Kevin Wilson wrote a great short story about the workers who have to sort the tiles that go into a Scrabble box. The hero is responsible for searching through the pile for the letter ‘q’. All day. On commission.
At this absurd level, it’s clear that the game isn’t made this way. They’d never produce all 26 letters, mix them up and then sort them. It pays to be thoughtful about the production process, so you simply make what you need in the first place.
But now, particularly with digital output, we’re doing it backwards. Making lots of stuff and then sorting it later. There’s very little cost to making more, and it’s getting more and more time-consuming to find what we’re looking for.
We’re replacing the magic of Google’s ability to sort through the miscellaneous with a new system based on simply making more, on demand.
Trust and attention remain the building blocks of brands and culture. We ignore this at our peril. There are no good shortcuts.
The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (permalink)
Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard – between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."
In desperation, Ireland's political class hit on a wild gambit: they would weaponize Ireland's sovereignty in service to corporate tax evasion. Companies that pretended to establish their headquarters in Ireland would be able to hoard their profits, evading their tax obligations to every other country in the world:
A single country – poor, small, at the literal periphery of a continent – was able to foundationally transform the global order. Any company that has enough money to pretend to be Irish can avoid 25-35% in tax, giving it an unbeatable edge against competitors that lack the multinational's superpower of magicking all its profits into a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea.
The effect this had on Ireland is…mixed. The Irish state is thoroughly captured by the corporations that pretend to call Ireland home. Anything those corporations want, Ireland must deliver, lest the footloose companies up sticks and start pretending to be Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, Maltese or Dutch. This is why Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR, has had no effect on America's tech giants. They pretend to be Irish, and Ireland lets them get away with breaking European law. The Irish state even hires these companies' executives to regulate their erstwhile employers:
But there is no denying that Ireland has managed to turn the world's taxable trillions into its own domestic billions. The fact that Ireland is cashing out less than 1% of what it's costing everyone else is terrible for the world's tax systems and competitive markets, but it's been a massive windfall for Ireland, and has lifted the country out of its centuries of colonial poverty and privation.
There are many lessons to be learned from Ireland's experiment with regulatory arbitrage, but one is unequivocal: even a small, poor, disintegrating nation can change the world system by offering a site where you can do things that you can't do anywhere else, and if it does, that poor nation can grow wealthy and comfortable.
What's more, there are plenty of "things that you can't do anywhere else" that are very good. It's not just corporate tax evasion.
First among these things that you can't do anywhere else: it's a crime in virtually every country on earth to modify America's defective, enshittified, privacy-invading, money-stealing technology exports. That's because the US trade representative has spent the past 25 years using the threat of tariffs to bully all of America's trading partners into adopting "anti-circumvention" laws:
There is nothing good about this. The fact that local businesses can't sell you a privacy blocker, an alternative client, a diagnostic tool, a spare part, a consumable, or even software for your American-made devices leaves you defenseless before US tech's remorseless campaign of monetary and informational plunder – and it means that your economy is denied the benefits of creating and exporting these incredibly desirable, profitable products.
Incredibly, Trump deliberately blew up this multi-trillion dollar system of US commercial advantage. By chaotically imposing and rescinding and re-imposing tariffs on the world, he has neutralized the US trade rep's tariff threats. Foreign firms just can't count on exporting to America anymore, so the threat of (more) tariffs grows less intimidating by the minute:
The time is ripe for the founding of a disenshittification nation, an Ireland for disenshittification. I have no doubt that eventually, most or all of the countries in the world will drop their anti-circumvention laws (the laws that ban the modification of US tech exports). Once one country starts making these disenshittifying tools, there'll be no way to prevent their export, since all it takes to buy one of these tools from a circumvention haven is an internet connection and a payment method.
Once everyone in your country is buying and using jailbreaking tools from abroad, there'll be no point in keeping these laws on your own books. But the first country to get there stands a chance of establishing a durable first-mover advantage – of reaping hundreds of billions selling disenshittifying products around the world. That country could be to enshittification-resistant technology what Finland was to mobile phones during the Nokia decade (and wouldn't you know it, the EU's newly minted "Tech Sovereignty" czar is a Finn!):
The world has experimented with many kinds of havens over the centuries. In the early 18th century, Madagascar became a haven for British naval deserters, who were adopted into the island's matriarchal clans. Together, they founded an anarchist pirate utopia:
The global system of trade has allowed America's tech companies to steal and hoard trillions, and to put every country at risk of being bricked when their IT systems are switched off at a single word from Trump:
There are more than 200 countries in the world. There's also an ever-expanding cohort of brilliant international technologists whose Silicon Valley dreams have turned into a nightmare of being shot in the face by an ICE goon, or being kidnapped, separated from their families and being locked up in a Salvadoran slave-labor prison. These techies are looking for the next place to put down roots and "make a dent in the universe." Lots of countries could be that place.
The Ireland for disenshittification wouldn't just have their pick of international technologists – they'd have plenty of Americans hungering for a better life. Two-thirds of young Americans "are considering leaving the US":
Ireland pulled off its tax-haven gambit by making influential people very rich, so that they would go to bat for Ireland. The Ireland for disenshittification will have the same chance. The new tech companies that unlock US Big Tech's trillions and turn them into their own billions (with the remainder being shared by us, tech users, in the form of lower prices and better products) will be a powerful bloc in support of this project.
Ireland showed us: it just takes one country to defect from this global prisoner's dilemma, and then everything is up for grabs.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1045 words today, 9348 total)
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
I’m going to start this post off with two rhetorical questions.
Do you believe that the use of AI should be free and unfettered in the video game industry and will certainly and overwhelmingly be a positive good for the industry generally?
Do you believe that AI should be banned and never used in the video game industry because it can only produce slop and result in job loss in the industry generally?
My position is simple: anyone answering “yes” to either of those questions is out of the conversation when I’m involved. Dogmatic approaches like those aren’t right, they’re not smart, they’re not helpful, and they will never produce any progress or interesting discussion. They’re a sort of religious beliefs pointed at a terrestrial industry and they make no sense.
And now let me add a rhetorical statement of my own, so that there’s no misunderstanding: every game publisher and developer out there is free to make their own decisions regarding AI, full stop. I’m here to talk, not to make demands.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about indie publisher Hooded Horse and its “zero AI” policy that it has written into its developer contracts. CEO Tim Bender spoke with Kotaku recently on the topic and he certainly didn’t hold back.
The label he helps run as CEO, Hooded Horse, struck gold after signing the medieval base-builder mega hit Manor Lords, but its library of published games has grown far beyond it in the past two years with releases like the Lego-like tower-defense game Cataclismo, the economic management sim Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, and the 4X sequel Endless Legend 2. Being strategy games isn’t the only thing they all have in common. They also all adhere to a strict ban on generative AI art.
“I fucking hate gen AI art and it has made my life more difficult in many ways…suddenly it infests shit in a way it shouldn’t,” Bender told me in a recent interview. “It is now written into our contracts if we’re publishing the game, ‘no fucking AI assets.’”
Now, if Bender says this has made his life more difficult, I’m going to choose to believe him. Honestly, I can’t imagine why he’d lie about something like that.
But he’s also clearly answered “yes” to rhetorical question #2 I posted above. And I just don’t understand it as a long term contractual policy. If AI largely sucks right now in the gaming industry, and I agree there’s a lot of bad out there, that doesn’t mean it will in the future. If AI has the capability to take some jobs in the industry today, that doesn’t mean it can’t create jobs elsewhere in the industry as well. If some applications of AI in the gaming industry carry with it very real moral questions, that doesn’t mean that every use does.
But when you really dig into Bender’s stated concerns that have led him to a blanket ban on the use of any AI by partner developers, you quickly understand his actual concern is a quality control concern.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we also talk to developers and we recommend they don’t use any gen AI anywhere in the process because some of them might otherwise think, ‘Okay, well, maybe what I’ll do is for this place, I’ll put it as a placeholder,’ right?” continued Bender.
“Like some, people will have this thought, like they would never want to let it in the game, but they’ll think, ‘It can be a placeholder in this prototype build.’ But if that gets done, of course, there’s a chance that that slips through, because it only takes one of those slipping through in some build and not getting replaced or something. […] Because of that, we’re constantly having to watch and deal with it and try to prevent it from slipping in, because it’s cancerous.”
It’s the Larian Studios concept art discussion all over again. Bender doesn’t seem to have an actual problem with developers using AI in developing a game. Instead, it appears he doesn’t want any AI-made product ending up in the finished game. Those are two very different things. But rather than trying to figure out how to QC the developers to make sure the end product is clean of AI, since that seems to be what Bender is after, we get a blanket ban on all AI use everywhere, all the time, by the developers.
Now, to keep things clear, my position is that Bender certainly can do this if he likes. It’s his company, have at it. But when I read this…
“When it comes to gen-AI, it’s not a PR issue, it’s an ethics issue,” Bender said. “The reality is, there’s so much of it going on that the commitment just has to be that you won’t allow it in the game, and if it’s ever discovered, because this artist that was hired by this outside person slipped something in, you get it out and you replace it. That has to be the commitment. It’s a shame that it’s even necessary and it’s a very frustrating thing to have to worry about.”
…I’m left with the impression that I’m listening to someone devoid of nuance reciting a creed rather than fully thinking this through.
AI will be used in gaming. To borrow a phrase, it’s a very frustrating thing to have to even state. It’s tough to get more obvious than that. The question and the conversation, as I keep saying, is about how it will be used, not if it will be used.
