ABC/Disney, like most major media companies, has spent much of its time during America’s bout with authoritarianism being a feckless wimp. The company was quick to ditch its already fleeting embrace of civil rights to please our dim, racist president, and were just as quick to pay Trump a $15 million bribe to settle a baseless Trump lawsuit they could have easily won.
But as Trump’s health and power becomes more shaky, ABC appears to be showing the faint outline of a backbone.
ABC/Disney execs are now more directly accusing the Trump administration of violating the First Amendment with its endless threats to pull the company’s broadcast licenses if it platforms journalists, comedians, or talk show hosts who refuse to kiss the administration’s ass.
Quick background: we’ve noted repeatedly how Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has been abusing the FCC’s dated “equal opportunity” (or “equal time”) rule to try and threaten daytime and late night talk shows with government retribution if they refuse to enthusiastically coddle Republicans.
Recently, the Carr FCC took the unprecedented step of demanding that ABC-owned Houston affiliate KTRK file a petition for declaratory ruling to the FCC, explaining to the agency why it didn’t file the appropriate paperwork for a February 2nd appearance by Democrat James Talarico on The View (the traction Talarico is making among Christians clearly seems to worry the administration).
So KTRK last week filed their petition for declaratory ruling. And it shows slightly more backbone that we’ve become used to, directly stating that the Trump FCC’s actions violate the First Amendment and are having a “chilling effect” on free speech. While the petition is technically on behalf of KTRK, it was signed by Paul Clement, a former Bush-era solicitor general and very experienced Supreme Court litigator.
Talk shows have historically been exempt from the dated, golden-era-of-television rules, which required that any airing of a political candidate on “publicly owned” airwaves is countered with the appearance from a candidate from the opposing party. But Carr isn’t interested in equilibrium; he’s interested abusing FCC authority to try and silence critics of Donald Trump and his increasingly unpopular policies.
ABC’s notice to the FCC notes that the target of the administration’s censorial rage, The View, was clearly granted a Bona Fide Exemption to the rule back in 2002. Most talk shows have broadly been viewed as exempt since 1984 or so (and increasingly so, as the Internet challenged TV’s supremacy). From the ABC filing:
“The View has been broadcasting under a bona fide news exemption granted to it more than twenty years ago, consistent with longstanding Commission interpretations designed to minimize the serious First Amendment problems inherent in the equal time regime. The View’s exemption remains valid and the constitutional infirmities in the equal time doctrine are even more pronounced today, when the broadcast airwaves account for a slice of the numerous media options through which Americans get their political information.”
Carr’s FCC has also been threatening to pull ABC’s broadcast licenses in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel making fun of the president’s wife; but as we’ve previously reported, ABC only holds eight broadcast licenses in total; most in reality are owned by right wing affiliate companies already loyal to Trumpism.
Here’s an interesting bit of note: It appears that the Carr FCC staged things in advance with the help of those affiliates to make ABC-owned KTRK seem like it was doing something wrong.
First, the FCC tried to tell ABC and KTRK that The View being widely viewed as exempt is “not a position uniformly held by broadcasters that air the program” (it is).
But on pages 3-4 of ABC’s filing, they note that not only did those other affiliates not originally file the paperwork for the appearance (because there’s no need to given their exemption), the FCC personally reached out to a number of non-ABC owned affiliates to have them file paperwork late so it would appear that the ABC-owned KTRK was an outlier that did something wrong. From ABC’s filing:
“The Bureau neglected to note, however, that while certain ABC affiliates documented Talarico’s appearance in their online public inspection files, the filings were made more than two weeks after Talarico’s appearance and apparently at the request of the FCC, which reportedly promised to eschew enforcement for the late filing. KTRK Television received no such request and no such offer, despite the Bureau specifically contacting it about the Talarico appearance less than 10 days after it occurred.”
So again, the FCC accused ABC and its directly owned affiliate of something false, then told non-ABC owned affiliates to file paperwork they never would have otherwise planned to if they wanted merger approval to make it seem like KTRK did something wrong. And since a lot of these affiliates are already very Trump-friendly propaganda mills, the FCC likely didn’t have to apply much pressure.
While it’s always possible the Trump-stocked Supreme Court makes an insane ruling in Trump’s favor, these threats to pull broadcast licenses are not fights the Trump FCC wants to actually litigate. They’re designed to simply be a form of harassment that makes life so costly and difficult for companies that threat targets — and everybody else — just pre-emptively bows to pressure to censor.
Trump and Carr expect companies to pre-emptively quiver and not put up a costly fight. And while these threats have worked for a while (because our corporate media is broadly opportunistic and pathetic), Trump’s abysmal poll numbers in the wake of the Iran war and soaring gas prices are likely instilling new confidence even among the most weak-kneed companies.
Long after the fact, these are the best kind. They remind us of how far we’ve come. They’re proof that not giving up was a good idea. They are fuel for the next thing.
But, at the time, they’re pretty hard to live with.
All we can do is remind ourselves that it’s an unskippable part of a useful journey.
Hello friends!
We are excited to announce a new feature that allows you to sync your activities from Garmin Connect™ with OsmAnd. This integration, now available for OsmAnd Pro users, enables you to automatically import your Garmin activities and view them in the Tracks section under a new folder called "Garmin Connect."
You can now easily access your Garmin activities within OsmAnd to use them for navigation, analysis, or sharing. This update makes it simpler to keep all your outdoor adventures in one place and seamlessy integrate your Garmin data with OsmAnd’s mapping tools.
First, you need to sign in to OsmAnd web using an active OsmAnd Pro subscription. Then you will need to connect your Garmin Connect™ account with OsmAnd Web. Once connected, OsmAnd will automatically sync your activities from Garmin Connect™ and create a new folder called "Garmin Connect" in the Tracks section. All your synced activities will be stored in this folder, allowing you to easily access and manage them.
You will be redirected to the Garmin Connect™ login page. Enter your Garmin Connect™ credentials and authorize OsmAnd to access your Garmin Connect™ account. Here you can choose sharing of Historical data (see details below). Click to "Save" button for continuation.
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Historic data: You can sync activities from the past 30 days by enabling this option on the Garmin Connect™ authorization page. Please note that activities older than 30 days cannot be imported automatically.
After successful authorization, you will see the Garmin Connect™ menu in your OsmAnd Web account with two section - "My data" and "Settings".
"My data" section contains "Synced activities" folder with all synced activities from Garmin Connect™, button "Last synced" activity, and Button "View on Garmin Connect™" that will redirect to your Garmin Connect™ account.
In "Settings" section you can choose type of activities to sync and the disconnecting button.
All your synced activities from Garmin Connect™ will be stored in the "Garmin Connect" folder in the Tracks section.
info
All new activities from Garmin Connect™ will be automatically synced with OsmAnd Web and added to the "Garmin Connect" folder. If you don't see your new activities in OsmAnd Web, please check that you have new activities available on your Garmin Connect™ account.
