during moments of intense political tension. But authorities are increasingly using them as a tool to preempt dissent.

In 2024, as more than half the world’s population headed to the polls, shutdowns followed. That year alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set just a year earlier. The geographic spread also widened significantly, with shutdowns affecting more countries than ever before. The Comoros imposed a shutdown for the first time, while other countries, such as Mauritius, instituted broad bans on social media platforms during elections.

At least 24 countries holding elections in 2024 had a prior history of shutdowns, putting billions of people at risk of disruptions during critical democratic moments.

What stands out is not just the scale, but the normalization. Notably, the number of shutdowns in 2025 broke the record set the year prior. Whereas network disruptions were once a rare occurrence, they are now a routine measure, increasingly treated by authorities as a standard response to periods of heightened political sensitivity. 

Civil Society Fights Back

Governments use all sorts of justifications—national security, curbing the spread of disinformation, and even preventing students from cheating on exams—for internet shutdowns. But civil society is watching, and documenting, network disruptions and their impact on citizens.

In 2016, as shutdowns became an increasingly common tool of state control, Access Now launched the #KeepItOn campaign to coordinate global advocacy against network disruptions. The campaign includes a coalition composed of 345 advocacy groups (including EFF), research centers, detection networks, and others who work together to report on, and fight back against, internet shutdowns. Anyone can get involved by signing on to campaign action alerts, sharing their story, or reporting a shutdown in their jurisdiction.

Ending this harmful practice remains the goal. In 2016, the UN passed a landmark resolution supporting human rights online and condemning internet shutdowns, and UN agencies have continued to warn against the practice. But the fight to change government practices remains an uphill battle, leading civil society—and even companies—to get creative. 

During repeated shutdowns in Gaza, grassroots efforts mobilised to distribute eSIMs so Palestinians could stay connected. In 2024, EFF recognized Connecting Humanity, a Cairo-based non-profit providing eSIM access in Gaza, with its annual award for its vital work. Satellite internet such as Starlink has been supplied to people in Ukraine and Iran, though it, too, is not immune to state control. Alongside these efforts, civil society continues to share practical guidance on circumventing shutdowns and maintaining access to information.

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world—and we’ll continue to fight back against internet shutdowns wherever they occur.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog. This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.

07:00 AM

Arkansas Tried To Pass An Unconstitutional Social Media Law. Again. It Lost. Again. [Techdirt]

Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill’s own sponsor couldn’t accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube while the sponsor publicly claimed those were the exact platforms being targeted. When the state’s own expert witness testified that Snapchat was covered, the state’s own attorney disagreed with his own witness in the same hearing. That law was struck down on First Amendment and vagueness grounds, and then permanently enjoined earlier this year in a suit brought by the trade group NetChoice.

So Arkansas went back to the drawing board and passed Act 900, which was supposed to fix all the problems with the original. Judge Timothy Brooks of the Western District of Arkansas has now preliminarily enjoined that law too, in a ruling that reads like a patient teacher explaining to a student why the homework still doesn’t work despite a rewrite.

The legislature did manage to fix the content-based definition problem that sank the first law, but the progress stops there. Act 900 imposes four main new requirements on social media platforms: a prohibition on “addictive practices,” default settings for minors (including a nighttime notification blackout), privacy default settings at the most protective level, and a parental dashboard requirement. Every single one of these provisions fell apart on review, each in its own special way.

The “addictive practices” provision might be the most impressively broken. Here’s what it actually says platforms must do:

Consistent with contemporary understanding of addiction, compulsory behavior, and child cognitive development, ensure that the social media platform does not engage in practices to evoke any addiction or compulsive behaviors in an Arkansas user who is a minor, including without limitation through notifications, recommended content, artificial sense of accomplishment, or engagement with online bots that appear human.

“Contemporary understanding of addiction” is doing a lot of work here, and it’s not up to the job. There is no consensus that social media constitutes addiction in any clinical sense. So it’s entirely unclear what a company would need to do here, which is fatal in a First Amendment context. And yet, the law is designed such that violations are strict liability and ridiculously broad. A plain reading of the law shows that it is not limited to addiction to the platform itself; a platform can apparently be held liable if its practices “evoke” addiction to off-platform activities. And the statute uses the singular “user,” meaning a single child’s response triggers liability.

As the court puts it:

Not only does Act 900 impose liability based on a single child’s response to the platform, it does so on a strict liability basis—a platform is liable for a practice the evokes addiction in a single child even if it could not have known through the exercise of reasonable care that the practice would have such an effect. “Businesses of ordinary intelligence cannot reliably determine what compliance requires.”