And people like Bender have exited that conversation, which is too bad. He’s clearly a good businessman and smart industry guy. We need his voice in the discussion.
Call it "lifehacking," or just call it, "paying attention to how you stay organized" – I don't care what you call it, I am an ardent practitioner of it.
I like improving my processes because I like what I do, and the more efficient I am at all of it (with apologies to Jenny Odell), the more of that stuff I can get done:
I want to do a lot of stuff. I am one of those people who is ten miles wide and one inch deep (it probably has something to do with imbibing Heinlein's maxim that "specialization is for insects" at an impressionable age). There's a million waterways I want to dip my toe (or my oar) into, and the better organized I am, the more of that stuff I'll get to do before I kick off. I'm 54, and while there's a lot of road ahead of me, I can see the end, off there in the distance. It's coming, and I'm not done – I'm barely getting started.
I've been around lifehacking since the very moment it was born. I was there. I published the notes on Danny O'Brien's seminal 2004 talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks":
In the years since, I've cultivated a small – but mighty – repertoire of organizational habits and tools that let me get a hell of a lot done. Weirdly, many of these tools are things that other people hate, and I can see why – they use them in very different ways from me. That's true of browser tabs (I loooove browser tabs):
And to-do lists, which will totally transform your life, once you realize that the most important to-do list is the one you maintain for everyone else who owes you a response, a package, or money:
Other essential tools languish in neglect, artifacts of the old, good web – the elegant weapons that dominated a more civilized age. First among these? RSS readers:
I will freely stipulate that people have a good reason to hate all this stuff. "Productivity porn" is often proffered as a mix of humblebrag (a way to make other people jealous of your almighty "productivity") and denial (fiddling with your systems is a ready substitute for actually doing things). Many (most?) of the foremost self-appointed pitchmen for "lifehacking" are cringey charlatans peddling "courses" and other nonsense.
But if you keep digging, there's a solid foundation beneath all the rot. At its very best, this stuff is a way to figure out what you really want to do, and to organize your life so that the stuff you want to do is the stuff you're doing.
A lot of people get into this kind of thing thinking it'll let them do everything. No one can do everything. The best you can hope for is to make conscious decisions about which stuff you'll never get to, while leaving at least a little room for serendipity.
Like I said, I want to do a lot of stuff. My organizing tactics are as much about deciding what I won't do as they are about deciding what I will do:
Which brings me to another tool that everyone hates and I love: email. I live and die by email.
First of all, I filter all my incoming email: mail from people who are in my address book stays in my inbox; mail from people I've never heard from before goes into a mailbox called "People I don't know." When I reply to a message, Thunderbird adds the recipient to my address book, so the next time I hear from them, they'll stay in my main mailbox.
I also filter out anything containing the word "unsubscribe," sending it into a folder called "Unlikely" (but not if the message contains my name – which is how I can stay subscribed to mailing lists I don't have time to read and make sure to reply when someone mentions me).
Second of all, I have a zillion Quicktext macros that I use to reply to frequently asked questions. I have one that spits out my mailing address; another that spits out my bio; and others for politely saying no to things I don't have time for, for information about how to pay one of my invoices, etc, etc.
Third: I have a small folder of emails that I can't reply to right away (usually because I need some information from a third party), which I review every morning and answer anything that I can clear.
Finally, I save it all. I have so much saved email, which means that if you ask me about something from 20 years ago, there's a good chance I can find it – provided we organized it over email.
All of which explains why I refuse – to the extent that I can – to do anything important over instant messaging, whether that's Signal or any of the other messaging tools that come with social media, workplace software, etc.
I understand why people like instant messaging: it does not overwhelm you with the burdens of the past. It is largely ahistorical, with archives that are hard to access and search. Its norms and register are less formal than email.
And, of course, instant messaging is far superior to email in some contexts. If you're on vacation with friends, having a big group-chat where you can say, "I'm making dinner – is everyone OK with cheese?" is indispensable. Same goes for asking a friend for directions, announcing that you've arrived at someone's office, or confirming whether it's OK to substitute 2% for whole milk on a grocery run.
But if you're like me – if you've figured out how to do as many of the things that matter to you as you can possibly squeeze in, then getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who's working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a machete and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, "Hey, catch this!"
The problem is that if you are asking about something important, something that can't be instantaneously managed by the recipient, then they will have to drop everything they're doing and, at the very least, make a note to themselves to go back to your message later and deal with it. Instant messaging doesn't have an inbox with everything you've been sent. Of course, that's why people love it. But the fact that you can't see all the things other people are expecting you to answer doesn't mean that they aren't expecting it. It also doesn't mean that everything will be fine if you just ignore all those messages.
Instant messaging is a great tool for managing something that everyone is doing at the same time. It's also a nice way to keep an ambient social flow of updates from people in a rocking groupchat. But IM is fundamentally unserious. It is antithetical to the project of making a conscious decision about what you won't do, so that you do as many of the things that matter to you before you get to the end of the road.
A massive email inbox is intimidating, but switching to IMs doesn't make all the demands in the email go away. It just puts them out of sight until they either expire or explode. Far better to decide what balls you're going to drop than to have them knocked out of your hand by a fast-moving watermelon.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1141 words today, 8278 total)
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Trump’s sycophants often claim his behavior is some kind of 4D chess. There are 4Ds, but this isn’t chess. Rather, it’s the crude instinct of a conman and would-be king.
Last July, I discussed 4Ds in the context of the Epstein files. I’m revisiting them now, with a slight adjustment, to assess his recent actions. They break down into four patterns: Deny, Deflect, Demean, Destroy.
There are many ways to slice and analyze Trump’s actions. For me, these four Ds are a handy mnemonic to help make sense of his otherwise seemingly random, malevolent behavior. So let’s walk through them with recent headlines in mind.
When Trump faces any kind of challenge, pushback or crisis, his first instinct is to issue a denial. He has White House officials, especially Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, trained to do the same.
As Trump’s approval numbers on the economy have fallen due to persistent inflation, his response to the affordability crisis is to reject the idea that prices are up. He even recently claimed the economy is “A+++++”. That’s five plusses, in case one wasn’t enough.
In short, affordability is a Democratic hoax, just like the Epstein files.
This creates incredulity among normal Americans and cognitive dissonance even among his supporters. After all, everyone buys groceries, Trump himself excepted. And we all know what we eat for dinner. It’s more than “a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, corn tortilla and one other thing,” as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently insisted we could all get by on.
Telling consumers their prices are down when they are actually up or scolding Americans to survive on $3 meals isn’t going to win over middle America, nor will it convince anyone that Trump is a good economic steward. Denials on the economy may be Trump’s go-to, but they are death come election time.
Trump’s more recent denials have similarly backfired. In response to the news of the death of Renee Good at the hands of an ICE agent, Trump claimed she “violently, willfully and viciously” ran him over.
The video shows nothing of the sort, of course. So once again, normal Americans were left wondering what is wrong with him while MAGA cultists got to practice denying their own eyes.
Deflect
Trump is all over the Epstein files. But the White House and its mouthpieces, like “Oversight” Committee chair James Comer (R-KY), insist the focus should be on Bill Clinton.
Only one percent of the Epstein files have been released, and most of those have been heavily redacted. That means many more stories to come, especially as Reps. Thomas Massie (R-TN) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) press for a special master to oversee the production by the DOJ.
Whenever those files get too hot, Trump creates incidents, sometimes big international ones like we saw in Venezuela or as we are likely to see with Greenland. The press has no choice but to report on them, and the public has little choice but to respond. Trump is an arsonist, and every fire he starts could consume us, so they need to be doused as we go.
This doesn’t change the fact, however, that the Epstein files are not going away. The victims, the co-sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and dogged reporters like Julie K. Brown understand Trump’s game, and they know how to drive attention back to the files and Trump’s involvement. Indeed, we are now in a clear pattern of a major story on Epstein dropping every few weeks, which has the ironic effect of holding the public’s fascination, like we’re all waiting for the next installment of a gripping whodunnit.
The most recent example of Trump deflecting again concerns the violence in Minneapolis. When his ICE agent murdered Renee Good, his DOJ launched an investigation—but not into her killer. Instead, in classic cartoon villain fashion, his lackeys decided to investigate her and her widow’s past political affiliations. This caused mass resignations within the Minnesota U.S. Attorneys office and soured public opinion even further against the White House, the DOJ and DHS.
Demean
Trump regularly seizes on criminal behavior by one person or one group and then extends that to cast blame on entire communities. For Venezuelans, it was Laken Riley. And for Somalis, it is fraud claims investigated years ago but rejiggered and reamplified, without support, by right wing YouTuber Nick Shirley. Trump even referred to the entire Somali community as “garbage.”
As the situation on the ground exploded in Minneapolis, owing to the regime’s own surge of federal agent and egged on to extreme behavior by their leaders and by Stephen Miller, Trump cast aspersions upon both individuals and groups. His officials labeled Renee Good a “domestic terrorist” before they knew anything about her. And Trump baselessly called protesters “professional agitators and insurrectionists.”
Trump has a habit of identifying any point of tension or conflict and blowing it up to an extreme version of itself, a practice known widely as “threat inflation.” As Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic writes,
The president and his allies constantly engage in what we might call threat inflation, giving Americans the impression that they face catastrophe on all sides and that the government therefore must respond maximally. In the administration’s telling, drugs enter America via not smugglers, but “narco-terrorists.” Immigrants never sneak into America; they “invade.” And anti-ICE protesters are “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” These designations rarely match the reality on the ground. Instead, they stoke fear beyond what reality justifies.