You can view, analyze, and manage your activities directly within OsmAnd Web. This integration allows you to have all your outdoor adventures in one place, making it easier to track your progress and share your experiences with friends.
The "Garmin Connect" tracks folder will be synced with OsmAnd mobile app, so you can also access your Garmin activities on the go. This means that you can view your Garmin activities on your mobile device and use them for navigation, analysis, or sharing with friends while you're out exploring.
The "Last synced" activity button opens last synced activity from Garmin Connect™ in OsmAnd Web. This allows you to quickly access your most recent activity and view it in detail.
The "View on Garmin Connect™" button will redirect you to your Garmin Connect™ account Activities page, where you can view your activities in more detail and access additional features provided by Garmin Connect™.
Not all activities from Garmin Connect™ may be synced with OsmAnd Web. Currently, only activites types what you choose in "Settings" > "Activites to sync" section will be synced.
Here you can choose which types of activities to sync with OsmAnd Web. Go to "Settings" > "Activities to sync" and select the activity types you want to sync.
After selecting the activity types, OsmAnd Web will automatically sync only those activities from your Garmin Connect™ account that match the selected types. This allows you to customize your syncing preferences and ensure that only relevant activities are imported into OsmAnd Web.
For disconnecting your Garmin Connect™ account from OsmAnd Web, go to "Settings" > "Disconnect" and click on the "Disconnect" button. This will revoke the access of OsmAnd Web to your Garmin Connect™ account and stop any further syncing of activities.
Your tracks from Garmin Connect™ will remain in the "Garmin Connect" folder in the Tracks section of your OsmAnd Web account, but no new activities will be synced until you reconnect your Garmin Connect™ account.
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.
Yesterday, I attended a workshop on systems thinking and political change, which included a presentation on the work of Donella Meadows, whose Thinking in Systems is a canonical work on the subject:
"Systems thinking" is an analytical framework that treats the world as a mesh of interconnected, nonlinear components and relationships that can't be easily understood or steered. A complex system isn't merely "complicated." A mechanical watch is complicated, in that it has many parts that work together in ways that require training and specialized knowledge to understand. But it isn't "complex" because each part has a specific function that can be understood and adjusted.
In a complex system – say, an ecosystem – the parts are meshed in a web of unobvious relationships that make it difficult to predict what effect will follow from a given perturbation. When a blight kills off a plant species, the soil stability declines, resulting in landslides during the rainy season, changing the mineral content of nearby waterways, which creates microbial blooms or fish die-offs in a distant, downstream lake.
But systems thinking isn't a counsel of despair that insists that you shouldn't do anything because you can never predict what will come of your actions. In Thinking in Systems, Meadows presents a hierarchy of leverage points for changing a system, ranked from least effective ("Constants, numbers, parameters") to most ("The power to shift paradigms to deal with new challenges"):
In all, Meadows theorizes 12 different "places to intervene in a system." The least effective of these – constants like taxes and standards, negative and positive feedback loops – are the sites of most of our political fights, and rightly so. They are the fine-tuning knobs of the system that adjust its margins. Once you have the rule of law ("the rules of the system"), you can drive change by amending, repealing or passing a law:
But when you're confronted with a system that is significantly, persistently dysfunctional, you will likely have to work at sites that are further up the hierarchy, such as "the distribution of power over the rules of the system" or "the goals of the system"; or the most profound of all, "the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises."
Thinking about paradigms is a form of "meta-cognition," which is to say, "thinking about how you think." Your paradigm encompasses all your assumptions, including your assumptions about how to proceed from your other assumptions: "if x, then y" is a paradigm.
The workshop where we were discussing all of this is part of a group whose goal is reversing the antidemocratic movement in our society and the climate emergency that is its backdrop. But as I listened to the speaker and the ensuing discussion, it occurred to me that Meadows' theoretical work was a very good way of describing the successes of the fascist movement in the UK and around the world.
Fascists like Farage and Trump are, at their root, anti-democratic. Their pitch is that the people are incapable of self-determination (as Peter Thiel puts it, "democracy is incompatible with freedom"). They want us to think that all our neighbors are irrational and foolish, and that we, too, are irrational and foolish, and that our safety and prosperity can only be safeguarded if we seek out those few people who are born to rule and liberate them from the petty niceties and regulations that democracy and the rule of law demand.
In other words, the paradigm of democracy is that all of us are capable of both wise self-governance and self-rationalized misgovernance, and each of us has a useful perspective to contribute. The fascist paradigm is that we can't be trusted to rule ourselves, and only the people who are born with "good blood" are capable of directing our lives:
This is the theory behind "race realism" and "human diversity" and all the other polite names the modern fascist uses to obscure the fact that they're reviving eugenics. It explains the panic over DEI, a panic driven by the belief that lesser people are being elevated to positions of rule and authority that they are genetically incapable of carrying out.
That's why, whenever a disaster arises, fascists demand to know the gender, race and sexual orientation of the pilot, the ship's captain, or the official in charge. If the person who crashed the cargo ship into the bridge has brown skin, we can add another line to the ledger of costs associated with the doomed project to put people who were born to be bossed around in the boss's seat (of course, if the pilot turns out to be a white guy, that proves nothing, except that mistakes sometimes happen).
The revival of fascism in this century has been scarily effective, and at times it can feel unstoppable. Meadows' work on systems thinking provides an explanation for that efficacy – and suggests a theory of change for dispatching fascism back to the graveyard of history. Fascists have made changes to things like laws and feedback loops, rules and distribution of power, but this all stems from a more profound alteration to the system, at the level of the paradigm.
Which suggests that the real fight we have is over that paradigm: we have to convince our neighbors that they are smart enough to rule themselves, and so are we, and so is everyone else. We have to convince them that even the smartest and wisest person (including us, including them) is capable of folly and needs to have checks on their (our) authority.
We need to attack the theory of the "unitary executive" and every other autocratic ideology head on. We have to insist that these aren't just unconstitutional, but that they are ideologically catastrophic. "No kings," because even an omnibenevolent king isn't omniscient, and that means that omnipotence is always omnidestructive in the long run.
The fascist revival has been scarily effective and resilient – and systems thinking offers an explanation for both that efficacy and that resiliency.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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.
In Malaysia, Astro has been the dominant pay-TV operator that held the FIFA World Cup broadcast rights since the early 2000s.
During the previous tournaments in Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022), the company marketed itself as “the Home of the World Cup” but that changed for the 2026 tournament this summer.
Last week, Malaysia’s Minister of Communications, Datuk Fahmi Fadzil, announced that the 2026 World Cup rights had gone to public broadcaster Radio Televisyen Malaysia and IPTV service Unifi TV, which is operated by Telekom Malaysia.
