News

Saturday 2026-08-29

08:00 AM

‘Right To Repair’ State Laws Continue To Surge, But Enforcement Remains Nonexistent [Techdirt]

There’s still a massive effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

US PIRG tells the Guardian that this year alone, legislators have introduced more than 50 bills across 22 states, including a Florida bill that addresses wheelchairs, a motorcycle-oriented bill in Missouri, and a proposal in Ohio that would apply broad new consumer repair protections across everything from digital devices to aircraft and construction equipment.

In Iowa, state lawmakers passed a first draft of right-to-repair legislation in April that focuses heavily on agricultural equipment and tractors, a subject that has driven broad, bipartisan support:

“Farmers have been fixing their own equipment as long as they have been farming, and it’s essential to the sustainability of our farms that we be able to have that control over the equipment,” said Aaron Lehman, who is also president of the Iowa Farmers Union.”

And on the federal level, efforts remain slow but ongoing to pass the Repair Act, which states that “a motor vehicle manufacturer may not employ any technological barrier or specified legal barrier that impairs the ability of a motor vehicle owner” to “access vehicle-generated data.”

One strange trend I keep seeing however (and this is perpetuated in the Guardian piece): despite major progress on passing new legislative proposals, I’ve yet to see a single state enforce any aspect of a new right to repair law despite absolutely no shortage of corporate offenders. And in several of these states these laws are approaching four or five years of age.

So while the momentum the movement has built is impressive, it’s decidedly less impressive if the new laws passed are so full of loopholes as to be pointless (as we saw when New York’s right to repair law was watered down post-passage), or enforcement doesn’t result in any actual observable reform. At some point activism has to start hammering real-world enforcement of laws already on the books.

07:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Move Fast And Settle Things [Techdirt]

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

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Our fun links this week include a new table format for food recipes and Rainbolt’s tear-jerking Geoguessr video.

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

Kanji of the Day: 安 [Kanji of the Day]

安

✍6

小3

relax, cheap, low, quiet, rested, contented, peaceful

アン

やす.い　やす.まる　やす　やす.らか

安全   (あんせん)   —   safety
不安   (ふあん)   —   anxiety
安心   (あんしん)   —   peace of mind
安打   (あんだ)   —   safe hit
安定   (あんてい)   —   stability
安い   (やすい)   —   cheap
安く   (やすく)   —   inexpensively
治安   (じあん)   —   Jian era (1021.2.2-1024.7.13)
安保   (あんぽ)   —   security (e.g., national security)
安全性   (あんぜんせい)   —   safety

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 掲 [Kanji of the Day]

掲

✍11

中学

put up (a notice), put up, hoist, display, hang out, publish, describe

ケイ

かか.げる

掲載   (けいさい)   —   publication (e.g., of an article in a newspaper)
掲げる   (かかげる)   —   to put up (a notice, sign, etc.)
掲示板   (けいじばん)   —   bulletin board
掲示   (けいじ)   —   notice
掲揚   (けいよう)   —   hoisting (e.g., a flag)
電光掲示板   (でんこうけいじばん)   —   electric noticeboard
掲出   (けいしゅつ)   —   posting (e.g., a notice)
電子掲示板   (でんしけいじばん)   —   bulletin board system
前掲書   (ぜんけいしょ)   —   cited
再掲   (さいけい)   —   redisplaying

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

05:00 AM

Pete Hegseth And His Department Of Unconstitutional Revenge Lose Again In California [Techdirt]

When Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a national security risk because it wouldn’t agree to his dangerously unethical demands for what Claude should be able to do, Anthropic sued to challenge the directives. One of the challenges was brought in the Northern District of California, where Anthropic has now notched another significant win.

While the previous victory resulted in a preliminary injunction being issued against Hegseth and his Department of Defense (unfortunately the court and Anthropic referred to it by the Trump Administration’s nickname, “Department of War,” but until Congress agrees to the renaming, we won’t), the court has now ruled on the merits, finding in favor of Anthropic on most of its claims and giving it all the relief it sought, namely both a permanent injunction and vacatur of Hegseth’s agency action.

In short, the court found that the action to “designate Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security, order all federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products, and ban all defense contractors from doing any business with Anthropic, even if unrelated to the military” violated Anthropic’s First Amendment rights, as well as its due process rights, and it further violated the APA as an arbitrary and capricious action.

The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment. The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth’s decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme, 10 U.S.C. § 3252, and was arbitrary and capricious. Though the Department of War is undisputedly free to select the AI vendor of its choice, the evidence demonstrates that the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless.

On the First Amendment claims, “The undisputed facts establish that Anthropic’s protected speech, on a matter of great public importance, was a substantial motivating factor for Defendants’ speech-chilling conduct, and that Defendants would not have taken the retaliatory action absent their desire to make an example of Anthropic for its public stance on the weighty issues at stake in the contracting dispute.” In reaching this conclusion the court found that Anthropic had been engaging in speech on matters of public concern—such as the safeguards built into an AI system—and that the Administration’s own social media posts made it clear that designating Anthropic as a national security risk was designed to punish it for this very expression articulating why it did not want to sell the government a version of Claude without those safeguards, rather than for any legitimate purpose.

Secretary Hegseth expressly tied Anthropic’s punishment to its attitude and rhetoric in the press. He stated that “Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance.” (AR 255B.) Referring to Anthropic and Amodei, he further stated: “Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of ‘effective altruism,’ they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military” through their “corporate virtue-signaling” and “Silicon Valley ideology.” (Id.) “Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles.” (Id.) The President described Anthropic as a “RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY” and its employees as “Leftwing nut jobs,” who “made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War.” (AR 255A.) […] Furthermore, the decision to publicly broadcast Anthropic’s punishment via social media—even before the formal, administrative process of making the necessary findings to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk had begun—makes little sense except as an attempt to swiftly make a public example of Anthropic for daring to criticize the Administration.

In other words, the government did not have to buy Claude if it couldn’t agree with Anthropic on what it should be able to do, but designating it a supply chain risk ineligible for any government contract was a punishment inflicted because it did not like Anthropic’s viewpoint that AI should have the safeguards Hegseth did not want it to have.

On its First Amendment claim the court found that Anthropic had shown “that (1) it engaged in constitutionally protected activity; (2) the defendant’s actions would ‘chill a person of ordinary firmness’ from continuing to engage in the protected activity; and (3) the protected activity was a substantial motivating factor in the defendant’s conduct.” It decided that the alternative Pickering test did not apply (“The Pickering framework is inapplicable here because the Challenged Actions were an exercise of sovereign power, not contractual power. […] Furthermore, the public labeling of Anthropic as an adversary of the United States and an “out-of-control, Radical Left AI company” that was attempting to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military” reflects a concerted effort to make an example of Anthropic” for its viewpoint resisting government demands, and not part of ordinary contract negotiations.), but even if it did, Anthropic would have still prevailed.

Moreover, even if the more flexible Pickering framework were applied, Anthropic has still shown that it is entitled to summary judgment. Under the framework, Anthropic must show it engaged in expressive conduct about a matter of public concern; government officials took adverse action against it; and its expressive conduct was a substantial or motivating factor for the adverse action. Damiano v. Grants Pass Sch. Dist. No. 7, 140 F.4th 1117, 1137 (9th Cir. 2025). In other words, Anthropic’s prima facie showing under the traditional test satisfies its burden under the Pickering framework so long as Anthropic is speaking on a matter of public concern. As already explained, Anthropic satisfies this burden. The government argues that “Anthropic’s public airing of its objections to DoW’s contractual terms does not transform this into a matter of public concern protected by the First Amendment.” (Dkt. No. 214 at 10.) However, “attempt[s] to reach the general public” are “considered relevant in other public concern cases.” Havekost v. U.S. Dep’t of Navy, 925 F.2d 316, 319 (9th Cir. 1991). And as the Supreme Court explains in Janus, matters of “great public concern” can arise in the context of contract negotiations, and the government does not get a pass on upholding First Amendment protections simply because it is engaged in contract negotiations. Janus, 585 U.S. 878, 910–14 (“[I]t is impossible to argue that the level of . . . state spending for employee benefits,” the subject of the contract negotiations between the union and the government, “is not a matter of great public concern.”). Anthropic was not critiquing a “single contract” (Dkt. No. 238 at 8); it was discussing the appropriate limits on the government’s use of frontier AI technology. That is a matter of public concern.

And the government had nothing to rebut Anthropic’s case, including any sort of true national security argument.

Defendants’ asserted national security concerns are further contradicted by their actions shortly before, immediately after, and since the Supply Chain Designation. Shortly before, in the February 24 meeting, Secretary Hegseth raised the possibility of invoking the Defense Production Act, meaning Anthropic was essential to national security rather than a threat to it. (Dkt. No. 166-5 ¶ 17; Dkt. No. 166-9 at 3.) Immediately after the designation, Under Secretary Michael told Anthropic that a deal was “very close.” (Dkt. No. 166-5 ¶ 27.) Since the designation, the White House has “discussed opportunities for collaboration” with Anthropic utilizing its new Mythos model, and these discussions appeared to range across a variety of sensitive contexts. (Dkt. No. 166-4 ¶ 81.) Those actions are inconsistent with any genuine belief that Anthropic is an adversary of the United States who might secretly poison its model to undermine national security. As such, the government has failed, under even a deferential review, to show that a legitimate national security interest outweighed Anthropic’s speech rights.

The court also found that the government’s action violated Anthropic’s due process rights. “Due process requires notice ‘reasonably calculated, under all the circumstances, to apprise interested parties of the pendency of [a government] action and afford them an opportunity to present their objections,'” but here Anthropic had none before it was suddenly blacklisted and designated a supply chain risk. That action deprived it of a liberty interest unconstitutionally.

“[A]bsent exigent circumstances,” due process must happen “before [a] final deprivation.” Esparraguera v. Dep’t of the Army, 101 F.4th 28, 40 (D.C. Cir. 2024). The record reflects that the Challenged Actions were taken without any meaningful notice or pre-deprivation process (and, in the case of the Presidential Directive and the Hegseth Directive, without offering any post-deprivation agency process either). Although Anthropic was on notice that the government objected to its contracting terms, it had no notice or opportunity to object before Defendants publicly barred it from all federal government work and blacklisted it with defense contractors. It also had no notice or opportunity to object to the factual basis for its designation as a supply chain risk, which it learned of in this litigation.

And then, in addition to the constitutional violations, the court also found that the designation was an arbitrary and capricious act under the Administrative Procedure Act as well.

Under the APA, an agency action must be set aside and held unlawful if it is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion,” “in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations, or short of statutory right,” or “without observance of procedure required by law.” 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A), (C), (D). Anthropic has shown that the Hegseth Directive and the Supply Chain Designation were in excess of statutory authority, contrary to law, and arbitrary and capricious. […] Secretary Hegseth’s February 27 order that “[e]ffective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic” is a final agency action and thus is subject to APA review. (AR 255B.) On its face, the order is the “consummation” of a decision-making process and “legal consequences [] flow” from it. Bennett v. Spear, 520 U.S. 154, 178 (1997) (citations omitted). Absent recission, which has not occurred to this day, any company doing business with both Anthropic and DoW between the time of the post and when the preliminary injunction issued in this case would have been in violation of the order. Indeed, Anthropic submits evidence that several law firms sent client alerts “describing the potentially far-reaching nature of the government’s actions and suggesting that Department contractors may be best served by reevaluating their relationship with Anthropic.”