When paired with Trump’s demeaning, dehumanizing language, threat inflation becomes an existential crisis for his racist, white supporters. He is training them to see every immigrant as a criminal or as an invading terrorist, every liberal as an insurrectionist (note the accusation as confession).
Where he succeeds, the path to ethnic cleansing, fascism and genocide opens. After all, against such terrifying people, no use of force or violence can be too great or unjustified.
Destroy
When Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House, the symbolism was inescapable. His aim is to take a wrecking ball to our government, including its institutions, and to the rule of law generally. His politicization of the DOJ has already led to transparently outrageous prosecutions of his political enemies, including James Comey, Letitia James and Adam Schiff.
Now, apparently because the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, wanted to show her boss and friend what a good footsoldier she is, Trump’s DOJ has launched a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act over protests in Minneapolis provoked by his own forces, even against the express wishes of the governor of the state. Trump has yet to fully politicize the U.S. military, but he apparently believes one way to do that is to force them to trammel upon citizens’ First Amendment rights over an invented crisis.
This week Trump has also once again taken direct aim at our most important military alliance by threatening to invade Greenland. Whether he actually does so remains to be seen, but the saber rattling has already destroyed what little trust remained with our once staunch allies. The U.S. is now rightly viewed as an unstable and dangerous world actor, as much a threat to peace as any other superpower.
Our own 4D chess
Trump’s behavior is meant to unbalance, gaslight and stun. But we can all learn to be on to him. In the end, his actions are quite rudimentary and predictable.
It takes a bit of practice, but try this for yourself. Whenever Trump grabs a headline with yet another head-spinning declaration or action, take a step back and ask which of the 4Ds applies. Is he denying the truth? Deflecting from it? Demeaning others? Destroying our guardrails? It’s usually one of them, if not more.
Unpacking his M.O. helps us put the brakes on the White House’s spin and allows us space to focus on actionable and concrete ways of stopping him, instead of just feeling drenched by the firehose of his lies and propaganda. Greater clarity on this will also reduce sensations of anxiety or paralysis because we now have some keen tools to address more precisely what he’s throwing at us.
AI can be useful. But so many people seem to feel it’s nothing more than an unpaid intern you can lean on to do all the work you don’t feel like doing yourself. (And the less said about its misuse to generate a webful of slop, the better.)
Like everyone everywhere, police departments are starting to rely on AI to do some of the menial work cops don’t like doing themselves. And it’s definitely going poorly. More than a year ago, it was already apparent that law enforcement agencies were just pressing the “easy” button, rather than utilizing it wisely to work smarter and faster.
Axon — the manufacturer of Taser and a line of now-ubiquitous body cameras — has pushed hard for AI adoption. Even it knows AI use can swiftly become problematic if it’s not properly backstopped by humans. But the humans it sells its products too don’t seem to care for anything other than its ability to churn out paperwork with as little human involvement as possible.
The report notes that Draft One includes a feature that can intentionally insert silly sentences into AI-produced drafts as a test to ensure officers are thoroughly reviewing and revising the drafts. However, Axon’s CEO mentioned in a video about Draft One that most agencies are choosing not to enable this feature.
Yep. They just don’t care. If it means cases get tossed because sworn statements have been AI auto-penned, so be it. If someone ends up falsely accused of a crime or falsely arrested because of something AI whipped up, that’s just the way it goes. And if it adds a layer of plausible deniability between an officer and their illegal actions, even better.
Not only is the tech apparently not saving anyone much time, it’s also being abused by law enforcement officers to justify their actions after the fact. But it’s shiny and new and seems sleek and futuristic, so of course reporters will occasionally decide to do law enforcement’s PR work for it by presenting incredibly fallible tech as the 8th wonder of the police world.
Sometimes reporters bury the lede. And sometimes their editors decide the lede should be buried by the end of the headline. That appears to be the case here, where Mya Constantino’s reporting isn’t exactly what’s being touted in this article’s original headline.
As can be observed from viewing the URL, the current headline (updated January 1st) wasn’t the original headline. The Wayback Machine tells the real story. This article was originally published on December 19, 2025 with this headline:
That headline (which reads “How Utah police departments are using AI to keep streets safer”) was immediately followed by these paragraphs:
Here’s a direct quote of those leading paragraphs:
HEBER CITY, Utah — An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.
However, the truth behind that so-called magical transformation is simple.
“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” Sgt. Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”
Fortunately, those paragraphs still remain in the updated post, which now contains a headline that makes a lot more sense:
The headline (accompanied by a short video of a tree frog) says:
Ribbit ribbit! Artificial Intelligence programs used by Heber City police claim officer turned into a frog
While I can understand why a small news outlet (albeit one that’s a Fox affiliate) might decide to play nice with the local cops rather than call out their software failure in the headline, it really doesn’t make it acceptable. My guess is the original headline was about maintaining access to officers and officials. At some point, someone realized the stuff detailed in the first paragraphs would probably attract more attention than some dry recitation of cop AI talking points.
But even the belated headline change doesn’t really make anything better here. There’s not really anything in the article that demonstrates how AI is making anyone safer. The article also notes that two different AI programs are currently being tested (Code Four, developed by a couple of 19-year-old former MIT students) and Draft One, which is part of Axon’s vertical integration strategy. That was the product that turned a cop into a frog, which probably explains why the reporter’s ridealong (so to speak…) only involved use of Code Four’s AI.
The reporter was on hand for a faux traffic stop that was later summarized by the AI to (apparently) demonstrate its usefulness. The journalist points out that the AI-generated report needed corrections, but at least didn’t turn any of the participants into a Disney-inspired character.
That being said, there’s nothing here that indicates these products will make streets “safer.” Here is the entirety of what was said about the tech’s positives by Sgt. Rick Keel of the Heber City PD:
Keel says one of the major draws is that the software saves them time, as writing reports typically takes 1-2 hours.
“I’m saving myself about 6-8 hours weekly now,” Keel said. “I’m not the most tech-savvy person, so it’s very user-friendly.”
Giving cops more free time doesn’t make streets safer. It just means they have more time on their hands. That’s not always a good thing. Of all the things that need to be fixed in terms of US policing, writing reports is pretty far down the list. It’s what’s being done with this extra time that actually matters. Pursuing efficiency for its own sake makes no sense in the context of law enforcement. The statements by this PD official raise questions that were never asked by the reporter, like the most important one: what is being done with this saved time? And if something still requires a lot of human activity to keep it from generating nonsense, is it really any better than the system it’s replacing?
One thing is for sure: AI doing the menial work of filing police reports is never going to make anyone safer. On the contrary, it’s only going to increase the chance that someone’s rights will be violated. And because law enforcement agencies refuse to be honest about the risks this poses and the fact that it appears only officers who don’t like writing paperwork will benefit from this added expense, they shouldn’t be trusted with tech that will ultimately only make the bad parts of US policing even worse.
Alexander Rhodes, the founder of the pornography addiction self-help group NoFap and repeat plaintiff, sued the parent company of Pornhub, Aylo, along with the University of California Los Angeles, two scientists, and an academic publisher for defamation. Filed in a court of common pleas in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and since removed to federal court by the defendants, the suit has gone under the radar by most news outlets.
I wrote for one of my publishers about the lawsuit but little coverage has picked it up. I hope that changes in the coming months as litigation advances in the case.
The lawsuit alleges a civil conspiracy bankrolled by Aylo to defame Rhodes and NoFap. Rhodes is a divisive figure in the wider anti-porn discussion as he believes that breaking “pornography addiction,” (which is not an accepted diagnosis in the DSM-5) requires participants to not engage in masturbation or watching pornography in a bid to “reboot” their brains. The theory is not supported by most science.
Nonetheless, he and his movement have gained traction over the years. Some sexual health experts started to scrutinize the claims of the NoFap philosophy as well as its supposed scientific basis. Because there has been some research pushing back on some of NoFap’s claims, lawyers for Rhodes claims it is proof of organized and explicit coordination to defame him. According to the lawsuit, Aylo is supposedly at the center of this scheme and allegedly paid off two scientists who have published critical research on NoFap. Furthermore, the complaint argues that UCLA and the academic publisher Taylor & Francis engaged in this defamation scheme by “aiding and abetting” the pair of scientists and Aylo by publishing the research.
This is a very weird lawsuit.
But what makes it weirder and more alarming than it is stems from the narrative pushed by the plaintiffs. In a bid to demonstrate the conspiracy, Rhodes presents a theory that the scientists and Aylo actively engaged in media pitches to dozens of journalists and other media personalities, including myself, to advance messages that disparage the NoFap company and its founder. Companies doing media pitches happen every day. Media pitches do not make anything into a conspiracy.
According to this theory, Rhodes alleges a coordinated media narrative that advances Aylo’s interests with the supposed end goal of… silencing this random dude who makes money off of telling people not to watch porn and jerk off. Even though Rhodes has the right to believe and communicate what he believes, it is quite a reach to insist that research and criticism of his beliefs and movement, including bog standard press coverage, amount to a conspiracy to defame.
Having people review strong claims is part of how academic research works. Having the media cover that research happens every day. It is silly to conclude that this turns it into a conspiracy.