This means that, with help from the government, which paid RM24 million for the rights (~$6.1 million), many Malaysians will have access to free streams.
Shortly after the deal was announced, Astro confirmed that it lost the rights. While the company said that it remains determined to be the home for Malaysian sports fans, paying millions of dollars for the broadcasting rights was not economically viable.
Astro: Piracy Devalued Broadcast Rights
Unlike the publicly funded broadcaster RTM, Astro would have had to recoup its investment in the World Cup rights commercially. That’s a significant challenge, according to the broadcaster, which explains that rights costs and piracy are both on the rise.
“Rising costs, driven by inflation and escalating international sports broadcasting rights, have significantly increased the financial investment required,” the company wrote.
“Meanwhile, rampant piracy has diminished the value of such rights to all legitimate platforms. In particular, the 2018 and 2022 World Cup were extensively pirated events in Malaysia,” the broadcaster added in its press release.
It is rare for a major broadcaster to publicly cite online piracy as one of the reasons why their bid for the licensing rights has reached a clear ceiling. They clearly believe that at the current price point, piracy has eroded the value of the broadcast rights too much.
Piracy Might Drop Now
Intriguingly, piracy could drop significantly now that Astro no longer has the FIFA World Cup broadcasting rights. Through MyTV, matches will be publicly available to millions of Malaysians rather than sitting behind a paywall. That removes one of the strongest piracy incentives: the costs.
Competing with piracy is much easier for a public broadcaster with government funding, which can offer matches for free. As a result, people who pirated the World Cup in 2018 and 2022 may now move back to freely available licensed broadcasts, lowering the piracy rate.
Of course, those piracy rates could easily pick up again when matches end up behind a paywall in the future.
Piracy Incentives in China, India, and Elsewhere
With roughly a month until kickoff, FIFA has reportedly finalized broadcast deals in more than 175 territories, but final agreements have yet to be signed in China and India.
Reports suggest that disagreements about FIFA’s licensing fees have proven to be a stumbling block. With billions of views at stake, these countries are two of FIFA’s most important markets in terms of audience demand.
This demand would not simply disappear when there are no formal broadcasters. Instead, it would redirect to unofficial streaming, including pirate ones. This adds an interesting element to the negotiations, as rightsholders and FIFA certainly don’t want to breed piracy habits.
For now, the FIFA World Cup begins on June 11, with broadcasts through both legal and pirate channels. Whether 2026 turns out to be the most pirated World Cup yet has yet to be seen.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
We also fixed our website generation, as build cycles added apps updates, new apps and posts, yet these were not published on the website (but available in the client!). It appears our huge mix of more apps and more languages takes a toll on memory usage. It took a bit longer to debug with our server hoster (Thanks OSUOSL for your quick reaction and support!) as the process was locking the machine up in the same locale sending us on a wild-goose chase. Things cleared up when we “downloaded more RAM” so to speak.
Diet: Nutrition, calorie, food management and tracker Health Manager: Manager weight, heart rate, blood pressure, menstruation and other health metrics Schedule: Schedule for conference and event Text to Speech: TTS tools Time Tracker: Track time usage on activities and screen time
…and more waiting for review. Our goal is to make discovering new apps easier, thanks to our client 2.0 search improvements that help users explore the catalogue. In due time huge categories like Internet and Multimedia might go away since apps are already covered by more granular ones.
Community News
We covered Conversations and now Quicksy changes in 2.19.16+free in last week’s post, but that one got delayed. Go read it as you might find that the new files storage workflow impacts you.
Mindustry was updated to 8-fdroid-157.4 with some nice changes and more fixes followed. But our first build was crashing so we had to fix it and rebuilt it. If you’ve already updated to the crashing version you can fix this without losing your progress by either upgrading to the next update or, in the meantime, by downloading the fixed package directly and installing it.
Nora was updated to 0.7.0 but it’s crashing. Upstream is aware, tracking the issue here, and we’re going to remove the faulty versions in the next cycles. If you did not update yet make sure to skip this version (in F-Droid or Basic, app details, upper right menu, “skip this update”).
Are you the lucky citizen of a firewalled country? Well, we can’t say congrats, but we can provide tools to ease some of that pain. Usually we could recommend a proxy-server-app-url-thing, but maybe that’s hard to reach too. The newly added Lumine, A lightweight local HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy server protects TLS connections over TCP, tries to achieve the same level of Internet freedom by running the proxy on the device. Based on the, now archived TLSFragment, it gets a rewritten faster core, subscriptions, management UI and more.
Murine Launcher, A modern, lightweight Launcher3 fork for an enhanced stock++ experience, was just added. We had trouble packaging Launcher3-based launchers for years. But now we get one! With the help of AI the dev successfully generated stubs for the framework jar which was the main blocker for packaging. This also opens the door for more Launcher3-based launchers. Would you like to help?
SimpleX Chat was updated to 6.5.1polishing the experience. But the big news came last week in 6.5.0 with added public channels, safe web links, and more. The developers also wrote about how public channels work and about the financial future of the project in a detailed post.
Snowflake Volunteer, Help people in censored countries access the Internet without restrictions, was added. What’s Snowflake? Snowflake allows people to connect to the Tor network in places where Tor is blocked by routing the connection through volunteer run proxies located in uncensored countries. Similar to VPNs, which help users bypass Internet censorship, Snowflake disguises the Internet activity as a video or voice call, making users less detectable to Internet censors. What does the app do? It allows you to act as the proxy for those in need of one, yet this does not expose you as you are just an entry-node in their path through the Tor network. Thank you for supporting Internet freedom around the world, from your pocket!
Though the official Syncthing Android client went to “development hell”, we still have a fork of it. And since then, there were two more clients added, BasicSync, which was just updated to 1.26, and the new SyncUp, An open-source Syncthing client, that comes with these features:
Daemon runs in-process on Android. The Go daemon lives inside the app via gomobile. There is no subprocess to manage, no IPC between a background service and the UI, and no service-restart handling.
Auto-accept folders from trusted peers. When you add a peer, you can toggle auto-accept so any folder they share is added to your device automatically without a prompt. Other pending offers show up as accept/ignore cards in the Folders tab.
QR pairing works both ways. Display your device’s QR for a peer to scan, or scan theirs. The 56-character device ID never needs to be typed by hand.
UI updates in near real time. Long-polling /rest/events means config changes, folder state, and incoming offers reach the UI in about a second, instead of on a polling interval.
But one of the nicest highlights is that this new client supports SAF, which is a long awaited feature that was never implemented in the official client before its development stopped.
Removed Apps
One app was archived
Thorium a PeerTube client: a PeerTube player
Newly Added Apps
26 more apps were newly added
Acutis Firewall: Parental control app that blocks adult content and dangerous sites on-device
Backtalk: Backtalk: message yourself to stay organized
Baseline: Gentle self-care for depression, disability, chronic illness, or burnout
Cheese BTC Widget: Tiny home-screen widget showing the latest Bitcoin price in USD or EUR
It took longer than I thought it would, but the Trump administration’s appeal of the court ruling and injunction that put a pause on RFK Jr.’s remaking of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and vaccine policy has come through.