The state, realizing belatedly that it had written an unworkable law, asked the court to just sort of ignore the strict liability language and read in a specific intent requirement that doesn’t exist anywhere in the text. As the judge notes, that’s not how any of this works. The courts interpret the law as written and are not there to fix the legislature’s mistakes:

Instead of defending the statute the General Assembly enacted, Defendants ask the Court to rewrite it by ignoring the strict liability provision altogether and inserting a specific intent requirement that appears nowhere in the text. The Court cannot do so.

Then there’s the default provisions. The court was actually somewhat sympathetic to the idea that the state has a legitimate interest in helping kids sleep. The problem is that the law itself undermines that interest by letting parents flip the nighttime notification blackout off. And the government is not there to fix what parents refuse to do:

While Defendants justify the notification default as an aid to parental authority, they ignore their own evidence that parents are part of the problem. If parents wanted to prevent their children’s sleep from being disrupted by late-night notifications, they have a readily available, free, no-tech solution already at their disposal: taking devices away at night. Yet “86% of adolescents sleep with their phone in the bedroom.” …. The State has provided no evidence that parents lack the tools to assert their authority in this domain, so it appears unlikely that the State’s deferential approach to restricting nighttime notifications will actually serve its stated interest in ensuring minors get enough sleep. This “is not how one addresses a serious social problem.”

The privacy default is worse. It requires platforms to set privacy controls to their most restrictive level for minors — but says nothing about who can change them. Meaning, as the court notes, the minor can just… change them. The state argued this was necessary to protect children from sexual exploitation online. The court points out the obvious problem:

On the other hand, because the default can be changed by the minor, this provision is also wildly underinclusive. Defendants say children need this law to protect them from sexual exploitation online. But the law, in effect, allows children to decide whether they need protection from sexual exploitation online because they are free to depart from the protective default. As Defendants’ evidence shows, teenagers’ developing brains make them less likely than adults to appreciate the risks associated with, for example, making their profiles public… Like the notification default, while the burdens imposed by the privacy default may be slight, they do not appear likely to serve the State’s asserted interest at all. Imposing small burdens on vast quantities of speech for no appreciable benefit is not consistent with the First Amendment. Arkansas cannot sentence speech on the internet to death by a thousand cuts.

Any law that burdens First Amendment speech has to be tailored precisely to a compelling goal. And if it’s either under or over-inclusive, it’s going to have problems surviving. Making it such that kids could just turn off the privacy controls fails that test.

But the dashboard provision is where things get genuinely hilarious, in that dark way where you wonder if anyone read the bill before voting on it. Act 900 has three separate definitions for people who interact with platforms: “account holders,” “users,” and “Arkansas users.” The problem is that, according to the statute’s own definitions, a “user” is specifically someone who is not an account holder — in other words, just a visitor to the site who doesn’t have an account. Yes, it’s confusing. The court is confused. Everyone is confused.

Act 900 has one particularly noteworthy problem: “users.” Act 900 has three different definitions for relationships a person can have with a platform. First, an “account holder” is “an individual who primarily uses, manages, or otherwise controls an account or a profile to use a social media platform.” Id. sec. 1, § 4-88-1401(1). “Account holder” is not used in any of the Act’s operative provisions. Second, a “user” is “a person who has access to view all or some of the posts and content on a social media platform but is not an account holder.” Id. § 1401(12). Third, an “Arkansas user” is “an individual who is a resident of the State of Arkansas and who accesses or attempts to access a social media platform while present in this state.” Id. § 1401(2). “Arkansas users” include both “account holders” and “users,” but “users” are definitionally not “account holders.” The addictive practices provision and the default provisions therefore apply to all Arkansas minors, whether they have a social media account or are merely a website visitor. Worse, the dashboard provision applies only to minor “users,” not account holders.

Again: the dashboard provision requires platforms to build parental supervision tools for minor “users.”

Not account holders. Users. Which, as the court notes, definitionally does not include “account holders.” Meaning it only applies to… random anonymous visitors to the website. Those who have accounts… apparently aren’t covered?

As the court explains, taking the statute at its word would require platforms to:

(1) collect age information from everyone who visits a covered platform to identify minors; and (2) collect and store identity information for every minor who visits a platform to track their “use habits,” connect them with their parents, and effectuate “tools for a parent to restrict his or her minor child’s access.”

This is a law that claims to be about children’s privacy that accidentally requires mass surveillance and identity collection on every anonymous visitor to a website, just in case one of them turns out to be an Arkansas minor. The court openly “questions whether this was the General Assembly’s intended result” but notes it can’t just rewrite the statute because the legislature picked the wrong word. That’s on them. Just like the earlier provision that the state asked the court to quietly rewrite.

The Arkansas legislature does not appear to be a detail-oriented body.

Oh, and there’s also an audit requirement directing platforms to conduct quarterly audits to ensure their products aren’t “causing minors to engage in compulsory or addiction-driven behavior” — again, including off-platform behavior, apparently. How a platform is supposed to audit for behaviors that happen when users aren’t on the platform is left as an exercise for the reader.