And this week, Rhodes ramped things up a notch by claiming not just your garden variety conspiracy, but a RICO claim. Rather than go into the details of that, we’ll just point you to an archive of Ken White’s lawsplainer: IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT.
His lawyers mention about 38 people who have written or tried to write about NoFap and Rhodes in a negative light. Their coverage has been almost entirely critical of his claims. For example, my writing on NoFap has been critical in the context that it pushes and reinforces anti-pornography sentiments among social conservative groups and is a constituent faction of the so-called online manosphere. I have heard that some publishers of mine have been served up threats of legal action and/or retraction demands for my reporting and analysis about these groups.
Other journalists, like Gustavo Turner, have written on some of the more outlandish claims of so-called porn induced erectile dysfunction (PIED). PIED is not an official diagnosis, and is more likely to be related to underlying issues as pornography is wholly unlikely to contribute to erectile dysfunction among men. Turner was called a “collaborator” against Rhodes in the suit, even though Turner has never directly written about him, and defamation has to be of and about someone specifically. The article linked above, which is also mentioned in the lawsuit does not discuss Rhodes and only mentions “NoFap” in the context of a hashtag “phenomena,” not having anything to do with Rhodes’ organization specifically.
Others mentioned in the lawsuit include authors with bylines at other outlets like Salon, Rolling Stone, Vice, and many others. He mentions “disparaging” media communicated by LGBTQ+ figures like Dan Savage of the Savage Love podcast because Savage hosted one of the defendants on his podcast talking about her research.
The lawsuit is quite expansive.
While I am not a defendant in the case, I still feel that listing out the simple mentioning of Rhodes’ critics as part of the grand conspiracy is a form of intimidation. It’s not as direct, but Rhodes appears to be trying to put on notice those who scrutinize the claims he makes that they could be the next defendant added.
This chills speech and reporting on more than just Rhodes and NoFap. It speaks to wider sentiments in today’s culture about how the courts can be a weapon to censor journalists from doing their jobs.
Already I have heard from journalists who claim that publications are rejecting pitches about Rhodes and NoFap, with the implication being that the publications are worried about litigation threats for merely writing about him. It feels like a classic case of chilling effects via a SLAPP suit, and it’s why anti-SLAPP laws are so important.
What is ironic is that Rhodes accuses the defendants in this case of intimidation: buying off journalists and the very outlets they allege advances the talking points of an organized civil conspiracy against his business and personage. Journalists aren’t a part of the conspiracy. They’re just reporting on what’s happening, and sometimes that includes research results. And, yes, sometimes that includes criticism of companies like Aylo for bad things they’ve done as well. Because journalists are reporting the news, not engaged in a grand conspiracy.
A thoughtful, reasonable, reflective person might take the time to personally reflect on why so many articles question the narrative he’s pushing. Others, however, might just claim a conspiracy against them.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll keep saying it because apparently it needs repeating: Donald Trump is not a free speech president. He just plays one on TV while doing the exact opposite behind the scenes. And in front of the scenes. And basically everywhere. Over and over and over again.
Nora Benavidez at Free Press (not the Bari Weiss publication, but the civil society group that has been around for years) has done the tedious but essential work of actually counting the censorship attempts from the Trump administration over the administration’s first year. Writing in the New York Times, she puts the number at around 200 documented instances:
Since returning to office, Mr. Trump and his administration have tried to undermine the First Amendment, suppress information that he and his supporters don’t like and hamstring parts of the academic, legal and private sectors through lawsuits and coercion — to flood the zone, as his ally Steve Bannon might say.
Two hundred. In a single year. From the guy who never shuts up about how he’s the greatest defender of free speech in American history.
As we pointed out a few months back, Trump didn’t just stumble into hypocrisy—he (as he does so often these days) literally said the quiet part out loud when explaining his executive order attempting to criminalize flag burning:
“We took the freedom of speech away.”
That’s… that’s not the flex you think it is, my dude.
The examples Benavidez catalogs range from the high-profile to the quietly terrifying. Many you’ve probably heard about:
His administration banned Associated Press reporters from certain parts of the White House and Air Force One because the outlet uses “Gulf of Mexico” rather than the term Mr. Trump prefers, “Gulf of America.” It tried and failed to force some of the nation’s biggest news organizations to agree to restrictions on coverage of the Pentagon. He has said critical coverage of his initiatives is “really illegal.”
In March, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and a leader of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on the Columbia campus, was arrested and detained by immigration officials for several months. That month, Rumeysa Ozturk, a student visa holder, was arrested by immigration officials and detained for several weeks, apparently because she was an author of an opinion essay criticizing Tufts University for its response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Arresting people and threatening deportation because of their political speech. That’s not a misunderstanding of the First Amendment—it’s a direct assault on it.
And the targets keep expanding.
After Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg ruled against the administration in a case involving the deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador, Mr. Trump called for the judgeto be impeached. A trainee wasdismissedfrom the F.B.I.’s academy, apparently for having displayed an L.G.B.T.Q. Pride flag. The F.B.I. also appears to havefiredagents for kneeling during George Floyd protests.
The administration has gone after law firms, forcing settlements where they agree to do pro bono work for administration-approved causes. Universities have been coerced into changing policies and paying millions. Social media platforms—the same ones MAGA world spent years screaming about for “censorship”—have been sued over their content moderation decisions and forced into “settlements” to stay in the good graces of our thin-skinned dictator wannabe:
Mr. Trump has sued social media platforms for their content moderation policies — free-speech decisions, in other words — leading to Meta, X and YouTube capitulating through settlements totaling around $60 million.
Let’s be clear about what that means: the President of the United States sued private companies because he didn’t like how they exercised their own First Amendment rights regarding what speech to host on their own platforms. And got them to pay up, because the alternative of being a constant target, was worse.
That’s the opposite of free speech.
Remember all those years of Republicans insisting that when private platforms made moderation decisions they didn’t like, it was “censorship,” but when the government did it, that was just fine? Yeah. We’re living in that world now.
Benavidez makes an important point about how this all works together:
What is important to recognize is that these efforts work in concert in their frequency and their volume: Even the most egregious cases seem to quickly fade from public consciousness, and in that way, they’re clearly meant to overwhelm us and make us think twice about exercising our rights.
This is the Bannon “flood the zone” strategy applied to constitutional rights. You can’t focus on any single outrage because there are fifteen new ones by the time you finish reading about it. Each individual act of censorship might spark a news cycle, but two hundred of them? That’s just… Tuesday.
And here’s what’s maddening: this is the same guy whose supporters spent years screaming that the Biden administration was engaged in unprecedented censorship because some officials sent some angry emails to social media companies—emails that, as we’ve covered extensively, the companies routinely ignored. That was the constitutional crisis that required Elon Musk to buy Twitter and “free the bird.”
But actual government coercion? Actual arrests? Actual lawsuits forcing private companies to change their speech policies? Actual bans on journalists? That’s apparently just “making America great again.”
Benavidez closes with a warning that shouldn’t need stating but apparently does:
But constitutional rights and democratic norms don’t disappear all at once; they erode slowly. The next three years will require a vigilant defense of free speech and open debate.
She’s right. And part of that vigilance means not letting the “free speech” crowd get away with pretending that the guy actively engaged in government censorship at scale is somehow its greatest defender.
Two hundred times. In one year. And we’re just getting started on year two.
The DOJ can’t indict a ham sandwich these days. That old saying doesn’t ring as true as it used to now that most of the DOJ’s work is just vindictive prosecutions.
It’s not just cases being tossed because DOJ prosecutors weren’t legally appointed to their positions. This dates back to the early parts of last year when the DOJ was trying to turn anti-ICE protesters into convicted felons. Most notoriously, the government failed to secure an assault indictment against Sean Dunn, a DC resident who famously “assaulted” an ICE officer by throwing a literal sandwich at them.
Former Trump personal lawyer Lindsey Halligan did manage to secure indictments (after multiple attempts) against former FBI director James Comey and current New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those case are gone but not because the grand juries rebelled, but because the “rule of law” party ignored a lot of rules and laws.
In 2016, the most recent year for which the Justice Department has published data, federal prosecutors concluded more than 155,000 prosecutions and declined over 25,000 cases presented by investigators. In only six instances was a grand jury’s refusal to indict listed as the reason for dropping the matter.
Lindsey Halligan managed to rack up nearly half that amount in a single case:
A grand jury rejected one of three charges Halligan proposed against Comey. She initially secured an indictment against James, but after a judge threw that case out , two grand juries voted down new indictments.
She did this twice with the same proposed defendant. The DOJ surpassed this number of rejections less than halfway through 2025, as grand juries not only rejected the vindictive prosecution of the DC sandwich thrower, but dozens of other cases brought by prosecutors.
At one point earlier this year, [DOJ US Attorney Bill] Essayli’s office had managed to secure indictments in less than a quarter of the felony cases it brought in connection with protests or immigration raids, the Los Angeles Times reported.
We’ve spent plenty of time criticizing grand juries here at Techdirt. But something weird and quietly wonderful is happening all over the nation, which is returning grand juries back to their roots: a crucial part of the system of checks and balances.
They’re a carryover from the British Empire, but one the founding fathers felt actually had some merit, as former federal prosecutor Randall Eliason explained in post last year discussing the DOJ’s multiple failures:
The Constitution requires that every federal felony be indicted by a grand jury. This safeguard was inherited from the British legal system, where it dates back to the Magna Carta in the 13th century. To prevent the king from arbitrarily locking up people for improper reasons, British law required the Crown to present its evidence to a panel of residents of the local community to establish that criminal charges were justified. The case could only proceed if that group of citizens, the grand jury, approved the charges.
