News

Wednesday 2025-12-10

04:00 PM

Public AI, Built On Open Source, Is The Way Forward In The EU [Techdirt]

Aquarter of a century ago, I wrote a book called “Rebel Code”. It was the first – and is still the only – detailed history of the origins and rise of free software and open source, based on interviews with the gifted and generous hackers who took part. Back then, it was clear that open source represented a powerful alternative to the traditional proprietary approach to software development and distribution. But few could have predicted how completely open source would come to dominate computing. Alongside its role in running every aspect of the Internet, and powering most mobile phones in the form of Android, it has been embraced by startups for its unbeatable combination of power, reliability and low cost. It’s also a natural fit for cloud computing because of its ability to scale. It is no coincidence that for the last ten years, pretty much 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers have all run an operating system based on the open source Linux.

More recently, many leading AI systems have been released as open source. That raises the important question of what exactly “open source” means in the context of generative AI software, which involves much more than just code. The Open Source Initiative, which drew up the original definition of open source, has extended this work with its Open Source AI Definition. It is noteworthy that the EU has explicitly recognized the special role of open source in the field of AI. In the EU’s recent Artificial Intelligence Act, open source AI systems are exempt from the potentially onerous obligation to draw up a range of documentation that is generally required.

That could provide a major incentive for AI developers in the EU to take the open source route. European academic researchers working in this area are probably already doing that, not least for reasons of cost. Paul Keller points out in a blog post that another piece of EU legislation, the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSM), offers a further reason for research institutions to release their work as open source:

Article 3 of the CDSM Directive enables these institutions to text and data-mine all “works or other subject matter to which they have lawful access” for scientific research purposes. Text and data mining is understood to cover “any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form in order to generate information, which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations,” which clearly covers the development of AI models (see here or, more recently, here).

Keller’s post goes through the details of how that feeds into AI research, but the end-result is the following:

as long as the model is made available in line with the public-interest research missions of the organisations undertaking the training (for example, by releasing the model, including its weights, under an open-source licence) and is not commercialised by these organisations, this also does not affect the status of the reproductions and extractions made during the training process.

This means that Article 3 does cover the full model-development pathway (from data acquisition to model publication under an open source license) that most non-commercial Public AI model developers pursue.

As that indicates, the use of open source licensing is critical to this application of Article 3 of EU copyright legislation for the purpose of AI research.

What’s noteworthy here is how two different pieces of EU legislation, passed some years apart, work together to create a special category of open source AI systems that avoid most of the legal problems of training AI systems on copyright materials, as well as the bureaucratic overhead imposed by the EU AI Act on commercial systems. Keller calls these “public AI”, which he defines as:

AI systems that are built by organizations acting in the public interest and that focus on creating public value rather than extracting as much value from the information commons as possible.

Public AI systems are important for at least two reasons. First, their mission is to serve the public interest, rather than focusing on profit maximization. That’s obviously crucial at time when today’s AI giants are intent on making as much money as possible, presumably in the hope that they can do so before the AI bubble bursts.

Secondly, public AI systems provide a way for the EU to compete with both US and Chinese AI companies – by not competing with them. It is naive to think that Europe can ever match levels of venture capital investment that big name US AI startups currently enjoy, or that the EU is prepared and able to support local industries for as long and as deeply as the Chinese government evidently plans to do for its home-grown AI firms. But public AI systems, which are fully open source, and which take advantage of the EU right of research institutions to carry out text and data mining, offer a uniquely European take on generative AI that might even make such systems acceptable to those who worry about how they are built, and how they are used.

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

02:00 PM

10:00 AM

How ICE’s Plan To Monitor Social Media Threatens Not Just Privacy, But Civic Participation [Techdirt]

When most people think about immigration enforcement, they picture border crossings and airport checkpoints. But the new front line may be your social media feed.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has published a request for information for private-sector contractors to launch a round-the-clock social media monitoring program. The request states that private contractors will be paid to comb through “Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.,” turning public posts into enforcement leads that feed directly into ICE’s databases.

The request for information reads like something out of a cyber thriller: dozens of analysts working in shifts, strict deadlines measured in minutes, a tiered system of prioritizing high-risk individuals, and the latest software keeping constant watch.

I am a researcher who studies the intersection of data governance, digital technologies and the U.S. federal government. I believe that the ICE request for information also signals a concerning if logical next step in a longer trend, one that moves the U.S. border from the physical world into the digital.

A new structure of surveillance

ICE already searches social media using a service called SocialNet that monitors most major online platforms. The agency has also contracted with Zignal Labs for its AI-powered social media monitoring system.

The Customs and Border Protection agency also searches social media posts on the devices of some travelers at ports of entry, and the U.S. State Department reviews social media posts when foreigners seek visas to enter the United States.

What would change isn’t only the scale of monitoring but its structure. Instead of government agents gathering evidence case by case, ICE is building a public-private surveillance loop that transforms everyday online activity into potential evidence.

Private contractors would be tasked with scraping publicly available data to collecting messages, including posts and other media and data. The contractors would be able to correlate those findings with data in commercial datasets from brokers such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR along with government-owned databases. Analysts would be required to produce dossiers for ICE field offices within tight deadlines – sometimes just 30 minutes for a high-priority case.

Those files don’t exist in isolation. They feed directly into Palantir Technologies’ Investigative Case Management system, the digital backbone of modern immigration enforcement. There, this social media data would join a growing web of license plate scans, utility records, property data and biometrics, creating what is effectively a searchable portrait of a person’s life.

Who gets caught in the net?

Officially, ICE says its data collection would focus on people who are already linked to ongoing cases or potential threats. In practice, the net is far wider.

The danger here is that when one person is flagged, their friends, relatives, fellow organizers or any of their acquaintances can also become subjects of scrutiny. Previous contracts for facial recognition tools and location tracking have shown how easily these systems expand beyond their original scope. What starts as enforcement can turn into surveillance of entire communities.

What ICE says and what history shows

ICE frames the project as modernization: a way to identify a target’s location by identifying aliases and detecting patterns that traditional methods might miss. Planning documents say contractors cannot create fake profiles and must store all analysis on ICE servers.

But history suggests these kinds of guardrails often fail. Investigations have revealed how informal data-sharing between local police and federal agents allowed ICE to access systems it wasn’t authorized to use. The agency has repeatedly purchased massive datasets from brokers to sidestep warrant requirements. And despite a White House freeze on spyware procurement, ICE quietly revived a contract with Paragon’s Graphite tool, software reportedly capable of infiltrating encrypted apps such as WhatsApp and Signal.

Meanwhile, ICE’s vendor ecosystem keeps expanding: Clearview AI for face matching, ShadowDragon’s SocialNet for mapping networks, Babel Street’s location history service Locate X, and LexisNexis for looking up people. ICE is also purchasing tools from surveillance firm PenLink that combine location data with social media data. Together, these platforms make continuous, automated monitoring not only possible but routine.

