News

Friday 2025-04-04

09:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: World Wide Wedge Issue [Techdirt]

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

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

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor Internet Society, a global nonprofit that advocates for an open, globally connected, secure and trustworthy Internet for everyone. In our Bonus Chat, Internet Society’s Natalie Campbell talks about issues around US leadership on digital trade and an open internet, related to a letter the Internet Society sent this week to the US Trade Representative.

Kanji of the Day: 習 [Kanji of the Day]

✍11

小3

learn

シュウ ジュ

なら.う なら.い

練習   (れんしゅう)   —   practice
学習   (がくしゅう)   —   study
習慣   (しゅうかん)   —   habit
実習   (じっしゅう)   —   practice (in the field)
講習   (こうしゅう)   —   short course
練習場   (れんしゅうじょう)   —   practice field
練習試合   (れんしゅうじあい)   —   practice game
習い事   (ならいごと)   —   accomplishment
習得   (しゅうとく)   —   learning
講習会   (こうしゅうかい)   —   class

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 嗣 [Kanji of the Day]

✍13

中学

heir, succeed

令嗣   (れいし)   —   your heir
嗣子   (しし)   —   heir
継嗣   (けいし)   —   successor
皇嗣   (こうし)   —   Imperial heir
養嗣子   (ようしし)   —   adoptive heir
皇帝の嗣   (こうていのし)   —   Emperor's heir
後嗣   (こうし)   —   heir
嫡嗣   (ちゃくし)   —   legitimate heir
天津日嗣   (あまつひつぎ)   —   imperial throne
天つ日嗣   (あまつひつぎ)   —   imperial throne

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

08:00 AM

Anchorage Police Department: AI-Generated Police Reports Don’t Save Time [Techdirt]

The Anchorage Police Department (APD) has concluded its three-month trial of Axon’s Draft One, an AI system that uses audio from body-worn cameras to write narrative police reports for officers—and has decided not to retain the technology. Axon touts this technology as “force multiplying,” claiming it cuts in half the amount of time officers usually spend writing reports—but APD disagrees.

The APD deputy chief told Alaska Public Media, “We were hoping that it would be providing significant time savings for our officers, but we did not find that to be the case.” The deputy chief flagged that the time it took officers to review reports cut into the time savings from generating the report.  The software translates the audio into narrative, and officers are expected to read through the report carefully to edit it, add details, and verify it for authenticity. Moreover, because the technology relies on audio from body-worn cameras, it often misses visual components of the story that the officer then has to add themselves. “So if they saw something but didn’t say it, of course, the body cam isn’t going to know that,” the deputy chief continued.

The Anchorage Police Department is not alone in claiming that Draft One is not a time saving device for officers. A new study into police using AI to write police reports, which specifically tested Axon’s Draft One, found that AI-assisted report-writing offered no real time-savings advantage.

This news comes on the heels of policymakers and prosecutors casting doubt on the utility or accuracy of AI-created police reports. In Utah, a pending state bill seeks to make it mandatory for departments to disclose when reports have been written by AI. In King County, Washington, the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has directed officers not to use any AI tools to write narrative reports.

In an era where companies that sell technology to police departments profit handsomely and have marketing teams to match, it can seem like there is an endless stream of press releases and local news stories about police acquiring some new and supposedly revolutionary piece of tech. But what we don’t usually get to see is how many times departments decide that technology is costly, flawed, or lacks utility. As the future of AI-generated police reports rightly remains hotly contested, it’s important to pierce the veil of corporate propaganda and see when and if police departments actually find these costly bits of tech useless or impractical.

Originally posted to the EFF Deeplinks blog.

Massive Expansion Of Italy’s Piracy Shield Underway Despite Growing Criticism Of Its Flaws [Techdirt]

Walled Culture has been following closely Italy’s poorly designed Piracy Shield system. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to order Italian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all of Google Drive for the entire country, and how malicious actors could similarly use that unchecked power to shut down critical national infrastructure. Since then, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), an international, not-for-profit association representing computer, communications, and Internet industry firms, has added its voice to the chorus of disapproval. In a letter to the European Commission, it warned about the dangers of the Piracy Shield system to the EU economy:

The 30-minute window [to block a site] leaves extremely limited time for careful verification by ISPs that the submitted destination is indeed being used for piracy purposes. Additionally, in the case of shared IP addresses, a block can very easily (and often will) restrict access to lawful websites – harming legitimate businesses and thus creating barriers to the EU single market. This lack of oversight poses risks not only to users’ freedom to access information, but also to the wider economy. Because blocking vital digital tools can disrupt countless individuals and businesses who rely on them for everyday operations. As other industry associations have also underlined, such blocking regimes present a significant and growing trade barrier within the EU.

It also raised an important new issue: the fact that Italy brought in this extreme legislation without notifying the European Commission under the so-called “TRIS” procedure, which allows others to comment on possible problems:

The (EU) 2015/1535 procedure aims to prevent creating barriers in the internal market before they materialize. Member States notify their legislative projects regarding products and Information Society services to the Commission which analyses these projects in the light of EU legislation. Member States participate on the equal foot with the Commission in this procedure and they can also issue their opinions on the notified drafts.

As well as Italy’s failure to notify the Commission about its new legislation in advance, the CCIA believes that:

this anti-piracy mechanism is in breach of several other EU laws. That includes the Open Internet Regulation which prohibits ISPs to block or slow internet traffic unless required by a legal order. The block subsequent to the Piracy Shield also contradicts the Digital Services Act (DSA) in several aspects, notably Article 9 requiring certain elements to be included in the orders to act against illegal content. More broadly, the Piracy Shield is not aligned with the Charter of Fundamental Rights nor the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU – as it hinders freedom of expression, freedom to provide internet services, the principle of proportionality, and the right to an effective remedy and a fair trial.

Far from taking these criticisms to heart, or acknowledging that Piracy Shield has failed to convert people to paying subscribers, the Italian government has decided to double down, and to make Piracy Shield even worse. Massimiliano Capitanio, Commissioner at AGCOM, the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees, explained on LinkedIn how Piracy Shield was being extended in far-reaching ways (translation by Google Translate, original in Italian). In future, it will add:

30-minute blackout orders not only for pirate sports events, but also for other live content;

the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers;

the obligation for search engines to de-index pirate sites;

the procedures for unblocking domain names and IP addresses obscured by Piracy Shield that are no longer used to spread pirate content;

the new procedure to combat piracy on the #linear and “on demand” television, for example to protect the #film and #serietv.

That is, Piracy Shield will apply to live content far beyond sports events, its original justification, and to streaming services. Even DNS and VPN providers will be required to block sites, a serious technical interference in the way the Internet operates, and a threat to people’s privacy. Search engines, too, will be forced to de-index material. The only minor concession to ISPs is to unblock domain names and IP addresses that are no longer allegedly being used to disseminate unauthorized material. There are, of course, no concessions to ordinary Internet users affected by Piracy Shield blunders.

An AGCOM board member, Elisa Giomi, who was mentioned previously on Walled Culture as a lone voice within AGCOM exposing its failures, also took to LinkedIn to express her concerns with these extensions of Piracy Shield (original in Italian):

The changes made unfortunately do not resolve #critical issues such as the fact that private #reporters, i.e. the holders of the rights to #football matches and other live #audiovisual content, have a disproportionate role in determining the blocking of #domains and #IP addresses that transmit in violation of #copyright.

Moreover:

The providers of #network and #computer security services such as #VPNs#DNSs and #ISPs, who are called upon to bear high #costs for the implementation of the monitoring and blocking system, cannot count on compensation or financing mechanisms, suffering a significant imbalance, since despite not having any active role in #copyright violations, they invest economic resources to combat illegal activities to the exclusive advantage of the rights holders.

The fact that the Italian government is ignoring the problems with Piracy Shield and extending its application as if everything were fine, is bad enough. But the move might have even worse knock-on consequences. An EU parliamentary question about the broadcast rights to audiovisual works and sporting competitions asked:

Can the Commission provide precise information on the effectiveness of measures to block pirate sites by means of identification and neutralisation technologies?

To which the European Commission replied:

In order to address the issues linked to the unauthorised retransmissions of live events, the Commission adopted, in May 2023 the recommendation on combating online piracy of sport and other live events.

By 17 November 2025, the Commission will assess the effects of the recommendation taking into account the results from the monitoring exercise.

It’s likely that copyright companies will be lauding Piracy Shield as an example of how things should be done across the whole of the EU, conveniently ignoring all the problems that have arisen. Significantly, a new “Study on the Effectiveness and the Legal and Technical Means of Implementing Website-Blocking Orders” from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) does precisely that in its Conclusion:

A well-functioning site-blocking system that involves cooperation between relevant stakeholders (such as Codes of Conduct and voluntary agreements among rights holders and ISPs) and/or automated processes, such as Italy’s Piracy Shield platform, further increases the efficiency and effectiveness of a site-blocking regime.

As the facts show abundantly, Piracy Shield is the antithesis of a “well-functioning site-blocking system”. But when have copyright maximalists and their tame politicians ever let facts get in the way of their plans?

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.

05:00 AM

Iowa Book Ban Law Again Mostly Dead Following Return Trip To Federal Court [Techdirt]

Will the third time be the charm? Let’s hope so. This charmless act of hatred masquerading as “for the children” legislating has been struck down again by the same federal court that tried to kill it off the first time.

In late December 2023, an Iowa federal court told the state there was little chance of saving its anti-LGBTQ/book ban, given how completely unconstitutional it was. It forbade school libraries from carrying books “containing descriptions or depictions of sex acts.” It also prevented teachers or librarians from mentioning anything related to sexual orientation or gender identity to any student from kindergarten through sixth grade.

The law wasn’t very specific as to what constituted a “sex act,” but to be on the safe side, it created a specific carve-out for the Bible, which contains descriptions of several sex acts. More heinously, the law also wished HIV/AIDS into the ignorance cornfield.