The court didn’t buy the government’s defense that “Secretary Hegseth could not have meant what he said because he concededly lacked the requisite authority to issue such a broad order.” To do so would have eviscerated the APA and its prohibition against arbitrary and capricious acts.

After all, if courts were to find agency actions unreviewable as non-final simply because the agency had not met its statutory obligations or did not have authority to take the action, that would defeat the entire purpose of APA contrary to law review. There is no way to read Secretary Hegseth’s words as anything other than a “consummation” of a decision-making process. (See Dkt. No. 238 at 17 (conceding in Defendants’ reply brief that “[w]hatever else, there is no doubt about the Secretary’s commitment to his course of action”).) And his Directive imposed “legal consequences” by declaring, effective immediately and in unqualified terms, that companies could not continue doing business with both Anthropic and DoW, with the implicit threat that DoW would stop contracting with violators. See San Francisco Herring Ass’n v. Dep’t of the Interior, 946 F.3d 564, 580 (9th Cir. 2019) (finding legal consequences flowed from Park Service orders where there was “no suggestion that compliance . . . was somehow optional”).

Furthermore, Anthropic did not meet the statutory definition for “supply chain risk” anyway.

The Administrative Record establishes that Anthropic’s conduct does not meet the requirements for finding a “supply chain risk” under Section 3252. The Michael Memo states: “By embedding unreasonably restrictive terms that restrict DoW’s warfighting operations beyond the limitations imposed by law, Anthropic seeks to grant itself an operational veto. This triggers the legal definition of supply chain risk at 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(4) . . . .” (AR 213.) But Section 3252 defines a supply chain risk as limited to “the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert . . . a covered system.” 10 U.S.C. § 3252(d)(4). The plain text of the statute is directed at covert acts or hacks, not overt, public positions regarding contract terms. The legislative history similarly explains that the statute aims to address “increasing risk that systems and networks critical to [the Department of Defense] could be exploited through the introduction of counterfeit or malicious code and other defects introduced by suppliers of systems or components.” S. Rep. No. 111-201, at 162 (2010). Contrary to Under Secretary Michael’s conclusion, Anthropic’s contracting position does not appear to bear any relation to the conduct that Section 3252 is aimed at addressing.

And per the other statute in play, it also did not grant Hegseth the authority to do any of this either.

Agencies may not impose sanctions or issue orders “except within jurisdiction delegated to the agency and as authorized by law.” 5 U.S.C. § 558(b). The Court has already found that the Presidential Directive to “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology” was a retaliatory act, taken without due process, meant to punish Anthropic for its protected speech. Supra § V.A–B. The record shows that the following Agency Defendants issued orders to terminate use of Anthropic’s products pursuant to the Presidential Directive, most within hours of the directive being issued: Treasury, FHFA, State, GSA, OPM, NRC, DHS, and Energy. Supra § II.G–H. DoW did the same, in reliance on the Hegseth Directive and Supply Chain Designation. Supra § II.E. These orders, in violation of Anthropic’s First Amendment and due process rights, were not “authorized by law,” and violate Section 558(b).

The court did not, however, find in favor of Anthropic’s ultra vires claim, because it hinged more on Trump, who was not named in this case, and seemed to have been underpled, compared to the other claims, but ultimately it was not necessary for Anthropic to prevail on to get all the relief it sought.

When a presidential order does not stem from powers granted through “an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself,” the order violates the separation of powers doctrine, and a district court may enjoin federal agencies from implementing the order as ultra vires. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 584–86 (1952). Anthropic argues that the president lacks “statutory authority” or a “constitutional basis” to direct “EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” (Dkt. No. 166 at 30; AR 255A.) In passing, Anthropic cites four statutes regulating “exclusion from federal contracting.” (Dkt. No. 166 at 30 (citing as “examples” 10 U.S.C. §§ 3203(a)(1), 3204(a); 41 U.S.C. §§ 3303(a)(1), 3304(a)).) However, Anthropic is not asserting a claim for violation of a specific procurement statute, see, e.g., State v. Su, 121 F.4th 1, 5 (9th Cir. 2024), and “claims simply alleging that the President has exceeded his statutory authority are not ‘constitutional’ claims.” Dalton v. Specter, 511 U.S. 462, 473 (1994). Anthropic’s passing references to the statutory provisions and Congress’s “power of the purse” are insufficient to carry its burden of showing the President clearly exceeded “any background constitutional authority” to issue the Presidential Directive, thereby rendering the order ultra vires in violation of the separation of powers. Sierra Club v. Trump, 929 F.3d 670, 696 (9th Cir. 2019).

That the court found liability for both the constitutional claims and APA claims is why Anthropic was able to get all that relief, including both vacatur of the agency action and also a permanent injunction.

First, despite the government’s arguing that the matter should simply be remanded back to the agency for further action, rather than the court vacating what the agency had earlier done entirely, the court disagreed that such a remand would be adequate (“In light of Anthropic’s showing that the Supply Chain Designation violates the substance of Section 3252 and that Secretary Hegseth lacked any authority to order a secondary boycott, remand without vacatur would be an inadequate remedy.”). There was no point giving the government another bite of an apple it wasn’t entitled to eat in the first place.

Nor were the government’s claims it would be harmed by this more extreme remedy availing, given how the government had been coping just fine with its action already having been enjoined for quite some time (“[T]here has been no showing by the government that vacatur would result in a national security risk or any other harm—despite the fact that the Supply Chain Designation and the Hegseth Directive have been preliminarily enjoined for over five months.”). It is also why the court denied an automatic stay of its order, since the government had obviously not been harmed by the preliminary injunction already in place.

And as for why the court also granted a permanent injunction on top of vacatur, it found that vacatur alone would not redress the constitutional injury.

Furthermore, to the extent Defendants rely on their voluntary cessation of the challenged conduct, it is not “absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.” Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Env’t Servs., 528 U.S. 167, 189 (2000) (citation omitted); Enrico’s, Inc. v. Rice, 730 F.2d 1250, 1253 (9th Cir. 1984) (“We recognize that the voluntary cessation of allegedly illegal conduct does not deprive a court of the power to grant injunctive relief.”). Defendants continue to defend and have declined to stipulate to enjoin the Challenged Actions. For these same reasons, legal remedies would be inadequate. As to Defendants’ argument that Anthropic “continues to speak freely,” has experienced an increase in its valuation, and has not had its federal contracts terminated yet (Dkt. No. 214 at 33–34), that reflects the restoration of the status quo pursuant to the preliminary injunction in this case. The record shows no indication that, upon lifting the preliminary injunction, the harms at issue would still be averted.

In sum, the vindictive petulance of Hegseth and the Trump Administration has led to a particularly obvious constitutional injury, which no statute otherwise privileges. Per the court, the directives are now nullities and Hegseth and his agency are prohibited from trying again. Pursuant to the separate order, if they want to take any action, it can only be what they were lawfully allowed to do in the first place.

This Order does not bar any Defendant from taking any lawful action that would have been available to it on February 27, 2026, prior to the issuance of the Challenged Actions. For example, this Order does not require the Department of War to use Anthropic’s products or services and does not prevent the Department of War from transitioning to other artificial intelligence providers, so long as those actions are consistent with applicable regulations, statutes, and constitutional provisions.

Daily Deal: Raspberry Pi Pico With Ultimate Starter Kit [Techdirt]

The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico With the Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich IoT learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. With over 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming and IoT engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming and IoT concepts. Packed with diverse hardware, including sensors, actuators, LEDs, and LCDs, it enables endless experimentation and creativity. Supporting three programming languages, MicroPython, C/C++, and Piper Make, the kit caters to varying skill levels while fostering coding versatility. With dedicated technical support and a vibrant online community, this all-in-one starter kit ensures a seamless, hands-on journey into the world of IoT. It’s on sale for $65 for a limited time.

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

School Asks Cops To Stop Using Stun Gloves On Its Students [Techdirt]

Compliant Technologies probably would have preferred to keep flying under the radar. But a gaudy new no-bid contract with ICE (worth up to $20 million!) made it impossible.

Prior to ICE’s big purchase, it may as well have never existed. It only had a few clients, and those few clients purchased a few pairs for prison guards and jail staffers. That’s the sort of thing that kind of makes sense. Controlling inmates in enclosed spaces requires a bit more finesse than just beating them with batons.

Given the increased chance of losing control of a “compliance” option, turning gloves into quasi-stun guns made it easier to deploy force while simultaneously reducing the probability of losing a baton/Taser/OC canister to an inmate who’s stronger and faster than the average prison guard (i.e., most of them).

But ICE decided it wanted even more force to deploy, even though deploying force (a lot of it “excessive”) is basically all ICE does. Under-trained officers tend to underperform in the field, especially when they’re asked to do something more than seize the occasional website or find illegal substances hidden in cargo containers.

Here comes the shocker. Not only did a cop shop give officers some stun G.L.O.V.E.s (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters), but it allowed them to deploy them in Omaha, Nebraska schools. With the G.L.O.V.E. backlash now fully engaged due to ICE’s interest in inflicting further unnecessary pain, an Omaha school district is “asking” cops not to use these gloves.

And the best thing we can say about this development is that the cops have actually agreed to stop glove-stunning students, without engaging in too much extracurricular bitching:

Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district.

The Omaha mayor and police chief said in a joint statement Monday that the gloves were used twice in the last school year, including in a program for students with learning deficits.

Reread that last sentence a few more times. That’s extremely disturbing. While officers claim to have only used them “twice,” it did deploy them at least once to stun “students with learning deficits.”

And I only said there was a minimum of bitching by the cops. There was still some bitching, which arrived in the form of belated justification for stun-tech I can almost guarantee no parent was aware school resource officers (a fancy phrase for “school cop”) had access to, much less using on students.

“We believe it is the safest use-of-force option in the rare times when it is used,” the statement said.

“Safest?” As compared to what?!?! At what point do you decide a school discipline issue necessitates an ambush with literal shock tactics? Is this safer than NOT FUCKING DOING THIS AT ALL? I’m not an expert in “low voltage emissions” but I would like to believe any option that is less violent than stunning a student into submission is actually safer than any option that involves incapacitating someone with an electric shock.

What’s wild is that the school district actually had to make this request and then hope the cops would comply. And they had to hold onto this hope despite there being significant pushback from the community these cops are supposed to be serving. That it took the cops an entire day to simply agree to use the multiple violent force options they already have available to them doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.

Destroying this minimal amount of confidence is the fact that this “agreement” (which hasn’t been made official) only extends to the Omaha PD. For some fucking reason, a bunch of Omaha-area cops “serving” Omaha schools apparently also have these gloves and aren’t promising to change a damn thing about how they handle policing schools.