Lessons from abroad

The United States isn’t alone in government monitoring of social media. In the United Kingdom, a new police unit tasked with scanning online discussions about immigration and civil unrest has drawn criticism for blurring the line between public safety and political policing.

Across the globe, spyware scandals have shown how lawful access tools that were initially justified for counterterrorism were later used against journalists and activists. Once these systems exist, mission creep, also known as function creep, becomes the rule rather than the exception.

The social cost of being watched

Around-the-clock surveillance doesn’t just gather information – it also changes behavior.

Research found that visits to Wikipedia articles on terrorism dropped sharply immediately after revelations about the National Security Agency’s global surveillance in June 2013.

For immigrants and activists, the stakes are higher. A post about a protest or a joke can be reinterpreted as “intelligence.” Knowing that federal contractors may be watching in real time encourages self-censorship and discourages civic participation. In this environment, the digital self, an identity composed of biometric markers, algorithmic classifications, risk scores and digital traces, becomes a risk that follows you across platforms and databases.

What’s new and why it matters now

What is genuinely new is the privatization of interpretation. ICE isn’t just collecting more data, it is outsourcing judgment to private contractors. Private analysts, aided by artificial intelligence, are likely to decide what online behavior signals danger and what doesn’t. That decision-making happens rapidly and across large numbers of people, for the most part beyond public oversight.

At the same time, the consolidation of data means social media content can now sit beside location and biometric information inside Palantir’s hub. Enforcement increasingly happens through data correlations, raising questions about due process.

ICE’s request for information is likely to evolve into a full procurement contract within months, and recent litigation from the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the Department of Homeland Security suggests that the oversight is likely to lag far behind the technology. ICE’s plan to maintain permanent watch floors, open indoor spaces equipped with video and computer monitors, that are staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year signals that this likely isn’t a temporary experiment and instead is a new operational norm.

What accountability looks like

Transparency starts with public disclosure of the algorithms and scoring systems ICE uses. Advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union argue that law enforcement agencies should meet the same warrant standards online that they do in physical spaces. The Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU argue that there should be independent oversight of surveillance systems for accuracy and bias. And several U.S. senators have introduced legislation to limit bulk purchases from data brokers.

Without checks like these, I believe that the boundary between border control and everyday life is likely to keep dissolving. As the digital border expands, it risks ensnaring anyone whose online presence becomes legible to the system.

Nicole M. Bennett is a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies at Indiana University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

08:00 AM

Crafting an Elevator Pitch for Your Book [Write, Publish, and Sell]

Crafting an Elevator Pitch for Your Book

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

In my younger days, I thought this quote from Ernest Hemingway was incredibly profound. To write was to turn something inside yourself into something others could interpret and (hopefully) understand. It was this ultimate act of self-sacrifice, giving something vital of yourself.

In 2025, that quote might more accurately look like: 

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Then post about it on social media, record a video about your process, generate a flywheel of ideas for your newsletter and blog, and make some updates to your site.”

Sure, the actual writing part is still about digging within yourself to share a story, idea, information, or insights. But if you want anyone to actually read what you’ve written, you have to be a relentless self-promoter. 

A lot goes into promoting yourself. But the first, and in my opinion most important, step is to craft an elevator pitch.

If you’re thinking, Paul, I’m not an elevator salesperson, come on… 

Then this post is very much for you. 


What is an Elevator Pitch?

Most simply, your elevator pitch is a quick response to the question, “What is your book about?”

The idea is to imagine you’ve just stepped onto an elevator with this curious reader, and they immediately inquire about your book. This pitch needs to be short enough to get it in before the doors ding again and that reader steps away forever. Your pitch is the one thing standing between your book and a new reader.

No pressure, though.

In practice, an elevator pitch is a short statement you’ll memorize and keep on hand to describe your book quickly and succinctly. You can use this practice for more than books too! A speaking engagement, online course, or video product are all content that should have a short pitch you can use to describe and promote them.

Creating Your Elevator Pitch

Writing an effective pitch is harder than it might seem. You’ve got to compress enough information into a single sentence or two to grab their attention but not give away so much that they won't need to read your book.

Luckily for you, I’ve broken writing your elevator pitch down into three key elements:

  1. The Who - The reader your book is for
  2. The Hook - The thing that makes your book different or compelling
  3. The Proof - Why you (and your book) deserve attention

Let’s break them down in more detail. 

The Who

This can be explicit. Something like “This book is for photographers working to learn photo editing.” If that makes sense (which it often does for nonfiction books), you should do that. Just be clear and specific. This is also the formula for starting your elevator pitch.

You might change it up during revisions, but I strongly recommend you draft your pitch leading with the ‘who.’

The Hook

If your ‘who’ speaks to the reader, the hook should be what reels them in. I swear that is the only fishing pun I’m doing today. 

Your hook should clearly state why your book is different. What makes it unique? What makes it something a reader should pick up instead of any of the myriad other books they could be reading?

Your hook is the most important part of your elevator pitch, and really, it’s the key part of all of your book marketing. Don’t be afraid to overwrite your hook for that first draft; you might find some of the language you edit away is useful for email or social media.

The Proof

Finally, close out your elevator pitch with a little about yourself or the book's value. This could be something like ‘the fourth book in my award-winning series’ or ‘a heavily researched look into some-sciency-thing’. The goal is to—very briefly—create a qualification that makes the reader trust you.

Or, for fiction authors, you might tease out more of the plot to expand on the hook. In that instance, you should build on your hook by revealing (or partially revealing) something key to the plot. 

Examples of Effective Elevator Pitches

I’ve got a few pitches I think work pretty well and serve as solid examples to consider for your own elevator pitch. Note that, for most fiction novels, the elevator pitch is the first line (or lines) on the back cover. Because elevator pitches are that versatile.

Let’s break them down and give each a quick look. 

Fiction Examples

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (2025)

“Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: to write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years—or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the twentieth century.”

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (2024) 

“A brand new mystery. An iconic new detective duo. And a thrilling new murder to solve…”

A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher (2023)

“A haunting Southern Gothic from an award-winning master of suspense, A House With Good Bones explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family.”

I chose these for a few reasons, but mostly, I liked how differently they approach the idea of an elevator pitch.

Emily Henry, for example, has written too much. Unless the elevator you’re on is old and rickety, you wouldn’t have time for that entire pitch. But she has a pile of name recognition and is known enough in her genre that she doesn’t need as succinct a pitch. Readers will buy her book on name recognition alone.

