It’s a multi-win week for MrWilson, who takes both top spots on the insightful side with one serving as a double-winner at the top of the funny side too. In first place for both insightful and funny is a rebuke of a very argumentative commenter who defended John Roberts’s claim that the Supreme Court is apolitical and just following policy:

I’d explain it, but the comments don’t allow for a script that loads a completely different explanation every time you glance at it or respond to it, whatever serves the argument in the moment.

In second place on the insightful side, it’s another comment on that same post, with a more accurate description of the absurdity of the claim:

This feels like Robert E. Lee telling slaves that they shouldn’t criticize him for fighting the North so hard in order to preserve the “right” of slaveholders to enslave them.

It’s an inherently patronizing and blatantly bullshit take. He also seems to think unpopular just means “people don’t like it” rather than “it’s actually an unconstitutional power grab.”

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from that post, this time from Berenerd offering another rebuke of Roberts:

Flying flags upside down in solidarity with insurrectionists, overturning decades old precedents including one that there was no real case before the court, but it was seen anyway because Pro-Choice kills babies. I think even on was overturned taking the exact opposite of the text of the law in question but I can’t find it…

Nope, nothing to suggest they are not trying to legislate from the bench.

Next, it’s Drew Wilson with a comment about the media’s approach to reporting on Trump:

It’s a clear cut example of sanewashing by the media. Yet, when you point out that it’s obvious sanewashing, the media types will whine about how they are not sanewashing and that they are just “clarifying” or “explaining” what the president meant. Then, the media will turn around and wonder why so few trust them anymore afterwards. It’s all frustrating, but it has also been going on for years now. It’s gotten to the point that this is hardly surprising.

Even the Canadian media when covering the US president does it. Live footage gets put out with Trump with his usual senile crazed rantings that make no sense at all, then when they cut back to the reporters who “break it down for all of us”, they basically do everything in their power to make Trump look as presidential as humanly possible. Sometimes, they’ll admit that he can be “unpredictable”, but that’s about it. Why the Canadian media contributes to the sanewashing of a president who is actively trying to undermine Canadian sovereignty is something I’ll never fully understand.

Over on the funny side, things are pretty quiet this week. We’ve already had the first place double-winner above, but there wasn’t much activity beyond that, so we’ll forego the editor’s choice and just highlight the second-place winner. It’s a commenter going by Magic 8 Ball in response to a comment suggesting Trump will hire, well, a magic 8 ball to replace the National Science Foundation board:

Outlook not so good

That’s all for this week, folks!

Now that our detour for the game jam winner spotlights is complete, we’re rolling out a new version of these weekly history posts after collecting your feedback. We’re shifting the timeframes to drop Five Years Ago and instead cover Ten, Fifteen, and Twenty Years Ago, and simplifying things a bit by just presenting a list of selected headlines. Let us know what you think in the comments!

This Week In 2016

• The Chilling Effect Of Mass Surveillance Quantified
• Once Again All Of Whatsapp Is Being Blocked In Brazil Because A Judge Is Upset It Won’t Turn Over Data
• Zappa Threatens Zappa Over Zappa Plays Zappa
• French National Assembly Votes (Sorta) To Finally Kill Its Three Strikes Hadopi Program
• DOJ Deploys Highly-Questionable Legal Arguments In Attempt To Save FBI’s Hacking Warrants
• When A Fingerprint IS The Password, Where Does The Fifth Amendment Come Into Play?
• Do You Own What You Own? Not So Much Anymore, Thanks To Copyright
• Homeland Security Wants To Subpoena Us Over A Clearly Hyperbolic Techdirt Comment