What makes this all so maddening is that none of these problems are subtle. The “user” vs. “account holder” mixup is the kind of thing that any lawyer should catch on a close read. The strict liability plus singular “user” combination in the addictive practices provision is exactly the drafting error that made the 2023 law fail. The defaults that can be changed by the very minor they’re supposed to protect — that’s not a hard problem to spot.

There is a reason this pattern keeps repeating.

Passing an unconstitutional law to “protect the kids” from Big Tech generates headlines, press conferences, and signing ceremonies. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders got to tweet about how “social media companies have gotten away with exploiting kids for profit” when she signed the original law. That made the news. The permanent injunction three years later, overturning that same law? Barely a ripple. Act 900 itself got its own round of celebratory press. The injunction we’re discussing here will get a fraction of that coverage.

The political asymmetry is kind of the point. State legislatures have figured out that there is essentially no downside to passing obviously unconstitutional social media laws. The upside is maximal: you get to posture as tough on Big Tech, protective of children, and responsive to moral panics about screens and teens. The downside — losing in federal court, wasting state resources on legal fees, and getting lectured by judges about basic First Amendment doctrine — happens quietly, years later, long after the political benefits have been banked.

Arkansas will almost certainly lose its appeal, and either way the legislature will be back next session with a new hastily drafted law that fixes some of Act 900’s problems while introducing fresh ones. And then that will get struck down. And then they’ll try again. Texas, Florida, California, Ohio, Utah, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and a growing list of other states are running the same play on roughly the same schedule.

The courts keep doing their jobs. NetChoice keeps winning. Judges keep writing careful opinions explaining, for what feels like the hundredth time, that strict scrutiny means what it means, vagueness doctrine exists for a reason, and you cannot simply compel platforms to do whatever you want because you have invoked The Children.

None of it matters to the incentive structure. The headline from the signing ceremony is worth more than the opinion from the courthouse. Until that changes — until voters start holding legislators accountable for passing laws that can’t survive even the most basic constitutional review — we’re going to keep reading rulings like this one. Arkansas just provided the latest installment. There will be more.

Kanji of the Day: 松 [Kanji of the Day]

松

✍8

小4

pine tree

ショウ

まつ

浜松   (はままつ)   —   Hamamatsu (city)
松原   (まつばら)   —   pine grove
若松   (わかまつ)   —   young pine
赤松   (あかまつ)   —   Japanese red pine (Pinus densiflora)
小松菜   (こまつな)   —   Japanese mustard spinach (Brassica rapa var. perviridis)
市松   (いちまつ)   —   check (pattern)
松林   (まつばやし)   —   pine forest
松葉   (まつば)   —   pine needle
門松   (かどまつ)   —   New Year's pine decoration
松明   (しょうめい)   —   torch (made of pine, bamboo, reed, etc.)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 喫 [Kanji of the Day]

喫

✍12

中学

consume, eat, drink, smoke, receive (a blow)

キツ

の.む

喫煙   (きつえん)   —   smoking (tobacco)
喫茶   (きっさ)   —   tea drinking
喫茶店   (きっさてん)   —   coffee shop
満喫   (まんきつ)   —   having one's fill (of food or drink)
喫煙者   (きつえんしゃ)   —   smoker
非喫煙者   (ひきつえんしゃ)   —   non-smoker
喫緊   (きっきん)   —   urgent
喫する   (きっする)   —   to eat
喫煙所   (きつえんしょ)   —   smoking area
受動喫煙   (じゅどうきつえん)   —   passive smoking

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

The banal djinni [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Technology changes things. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us trivial conveniences.

We’re in the biggest moment of technical change of our lifetimes. What are you using your wishes for?

      

Hypocritically, The Origin Of The Supreme Court’s ‘Shadow Docket’ Was An Attempt To Curb Executive Power [Techdirt]

I originally began this headline with the word “ironically.” But it would only be ironic if it wasn’t by design. Irony suggests something slightly out of the control of the principal figures resulted in something somewhat unexpected.

That isn’t the case here. This was by design. The New York Times has obtained the behind-the-scenes memos issued by Supreme Court justices back in 2016, as they discussed responding to an “emergency” appeal related to questionably authorized application of the Environmental Protection Agency’s powers by then-president Barack Obama.

Here’s how that went, once the Supreme Court was finished with its backroom “discussion:”

For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

The Supreme Court never bothered to hear the case on its merits. The emergency appeal never resulted in the appellants being asked to submit briefings or engage in oral arguments. Instead, the 5-4 conservative majority decided to block Obama’s “Power Plan” via a single paragraph that made it clear Chief Justice John Roberts had not only pushed for this behind-the-scenes handling of the case, but had gotten what he wanted from the other justices.