Meanwhile, Richard Osman’s pitch is insanely short. But it’s so pointed that it works. If you’re not into mysteries, this might not be the kind of standout pitch that sells you as a reader. For his audience though, it’s likely enough. Mysteries can’t give away too many details, or there’s no mystery, right? Osman takes that idea to the max and has seemingly found a way to say as little as possible while still actually pitching his work.

Finally, Kingfisher’s pitch is textbook. It identifies the who—in this case fans of ‘haunting Southern Gothic.’ And we’ve got the hook in ‘explores the dark, twisted roots lurking just beneath the veneer of a perfect home and family’ to set us up. We know this is a haunting story about skeletons in the closet for a family. Finally, the proof comes from the accreditation: ‘award-winning master of suspense.’ This pitch nails it. 

Crafting an Elevator Pitch for Your Book

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Nonfiction Examples

Nonfiction books need to pitch not just the book itself but also both the author and the transformation or growth the book is promising. Fiction authors are selling you a book to entertain you; nonfiction authors are selling you their wisdom. That needs to be clearly defined in your pitch. 

Profit On-Demand by Matt Briel (2025)

“Whether you're an artist, content creator, entrepreneur, or someone who just thinks the world needs more raccoon merchandise, this book shows you exactly how to build something real in the creator economy and scale beyond what your high school guidance counselor said was ever possible.”

Burn the Playbook by Joe Pulizzi (2025)

“For creators, new grads, or those stuck in a job that brings no satisfaction: The system was never built for your freedom. Burn it. Build your own. This isn’t a book. It’s a match. Light it.”

Both of these examples highlight how to inject the who clearly at the start and quickly make a pitch with their hook. The proof in these pitches is more tied to the author’s name brand, so both Briel and Pulizzi end their pitch with inspiration instead.

One thing I will note, which I think is maybe a mistake, is that Joe Pulizzi has opted to minimize himself in his pitch. That works because he’s well known to his intended audience, so selling himself further might be excessive. But for most of us who are eagerly looking to get new readers, we will need to call out what makes our book the right one. 

Building on Your Elevator Pitch for Book Marketing

You might notice that these examples are all a little off from the formula I mentioned. That’s not uncommon: your elevator pitch really needs to stand out—while also hitting those three key points (who, hook, proof). Sometimes you may need to downplay one to emphasize another.

When you go to write your own elevator pitch, here’s what I recommend doing:

  1. Reread the feedback from your beta readers. See how others see your book.
  2. Draft as many versions as you can, trying to keep them all to three sentences or fewer. Seriously though, the more you can draft, the better.
  3. Use an AI to mash the versions you created together to see a new perspective.
  4. Take all of these versions and set them aside for a week or so.
  5. Come back and sift through to figure out which ones resonate the most, then refine those.

That should give you two or three really solid pitches. Now you just need to go find some elevators to test them out on!

Crafting an Elevator Pitch for Your Book

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Get Ready To Enter A New Decade With The Next Public Domain Game Jam: Gaming Like It’s 1930! [Techdirt]

The new year is approaching fast, and you know what that means: new material is entering the public domain in the US, and we’ll be celebrating it with the eighth installment of our public domain game jam. What’s more, this is an extra special year because the ever-growing public domain is hitting a new decade: it’s time for Gaming Like It’s 1930!

As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:

  • Written works by Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, Olaf Stapledon, Sigmund Freud, William Faulkner
  • Art by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grant Wood, M. C. Escher, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian
  • Films All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Crackers, Hell’s Angels, and the first Looney Toons
  • Music by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, the Gershwins, and Son House
  • Other characters including Nancy Drew and The Little Engine That Could

The jam will begin on January 1st and run through the end of the month, accepting submissions of both analog and digital games based on works from 1930. Whether you’ve participated before or not, we encourage everyone to get involved!

Even if you don’t have any experience, it’s never been easier to try your hand at game design. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

At the end of the jam we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. We’ll be back with more reminder posts as the jam draws nearer, including a look at one card game submission from last year that has since been released for purchase and is getting great reviews (so stay tuned for that!)

Kanji of the Day: 追 [Kanji of the Day]

追

✍9

小3

chase, drive away, follow, pursue, meanwhile

ツイ

お.う

追加   (ついか)   —   addition
追う   (おう)   —   to chase
追求   (ついきゅう)   —   pursuit (of a goal, ideal, etc.)
追及   (ついきゅう)   —   investigation (e.g., into someone's guilt)
追試   (ついし)   —   replication (of an experiment)
追い風   (おいかぜ)   —   tailwind
追跡   (ついせき)   —   chase
追って   (おって)   —   later on
追悼   (ついとう)   —   mourning
追突   (ついとつ)   —   rear-end collision

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 辛 [Kanji of the Day]

辛

✍7

中学

spicy, bitter, hot, acrid

シン

から.い　つら.い　-づら.い　かのと

辛い   (からい)   —   spicy
辛口   (からくち)   —   dry taste (e.g., sake, wine)
香辛料   (こうしんりょう)   —   spice
辛抱   (しんぼう)   —   patience
唐辛子   (とうがらし)   —   capsicum (Capsicum annuum, esp. the cultivated chili peppers)
辛み   (からみ)   —   hot taste
辛勝   (しんしょう)   —   narrow victory
辛くも   (からくも)   —   barely
甘辛   (あまから)   —   sweetness and saltiness
辛うじて   (かろうじて)   —   barely

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

10 Years of Let's Encrypt Certificates [Let's Encrypt]

On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. We were proud that we had issued a certificate that a significant majority of clients could accept, and had done it using automated software. Of course, in retrospect this was just the first of billions of certificates. Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’ve become a household name among system administrators. We’re closing in on protecting one billion web sites.

In 2023, we marked the tenth anniversary of the creation of our nonprofit, Internet Security Research Group, which continues to host Let’s Encrypt and other public benefit infrastructure projects. Now, in honor of the tenth anniversary of Let’s Encrypt’s public certificate issuance and the start of the general availability of our services, we’re looking back at a few milestones and factors that contributed to our success.

Growth

A conspicuous part of Let’s Encrypt’s history is how thoroughly our vision of scalability through automation has succeeded.

In March 2016, we issued our one millionth certificate. Just two years later, in September 2018, we were issuing a million certificates every day. In 2020 we reached a billion total certificates issued and as of late 2025 we’re frequently issuing ten million certificates per day. We’re now on track to reach a billion active sites, probably sometime in the coming year. (The “certificates issued” and “certificates active” metrics are quite different because our certificates regularly expire and get replaced.)

The steady growth of our issuance volume shows the strength of our architecture, the validity of our vision, and the great efforts of our engineering team to scale up our own infrastructure. It also reminds us of the confidence that the Internet community is placing in us, making the use of a Let’s Encrypt certificate a normal and, dare we say, boring choice. But I often point out that our ever-growing issuance volumes are only an indirect measure of value. What ultimately matters is improving the security of people’s use of the web, which, as far as Let’s Encrypt’s contribution goes, is not measured by issuance volumes so much as by the prevalence of HTTPS encryption. For that reason, we’ve always emphasized the graph of the percentage of encrypted connections that web users make (here represented by statistics from Firefox).