If you need a reminder on how we got here, here you go. In June of ’25, Kennedy fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP panel, a group of advisers that recommends vaccine schedules for the country. He then appointed what were eventually 13 new members to ACIP, nearly all of them virulent anti-vaxxers or otherwise aligned with Kennedy’s misinformed views on medicine and science. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued earlier this year, arguing that Kennedy had violated the American Procedures Act (APA) by his actions, specifically because he did not follow evidence, proper procedure, or factual science in the appointments. The court agreed, ruling against the administration and issuing a preliminary injunction on HHS for staffing ACIP with the new appointees and nixing any of the recommendations it had made thus far.
And so now the administration has appealed that ruling, though it’s any wonder as to what the administration’s arguments will be for the appeal.
A filing Wednesday evening in the District of Massachusetts indicates the administration is appealing Judge Brian Murphy’s order March 16. Murphy put any decisions made by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee on hold, ruling that Kennedy replaced the committee “unlawfully.”
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate signed the appeal.
The Justice Department could file a motion for emergency relief to get the court to act on its appeal immediately. That would require the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to act quickly in deciding whether to stay, or pause, the March 16 ruling.
Regardless, the court activity on this will likely eventually take months to work out. The AAP isn’t backing down, with its attorney vowing to respond to the appeal and taking the posture that it believes they will prevail. Reading the APA statute, I very much tend to agree, but this is Trump 101 stuff. Never back down, exhaust every legal avenue to get your way, and hope someone along the way fucks this up so you get your way. That the final leg on this journey might be a Supreme Court that often looks like another part of the Executive Branch, rather than an independent arm of government is certainly part of the calculus.
But in the meantime, two things remain true. The Trump administration, which has at times made noises about wanting to rein in Kennedy and his nonsense, is working hard to allow him to continue to make America sicker. And because of Kennedy’s refusal to follow basic protocol and science, the country is without a competent body to advise on vaccination schedules.
Meanwhile, the status of the advisory panel — a key group meant to be composed of vaccine experts independent of government influence — is in limbo.
A meeting that had been scheduled for March at which members were expected to discuss Covid shots has been postponed indefinitely. The committee is supposed to meet again in late June. There is no agenda yet.
Given the current makeup of the panel, that may indeed be the best possible outcome currently. But it’s not a long term plan, nor a long term positive. ACIP existed for a reason. The country needs intelligent, sincere, and sane people advising the country on how to combat infectious diseases with medicine and technology.
We are without that right now, purely because Trump thought putting Kennedy in charge of HHS was anything other than a form of national self-harm.
The White House AI framework made official what we already knew: this administration has no interest in regulating AI. Any legislation that contradicts the framework will be a dead end. In this regulatory vacuum, it is instructive to turn to norms developed by libraries and archives through their decades of experience working through the same core issues that are now animating AI debate: understanding copyright law; providing machine access to data; contextualizing information; and adhering to responsible stewardship obligations to communities.
The Google Books Library Project can be instructive. In the mid-2000s, research libraries partnered with Google to digitize and preserve millions of volumes in their collections. To solve the problem of how to store and provide access to a massive number of scanned books, research libraries banded together to create HathiTrust, a secure, searchable repository that remains in use today. Of course, this didn’t happen without legal challenges. Authors Guild separately sued Google and HathiTrust for copyright infringement in what came to be known as the “Google Books” cases. But these cases ultimately established the legal precedent that copying books to create a digital searchable database is fair use. Based on this precedent, research methods such as text and data mining are possible because of mass digitization, and lawful under fair use.
Based on Google Books and other litigation, libraries put a stake in the ground when it comes to copyright law: training AI models on copyrighted works generally is fair use, a position articulated by the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) in 2023, and updated in light of recent court decisions. In two of those decisions, Kadrey v. Meta and Bartz v. Anthropic, judges held that training AI models on copyrighted works is transformative and therefore fair use. It’s worth noting that these cases are in a commercial context. It is likely that a court would rule in favor of AI uses in educational, research, and scholarly contexts, as those are favored uses under fair use.
Meanwhile, disagreements over AI safety, harm prevention, bias mitigation, and abuse have held up federal AI legislation in the US. But these are not new problems for libraries, which have developed norms to balance the collection and preservation of sensitive information in archives and special collections with the imperative to provide the broadest possible user access to digitized content. One example is the 2010 ARL principles to guide vendor/publisher relations in large scale digitization projects with special collections, which calls for libraries to make material available to the public while providing context to aid in the understanding of that material. Libraries have also developed frameworks for stewarding materials of vulnerable communities and historically marginalized groups, like the Library of Congress access policy on culturally sensitive materials relating to Indigenous peoples, which includes transparent procedures for controlled access and use of culturally sensitive materials.
Congress has also been legislating in the dark around issues like transparency and provenance in AI training, and many of the proposals we have seen so misunderstand these concepts that they threaten to bring the university-based research enterprise to a halt. Libraries already do what Congress is trying to mandate — authenticating, contextualizing, and documenting collections — but the legislation is too disconnected from this expertise, and as a result unworkable for the institutions that actually practice rigorous provenance.
As AI governance debates continue to stall on Capitol Hill, library norms offer a foundation for approaching AI training and research in a way that is responsible, steeped in library expertise, and advances the public interest.
With gratitude to Betsy Rosenblatt, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University Law School
Katherine Klosek is the Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at the Association of Research Libraries.
Runaway selection happens when organizations compete with each other far beyond the point where it’s rational to do so. We see this in species as well–peacocks have ungainly and inefficient feather displays because, as Alice’s Red Queen said, “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”
In organizations, there’s a desire to do good work. Pressure to outdo the others. And a desire for deniability and certainty. Add those up, and we are left with a quest for more long after it’s helpful.
How many people applied for that good job you just posted? 1,000? Spread the word, more applications must be a good thing. It’s not unusual for digitally-amplified hiring processes to see 5,000 applications arrive in a day. 360,000 people applied for a slot in the Goldman Sachs internship program. Would a million have been better?
And then, let’s use AI to pick the 80 best candidates and interview each via Zoom.
Take the ten best and put them through a series of interviews, rotating through each person on the team, including aptitude tests and real-time projects. In many organizations, there are 6, 7 or even 10 rounds of interviews.
It costs a typical organization more than $14,000 to hire an executive, and the time and emotional cost to applicants is many times that. This all leads to lowered productivity, wasted time and a damaged brand.
What do we get in exchange for this investment? Are the people you hire with this exhausting/exhaustive process adding more value than the ones we found with much less time ten years ago?