The health curriculum shall include the characteristics of communicable diseases including acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

[…]

The health curriculum shall include age-appropriate and research-based information regarding the characteristics of sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV and the availability of a vaccine to prevent HPV, and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The court handling the challenge to the law said this about it on its way to saying the law, as written, was a good as dead, constitutionally-speaking:

The law is incredibly broad and has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries, including, among others, nonfiction history books, classic works of fiction, Pulitzer Prize winning contemporary novels, books that regularly appear on Advanced Placement exams, and even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assaultThe sweeping restrictions in Senate File 496 are unlikely to satisfy the First Amendment under any standard of scrutiny and thus may not be enforced while the case is pending. Indeed, the Court has been unable to locate a single case upholding the constitutionality of a school library restriction even remotely similar to Senate File 496.

Whew. You’d think no one would appeal this sort of shutdown, but the Iowa government isn’t spending its own money and wouldn’t even consider briefly borrowing its constitutents’ shame. It appealed this decision and was granted a brief revival by the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court eight months later.

It didn’t exactly green light the law, but suggested the lower court needed to spend a bit more time considering the underlying First Amendment issues. It also suggested that even if it agreed with the lower court’s reasoning, it would only apply the injunction to the named plaintiffs and allow the rest of state to be subjected to their legislators’ open bigotry.

The case has been examined again by the lower court. And, whatever hopes the state may have had about salvaging this terrible law have been dashed again. The lower court is no more impressed than it was the first time around.

Iowa cannot, for now, continue to enforce part of its book ban law, a federal judge said Tuesday, giving major publishers that sued the state the second temporary reprieve they requested.

The new decision from U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher again temporarily blocked the part of the law that prohibits school libraries and classrooms from carrying books that depict sex acts.

[…]

The appellate court told the lower court that it failed to apply the correct analysis in determining whether to temporarily block the law. In his decision Tuesday, Locher stated that the unconstitutional applications of the book restrictions “far exceed” the constitutional applications “under both legal standards the Court believes are applicable.”

In its latest decision [PDF] (which the Associated Press can’t seem to link to or embed in its coverage), the court arrives at the same conclusion it did last time. This isn’t a good lawful. It’s definitely not a lawful law. And it takes time to criticize the state’s hypocritical carve out for its preferred religious text.

In essence, Senate File 496 does what Pico and Pratt prohibit: it imposes a puritanical “pall of orthodoxy” over school libraries by concluding that there is no redeeming value to any book that contains a “description” of a “sex act” even if the book is a work of history, self-help guide, award-winning novel, or other piece of serious literature. See Pico, 457 U.S. at 871 (“Our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas.”) (plurality opinion); see also Tinker, 393 U.S. at 511 (“In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate.”). The fact that the Bible and other religious texts are exempted from Senate File 496 reinforces the problem because it shows that even the Iowa Legislature does not believe all books involving sex acts are devoid of pedagogical value. There is no substantial or reasonable governmental interest that would justify allowing some books with sexual content to be in school libraries but not others.

The injunction is back in force. This will obviously be appealed because the Eighth Circuit reversed it the first time it handled the case. (Of course, it would be appealed anyway because there’s no way the state’s top bigots are going to let this one go until there are no further legal options.) We’ll see what the Appeals Court has to say at some point in the future but, at least for the moment, the Constitution wins and hateful ignorance is back to racking up losses.

Daily Deal: uTalk Language Learning [Techdirt]

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03:00 AM

Four-word advice [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

When there’s a complex situation that feels foreboding, you might need a manual, a coach and even a system to move forward.

Or, it’s possible you simply need someone to tell you, “you’ll figure it out.”

      

A Sham and a Scam [The Status Kuo]

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Donald Trump appeared in the Rose Garden yesterday to announce his long dreaded “Liberation Day” tariffs. No one quite knew what to expect, given his contradictory messaging and on-again/ off-again approach to tariffs so far.

Still, few expected what he actually declared: an across-the-board, minimum 10 percent tariff on nearly all imported goods worldwide, plus additional tariffs he misleadingly labeled “reciprocal” as if to imply they are in response to unfair tariffs by other countries.

These hit some nations’ exported goods with import taxes of around 50 percent. For example, China is now at 54 percent and Vietnam at 46 percent. These are staggering new levies.

The markets shuddered and dropped sharply in response, which is probably why Trump waited until after they closed to make the announcement. At the time of this writing, three hours before the opening bell on Wall Street, the S&P 500 is down 3.3 percent and the tech-heavy NASDAQ is down 3.7 percent in after-hours trading as investors worry about the global economic impact of the tariffs.

Economist Justin Wolfers pulled no punches in his assessment: “Monstrously destructive, incoherent, ill-informed tariffs based on fabrications, imagined wrongs, discredited theories and ignorance of decades of evidence. And the real tragedy is that they will hurt working Americans more than anyone else.” As you’ll see in the discussion today, Wolfers is dead on with this.

To get a full sense of it all, let’s ascend to 10,000 feet and survey the danger and the damage from a higher vantage point before dropping down for a closer look.

Subscribe now

Tariffs are a tax, but how big are these?

Trump claims that the tariffs will raise roughly $6 trillion. Applying a typical 10 year window, that’s around $600 billion a year.

That would make it the biggest single tax hike in generations. And remember, tariffs operate as a flat, national sales tax, which means that the rates don’t “progress” with income. Middle class and working families will be hit hardest.

Broadly understood, the tariffs are a way for Trump to pay for his planned massive tax cuts for the wealthy. As Prof. Robert Reich notes in a chat with my friend Heather Lofthouse, Trump’s tariffs are a $6 trillion wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. Reich notes that tariffs are a regressive tax upon consumers, while the proposed tax cuts are designed for the wealthy. “Put those together, and you have a gigantic redistribution upward, from working people and the poor to the very wealthy. That is a scandal.”

Trump relies on revisionist history as justification

In his Rose Garden speech yesterday, Trump laid out some true revisionist doozies. He claimed, for example, that the federal government implemented an income tax in 1913 so that citizens, rather than “foreign countries” would “start paying the money necessary to run our government.”

This gets it wrong from the outset: Foreign countries do not pay tariffs, domestic importers do. They then typically pass the extra costs down to consumers. The federal income tax was a way to force wealthier Americans to shoulder a fairer, more proportionate share of the national tax burden.

Trump also claimed that the Great Depression, which began in 1929, “would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy.” In fact, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the era are largely blamed for deepening and prolonging the misery of the Great Depression.

Trump is lying once again to the American people so that, as Prof. Reich noted, he can shift the burden of paying taxes from the wealthy to the poor by reducing the federal income tax on the former while increasing sales taxes on the latter.

How did they calculate the tariffs?

Trump went before the cameras and awkwardly held up a large sign that was labeled “Reciprocal Tariffs.” But don’t be fooled. This is not about hitting back at countries with high tariffs on U.S. goods.

The moment he held up that sign, economists and trade experts began trying to reverse engineer what it meant. The chart comprises three columns: the country, “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” (including claimed “currency manipulation and trade barriers”), and “U.S.A. Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs.”

Bear with me as we dive down for a closer look into the numbers, because it’s important to understand that these are not “reciprocal tariffs” at all. And that matters because they can’t be negotiated down if they don’t exist in the first place.

These aren’t “reciprocal” anything

The first thing experts noted was that the second column in Trump’s chart was all wrong. Most of those so-called tariffs do not exist at the levels displayed. For example, as financial reporter James Surowiecki noted, South Korea does not charge us a 50 percent tariff, and the EU does not charge us a 39 percent tariff as the chart below claims.

So what gives? Where do these numbers come from? Different sources quickly calculated how they arrived at these incredible numbers. Surowiecki wrote,

They didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.

So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.

A group at Flexport also cracked the code quickly and confirmed it with hard numbers it laid out in a chart. Wrote its CEO, Ryan Petersen,

It’s quite simple, they took the trade deficit the US has with each country and divided it by our imports from that country.

The chart below shows the predictions of this formula plotted against the actual new tariff rates.

Faced with these figures, the White House confirmed that the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” were really just half the current trade imbalance. Said one Trump aide,

“The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers … based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a White House official said, calling it “the most fair thing in the world.”

It’s also the most insane way imaginable to address trade deficits. Basic principles of comparative advantage, taught in any introductory economics college course, assume that with some countries you will run a trade surplus and others a trade deficit. Countries that manufacture cheaper goods, for example, are likely to export more to you than they import. The advantage you gain from this is cheaper prices on basic consumer goods such as clothes and toys.

Economist Wolfers sought to explain Trump’s fallacy:

Take a simple example: I run a trade deficit with Trader Joe’s buying their meals, while they buy none of mine. My trade deficit as a share of my imports is 100%.

By Trump’s trade logic, this deficit is evidence they’re imposing 100% tariffs on the meals I try to sell them.

Obviously this is nonsense.

Further, slapping a sudden 46 percent tariff on, say, Vietnam simply because it runs a trade surplus with the U.S. is bad economics. It will devastate that country’s export economy while sending the cost of their goods soaring for U.S. families.

But even worse, the numbers in Trump’s charts only calculate the trade deficit in goods, not services. The U.S. runs a trade surplus in services with the world, but that doesn’t matter in these charts at all.

Bottom line? The numbers Trump is throwing around are not really about tariffs by foreign countries at all, but rather only about our trade deficits in goods with them. They are being distorted to justify crushing tariffs that will hobble the world economy and transfer $6 trillion in goods from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Whom did they include and leave out?

Let’s zoom back up again. If you ever want an example of incompetence paired with corruption, look no further than these new tariffs which impose levies upon places with zero human population.

For example, they include a 10 percent tariff upon the “Heard and McDonald Islands” which have no people living on them. It’s just penguins. And the only people living within the “British Indian Ocean Territory,” which also gets slapped with a 10 percent minimum tariff, are the U.S. military personnel at the base at Diego Garcia. He’s literally taxing a U.S. military base.

It’s as if an intern went through a Wikipedia list of countries to make this chart.

But perhaps this was just some kind of administrative oversight, right? Maybe no one high up had a hand in reviewing the nations to be hit with tariffs?

That’s unlikely, given that the two countries somehow not listed are Russia and North Korea. Now, in fairness, North Korea has no substantial trade with the U.S. (and neither do the penguins at the Heard and McDonald Islands). But Russia still does billions in trade, so why is it conspicuously off the list?

Prof. Michael McFaul pointed out that, as reported by Reuters, on “Liberation Day” while Trump was busy announcing new tariffs on our allies and biggest trading partners, the White House had made arrangements for a visit by the head of Russia’s sovereign fund. He demanded an explanation for this, but one is unlikely forthcoming.