This Week In 2011

• Judge Slams Copyright Troll Lawyer John Steele’s Latest ‘Fishing Expedition’
• The EU Commission Tries To Defend ACTA And Fails Miserably
• Copyright Law Is Not Supposed To Protect Someone From Being Upset
• Perfect 10 Sues Again: This Time It Goes After Usenet Provider Giganews
• Senator Wyden Warns That Domain Seizures And COICA Undermine Internet Freedom
• Homeland Security Demands Mozilla Remove Firefox Extension That Redirects Seized Domains
• Righthaven Hires ‘Star’ Copyright Maximalist Lawyer To Try To Dig Itself Out Of The Deep Hole It’s In
• Hollywood Pushing EU To Sign ACTA Before It Has A Chance To Study The Legal Implications

This Week In 2006

• Monitoring Website Visitors Not The Same As Violating Privacy
• Epson Stops E-Tailers From Selling Off-Brand Ink Cartridges
• Senate Telecom Bill More About Granting Favors Than Improving Telecom?
• Big Content Goes Back To Sneaking Bad Rules In Through Treaties
• Teaching Artificial Intelligence Through Twenty Questions
• Data Retention Backer Mystified That Anyone Would Oppose Such A Plan
• Misplaced Blame Over iTunes Pricing
• More Lawsuits Against Google… To Protect The Children

Ah, Denuvo. It’s been several years since we checked in on this once vaunted DRM tool that billed itself as undefeatable. The end of PC gaming piracy was said to be at hand, at least for any title using Denuvo. Then, predictably, the cracking community saw the target the company had put on its own tool and got to work. They were first able to crack games using Denuvo in months, which turned into weeks, which turned into days, which eventually turned into it being cracked essentially on a game’s launch day.

So, how’s it been going for Denuvo since? Well, it’s essentially been rendered completely useless at this point.

As recently reported by Tom’s Hardware, on April 27, a large Reddit thread tracking which games using Denvuo DRM still needed to be cracked or bypassed officially hit zero. (This list tracks games that don’t require an online server connection, not MMORPGs and other games that do.)  What that means, effectively, is that according to Denuvo modders and hackers, the DRM tech is no longer able to stop pirates from downloading and installing games for free. This milestone for hackers is largely thanks to the MKDev collective and modder DenuvOwO. It was these people who created the hypervisor-based bypass (HVB) that installs a kernel-level driver to bypass Denuvo’s DRM checks.

Technically, Denuvo is still in the game, but it isn’t functioning as it should, and pirates can play without paying. And there is already some evidence that bypassing Denuvo has led to performance improvements in titles like Resident Evil Requiem, which might push some people to use the bypass even if they bought the game legally. We saw this in a previous Resident Evil game when hackers bypassed Denuvo in 2021.

This is always the life cycle of DRM in video games. Whatever audacious claims a DRM company might want to make early on with its product, the technology is eventually defeated to one degree or another and all that is left are the byproducts of the DRM that serve to do nothing other than annoy legitimate customers of a video game. If the technology is so intrusively bad that even legit buyers of a game want to crack it out of their games, and the pirates are completely unencumbered by it as well, then it’s a wonder why anyone would bother including it in their games to begin with.

DRM is pretty much always bad. The desire to protect a game from pirates is understandable, but ultimately pointless. There is almost never enough benefit in terms of generating more sales by trying to fight piracy to be worth pissing off your actual paying customers. And tactics such as what publisher 2K has decided to do in the wake of Denuvo’s complete failure aren’t any better.

2K Games has apparently begun adding 14-day online check-ins to some of its PC games. The check-in has apparently been added to NBA 2K25, NBA 2K26, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. These games now reportedly use a “fixed offline authorization token” that expires after two weeks. Once that happens, the game will not be playable until you connect to the internet and let the game ping Denvuo to get a new token. Pirat Nation and hackers are claiming this new countdown isn’t properly disclosed on the games’ Steam Store page or in each title’s respective EULA.

I’ll just add that pushing this new requirement out via an update to existing purchases is also a problem. Customers bought these games with the understanding of how they would work or not when offline. 2K suddenly changing the product in a meaningful way after it had already been purchased is a flatly anti-consumer move.

And I have no doubt that this online check requirement will be defeated by the same folks who defeated Denuvo. This arms race continues, but it shouldn’t. Why not focus on making great games and connecting with your paying customers to give them reasons to actually pay instead?