However, the suburban Bellevue police department that patrols two Omaha schools and the large Bellevue district said its officers will continue carrying the gloves. Three other large school districts in the metro area that have Omaha school resource officers assigned to their buildings have not taken action to stop police from using the devices.

This agency saw the backlash and the semi-capitulation of the city’s largest law enforcement agency and then… did absolutely nothing. As far as the Bellevue PD is concerned, it’s still open season on students when it comes to SROs (school resource officers) and their stun gloves.

The schools in that district appear to be led by people who will never take issue with anything cops might do. Nothing to see here, says the district spokesperson, whose statement sounds like something delivered by someone who developed Stockholm Syndrome while undergoing a lobotomy:

Bellevue schools spokeswoman Amanda Oliver said the district has a great relationship with Bellevue police and doesn’t see a need to alter anything.

Oh, I’m sure the district has a “great relationship” with the cops. But we’re not worried about the administrators. We’re worried about the kids, who are the ones who will be subjected to violent force, including these novel stun gloves the kids at ICE keep talking about. And the Bellevue PD has used them just as often on students as the Omaha PD. And even though it was only “two” instances, the Omaha PD was at least willing to swear off using this tech in schools.

Meanwhile, in Bellevue, it’s apparently business as usual, even though no one (other than the PD and this weirdly cheery PR person) wants cops to have this option when patrolling schools.

At last week’s school board meeting, about 30 people spoke out against police using the gloves. Residents and board members alike said they were appalled at the practice. No one spoke in favor of it.

No one except the people who will never be subjected to the stun gloves, which the company helpfully points out won’t leave evidence “burn or contact marks” on the minors subjected to them. Bellevue schools — via its PR flack — said everything is fine. The chief of the Bellevue PD, Ken Clary, similarly claims to have a healthy relationship with the G.L.O.V.E.

“I am not comfortable having our officers give up a tool that has repeatedly proven to be safe, effective, and less harmful than the alternatives,” Clary said in a statement.

Again: as compared to what? You can’t just say this option is better than others without providing any evidence to support this statement. I mean, you can, but you shouldn’t expect anyone to believe you. This just sounds like a top cop claiming each new force option is more “effective” and “safer” than whatever the department is already using. Adding yet another option is never viewed as adding to the excess. It’s just folded in with everything else and glossed over in public statements until the public’s attention is focused elsewhere.

There’s no reason for ICE to have these gloves. Officers already have tons of force options, as well as the full permission/judicial immunity to use whatever option they feel will inflict the most pain at any given point. The G.L.O.V.E. may have started out as a prison option, but now it’s clear cops want this option whenever they’re dealing with… shall we say… captive audiences. And the defenders of this tech are making it clear they think inmates and students are interchangeable, at least when it comes to deploying force.


01:00 AM

What’s next? [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

For fifteen or twenty years, this question is relentlessly answered, whether or not we ask it.

After we learn fractions, the teacher moves on to decimals. After we read O’Connor, we’re handed Faulkner. In music history, Debussy follows Brahms. Chemistry after biology.

It persists in some places after school… the museum hangs Picasso in the next room after Braque.

And in the old days, the newspaper editors spent a lot of time organizing their stories and their pages.

But now… nothing.

Random access. No attention paid to what we need to know now, what follows from where we are, what’s about to be important.

Not at work and not as citizens.

Instead, it’s a random-access blizzard of emails, meetings and alerts. A mob screaming about the emergency of the moment without lining up the context first. Part of our dislocation and ennui come from the lack of a shared curriculum.

Choosing what’s next might be the most important decision we make today.

      

Friday 2026-08-28

11:00 PM

Republicans Stumble In Bid To Flood Midterm Airwaves With Discounted Ads [Techdirt]

Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment. Which is every bit as stupid and corrupt as it sounds.

Previously, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), political parties were subjected to strict statutory caps on how much money they could spend in direct coordination with their candidates’ campaigns. The Supreme Court’s June ruling eliminated candidate contribution caps, made it much easier for rich people to flood Joint Fundraising Committees (JFCs) with cash, and basically gave a giant green light for more quid-pro quo corruption to be exploited by dark money groups.

Given the broad disparity in how much money the two U.S. parties have ($125 million for the GOP versus a bunch of debt for the mismanaged DNC) Republicans were keen to use the Supreme Court ruling to their advantage in the coming midterms, hoping to flood the airwaves with more dark money-funded agitprop than ever before in a bid to try and offset Donald Trump’s nose-diving popularity.

Hoping to embolden their plan and provide discounts, the Brendan Carr FCC’s media bureau quietly issued an announcement late last March saying they were making some changes to the FCC’s lowest unit charge (LUC) requirements governing broadcast TV political ads. The changes expanded which political entities qualified for discounted broadcast advertising rates.

Historically, a subset of political candidates were given a discounted rate on ads starting 60 days before the midterms (generally the lowest rate any advertiser has to pay during that block of time). The Supreme Court and FCC collaborated to extend that discount to effectively all dark money political groups and JFCs, giving the GOP a massive advantage in midterm messaging and spending.

But things have since gotten slightly more complicated for Republicans.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans refuse to fill the other empty Democrat seat), issued a statement this week belatedly blasting the Carr FCC for expediting America’s steady decline at the hand of billionaire donors and political corruption:

“In the final stretch of a national election, this FCC is unleashing a flood of coordinated
campaign money into broadcast advertising, just as the Supreme Court has cleared the way
for unlimited coordinated spending between parties and candidates. This unprecedented,
last-minute decision gives the biggest political spenders an even bigger advantage over
everyone else by expanding the candidate-only discount established by law to joint
fundraising and party committees, an advantage that will make it hard for anyone else to
catch up before Election Day.

According to Gomez, Carr’s FCC also made the changes with all the transparency you might expect:

This decision was made behind closed doors by agency staff, not by the full Commission, and it contradicts what this administration itself told the Supreme Court less than a year ago about who qualifies for this discount. In direct conflict with the administration’s position, the FCC relies on alleged staff-level guidance that was never provided in writing and that nobody could find, and adopted it with no opportunity for the public to weigh in. The American people should not have sweeping election-year rule changes forced on them in the dark, on the eve of an election, without a single opportunity for public input.

But there’s some new bad news for Brendan Carr and the Republican midterm agitprop machine: Sen. Jon Ossoff, Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet and Senate candidates Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown filed a lawsuit last June attempting to stop the FCC. And this week, The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided 2-1 with the four Democrats, temporarily suspending the FCC effort:

“The [lowest unit charge] requirement and campaign finance statutes are clear that neither political parties nor joint fundraising committees with non-candidate members can be entitled to the LUC.”

The court found that the Carr FCC also basically ignored numerous complaints by broadcasters and politicians about the unfairness of the discounted ad rate plan:

“Despite the time-sensitive nature of these proceedings, the Commission intentionally took no action and offered no response to the Application for more than three months. The Commission did not, for example, seek responses from impacted parties, or engage in fact finding, or secure supplemental briefing, or solicit public comment, or schedule or conduct an oral argument.”

Funny, that.

Republicans will inevitably appeal. Though the Republican effort to get highly discounted rates for their midterm agitprop campaigns has stalled out at an inopportune time (for them). But overall, the general direction of U.S. lobbying and corruption safeguards generally has only been headed one direction, with fairly ugly and obvious results everywhere you look.

Belgian Orders Demand Pirate Site Operators’ Bank Details, Crypto Wallets and Server Logs [TorrentFreak]

bitcoinBelgium’s Department for Combating Online Infringement (BAPO) regularly issues site blocking decisions, which are grounded in orders from the Brussels Business court.

These blocking efforts yield some results but pirate sites often switch domain names quickly, frustrating the enforcement efforts.

With a series of new decisions issued this week, Belgium’s anti-piracy department is trying to tackle the piracy problem more directly. Instead of blocking the sites, they compel domain name registrars to identify the associated operators.

Domain Registrars and a Registry

As with the blocking effort, the five decisions are linked to an order from the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels. Four decisions are addressed to domain registrars, while the fifth targets a domain name registry that holds registrant records directly.

The order and the decisions are redacted and don’t mention the rightsholder or the targeted websites.

That said, the court’s reasoning refers to the need to preserve “the sports economy and the European solidarity model”, which clearly points at sports piracy. And there are more tells that allow us to name several of the targeted intermediaries.

BAPO told TorrentFreak the secrecy is not its own choice but the court’s. The judge “ordered the disclosure of information to enable the plaintiff to identify the infringer and conduct further investigations,” it said, and separately “ordered that the identity of the targeted content and intermediary may not be disclosed.”

BAPO did not say whether the domain names would be identified later, but three intermediaries are accidentally mentioned by name. One decision instructs Hosting Concepts to send the requested information to BAPO, another sets a deadline for Hostinger, while a third does the same for Key Systems. Every other mention in those documents is replaced with placeholders.

These are all EU-based domain registrars. The fourth registrar and the domain name registry are not named. The same is true for the domain names that are targeted.

Bank Details, Crypto Wallets, and Server Logs

The four registrar decisions each demand the same seven categories of information. This includes a long list of data that should be handed over, including the customer’s name, every postal address, email address and phone number ever attached to the account.

The intermediaries are also compelled to disclose “the full IBANs and the exact names of the holder(s) of the relevant bank accounts”, and card details down to the issuing bank, country of issue and card type.

Payments in cryptocurrency are covered too. The orders cover any “means of payment in crypto-assets, where applicable, including in particular the wallet addresses used, the type of crypto-asset concerned, and the transaction identifiers (hash IDs)”.

Targeted information

information

The registrars also have to check their logs for the target’s IP address, device type, operating system and browser used to create the account, followed by “all logs and connection data retained by the relevant intermediary relating to the use of the customer account over the last twelve (12) months”.

IP-addresses, logs, user-agent

logs

The domain registry decision is more narrow, requesting registrant details, the identity of the registrar, the nameservers in use, and the history of changes. The Brussels Business court concluded that these demands are proportionate and BAPO has relayed these to the intermediaries.

Gag Order

The decisions come with a gag order. The domain registrars and registry are not allowed to disclose the information-seeking request to their customers or any third parties, including the press.

That order covers “any information concerning the very existence of these proceedings or of the order, or of any matter connected with the proceedings”.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) normally requires a provider to inform affected users that their data has been handed over. However, BAPO notes that there is an exception when criminal investigation and prosecution are at stake, which it believes applies here.

Not Informed

not informed

What the criminal allegations are isn’t immediately clear. However, the order effectively means that the pirate site operators can have their identity, banking history and connection logs handed over to rightsholders without their knowledge.

Can it be Enforced?

The decisions rely on Article 10 of the DSA, which covers how an information order applies to a provider elsewhere in the EU. BAPO’s actual powers come from Belgian law, and all the named intermediaries sit outside Belgium, so whether it can enforce the measures against them has yet to be seen.

BAPO went further, telling TorrentFreak the orders aren’t even limited to the EU. Under the Belgian civil procedure and the DSA, it said, “every intermediary whose service is being used to give access to illegal content within the Belgian territory can be ordered to disclose information regarding its customer.”