Congress could end this madness now

There’s something often overlooked in all the fear and handwringing over Trump’s tariffs: It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress, which holds the power of the purse, delegated tariff authority to the White House and has the power to take it back.

Indeed, last night four GOP senators—Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AL), Susan Collins (R-ME), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) bucked their party and joined the Democrats to vote to deny Trump the power to declare a national emergency as the basis for tariffs upon Canada. The GOP-led House refuses to take up this measure, however, because it has shamefully bowed to Trump’s wishes.

By ceding its tariff authority to the Trump White House, Congress is essentially allowing Trump to impose a massive new sales tax and wealth transfer without a single piece of legislation or any kind of budget being passed. That’s not how massive tax changes are supposed to occur. The people should have a chance to be heard. There should be committee meetings and mark-ups with a chance to lobby. Instead, Trump has pulled all the power for himself, raising the possibility of corruption along the way. After all, if you want to be spared tariffs, you need only seek the grace and line the pockets of one person now.

If the economy goes into recession as prices rise from the “Liberation Day” tariffs, the blame should rest not just with Crazy Donald but his enablers in the House and Senate. They understand that this path is both foolish and dangerous but are too cowardly or too greedy to care.

And we can’t say we weren’t warned. Kamala Harris spoke frequently during the campaign about how Trump would impose what amounts to a 20 percent national sales tax upon the country:

Harris was right about Trump’s plans, but off by about $1,000 per family. As discussed at the top, the projected tax revenues from these tariffs are around $6 trillion, according to the White House. With 134 million U.S. households, and assuming a ten year period, this comes to around $5,000 per household per year.

If voters were grumbling about their personal economic outlooks and inflation before the election, they are in for a far bigger shock should these tariffs take full effect in the coming days.

02:00 AM

Trump Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic [Techdirt]

There’s a fundamental problem with Donald Trump’s new trade policy: it fails a test that actual 5th graders can pass. I know this because I tried explaining his “Liberation Day” trade plan to one last night. Here’s how that conversation went:

“Imagine you want to buy a toy at a store which costs $50. You pay for the toy and walk away with it. The President looks at that transaction and says ‘wait, you paid the store $50 and the store paid you nothing, therefore the store is stealing from you. To “fix” this, I’m going to tax the store $25. From now on that same toy costs $75.”

The 5th grader looked at me like I was crazy. “Whaaaaaaat? None of that makes sense. If I pay for something, it’s not stealing. And taxing the store seems stupid, and then everything is more expensive. Why would anyone do that? That can’t be how it works.”

This is the core problem with Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade policy: it fundamentally misunderstands what trade deficits are. And if you think that’s bad, just wait until we get to the part where this policy declares economic war on penguins and our own military base.

The policy, unveiled yesterday afternoon, is called a “reciprocal tariff plan,” which is a bit like calling a hammer a “reciprocal pillow.” The premise is that since other countries have high tariffs on us (they don’t), we should have high tariffs on them (we shouldn’t). But that’s not even the weird part.

At the heart of this policy is a chart. Not just any chart, but what might be the most creative work of economic fiction since, well, Donald Trump launched his memecoin. Trump proudly displayed these numbers at a White House event, explaining that they showed the tariffs other countries impose on the US. He emphasized repeatedly that the US was being more than “fair” because our reciprocal tariffs would be less than what other countries were charging us.

There was just one small problem: none of the numbers were real tariff rates. Not even close. Vietnam, according to the chart, imposes a 90% tariff on US goods. This would be shocking news to Vietnam, which does no such thing.

At first, observers assumed the administration was simply inventing numbers, which would have been bad enough. But the reality turned out to be far more stupid. James Surowiecki stumbled into what was actually happening:

Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate what Surowiecki discovered. The administration didn’t just make up random numbers — that would have been too simple. Instead, they invented a formula that manages to be both more complicated and more wrong: they took our trade deficit with each country and divided it by that country’s exports to us.

So for Indonesia, the math went like this:

  • US trade deficit with Indonesia: $17.9 billion
  • Indonesia’s exports to the US: $28 billion
  • $17.9B ÷ $28B = 64%
  • Therefore (according to this logic), Indonesia must be charging us the equivalent of a 64% tariff

This is roughly equivalent to calculating your coffee shop’s markup by dividing how much coffee you buy from them by how much coffee they buy from you. Which would make sense if you were in the coffee business, but you’re not.

When confronted about this methodology, the administration didn’t backtrack. They just admitted it:

“The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers … based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a White House official said, calling it “the most fair thing in the world.”

Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit:

This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to “make my wrong econ math look more scientific.” The document even admits that they couldn’t figure out the actual tariff rates, so they “proxied” them with this formula instead. That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.

The fundamental problem here isn’t just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It’s that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They’re not the same thing. At all.

Let’s back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be:

  1. “Deficit” sounds bad
  2. Therefore, trade deficits must be bad
  3. Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us
  4. Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to “level the playing field”

Remember that 5th grader from earlier? They already understood what Trump doesn’t: when you buy a toy for $50 at a store, you have a “trade deficit” with that store. You gave them $50, they gave you $0. But you also got a toy. That’s not the store cheating you — that’s just how buying things works.

A trade deficit between countries works the same way. When we have a trade deficit with a country, it just means we bought more stuff from them than they bought from us. We got the stuff. They got the money. That’s it.

Trump’s solution to trade deficits (which aren’t a problem) is to impose tariffs (which don’t help). In fact, they can often make things worse. According to actual economists who study this stuff, higher tariffs can actually lead to higher trade deficits, not lower ones.

Joseph Gagnon, one of the world’s foremost experts on trade deficits, explains exactly why this is such a bad idea:

Although tariffs do not reduce trade deficits, they do reduce imports and exports, as well as total income. That’s because they force a country to shift resources from more profitable exports to less profitable imports, as well as to services. But the long-run economic effects are also negative. By shielding producers from foreign competition, a tariff ultimately leads to less business innovation, slower productivity growth, and lower household living standards.

You might notice something about that paragraph. It starts by describing how tariffs hurt the economy in the short term. Then there’s a “but” — which usually signals some kind of silver lining. Instead, it just pivots to explaining how tariffs hurt the economy even more in the long term.

Cool.

So we have a policy that:

  1. Is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of trade deficits
  2. Uses made-up numbers derived from a nonsense formula
  3. Would actually make the “problem” it’s trying to solve even worse
  4. Will definitely make Americans poorer

But wait, it gets better.

All of this glosses over the fact that “reciprocal tariffs” are not reciprocal at all. Trump’s team is making up fake tariff numbers for foreign countries based not on anything having to do with tariffs, but on trade deficits, which is just an accounting of inflows vs. outflows between two countries. It’s only reciprocal because the Trump team faked the numbers.

On top of that, Trump can only impose tariffs (normally a power of Congress) based on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act. Both laws require there to be an actual “emergency.” The only emergency here is that nobody in the administration understands what trade deficits are.

But at least we may know where they got their brilliant formula from. There has been some suggestion that the administration got the idea from AI — specifically from asking a large language model how to calculate “fair” tariffs based on trade deficits. And yes, when asked “What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even-playing fields when it comes to trade deficit? Set minimum at 10%,” several AI models did suggest something similar to the administration’s approach.

guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?i went to the pit for y'all and brought back the screenshots with alt text

Amy Hoy (@amyhoy.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T00:42:22.169Z

But here’s the thing: every single AI model also included very clear warnings about why using this formula would be catastrophically stupid. I tested this myself with multiple LLMs (Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, and Copilot), and they all basically said “Well, if you insist on doing something this economically illiterate, here’s how you could do it, BUT PLEASE DON’T.”

My favorite was DeepSeek, in which I had its reasoning turned on, and it seemed particularly perplexed as to why I would try to balance trade deficits with tariffs, but felt resigned to do so:

That’s a little small to read, but it says:

Wait, but is this the right approach? I mean, tariffs can have various effects. If you impose a tariff, it might lead to retaliation from other countries, which could hurt US exports. Also, higher tariffs could increase prices for consumers in the US, which isn’t great for the economy. But the user is specifically asking about balancing the trade deficit, so maybe those considerations are secondary here.

Yeah, that’s literally DeepSeek grappling with the fact that the user here (the US government) is asking for a fundamentally stupid thing without understanding the consequences.

The administration appears to have taken only the formula and ignored all the warnings. Which would be merely sad if they were just playing with theoretical numbers. But they’re not. They’re actually implementing this policy, using emergency powers that are supposed to be reserved for actual emergencies — not “we don’t understand how trade works” emergencies.

Which then brings us around, finally, to the penguins.

Because MAGA’s best economists are implementing it so mechanically, applying their formula to every country in what appears to be the CIA World Factbook, we end up with some truly spectacular results.

Let’s take a closer look at the very last page of the administration’s tariff list:

Now, you might notice a bunch of these entries show a flat 10% tariff rate. That’s what happens when a “country” has no trade with the US at all — the formula defaults to the minimum. A mildly competent team might have wondered why these places have zero trade with us and done a quick check before declaring economic war on them.

But this team isn’t mildly competent. This team is extremely, profoundly, impressively incompetent.

So let’s look at who exactly we’re launching a trade war against, starting with the Heard and McDonald Islands. Total population: zero human beings. The only residents are some absolutely stunning penguins. You can actually adopt one if you want — though I suppose that may now cost 10% more, thanks to Trump’s tariff.

But that’s not even the best part. Just a few lines up, you’ll find the “British Indian Ocean Territory,” also known as the Chagos Islands. Nearly all of the humans currently on these islands are US military personnel at the Diego Garcia base. And they’re only there because, as detailed in a recent Behind the Bastards podcast, the British government forcibly expelled all the native inhabitants to lease the territory to the US military.

Let that sink in for a moment: Donald Trump just imposed tariffs on our own military base. On territory we lease. Where the only residents are US military personnel.