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

Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is one of the most controversial figures in the Trump administration, a gate crasher in the buttoned-up world of national security. 

In a field where quiet professionalism is revered, Gorka is loud and mercurial. With a booming, British-accented voice, he describes U.S. operations turning suspected terrorists into “red mist” and stacking bodies “like cordwood.” He wears a lanyard inscribed with “WWFY & WWKY,” referencing a line from President Donald Trump: “We will find you and we will kill you.”

It is a testament to the frenzy of Trump’s first year back in office that even the colorful Gorka had faded into the background as the nation reeled from a mass deportation campaign and sweeping cuts to federal agencies. That changed this February with the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which heightened the risk of retaliatory attacks on American citizens and interests around the world. Overnight, there was renewed interest in who leads White House counterterrorism efforts.

My editors and I decided it was time to break out the Gorka files. For six months, I had monitored Gorka’s public remarks for clues about the status of his long-promised national counterterrorism strategy and updates on deadly U.S. strikes in Africa and the Middle East. It had started as old-fashioned beat reporting; I cover counterterrorism, and he’s the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

The trove of details I collected from months of Gorka’s public statements, along with interviews with more than two dozen current and former security officials, were woven into a ProPublica investigation published in April. It’s an in-depth look at Gorka and his role in the hollowed-out national security apparatus after a year of leadership turmoil and personnel loss as Trump shifted resources toward his immigration agenda.

ProPublica reached out to Gorka for comment in multiple ways. He never responded, instead lashing out at me via posts on X before the story published. He told his 1.8 million followers that I was anti-American and accused me of writing a “putrid piece of hackery.”

There went my hopes for a good-faith exchange. After discussion with my editors, ProPublica decided to note the insults in the story. It was another revealing layer to the combustible leader Trump had installed in a sensitive national security role. A former senior official noted the eruption was “Gorka being Gorka.”

Increasingly, journalists are pushing back against attacks on our credibility by “showing the work,” guiding readers through the reporting process to dispel myths and foster transparency. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to show how basic beat reporting — fact-checking the assertions of a powerful figure — led to a broader story about the state of the U.S. counterterrorism mission at a critical moment.

I’ve covered the post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus for more than two decades, so Gorka was a familiar presence, an academic known mainly for a well-documented hostility toward Islam, which he has portrayed as inherently violent. Gorka has dismissed criticism of this portrayal as “absurd,” saying his focus is “the war inside Islam” between radicals and Western-aligned Muslim leaders. He also served as an adviser under the first Trump administration but was ousted after just seven months amid White House infighting. 

At the time, dozens of lawmakers had demanded his resignation, and investigative outlets detailed links — which Gorka denies — to the Hungarian far right. After the bruising exit, Gorka waited patiently as the Republican Party swung harder right in the Biden era and eventually returned Trump to office.

Gorka was appointed White House counterterrorism czar — he called it his dream job — in a new era without the “adults in the room,” as some officials referred to the more moderate advisers around Trump in the first term. Privately, national security personnel expressed alarm that intelligence about threats was in the hands of an official who reportedly struggled to get security clearance in the first Trump administration.

To me, Gorka was a weather vane for the administration’s national security thinking: Would his “war on terror” mindset clash with the more isolationist “America First” camp that wanted no more forever wars? How would a vast security apparatus built for the Islamist militant threat reorient toward a new focus on far-left “antifa” militants and Latin American drug cartels newly designated as terrorist organizations?

I was especially interested in the status of a national counterterrorism strategy Gorka had been promising since taking office; such documents typically lay out an administration’s approach to fighting the most urgent threats. Though Gorka had described his plan as “imminent” and “on the cusp” of release, months ticked by without any sign of it.

To glean clues about the strategy, I made it my mission to watch every news appearance, read every interview and listen to every podcast featuring Gorka since December 2024, the month before he entered the White House. It took some digging — he rails against the mainstream news media and prefers to appear (largely unchallenged) on niche pro-Trump news outlets and at conservative think tanks.