That is a broad claim and has to be tested in practice.

Unfortunately, the press and the public at large are left in the dark, as it remains a mystery who requested the order, who it targets, and which other intermediaries it applies to.

Whether any of the intermediaries have complied yet is unknown and, given the gag order, they are not likely to let anyone know.

—

Copies of BAPO’s five decisions are available here (pdf), here (pdf), here (pdf), here (pdf) and here (pdf).

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

07:00 PM

New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 16.0a10 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 16.0a10 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

⚠️ Reminder: The Tor Browser Alpha release-channel is for testing only. As such, Tor Browser Alpha is not intended for general use because it is more likely to include bugs affecting usability, security, and privacy.

Moreover, Tor Browser Alphas are now based on Firefox's betas. Please read more about this important change in the Future of Tor Browser Alpha blog post.

If you are an at-risk user, require strong anonymity, or just want a reliably-working browser, please stick with the stable release channel.

✨ New Features which need attention!

📖 Updated Built-in manual on Desktop Tor Browser

The Tor Project's old support page and content has been updated. Starting with Tor Browser 16.0a10, this updated design and content is now baked into the browser and replaces the legacy manual. You can access the manual directly by navigating to about:manual in the URL bar or by clicking on the various "Learn more" links found in the browser's UI.

⚙️ Settings Redesign now enabled by default

With Tor Browser 16.0a10, we have enabled the new about:preferences designs from Mozilla by default. Our additional settings (connectivity, letterboxing, security level, etc) should now all be migrated over and using the new design language. Please file an issue if you find any regressions!

🪟 Generic Window Titles

On most (all?) desktop operating systems, applications have the ability to programmatically set and update the title of their windows. Normally, this is very useful as it allows the names of your applications to appear in the desktop UI in the title bar or as entries in application switchers (e.g. when you alt-tab between applications).

Historically, web browsers have dynamically updated their application's window title to the contents of the current web page's <title> element. For example, the window name for the browser window you are currently using is very likely some variant of New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 16.0a10 | The Tor Project — Tor Browser. If you were to navigate away from this page (please don't), the title would be updated to some variant of that page's <title> element contents.

While this process provides convenient usability to end-users, these title changes are generally detectable and readable by 3rd party applications or the operating system itself. This is typically not a privileged action, meaning software does not typically require special permissions to do this. These same APIs which allow programs to enumerate open windows also allow them to record browsing history using window title changes as a side-channel.

To counteract this, we've developed (and upstreamed) an opt-in feature disabling these window title changes and instead replacing them with just the the name of the browser. You can try this feature out by going to about:preferences, clicking on Privacy and security in the navigation panel, clicking on Advanced settings within the Connection and software security group, and checking Use generic window titles in the Protections from third-party applications group. With this setting enabled, all Tor Browser window titles should now simply read Tor Browser Alpha.

For any vanilla Firefox users out there, you can enable this feature by going to about:config and setting the privacy.exposeContentTitleInWindow (for normal-browsing windows) and privacy.exposeContentTitleInWindow.pbm (for private-browsing windows) boolean options to false.

We had hoped to enable this feature by default in the 16.0 series, but it is a bit late in the release cycle to push out such a feature with potentially unseen side-effects (e.g. causing breakage with a11y software, specific desktop environments, or other custom configurations) without user testing. Please give this feature a go (especially if your desktop environment is non-standard) and report back any issues or incompatibilities you find.

Send us your feedback

If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 16.0a9 is:

02:00 PM

Irony: Catholic Bishops Tell FL Officials To Respect Its Religious Liberty To Not Accept Religious Exemptions For Vaccines [Techdirt]

The country is continuing to reel from multiple infectious disease outbreaks in America, even as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough: you don’t actually need me to go on. With RFK Jr. using his position as Secretary of HHS to further muddy the waters on vaccines and their safety, some states are going even further than the federal government. Even as states like South Carolina have fielded proposals to end religious exemptions for public school inoculations, states like Florida have attempted to go the opposite direction and simply end all school vaccine requirements by law. While that attempt has so far failed, there are state laws that mandate schools accept religious exemptions for vaccines.

And not just public schools. This mandate is written to affect private religious schools as well and the irony here is thick. For example, Florida AG James Uthmeier wrote a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops warning them that they might not qualify for state scholarships and vouchers any longer. Why? Because Florida Catholic schools don’t accept religious exemptions for vaccine requirements.

As you can read for yourself in Uthmeier’s post, his letter did far more than issue that warning. It also went into great detail in explaining to a group of Catholic Bishops why they don’t have any legitimate religious reason to refuse those exemptions. Uthmeier did correctly identify that there is irony in all of this, but his targeting computer is off. The actual irony is in a government official, an Attorney General no less, telling religious elders what their own religion says, all while blatantly violating the First Amendment.

Here’s the First Amendment’s opening text, in case you need it.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If an AG can tell a religion what it means to express its faith, then there is no point to the opening of the First Amendment. They can’t. This is obvious.

But let it never be said that Florida Bishops aren’t a patient lot, I suppose. The FCCB took the time to respond to Uthmeier to demonstrate precisely their religious justification for refusing vaccination exemptions.

Florida’s Catholic schools do not accept religious exemptions for vaccines. In a letter to Attorney General James Uthmeier, made public last week, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops said Florida bishops don’t have to justify their position, but are doing so “out of respect for you and your office.”

The letter goes on to say that the position against religious exemptions for vaccines is rooted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states that, “Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good.” 

A better justification for vaccinations in general this writer could not come up with. And the debunking of Uthmeier’s misguided attempt to tell Catholic leaders what they should believe is fairly easy, as well. The AG’s letter makes much of the idea that today’s vaccines include the cells of presumably newly aborted fetuses and, since the Catholic Church is very much anti-abortion, that means that they should I guess be anti-vaccine as well. Which, if you’re following along, isn’t an argument that Catholic schools should accept religious exemptions for students, but rather an argument that no Catholic anywhere should get vaccinated at all.

Except he’s wrong. Vaccines produced today, and even going back decades and decades, don’t contain any cells from newly aborted fetuses.

Vaccines do not contain fetal cells. As the American Academy of Pediatrics explains, some vaccines involve growing viruses in human cell cultures originally developed from two aborted fetuses in the 1960s: “These cell lines are still going, so no new aborted fetuses are ever needed. Purification processes filter the vaccine during production, and no fetal tissue remains.”

The Catholic Church says it’s morally permissible to receive these vaccines and that people who choose to vaccinate their children can do so with a clear conscience because, as the Florida bishops note, “the parent is not cooperating with the original immoral act.” 

Additionally, in 2021, Pope Francis told people to get the COVID-19 vaccine, calling it an “act of love,” even though fetal cell lines were used to develop both the Moderna and Pfizer shots. 

Does AG Uthmeier really intend to argue with the Pope, the vicar of Christ to Catholics, about what is permissible under Catholic dogma and what is not? This from the same party that absolutely adores playing religious victim when it suits their own political desires, or when they want to encroach on American secular society.

If the Uthmeier had any shame, he’d immediately apologize for disrespecting Florida Catholics, Catholic leadership, and for wildly overreaching in his attempt to carry out his state government’s stupid attempt to make everyone sicker. But he won’t. At best he’ll slink away and say no more on the topic at all.

But if we’re really lucky, there will be a conflict that pits the Florida government against the Catholic Church with the latter crying foul over an encroachment on its own religious liberty. Were I of a praying sort, that is what I would pray for.

01:00 PM

Don’t Freak Out About Mail-In Ballots. (At Least Not Just Yet.) [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of U.S. News & World Report

Were you to only read the headlines and the hot takes, you might conclude that mail-in balloting is toast and the midterms right along with it. After all, Trump took direct aim at mail-in voting in a completely illegal executive order, and earlier this week the Supreme Court greenlit his sabotage.

To top things off, yesterday the federal judge in Boston overseeing these cases bowed to the High Court’s reasoning and lifted the other court order, the one thing keeping the White House and the Postal Service from proceeding with their plan to police mail-in ballots.

Deep breath time. Stepping back and taking in a wider view, this much remains clear: Despite procedural setbacks, the merits of Trump’s order have not been ruled upon by a higher court, meaning no one has actually won this fight yet. Indeed, it’s barely begun.

Today I want to walk through where things stand and help talk folks down from the ledge if you happen to be standing on one. And I want to offer some practical advice in the face of all this wild and disturbing litigation over mail-in ballots.

Subscribe now

The nutshell

In March of this year, facing Senate resistance on his SAVE America Act, Donald Trump signed an executive order that sought to put the federal government in charge of deciding whose mail ballots get delivered. That’s suspicious right out the gate, because the Constitution gives authority over federal elections to the states and Congress—not the president.

Judge Indira Talwani, sitting in Massachusetts, blocked Trump’s plan on the merits. And she did so in two different cases brought by two different sets of plaintiffs.

This week, the Supreme Court knocked out one of those blocks, clearing half the path for the White House and the USPS to move forward with the executive order and leading many to claim the sky was falling.

The headlines certainly didn’t help. The media didn’t adequately explain that the High Court had actually ruled on a narrow technicality. The states that had sued, the Court said, had filed too early, before the Postal Service had finalized its rule. That meant, in legal terms, that the case was not “ripe” for adjudication, so as a matter of law the district court lacked the power to hear it. (The liberal justices disagreed, but for now let’s just assume the “ripeness” question is the operative one.)

The media also often brushed past another important point. The justices had gone out of their way to say they weren’t ruling on whether the plan itself is legal. “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” they wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

Then on Wednesday, Judge Talwani also lifted the block in the second case, saying she felt bound by the Supreme Court’s reasoning. She did this even though, as Democracy Docket noted, she clearly didn’t love it. That meant, for the moment, the federal government could move ahead with implementation of the rule.

But that moment might not last long. Judge Talwani told the groups suing that they’re free to come back with a stronger case, now that there’s a finalized rule to challenge. And by the end of the day, a coalition of 23 states, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro personally—with Hawaii newly joining the state plaintiffs—did exactly that. They immediately filed a motion asking the court to stop the government from moving forward.

If this seems convoluted, it’s because it is. And there’s a fair question hanging out there: Why would the SCOTUS majority bother knocking out the lower court’s injunction on a technicality like ripeness if the plaintiffs could simply come right back and sue again now that the rule is final?

The cynic in me believes that the radical justices want to signal to the White House that they have its back and will do everything they can to put their finger on the scale, at least up to a point. It costs the majority nothing to throw this wrench into the plans and give Trump a “win,” even if short-lived.

Then the true cynic in me wonders whether they are trying to run out the clock so that they can argue it’s “too late” for courts to get involved. More on that in a bit.

What Trump’s order actually tries to do

Back in July, in a piece in The Big Picture (I hope you’re a subscriber!), I laid out what Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots sought to achieve.

Homeland Security is building a master list of who counts as a U.S. citizen, and it’s sharing that with states. It supposedly exists to verify states’ voter rolls. At the same time, the order directs the Postal Service to build a system for states to “opt in” and let USPS handle their mail-in ballots. Once they do, USPS will deliver only those mail-in ballots from voters who are on that government-approved list.