(These graphs are snapshots as of the date of this post; a dynamically updated version is found on our stats page.) Our biggest goal was to make a concrete, measurable security impact on the web by getting HTTPS connection prevalence to increase—and it’s worked. It took five years or so to get the global percentage from below 30% to around 80%, where it’s remained ever since. In the U.S. it has been close to 95% for a while now.

A good amount of the remaining unencrypted traffic probably comes from internal or private organizational sites (intranets), but other than that we don’t know much about it; this would be a great topic for Internet security researchers to look into.

We believe our present growth in certificate issuance volume is essentially coming from growth in the web as a whole. In other words, if we protect 20% more sites over some time period, it’s because the web itself grew by 20%.

A few milestones

We’ve blogged about most of Let’s Encrypt’s most significant milestones as they’ve happened, and I invite everyone in our community to look over those blog posts to see how far we’ve come. We’ve also published annual reports for the past seven years, which offer elegant and concise summaries of our work.

As I personally think back on the past decade, just a few of the many events that come to mind include:

We’ve also periodically rolled out new features such as internationalized domain name support (2016), wildcard support (2018), and short-lived and IP address (2025) certificates. We’re always working on more new features for the future.

There are many technical milestones like our database server upgrades in 2021, where we found we needed a serious server infrastructure boost because of the tremendous volumes of data we were dealing with. Similarly, our original infrastructure was using Gigabit Ethernet internally, and, with the growth of our issuance volume and logging, we found that our Gigabit Ethernet network eventually became too slow to synchronize database instances! (Today we’re using 25-gig Ethernet.) More recently, we’ve experimented with architectural upgrades to our ever-growing Certificate Transparency logs, and decided to go ahead with deploying those upgrades—to help us not just keep up with, but get ahead of, our continuing growth.

These kinds of growing pains and successful responses to them are nice to remember because they point to the inexorable increase in demands on our infrastructure as we’ve become a more and more essential part of the Internet. I’m proud of our technical teams which have handled those increased demands capably and professionally.

I also recall the ongoing work involved in making sure our certificates would be as widely accepted as possible, which has meant managing the original cross-signature from IdenTrust, and subsequently creating and propagating our own root CA certificates. This process has required PKI engineering, key ceremonies, root program interactions, documentation, and community support associated with certificate migrations. Most users never have reason to look behind the scenes at our chains of trust, but our engineers update it as root and intermediate certificates have been replaced. We’ve engaged at the CA/B Forum, IETF, and in other venues with the browser root programs to help shape the web PKI as a technical leader.

As I wrote in 2020, our ideal of complete automation of the web PKI aims at a world where most site owners wouldn’t even need to think about certificates at all. We continue to get closer and closer to that world, which creates a risk that people will take us and our services for granted, as the details of certificate renewal occupy less of site operators’ mental energy. As I said at the time,

When your strategy as a nonprofit is to get out of the way, to offer services that people don’t need to think about, you’re running a real risk that you’ll eventually be taken for granted. There is a tension between wanting your work to be invisible and the need for recognition of its value. If people aren’t aware of how valuable our services are then we may not get the support we need to continue providing them.

I’m also grateful to our communications and fundraising staff who help make clear what we’re doing every day and how we’re making the Internet safer.

Recognition of Let’s Encrypt

Our community continually recognizes our work in tangible ways by using our certificates—now by the tens of millions per day—and by sponsoring us.

We were honored to be recognized with awards including the 2022 Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography and the 2019 O’Reilly Open Source Award. In October of this year some of the individuals who got Let’s Encrypt started were honored to receive the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice.

We documented the history, design, and goals of the project in an academic paper at the ACM CCS ‘19 conference, which has subsequently been cited hundreds of times in academic research.

Our initial sponsors

Ten years later, I’m still deeply grateful to the five initial sponsors that got Let’s Encrypt off the ground - Mozilla, EFF, Cisco, Akamai, and IdenTrust. When they committed significant resources to the project, it was just an ambitious idea. They saw the potential and believed in our team, and because of that we were able to build the service we operate today.

IdenTrust: A critical technical partner

I’d like to particularly recognize IdenTrust, a PKI company that worked as a partner from the outset and enabled us to issue publicly-trusted certificates via a cross-signature from one of their roots. We would simply not have been able to launch our publicly-trusted certificate service without them. Back when I first told them that we were starting a new nonprofit certificate authority that would give away millions of certificates for free, there wasn’t any precedent for this arrangement, and there wasn’t necessarily much reason for IdenTrust to pay attention to our proposal. But the company really understood what we were trying to do and was willing to engage from the beginning. Ultimately, IdenTrust’s support made our original issuance model a reality.

Conclusion

I’m proud of what we have achieved with our staff, partners, and donors over the past ten years. I hope to be even more proud of the next ten years, as we use our strong footing to continue to pursue our mission to protect Internet users by lowering monetary, technological, and informational barriers to a more secure and privacy-respecting Internet.

Let’s Encrypt is a project of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. You can help us make the next ten years great as well by donating or becoming a sponsor.

Creepy Dancer [The Stranger]

Got problems? Yes, you do! Email your question for the column to mailbox@savage.love! by Dan Savage Cisgender bi-female late forties, living in the Bay Area. My boyfriend and I have been dating six months and are very much in love. His friends party quite a bit, lots of drinking and other party favors, and we all enjoy feeling good on the dance floor. The first time I met one of his friends — a guy in his thirties — it was a big, fun night, I wanted his friend to feel included (it was mostly couples), so I put my arm around him and bumped hips with him on the dance floor. We were all dancing together. I’m pretty sure he grabbed my ass when I was making out with my boyfriend on the dance floor. A month later, we are all out dancing again and he started saying things like, “You’re trouble,” and, “If your ‘boyfriend’ wasn’t in the picture, we would have something going…

[ Read more ]

07:00 AM

Judge: Even If Trump’s DOJ Goes After Comey Again, It Won’t Have Access To Evidence It Illegally Obtained [Techdirt]

Lindsey Halligan — a former personal lawyer for Trump who specialized in insurance law — was suddenly propelled to the top of the DOJ heap after better, more qualified lawyers refused to engage in Trump’s revenge prosecutions.

The exit of prosecutors unwilling to engage in politically motivated, completely mismanaged prosecutions of Trump enemies like former FBI director James Comey and New York AG Letitia James created a void. Trump, as he always does, filled it with someone he liked, rather than someone who could actually do the job.