So to sum up where we are:

  1. The administration invented an economic emergency
  2. To justify a policy based on made-up numbers
  3. Generated by an AI formula that came with explicit warnings not to use it
  4. Which they’re now using to launch trade wars against:
    • Penguins
    • Our own military
    • And presumably Santa’s Workshop (someone check for a North Pole entry)

And while the penguins and military base make for amusing examples of this policy’s incompetence, the real damage will come from applying this same backwards logic to basically all of our actual trading partners — countries whose goods and services make American lives better and whose economic relationships we’ve spent decades building. And who, historically, welcomed back American goods and services as well. All of that is now at risk because someone couldn’t be bothered to learn what a trade deficit actually is. And the American electorate deciding that’s who we wanted to govern the country.

When your trade policy is so fundamentally misguided that you’re declaring economic war on flightless birds and your own armed forces, perhaps it’s time to admit that the 5th grader from the beginning of this story wasn’t just smarter than the administration — they were dramatically overqualified for Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.

12:00 AM

New Release: Tails 6.14.1 [Tor Project blog]

Today, we are releasing 6.14.1 instead of 6.14 because we discovered an important issue while testing 6.14 on Tuesday and had to start the release process again to fix it.

New features

More flexible confinement of Tor Browser

We improved the confinement technology that we use to protect your files from possible security vulnerabilities in Tor Browser.

Until now, Tor Browser could only save downloads to and read files from a limited number of folders.

With Tails 6.14.1, you can safely access any folder in your Home folder or Persistent Storage from Tor Browser.

This new integration also solves other usability and accessibility issues:

  • The Large Text accessibility feature works in Tor Browser. (#19266)

  • The Cursor Size accessibility feature works in Tor Browser. (#19572)

  • The minimize and maximize buttons are available again in the title bar. (#19328)

These improvements rely on 2 security technologies: the flexibility of the new XDG Desktop Portals of Flatpak allowed us to relax the AppArmor confinement, improving usability without compromising on security.

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 14.0.9.

  • Update the Tor client to 0.4.8.16.

Fixed problems

  • Fix the Welcome Screen freezing after unlocking the Persistent Storage. (#20783)

  • Add a clearer border to the Kleopatra window when on white background. (#20861)

  • Fix the error when closing the check for upgrades from About Tails. (#20861)

For more details, read our changelog.

Get Tails 6.14.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 6.0 or later to 6.14.1.

  • 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 6.14.1 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 6.14.1 directly:

Support and feedback

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

Thursday 2025-04-03

11:00 PM

Trump’s FCC ‘Investigates’ Disney For Not Being Racist And Sexist Enough [Techdirt]

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr isn’t really interested in doing his actual job as head of the FCC. He’s not interested in protecting consumers or markets from notoriously shitty telecom monopolies. He’s not interested in protecting consumers or markets from harmful consolidation. He’s not interested in addressing the fact the telecom industry just saw the worst hack in history.

What’s he interested in? Harassing companies that don’t adequately bend the knee to Trump. And harassing companies that aren’t suitably racist or sexist enough for the Trump administration’s liking.

Carr’s already announced he’s launching phony “investigations” into Verizon and Comcast for not being racist and sexist enough (read: having some bare-bones inclusivity efforts on a website). He’s doing this by leveraging looming approvals for potential shitty mergers to bully these companies into submission. And because these companies are routinely stocked with abject cowards, it will probably work.

And Carr continues to expand his anti-civil-rights campaign on the taxpayer dime. Last week he announced he’s also “investigating” Disney/ABC for not being racist and sexist enough. From NPR (which Carr is also “investigating” for being insufficiently deferent to christofascist clods):

“In a letter to Disney CEO Robert Iger, Carr said the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau will review whether Disney or ABC have violated any FCC equal employment opportunity regulations. He added that the probe will apply to both past and current policies.”

As with all of these investigations, Carr is pulling his legal justifications entirely out of his ass. He’s basically trying to claim that marginal efforts to be more inclusive are themselves in violation of anti-discrimination rules and laws. Rules and laws they’re trying to destroy. It’s circular logic gibberish designed to give a thin veneer of legitimacy to pointless bullshit harassment. Sayeth Carr:

“Numerous reports indicate that Disney’s leadership went all in on invidious forms of DEI discrimination a few years ago and apparently did so in a manner that infected many aspects of your company’s decisions.”

In telecom, Carr has tried to re-interpret language in the Communications Act designed to prevent discrimination to attack efforts against discrimination. It will never hold up in even the shittiest of courts, but Carr of course doesn’t care about that. He wants the publicity generated by the fake investigations to do the bullying. He wants to scare companies with fake, costly inquiries into nonexistent violations.

Disney, like most feckless U.S. corporations, has been happy to oblige so far, scrubbing their websites and earnings reports of references to equality and inclusion, shortening warnings on Disney+ about how older Disney content may feature racist stereotypes, and shuttering already flimsy programs designed to help marginalized populations.

Of course the U.S. press, many of them keen to avoid harassment or get tax cuts and merger approvals, have proven appropriately feckless in their news coverage of Carr’s weird zealotry.

Authoritarian propagandists have hijacked the term “DEI” to help sanitize and normalize sexism/racism, and conflate half-assed corporate inclusivity initiatives with popular civil rights. Instead of saying Carr is “being racist,” “being sexist,” “embracing resegregation,” or “attacking civil rights,” they’re quick to adopt the more sterile “he’s investigating DEI” nomenclature:

And if you read through pretty much any coverage of these sham investigations, you’ll find they all go out of their way to frame Carr’s racist and sexist harassment of companies as serious adult policymaking. Because that’s what you get when you let journalism consolidate at the hands of feckless trust fund brunchlords who are more interested in tax cuts and access than serving the public interest.

Carr’s a weird zealot launching baseless investigations into companies because they’re not being suitably racist and sexist enough for his king’s liking. It’s pathetic, and the collective press and corporate response so far has been equally so.

09:00 PM

EFF Vows to Fight Back Against U.S. Site Blocking Bills [TorrentFreak]

stop dangerAfter a decade of focusing efforts overseas, the push for website blocking has landed back on American shores.

The fierce backlash against SOPA effectively shelved domestic site blocking initiatives in the U.S., but that hesitation appears to have evaporated.

With Representative Zoe Lofgren’s introduction of the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) in February, the controversial mechanism of court-ordered blocking against foreign ‘pirate’ sites is no longer just a foreign issue; on The Hill it’s a hot topic once again.

Should the proposal become law, FADPA would enable rightsholders to restrict access to verified pirate sites, run by foreign operators. Site blocking orders would apply to both Internet providers and public DNS resolvers.

Lofgren’s bill received broad support from rightsholders and other lawmakers are showing interest as well. According to reports, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa is working on a second site blocking bill, which could increase political momentum.

EFF: Site Blocking is a Terrible Idea

When U.S. site blocking legislation was first introduced fourteen years ago, these measures were still a novelty. Since then, however, dozens of countries have implemented formal blocking procedures, some more strict than others.

That doesn’t mean that site blocking lacks opposition. In the United States, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it will fight back against the renewed push in favor of blocking, decrying the proposals as a “terrible idea”.

“These new proposals would let rights holders get federal court orders forcing ISPs and DNS providers to block entire websites based on accusations of infringing copyright. Lawmakers claim they’re targeting “pirate” sites—but what they’re really doing is building an internet kill switch,” EFF’s Joe Mullin writes.

The EFF sees the site blocking proposals as a threat to the free and open internet. This critique is grounded in the risk that legitimate sites could find themselves blocked as collateral damage if they share IP-addresses or hosting with pirate sites.

These concerns are not hypothetical. Recent events have shown that site blocking measures still affect legitimate sites, such as when Google Drive and Cloudflare-linked sites were taken offline in response to Italian blocking demands.

Site Blocking Doesn’t Work

According to EFF, site blocking is both “dangerously blunt” and “trivially easy to evade”. People can use VPN services to evade blocking measures, for example, or switch to alternative DNS resolvers that are not subject to blocking restrictions.

The group doesn’t see site blocking as an effective tool to curb piracy, but as a broader effort to institute a censorship regime.

“Site-blocking legislation is an attempt to build a new American censorship system by letting private actors get dangerous infrastructure-level control over internet access,” Mullin warns.

At this stage, little is known about the technical implementation of the proposed site blocking efforts. Rightsholders know that it’s not going to solve their piracy problem, but they argue that it’s better than doing nothing.

Reviving the U.S. Site Blocking Protests

Pushback against the site blocking proposals was expected, but it will be difficult to equal the massive opposition against SOPA in 2012, which turned into a global Internet protest.

EFF is committed nonetheless and Mullin gladly reminds lawmakers of this ghost of the past.

“The question is whether lawmakers remember what happened the last time they tried to mess with the foundations of the open web. If they don’t, they’re going to find out the hard way. Again,” he says.

“Site-blocking laws are dangerous, unnecessary, and ineffective. Lawmakers need to hear—loud and clear—that Americans don’t support government-mandated internet censorship. Not for copyright enforcement. Not for anything.”

Similar to thirteen years ago, EFF has set up a dedicated page inviting members of the public to reach out to their representative in Congress, to share any concerns they may have.

EFF’s action page

eff take action

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

02:00 PM

Take-Two DMCAs Video Of GTA5 Mod To For GTA6 Map Content [Techdirt]

Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, have been telling us who they are for years. And who they are, for our purposes, amounts to a game developer that both absolutely hates any leaked information about its games and one that has been perfectly willing to go to war with its own modding community. After suffering an intrusion by bad actors in 2022, a bunch of information and footage from the in-development Grand Theft Auto 6 leaked onto the internet. That leak has been bookended by Rockstar and Take-Two engaging in all kinds of DMCA takedowns for game mods and even saved game files for Grand Theft Auto titles and other franchises.

What do these two topics have in common? Well, they came together recently when Take-Two issued a takedown notice on YouTube videos in which one modder shows off his custom map that seeks to input as much of the map for GTA6 that could be derived from the leaks into GTA5.

Modder ‘Dark Space’ had created a free-to-download GTA 5 map using leaked coordinate data and official trailer shots of GTA 6. He also uploaded gameplay footage of the mod to his YouTube channel. In January, the mod gained widespread attention as GTA fans, eager for a glimpse of the upcoming game, explored this fan-made recreation ahead of GTA 6’s official launch.

However, Dark Space confirmed that he recently received a take down notice from YouTube. 