So what happens if states don’t opt in? Those that don’t hand over their voter rolls to the federal government could see every one of their mail ballots refused. If that sounds insane, the postmaster general confirmed this under questioning from senators this summer, saying flatly that USPS would withhold ballots from any state that doesn’t turn over its list.

That’s a code red. Most blue states have understandably refused to cooperate, while many red states have gone along. The regime then sued the blue states to obtain their voter rolls, but it has lost 23 times consecutively, including before Trump-appointed judges, which tells you something about the merits of its arguments.

Note that DHS’s citizenship database has a documented track record of flagging legitimate, naturalized citizens as non-matches, a problem the government has conceded in court. Real, eligible voters would get caught by a highly imperfect federal filter.

Two lawsuits, one judge

Two different groups sued over the plan, and both cases landed in front of Judge Talwani in Massachusetts. As Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck explained, one case was brought by 23 Democratic-led states plus Washington, D.C. That’s the one that made it to the Supreme Court this week. The other was brought independently by voting-rights groups, led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.

Judge Talwani blocked the plan on the merits in both cases, first ruling for the states in June and then issuing a separate injunction for the voting-rights groups in August. A three-judge appeals court panel, including a judge appointed by Trump himself, left Judge Talwani’s states’ injunction in place in July. That means the merits of the plan have faced multiple serious legal tests so far and lost each time.

Procedural maneuvering

On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with the White House, but as I discussed above, it was only on a technicality, and it affected only one of the two cases. The six-justice majority focused on timing: The blue states and D.C. had filed their lawsuit while the Postal Service still had a proposed rule, not a finished one, and the majority found that too early to sue over.

For a couple of days, Judge Talwani’s separate block on the Postal Service’s implementation of the rule, in the case brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting-rights groups, remained in place. Then yesterday, Judge Talwani lifted her second block in the voting-rights group's case. She said she felt bound to apply the same reasoning the Supreme Court used on Monday, even though her order took several pointed shots at the majority’s logic along the way.

Importantly, Judge Talwani lifted her block “without prejudice,” meaning she would allow an amendment or a refiling. That left the door open for the plaintiffs to come back now that a final rule actually exists. The Postal Service finalized that rule Friday. The moment it did, it became fair game for a lawsuit on the merits, with no question of “ripeness” in the way.

The voting-rights groups took her up on her invitation. Meanwhile, a parallel case in Washington, D.C. was renewed the same week, with plaintiffs there arguing that the existence of a final rule also now makes their case ripe for review.

Norm Eisen, one of the lawyers leading these cases, put it simply the day the Supreme Court ruled: “Now we HAVE a final rule & we will litigate it. I’m as confident in our arguments here as in any of our cases!”

The Constitution says this isn’t Trump’s lane

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states, not the president, the power to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections, with Congress holding a check on that power. The president appears nowhere in the mix.

Judge Talwani built her original June ruling around that language, finding that the executive order tried to hand the president and the Postal Service a role the Constitution reserves for states and Congress. As legal expert Joyce Vance noted in her own coverage of the case, the entire fight is really a test of whether the executive branch can seize authority the Constitution explicitly puts in the states’ hands.

Justice Jackson’s dissent from the SCOTUS emergency docket ruling this week drove this point home. She noted that “the Government has not even bothered to assert, much less demonstrate, that the President has the constitutional authority to issue an order that directs the manner in which the mail-in ballot aspect of federal elections is to be administered.” Legal writer Chris Geidner, covering the Court’s ruling in his newsletter, noted that the dissents pointed to language the majority opinion itself included in its brief, unsigned opinion: Nobody, including the government, was arguing the order is actually constitutional.

Beware a twisted Purcell

Even though no one can credibly argue that the president has the power to do something the Constitution expressly forbids with respect to federal elections, the most serious threat comes from a Court that remains highly selective about when it does—and does not—get involved in election matters.

Federal courts are supposed to uphold a longstanding practice of avoiding last-minute changes to how elections are run. The concern is that changing the rules close to an election creates confusion for voters. It’s called the “Purcell principle” after a 2006 case.

Prof. Vladeck flagged that principle as the thing to watch most closely in this fight. The same Supreme Court majority that just ruled for the administration on procedural grounds could decline to block the Postal Service rule, even while agreeing the rule is illegal, simply by throwing up its hands and saying Election Day is too close for a court to jump in. It’s a twisted version of Purcell that actually permits the very kind of chaos the case is supposed to prevent.

We can look directly at the Court’s own history of inconsistent application of the principle to see the danger. Recently, it repeatedly changed election rules using its own emergency docket in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama this term, very late in election cycles, when doing so favored Republican interests. Purcell seems to disappear as a consideration when it suits the majority, staying the hands of courts instead of mapmakers or federal officials precisely when injunctions are most needed to prevent electoral chaos.

Where the real opportunities still are

The challenges brought this week attack an actual, published and final rule, rather than a proposed one. That’s the gap the Supreme Court somewhat pointlessly said doomed the first case, but it’s closed now.

Judge Talwani is still the judge on the two Massachusetts cases that are furthest along. And she already ruled for the states in June on the constitutional grounds discussed above and reached the same conclusion in the voting-rights groups’ case this month. Nothing about this week’s rulings touched that reasoning.

There’s also a separate case running along a parallel track. The NAACP has an ongoing case against USPS in Washington, D.C., under a 2021 settlement in which the Postal Service promised to prioritize timely delivery of election mail through 2028. A D.C. Circuit panel let USPS keep working on its rule while that case plays out, but the underlying settlement claim is still alive, and it doesn’t depend on the constitutional question at all; it’s a settlement agreement the Postal Service already signed.

What voters can do in response

If there is any takeaway from these cases, it is this: The Supreme Court cannot be trusted to do the right thing (okay, duh) and voters need to take precautions. Voters worried about their ballot getting caught up in a federal list-matching system, or their state’s ballots being denied access to the mail entirely, have options that sidestep this entire fight.

Notably, early in-person voting isn’t touched by any part of this rule. Neither are drop boxes, wherever states offer them. A ballot placed directly in an official drop box never actually enters the postal system that the executive order and rule are trying to police.

For voters who rely on the mail because in-person or drop-box options aren’t practical, mailing ballots as early as possible can reduce the risk of getting caught in the transition if the rule takes effect while litigation is underway. Voters should also track their ballots through their state’s official tracking tool.

These considerations are especially important in states that rely heavily on mail-in ballots, particularly in California, where mail-in ballots counted after Election Day have repeatedly determined close House races. Based on Trump’s current false and inflammatory rhetoric around election fraud being driven by mail-in ballots, he will likely refuse to accept the House election results if California is continuing to count millions of mail-in ballots after Election Day.

An outright win by House Democrats in California on Election Night, on the other hand, from millions of early, drop-box and same-day ballots would effectively prevent Trump from making this claim.

To my California readers: If you are accustomed to using mail-in ballots, you can do your part to reduce the chaos by placing your completed ballot in a drop box or by voting early and in person.

After all, Trump can’t exactly demand that California stop its vote count or send in the FBI to seize machines and uncounted ballots if the Dems are already up and hold the House majority by the end of Election Night.

Please help spread the word by sharing the above information, especially with other California voters who could well determine the House majority this November.

Share

10:00 AM

09:00 AM

Comparing Nixon’s Attacks On The Press To Trump’s [Techdirt]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In his White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026, President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the “failing” New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn’t smile enough. He dismissed the award she received at the dinner as “fake” and celebrated the recent firing of top CBS News employees.

Such ongoing extreme hostility from the president has contributed to Americans’ loss of faith in the news media, which has plummeted to an all-time low.

While the situation is in many ways unique to this moment, a perceived crisis around the very notion of “objective reporting” – and presidential use of that idea to denigrate and delegitimize the press – has a long history.

Nixon administration played hardball

Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, for example, attacked coverage of police brutality at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention as one-sided in favor of antiwar protestors. Once in office, Nixon deployed Vice President Spiro Agnew to verbally assault journalists for their putative bias and elitism.

In an infamous 1969 speech, Agnew denounced TV newsmen – they were, indeed, mostly men – as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” hostile to the president and therefore out of touch with average Americans. Agnew singled out NBC anchorman David Brinkley for his claim that “objectivity is impossible” and that “fairness” was a more reasonable objective. Like many journalists, Brinkley understood “objectivity” as implying an almost mechanical delivery of pure facts, while “fairness” was more realistic, an earnest effort to be judicious.

Agnew concluded with a challenge: People should “let the networks know that they want their news straight and objective.” He framed this populist turn as an alternative to government interference. But journalists felt the looming threat of censorship.

Brinkley’s statement was not impudent. It was realistic: an acknowledgment that journalists are humans with preconceptions and values, but that their professional mandate is to strive for impartiality.

Carefully balanced reporting was not only the baseline of journalists’ training but also a business imperative. There were only three national nightly news shows, all seeking the widest possible audience. Moderation was more profitable than swinging hard left or right.

Although frustrated with journalism in general, Agnew zeroed in on TV in his speech because it had displaced print as Americans’ leading news source. And the reality of Federal Communications Commission licensing, whereby a federal agency determined who could use publicly owned airwaves, made broadcasters vulnerable to the actions of a vengeful president.

The licensing issue still resonates. Comedian Jimmy Kimmel, a frequent Trump critic, had his show briefly suspended by ABC after angering the president’s supporters.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” FCC chair Brandon Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Kimmel survived this attack largely because public support surged, and he continues to satirize the White House. Others have been less fortunate.

Journalists fought back

Struggling to compete, newspapers in the 1960s and ’70s could have easily downplayed Agnew’s criticisms of a rival medium.

Instead, they stood up for TV. In the course of my research, I’ve found that not only in publicly accessible material but also in unpublished archival papers both broadcasters and newspapers consistently understood an attack on one media outlet as an attack on all, a lesson that holds true in 2026.

One of Agnew’s “snobs” was the liberal New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Wicker was on Nixon’s “enemies list,” and he voiced concerns about not just Nixon and Agnew but also more generally about the very notion of objectivity.

Agnew raised hackles across the American journalism community. But Wicker’s reactions stand out in particular, because he was employed by what was then known as “the paper of record,” whose grandiose credo had long been “To Give the News Impartially, Without Fear or Favor.”

In a column published on Nov. 16, 1969, Wicker granted that it was legitimate for Agnew to ask “how the power of that extraordinary medium (TV) can be most equitably controlled and exercised in the general public interest.”

But Wicker underscored that Agnew “couched his argument in direct political attack on those who differed with Mr. Nixon” and “came close to claiming immunity from criticism for Presidential utterance.”

Taking on ‘objectivity’

Two years after Agnew’s “effete snobs” speech, Wicker wrote an essay for Columbia Journalism Review objecting to journalism’s “tradition of objectivity” and “orientation toward nationalism in politics and toward establishmentarianism in other areas of society.”

The consequence, he wrote, was a heavy and generally uncritical reliance on official sources, all in the name of a spurious notion of objectivity.