This created a lot of problems. Lindey Halligan’s inexperience nearly brought these proceedings to a complete halt during her initial appearance as the newly-not-really-even-appointed US Attorney. A couple of months later, this inexperience is no longer the main thing holding her back. It’s the law of the land.

Presidential appointments — even those made by MAGA god-king Donald Trump — are expected to follow the rules. Halligan’s didn’t. Not only was she never officially elevated from appointee to US Attorney, the amount of time that had passed between the exit of qualified prosecutors and Trump’s hasty insertion of his insurance lawyer took this decision out of Trump’s hands. It was up to the courts to assign a prosecutor. It was no longer a matter of choice for DJT.

A recent order from the court handling both vindictive prosecutions makes that extremely clear. If Halligan hasn’t been legally appointed, she cannot possibly engage in grand jury proceedings, much less try to convert these into federal prosecutions. The cases against Comey and James have been dismissed, albeit without prejudice. But the clock continues to run on those cases and the administration doesn’t seem to have a Plan B to fall back on.

This means quite a bit for Comey. The (bullshit) charges he’s been hit with will soon expire under the statute of limitations. But his defense team isn’t going to sit around and wait for the statute bell to toll. His reps are also attacking the underlying evidence, which was also highlighted by the same judge who declared Halligan wasn’t legally appointed to her position.

Here’s some of what was detailed in a strong judicial rebuke of the administration that was mostly overshadowed by its rejection of Halligan as a legal representative of the Trump government:

Here, the government was permitted to search all of the Richman materials but authorized to seize only evidence related to violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 (Theft and Conversion of Stolen Government Property) and 18 U.S.C. § 793 (Unlawful Gathering or Transmission of National Defense Information), both markedly different offenses than those with which Mr. Comey is currently charged.

[…]

The government appears to have conflated its obligation to protect privileged information–an obligation it approached casually at best in this case–with its duty to seize only those materials authorized by the Court. This cavalier attitude towards a basic tenet of the Fourth Amendment and multiple court orders left the government unchecked to rummage through all of the information seized from Mr. Richman, and apparently, in the government’s eyes, to do so again anytime they chose. The Arctic Haze investigation was closed in September 2021, with no charges filed. The Richman materials sat dormant with the FBI until the summer of 2025, when the Bureau chose to rummage through them again.

First, the government obtained and accessed privileged communications between James Comey and his legal reps. Its rummaging of the contents of seized devices expanded to include evidence of criminal acts other than those Comey was (very eventually) charged with. Finally, the government sat on this “evidence,” choosing only to look at it again four years later, after Trump returned to the Oval Office.

There are a handful of constitutional violations in here, which would be problematic enough without the additional circumstantial evidence that strongly suggests the only reason the FBI would look at this evidence four years after first obtaining it was to satisfy Trump’s demands that James Comey be punished for… something.

This transparent attempt to manufacture charges from evidence seemingly illegally obtained/accessed has led to another loss for the Trump DOJ currently being mismanaged by Pam Bondi and a bunch of lawyers best known for serving Trump’s personal legal interests during his all-too-brief return to the private sector.

A recent order [PDF] from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (known previously for her work with the FISA court) says Trump’s DOJ can’t use this illegally-derived evidence to engage in another attempt at saddling James Comey with a federal indictment. (h/t Josh Gerstein at Bluesky)

First, the judge points out all the things the DOJ hasn’t done:

First, although the Court has been in communication with attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has not yet entered an appearance to make representations on behalf of the Government, and counsel for the Government has not yet been identified.

Second, the Government has not yet indicated who has custody of the material at issue, and neither the Petitioner nor the Court can determine the identity of the custodian until the Government appears in this case. Given that the custody and control of this material is the central issue in this matter, uncertainty about its whereabouts weighs in favor of acting promptly to preserve the status quo.

And this is how this all works out for Comey’s lawyer, Daniel Richman, whose computer was seized, its contents imaged by the DOJ, and apparently searched whenever the DOJ felt like doing so:

The Court concludes that Petitioner Richman is likely to succeed on the merits of his claim that the Government has violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures by retaining a complete copy of all files on his personal computer (an “image” of the computer) and searching that image without a warrant. The Court further concludes that Petitioner Richman is also likely to succeed in showing that, because of those violations, he is entitled to the return of the image under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(g).

The word “return” means something in this particular context. While it’s impossible to prevent anyone from making a copy of anything digital they’ve been ordered to “return,” the order makes it clear that even if the government retains its image (rather than destroying it so it’s inaccessible by the government), it will not be allowed to use anything from that image file as evidence in future prosecution efforts against Comey.

If the government is smart, it will perform the “return” (which means destroying its copy of the contents of Richman’s computer). But this government isn’t smart. It’s a confederacy of brutish dunces. And there’s little doubt it’s doing everything it can to find some way to make federal charges against Comey stick long enough to convert its Pyrrhic victory into a viral X post. But for now, the law of the land has control. With any luck, the law of land will protect us from the vengeance of an elected government that has no respect for the people it’s supposed to be serving.

06:00 AM

If your marketing isn’t working… [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

If you are struggling to get the word out, if customer traction is elusive, if you are always hustling for a little bit of attention, if it feels like you need to spend more money on promotion…

It might be that you skipped the important part.

Marketing isn’t hype. Marketing is making a product or service that matters.

If you’re struggling selling the thing you made, it’s worth reconsidering the audience, the promise and the change you seek to make–and then be honest with your team about whether your offering is actually remarkable, or just the best you could do with what you had.

Because the market doesn’t care how hard you’re trying.

      

Pluralistic: Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (09 Dec 2025) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]


Today's links


A 1960s ad for IBM mainframes, featuring a woman in an office chair seated at a console, surrounded by large processing and storage units. It has been modified. A man in a business suit, impatiently checking his watch, looms out from between two of the cabinets. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The woman's head has been replaced with a hacker's hoodie. Both the woman and the man have been tinted red.

Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (permalink)

I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.

IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/

The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane."

After all, judging software by lines of code is a terrible idea. To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a negative correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with too few lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use too many steps to solve a problem. The ideal software is just right: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies.

This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more.

Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurements for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival firms. Yes, Microsoft actually boasts to companies about the fact that if you use their products, they will gather sensitive data about how your workers perform individually and as a team, and share than information with your competitors!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

But while tech companies employed programmers to develop this kind of bossware to be used on other companies' employees, they were loathe to apply them to their own workers. For one thing, it's just a very stupid way to manage a workforce, as Bill Gates himself would be the first to tell you (candidly, provided he wasn't trying to sell you an enterprise Office 365 license). For another, tech workers wouldn't stand for it. After all, these were the "princes of labor," each adding a million dollars or more to their boss's bottom line, and in such scarce supply that a coder could quit a job after the morning scrum and have a new one by the pre-dinner pickleball break:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

Tech workers mistook the fear this dynamic instilled in their bosses for respect. They thought the reason their bosses gave them free massage therapists and kombucha on tap and a gourmet cafeteria was that their bosses liked them. After all, these bosses were all techies. A coder wasn't a worker, they were a temporarily embarrassed founder. That's why Zuck and Sergey tuned into those engineering town hall meetings and tolerated being pelted with impertinent questions about the company's technology and business strategy.