We’re dealing with a president who thinks he’s a king. And his DOJ is finding out that regular Americans not only don’t view him as a king, but aren’t willing to rubber stamp a bunch of vindictive prosecutions meant to remind citizens who’s in power.
Halligan went 1-for-3 in her attempted prosecution of James Comey. Former Fox commentator Jeanine Pirro did even worse when trying to prosecute an anti-ICE protester for assault.
Pirro’s office presented these facts to a D.C. federal grand jury and asked them to indict Reid for assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer, a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison. When the grand jury refused, prosecutors tried again with a second grand jury. And then with a third. Each grand jury refused to return the indictment sought by prosecutors.
Now that this sort of thing is almost a daily occurrence, Trump loyalists like Pirro are blaming their inability to secure indictments on the public, rather than their own inability to read the room and discard felony charges jury members don’t seem to believe are warranted. That’s part of the reason why so many indictments are returned by grand juries: prosecutors who actually know what they’re doing (rather than the stunt casting that passes for federal agency appointments under Trump) will ditch cases that seem doomed to be rejected by grand jurors.
No one in the administration will learn anything from this. Bill Essayli will continue to scream at his underlings for failing to turn vindictive bullshit into prison sentences. Lindsey Halligan will continue to bumblefuck her way into an eventual firing for failing to fulfill Trump’s revenge fantasies. And other under-qualified former Fox b-listers will return to their former employer to complain their losses are just more evidence of a latent strain of liberalism that’s making America less great again.
“There are a lot of people who sit on juries and and they live in Georgetown or in Northwest or in some of these better areas, and they don’t see the reality of crime that is occurring,” Pirro said in August on “Fox News Sunday.”
Pirro also blamed that alleged indifference to crime for a grand jury’s refusal to indict Justice Department paralegal Sean Dunn for throwing a Subway sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent during a street confrontation earlier that month.
“The grand jurors don’t take it so seriously. They’re like, ‘Eh, you know, whatever.’ My job is to try to turn that around,” Pirro said.
Like many people in Trump’s orbit, Pirro is so divorced from reality she should be cutting it alimony checks every month. The grand juries are taking it seriously. It’s the DOJ prosecutors that are being glib, treating every ridiculous case like a foregone conclusion as they try to convert Trump’s desire for vengeance into criminal charges. Say what you will about grand juries, but it appears jurors aren’t willing to help the government strip people of their freedom just because it’s angry.
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With the current mess that the US is in, there has been plenty of talk of “what comes after” and how to think about the big structural changes needed to prevent another authoritarian from taking over and abusing all the levers of power for corruption and self-enrichment.
There are many different issues to address, but we should be thinking creatively about how to redesign our institutions to be more resilient to the abuses we’re witnessing.
One area ripe for creative rethinking is the federal judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court. Because right now, we have a system where individual judges matter way, way too much. Rather than the minor reforms and incremental changes some are suggesting, I think the solution is to go big. Really big. Expand the Supreme Court to at least 100 justices, with cases heard by randomized panels.
I’ll explain the details below, but the core philosophy is simple: no single Supreme Court Justice should ever matter that much.
President Trump has found a powerful but obscure bulwark in the appeals court judges he appointed during his first term. They have voted overwhelmingly in his favor when his administration’s actions have been challenged in court in his current term, a New York Times analysis of their 2025 records shows.
Time and again, appellate judges chosen by Mr. Trump in his first term reversed rulings made by district court judges in his second, clearing the way for his policies and gradually eroding a perception early last year that the legal system was thwarting his efforts to amass presidential power.
The actual figures are damning. Trump’s appellate appointees voted to allow his policies to take effect 133 times and voted against them only 12 times. That’s 92 percent of their votes in favor of the administration.
When Chief Justice John Roberts responded to Trump’s criticism of an “Obama judge” back in 2018, he insisted that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”
The data suggests Roberts was either naive or lying.
The Times analyzed every judicial ruling on Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda, from Jan. 20 to Dec. 31 of last year, or more than 500 orders issued across 900 cases. About half of rulings at the appellate level were in Mr. Trump’s favor — better than his performance with the district courts, though worse than his record at the Supreme Court, where the rulings on his agenda have almost all been on a preliminary basis in response to emergency applications.
And there it is. The higher you go up the judicial food chain, the better Trump does. District courts ruled in his favor 25% of the time. Appeals courts: 51%. The Supreme Court: 88%.
Now, some will argue this is the system working as designed—higher courts correcting overzealous lower court judges. And sure, that’s part of what appeals courts do. But the pattern here isn’t just about legal merit. It’s about how much individual judges matter, and how vulnerable the system is to ideological capture.
The uniformity of the judges’ votes is reason for serious concern, said Mark L. Wolf, a former federal judge nominated by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Wolf recently retired so he could speak more freely about what he has characterized as the threat that Mr. Trump posed to the rule of law.
“If you’re an impartial judge, the same party is not going to win every time,” he said. “Because the facts are different, the law is different, and so the result is often going to be different.”
This gets at the fundamental problem. When you have a small number of judges with lifetime appointments, whose ideological leanings are known quantities, those individual judges become enormously powerful. A single justice retiring or dying at the wrong time can reshape American law for a generation. That’s insane. No single person should have that kind of power over the constitutional rights of 330 million people.
And it gets worse. The Times found that three Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit—Judges Gregory Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin Walker—accounted for more than half of all pro-Trump votes from Trump’s appellate appointees. Three judges. In one circuit. Exercising “outsized influence.”
Combined, Judges Gregory G. Katsas, Neomi Rao, and Justin R. Walker voted 75 times in favor of the administration — slightly more than half of the pro-Trump votes from Mr. Trump’s appointees logged by the Times analysis — and only three times against.
So what do we do about this?
The typical response from Democrats when they’re in power is to either accept the status quo or propose modest reforms that don’t actually address the structural problem. Republicans, meanwhile, have been playing the long game on judicial appointments for decades, understanding that packing the courts with ideologically aligned young judges is one of the most effective ways to entrench their policy preferences beyond electoral accountability.
We need to think bigger. Much bigger.
Here’s my proposal: Expand the Supreme Court to at least 100 justices, with cases heard by randomized panels of 9 justices. High-profile or particularly important cases could be reheard en banc by a larger panel or the entire court, similar to how it’s currently done in appeals courts.
Before you dismiss this as just another “court packing” scheme, let me explain why it’s fundamentally different from what FDR tried to do in 1937.
FDR’s plan was explicitly designed to shift the ideological balance of the court in his favor. He wanted to add up to six new justices precisely because the existing court kept striking down New Deal programs. The goal was partisan advantage, and everyone knew it. That’s why it failed—even FDR’s own party largely opposed it as a power grab.
What I’m proposing is the opposite. By expanding to at least 100 justices, you’re not packing the court in any ideological direction. You’re diluting the power of any individual justice—or any ideological bloc—to the point where it doesn’t matter nearly as much who gets appointed or when they retire or die. And unlike some reform proposals that would require a constitutional amendment, this one doesn’t. The Constitution doesn’t specify the size of the Supreme Court—Congress has changed it before, from as few as five justices to as many as ten.
Think about it this way: Right now, replacing one justice out of nine can shift the balance of the court from 5-4 one way to 5-4 the other way. That’s an enormous swing from a single personnel change. But if you have 100 justices, and cases are heard by randomized panels of 9, the ideological composition of any given panel becomes much more variable, and the overall composition of the court becomes much more stable over time.
No single president appointing one or two or even ten justices can fundamentally reshape the court. No single justice dying at an inopportune moment can throw constitutional law into chaos. The incentive for presidents to appoint ideological extremists diminishes because no individual justice will be important enough to matter that much.
This is the core principle: No single Supreme Court justice should ever be important enough to matter.
We shouldn’t care who any individual justice is. We shouldn’t have national freakouts when an 87-year-old justice refuses to retire. We shouldn’t have presidents salivating over the actuarial tables of aging justices. The system should be robust enough to absorb personnel changes without lurching wildly in one direction or another.
How would this work in practice? There are several possibilities.
One approach would be to elevate existing appeals court judges to the Supreme Court. This could happen all at once or gradually over time. Given that there are currently around 180 active appeals court judges, drawing from this pool wouldn’t be difficult from a numbers perspective.
Another approach would be a rotating system where appeals court judges serve temporary terms on the Supreme Court. This would actually align with how many other countries structure their highest courts and would create a more fluid relationship between the appellate and Supreme Court levels.
Either approach could be combined with term limits—say, 18 years—for Supreme Court justices. Term limits address a different but related problem: the arbitrary power that comes from lifetime appointments combined with advances in life expectancy. When the Constitution was written, justices served an average of about 15 years. Now they routinely serve 25, 30, or more. Term limits would make appointments more predictable and reduce the incentive for presidents to appoint the youngest possible ideologues who might serve for four decades.
There are additional benefits to this approach beyond diluting individual power.
First, the Supreme Court could actually hear more cases. The court has been steadily shrinking its docket for decades, from around 150 cases per year in the 1980s to around 60-70 today. With multiple panels operating simultaneously, the court could address far more legal questions, reducing the enormous backlog of important issues that never get resolved.