Deeply offended, New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal sent a confidential memo to publisher Punch Sulzberger.

“In essence,” Rosenthal wrote, “what Tom’s piece adds up to is a public statement by … a well-known columnist of the Times … that objectivity and comprehensiveness, the journalistic foundations of this paper, are no longer valid and that the kind of paper the Times is now is no longer meaningful.”

Rosenthal said Wicker’s public expression of these thoughts was “bad for the paper” externally and “bad for morale” internally.

Regardless, such disputes at The New York Times were always waged behind the scenes. The gold standard for journalism was – and remains, whenever possible – to tell the story, not be the story.

Denouncing bias as deflection

Today, by contrast, it is widely known that the CBS News division “is on fire,” as longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley said, shortly after he was sacked.

Newly installed CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, who has no broadcast experience, positions herself as an advocate for “free speech and free thinking” and her Free Press newsletter as a reclamation of objective reporting. Yet at CBS she has made editorial choices, including killing a story highly critical of the Trump administration, that consistently favor the White House.

Like Agnew, in other words, Weiss appears to cloak uncritical acceptance of presidential positions as a battle against “bias.”

Denouncing “bias” is usually an attempt by those in power to deflect from what reporters have uncovered – from Vietnam to Watergate to Iraq. It is thus startling for someone within journalism to use the establishment’s word – bias – to self-censor.

The apparently deliberate imploding of CBS News and its flagship investigative journalism program “60 Minutes” is all the more shocking when you consider the network’s past triumphs in serving the public interest while angering politicians and presidents.

Holding government accountable

In 1971, for example, the Army and the Nixon administration attacked “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a CBS documentary about military public relations activities. Officials charged that the editing had been misleading and malicious, and the U.S. House of Representatives subpoenaed CBS journalists’ raw footage.

This congressional investigation ended as a victory for the press and the public’s right to know. CBS refused to share its outtakes, and the network’s president risked going to jail for contempt of Congress.

In his column, Wicker declared the documentary excellent, and he correctly painted the subpoena of CBS materials as resulting from White House pressure.

That same year, The New York Times and The Washington Post printed the Pentagon Papers, revealing that the government had been misleading Americans for years regarding Vietnam. The two newspapers were briefly silenced by the White House, which persuaded the courts to order them to cease releasing the documents, and then were vindicated when the Supreme Court barred the government from restraining publication.

Wicker argued that “no statute exists that says government officials must be protected from the exposure of their follies or misdeeds,” and that the Pentagon Papers’ culprit was the government, not the newspapers.

Here, Wicker made a fair, if not strictly objective, evaluation.

Such opinionated defenses of the press still ring true today. Agnew repeatedly attacked naysayers as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” but journalism serves a positive function in particular when its stories are negative.

That’s how the public is able to hold government accountable, and accountability is crucial to the fight for democracy and against censorship and authoritarianism.

Heather Hendershot is Professor of Communication Studies and Journalism at Northwestern University.

06:00 AM

Three Ways to Grow Your Business [The Business of Printing Books]

Three Ways to Grow Your Business

There are a lot of ways to grow a business, but when you get down to it, there are three fundamental drivers of growth that matter the most. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them, and for authors and creators, they change how you think about every sale.

They are:

  1.  Get more customers.
  2.  Increase the value of each order (sell more per transaction).
  3. Get customers to buy more often (increase their lifetime value).

This framework is a cornerstone strategy for the work we do at my agency and in the MBA courses I teach! 

Every growth tactic you’ve ever heard of ladders up to one of these three. 

  • Increased conversion rate → More New Customers
  • More clicks on your emails → Increased Lifetime Value
  • Bundled discount → Higher Revenue Per Transaction 
  • Better return on ad spend → More New Customers
  • Selling a signed copy → Higher Revenue Per Transaction

And the list goes on. 

And because they multiply together, you only have to double one of them to double your business, plus small gains across all three compound into something much bigger. The more intentional you can be with which lever needs to be pulled and why, the more confident you can be in the work we are doing. 


Customers: The Biggest Impact on Growth

While this sounds simple and straightforward, it is often unseen or misunderstood. 

In my MBA classes and in any speaking engagements, I always take an informal poll to see which of these will have the biggest impact on a business. 

Every single time, the top answer is #1: more new customers.

And while yes, new customers are sexy and exciting. I always joke that focusing on driving greater lifetime value is like the person everyone’s parents wanted them to date in high school. Stable, reliable, and smart, probably destined to be a doctor, engineer, or professor one day. But they are not sexy like acquisition. The problem is that obsessing solely on new customers is a great way to run a vending machine. Not a business.

Here's what I mean. Say in year one, you sell one book to 1,000 readers at $25 each. That's $25,000 in revenue. In year two, you want to double. You have three paths to get there: 

  1. More customers — sell 1 book to 2,000 people at $25 = $50,000
  2. Higher order value — sell 1 book to 1,000 people at $50 = $50,000
  3. More frequent purchases — sell a second book to the same 1,000 people at $25 = $50,000

Same result, three different levers. Options 2 and 3 get missed most often, but they’re also your most profitable, because they don’t come with an acquisition cost attached.

Direct-to-Reader Book Sales

Use Lulu Direct to sell books on your Wix, Shopify, or WooCommerce website, with a Direct Buy Button, Direct Checkout link, or the Order Import tool.

Learn About Lulu Direct

Breaking Them Down

Here’s what each lever means and the ways we help you pull it.

1. New Customers

This one is straightforward: who is your audience, where do they live online, and how do you get discovered by more of them?

In the early days of building a readership, this is where most of your energy should go. You're doing everything yourself, figuring out what resonates, and getting the word out through whatever channels you have: social, in-person, word of mouth.

Ways to move this lever:

  • Use the audience and attention you have to drive people somewhere they can take an action.
  • Leverage your social channels to send traffic to your products.
  • Sell books in person whenever you can.  Talking to your readers in person is a gift; those insights are worth their weight in gold.

Ways Lulu can help:

  • The Lulu Bookstore makes selling easy: publish your project, send people there, and they take care of checkout and fulfillment.
  • The Direct Buy Button lets you sell wherever you have an audience. It embeds into blogs, is easily linkable, and lets you keep your customer data without even having your own site.
    • Pro tip: Start collecting customer data as soon as possible. You’ll thank yourself when we get to #3.

2. Average Order Value

How much each customer spends per transaction. Most creators leave a lot of money on the table here because they are thinking in terms of single products as opposed to a packaged offer.

The more intentional you are here, the more value you can deliver and capture in each transaction. They have their wallet out; give them something extra to add or curate a package for them.

Ways to move this lever:

  • Add a companion workbook or guide to your book.
  • Create a box set or series instead of a single volume. Bundling is your friend.
  • Offer a signed or premium edition alongside the standard one.
  • Create additional resources to sell alongside, such as digital downloads, courses, and the like.
  • Incentivize higher-value purchases. Ecommerce brands do this constantly: “Free shipping on orders over $50.” “Free gift on orders over $70.” There is no reason you shouldn’t do the same. Take your current average order value, increase it by 15-20%, and that is your new “something free” milestone. 

Ways Lulu can help:

  • Lulu Direct lets you sell directly through your site with full control over the price and how it is presented. And all your customer data is yours!
  • Build a bundled product that combines several items into a single package. You can even bundle other store items with your books, perfect for driving gift purchases.
  • Create variations of your book: introduce a hardback alongside your paperback, or add a premium edition above that.
  • The Lulu API opens the door for full personalization if you want to go deeper. If it is made just for them, they will likely be willing to pay more for it. 

3. Lifetime Value

This is the one I care most about and where my bias will be on full display. I run a retention-focused marketing agency. Email and lifecycle marketing are what we do all day.

But the bias comes from results, not preference. Selling to a reader who already loves your work is fundamentally different from convincing a stranger to take a chance on you. The economics are better. The relationship is warmer. The conversion is easier. When this first clicked for me, it felt like cheating. And after spending time building brands on social, having an owned audience, not one I’m renting from a platform, really felt like cheating. 

The catch: you can only drive lifetime value if you own the customer relationship. If all your sales go through a marketplace, those readers belong to the marketplace. You have no way to reach them again.

This is why I'm adamant about selling direct, not instead of marketplaces, but alongside them. Own the relationship wherever you can.

Platforms are like drug dealers; they will get you hooked, then raise their rates.

Ways to build it:

  • Use your customer data to bring past buyers back through owned channels, especially email. Email is the cockroach of marketing channels. It just won't die. And once you've seen what a well-timed retention email does to your revenue, you'll stop thinking of it as a nuisance scurrying around your kitchen and start looking at it fondly like that new air fryer that is two steps away from completely replacing your oven.
  • Introduce more than one product over time. With one product, you have a product. With multiple, you have a business.
  • Re-market your next release to the people who loved your last one or offer it for pre-order to readers who want a first edition.
  • Update and evolve your offerings over time: a new edition of a cookbook, a holiday version, and yearly planners.
  • Keep building a relationship beyond the transaction. You may never out-scale the giants in your space, but you can out-human them. In today’s world, that matters more than ever.

Ways Lulu can help:

  • Lulu Direct and the Lulu API keep your customer data in your hands, not a marketplace's.
  • Publish as many products as you want and build out a real catalog over time. Children's book authors do this beautifully, building series book by book and bringing the same readers back again and again.

It has taken all the self-restraint in me to not go a mile deep on this topic, but if you like it enough, let the Lulu Team know, and I will be happy to dive deeper into it in another post. 

Where Each Lever Fits by Business Stage

Depending on where your business is, you’ll naturally lean on one lever more than the others.

  • In the early days, focus on new customers. You’re finding your audience and getting discovered, often doing everything yourself. Lean on the Lulu Bookstore and the Direct Buy Button. And start selling direct as early as you can: you’ll thank yourself later, because you can only drive real lifetime value if you have the customer data to do it.
  • As you mature,  think about average order value. With a rhythm for producing and selling in place, get strategic about how much each sale is worth: bundling, special editions, and personalization through the Lulu API.
  • Once you’re established, drive lifetime value. The long game is selling to the readers you already have. Use Lulu Direct or the Lulu API to bring readers back for recurring purchases.

You don’t have to pull all three at once. But over time, the most strategic and strongest businesses know how to move all three. Still, getting these to maturity does take time. 

Lean into the stage you’re in, set up direct selling early, and layer in the next lever as you grow.

Three Ways to Grow Your Business

MKTG Rhythm is a retention-focused marketing agency helping brands build deeper relationships with their customers and turning those relationships into revenue. Specializing in email & retention marketing, lifecycle strategy, customer insights, and marketing technology, MKTG Rhythm works with brands to keep their best customers coming back for more.

LA Mayor Karen Bass The Latest Democrat To Wimp Out On Paramount Merger [Techdirt]

The unpopular Paramount Warner Brothers merger should have been a perfect opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate they are finally serious about stuff like media consolidation, right wing propaganda, media reform, and antitrust after decades of policy incoherence.