Actually, tech bosses didn't like tech workers. They didn't see them as peers. They saw them workers. Problem workers, at that. Problems to be solved.

And wouldn't you know it, supply caught up with demand and tech companies instituted a program of mass layoffs. When Google laid off 12,000 workers (just before a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for 27 years), they calmed investors by claiming that they weren't doing this because business was bad – they were just correcting some pandemic-era overhiring. But Google didn't just fire junior programmers – they targeted some of their most senior (and thus mouthiest and highest-paid) techies for the chop.

Today, Sergey and Zuck no longer attend engineering meetings ("Not a good use of my time" -M. Zuckerberg). Tech workers are getting laid off at the rate of naughts. And none of these bastards can shut up about how many programmers they plan on replacing with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

And wouldn't you know it, the shitty monitoring and ranking technology that programmers made to be used on other workers is finally being used on them:

https://jonready.com/blog/posts/everyone-in-seattle-hates-ai.html

Naturally, the excuse is monitoring AI usage. Microsoft – along with all the other AI-peddling tech companies – keep claiming that their workers adore using AI to write software, but somehow, also have to monitor workers so they can figure out which ones to fire because they're not using AI enough:

https://www.itpro.com/software/development/microsoft-claims-ai-is-augmenting-developers-rather-than-replacing-them

This is the "shitty technology adoption curve" in action. When you have a terrible, destructive technology, you can't just deploy it on privileged people who get taken seriously in policy circles. You start with people at the bottom of the privilege gradient: prisoners, mental patients, asylum-seekers. Then, you work your way up the curve – kids, gig workers, blue collar workers, pink collar workers. Eventually, it comes for all of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

As Ed Zitron writes, tech hasn't had a big, successful product (on the scale of, say, the browser or the smartphone) in more than a decade. Tech companies have seemingly run out of new trillion-dollar industries to spawn. Tech bosses are pulling out all the stops to make their companies seem as dynamic and profitable as they were in tech's heyday.

Firing workers and blaming it on AI lets tech bosses transform a story that would freak out investors ("Our business is flagging and we had to fire a bunch of valuable techies") into one that will shake loose fresh billions in capital ("Our AI product is so powerful it let us fire a zillion workers!").

And for tech bosses, mass layoffs offer another, critical advantage: pauperizing those princes of labor, so that they can shed their company gyms and luxury commuter busses, cut wages and benefits, and generally reset the working expectations of the tech workers who sit behind a keyboard to match the expectations of tech workers who assemble iPhones, drive delivery vans, and pack boxes in warehouses.

For tech workers who currently don't have a pee bottle or a suicide net at their job-site, it's long past time to get over this founder-in-waiting bullshit and get organized. Recognize that you're a worker, and that workers' only real source of power isn't ephemeral scarcity, it's durable solidarity:

https://techworkerscoalition.org/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WaWa Digital Cameras threatens to break customer’s neck https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/abusive-new-york-camera-store.html

#20yrsago Keyboard used as bean-sprouting medium https://web.archive.org/web/20051205011830/http://www.nada.kth.se/~hjorth/krasse/english.html

#15yrsago Judge to copyright troll: get lost https://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-take-alleged-file-sharers-to-court-but-fail-on-a-grand-scale-101209/

#15yrsago Ink cartridge rant https://web.archive.org/web/20101211080931/http://www.inkcartridges.uk.com/Remanufactured-HP-300-CC640EE-Black.html

#15yrsago 1.1 billion US$100 notes out of circulation due to printing error https://www.cnbc.com/2010/12/07/the-fed-has-a-110-billion-problem-with-new-benjamins.html

#15yrsago EFF wants Righthaven to pay for its own ass-kicking https://web.archive.org/web/20101211011932/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/payup-troll/

#15yrsago danah boyd explains email sabbaticals https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/12/08/i-am-offline-on-email-sabbatical-from-december-9-january-12.html

#15yrsago TSA subjects India’s US ambassador to public grope because of her sari https://web.archive.org/web/20101211113821/http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2010/12/india-diplomat-gets-humiliating-pat-down-at-mississippi-airport-/134197/5?csp=outbrain&csp=obnetwork

#15yrsago California’s safety codes are now open source! https://code.google.com/archive/p/title24/

#10yrsago When the INS tried to deport John Lennon, the FBI pitched in to help https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/dec/08/john-lennons-fbi-file-1/

#10yrsago The Big List of What’s Wrong with the TPP https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights

#10yrsago Concrete Park: apocalyptic, afrofuturistic graphic novel of greatness https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/08/concrete-park-apocalyptic-afrofuturistic-graphic-novel-of-greatness/

#10yrsago Denmark’s top anti-piracy law firm pocketed $25m from rightsholders, then went bankrupt https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyer-milked-copyright-holders-for-millions-151208/

#5yrsago Uber pays to get rid of its self-driving cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#goober

#5yrsago All the books I reviewed in 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

#5yrsago Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#walkaway

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

A Big Renewal Day, and a Big Pic Post Coming! [The Status Kuo]

December 9 is the anniversary of my launch of The Status Kuo as a subscriber-supported newsletter. Thanks to all who signed up and renew on this date! You help me devote myself more fully to this endeavor.

On this day each year, there are always a number of folks who can’t continue to support for whatever reason. If you’d like to help make up the shortfall, please consider upgrading your account today!

Subscribe now

Programming note: I’m writing today for The Big Picture about a case now under consideration by the Supreme Court after oral arguments yesterday. It’s one that’s flown under the radar for most folks, but to us lawyers and constitutionalists, there’s a pit in our stomachs.

That’s because the Court appears ready overrule or severely limit a case called Humphrey’s Executor, which has been governing law since 1935 and forms the basis of our administrative state. Striking that case down would carry enormous consequences for our democracy. I explain it in greater detail this afternoon in language I hope non-lawyers can appreciate.

If you’re not yet a subscriber to The Big Picture, which I write for once weekly, you can sign up here to receive my piece in your inbox later this afternoon. It’s free to sign-up, but we do love our voluntary supporters that make that newsletter possible, too!

Look for my piece in your inboxes later today—and thanks again to any who choose today to support my work.

Jay

05:00 AM

Three Tweets That Capture The Entire Elon Musk Free Speech Con [Techdirt]

We’ve spent years calling out what a hypocrite Elon Musk is on free speech. But sometimes the universe Elon hands you a gift: three tweets in the span of a little over a week that demonstrate the entire con more clearly than any deep dive ever could. Let’s start with this one:

That’s Elon announcing that:

Falsely labeling non-violent people as “fascist” or “Nazi” should be treated as incitement to murder

Which is, to be clear, an extreme anti-free speech position. It’s an extremely censorial stance.