But the internal discussion was anything but indicative of a majority view. John Roberts — citing no case law (but referring to TV interviews and EPA website posts) — claimed Obama was abusing his executive power by putting this plan into action. He also claimed this “emergency” ruling needed to be issued prior to the scheduled court recess because if SCOTUS failed to do so, immediate irreparable harm would be the result.

[Justice Roberts] argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

This faux concern about immediate harm was contradicted (far more immediately) by the dissenting justices, beginning with Justice Stephen Breyer, who pointed out what the plan actually demanded in terms of timelines:

Justice Breyer responded later that day to the chief’s memo but did not address all its points. Such stays were unusual, he wrote, stating his objections mildly.

He skipped over the question of whether the plan was lawful, asking only: Why the rush? The circuit court had already set a date to hear the case in June. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions was six years away; full compliance was not required until 2030. That was plenty of time for the case to play out through the legal system.

John Roberts didn’t care. He wrote back, claiming the burdens placed on the power industry were too onerous. Why, if the plan were allowed to be enacted, Roberts said, companies across the entire nation might be expected to spend $480 billion over the next 15 years. To put that in context, the electric sector of the US power industry has made over $200 billion in profit over the last five years alone. Had this plan been allowed to move forward, states and utilities would have easily absorbed the cost of compliance. More likely, they would have just passed on the cost of compliance to customers, ensuring their profit margins remained where their investors preferred them to be.

Roberts claimed that without emergency back-door action, these utilities were “highly unlikely to survive.” Elena Kagan responded by pointing out that even if that might be the case, the nation’s top court was obligated to hear the case in court and rule on the merits, rather than issue a non-opinion that said nothing more than the majority was unwilling to allow Obama’s alleged executive power overreach.

That prompted Justice Alito to pitch in his expected two cents, which was this:

Echoing the chief justice’s sense of insult and suspicion about the Obama administration, he wrote that the E.P.A. appeared to be trying to render the court irrelevant.

And that, of course, is a sticking point for Alito, who has definitely done everything he can to prevent the Trump administration from… um… rendering the court irrelevant.

The context matters. First, this was a conservative majority trying to dump a “liberal” plan to make the US more reliant on clean energy because conservatives generally hate clean energy and it definitely looked like the Democratic Party might continue to hang on to this executive power when the only GOP candidate of interest was a pussy-grabbing loudmouth with zero political experience.

Second, another justice decided to exit the mortal plane at an inopportune time for the conservative majority:

The following Saturday morning, Justice Scalia failed to appear for breakfast at a weekend hunting retreat in Texas. Hours later he was found dead. As far as the public record reveals, the vote on the Clean Power Plan was his last. Had the court not acted with exceptional speed, the case would have ended in a deadlock and the Obama plan would have stayed in place.

The current makeup of the Supreme Court — as well as its newfound deference to executive power and excessive utilization of the “shadow docket” — can be traced back to these two events. The GOP managed to stonewall Obama’s Supreme Court appointee, allowing Trump to stack the court. And with the court now heavily tilted toward whatever it is that passes for “conservatism” these days (mostly white Christian nationalism, peppered heavily with president-as-king assertions), the shadow docket allows the justices who once pretended to be concerned about reining in executive power to allow this power to expand to the limits of its imagination.

Since this moment — now exposed by the publication of previously secret memos — two-thirds of the Supreme Court are now Constitutional Crisis hotline operators who refuse to answer any call that isn’t coming from the White House. Should the regime change following the next presidential election, we can only expect this hypocrisy to continue.

Daily Deal: CyberTraining 365 Online Academy [Techdirt]

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Pluralistic: It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (22 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A 1950s killer robot with eye lasers; it has collected four bell jars in which float the heads of disembodied nurses. It is zapping one jar with its lasers. In the background is a golgotha, taken from a Dore Old Testament engraving.

It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (permalink)

If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."

(If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and "voting with your wallet" only works if you're a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)

To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don't fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for "someone in the supply chain of the media industry."

The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn't make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we've had hyperinflation in "making and handling copies" but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn't fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they're in on the racket.

Take "fintech," all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn says, "Whenever you hear 'fintech,' you should think 'unregulated bank.'" It's not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.

There's no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don't want to.

Then there's Uber, which claimed that it wasn't a taxi company, it was a "transportation network company," which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. "Uber isn't a taxi company, it's a transportation network company" is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar-panel for a sex-machine."

Emboldened by the success of the "transportation network company" wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn't a "food delivery company" but rather a "delivery network company." This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber's system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.

From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":

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

One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren't "healthcare staffing agencies," rather, they are "healthcare worker platforms" that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.

This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in "Uber For Nursing," a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing

If "Uber for nursing" rings a bell, you might be thinking of "Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care," an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven't merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.