And the second question: would your third or fourth choice have worked out just as well, if not better?
If Red Queen hiring actually worked, then we’d see that organizations that spend more time on it would outperform those that don’t. It’s pretty clear to me that this isn’t the case–it’s not an investment in the future, it’s a sign of bureaucratic stasis, a quest for deniability, and a thoughtless pursuit of the wrong sort of more. We’ve made it much easier for people to apply for jobs, but done little to improve what happens after the applications arrive.
What if we spent the time wasted on Red Queen maximization doing something useful instead–training and orientation, perhaps. Interview until you find someone who can do the job, then hire them. Then get back to work.
We can’t even ask that question, because it feels like a compromise. Without any data at all, we’ve bought into the Red Queen race that our false proxies, sufficiently polished, deliver better results. In fact, there’s a huge increase in the cost to the applicants and the organization, but no measurable increase in the value created.
Successful fishermen understand that casting an ever-wider net is not always the best way to catch the fish you need.
Last month we noted how tech companies, automakers, and others were trying to kill Colorado’s existing “right to repair” law, which is supposed to make it cheaper and easier to repair the things you own.
More specifically, tech companies like Cisco and IBM were pushing Colorado lawmakers to sign off on SB26-090, the Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair law, which would neuter much of the state’s existing protections under the pretense of making the public safer.
“SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.”
Like many similar efforts, tech companies falsely tried to convince lawmakers that making things cheaper and easier to repair would pose entirely new privacy and security risks, and that independent repair shops would be prone to make constant and dangerous mistakes. Pre-Trump Lina Khan era FTC studies had repeatedly indicated those claims are false.
In this case, IBM and Cisco had tried to use an updated definition of “critical infrastructure” that was so large and vague as to render all the protections meaningless. While they failed this time, they’ll be back. Countless companies, across countless industries, are desperate to boost revenues by monopolizing repair and driving up the cost of ownership for consumers and other companies alike.
Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, not one has actually managed to enforce their new laws despite no shortage of targets, something that gets curiously omitted by most reporting, and indicates the movement has a lot of work left to do.
Just as Hillary Clinton positioned her run as a third term for Obama ("America is already great"), so did Biden (and then Harris) position their campaigns as a second Biden term. As Biden said (in 2019): "Nothing would fundamentally change":
So a vote for Biden would be a vote for another four years of forceful, material support for genocide; another four years of compromise with Democratic establishment on student debt and healthcare gouging; and another four years of a president who was obviously in mental decline.
Harris's campaign was, "A vote for me is a vote for all of the above (minus the cognitive decline)." Actually, it was worse: by conspicuously failing to campaign on the Biden administration's record on reining in corporate power, a vote for Harris was "A vote for all of the above, minus the mental decline and the antitrust."
Whereas a vote for Trump was a vote for change, a vote to give the establishment a black eye. It was also a vote for genocide and racist pogroms and gangster kleptocracy, which is why many voters stayed home, casting a ballot for America's all-time favorite candidate, "None of the above," while any number of furious people and/or vicious racists turned out for Trump.
There's one book that crystallizes my thoughts on this better than any other: Naomi Klein's 2023 Doppelganger, which analyzes our politics in terms of (warped) "mirror images." One of the mirror world pairings that Klein analyzes is the progressive movement, a coalition of liberals and leftists (led by liberals).
Like every coalition, the two main groups that constitute "the progressives" do not agree on many important issues, though they do have common goals. Both groups support equality for people of all genders and races, but for liberals, an equal world is one that fixes the problem that 150 straight white men own everything by replacing 75 of them with racialized people, women and queer people (whereas the leftist fix is abolishing the system in which 150 people own everything).
Biden set himself up as a peacemaker for this coalition, and his "unity task force" divided up the appointments in his administration between the Warren-Sanders leftists and liberals, including those who clearly belonged to the Manchin-Sinematic universe. This meant that his administration worked at cross-purposes to itself, neutering its boldest initiatives, rendering them impotent.
Take Biden's plan to finally allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharma companies, a move that was very long overdue. Before this, the way the system worked was: pharma companies named a price – any price! – and then Uncle Sucker paid it. No other country in the world operates this way, and, of course, the lion's share of pharma R&D costs are already borne by the American public (or they were, until Musk DOGEd the US research budget to death).
So the American public pays more than anyone else in the world to develop these drugs, and then they pay more than anyone else in the world to buy these drugs. This is madness, and putting an end to it is an obvious political win. But Biden found a way to do it that "balanced" the leftist principle of protecting people from capitalist exploitation with the liberal principle of protecting businesses lest the essential function of developing life-saving drugs become a state activity (rather than a market one).
Biden's solution? A "Build Back Better" plan that would allow the federal government to negotiate up to ten drug prices (and as few as zero drug prices), but the new prices would only kick in after the 2024 election, so no one would see the benefit of this in time for the next general election:
This is a solution that pleases no one – and that's the point. Biden and his team viewed the presidency as an institution for making sure everyone was equally unhappy, a philosophy that Anat Shenker-Osorio calls "pizzaburger politics." This is named for a thought-experiment in which half your family wants pizza and the other half wants burgers, so you serve them "pizzaburgers" and make everyone miserable and declare yourself to have the fair-handed wisdom of Solomon (yes, I'm aware that this analogy has a fatal flaw in that pizzaburgers actually sound delicious, but work with me here).
Biden prided himself on running a pizzaburger presidency, in which every move that satisfied the left of his party was neutralized by a concession to the party's right wing establishment:
(Trump enacted mirror-world version of Biden's pharma price controls: TrumpRx, a program that claims to lower drug prices while those prices actually go up):
Biden's pizzaburger compromises made everyone unhappy. He appointed generational talents like Lina Khan, Jonathan Kanter and Rohit Chopra to run key agencies charged with crushing corporate power, and then gave lifetime appointments to corporate-friendly judges who blocked their rulemakings and penalties:
Of course, it wasn't just Biden's own judicial appointees who stood in his way; from the Supreme Court on down, on issues from student debt cancellation to noncompetes, judges blocked the Biden administration. When this happened, Biden somehow couldn't find his way to his bully pulpit. Rather than working the refs – the way Trump does, in ways that energize his base, stiffens his legislators' resolve and intimidates other judges – Biden tinkered in the margins to find ways to advance half-measures and stayed mum in public.