We, and Dark Space, can but speculate as to the motivation behind the takedown. Perhaps Take-Two considers the details in the map to be spoilers of sorts, though it would seem the widely available leaked information about the forthcoming game and the trailers did the spoiling first. Perhaps it considers the map construction to be proprietary information, covered by copyright, and acted upon it. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of lawyers lawyering.

But what isn’t up for debate is that the modding community continues to feel slighted by the company, while any sane understanding of the effects of these mods is one that is beneficial to Take-Two.

He also criticised Take-Two’s handling of modders, stating, “When will these companies learn to stop attacking their own feet? It’s thanks to the community of players and modders that these companies can stand.”

He claimed that the company has a history of hiring private investigators and taking legal action against them, rather than supporting their work. He pointed to past instances where Take-Two had sent private investigators to modders’ homes, filed lawsuits, and banned creators from making GTA-related content.

As an example, he cited the original GTA Trilogy on PC, where mods were essential for fixing game-breaking bugs and making the titles playable. He argued that instead of appreciating these contributions, Take-Two cracked down on modders instead of acknowledging their efforts.

It should go without saying that importing the game map, as best as can be recreated by a modder, into an older game does not replace the new game. In fact, the attention this mod and those like it have received are a symptom of the thirst the public has for the new game. The company could have used all of this as a free marketing tool for GTA6, if it wanted to. It’s not even that hard.

“Folks, go look at the map if you want. We know you’re hungry to play this game and we’re equally hungry for you to do so. This doesn’t reflect the entirety of the new map, the new game, or the experience you’ll have playing it, but whet your appetites because GTA6 is going to be great.”

It would have been that easy. But instead, the company has decided to once more slight the modding community that helps drive ongoing interest in Take-Two’s new and existing titles. Attacking, as Dark Space put it, their own feet.

Pluralistic: What's wrong with tariffs (02 Apr 2025) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links



The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, taken in the late 18th century, overlooking a stretch Lebanon. It has been emblazoned with the 1970s-era logo for the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before it stands a figure taken from an early 1900s illustrated bible, depicting a Hebrew priest making an offering to the golden calf at the foot of Mt Sinai. The priest's head has been replaced with the head of Milton Friedman. The calf has been adorned with a golden top-hat and a radiating halo of white light.

What's wrong with tariffs (permalink)

It's not that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same…obviously. But for decades – since Clinton – the Dems have sided with neoliberal economics, just like their Republican counterparts, so the major differences between the two related to overt discrimination, to the exclusion of the economic policies that immiserated working people, with the worst effects landing on racial minorities, women, and gender minorities.

So the Dems stood against discrimination in mortgage lending – but not for the minimum wage that would have lifted the lowest paid workers out of poverty so the could afford a mortgage. They stood for abortion rights, but against Medicare For All, which meant all women had the right to an abortion, but the poorest women couldn't afford one. And of course, in a country where racial and gender discrimination were still the order of the day, the poorest and most vulnerable Americans were racialized, women, disabled, and/or queer.

The Dems' embrace of Reaganomics meant that working people of all types experienced steady decline over 40 years: stagnating wages, economic precarity, increased indebtedness, and rising prices for health care, education, and housing. When Trump figured out that he could campaign on these issues, Dems had no response. Trump's "Make America Great Again" was meant to appeal to a time when working Americans were – on average, depending on their whiteness, maleness and straightness – better housed, better paid, and better cared for.

Of course, those benefits were unevenly felt: America was slow to extend the New Deal to racial minorities, women, disabled people, and other disfavored groups. Trump's genius was to marry white supremacy to economic grievance, tricking white workers into blaming their decline on women, brown and Black people, and queers – and not on the billionaires who had grown so much richer even as workers got poorer.

But Trump couldn't have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment's total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi's "We're capitalists and that's the way it is" to Hillary Clinton's catastrophic campaign slogan, "America is already great," the Dems' answer to workers' fear and anger was, "You are wrong, everything is fine." Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to "foam the runways" for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers' homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you "America is already great":

https://www.npr.org/2014/05/25/315276441/its-geithner-vs-warren-in-battle-of-the-bailout

Racial and gender justice matter, of course, but when they're pursued without considering economic justice, they're dead ends. The point of racial and gender justice can't merely be firing half of the 150 straight white men who control 99% of the country's capital and replacing them with 75 assorted women, queers and people of color. The worst-treated workers in America are also its most discriminated-against workers, so the best way to help women, racialized people, and other disfavored minorities is to help workers: protect unions, raise the minimum wage, defend tenants, cancel student debt, and give everyone healthcare. In the same way that a special tax on incomes over $1m will disproportionately affect straight white men, an increase in the minimum wage will disproportionately benefit women and people of color – as well as the majority of straight white men who are also getting fucked over by people with $1m salaries.

Since the Clinton years, Democrats have been trying to figure out how to defend economic policies that help rich people while still somehow being the party of social justice. This has produced a kind of grotesque, Sheryl Sandberg "Lean In" liberalism, which stood for the rights of women who were also corporate executives. It's not that these women aren't treated worse than their male counterparts – misogyny is alive and well in the boardroom. But the number of women who experience boardroom discrimination is tiny, because the number of women in the boardroom is also tiny.

The right saw an opportunity and seized it. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, they created "mirror world" versions of social justice issues, warped reflections of the leftist positions that had been abandoned by a progressive coalition led by liberals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

In right wing, conspiratorial hands, rage at wage stagnation and lack of parental leave turned into reactionary demands for an economy in which women would be full-time homemakers while their husbands recovered their roles as breadwinners. The 1999 Battle of Seattle saw mass protests over the WTO and a free trade agenda that would let capital chase low wages and weak environmental and worker safety policies around the world. But Clinton went ahead and signed more free trade agreements, which were also pursued by Obama. So the right filled the vacuum with a mirror-world version of the Battle of Seattle's rage at billionaires, transforming the anti-free trade agenda into racism, xenophobia, and Cold War 2.0 sinophobia.

It's a cheap trick, but Dems keep falling for it. When the right declares itself to be against something, Dems can be relied upon to be in favor it, no matter how reactionary, anti-worker and authoritarian "it" is. During Trump 1.0, Dems lit James Comey votive candles and passionately defended the "intelligence community," a community that gave us CIA dirty wars and FBI COINTELPRO. Anthropologists call this "schizmogenesis" – when a group defines itself by valuing whatever its rivals deplore, and vice versa:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

You can see schizmogenesis playing out right now, as "progressives" make Signalgate scandal into a fight over poor operational security (planning a war crime using a commercial app) and not a fight over war crimes themselves.

Signalgate will be out of the headlines in a matter of days, though – unlike tariffs, which will continue to make global headlines throughout the Trump presidency, as Trump continues his "mad king" policy of recklessly and chaotically erecting trade barriers that are certain to make supply chains more brittle and raise prices.

For the most part, the progressive discussion of Trump's tariffs takes the position that tariffs are always a terrible idea – in other words, that Clinton and Obama had the right idea when they created free trade agreements with countries around the world, and Trump is vandalizing an engine of American and global prosperity out of economic ignorance.

Economists support this analysis. But in a new, well-argued editorial in The Sling, University of Utah economists Mark Glick and Gabriel Lozada present a more nuanced version of the tariff debate, one that dodges the trap of neoliberal economics and schizmogenesis:

https://www.thesling.org/the-failed-assumptions-of-free-trade/

Rejecting tariffs is practically an article of religious faith among economists. As the NYT put it in their reporting of the 2025 meeting of the American Economic Association, "free trade is perhaps the closest thing to a universally held value among economists":

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/economy/economists-politics-trump.html

Every Econ 101 class has a unit on David Ricardo's "theory of comparative advantage," which argues that different countries have different capacities and specialties, and that free trade allows these advantages to be shared to the benefit of everyone, making trade a "positive expectation" game. The corollary is that tariffs make everyone worse off.

As Glick and Lozada write, the logic of this argument is unassailable, provided you accept its bedrock assumptions as true – and that's where the problem lies.

Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or – incredibly – known to be wrong. As Milton Friedman famously wrote:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

It's actually worse than it seems, because economics, as a field, has been violently allergic to empirically testing its assumptions, so it doesn't even know when it is operating on the basis of one of Friedman's "wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality." This is what Ely Devons meant when he said, "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

What are the assumptions that underpin the orthodox view of free trade, then? As Glick and Lozada write, the case against all tariffs depends on five assumptions, all of which fail empirical investigation.

I. Full employment

The standard model of free trade assumes full employment – "when workers are displaced by imports, they can easily become re-employed at the same wages." This is the crux of the "social surplus" that free trade theoretically produces. This assumption doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny. After the US dropped its tariffs, it experienced a 74% decline in manufacturing jobs – the best-paid jobs for non-college-educated men. Those workers didn't find equivalent employment – indeed, in many cases, the found no employment at all. From 2001-18, the US lost 1.132m manufacturing jobs to China, and gained 0.176m jobs manufacturing goods for export to China.

II. No externalities

The employment losses from free trade are not evenly distributed – they are geographically concentrated, and the greatest concentrations are in regions that flipped from Democratic strongholds to Trumpish heartlands over the decades since the US dropped its tariffs. The losses to these regions aren't limited to the directly affected manufacturing jobs, but all the other economic activity those jobs supported. The people who sold groceries, cars, and furniture to factory workers also lost their jobs. When young people abandoned the cratering regional economy, that devastated education and other services catering to families.

III. Comparative advantage leads to long-term growth and development

The theory of comparative advantage says that the world is better off when each country gets to do the thing it's best at. What are poor countries best at? Being poor: having a cheap labor force and weak rule of law to protect workers' health and the environment.

Without exception, the poor countries that grew richer did so in the presence of tariffs: "free trade is not a development strategy, it is a static policy that can impede development":

https://2024.sci-hub.se/1864/6d3f610c51446f057a4054080c70ab0e/chang2003.pdf#navpanes=0&view=FitH

IV. Floating currencies keep trade balanced

In theory, adjustments in the currency markets will rebalance imports and exports – countries whose currency declines will have to switch to domestic production, because goods from abroad will become costly. That's not what happened. Instead, foreigners have invested the US dollars they got from selling things to Americans into US securities and real estate, "which does not increase US productivity because it generates no new capital formation (at least directly)."