This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn't taking workers' jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-work-under-algorithmic-eyes

Algorithmic oversight is a terror for any worker, but it's particularly bad when applied to healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They're trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is." The implication here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.

Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they're just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber's playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that's corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers' unions).

That's what's happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, "travel nurses") and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren't part of their workers' unions.

Staffing agencies weren't good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to "register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category." These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder's fees.

Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.

Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they're little more than a "job-notice board." But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don't want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you're offered in future.

In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers "finder's fees," by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren't allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms' "solar panel for a sex-machine" gambit transforms the finder's fee into a "platform fee" that somehow escapes regulators' grasp.

How is it that a regulator can't see that a "platform fee" is exactly equivalent to a "finder's fee?" This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it's a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.

The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied "to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws." In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill "to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws." In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called "lightest-touch regulation." All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.

In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an "under the radar" approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.

One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law "affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules." The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York's state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don't figure that out, that's because they don't want to.

Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The "go meta" ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don't drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don't own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.

The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can't regulate tech. Once you've decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you're going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago PKD ratted out other SF writers to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010428121230/https://www.linguafranca.com/print/0105/cover.html

#15yrsago Weird Al snubbed by Lady Gaga, releases his parody without permission as fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxXKfQkswE

#15yrsago How do you compete with free? A taxonomy of reasons to pay for digital files https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears

#10yrsago Before 1988 Olympics, South Korea sent ‘vagrants’ to camps where rape and murder were routine https://web.archive.org/web/20160420234916/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

#10yrsago Luxury overnight bus with sleeper cabins shuttles between LA and San Francisco https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/sleepbus-gets-you-from-sf-to-la-for-50.html

#10yrsago Volkswagen’s internal Dieselgate probe stuck because the company used code-words for its cheat software https://web.archive.org/web/20160419095045/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/vw-cheating-code-words-said-to-complicate-emissions-probe

#10yrsago Chinese opsec funnies: your foreign boyfriend is a western spy! https://web.archive.org/web/20160420125125/https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/nsed/

#10yrsago UK Chancellor exempts families of “Politically Exposed Persons” from money laundering scrutiny https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

#10yrsago Colorado school district wants to arm security staff with assault rifles https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/0419/Colorado-school-district-to-equip-security-workers-with-semiautomatic-rifles

#5yrsago McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

#5yrsago Real penalties for covid evicters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

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

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

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

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish [The Status Kuo]

Images courtesy of the Fox Network

Virginia voters approved a ballot referendum on Tuesday that could hand Democrats four additional congressional seats in November. It’s the latest move in a nationwide redistricting war that Donald Trump ignited less than a year ago and that has now, by most measures, backfired bigly.

The result was closer than advocates had hoped, but Virginia is still a more purple state than, say, California. And when all the votes are counted it will still be a comfortable win—around 3 to 4 points—driven by lopsided “yes” margins in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where many recently fired federal workers do not like Trump one bit.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) deserves credit for beating back the White House’s gerrymandering push. And he had this to say following the election results:

Last July, Donald Trump demanded that Texas draw five new Republican seats in the middle of a decade, igniting a chain reaction of corrupt MAGA state legislators attempting to rig the midterm elections. While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite.

Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.

We won Prop 50 in California, reclaimed a seat in Utah, pushed back extremists in Ohio and halted toxic GOP efforts in Indiana, New Hampshire, Nebraska and Kansas.

With this victory, it’s a good time to step back and review how we got here and what challenges lie ahead, even as we take a much-deserved victory lap! Go Virginia!

Subscribe now

Brushfire in Texas

In the summer of 2025, Trump summoned Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map mid-decade. His express goal was to lock in a Republican House majority long before the 2026 midterms could punish his party. It was a calculated act of political arson, but because the universe has a good sense of humor, that same fire is now threatening his own party’s House majority.

This redistricting push did not emerge organically. Planning began among Trump’s advisers before his inauguration, spearheaded by the National Republican Redistricting Trust. The pitch was simple: Republicans hold a razor-thin House majority, just a couple seats above the 218 threshold to govern. The midterms historically punish the party in power. The only way to survive the 2026 cycle was to gerrymander key maps before any votes were cast.

Texas was the first state to oblige. The Lone Star State’s scheme to steal the election led to a dramatic walkout by state House Democrats who fled the state to deny quorum during the first special session and to draw national attention to the crisis. When the realities of staying away so long forced their return, a second legislative session produced a map targeting five Democratic-held seats, redrawn to favor Republicans by margins of R+10 to R+17 based on 2024 presidential results (keep that in mind for our later discussion).

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the maps into law on Aug. 29, and Missouri and North Carolina followed within weeks.