Yes, free speech allows you to refer to someone as a Nazi. As the ACLU has written: there’s no such thing as a right not to be called a Nazi. There are plenty of legal cases where this has been made clear by judges. Here’s just one:

Statements indicating a political opponent is a Nazi or coward are “odious and repugnant” and far too common in today’s political discourse. But they are not actionable defamation “because of the tremendous imprecision of the meaning and usage of such terms in the realm of political debate.” In other words, being called a Nazi or coward are not verifiable statements of fact that would support a defamation claim

So, already, we see that Elon is taking an anti-free speech stance with that tweet. Political hyperbole, even of the Nazi-calling variety, is protected speech. Always has been.

Now keep that tweet in mind as we head into the next one.

Because over the weekend… Elon Musk pretty clearly falsely called the EU Commission (which just fined him)… Nazis.

If you can’t see that, it’s Elon retweeting someone who posted an image of the EU flag being pulled back to reveal a Nazi flag. The original poster says “The Fourth Reich” and Elon’s quote tweet says: “Pretty much.”

So, let’s recap: falsely calling non-violent people Nazis is, according to Elon, “incitement to murder” and yet here he is… falsely calling non-violent people Nazis. Just a week after that original statement.

And then there’s the third act that ties it all together. I know he’s said this one before in similar forms, but this weekend he also claimed that the “Surefire way to figure out who the bad guys are is by looking who wants to restrict freedom of speech.”

So, uh, yeah. Just a week after Elon says that labeling a non-violent person a Nazi should be considered “incitement to murder” (an inherent attempt to suppress speech of critics), he claims that the easiest way to figure out who are “the bad guys” is to see who wants to suppress speech.

According to Elon’s own standard: he is the bad guy. He is saying that we should suppress speech of those who call him a Nazi. And therefore, he is a bad guy. By his own logic.

The pattern is obvious. Elon’s entire incoherent “free speech” framework collapses into a single, coherent principle: speech I like is protected, speech I don’t like should be punished. He wants the freedom to call the EU Commission Nazis. He wants to criminalize anyone who calls him one. He proclaims that those who restrict speech are “the bad guys” while simultaneously arguing that calling him a Nazi should be treated as incitement to murder—a severe restriction on speech. And when he or his allies do actual Nazi-like things? Well, you better not mention it, or you’re inciting violence.

This is what happens when someone who has never understood the actual principles of free speech tries to cosplay as a free speech absolutist. The mask doesn’t just slip—it falls off entirely, and all that’s left is the naked self-interest underneath.

Daily Deal: Curiosity Stream Standard Plan [Techdirt]

Explore an incredible world of documentaries with a Curiosity Stream Standard Plan. This top-tier streaming service offers unlimited access to thousands of films, series, and shows to satisfy your thirst for knowledge. Discover a vast library of content with Curiosity Stream’s standard plan, spanning science, technology, history, nature, and art. Delve into an array of engaging topics with breathtaking visuals and unparalleled storytelling. With new content added weekly, you’ll never run out of things to watch. It’s on sale for $150.

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

Citizenship Ceremonies Are Being Disrupted By Trump’s Latest Wave Of Bigoted Cruelty [Techdirt]

The president, who drapes himself in the flag so inappropriately you’d think it would be filing HR complaints on a daily basis, is now preventing some the best potential US citizens from becoming US citizens.

Ever since Trump’s unexpected second appearance in the Oval Office began, it was immediately clear the bigoted efforts he fired up during his first term were only a prelude to the incessant cruelty he’s engaged in now. Trump leveraged a tragedy into an opportunity to shut down migration efforts from 10 countries. A few days later, the DHS (via dog-killing frontmouth Kristi Noem) said the racist plague had expanded to cover another nine countries.

While this took place, Trump converted his personal animus towards political opponents into truly racist invective targeting an entire country:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.

[…]

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

Trump continues to insist there’s no better place in the world than the United States. Then he makes it clear the only people welcome to avail themselves of his version of American exceptionalism are whites who probably already live here. Everyone else from anywhere else can go fuck themselves… if they can find time to do so between being persecuted/tortured to death in their countries of origin.

And that has led to this, which is exactly the sort of thing that should rend your heart and capsize your soul:

Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.

The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.

That’s right. People who have spent years jumping through all the citizenship hoops (which includes a test 99% of natural-born American citizens couldn’t pass) are being fucked out of their effort by a bunch of racists who have been given the keys to the American Dream kingdom.

This is heartbreaking. And it’s just as heartbreaking even if you don’t often engage with recent American citizens or migrants doing everything they can to remain in this land of opportunity. And it’s obviously targeted. The whole process didn’t get shut down. It only targeted the people this administration feels are more worthless than others.

“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”

This is where I get personal, mainly because there are still too many commenters willing to wade in and spew stereotypes and bad faith arguments all over the the comment thread.

Outside of Techdirt, I am otherwise employed. Most of my recent work experience involves manufacturing. My current job spreads that to things like meat processing and food prep. I have had the privilege to work beside some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever encountered. And few of those people were white, natural-born US citizens.

I have witnessed the sheer joy of coworkers returning from citizenship ceremonies like these. I have seen them struggle with not only the weirdness of the American language, but the subsets created by heavy industry without ever seeing any one of these amazing people express any desire to give it all up.

I have watched an absolute fireball of a young man — an El Salvadoran refugee — work 100+ hours week after week to turn his dreams into a reality. I also had the pleasure of watching this person obtain his US citizenship after being jerked around by the bureaucracy that always makes this sort of thing more difficult than it should be, even when not overseen by a cadre of white Christian nationalists. I also saw this man turn his hours of servitude to multiple employers into the most impractical of second vehicles: a 2019 Maserati GT, which is not the sort of car one would expect anyone to buy in a state that spends 4 months a year covered in snow. (To be fair, his primary vehicle is a 2014 Ford F-150.)

These immigrants are amazing. And their work ethic embodies the American ideal of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Meanwhile, the more privileged in our midst have been buying “rolling coal” flip switches and turning the American flag into something that can be brandished with ill intent, completely erasing its long history as a symbol of hope. On top of it all, there’s the new Trump administration, which sees bootstraps as Achilles tendons and immediately starts slashing away at them.

Many of the best people I know weren’t born here. The people I do know who make the most noise about patriotism are mainly hypocrites whose claims about using their Second Amendment rights to protect the rest of the Constitution are as empty as their claims that it’s always everyone but them to blame for the shithole Trump is desperate to turn this country into.