V. The US provides compensation for trade-related job-losses

While other countries with robust social safety nets offered retraining, income support, and other programs to cushion the blow of trade-related job-losses, the US – with the worst social safety net in the rich world – offered "woefully inadequate" supports to dislocated workers:

https://www.piie.com/bookstore/job-loss-imports-measuring-costs

Now, just because some tariffs are beneficial, it doesn't follow that all tariffs are beneficial. When the "Asian Tiger" countries were undergoing rapid industrialization and lifting billions of people out of poverty, they did so with tariffs – but also with extensive industrial policy and direct investment in critical state industries (Biden was the first president in generations to pursue industrial policy, albeit a modest and small one, which Trump nevertheless dismantled).

Trump is doing mirror-world tariffs: tariffs without industrial policy, tariffs without social safety nets, tariffs without retraining, tariffs without any strategic underpinning. These tariffs will crash the US economy and will create calamitous effects around the world:

https://archive.is/JvRF9

But the fact that Trump's tariffs are terrible doesn't mean tariffs themselves are always and forever bad. Resist the schizmogenic urge to say, "Trump likes tariffs, so I hate them." Not all tariffs are created equal, and tariffs can be a useful tool that benefits working people.

And also: the fact that tariffs can be useful doesn't imply that only tariffs are useful. The digital age – in which US-based multinational firms rely on digital technology to loot the economies of America's trading partners – offers countries facing US tariffs a powerful retaliatory tactic that has never before been seen on this planet. America's (former) trading partners can retaliate against US tariffs by abolishing the legal measures they have instituted to protect the products of US companies from reverse-engineering and modification. Countries facing US tariffs can welcome US imports – of printers, Teslas, iPhones, games consoles, insulin pumps, ventilators and tractors – but then legalize jailbreaking these devices:

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

That would deprive the largest US companies of their recurring revenue streams – from service, consumables, software, payment processing, etc – creating huge savings for consumers all over the world, and huge profits for the non-US companies that make these jailbreaking tools, and the small businesses that supply them. For example, your country could become the world's leading exporter of iPhone jailbreaking tools, and the world's powerhouse for alternative iPhone stores that charge 1-2% commissions on payments, as opposed to the 30% Apple takes out of every dollar (euro, pound, peso) that iPhone owners spend within their apps. This would tempt in all the biggest app companies in the world – from Patreon to Tinder, Fornite to the New York Times – who could offer their products at a discount and still make more money than they make on Apple's App Store.

But that's just one market this enables: the actual business of iPhone jailbreaking would likely work much like the market for phone unlocking more broadly: thousands of small and medium-sized businesses like dry-cleaners and convenience stores where you can bring your phone and pay a few dollars to have it unlocked and set up with a new app store where all the apps are the same – but everything is 20% cheaper.

This is a development opportunity without parallel. US tech monopolists worked with the US trade representative to rig markets around the world, allowing tech giants to siphon away vast fortunes from America's trading partners. These rich deposits of wealth are just sitting there, begging for some country to sink a shaft into them and pump them dry, secure in the knowledge that Trump has ejected from the global system of free trade and they have nothing to lose.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A Wayback Machine banner.

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Shadow Cities: the untold lives of squatters https://memex.craphound.com/2005/04/03/shadow-cities-the-untold-lives-of-squatters/

#20yrsago Tube escalators to get video ads https://web.archive.org/web/20050406225247/http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/03/business/ad04.html

#5yrsago Bug bounty programs as catch-and-kills https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#features-not-bugs

#5yrsago Wikipedia vs patent troll https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#worldlogic

#5yrsago Amazon's leaked anti-worker smear plan https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/03/socially-useless-parasite/#christian-smalls


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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)

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/


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

ISSN: 3066-764X

11:00 AM

10:00 AM

My SNA Visible Minorities column 65: “Letter from Canada”, where a country weirdly threatened by its southern neighbor, including racist/secessionist merchandise from FBI Director Kash Patel, is somehow taking it all in stride (April 1, 2025, and it’s not an April Fools’ article) [debito.org]

Excerpt: According to the CBC, support for Canada becoming part of the US is highest in Alberta, at 15 percent surveyed, as opposed to nine percent nationwide. That’s why MAGAts target Alberta for annexation.  They’ve worked with Canadian separatists for quite some time, with regular networking and megaphoning on social media.  But they’ve also been involved in secession rehearsals. In 2022, a monthlong Canadian “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting Covid mandates set up blockades across Canada and obnoxiously occupied the center of Ottawa. The Convoy turned out to be more than half funded by American donors.  The Canadian government also seized an arsenal near the an Alberta-Montana border crossing that was set up by an Albertan militia “supportive of a war with police.” But now it’s gone beyond funding into actively fomenting. Shortly after I arrived in Canada, I found in my Twitter feed advertisements for an online store called “Based Apparel” (in Canada, https://thebasedco.com) offering T-shirts and other xenophobic merch. This includes an American flag in the shape of Alberta entitled “Alberta, USA.”  MCGA/MAGA caps with the Canadian maple leaf overlaid with the American flag.  A US flag with a maple leaf in the blue field next to a slogan of “US-EH” (a pun on “USA” with the stereotypical Canadian “eh” sentence ending).  Coffee cups saying “Singh Horton’s” instead of “Tim Horton’s,” implying they’re no longer a Canadian institution because Sikhs run franchises. Or if that’s not racist enough, you can get shirts with parody Community Chest “Go Directly to Jail” Monopoly game cards showing a cop dragging a Sikh saying, “Do not pass go, do not collect pension.”  A meme from the “Oregon Trail” video game shows a covered wagon with the caption, “You have died of diversity” (as opposed to “dysentery”).  Or you can just settle for a less subtle T-shirt depicting an American eagle f**king a Canada goose. (Screen captures of all merchandise in the blog entry.) Who owns Based Apparel?  Kash Patel, the current Director of the FBI.  An official at the highest levels of American government, in charge of federal police investigations, is directly profiting from sowing secession in another country.

Otherwise Objectionable: When Congress Ridiculously Tried Merging Censorship With Freedom [Techdirt]

Moral panics come and go, but stupid legislation is forever. At least until the Supreme Court steps in. This week on Otherwise Objectionable, my podcast series about Section 230, we talk about how the moral panic over “porn” online, including Senator James Exon’s infamous blue binder of internet porn, caused the Senate to pass a horrifying censorship bill that would have required the internet be as clean as Sesame Street.

Episode 4: The Solution

Enter Representatives Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, who recognized that Exon’s approach wasn’t just unconstitutional — it fundamentally misunderstood how the internet worked. Instead of trying to turn every website into PBS Kids, they proposed something radical: trust users to make their own choices about what content they wanted to see, and protect the platforms that gave users those tools.

Their proposal, which would become Section 230, was based on a simple premise: the internet would work better if we empowered users rather than censors. Want to keep your kids away from adult content? Great — here are tools to do that. Want to create a family-friendly platform? Fantastic — you won’t get sued for trying. Want to build a more open platform? Also fine — you won’t get sued for that either.

This approach was such obvious common sense that it sailed through the House with overwhelming bipartisan support. But then congressional efficiency (or perhaps laziness) kicked in. Rather than reconcile the House and Senate approaches, leadership simply merged the bills together. The result? Section 230, a law designed to promote free speech and user choice, became part of the Communications Decency Act, a law designed to censor the internet into bland submission.

The supreme irony is that when the Supreme Court inevitably struck down most of the CDA as unconstitutional, Section 230 was the only part that survived. The provision that was never meant to be part of the censorship bill turned out to be its only lasting legacy. As Congress once again rushes to “protect the children” through ham-handed internet regulation, it’s worth remembering how the last moral panic resulted in terrible unconstitutional nonsense, that accidentally got merged with the very protection that makes a free and open internet possible.

08:00 AM

Trump’s Buddies At Andreessen Horowitz Want To Help Buy TikTok, Turn It Into A Right Wing Safe Space [Techdirt]

We’ve noted more times than I can’t count that the push to ban TikTok was never really about protecting American privacy. If that were true, we would pass a real privacy law and craft serious penalties for companies and executives that play fast and loose with sensitive American data.

It was never really about propaganda. If that were true, we’d take aim at the extremely well funded authoritarian propaganda machine and engage in content moderation of race-baiting political propaganda that’s filling the brains of young American men with pudding and hate.

Banning TikTok was never really about national security. If that were true, we wouldn’t be dismantling our cybersecurity regulators, hosting sensitive military chats over Signal with journalists, voting to cement utterly incompetent knobs in unaccountable roles across military intelligence, and letting run-amok data brokers sell personal info to global governments (including our own).

The push to Facebook was about ego, money, and information control. Ego; Trump got mad at TikTok videos making fun of his small crowd sizes. Money: Facebook worked tirelessly to spread bogus moral panics about TikTok in order to kill off a competitor they couldn’t out-innovate. Control: the GOP wants to own TikTok so they can ensure it’s friendly to an essential cornerstone of party power — their propaganda.

Enter the fine folks at (Trump friendly) Andreessen Horowitz, who are emerging as a late-stage bidder for a big chunk of whatever winds up being left of TikTok alongside (Trump friendly) Oracle:

“US venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz is in talks to invest in social media platform TikTok as part of an effort led by Donald Trump to wrest control of the popular video app from its Chinese owners. The venture capital group, whose co-founder Marc Andreessen is a vocal supporter of the US president, is in talks to add new outside investment that will buy out TikTok’s Chinese investors, as part of a bid led by Oracle and other American investors to carve it out of its parent company ByteDance.”

Thanks to America’s silly and performative ban, ByteDance has until April 5 to sell TikTok to U.S. controlled companies. There’s still no word on what a finalized deal will look like, and ByteDance has had strong reservations in including the company’s engagement algorithms as part of any deal.

We’ve kind of come full circle here. If you recall, Trump’s big plan during his first term was to transfer ownership of TikTok to right wing-friendly companies Oracle and Walmart. That plan ultimately fell apart, and Trump has subsequently waffled back and forth on what to do, in part because he was trying to appease right wing billionaire donor and ByteDance investor Jeffrey Yass.

Marc Andreessen, who has become increasingly incoherent as he prostrates himself and his empire to King Dingus, clearly wants TikTok ad money, but he also wants information control. Andreessen is already on the board of Meta and one of the investors in Elon’s takeover of Twitter. If he grabs a large stake in TikTok, an overt authoritarian will have meaningful power over the country’s three biggest social media platforms. That is, you know, bad for a long list of reasons that should be obvious.