California knows how to contain infernos

The Texas Dems’ walkout had its desired effect: It lit the warning fires and put all Dems on notice of the danger. The Democratic response was swift and unambiguous. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had spent years championing the state’s independent redistricting commission, pulled a 180. He pushed hard for a ballot measure, Prop 50, to be decided in November 2025. If passed, it would enact a Democratic gerrymander designed to flip five or so Republican seats—all in response to the Texas steal.

The California GOP and Trump’s Justice Department sued, but a federal panel rejected the claim, finding the map was partisan gerrymandering permissible under current Supreme Court precedent. What’s good for the goose, as they say.

Prop 50 passed by a wide margin, and on Feb. 4, SCOTUS declined to hear an appeal, without comment or dissent. California’s temporary map was locked in for the 2026 midterms, effectively canceling out Texas’s map.

The Old Dominion raises the stakes

The 2025 Virginia elections changed what was possible in that state. Democrats swept all three statewide offices and retained their majorities in the House of Delegates and state Senate, delivering a clean trifecta. Democratic legislators then moved in October 2025 to propose a constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to take back redistricting power from the state’s own bipartisan commission. It was the same commission that Virginia voters had approved by nearly a 2-to-1 margin just five years earlier.

This was a bold and controversial move, driven in large measure by a political force of nature: L. Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia state Senate. After Trump announced his Texas plan, Lucas announced she would pursue a map producing a 10-1 House delegation, eliminating four Republican seats.

They passed that map last night.

Republicans labeled the move a blatant gerrymander, and in fairness, it was. But Democrats offered an important distinction. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who had once supported the bipartisan commission the map was now circumventing, said the national context had forced the issue: “What has changed is what we’re seeing in states across the country — and a president who says he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats before this year’s midterm elections.”

Both California and Virginia submitted their maps to voters via ballot measure. By contrast, Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina passed their maps through captured legislatures, behind closed doors, with no public ratification.

Moreover, the Democratic changes are temporary. Virginia’s amendment explicitly returns redistricting to the bipartisan commission after the 2030 census. California’s ballot measure carries a similar sunset provision. Republicans built their gerrymanders to last a decade, while Democrats built theirs to expire.

Trump, for his part, called the Virginia amendment “a blatant partisan power grab” during a tele-rally the night before the vote, warning that a “yes” result would leave Virginia Republicans “wiped out in terms of representation in Washington.” It was the best messaging he could have given voters who actually want to see that happen. Of course, Trump neglected to mention that he had personally launched the redistricting wars by pressuring Texas to engineer exactly that outcome for Democrats there.

The Scoreboard

Let’s pull back from Virginia for a moment and look at the full battlefield.

On the Republican side: Texas drew a map targeting five Democratic seats, currently in effect after a Supreme Court order blocked a lower-court ruling that found it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. North Carolina passed a map aimed at flipping the state’s one remaining swing seat now held by Rep. Don Davis (D-NC), whose district has had continuous Black congressional representation for over 30 years. Missouri passed a gerrymander targeting one seat, despite a citizen petition drive to force a public vote, only to have the Republican secretary of state and a partisan judge run out the clock. Ohio’s bipartisan commission produced a map favoring Republicans by one to two additional seats. GOP gross seat potential: roughly eight to nine seats.

On the Democratic side: California’s map is set, potentially gaining five or even six seats. A court-ordered map in Utah adds one to two more. Virginia, if tonight’s result survives the courts, adds four. Democratic gross potential: ten to twelve seats.

That means that before Virginia’s vote, the running count had Republicans up by a couple seats on the redistricting battlefield. Virginia flipped that margin.

Republican dummymanders are a real thing now

When a party gerrymanders so aggressively that it backfires, political scientists somewhat derisively call this a “dummymander.” It has happened in Texas before: In 2018, backlash against Trump’s first term flipped two Texas seats that Republicans had considered safe. The 2025 GOP map may be running the same dumb play.

To create five new Republican-leaning seats, Texas mapmakers had to crack Democratic-heavy urban districts and push displaced Democratic voters into neighboring Republican-held districts, making those districts “softer” targets.

Moreover, the new GOP-leaning seats were drawn using 2024 presidential election data, when Trump was at the peak of his strength with Latino voters in South Texas. That assumption is now wobbling badly. A University of Houston/Texas Southern University poll last September found only 41 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 would do so again, down from 53 percent. That number is likely far lower today. A recent Democratic win in a Tarrant County special election underscores this. The Democratic candidate won by 14 points in a district Trump had carried by 17. That’s a stunning swing.

The Brookings Institution has concluded the new Texas map will most likely net Republicans two seats, not five, and that in a genuine wave, Republicans could actually lose seats they believed were safe.

Florida could be walking into the same trap this week. Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map. But Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political scientist, warned of the risk: “It’s possible you end up with, instead of a gerrymander, what we might call a dummymander. You’ve tried to help yourself but ended up hurting your own party and you lose seats.” That warning came right after Democrats flipped a Florida state House seat in Palm Beach—the county that includes Mar-a-Lago.