This compromise-oriented meekness carried over into Biden's relationship with Democratic lawmakers who sold out the American people. Rather than campaigning for the primary opponents of monsters like Fetterman, Sinema and Manchin, Biden worked behind the scenes to broker compromises, delivering yet another inedible pizzaburger (and acting hurt and bewildered when no one thanked him for it). The alternative? Constitutional hardball:
It's not clear whether Harris's abbreviated campaign could have made the public case that she would govern in a more muscular fashion as befitted the polycrisis facing the nation, but she didn't even try. A couple Democratic Party insiders of my acquaintance tell me that Biden only agreed to step aside on the condition that Harris not criticize his record. I don't know if that's true, but even within that hypothetical constraint, Harris hardly presented herself as an avatar of change. She carried on Biden's tradition of conspicuously failing to campaign on the significant achievements of Biden's own trustbusters, and put her brother-in-law, the lawyer who helped Uber crush labor rights in California, in charge of her campaign:
The point of all this is that the American people have, on two occasions, comprehensively rejected the "America is already great"/"Nothing would fundamentally change" politics of a liberal-dominated left/liberal progressive coalition. The senior partners in that coalition have driven the country into a ditch, letting Trump stage a fascist takeover that has us fighting not to win another election, but just to have another one.
Americans are sick of being told that their politicians can't do anything because "they're not the Green Lantern:"
America isn't already great. If we are to have more elections – much less win them – we will need to mobilize millions of people. You don't do that by telling them to oppose Trumpismo – you get them out in the streets by giving them something to support. That was Mamdani's winning message: "I know what a politician can do, and I will do it":
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Lately, we’ve been a tad preoccupied with our own debacle of a war in Iran to pay much attention to another major war nearby. But we really should, because it sure seems like Russia is starting to lose that war to Ukraine.
Putin ordered an all-out attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Against all odds, that initial assault failed, as I explained in 50 days of reporting on the first part of that war. Four years later, Russia’s quest to defeat its far smaller and poorer neighbor is failing in ways that the numbers make impossible to ignore.
With so many terrible headlines to digest these days, it’s encouraging to see real evidence that a small, tenacious and adaptable country, through its valiant people and leaders, can stand up to a brutal dictator and prevail.
Russian casualties.According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russian forces have sustained roughly 1.34 million casualties—killed or wounded—since February 2022. That’s a staggering figure, but the recent numbers are even worse. President Zelenskyy reported in March that Russia had lost nearly 100,000 soldiers in just the first three months of 2026—roughly 33,000 per month—with 90 percent of those casualties attributed to Ukrainian drones. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, put the ratio at roughly six Russian losses for every Ukrainian one. As Euromaidan Press reported in early May, Russia is now losing soldiers faster than it can replace them for the fifth consecutive month.
The Russian economy. The Moscow Times reports that Russian GDP growth has slowed to around one percent, down from above four percent just two years ago, a figure initially fueled by war spending. Recession is now a realistic possibility. The Bank of Finland’s economic bulletin found that Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the financial cushion built up over decades of oil revenues, has lost more than half its value since the invasion began. Taxes are increasing, social spending is falling, and Russia’s central bank is warning of a severe labor shortage. Putin himself publicly admitted that Russia’s GDP shrank in the first two months of 2026.
Russia’s oil woes. Russia Matters publishes a war report card, and last week it documented that Ukrainian drone strikes have forced roughly 40 percent of Russia’s oil export capacity offline. According to Bloomberg, in early 2026 Ukrainian forces hit the Baltic export terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk five times in ten days, cutting oil flows to just a third of normal and costing Russia more than a billion dollars in a single week. The New York Times assessed that the campaign has damaged or destroyed approximately 20 percent of Russia’s total refining capacity since 2024.
This isn’t 20th century warfare
How could all this be happening at once? There are several contributing factors, but one overarching theme emerges from military analysts covering the war. Russia has been fighting a 20th-century war, but Ukraine is waging a 21st-century one.
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and expert on the Russian military, has argued that the conventional metrics of battlefield success obscure what’s really happening. Kofman wrote that “territory changing hands is a lagging indicator for what’s happening” inside the two forces—and that “gradually then suddenly” transitions are possible as a result. And what is happening inside Russia’s forces is apparently a slow-motion collapse.
When Putin first ordered the invasion, Russian military doctrine rested on a familiar model: mass, hierarchy and firepower. He sent in columns of tanks. The command structure was centralized. Industrial-scale logistics flowed through a controlled supply chain.
Putin and his generals might be forgiven for thinking this was the way to go. After all, it was the doctrine that won World War II and that crushed Chechnya. The assumption was that Ukraine—outgunned, outnumbered and facing the second-largest military in the world—would fold in days.
Ukraine’s response, as the Center for European Policy Analysis documented in a recent report, was something Russia’s top-down system did not anticipate: a wartime “innovation culture” comprising small Ukrainian companies, front-line engineers, small military units and private developers. Together, following that initial shock, they began collaborating to produce a wartime loop of design, battlefield test and rapid iteration. Through this system, Ukraine weaponized commercial technology into military systems faster than traditional defense procurement cycles could.
The numbers are extraordinary. CEPA reports that Ukraine is now producing roughly eight million first-person view (FPV) drones per year. These are small, unmanned, cheap and agile single-use aircraft that have effectively replaced artillery as the dominant tool of the battlefield. Zelenskyy’s data showed Ukrainian drones hitting 33,000 Russian troops in December 2025 alone, up from 16,000 in July. Importantly, and to the consternation of Russia’s military planners, that monthly toll rose every single month through the second half of 2025.
I had the same question you may have at this point. How did Ukraine succeed in beating mighty Russia in the “drone wars”? Weren’t Russian drones the ones wreaking havoc on Ukrainian cities and military positions? When I looked into it, I learned something rather astonishing: Ukraine’s edge in drone warfare is based on something so simple it’s nearly absurd: a fishing reel made of glass.
How to defeat a military superpower’s jammers
Standard FPV combat drones communicate by radio. The remote operator sends control signals through the air, and the drone responds in real time. That sounds great, but there’s a problem. Radio signals can be jammed. When Ukraine began to deploy drones at scale, Russia responded with electronic warfare, and for a period it effectively countered Ukraine’s drone threat.
Ukraine’s answer, as documented by GIS Reports journalists who visited front-line drone workshops in January 2026, was to eliminate the radio entirely. It did so using fiber optic cable.
The idea sounds too crazy to work, but fiber-optic drones actually carry a spool of ultra-thin cable as they fly. As a drone moves toward its target, the cable unspools behind it, like a kite on a very long string, maintaining a hardwired connection to the operator. The signal travels as pulses of light through glass, not as radio waves through air. It’s as if the operators are playing a deadly game of “telephone” with a bomb-packed drone on the other end.
Because of this direct connection, there is no frequency to jam, no signal to intercept. As one Ukrainian combat veteran told GIS Reports: “A fiber-optic drone is not designed to conduct 30 to 40 sorties per day. It is intended for a single sortie and a precise strike. Countering it is extremely difficult—so far, only physically shooting it down works.”
This work-around solution emerged out of necessity, through trial and error. As a Carnegie Endowment analysis noted, front-line operators and engineers in workshops near the fighting identified the issue and iterated until they solved it, building “an entirely new category of unmanned weapon.”