Second, it could help rationalize the federal circuit system. The Ninth Circuit, for example, is a behemoth that covers nine states plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, with more than twice as many judges as the smallest circuits. With a reorganized Supreme Court drawing from an expanded pool of appellate judges, there would be an opportunity to realign the circuits into more sensible and equally-sized units.
Third, randomized panels would undermine the strategic timing that currently shapes which cases reach the court and when. Right now, advocacy groups wait for favorable court compositions before pushing major cases. The Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade didn’t happen by accident in 2022—anti-abortion activists had been deliberately holding back their most aggressive challenges for years, waiting until they knew they had a 6-3 anti-abortion majority locked in. With randomized panels drawn from 100 justices, that kind of strategic patience becomes pointless. You can’t game a court composition you can’t predict.
Now, there are legitimate questions and criticisms of this approach.
Some will argue that a 100-justice court would produce inconsistent rulings—different panels reaching different conclusions on similar issues. This is a real concern, but it’s manageable. En banc review could resolve circuit splits and ensure consistency on the most important questions. And frankly, we already have inconsistency—different circuit courts regularly reach contradictory conclusions that take years to resolve. Also the Supreme Court’s composition continually changes over time, and we still accept the results from different panels. No one sees a problem with relying on cases from half a century ago even though none of the Justices who made those rulings is even alive, let alone on the court, any more.
The most serious objection is political: any expansion would be seen as partisan court packing regardless of intent. This is true. Republicans would scream bloody murder if Democrats expanded the court by 91 justices, no matter how the new seats were filled. But Republicans are already screaming bloody murder about the courts whenever they don’t get their way. The question isn’t whether a reform will be controversial. The question is whether it will actually fix the problem.
The status quo isn’t neutral. A system where individual justices wield enormous power is a system that advantages whoever is best at the long game of judicial appointments. For the past several decades, that’s been Republicans.
Refusing to change a broken system because change might be controversial is just accepting permanent disadvantage while pretending to take the high road. Indeed, for anyone who (falsely) claims that this plan is “packing the court” (a la FDR), it’s the opposite. The Republicans and the Federalist Society spent decades plotting out things to get us where we are today, with a court that is “packed” in favor of their interests.
This is about unpacking the court.
The data from the Times analysis should alarm everyone who cares about an independent judiciary. When 92 percent of a president’s judicial appointees vote in his favor, that’s not impartial justice. That’s a rubber stamp. And when that pattern intensifies the higher you go in the judicial system, culminating in an 88% success rate at the Supreme Court, you have a system that’s been captured.
The solution isn’t to try to capture it for the other side. The solution is to build a system that’s resistant to capture in the first place.
Make the Supreme Court so large that no president can pack it. Make individual justices so interchangeable that none of them become celebrities or villains. Make the system boring. Make it work.
Because right now, we have a Supreme Court where everyone knows exactly who the swing vote is, where entire advocacy organizations are built around influencing specific justices, where presidential elections are decided partly on who might die in the next four years.
That’s not how a functional judicial system in a modern democracy should work. It’s time to unpack the court.
Last May we noted how Verizon was lobbying the Trump administration to eliminate rules making it easier to switch mobile providers (and bring your phone with you). And as usual with the pay-to-play Trump administration, the Trump FCC is tripping over itself to give Verizon what it wants.
The Trump FCC says it is eliminating rules requiring that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network. As part of its lobbying efforts, Verizon has falsely claimed that adhering to the 60 day unlocking requirements is somehow a huge boon to criminals, something Brendan Carr’s industry-coddling FCC parrots in the agency’s announcement:
“[The rule] required one wireless carrier to unlock their handsets well earlier than standard industry practice, thus creating an incentive for bad actors to steal those handsets for purposes of carrying out fraud and other illegal acts.”
This is, you’ll be surprised to learn, a lie.
Older folks might remember that Verizon used to be even more obnoxious on this subject of consumer freedom. Once upon a time, the company banned you from even using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon apps. It also used to be horrendous when it came to unlocking phones, switching carriers, and using the device of your choice on the Verizon network.
Two things changed that. One, back in 2008 when the company acquired spectrum that came with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.
Here you have both a major wireless company and U.S. regulators lying to your face, insisting that killing these basic protections help create a “uniform industry standard that can help stem the flow of handsets into the black market.”
Verizon used to sell phones that were already fully unlocked, but received a waiver from the first Trump administration in 2019 after the company again lied about how making it easier to switch carriers would make it harder to “prevent fraud.”
Ultimately, what Verizon (and its friends at the corrupt FCC) want is zero government oversight whatsoever, taking us back to the days when Verizon could impose any number of obnoxious restrictions designed to harm (device and app) competition and the public interest. They want to bring back the era where you were locked to one provider via locked phones and long-term contracts.
Given enough time and rope, they’ll inevitably push to be able to control what apps and services you can use (read: net neutrality). This desire to exploit telecom monopoly power operates a bit like the physics of running water; it only really goes one direction without functional government oversight.
Because U.S. journalism is a clown show, many outlets are taking Verizon and the FCC’s unsubstantiated claims of increased fraud and parroting them in headlines, like Reuters does here:
In exchange, Verizon obediently acquiesces to administration demands that executives remain quiet while the administration destroys democracy and civil rights, and occasionally makes an effort to try to be more sexist and racist. So far that corrupt symbiosis is working out well for both parties.
Short-lived and IP address certificates are now generally available from Let’s Encrypt. These certificates are valid for 160 hours, just over six days. In order to get a short-lived certificate subscribers simply need to select the ‘shortlived’ certificate profile in their ACME client.
Short-lived certificates improve security by requiring more frequent validation and reducing reliance on unreliable revocation mechanisms. If a certificate’s private key is exposed or compromised, revocation has historically been the way to mitigate damage prior to the certificate’s expiration. Unfortunately, revocation is an unreliable system so many relying parties continue to be vulnerable until the certificate expires, a period as long as 90 days. With short-lived certificates that vulnerability window is greatly reduced.
Short-lived certificates are opt-in and we have no plan to make them the default at this time. Subscribers that have fully automated their renewal process should be able to switch to short-lived certificates easily if they wish, but we understand that not everyone is in that position and generally comfortable with this significantly shorter lifetime. We hope that over time everyone moves to automated solutions and we can demonstrate that short-lived certificates work well.
Our default certificate lifetimes will be going from 90 days down to 45 days over the next few years, as previously announced.
IP address certificates allow server operators to authenticate TLS connections to IP addresses rather than domain names. Let’s Encrypt supports both IPv4 and IPv6. IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important. You can learn more about our IP address certificates and the use cases for them from our post announcing our first IP Certificate.
We’d like to thank the Open Technology Fund and Sovereign Tech Agency, along with our Sponsors and Donors, for supporting the development of this work.
OsmAnd's Topography plugin offers an Avalanche color scheme for the Slope layer, coloring terrain by steepness to highlight potential avalanche risks. This visualizes slope angles intuitively for safer backcountry navigation.
The scheme starts transparent (under 30 deg), then gradients to yellow/orange (30-40 deg) and red/purple (over 40-45 deg high-risk), as shown in the legend—focusing colors on risky slopes only. Powered by precise DEM sources including ALOS (JAXA), MERIT DEM, ArcticDEM, and European LiDAR DTMs—for coverage from 70°N to 70°S and beyond.
Pro tips:
Layer with Contour lines (every 20m) for elevation context.
Stay safe: Colors indicate terrain steepness, not live avalanche risk—combine with forecasts!
We appreciate your interest in us and thank you for taking the time to read this article. Join us on social media to keep up to date with the latest news and share your experiences. Your opinion is important to us.
Once a company hits a plateau in its market share, the pressure begins to mount.
Investors want more of a return, shareholders want the stock price to go up. Managers pay attention to the metrics they’re held to, and the squeeze begins.
At first, the squeeze focuses on efficiency. Cut obvious costs without diminishing customer delight or the conditions that the employees work under.
That doesn’t pay off forever, particularly in competitive markets.
At this point, there are two options:
The first is to reengage with the market. Innovate. Create opportunities for customers to find more opportunities and value. Use the resources you have to make something better.
The other, which is far more common, is to squeeze people–imagining that they might not notice, and then, with full knowledge that they do, but betting that they don’t have much of a choice.
Diminish the quality of life for employees. Demand more, offer less. Increase stress and forget what the original focus of the organization might have been.
Raise prices but lower quality and portion size and service at the same time.
Fedex decided that answering the phone on the first ring, happily honoring their guarantee and bringing extraordinary service to customers wasn’t as important as increasing their bottom line. Phone trees, unattended email boxes and plenty of fine print all exist to squeeze a few more dollars out of their existing sales.
JP Morgan Chase actively chooses to maximize short-term profit, betting that customers are too entrenched to switch. They’ll invest in coal, amplify credit card debt and outsource whatever they can to increase their margins.
If you use either of these companies, or any of their peers, can you honestly say that they care more and deliver more value than they used to?
Cory Doctorow describes the monopolistic dead ends built into most corporate financing schemes. Enshittification isn’t the decay that comes from neglect. It’s the active squeeze, trading the path of better for the short-term goal of making a few more pennies.
When an organization races to the top, they’re very clear about what they’re doing. They’ll engage their team and the market in a mutual dance toward possibility and improvement.
But when an organization is focused on the squeeze, they know precisely what they’re doing, but will obfuscate and deny instead of admitting it.