As Jeffries warned in his statement last night,

If Florida Republicans proceed with this illegal scheme, they will only create more prime pick-up opportunities for Democrats, just as they did with Trump’s dummymander in Texas. We will aggressively target for defeat Mario Díaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Kat Cammack, Anna Paulina Luna, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills and Brian Mast. We are prepared to take them all on, and we are prepared to win.

Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.

Now, that is the fighting spirit Dems need to retake the House.

Court challenges

We’re not out of the woods yet. Republicans have repeatedly sought to stop the Virginia plan in the courts. A Tazewell County circuit judge, who had run for the Virginia House of Delegates in 1999 as a Republican, twice ruled the amendment was unlawful, once in January and again in February, each time on different grounds. But the Virginia Supreme Court overruled both injunctions and allowed the election to proceed, setting oral arguments for April 27, six days after the election.

No one can predict how that court will rule, but it would certainly be unusual for a traditional conservative-minded court to overturn the will of both the legislature and the people on the kinds of technicalities that the Republicans raise. We’ll know more in a week.

The larger wild card is at the federal level. The Supreme Court is set to issue its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A broad ruling could allow Republican-controlled states to redraw majority-minority districts in states like Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. This would reopen the redistricting board in ways that could dwarf anything Democrats gained in California or Virginia.

Election watchers are paying close attention to the opinion’s timing. If it arrives in June, that may not be enough time for red states to change their maps ahead of November’s midterms.

Trump’s hubris and his nemesis

The ancient Greeks had a precise word for what Donald Trump did in the summer of 2025. It wasn’t pride exactly. It was hubris.

To the Greeks, hubris referred to a specific kind of public overreach: the act of a powerful man who, flush with victory, reaches for more than the gods have allotted. The offense isn’t ambition. It is the assumption that the cosmic rules governing lesser beings no longer apply.

What followed in their telling was nemesis, named after the goddess of retribution. It describes how overreach generates its own undoing. With hubris and nemesis, a powerful man does not fall because someone defeats him. He falls because his own act of reaching throws the cosmos out of balance and sets forces in motion he cannot control.

Trump won the presidency, the Senate and the House—the latter by a thread. But he decided that wasn’t enough. He reached for the map itself, pressuring states to redraw district lines before voters could render a verdict on his administration. It was not enough to have power. He wanted power insulated from accountability.

Instead, he handed his opponents both a playbook and a rallying cry. California was the first to answer, Utah’s courts followed, and Virginia joined the fight last night. The forces Trump set in motion—i.e., mid-decade redistricting as a legitimate tool of political warfare—will outlast his administration and remain available to any Democratic majority that chooses to use them. (Hello, New York…) Trump has handed his opponents the very weapons he could least afford them to use.

The redistricting wars have shown that democratic institutions don’t preserve themselves through the virtue of one party alone. To end gerrymandering, in many key states Democrats had created non-partisan redistricting commissions, but the GOP took advantage of their good faith efforts. So Democrats adapted, moved quickly and came out fighting. They learned that preserving democracy sometimes requires battling on the terrain your opponents have chosen, with the very tools they normalized.

04:00 AM

Stop Begging Big Tech To Fix Your Social Media Experience. You Can Do It Yourself. [Techdirt]

Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate.

I’ve written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking back control over the open web. I know this is not a popular opinion with many Techdirt readers, but I’m hoping some of you will read through this to try to understand and engage with the points I’m making here. I truly do believe that if used well and appropriately, these tools can serve to put power back into the hands of users, rather than giant centralized companies who are more interested in exploiting your attention.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with an AI-powered tool that Bluesky has released (much to the chagrin of many users) to a relatively small group of early beta testers. I think the negative reaction to the product announcement is understandable, given the general distrust of all AI tools, but it’s really worth examining what this tool is and what it can enable, including really empowering people to take back control over their own social experience. It literally gives you a path to routing around Bluesky’s own design features if you don’t like them.

Yes, a lot of AI is overhyped garbage being shoved at people who don’t want it — but that doesn’t mean the underlying tools can’t be useful when applied carefully by those who choose to use the tools appropriately.

It means not outsourcing your brain to the tool, but rather using it the way any skilled person automates some aspect of work that they do. I’ve sanded and restained the floors of my house, and while I could have done the whole thing by hand with a stack of sandpaper, it was helpful to rent a floor sander from a local hardware store, learn how to use it properly, and then use it so that I could finish the job in a day rather than weeks. I view AI tools the same way. If you learn how to use them properly, as an assistive tool rather than a replacement for your brain, they can help you accomplish useful things.