Other suitors may not be much better. As I was writing this, news emerged that Jeff Bezos (the guy currently making the Washington Post more friendly to authoritarian ideology and hostile to anyone who disagrees) is also putting in a bid for Amazon to acquire TikTok. If his bumbling at WAPO is any indication, his ownership of TikTok wouldn’t be much better for free expression.

Modern U.S. authoritarians don’t want major popular tech platforms engaging in content moderation of right wing propaganda and disinformation, a cornerstone of Trump power (since their actual policies, like letting shitty corporations do whatever they want, dismantling civil and labor rights, and giving billionaires more tax cuts, are broadly unpopular amongst the plebs).

But the TikTok ban really can’t be separated by the broader GOP quest to dominate the entirety of modern media. You might recall how the GOP spent years successfully bullying tech companies into going soft on race-baiting right wing propaganda, often under the pretense they were doing serious adult business on antitrust reform or trying to combat (completely bogus) “censorship” of Conservative ideologies.

There was, if you recall, a whole three year news cycle where major news outlets propped up the myth that this wasn’t about control, propaganda, and forcing unpopular right wing policies down everybody’s throat, it was about reining in corporate power and “holding big tech accountable.” These GOP efforts were, time and time again, portrayed in the press as serious, adult, good faith policymaking.

A few years later and everything is completely fucked, regulators are either being stripped for parts or being used to harass companies for not being racist enough, all our biggest tech companies have folded on moderating right wing racism, right wing propaganda is worse than ever, journalism is dying, civil rights and free speech face existential threats, and federal corporate oversight is effectively dead.

Really a great job on all fronts, from policymakers to U.S. journalism. Everybody really nailed it.

TikTok always heavily trafficked in a lot of right wing engagement bait because, as an amoral algorithmic engagement machine, they like to shovel more of the stuff you already like your direction. But at the same time, I personally found I was more likely to find left wing content on TikTok than I would on, say, Facebook’s reels. Ultimately, TikTok has veered even harder right as it tried to appease U.S. authoritarians.

However right wing friendly you think TikTok is now, it will be notably worse under Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, and far more likely to take action against content and creators Trumpism doesn’t like. All in service to authoritarian control, and chasing where the real money is in America media right now: telling young angry men all of their worst lizard-brained impulses are correct.

Kanji of the Day: 状 [Kanji of the Day]

✍7

小5

status quo, conditions, circumstances, form, appearance

ジョウ

状況   (じょうきょう)   —   state of affairs
状態   (じょうたい)   —   state
現状   (げんじょう)   —   present condition
症状   (しょうじょう)   —   symptoms
年賀状   (ねんがじょう)   —   New Year's card
起訴状   (きそじょう)   —   indictment
感謝状   (かんしゃじょう)   —   thank-you letter
形状   (けいじょう)   —   shape
病状   (びょうじょう)   —   patient's condition
経済状況   (けいざいじょうきょう)   —   economic conditions

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 酔 [Kanji of the Day]

✍11

中学

drunk, feel sick, poisoned, elated, spellbound

スイ

よ.う よ.い よ

酔い   (えい)   —   drunkenness
麻酔   (ますい)   —   anaesthesia
泥酔   (でいすい)   —   being dead drunk
酔う   (えう)   —   to get drunk
全身麻酔   (ぜんしんますい)   —   general anesthesia
二日酔い   (ふつかよい)   —   hangover
麻酔薬   (ますいやく)   —   anesthetic
酔っ払い   (よっぱらい)   —   drunkard
ほろ酔い   (ほろよい)   —   slight intoxication
酔っぱらい   (よっぱらい)   —   drunkard

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

230 Protects Users, Not Big Tech [Techdirt]

Once again, several Senators appear poised to gut one of the most important laws protecting internet users – Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230)

Don’t be fooled – many of Section 230’s detractors claim that this critical law only protects big tech. The reality is that Section 230 provides limited protection for all platforms, though the biggest beneficiaries are small platforms and users. Why else would some of the biggest platforms be willing to endorse a bill that guts the law? In fact, repealing Section 230 would only cement the status of Big Tech monopolies.

As EFF has said for years, Section 230 is essential to protecting individuals’ ability to speak, organize, and create online. 

Congress knew exactly what Section 230 would do – that it would lay the groundwork for speech of all kinds across the internet, on websites both small and large. And that’s exactly what has happened.  

Section 230 isn’t in conflict with American values. It upholds them in the digital world. People are able to find and create their own communities, and moderate them as they see fit. People and companies are responsible for their own speech, but (with narrow exceptions) not the speech of others. 

The law is not a shield for Big Tech. Critically, the law benefits the millions of users who don’t have the resources to build and host their own blogs, email services, or social media sites, and instead rely on services to host that speech. Section 230 also benefits thousands of small online services that host speech. Those people are being shut out as the bill sponsors pursue a dangerously misguided policy.  

If Big Tech is at the table in any future discussion for what rules should govern internet speech, EFF has no confidence that the result will protect and benefit internet users, as Section 230 does currently. If Congress is serious about rewriting the internet’s speech rules, it must spend time listening to the small services and everyday users who would be harmed should they repeal Section 230.  

Section 230 Protects Everyday Internet Users 

There’s another glaring omission in the arguments to end Section 230: how central the law is to ensuring that every person can speak online, and that Congress or the Administration does not get to define what speech is “good” and “bad”.   

Let’s start with the text of Section 230. Importantly, the law protects both online services and users. It says that “no provider or user shall be treated as the publisher” of content created by another. That’s in clear agreement with most Americans’ belief that people should be held responsible for their own speech—not that of others.   

Section 230 protects individual bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and social media users who have ever reshared or retweeted another person’s content online. Section 230 also protects individual moderators who might delete or otherwise curate others’ online content, along with anyone who provides web hosting services

As EFF has explained, online speech is frequently targeted with meritless lawsuits. Big Tech can afford to fight these lawsuits without Section 230. Everyday internet users, community forums, and small businesses cannot. Engine has estimated that without Section 230, many startups and small services would be inundated with costly litigation that could drive them offline. Even entirely meritless lawsuits cost thousands of dollars to fight, and often tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Deleting Section 230 Will Create A Field Day For The Internet’s Worst Users  

Section 230’s detractors say that too many websites and apps have “refused” to go after “predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies,” and imagine that removing Section 230 will somehow force these services to better moderate user-generated content on their sites.  

These arguments fundamentally misunderstand Section 230. The law lets platforms decide, largely for themselves, what kind of speech they want to host, and to remove speech that doesn’t fit their own standards without penalty. 

 If lawmakers are legitimately motivated to help online services root out unlawful activity and terrible content appearing online, the last thing they should do is eliminate Section 230. The current law strongly incentivizes websites and apps, both large and small, to kick off their worst-behaving users, to remove offensive content, and in cases of illegal behavior, work with law enforcement to hold those users responsible. 

If Congress deletes Section 230, the pre-digital legal rules around distributing content would kick in. That law strongly discourages services from moderating or even knowing about user-generated content. This is because the more a service moderates user content, the more likely it is to be held liable for that content. Under that legal regime, online services will have a huge incentive to just not moderate and not look for bad behavior. This would result in the exact opposite of their goal of protecting children and adults from harmful content online.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Training AI Using ‘Pirated’ Content Can Be Fair Use, Law Professors Argue [TorrentFreak]

fair pirateIn the race to build the most capable LLMs, several tech companies have sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners.

Many of those companies are now being sued for alleged copyright infringement. The list includes Meta, which faces a class action lawsuit filed by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, among others.

This case has a clear piracy angle, as Meta used BitTorrent to download archives of pirated books to use as training material. Notably, the authors argue that, in addition to copying pirated books from Anna’s Archive and Z-Library, in the same process Meta also uploaded pirated books to third parties.

Last month, both parties filed motions for summary judgment. Meta’s motion relied heavily on a fair use defense. Meanwhile, the authors argued that the downloading of millions of books cannot be classified as fair use, since the source of the books is clearly copyright infringing.

“The uncontroversial implication is that for fair use to apply, the work that was copied must have been lawfully acquired in the first place,” the authors wrote.

IP Professors Back Meta’s Fair Use Argument

This week, a group of IP Law Professors submitted a “friend of the court” or amicus brief, backing Meta’s fair use defense. The professors, including scholars from Harvard, Emory, Boston University, and Santa Clara University, have different views on the impact of AI but are united in their copyright stance.

The Profs

profs

The brief stresses that Meta’s alleged use of pirated books as training data can be considered fair use. The source of the training data is not determinative, as long as it’s used to create a new and transformative product, they argue.

“The case law, including binding circuit precedent, holds that internal copying, made in the course of creating new knowledge, is a transformative use that is heavily favored by fair use doctrine,” the professors write.

Transformative Use: Piracy or Not

The professors’ argument is centered around the concept of “transformative use.” They note that using books outside their original ‘reading’ purpose to create an AI model, transforms the purpose of the use. This internal copying, they argue, falls into a category courts have consistently recognized as fair use, also known as “non-expressive use”.

The amicus brief cites several cases to back up their line of reasoning. This includes the Perfect 10 v. Amazon lawsuit, where the Ninth Circuit found that it was fair use when Google created thumbnails using images copied from unauthorized “pirate” sites, because the resulting image search tool was transformative.

Pirate thumbnails

perfect 10 amazon

The authors cited conflicting cases, but the professors note that cases where fair use was denied typically involved copyright infringement related to personal consumption, rather than use of content to create something new.

The brief distinguishes this case from those cited by the plaintiffs, which involved unauthorized copying for direct consumptive use (e.g., downloading for personal enjoyment). In contrast, Meta’s internal copies were allegedly not perceived by humans but used to build a new tool.

“Fair use, like copyright as a whole, ‘is not a privilege reserved for the well behaved’,” the brief notes. “Fair use doctrine should focus on the consequences of a ruling for knowledge and expression. Other considerations should be left for other legal regimes.”

The professors’ comments appear to relate to Meta’s internal use of the books, as training material for LLMs. It’s worth noting, however, that the authors also accuse Meta of uploading these books to other file-sharers while obtaining their own copies.