I developed a nightly ritual. After dinner with my family, I’d hole up to listen to Gorka, hunting for the scraps of news buried in his over-the-top vocabulary and graphic storytelling. Alongside my note categories for “Trump Anecdotes” and “Militant Death Tolls” was one for “Big Words.” For example, the president calls Joe Biden “sleepy”; Gorka prefers “somnambulant.”

Weeks into the reporting, in February 2026, I realized Gorka’s speech had burrowed into my brain when I watched a silly video and thought, in his voice, “Preposterous!” It was time for a break.

I reread my notes from hours of listening sessions. I interviewed counterterrorism analysts and national security watchdog groups about Gorka and his remit. Veteran national security personnel added context and analysis. Just as my editors and I were discussing how to turn the findings into a story, the Iran war began and the spotlight on Gorka grew brighter.

Much of the material on air strikes and the dismantling of guardrails was first incorporated into a story I reported about the Pentagon moving away from more robust civilian protections, a reversal highlighted by a deadly U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Iran. Other reporting ended up in the story about Gorka’s phoenixlike return to the White House and what it says about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine.

Gorka didn’t respond to requests for comment beyond the hostile posts on X. When I asked the White House for comment, spokesperson Anna Kelly praised Gorka’s “incredible job” but sidestepped questions about his approach. “Anyone attempting to smear him and the President’s national security team is only revealing that they haven’t been paying attention for the past year,” Kelly wrote, “as anyone with eyes can see that our homeland is more secure than ever.” 

As of writing, exactly two months into the Iran war, Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy has yet to appear.

Not this again. For many years now there have been a series of ongoing lawsuits between E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump, involving a variety of issues, but mainly whether or not he sexually assaulted her back in the 1990s and, separately, whether he defamed her in claiming he’d never met her after she accused him of sexual assault. As I’ve explained previously, I think the defamation claim part of it is pretty weak, but back during the first Trump administration, he had sought to have the DOJ substitute in and take over for him in the defamation case, which would have immediately ended the case, as you can’t sue the government for defamation. Having the DOJ substitute in for a government employee is allowed under the Westfall Act, and is designed to allow the US government to become the party when a government employee is sued for doing something in the course of their job (the normal example is if a government driver hits someone with a vehicle).

Back in 2020, this failed, as the judge pointed out that denying you raped someone is not part of the president’s official job.

Eventually the various cases made it to trial and the two juries that heard the cases awarded Carroll nearly $88.3 million across two verdicts. Since then Trump has continued to try to avoid ever having to pay.

The case has bounced around a bunch, and Trump had asked for a do-over in the Second Circuit in the latest round. In rejecting that, one of the judges, who had been a part of the panel for an earlier ruling, described how freaking exhausting all this is:

These are the third and fourth times our Court has voted to deny en banc rehearing of rulings in this case, which concerns defamation and sexual assault claims brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. The two per curiam decisions at issue in this round of en banc voting — the fifth and sixth opinions by our Court in this case — arise from two related suits. The first (“Carroll I”) asserted defamation claims based on statements made by Trump in June 2019 while he was President, and the second (“Carroll II”) asserted a sexual assault claim as well as defamation claims based on statements made by Trump in October 2022 after he left office. Although Carroll I was filed first, Carroll II was tried first; in May 2023, the jury in Carroll II found, following a nine-day trial, that Trump sexually abused Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 by digitally penetrating her and that he defamed her with comments he made in 2022 after he left office. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, and this Court affirmed, Carroll v. Trump, 124 F.4th 140 (2d Cir. 2024) (per curiam) (“Carroll 4”), and denied rehearing en banc, 141 F.4th 366 (2d Cir. 2025).