The F-Droid website has not been refreshed since January 5th due to some infrastructure issues, hence new apps and new updates were delayed to be listed. If you can read this it means we fixed it.
Meanwhile, as usual, we recommend the usage of F-Droid client or F-Droid Basic to get info on new apps and timely app updates as expected.
This also means our last week post was not published, so this week… it’s a big longer.
Community News
We are always glad to hear people use F-Droid, but if you see our app installed on some device you weren’t expecting to feature it, please do ping us.
Aurora Store was updated to 4.8.0, as Beta for now, so you either update manually or enable Betas from the app page menu. Android 6 is now the minimum supported, it also adds Material Design Expressive theme and brings filters back.
BasicCashFlow was updated to 2.0 but also brings a signing key change. Unfortunately there’s no way to export data so if you decide to uninstall and then install the update, you’ll need to add your data again from scratch.
Cfait was updated to 407 but it also had an application ID change. You’ll get this info in the app the next time you open it. The new one, named the same, was just included, so make sure you take the jump to Cfait, Powerful, fast and elegant TODO / task manager (CalDAV and local).
FairScan – PDF Scanner was updated to 1.10.0 adding a feature you might want your favorite developer to include: scanning from other apps. It basically means some other app, say your messaging app, might detect that you have FairScan installed (or even ask for it) and offer a button to “Scan as PDF”. How that came to be can be read in this post, but their blog has more app development insights posts that make for a good read.
Fennec F-Droid was updated to 147.0.0 and the changelog looks uneventful. Yet we see a bit of new design around the start page and the new added tab bar, so something is being worked on. Psst, you are still here? So, the thing is that the design changes are way more deeper that those two features above and are all hidden in the secret menu. No joke, that’s its name. So, make sure no one is looking first. Ready? Go to Fennec Settings, scroll down to About, touch the Fennec icon 5 times and do a pirouette. Now go back to settings, and scroll down to the new Secret Settings (!!). There are many things listed here, we’ll just toggle the ones we know are safe and fun: “Composable Toolbar” (main one), “Toolbar Customisation” (setting for one button) and “Tab Manager enhancements” (new tabs view).
Litube was updated to 2.0.1 after a 5 month absence. It brings a native Android player, Picture-in-Picture support, improved performance, a Download Manager, a better live chat UI and more.
Meshtastic was updated to 2.7.10 (29319661) fdroid. We recently saw a nice description of how its whole ecosystem is working in a, yes Youtube, video. If you wondered if it fits your decentralized workflow, now you might find out.
Neo Store was updated to 1.2.1, and besides the usual fixes we noticed a change that we salute: “Update: Enable mirror-rotation by default for F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid”. F-Droid Client has supported mirror rotation for years, making downloads faster and relieving the pressure on main servers, and while NeoStore supported mirrors for a while now, users needed to know about this feature and toggle it to ON by themselves in Settings.
NewPipe was updated to 0.28.1 with a long list of changes and the crash fixes are welcomed.
Oblivion, Remote lock and wipe triggers for compromised or unattended devices, had an application ID change. If you’ve installed it before yesterday make sure to uninstall it and install the new Oblivion app.
Syncthing-Fork was updated to 2.0.13.0 and it’s mostly fixes. If you’ve followed the fork drama in the last months maybe take a look at what has changed and decide to update.
Traffic Light was updated to 2.8 with a new signing key. You’ve installed this is the past? Better uninstall and install the new update.
Small sneak peek here, in the next major client update these type of issues, and more, will be highlighted for you to see and action as needed.
WebLibre: The Privacy-Focused Browser was updated to 0.9.30 with the codebase of Firefox 146.0.1. The changes are numerous but two caught our eye as major pain points in our own Fennec, first: “Added encrypted profile backup and restore system with password protection” and second: “Added bookmark import/export functionality”. The full changelog is here.
AntennaPod was updated to 3.11.0 featuring one of the most requested features: in addition to stopping the sleep timer after X minutes, you can now configure it to stop after X episodes. Also, more users now get the modern bottom navigation interface and more.
Libre Camera got a new release 2.0.1 after a pause of two years. What’s new? Too much to convey here: now using CameraX API (better device support), more settings, HEIC support, performance improvements, better translations and more.
Removed Apps
5 more apps were removed
Aster Launcher: minimalist productivity launcher
Identify Dog Breeds Pro: Identify dog breeds with your smartphone
Kmtemplate: Organize tasks effortlessly across all your devices with Kmtemplate (We have a lot of notes apps, this one still needs to provide what it promises)
SmartScan: Search images and videos offline using text or by reverse image search (Upstream archived the source, but they’ve reached out to us and we hope it will make a comeback)
ZipXtract FD: ZipXtract can extract and create archive
Newly Added Apps
38 more apps were newly added
Before you read the list, huge thanks to @linsui for taking the time over the holidays to review so many new apps waiting for inclusion. Due to the website issue, some of these already even got updates.
AI Hub: All your AI tools together in one simple app
It has already been 5 years since UnifiedPush started! It also means I don’t have any Play Services, the official or microG reimplementation, for 5 years now. It is a good moment to do a recap, and think about what can be UnifiedPush in 5 years.
It turns out I don’t remember in details how all started, I need to read
some historical pull requests and chats.
Why do I need push notifications?
I think I’ve installed my first alternative ROM,
LineageOS, around 2013, and never went back to
stock ROMs since then. At this time, I didn’t really care about the apps I
was installing, it was mainly to take control of my devices and get rid of
the bloatwares.
I understood that I needed the Play Services, or a reimplementation, for
some applications to properly work, and I was vaguely knowing why. So, every
time I updated my phone, I had to boot into the custom recovery (TWRP), to
flash a zip, to get microG. It was, well .. not the best user experience.
Then, I tried to stay without the Play Services, it was even worse, messages
weren’t reliable, the battery drained and there were many foreground
notifications, which I understood were required to keep a service running.
So I decided to go with a fork of LineageOS that includes microG by default,
and distributed by microG team: LineageOS for
microG.
Even after using this new system, the experience was nearly the same. Why?
Because most of my apps were from F-Droid. Push notifications with Google
(via microG) require the use of a proprietary library *, which comes with
telemetry, unless explicitly configured to exclude them. F-Droid deny this
library, which is fair given that their purpose is to promote free software.
So, we’re in 2020, and I finally want to look why I can’t use microG with
Fedilab and Element from F-Droid, and if we can replace microG with another
notification app.
It turns out among others notification applications, F-Droid distributes
Gotify. It isn’t able to forward notifications to
other apps, but there is an issue opened for that
feature, and jmattheis,
the developer seems open to the idea.
I didn’t touch any Android dev at this moment, but I tried to hack
something. Fortunately, jmattheis review helped a lot to make things
less hacky. So here came gotify-connector.
It looks like from the pull request history that “connector” comes from
jmattheis, for which I added “distributor” later.
At this moment, the feature has picked the interest of some persons,
including sorunome, karmanyaahm and sparchatus. Sorunome,
contributor to FluffyChat, told me that the feature may interest people in
OpenPush Matrix room.
First UnifiedPush version (2020)
Late 2020, looking at some p2p projects, I thought it would be cool having a
p2p based solution too. So came the questions about ecosystem lock-in of a
Gotify only solution, adoption, and fragmentation. If we have multiple
applications able to provide push notifications, we should have a library
that is compatible with all of them. When a new application providing push
notifications is published, then all existing applications supporting the
thing would be directly compatible. Going that way, we needed to specify
how it should work first.
I shared the idea in OpenPush room, and it picked the interest of someone in
particular, sparchatus, who helped me to write the specifications. We
discussed many edge cases to see how things could be.
I published a first version of the specifications, a library, and a fork of
Gotify until the support was merged *.
Sorunome was interested in implementing the support in Fluffychat. It required a flutter lib, karmanyaahm wrote a lib porting the already published library to the framework. We also needed something to translate Matrix push protocol, and make Gotify server compatible: karmanyaahm wrote common-proxies for this.
* Which actually never happened 🤷
FluffyChat, Fedilab, and more (2021)
Early 2021, FluffyChat was supporting
UnifiedPush. And soon came Fedilab too, as the dev,
Thomas, was directly interested.
Starting with these 2 applications was a chance for the project: we had
support for Matrix, and many other chats using Matrix bridges, and for the
Fediverse. This covered enough applications for some FOSS
enthusiasts. Retrospectively, UnifiedPush may never have started without
these 2 applications.
After that, some applications started to implement the feature, such as a
Tox application, or
FMD, a FOSS solution to find your device.
Mid 2021, I implemented UnifiedPush support for
Element, which was soon
merged by
SchildiChat, a
fork. I think the experience from SchildiChat helped for it being merged
into Element mid 2022.
UnifiedPush for Linux (mid 2021)
At this moment, vurpo came to UnifiedPush Matrix room to talk about push
notifications for Linux devices. So we had UnifiedPush for Linux by
mirroring the specifications for Android to D-Bus IPC.
ntfy, NextPush (2021)
During 2021, a new project appeared on the Internet:
ntfy. A project like Gotify, that can work without any
account, with a public server. The app is extremely easy to use, as you have
nothing to set up. And the developer, binwiederhier, was directly
interested in supporting UnifiedPush, to make ntfy a distributor.
Merged early 2022, it was an important step for UnifiedPush: we have a
distributor to recommend by default.