The amicus brief doesn’t address this issue directly, but previous back-and-forths in court showed that uploading is likely to be a central point of contention as the case moves forward.

‘Copyright Infringement Is Not the Answer’

The amicus brief is mostly targeted at the potential use of books as training input, which Meta and other companies publicly acknowledged. Whether this is fair use is a key question that this and other courts have to decide.

Other countries, including Japan, have reportedly crafted exceptions in their law to allow tech companies to train LLMs on copyrighted material, without permission.

The U.S. has no such exceptions, but the professors urge the court to consider fair use. As the VCR and other innovations showed, copyright shouldn’t stand in the way of new tools and developing technologies.

“Copyright owners have often predicted that new technologies, from photocopying to home VCRs to the internet, would create disasters for copyright owners and that fair use needed to be shrunk to protect them; instead, new technologies have routinely created
new markets,” they write.

“Whatever the risks of AI—and there may be many—condemning the act of creating large-scale training datasets as copyright infringement is not the answer.”

A copy of the proposed Amicus Curiae brief, which was granted by the court yesterday, is available here (pdf)

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

04:00 AM

But His Gmail: National Security Advisor Waltz’s Private Email Hypocrisy [Techdirt]

Remember Mike Waltz? The National Security Advisor who’s spent the last few weeks demonstrating his profound inability to handle basic security? First, there was the illegal Signal chat where he accidentally added a journalist while discussing potential war crimes. Then we learned about his completely exposed Venmo contacts and leaked passwords. And now, in a twist that would be too on-the-nose for fiction, it turns out the same official who previously demanded DOJ action over private email use… has been conducting government business through Gmail.

Ah, but her emails.

All this seems less than great for the top “security” official in the administration.

Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.

The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.

This is, needless to say, pretty fucking bad. First, there’s the basic security incompetence: the National Security Advisor conducting sensitive government business through a commercial email service. Even if Gmail has robust security, it’s completely inappropriate for handling government communications — giving Google potential access to sensitive national security discussions that should never leave secured government systems.

But more concerning is what this reveals about Waltz’s (lack of) judgment. As National Security Advisor, he’s one of the highest-value targets for foreign intelligence services. Every personal account, every commercial service he uses represents another potential vulnerability for adversaries to exploit. And given his demonstrated pattern of security failures — from exposed Venmo contacts to leaked passwords — it’s clear he’s making their job easier.

The National Security Council’s response is a masterclass in missing the point (or, more accurately, misdirecting from the point). When pressed about “sensitive military matters” being discussed over Gmail, their spokesperson offered this gem:

Hughes said NSC staff have guidance about using “only secure platforms for classified information.”

This attempt at reassurance actually reveals the depth of the problem. The distinction isn’t just between classified and unclassified information — it’s about maintaining basic operational security for all sensitive government communications.

And as if to underscore how little they grasp this, we learned from a WSJ article that Waltz’s infamous Signal chat wasn’t a one-off mistake.

Two U.S. officials also said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations

The scale of security failures here should be absolutely disqualifying for any administration official, let alone America’s top national security advisor. But what makes this situation particularly galling is Waltz’s own history of grandstanding about private email use. Here he is in a tweet that remains up from less than two years ago:

Yes, that’s the same Mike Waltz demanding DOJ action over private email use by a previous National Security Advisor. The hypocrisy would be merely annoying if the stakes weren’t so high. But this isn’t just about scoring political points — it’s about the fundamental security of our nation’s most sensitive communications.

By Waltz’s own standard, articulated in that still-visible tweet, the DOJ should be investigating his wanton use of private commercial messaging services. But more importantly, someone needs to ask: if this is how carelessly our National Security Advisor handles basic operational security, what other vulnerabilities has he created that we don’t yet know about?

ICE Is Using Pure Bullshit To Turn People Into Venezuelan Gang Members To Keep Hitting Its Daily Arrest Quota [Techdirt]

Donald Trump has decided he can’t do immigration enforcement without doing war crimes. That’s where we’re at now as a country: under the thumb of someone exercising executive war powers to remove anyone looking faintly Mexican from the country under the extremely dubious theory that the people rounded up by ICE are all members of foreign gangs.

Of course, it’s not limited to warriors or wars. The Trump Administration is now just disappearing people for exercising their First Amendment rights. But, in this case, the outlandish claim is that everyone who was arrested and flown (in violation of a federal injunction!) to El Salvador to rot in that country’s prisons is a member of gangs like MS-13 and… um… Tren de Aragua.

Oh wait. You haven’t heard of Tren de Aragua, a.k.a. TdA? Don’t blame your service provider and/or your social media feeds. The gang Trump (sort of) declared “war” on is something new. It’s not MS-13. Apparently, it’s the new “most dangerous thing ever,” even if there’s nothing that demonstrates TdA is making the sort of inroads into America that MS-13 has.

But Trump has always been able to round up rubes to help with the duping. That’s where New York City mayor Eric Adams — a recent recipient of Trump largesse — comes into play, as Max Rivlin-Nadler reports for Hell Gate.

The Trump administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 200 Venezuelans to a massive prison in El Salvador without any due process. How has the president justified using a 227-year-old law that has only been wielded during actual wars to override the Constitution? He claims these men are members of the gang “Tren de Aragua.”

[…]

[T]he NYPD and Mayor Eric Adams […] spent much of 2024 pushing a narrative that New York, which is home to thousands of recently-arrived Venezuelan migrants, is somehow being inundated with members of a small, relatively new regional gang that is named for the Tocorón prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. 

[…]

“We believe they are participating in illegal behavior, and they’re the source of some of the increases in robberies and pattern robberies, particularly on scooters. And we continue to monitor the situation, but it is alarming,” Adams said. He added that Tren de Aragua was “a very dangerous gang,” and that he had sent his NYPD deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism to Colombia to gather information. 

Scooter robberies? Vague “illegal behavior?” Well, no wonder Trump deployed his war powers to rid this country of a threat incapable of being coherently defined by the NYC mayor in the president’s back pocket.

Supposedly the easiest way to identify members of a gang no one had really ever heard of before Trump started sending planeloads of non-white people to prisons in El Salvador is by their tattoos. After all, MS-13 is notorious for its inking and its members’ inability to blend into any society that isn’t currently bathing itself in bathtub meth money.

In fact, ICE has its own guide [PDF] for identifying TdA members by their tattoos. But as American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out on Bluesky, the guidelines are somewhat even worse and more lax than the bullshit regular cops use to place people in (domestic) gang databases.

This nomination system uses points. Eight points is all it takes to get you labeled as someone fast-tracked for an indefinite prison sentence in a nation you weren’t even born in. A lot of this relies on tattoos. Four points for gang tattoos. Four points for any tattoo an ICE officer believes is a gang tattoo. Six points for texting anyone ICE thinks is a TdA member and 3 points for sending funds (via Cash app or other services) to anyone whose tattoos are presumed to be TdA-related.

Even if someone fails to hit the 8-point threshold for immediate expulsion to El Salvador (and, remember, we’re dealing with alleged Venezuelan gang members here), points can be added by any ICE officer or supervisor willing to put their thumb on the scale.

Aliens scoring 6 or 7 points may be validated as members of TDA; you should consult with a supervisor and OPLA, reviewing the totality of the facts, before making that determination; if you determine an alien should not be validated at this time as a member of TDA, when available, you should initiate removal proceedings under the INA.

This ICE guidance — obtained by the ACLU — relies heavily on identifying TdA members by their tattoos. But there’s a massive logical flaw here: unlike MS-13, TdA doesn’t treat tattoos as a basis for entry or a sign of loyalty. ICE already knows this. So does the DHS.

[I]nternal U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI documents obtained by USA TODAY reveal federal authorities for years have questioned the effectiveness of using tattoos to identify members of Tren de Aragua, also known as TdA.

Gang Unit collections determined that the Chicago Bulls attire, clocks, and rose tattoos are typically related to the Venezuelan culture and not a definite (indicator) of being a member or associate of the (TdA),” reads a 2023 “Situational Awareness” bulletin on the criminal gang written by the U.S. Custom and Border Protection’s El Paso Sector Intelligence Unit.

In another DHS document, titled “ICE Intel Leads,” a former Venezuelan police official interviewed by authorities said tattoos are “the easiest but least effective way” of identifying members of the criminal gang

Everyone who hasn’t been completely corrupted by their association with Trump knows the accepted method of identifying gang members doesn’t actually work. Everyone in the inner circle doesn’t care. And ICE has never given a shit one way or the other, so long as it’s able to hit the ever-escalating expulsion benchmarks set by the administration and backed by barely-sentient FEDZ® doll Kristi Noem, who decided to issue a “tough on crime” statement in front of an overcrowded El Salvadoran prison cell while prominently displaying her $50,000 Rolex watch.

Between the bizarre invocation of the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since the abuse of Japanese US residents during World War II made it unfashionable and ICE’s enthusiasm for rounding up any foreigners officers come across, it’s no surprise areas where Latin Americans are a majority of the population are considered target-rich environments.

What is surprising, however, is that some local law enforcement agencies are viewing ICE as the enemy and the people they serve as people worth protecting from federal government overreach.

In Santa Fe County, N.M., last month, local police leaders stood before a packed auditorium and showed photos of their uniforms so residents would know what they look like — and, more pointedly, what ICE does not.

“Whatever happens around the country, whoever is president, you are our community. We are your officers,” Santa Fe Police Chief Paul Joye said with the help of a Spanish interpreter. “It is a fundamental human right that you feel safe in your home regardless of where you’re from.”

[…]

Many police chiefs have opted to risk the ire of the federal government in an attempt to preserve trust with immigrant communities – a bond that can be tenuous even in the best of times.

In Boston, when police commissioner Michael Cox pointed out last month that his agency doesn’t have the authority to enforce immigration law, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said he’d “bring hell” to the city. On March 24, ICE arrested more than 300 people in Massachusetts.

It’s nice to know that at least a few cops aren’t on board with Trump’s anti-immigrant warfare. There’s still no unified front pushing back against ICE but every little bit helps. Unfortunately, none of this will matter to the Trump administration. It’s incapable of being shamed and it’s fine with massive amounts of collateral damage as long as its intended targets are included in the body count.

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