Carroll I was tried in January 2024. The jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages. On appeal of the judgment, the panel issued two decisions. First, in April 2025, while the appeal was pending and after it had been fully briefed, Trump moved before us to substitute the United States as the defendant under the Westfall Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2679. The panel denied the motion by order last June, and issued an opinion explaining our reasoning in August. Carroll v. Trump, 148 F.4th 110 (2d Cir. 2025) (per curiam) (“Carroll 5”). Second, in September, the panel rejected Trump’s attempt to reassert a defense based on presidential immunity, and affirmed the district court’s rulings and the jury’s damages award. Carroll v. Trump, 151 F.4th 50 (2d Cir. 2025) (per curiam) (“Carroll 6”). It is these two panel rulings — Carroll 5 and Carroll 6 — that are the subject of these en banc petitions.

Trump and the United States have petitioned for rehearing of Carroll 5, and Trump has petitioned for rehearing of Carroll 6. Neither petition identifies how our decisions conflict with precedent of this Circuit, another Circuit, or the Supreme Court, or pose a question of “exceptional importance” justifying en banc review.

Having lost yet again, Trump has now appealed to the Supreme Court — where he’s presumably hoping the Court that handed him sweeping presidential immunity will ride to the rescue again. After all the only two notable exceptions to the Court backing him were specifically economy-related: blocking the firing of Fed members and striking down the illegal tariffs. Protecting Donald from sexual assault and defamation claims doesn’t fit into that bucket.

And, on Tuesday, the DOJ filed a motion with the Supreme Court saying that it is planning to ask to (once again) substitute itself in for Trump as the party under the Westfall Act. If I’m reading all this correctly, in the same case the DOJ is asking to appeal the earlier failure to be able to substitute itself in under the Westfall Act, it’s also still asserting its intent to actually substitute itself in.

Either way, this is a stunningly egregious move by Trump’s DOJ — once again acting as his personal legal fixer rather than a defender of the Constitution and the rule of law. The appeals court has made clear multiple times that he can’t use the Westfall Act to effectively force the case into a position where it must be dismissed, in part because the government waived the argument years ago and it’s too late to try to bring it back. In its ruling last week it explained:

The typicality ended there, as the Westfall issues were then litigated in three courts over the course of four years. … The critical juncture for present purposes was when the Westfall Act issue was presented on remand before the district court in June and July 2023. At that time, the Attorney General expressly declined to issue a Westfall certification or to otherwise seek substitution, and Trump did not take any action with respect to certification or substitution. … see 28 U.S.C. § 2679(d)(3) (allowing the employee to petition for certification where the Attorney General has declined to certify). The Westfall issue lay settled until April 2025, when the Government and Trump revived their efforts to have the United States substituted as the defendant in the case by moving for that relief in this Court….

The Carroll 5 panel denied the Government’s post-trial motion to substitute for three separate reasons: (1) the Government and Trump had waived substitution by failing to request it before the district court prior to trial; (2) the 2025 request was untimely under the Westfall Act; and (3) as a matter of equity in light of the procedural posture of the case. … These rulings were correct as a matter of law and did not warrant en banc review.

Basically: the Attorney General explicitly declined to seek Westfall certification back in 2023, Trump didn’t push back at the time, and the case went to trial and verdict. The Trump DOJ’s obvious counterargument — that a different administration gets a fresh shot at this — isn’t how it works. The waiver belongs to the United States as a party, not to whoever happens to be sitting in the AG’s chair at any given moment. The courts have said so, repeatedly and clearly.

But now it’s heading to a Supreme Court that has already declared Trump immune from basically anything in court, so who the hell knows where it goes.

There’s so much craziness going on right now that this barely registers as a blip. A jury found the President of the United States liable for sexual assault and defaming his victim. He’s been trying to make that verdict disappear for years. Now he’s got the Justice Department helping him. And it’s not even among the five most alarming things involving Donald Trump that day.

Maybe this isn’t just another vindictive prosecution by the Trump administration. But we’re going to need a lot more evidence to the contrary to abandon this conjecture:

The FBI searched the Virginia state Senate leader’s hometown office and her neighboring cannabis shop Wednesday, bringing into public view what two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press was a corruption investigation.