Instead, numerous prominent California Democrats have been buckling to Paramount demands aimed at settling a 12-state antitrust lawsuit aimed at protecting consumers, labor, and markets from the $111 billion deal’s obvious looming labor and competition harms.

That includes California Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently quietly leaked word that he’d prefer it if California AG Rob Bonta settle the lawsuit instead of taking it to court (which still has the very real potential to kill the terrible deal entirely). Same for gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra, who recently insisted “you get way more done in the conference room than you do in the courtroom.”

Settlement also appears to be the position of Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who seems to believe that a patchwork of conditions will somehow protect Hollywood, and the country at large, from Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his plan for U.S. media domination:

“While there are varying perspectives on the proposed transaction, today we are united around one clear message: It is time for all parties to come to the table. The continued uncertainty is not good for workers, not good for productions and not good for the future of this industry,” Bass said during a press conference.

She added, “Too many productions are at a standstill, which means Angelenos are out of a job and they’re not getting paid. As mayor, I cannot stand by as the job security of thousands of hardworking union members is being put at risk. That is why we are calling on Paramount, Attorney General Rob Bonta and all relevant parties to come together, engage directly and in good faith and work urgently to find common ground and keep our vital industry in Los Angeles.”

As somebody who has covered big telecom and media mergers for the better part of an adult life, such conditions (which sound like they could include a forced sale of some TV channels) generally aren’t well crafted, routinely aren’t meaningfully enforced (especially across states), and almost always have a short shelf-life in a way that does nothing to address long-term consolidative harm.

And the Paramount deal, to be clear, is an irredeemable turd. Data indicates it’s likely to result in endless price hikes, less competition, and untold thousands of layoffs as the massive debt load is offloaded (as always) onto the backs of labor, creatives, and consumers. So understandably, labor unions like WGA West were not impressed by Bass’ push for a settlement in a statement issued to the press:

“We are disappointed that Mayor Bass has chosen to join Paramount’s pressure campaign on public enforcers to push through a merger that is being rightfully challenged as illegal and will lead to job losses in the entertainment industry. Her statement comes on the heels of a county report estimating thousands of jobs will be lost if the merger proceeds.”

Beyond the labor impact, there’s the fact that 49.5% of the debt financing is coming from overseas autocrats like the Saudi government, raising no limit of foreign influence concerns (that Republicans like Brendan Carr, who suffered an endless embolism about TikTok’s foreign ties, suddenly and curiously couldn’t care less about).

It’s also before you get to the fact that billionaire Paramount owner Larry Ellison is an overtly anti-democratic fan of Trump authoritarianism, and very clearly has ambitions to turn outlets like CBS and CNN into oligarch-friendly right-wing agitprop machines. Or, to be clear, even more overtly oligarch-friendly right wing agitprop machines.

The push for meaningless conditions and approval is a characteristic disappointment for Democrats, which haven’t had a functional media reform strategy in the last decade, part of the reason they spend so much time being dog-walked by right wing propaganda seeded across a shaky press.

Outside of spotty exception they’ve also routinely failed to be consistent on antitrust, resulting in Trump authoritarians being able to openly delude the electorate that they were the party of meaningful antitrust reform last election season.

Democratic incontinence has left it to actors like Mark Ruffalo to be the voice of coherent reason and leadership on antitrust, culminating in Paramount falsely claiming he was being “antisemitic” for criticizing Larry Ellison, Oracle, and the entire gambit’s documented tether to Benjamin Netanyahu.

California AG Bonta so far doesn’t seem inclined to settle, cancelling a planned meeting earlier this week after he claimed Paramount both leaked — and misrepresented the focus and intent of — the meetings to the press. But it’s clear the political pressure on him is mounting.

If Bonta does settle, 50 years of U.S. history generally suggests one consistent outcome: the deal moves forward, the conditions don’t really work, the new Paramount/CBS/Warner/CNN empire fires thousands of people, jacks up prices, and releases ever-shittier product in order to cut corners. The debt of the pointless deal strangles whatever’s left of Warner Brothers, resulting in yet more shitty acquisitions by somebody else later on (Netflix, Disney, Amazon).

And, like clockwork, all of the people involved in normalizing it (including the press and a bipartisan parade of politicians and pundits) will memory their role while ignoring the longer-term impact, immediately moving on to supporting the next giant terrible merger having been completely unwilling to learn anything meaningful from experience.

Oracle Helped Kneecap Section 230, Then Bought 15% Of A Company That Needs It. [Techdirt]

Six years ago, when Trump first tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations to his billionaire buddy Larry Ellison at Oracle, we wondered if this would finally get Oracle to change its tune on Section 230. While not as widely known outside of Silicon Valley, Oracle has been a driving force behind the scenes to get Congress to kill Section 230, appearing to do so almost entirely out of spite directed at Google.

It never made much sense. For most of that time, Oracle was busy trying to build itself into a leading cloud service provider — and cloud services rely on the exact same Section 230 protections Oracle was paying people to attack. But it’s not like Oracle is known for being particularly successful in its ability to think things out long term.

While Trump’s first attempt to hand TikTok to Oracle flopped, the second attempt (helped along by Democrats succumbing to a bogus moral panic about TikTok’s alleged dangers) resulted in Oracle ending up with a 15% stake in TikTok (as well as a lucrative hosting deal). In fact, Oracle’s long-term top lobbying exec, Ken Glueck (who was the architect of Oracle’s funding of a bunch of dark money groups that attacked Section 230) actually ended up with a seat on TikTok’s board.

And TikTok is already suffering from the attacks on Section 230. Remember, the wacky Anderson v. TikTok ruling that bizarrely said TikTok didn’t qualify for Section 230? That kind of ruling doesn’t happen without the widespread drumbeat of “Section 230 has gone too far” that Oracle spent years helping to push. TikTok is in a way worse position legally because of Ken Glueck’s advocacy. And now he’s on their board.

Meanwhile, Oracle, while not in the top tier of cloud providers — AWS, Microsoft, and Google together account for around 63% of enterprise cloud spending — is solidly at the top of the second tier. And while there aren’t that many Section 230 cases targeting the underlying cloud hosting providers, they’re not totally unheard of.

So, Section 230 protects both Oracle, and its large investment in TikTok. Yet Oracle spent years funding attacks on Section 230 (mainly just to piss off Google) and the main architect of that strategy is now on TikTok’s board.

Which puts us right back where we were six years ago, wondering if Oracle will ever change its tune. The company’s disclosures offer a partial answer. Section 230 is still under attack in DC, but the courts have been dismantling the law via judicial decisions that it’s not even clear what’s left for Congress to do. Looking at Oracle’s “Political Activity Reports” we see that while back in 2019 it was funding anti-tech groups which promoted attacks on Section 230 (like the Internet Accountability Project, the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, and the Copyright Alliance), these days it only funds the Copyright Alliance whose remit is larger than just attacking tech (though it still does that too).

Indeed, the IAP and FFMI, who were these huge fake grassroots non-profits designed to hold Google and Amazon to account, barely seem to exist any more. FFMI’s website stopped updating in 2023 and IAP’s in 2024. It’s almost as if they were astroturfed operations that suddenly became unnecessary once Ellison could get what he wanted directly, having spent $45 million to work his way deeper into Trump’s circle.

It looks like a large segment of the “grassroots” movement against Section 230 was conjured into existence with Oracle’s quiet backing, and seems to have evaporated once Oracle no longer needed it to exist.

Of course, there’s also the separate issue of the ongoing attempt by Ellison to also buy up half of Hollywood. Hollywood itself has probably been the second biggest force, behind Oracle, in the anti-Section 230 lobbying effort over the past decade. Ellison already owns Paramount, and may still end up with Warner Bros., as well, which might pull Oracle’s efforts back towards hating the open internet rather than defending the thing its own business runs on.

The simple fact, though, is that if you want a dynamic, competitive open internet, you need a strong Section 230. Gutting it won’t hurt the internet giants. They have buildings full of lawyers and can survive the onslaught of misguided lawsuits (most of which they’ll end up winning in the end). However, it will hurt all the small sites, the forums, the upstarts, the blogs that can’t afford to find out whether a case would get dismissed after a couple years and a million dollars of discovery. Who knows… perhaps that’s Ellison’s strategy all along: make the open internet weaker, so the companies he controls have way more power.

The next time Section 230 lands on the chopping block — and it will — Oracle (and, for that matter, TikTok) will have to pick a side. The smart move would be to defend it. But, then again, the smart move all along would have been for Oracle to defend it, and it chose the opposite for many years. The real question is whether Oracle’s years-long campaign against Section 230 comes back to bite it: devaluing the TikTok stake it worked so hard to get, and eating away at the legal protections its entire cloud business sits on top of.

Daily Deal: The 2026 Canva Creator Mastery Bundle [Techdirt]

Take your design skills to the next level with the 2026 Canva Creator Mastery Bundle, a powerful all-in-one course for modern creators and business owners. This program teaches you how to use Canva effectively to produce professional-quality visuals for any purpose. You’ll explore practical design techniques, creative workflows and branding strategies that make your content stand out. This bundle is perfect for anyone ready to upgrade their digital presence and design skills. It’s on sale for $30.

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

Kanji of the Day: 張 [Kanji of the Day]

張

✍11

小5

lengthen, counter for bows & stringed instruments, stretch, spread, put up (tent)

チョウ

は.る　-は.り　-ば.り

頑張って   (がんばって)   —   do your best
主張   (しゅちょう)   —   claim
頑張り   (がんばり)   —   tenacity
緊張   (きんちょう)   —   tension
張り   (はり)   —   stretch
緊張感   (きんちょうかん)   —   feeling of tension
頑張る   (がんばる)   —   to persevere
出張   (しゅっちょう)   —   business trip
引っ張る   (ひっぱる)   —   to pull
引っ張り   (ひっぱり)   —   pulling

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 憎 [Kanji of the Day]

憎

✍14

中学

hate, detest

ゾウ

にく.む　にく.い　にく.らしい　にく.しみ

憎しみ   (にくしみ)   —   hatred
憎む   (にくむ)   —   to hate
憎い   (にくい)   —   hateful
憎悪   (ぞうお)   —   hatred
愛憎   (あいぞう)   —   love and hate
心憎い   (こころにくい)   —   refined
憎たらしい   (にくたらしい)   —   odious
生憎   (あいにく)   —   unfortunately
憎らしい   (にくらしい)   —   odious
憎まれ口   (にくまれぐち)   —   abusive language

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

03:00 AM

Flock Claims It’s The First Company To Expose Police Misuse Of Surveillance Tech [Techdirt]

Flock Safety is hurting. It spent the early part of its career pitching plate reader tech to people who honestly didn’t need it: HOA supervisors and gated communities. Then it realized there was far more money to be made by courting governments, rather than the richest parts of the private sector.

A few years later and Flock’s network of ALPR (automated license plate readers) cameras is now snagging plate reads at a rate of 20 billion a month. Power, responsibility, etc., as the old saying goes. Except cops and Flock wanted all of the power and none of the responsibility, which leads us to where we’re at now.