I have also implemented
NextPush at the same
period, giving an easy opportunity to self-host a push server, if you
already host a Nextcloud server
In the same time, Gotify developer informed us that they finally prefer not
to merge the support, as they don’t use it and prefer to avoid adding
maintenance to their project, which is perfectly understandable. With this
new position, the official support of UnifiedPush by ntfy, and the new
NextPush app, I preferred to discontinued Gotify forks as well.
KUnifiedPush (mid 2022)
Mid 2022, the KDE team, and particularly vkrause,
published KUnifiedPush: a
distributor for Linux, compatible with different push server, like ntfy or
NextPush. Until then, we only had POC implementations of distributors for
Linux. KUnifiedPush also provide libraries for KDE applications.
This allowed Linux applications to finally support the protocol.
Full-time on UnifiedPush (2024 - 2025)
At the end of 2023, we have more than 20 applications supporting
UnifiedPush, and another distributor:
Conversations. Element being
probably the one with the larger user base at this moment. Someone advised
me to apply for a grant with NLnet, as it would boost
development of the project.
During the application process with NLnet, COVESA
reached me because they wanted to support the project, but needed a few
features that weren’t present, to get a more robust authorization mechanism
and avoid registration spamming.
UnifiedPush has always been compatible with web push (RFC8030 and RFC8291
but RFC8292, aka VAPID, wasn’t). Embracing the standard to require web push
was a potential step to take. The specifications needed to be updated in
that direction, to require encryption (RFC8291) and to handle authorizations
with VAPID (RFC8292). Relying on standard will hopefully help for the
adoption, as the server side implementation may be used for web applications
in the same time.
At the end of 2024, I’ve started working full-time on UnifiedPush.
Working with COVESA also allowed to get
Sunup, a distributor using Mozilla’s
push server, autopush,
and to add a self-hostable backend for autopush. This feature is currently
being merged.
NLnet gave the opportunity to polish many things that were pending, to add a
migration feature to the protocol, which can be used to get a fallback
service when your self-hosted server is down, to implement the actual web
push specifications on Mastodon, and to add web push/UnifiedPush to some
applications. It includes Fennec/IronFox, forks of Firefox, so we can now
get push notifications with web applications. It also includes SimpleX
(being merged), Nextcloud (being merged), DeltaChat (TODO), and flatline
(TODO), a self-hostable version of Signal server, hopefully upstreamed to
Signal servers.
The idea is to increase the network effect: the more applications support
UnifiedPush, the more UnifiedPush can be relevant for users, and the more
users will use UnifiedPush. If the number of UnifiedPush users increases, it
pushes applications’ developers to support the protocol. At the end, we can
use our phone with the push service we want, to get an expected user
experience even without the Play Services.
Retrospective
It was by chance that I started UnifiedPush and the project would never have
existed without other projects like F-Droid, Gotify, Matrix, Fluffychat or
Fedilab, and many more, without the help of many people.
I think it shows how the FOSS ecosystem can be beneficial for everyone. I
develop Sunup, but often contribute to ntfy. The projects could be seen as
“concurrent”, but aren’t: the applications answer different needs. We don’t
have anything to win or lose if a user chose one app over the other. But we
all win if a user chose to use one, no matter which, as it increases the
network effect.
If UnifiedPush wasn’t started 5 years ago, I’m sure an equivalent project
would have started since then. This is something that was awaited in the
mobile FOSS community, and there were already some research work on the
subject.
I wasn’t aware how many things were implied with push notifications. It is
understandable that giving a single entity the capacity to provide such an
important feature give them incredible power. This is concerning when their
solution doesn’t follow least-privilege policies, come with system rights,
has access to the full system, and with “features” we don’t want, such as
advertisement and telemetry.
I now understand why push servers may be a tool for mass surveillance and
how an open solution is important for resilience. Some networks exist
outside the Internet, some regions in the world suffer from services block,
some users may be banned from these services. When a service is controlled
by a single entity, nothing can be done when they consider your device too
old to be supported. Offering an open alternative is a response to all these
problems.
The idea is not to move everyone to an open solution, but to give the
freedom to. Supporting these alternatives also reduces risks of power abuse
from Google. If you develop an application, ask yourself how fast could you
recover from being banned by Google?
Working full-time on UnifiedPush is incredible. I’m extremely happy a
foundation like NLnet exists. I hope my work is beneficial for the project
and for most of the users. When it all started, I didn’t imagine a second I
could work on this, I just wanted my Matrix and Mastodon notifications
without the Play Services.
I would love to continue working daily on UnifiedPush, and there are
probably tons of things to do, specially for Linux devices, and many apps to
port the feature to. But NLnet funds aren’t unlimited, our main goals are
reached - improving the protocol, improving the existing code and
documentation, boosting the network effect on Android -, and I don’t want to
take the potential place of another project.
Among other things, we still need to improve libraries for UnifiedPush on
Linux, and it’d be great to have a UI for KUnifiedPush to publish it on
Flatpak. There are some important applications, such as Mozilla sync
service, that use an allow-list of authorized push servers, defeating the
purpose of self-hosting: it would be great implementing a better anti-SSRF
mechanism. We will probably have to build these blocks and others
together. If you want to contribute, do not hesitate to PM on
Mastodon or join UnifiedPush matrix
room.
UnifiedPush in 5 years
The best thing that could happen to UnifiedPush on Android in 5 years would
be for it to no longer exist.
If Android gives us a system API to let the user define their push service
we wouldn’t need UnifedPush anymore. Passkeys (API to login without
passwords), used to be provided by the Play Services only. Today, probably
to increase the adoption, Android has migrated to a system API (Credential
Provider),
to allow any password manager to provide the service. With a Push Service
API, UnifiedPush would have kind of been integrated into the OS. The
applications would receive push endpoints like we do, and they would send
web push requests, following standards, like web applications does, like
UnifiedPush does. Migration from UnifiedPush would be minimal.
If we manage to have such a Push Service API, we can expect many more apps
supporting the feature. And we will finally be able to choose the services
we want to trust.
Hopefully, working on UnifiedPush can push in that direction by increasing
the demand, and highlighting the need.
On Linux, I think the adoption depends a lot on how the mobile Linux
ecosystem evolves. I personally think and wishes that it goes in the right
direction. And I think a lot of things can happen in 5 years on the matter.
First, the site lost control over its original annas-archive.org domain after the U.S.-based Public Interest Registry (PIR) placed it on serverHold.
PIR typically only takes these kinds of measures based on a court order. However, when we asked for more details, the registry informed us that it was “unable to comment on the situation at this time,” only adding to the mystery.
A few days ago, the domain trouble continued when Anna’s Archive’s .SE domain suddenly became unresponsive after being operational for years. For this domain, the registrar took action, as the site was put on clientHold. While we tried to get additional information from the registrar, our requests remained unanswered.
While it is clear that ‘something’ is going on, it’s not clear what. The troubles started not long after Anna’s Archive announced that it had backed up Spotify, but there is no concrete link to a music industry push against the site.
OCLC Seeks Permanent Injunction
What we do know for certain is that Anna’s Archive’s troubles are not over yet. Yesterday, a federal court in Ohio issued a default judgment and permanent injunction against the site’s unidentified operator(s).
This order was requested by OCLC, which owns the proprietary WorldCat database that was scraped and published by Anna’s Archive more than two years ago. OCLC initially demanded millions of dollars in damages but eventually dropped this request, focusing on taking the site down through an injunction that would also apply to intermediaries.
“Anna’s Archive’s flagrantly illegal actions have damaged and continue to irreparably damage OCLC. As such, issuance of a permanent injunction is necessary to stop any further harm to OCLC,” the request read.
This pivot makes sense since Anna’s Archive did not respond to the lawsuit and would likely ignore all payment demands too. However, with the right type of court order, third-party services such as hosting companies and domain registrars might come along.
Court Grants Default Judgment
The permanent injunction, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Watson yesterday, does not mention any third-party services by name. However, it is directed at all parties that are “in active concert and participation with” Anna’s Archive.
Specifically, the site’s operator and these third parties are prohibited from scraping WorldCat data, storing or distributing the data on Anna’s Archive websites, and encouraging others to store, use or share this data.
Additionally, the site has to delete all WorldCat data, which also includes all torrents.
The order
Judge Watson denied the default judgment for ‘unjust enrichment’ and ‘tortious interference.’ However, he granted the order based on the ‘trespass to chattels’ and ‘breach of contract’ claims.
The latter is particularly noteworthy, as the judge ruled that because Anna’s Archive is a ‘sophisticated party’ that scraped the site daily, it had constructive notice of the terms and entered into a ‘browsewrap‘ agreement simply by using the service.
While these nuances are important for legal experts, the result for Anna’s Archive is that it lost. And while there are no monetary damages, the permanent injunction can certainly have an impact.
More Trouble Ahead?
It is expected that OCLC will use the injunction to motivate third-party intermediaries to take action against Anna’s Archive.
Whether intermediaries are considered in “active concert” with Anna’s Archive will differ based on who you ask. However, OCLC previously said that it intends to “take the
judgment to website hosting services to remove WorldCat data from Anna’s Archive’s websites”.
The injunction that was issued yesterday obviously cannot explain the earlier domain name troubles. That said, it’s not unthinkable that OCLC will also send the injunction to domain registrars and registries, to add further pressure.
—
A copy of the opinion and order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Watson is available here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/stfu
Anna’s Archive has had its fair share of domain troubles over the past two weeks.