To be sure, Russia has copied the technology. But what it cannot copy, as GIS Reports’ analysis put it, is the strategic culture gap. “Russia capitalizes on its scale, whereas Ukraine harnesses innovation through continuous improvement.” Once Russia validates a concept, it can mass-produce it. But the next concept will already have come from Ukraine.
The fleet that “constantly hides”
The same dynamic produced a dramatic result at sea for Ukraine, which had no meaningful navy. Russia had the formidable Black Sea Fleet, one of its most powerful and symbolically important forces, anchored in occupied Crimea.
So Ukraine built naval drones instead.
The Magura V5, a surface drone costing roughly $250,000 per unit, began striking Russian warships costing hundreds of millions of dollars in 2023. By early 2024, as the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings documented in September 2025, Magura drone boats, armed with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, had sunk multiple warships, destroyed a Russian helicopter and badly damaged another, and even shot down two Su-30 fighter jets. The Russian Black Sea Fleet has lost an estimated $500 million in assets and now barely operates, venturing at most 25 miles from port to fire missiles before retreating.
As the commander of Ukraine’s naval drone operations told the Washington Times: “They constantly hide.”
Russia tried to build its own naval drone counteroffensive for 2026. But as Euromaidan Press reported just days ago, SpaceX, at Ukraine’s request, blocked Russian access to Starlink satellite communications, and its new drone program collapsed entirely. (Perhaps Elon Musk finally realizes which side he needs to be on.) It turns out, Russia’s naval drones were wholly dependent on commercial Western infrastructure that could simply be switched off. Ukraine’s systems, built from the ground up, exhibit no such dependency.
Two caveats, and a lifeline
Ukraine knows that Russia is not standing still. Ukraine’s own commanders, including the head of the 3rd Assault Brigade, acknowledged last fall that Russia had actually outpaced Ukraine in raw FPV drone numbers by 2025. In short, Russia copies what Ukraine invents and scales it massively. The advantage Ukraine holds is in the speed of the next iteration. This is a real edge, but it’s one Russia is actively working to close.
Importantly, Ukraine’s innovation culture doesn’t run entirely on its own ingenuity. Chatham House’s analysts noted that Ukraine’s adaptability is partly a function of being plugged into a global technology ecosystem that Russia has been progressively cut off from by sanctions.
And then there is the lifeline the United States inadvertently extended. Chatham House assessed that by early 2026, Western sanctions were finally working: Russian oil export revenues had fallen, the economy was contracting and Putin appeared to face genuinely painful choices about sustaining the war. Then the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran sent oil prices soaring as Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Russia, as a major energy exporter, got a massive windfall it did nothing to earn. The Trump administration also temporarily eased sanctions on Russian oil, handing Moscow further relief at exactly the wrong moment. Russia Matters reported that Russia’s budget revenues from oil extraction nearly doubled in March 2026 relative to the month before.
Whether that reprieve holds may prove the pivot point on which the next chapter of this war turns.
A lesson we should take to heart
There is a lesson in all of this that America might wish to apply. We are currently in the thick of our own war, bringing the most expensive, technologically sophisticated military in human history to bear against a far weaker, less sophisticated adversary. Iran cannot match our firepower.
But it may not need to.
Asymmetric warfare follows consistent rules. The weaker side survives by being nimble, cheap and tapped into systems that don’t depend on the infrastructure the stronger side can target. The stronger side struggles because its overwhelming capabilities were built for a different kind of war.
Russia learned this the hard way. It sent its best conventional forces to fight an adversary that had given up on fighting conventionally. The mismatch didn’t show up immediately, as Russia made early gains, held conquered territory and sustained its war narrative for months. But the structural disadvantages for Russia have compounded. Four years later, the tanks are gone from parades in Moscow and its sovereign wealth fund is half empty.
The U.S. of course is not Russia. Our military is more capable, more adaptive, and more technologically sophisticated. But the core lesson of Ukraine is not about any specific weapon or tactic. It’s about what happens when a massive, top-down military machine meets an adversary fighting a fundamentally different war—and whether the big war machine can adapt fast enough to matter.
Russia is failing that test. And as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, with gas and fertilizer prices soaring and no easy way out of the war Trump started, we may be failing it, too.
Small waterfall on Gunung Lambak, one of several along the stream that flows next to the main path up the mountain. This is a focus stack of 2 photographs, and a neutral density filter was used to allow a long exposure time of 2 seconds.
Kash Patel is one of the rare Trump political appointees who actually has some experience that might be useful in his current position. But it wasn’t his past experience as a federal public defender and prosecutor that prompted Trump to elevate him to the post of FBI Director. Instead, it was his willingness to engage in politically motivated investigations, along with his willingness to host pro-MAGA podcasts when their original hosts were in prison on federal charges.
Patel serves at the president’s pleasure, as all political appointees do. But Trump’s pleasure is more unpredictable than most. Perhaps realizing his time frame for making hay is extremely short, Patel has done very little in terms of leadership, preferring to spend his time (allegedly) partying it up when not (allegedly) failing to gain the trust and respect of the Bureau.
When not saying stupid things on social media or during press conferences, Patel likes to leverage his position to do things like… hang out in the US Olympic hockey team locker room as they celebrated their gold medal win.
Consequently, plenty has been published about Patel’s (alleged) inability to stay sober and/or do his damn job. A shocking expose of Patel’s (alleged) constant insobriety prompted Patel to respond in the fashion he’s been accustomed to during his tenure as FBI Director. He filed a libel lawsuit against The Atlantic over its reporting on his months of (allegedly) unprofessional behavior.
Hilariously, Patel and his lawyers relied on a previous lawsuit he had filed against MSNBC for its earlier reporting on pretty much the same subject, taking particular objection to this statement made by reporter Frank Figliuzzi:
Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.
Perhaps he should have waited until his first lawsuit had been fully litigated. The lawsuit he used as part of his arguments in favor of “actual malice” was dismissed, with the judge finding in favor of MSNBC and Figliuzzi.
So, this is one the things Patel seems to be involved in daily, which isn’t actually a part of his day-to-day duties as FBI Director. The other thing he seems to be doing on a regular basis is ensuring the people who still work for him won’t want to work for him for much longer.
FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.
[…]
The director has also avoided meeting this week with some key operational leaders of the bureau, the people said, raising concerns inside the FBI about Patel’s ability to stay abreast of pressing threats and investigations in order to make the best decisions.
Will this reporting prompt another lawsuit from Kash Patel? I would hope his lawyers are smarter than Patel appears to be, because going back to the same well so quickly following a libel lawsuit loss might add sanctions to the humiliation of another public loss in a federal court.