Dozens of cities are shutting down (or attempting to) their Flock cameras. Journalists all over the nation have published reports based on public records requests and court filings that demonstrably show Flock’s expansive camera network is empowering a new flavor of “superpredator.” This time, the uber-predator wears cop clothes.

On top of all of that, there’s been illegal (often second-hand) access by federal officers who talk local cops into performing searches for them. Then there are the cops themselves — who when not using Flock’s network to rat out migrants and/or hunt down people seeking legal abortions — are using this tech to keep tabs on people who’ve moved on from their relationships with the thin black-and-blue line of domestic abusers and stalkers.

Flock is now desperately trying to rehabilitate its image. At this point, Flock is synonymous with stalkerware, which would already be concerning if it weren’t for the fact that people’s taxes are paying for the cameras, as well as the cops who believe anything this powerful should be abused as often as possible.

Flock recently made some changes with an eye on curbing cop misuse of its massive database. While it did at least make these restrictions the default options for new customers, the alterations don’t really affect existing users. And law enforcement agencies just now signing up for Flock’s stalkerware will find it easy to opt-out of the bumper bowling lanes Flock has set up.

While I do believe Flock’s efforts are earnest — at least as far as they go — I don’t believe Flock actually wants to alienate its largest and most profitable customer base. But I will say this: I don’t remember the CEO of Harris Technologies doing interviews and responding to town hall meetings when Stingrays (and the damage done) went viral.

On the other hand, what even the fuck is going on here? People selling surveillance tech to entities that immediately abuse it shouldn’t be going live with comments that suggest regular Americans shouldn’t be involved in discussions that involve their privacy vs. their security. And yet, here we are. Here’s TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha with more details:

The country needs to find a “compromise” between privacy and safety, according to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley.

“When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise,” Langley said during a recent interview with Fox News. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy?”

First off, if you’re headed to Fox first, it means you’re not really serious about dialing back surveillance that allows cops to hunt down abortion seekers, federal officers to hunt down migrants, and cops to hunt down their ex-girlfriends. These are all things most Fox viewers approve of.

Second, you’re not the right person to be asking about “balancing” privacy and security. You don’t really care about privacy. And despite the company’s claims, there’s little evidence on the record that installing Flock ALPRs actually leads to lower crime rates, which is what Langley is talking around when he uses a vague term like “security.”

I mean, I can secure my immediate private area with a network of cameras, improvised explosives, and sitting on my porch bathtub-cranked to the gills while cradling a shotgun. Privacy ain’t an issue. The same thing can be said for the other side: cops can load up on surveillance tech and claim things are more “secure,” but “secure” isn’t necessarily safe, and privacy still matters, whether or not Flock or its customers are willing to engage honestly with this topic.

But that isn’t the most insane/inane thing to fall out the mouth of Flock’s CEO. This is:

“I don’t think that Flock created police abuse. I think we’re the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it.”

Hot diggity damn. WTAF.

It’s true that Flock didn’t “create” police abuse. But it just sat on its hands for months as evidence of police abuse piled up.

And the long history of police abuse of pretty much every database/surveillance tool they have access to should have resulted in restrictions being put in place before the company went shopping for cops, rather than hastily put into place (figuratively) minutes ago by a CEO who is now making “PLEASE CLAP” media appearances in hopes of preventing even more contract cancellations and negative press.

While it is true that Flock’s log files can (sometimes) be obtained via public records requests (which has led to exposure of abuse by police officers), this isn’t because Flock is so good at either privacy or security. It’s just the expected side effect of doing business with government agencies.

And Flock is not the champion it pretends to be. Plenty of companies are capable of sniffing out abuse by government agencies. Most just tend not to look for it. Flock is definitely not the “first” to “shine a light” on police misconduct. 90% of this is involuntary and the other 10% is absolute horseshit. I don’t remember Flock ever posting on its blog about police abuse even though it apparently has access to search logs. It’s always someone else doing the real work, with Flock hopping on the blog to post defensive statements and/or highlight some cop official rando talking big about “this one time we found a stolen car.”

If Flock really wants to be the hero, it needs to start breaking news, rather than reacting to it. It should be the whistleblower, alerting law enforcement management and cutting off access the moment it sees something sketchy. And it should have been doing this long ago, rather than pretending it cares the most… but only after it has weathered a few years of negative press.

12:00 AM

Fertilizing the weeds [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

It’s not up to us to fix the world all by ourselves. But we vote with our attention and our dollars. If we’re attracted to the wrong stuff like moths to a flame, don’t be surprised when folks spend time building new fires.

Each of us knows that we’re motivated by positive feedback. We’re drawn to behaviors and activities that earn us a smile or a prize. And yet, we often forget to reward the businesses, behaviors and systems we want more of.

Many of us are drawn to invented controversies, hustles, one-click bargains, come-ons, convenience that comes at a high price, division, brawls, tired tropes, social networks that trap us and, while we’re at it, a big bag of fried chips.

Actually, you’re a philanthropist, doling out attention and cash to the behaviors you care about. Invest wisely.

If people stop going to the circus, the clowns go home.

      

Thursday 2026-08-27

11:00 PM

Iowa AG Brenna Bird Makes Silly, Empty Legal Threats To Try And Save Larry Ellison’s Paramount Merger [Techdirt]

As we’ve been noting, billionaire Larry Ellison’s effort to dominate what’s left of corporate media is facing some headwinds after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against his planned $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. As we’ve also noted, this is a giant turd of a deal, the debt from which will indisputably result in mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier overall product.

We know this because it’s what happens every time U.S. media giants merge; particularly when Warner Brothers is involved. It’s not something for economists or pundits to even debate. Large scale media consolidation is uniformly, indisputably bad for labor, markets, and consumers. There’s not a major U.S. industry where the impact isn’t very clearly obvious.

But the state AG lawsuit introduces all sorts of costly new delays for Ellison, which has resulted in a sort of PR desperation at the company. That has included repeatedly insisting that anybody who criticizes the merger (or Ellison) is somehow “antisemitic”. It’s also involved heavily lobbying a parade of high-profile people to try and convince the 12 state AGs to settle the case before next March’s trial.

That includes Iowa AG Brenna Bird, who wrote an editorial over at the right wing propaganda website DailyWire stating she was planning on suing California to try and stop the merger. To be clear there’s no indication she’s actually filed any legal paperwork or has any coherent standing to get legally involved, but she’s super keen to have you think she’s doing something important all the same.

The editorial is full of all sorts of silliness, including the observably false claim that more media consolidation somehow magically improves market competition (you can observe 50+ years of U.S. history to answer that question for yourself). She also leans heavily on this claim by Paramount that if they’re allowed to merge, they’ll create 30 big movies a year:

“A successful Paramount-Warner Bros. merger would change that. Netflix dominates the market for streaming. Paramount+ and HBO Max together are smaller than Netflix, smaller than Disney, and smaller than Amazon. The merger could create a company to compete: an estimated $6 billion in savings to reinvest, and a public commitment to release at least 30 movies in theaters every year. More movies mean more entertainment — and more competition means lower prices.”

As you may have observed from any of the hundreds of major U.S. mergers anytime in the last five decades, pre-merger promises by company executives are utterly worthless. They’re even more worthless in an era where we’ve defanged most of our public-protection, consumer, and labor regulators under the pretense this would somehow result in unbridled free market innovation.

Amusingly, Bird also tries to claim that California (which she singles out but is joined by 11 other state AGs in the suit) has introduced delays that would have somehow magically have instead gone toward lowering streaming video prices:

“Now think about what California’s delay is doing. Beginning in October, Paramount is contractually obligated to pay Warner Bros. roughly $7 million a day for as long as this transaction sits in limbo, and the trial that 12 state attorneys general have engineered will not even start until March 2027. That money could have lowered streaming costs but instead is being burned on a lawsuit that federal antitrust enforcers and 68 regulators around the world already concluded was unnecessary.”

It should go without saying that no, Paramount would have not just magically lowered streaming video prices if not for the AG lawsuit. That’s just… not even a coherent claim?

Most of the regulators around the world rubber stamped the deal because it has no meaningful impact on their local economies. 12 states sued to stop the deal because literally every time Warner Brothers is involved in a merger, it results in untold thousands of Americans losing their jobs, prices getting higher, and the remaining company getting steadily more enshittified. Again, this is not a debate.

The idea that letting media further consolidate — at the hands of a Trump-allied anti-democratic billionaire like Larry Ellison no less — somehow results in mystical new utopias for everyday Iowans is a very curious delusion. For Bird, the fact that the Trump DOJ (long since purged of every last person who actually believed in antitrust) claimed the deal would be good for Americans was evidence enough:

“The Department examined this deal market by market and found a benefit in each one. In streaming, it concluded the combined firm is likely to increase competition by giving consumers “a more robust competitive alternative” to the dominant players.”

I suppose Bird thought meaninglessly injecting herself in the debate over media consolidation would somehow move the needle for an oligarch, but it’s mostly just sad. I also think the endless PR and lobbying lengths Paramount has been willing to go to in order to sell this shitty deal to the public provides its own evidence as to why you probably don’t want to give Larry Ellison any more power.

Pressure continues to build for the state AGs to settle the lawsuit and allow the merger to proceed. When and if that happens, the high debt load of the deal will result in thousands of people losing their jobs, consumer prices will soar ever higher, conditions won’t be meaningfully enforced, and whatever’s left of Paramount/Warner Brothers under the management of weird brunchlords like Bari Weiss will produce more and more lowest-common-denominator offshored crap in the pursuit of impossible scale.

And when that happens, because it always happens, all the people rooting for consolidation and less regulatory scrutiny will very suddenly and curiously be nowhere to be found. All that will be left is a bunch of trash and some carnage, like the circus very abruptly packed up and left town.

09:00 PM

RSSSiteUpdated
XML About Tagaini Jisho on Tagaini Jisho 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML Arch Linux: Releases 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Carlson Calamities 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Debian News 2026-08-29 08:00 AM
XML Debian Security 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML debito.org 2026-08-29 08:00 AM
XML dperkins 2026-08-29 01:00 AM
XML F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML General Union 2026-08-29 03:00 AM
XML GIMP 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Japan Bash 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML Japan English Teacher Feed 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML Kanji of the Day 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Kanji of the Day 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Let's Encrypt 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Marc Jones 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Marjorie's Blog 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML OpenStreetMap Japan 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML OsmAnd Blog 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML Popehat 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Ramen Adventures 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Release notes from server 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect 2026-08-29 01:00 AM
XML SNA Japan 2026-08-29 01:00 AM
XML Tatoeba Project Blog 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML Techdirt 2026-08-29 08:00 AM
XML The Business of Printing Books 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML The Luddite 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML The Popehat Report 2026-08-29 01:00 AM
XML The Status Kuo 2026-08-29 01:00 AM
XML The Stranger 2026-08-29 07:00 AM
XML Tor Project blog 2026-08-29 08:00 AM
XML TorrentFreak 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML what if? 2026-08-29 06:00 AM
XML Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed 2026-08-24 01:00 PM
XML xkcd.com 2026-08-29 06:00 AM