Let me give an example: a couple of weeks ago, law professor Blake Reid wrote a short thread on Bluesky about how he needed to take a break from social media, because he worried that it was eating up too much of his time and he was better off just stopping cold turkey, to avoid getting sucked into unproductive discussions that push him to (as he put it) “get over my skis” in engaging in conversations where he’s tempted to weigh in despite not having much expertise (a common thing on social media). It’s a worthwhile thread.

But in that thread he mentioned that he was hopeful that maybe some day technology itself could help him use social media in a healthier way, to dial back how much time he spent on it, and get him focused on the more productive and useful discussions (which he admits also happen regularly on Bluesky).

What was amusing to me was that the only reason I saw that post by Reid was because I’ve been beta testing a new tool that… kinda does that. When he wrote that thread, I was actually on vacation, hiking in the National Parks in Utah, and mostly offline. But in the evenings, I would check in, and rather than sorting through everything I missed on social media that day, I had a tool just show me things that I would find useful that I might have missed.

But using an AI tool, I had built an entirely personalized news aggregator, which had access to my Bluesky account, Techdirt’s RSS feed, and the knowledge that I had been out all day and wanted not just a summary of what news might be interesting to me as the editor of Techdirt, but also what people on Bluesky were saying about it. Here’s a screenshot of what my first attempt at this looks like:

The tool that let me do this is an advanced version of Attie, which I also recognize is extremely controversial among users on Bluesky, many of whom vocally have expressed their hatred of the very idea of it when it was announced last month. But, my main interest is in figuring out to empower users who want to take control over their own social experience, and this seems like a clear example of that. I’ll note that this version of Attie has not yet rolled out to most of the beta testers (I believe some have access to it — but this is one small benefit of being on the board).

Honestly, I think the way Bluesky announced Attie may have done it an injustice, positioning it as a kind of AI-powered feed generator. There are multiple other feed generator tools for Bluesky out there, many of which are really fantastic. For a while now I’ve used both Graze.social and Surf.social to make AI-powered feeds (which never seemed to generate much controversy).

But generating feeds alone isn’t all that interesting. With the more advanced version of Attie, I can take much more control over my entire social experience. The fact that with a single prompt I could build that personalized aggregator (based not just on my own feed, but Techdirt’s RSS) is something more powerful, including the fact that the tool knows to summarize a whole days’ worth of posts, because I’m trying to see in a glance if there’s anything relevant for Techdirt and I’d been offline the entire day.

Rather than just letting a single company (in this case Bluesky) define my entire experience for me, I can vibe-code my social experience. I can tell it not just the types of content I want to see, but how I want to see it. And for what reason. And how much (or how little) content to show me. And with what context around it. It’s all based on what I expressly want. Not what any company thinks I want.

And I keep experimenting with other versions of this as well. In one test, I had it also try to summarize stories and tell me why it thought I’d find them useful for Techdirt:

In this case it not only found a story that is interesting to me, but it suggested multiple sources for me to read about it, even noting (for example) that Professor Eric Goldman’s blog post is “the definitive blog post” for my coverage (it’s not wrong).

I go back to the piece I wrote a little while back about the kind of learned helplessness of social media users. We’ve had two decades of billionaires deciding exactly how they wanted to intermediate your social experience. How your feed looks. What kind of algorithm you’ll see. What sorts of content will be put in your feed. They got to focus on engagement maxxing. You just had to deal with it.

In such a world, the only thing users felt they could do in response was to yell. They could yell at the CEOs of these platforms. Or at the government, telling them to yell at the CEOs of these platforms.

But with an AI tool that explores an open social ecosystem, you don’t need to yell at a CEO or a regulator. You can just tell the tool what you want, what you don’t want, how you want (or don’t want) to see it, and what context would be useful. It puts you in control.

And yes, sometimes it makes mistakes. It can recommend a story I’m not interested in. But, then I can just tell it that such and such story isn’t useful and why… and it will update the system for me.

Once again, I understand that some people hate any and all uses of AI. And I’m not suggesting you have to run out and use the tools yourself. You do you. But showing concrete use cases where these tools actually deliver more user agency — more control over your online environment, rather than deferring to the whims of any particular company — matters.

The larger point here isn’t really about Attie specifically (indeed, anyone could build their own version of this thanks to open protocols). It’s that for two decades, users have been trained to believe their only options are to accept whatever a platform gives them, or yell loudly enough that someone powerful might change it. That’s the learned helplessness I wrote about earlier, and it’s corrosive.

Tools like this — built on open protocols, not locked inside a corporate walled garden — represent a different path. One where you don’t petition a billionaire for a better feed algorithm. You don’t petition the government to try to put time limits on social media. You just build the experience you want. You tell it to make you a better interface that matches what you want. You tell it you don’t want to spend that much time. That’s what “protocols, not platforms” actually looks like in practice, helped along by agentic tools, and it’s why I think this matters well beyond whether any particular AI tool is good or not.

02:00 AM

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