The funniest thing about this reporting is that the FBI official spokesman, Ben Williamson, refused to deny the use of polygraph tests, instead deciding to deny the assertion that Patel isn’t regularly attending meetings with key FBI officials. It’s not like Williamson couldn’t have just lied about the polygraphs. This is an administration that is willing to lie about pretty much anything at any time. Having their lies exposed doesn’t regularly result in firing, which means blatantly lying has nearly no professional consequences. But Williamson just decided to ignore a question he didn’t want to answer.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.
Those were the (alleged) facts on the ground as of July 2025. Since then, Patel hasn’t done much to distance himself from allegations of misusing his position for personal gain, whether it’s trying to get special treatment from the Bureau itself, or crashing Olympic celebrations just because he can.
I find it hard to believe even Patel himself thinks he’s actually leading the FBI. After all, this is the same guy who (allegedly!) thought he’d been fired when he bungled one too many login attempts. But he’s the perfect guy for the Trump administration: someone who spreads falsehoods, yells “fake news” whenever publicly criticized, files lost-cause lawsuits against people protected by the First Amendment, and will quietly accept his dismissal whenever Trump decides to turn on him.
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As you’ll recall, when Elon Musk first started buying up Twitter stock, before he officially decided to buy the whole company, he blew past the SEC-mandated deadline to reveal publicly that he had accumulated over 5% of the stock. Indeed, Musk waited until he held nearly 10% of the company’s stock before revealing his position at all. Many shareholders were rightly pissed off about this, because it likely diminished the value of their shares. There’s a reason the law says you need to disclose crossing that 5% line.
And, to be clear, this isn’t one of those gray areas of the law. This is a case where Elon pretty clearly violated the law in very obvious ways. But because the Biden admin was so terrified of looking even remotely biased against Elon, the SEC took nearly three years investigating the case (and yes, part of that was Elon trying to ignore investigatory demands) before finally suing him… in the last week of the Biden admin.
I’m somewhat amazed it took this long, but earlier this week, the Trump SEC announced a settlement. Despite the blatant flouting of the rules — which likely cost Twitter shareholders millions of dollars — the settlement requires Elon to pay $1.5 million. That’s basically pocket change to the world’s richest man. It’s not even a slap on the wrist, which might sting a bit.
“I do think that it suggests if you’re wealthy or powerful enough then there aren’t going to be consequences,” said Fagel, who previously led the SEC’s San Francisco office. “The optics of this are terrible.”
Perhaps in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t much matter. No real fine was going to matter much to Elon Musk. He has enough money to be shielded from effectively any monetary punishment — they could fine him 99% of his wealth and he’d still be richer than basically anyone reading this.
But it’s this kind of thing, and the lack of real consequences for it, that undermine our trust in institutions and the rule of law. The message being sent is hard to miss: if you’re wealthy enough and loyal enough to Trump, the rules simply don’t apply to you.
This release is an emergency release to fix a critical security vulnerability
in the Linux kernel, as well as security vulnerabilities in Tor Browser and
in the Tor client.
Changes and updates
Update the Linux kernel to 6.12.86, which fixes Dirty Frag, a vulnerability that could allow an application in Tails to gain administration privileges.
For example, if an attacker was able to exploit other unknown security
vulnerabilities in an application included in Tails, they might then use
Copy Fail to take full control of your Tails and deanonymize you.
We are not aware of this vulnerability being used in practice until now.
More than 4,000 Hollywood insiders recently signed a letter blasting Paramount’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, noting that the massive consolidation will be very historically harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. That’s a very correct observation, especially as it relates to Warner Brothers, which has never been involved in a merger that didn’t result in mass layoffs, higher prices for everyone, and a significantly shittier overall product.
Now a coalition of press groups, including Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and Reporters Without Borders, are pressing Paramount regarding “potentially corrupt acquisitions and deals” they argue could undermine shareholder value by degrading the (already sagging) quality of journalism at CBS News and CNN, while “relinquishing editorial control of major news outlets to the Trump administration.”
The journalism groups make the point that the Ellison family effort to turn CBS into a Trump and Netanyahu-friendly agitprop machine has been disastrous for the company’s share price. And because both organizations are technically shareholders, they’re demanding deeper access to the Paramount books to see what other dodgy bullshit may not have been revealed yet:
“Since Paramount Skydance announced its most consequential Trump-friendly changes at CBS News in October — acquiring The Free Press and appointing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief — the company’s market capitalization has decreased by 40%, wiping out more than $8 billion in shareholder value. Ratings for key programs, like “CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil,” have also dropped precipitously. Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders, which are both shareholders in Paramount Skydance Corp., are entitled to inspect the company’s books and records related to these developments under Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law.”
They’ve given Paramount five days to respond to their request for more documents and data related to any promises Paramount may have made the Trump administration. I’m not convinced the gambit will go anywhere, but it’s nice to see these kinds of groups (historically absent from many of these fights) suddenly paying closer attention to media consolidation.
Larry Ellison’s interests here are two-fold. He wanted to gift his nepobaby son David with two major Hollywood studios so David can pretend he’s a very big boy doing very serious things. But he’s also keen on dismantling what’s left of journalism at places like CBS News and CNN (already reeling from years of corporate cowardice) turning them into right-wing friendly agitprop mills that are even more friendly to his favorite autocrats (Trump and Netanyahu).
You’ll recall Bari Weiss sold herself to Paramount as an expert who could modernize CBS News through virality and mass audience appeal (despite having no actual experience in journalism). But Weiss, who got her start at the helm of a strange contrarian troll blog, has the instincts and ideas of a 90 year old man, and clearly isn’t capable of generating watchable propaganda in any ratings-grabbing way that actually appeals to anyone (even MAGA folks, who already have no limit of agitprop options).
The Trump administration will certainly rubber stamp the deal. Paramount will likely keep this effort locked up in the courts indefinitely. And the Democrats’ demand for the FCC to investigate the dodgy Chinese and Saudi financing propping up the deal isn’t likely to go anywhere. That leaves a collaborative looming lawsuit by state AGs as the most likely path toward ensuring this deal never gets off the ground.
But even if the deal gets approved, this giant company’s long-term survival is far from guaranteed. Especially given the shaky state of Hollywood, the steady enshittification of streaming, and the fact that there’s very little evidence that the any of the Paramount folks are competent.
There’s a very high likelihood that the combination of Paramount’s massive debt load from both the CBS and Warner deals– and fleeing audience (either bored by bad product or disgusted by the companies’ Trump allegiances) — combines with Larry Ellison’s over-extension on AI to result in some very precarious financial footing.
These major media deals always go terribly for consumers and labor, but execs often benefit from tax breaks, temporary stock boosts, and compensation in no way dictated by competency (see: CEO David Zaslav). But this series of deals is so massive and problematic, it could generate some very significant pain for the extraction class, and make all past merger disasters seem adorable by comparison.
In Malaysia, Astro has been the dominant pay-TV operator that held the FIFA World Cup broadcast rights since the early 2000s. 
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