One of the people said the investigation into Democratic Sen. L. Louise Lucas was opened during Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation.

While the probe apparently has spanned administrations of different political parties, Democrats viewed it against a backdrop of recent, politically charged inquiries during President Donald Trump’s tenure. Lucas, who has been a senator for 34 years, was a prominent voice in Virginia’s recent redistricting effort, a Democrat-led initiative to counter Republican redrawing pushed by Trump.

If you’re not familiar with why Trump might be targeting L. Louise Lucas, here comes some remedial instruction. In April, Virginia voters approved redrawn voting districts that could conceivably shift the Democratic Party’s Congressional majority from 6-5 to 10-1. This was done in response to the GOP’s unprecedented mid-term gerrymandering — something that’s usually done every 10 years or so as census data begins to trickle in.

The GOP has no problem with redrawing districts to disenfranchise voters, most of them minorities. And the Supreme Court recently gave its blessing to the Second Coming of Jim Crow, which has resulted in red states rushing to maintain GOP supremacy by excluding voters based on their racial makeup. Virginia just did what a lot of red states are already doing, but the party in power went blue. This worked, which made MAGA people angry, resulting in them arguing against the same gerrymandering they’re usually fond of.

Louise Lucas not only helped get this referendum passed, she’s perfectly happy to take shots at federal-level Trump doormats while doing so:

If you can’t see the X.com embed, it’s Louise Lucas responding to Senator Ted Cruz’s whining about Virginia’s “brazen abuse of power and insult to democracy” (keep in mind, Cruz is saying it’s “an insult to democracy” for voters to pass a referendum with a majority of the popular vote) with a splendidly saucy:

You all started it and we fucking finished it.

So, that’s Exhibit A (at minimum!) that suggests this raid wasn’t really about whatever may or may not have been under investigation prior to Trump’s return to office. Trump has already made it abundantly clear he won’t tolerate gerrymandering that doesn’t hand his party more seats in Congress. In the case of Virginia and L. Louise Lucas, this includes attacks on social media targeting the Virginia governor, as well as referring to the Virginia referendum vote as a “RIGGED ELECTION.”

Another point in favor of “vindictive prosecution” is this: it’s being spearheaded by the same DOJ office that has tried (and failed) to convict political enemies of Trump like former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Then there’s this: somehow Fox News reporter Alex Hogan just happened to be on the scene in Portsmouth, Virginia to cover the FBI’s raid. The coincidence looks even more unlikely when you take into consideration that Alex Hogan is (to quote Fox’s bio page) “a London-based correspondent.” Somehow, magically… she was suddenly an entire ocean away and right in front of the Portsmouth, VA offices being raided.

Fox News seems to know how bad this looks. Whoever’s doing damage control at Fox has hastily rewritten Hogan’s bio page to make it appear as though she was just handling the sort of stuff she’s been doing for an unknown length of time as, um, someone not so “London-based”?

Here’s how this page looked in February 2026, before anybody started asking questions about Fox’s Johnny-on-the-spot raid coverage:

Here’s how it looks now, now that people are asking questions:

There’s more anecdotal evidence out there, including a report that a former interim US Attorney for Eastern District of Virginia had been pushing this investigation because “it would help Trump in the mid-terms.”

Now, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this, other than what’s been said by a couple of anonymous sources. No court documents have been filed. No criminal charges have been brought. And no one at the FBI or DOJ seems willing to share any details with the rest of the nation.

But the odds of this being anything other than a politically motivated effort are next to zero. The DOJ and FBI have shed any pretense of being neutral parties solely interested in seeking justice. For the entirety of Trump’s second term, they’ve done nothing but demonstrate their willingness to do whatever’s demanded of them, even if it’s illegal, unconscionable, or absolutely unprecedented. This looks like more of the same. If this administration wants to prove us wrong, it’s going to have to have to clear the trust hurdles it has spent the last 18 months erecting.

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