We are ruled by people who have never truly engaged with anyone who doesn’t completely align with their views and preconceptions. The real world is filled with people who are wonderful and open and giving and never ask for anything more than to be treated as fellow human beings. This administration wants those people gone and, if possible, scrubbed from history. But these are the people I would go full “ride or die” for: the people who have seen the worst the world has to offer and still remain optimistic and helpful and considerate despite having lived through things most Americans can’t possibly imagine.

The people running the government have never experienced joy. The only way they can interact with optimism is by pushing the narrative that the glass is half-empty and insisting it’s the “others” among us who have taken the best part of the glass’s content and left us to deal with what’s left over. It’s all lies. And yet it will always work because, while it’s impossible to get a majority of Americans to agree on a hero, it’s insanely easy to get most Americans to agree on a scapegoat.

02:00 AM

Weird King Trump Pretends He’ll Be Objective In Deciding If His Son In Law And Rich Friends Can Buy Warner Brothers [Techdirt]

Last week Netflix announced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, after elbowing out rival acquisition bids (for now) by Comcast/NBC and Paramount/CBS. But as we noted then, the deal still needs regulatory approval from Trump, who has already stated several times that he’d prefer it if his billionaire bestie new owner of CBS, Larry Ellison, comes away victorious. And the Ellison family, via Paramount (with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Saudi money), have made a hostile takeover bid.

Over the weekend, Trump was again asked about the deal, and again hinted at the fact that he’ll be the one who decides who can buy Warner Brothers (this is, in case it’s not clear, not how regulatory autonomy is supposed to work):

“speaking with reporters on the red carpet of the Kennedy Center Honors event in Washington, D.C., said Netflix’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. studios and streaming business will require a review, and said, “I’ll be involved in that decision.”

Despite the fact the Paramount hostile takeover bid features his own son in law, the Saudis, and a billionaire bestie who shares his authoritarian policies, Trump and right wing media outlets like the Wall Street Journal are desperately trying to pretend this is going to be a neutral process:

That’s…not even a true statement. Trump has openly stated he’d prefer Paramount to win the bidding process, and that was before his own son in law was involved. Ellison has already met with Trump, at least once, to promise him he’d fire whichever CNN hosts Donald doesn’t like. If this comes down to federal approval, it’s clear which side Trump’s going to come down on.

Hoping to compete, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has already begun the shameless process of adequately kissing Trump’s ass, but it’s not entirely clear it’s going to work:

“According to Trump, Sarandos visited the Oval Office last week. The Netflix exec is “a fantastic man,” the president said. “I have a lot of respect for him, but it’s a lot of market share.”

Trump also said of Sarandos, “He’s a great person… He’s got a lot of interesting things happening aside from what you’re talking about, but it is a big market share. There’s no question about it. It could be a problem.”

This cronyism and corruption is once again, with the press’ help, going to be hidden beneath a veneer of fake populist antitrust. You might remember that last year the lie was pushed repeatedly that the “populist” Trump administration really cared about unchecked market power, and (alongside authoritarians JD Vance and Josh Hawley) was to be taken seriously on antitrust reform and “reining in big tech.”

But despite the claims by useful idiots like Matt Stoller, that was never true; the administration has caused generational harm to consumer protection and corporate oversight. And the efforts to “rein in big tech” wound up with tech executives putting their full support behind an authoritarian government and behaving worse than ever.

Of course, here the only thing Trump is interested in is in helping his billionaire ally further dominate media. And if he can’t have that, he’ll be satisfied with Netflix executives debasing themselves repeatedly if they want DOJ approval of the pending merger. Trump’s FCC and DOJ have repeatedly violated the law and abused the merger process to curry favor from feckless companies (see: Verizon, CBS).

Even before the deal was finalized, Paramount and/or the Trump administration had begun seeding complaints in Republican-friendly media that the bidding process was unfair to Larry Ellison and CBS/Paramount, and that the Trump administration is concerned about the antitrust impact of a Netflix Warner Brothers combination.

As noted, Paramount is now angling to appeal directly to investors with a a hostile takeover bid. With Netflix’s deep pockets and a $5.8 billion breakup fee on the line, that fight is certain to be an extended one, even with the personal help of Trump and his corrupted courts. It could, potentially, even outlast the Trump administration itself.

While the Netflix acquisition likely will be bad for markets or consumers (consolidation typically is), the alternatives (Comcast and Larry Ellison) would be significantly worse, with likely significantly more layoffs. Still, there’s absolutely nothing the Trump administration does that’s in good faith, and the administration’s sudden concern with “market power” are as hollow as a dollars store chocolate Easter bunny.

That, of course, won’t be detailed by the consolidated media outlets covering this deal journalistically, who’ll play along with Trump happily if it means getting their own shitty mergers approved.

Tuesday 2025-12-09

10:00 PM

New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.3 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 15.0.3 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

Tor-hosted NoScript updates

From this release on, NoScript versions for Tor Browser are hosted on Tor's infrastructure, allowing us to deliver more timely and reliable updates. Distinguished by a version number ending with ".1984", they are otherwise equivalent to their AMO (stable) or pre-release counterparts: e.g. 13.5.2.1984 (Tor) = 13.5.2 (AMO).

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 15.0.2 is:

07:00 PM

IPTV Pirate’s Bitcoin Booty Sold at Auction For Just Over $1 Million [TorrentFreak]

iptv2-sIn common with many countries in Europe, rightsholders in Sweden are attempting to tackle demand for pirate IPTV services and the many suppliers more than willing to meet it.

Assisted by rightsholders, Swedish law enforcement only has the resources to pursue a relatively small number of cases all the way to prosecution and trial. The case against a man said to be behind one of the most popular platforms was among a select handful of similar cases in recent years.

Indicted for Copyright Violations

In 2023, the man was indicted for his alleged ‘involvement’ in Viking IPTV, a pirate IPTV service popular in Sweden and recognized across the Scandinavian region.

Viking provided access to a wide range of content, and with demand from the public only increasing, the service had no shortage of customers. Anti-piracy group Rights Alliance reported that Viking IPTV had become a well-known brand in Sweden, with a level of business befitting that of a leading provider.

During the trial at Sweden’s Patent and Market Court (PMD) in May 2024, much evidence was presented to establish the man’s guilt. He had logged into the service’s support email and managed Viking’s Facebook page, among other things. The court also heard that he generated substantial profits from the service.

Making Money, Moving Cryptocurrency

In common with similar services, customers of Viking had options to pay: the convenience of PayPal or cryptocurrency.

Those who opted for Bitcoin sent cash via Swedish mobile payment service Swish to an exchange, with Bitcoin forwarded to wallets operated by unnamed individuals further up the chain. Rights Alliance and the police agreed that the success of the service meant there was plenty of Bitcoin to send.

Viking IPTV had several thousand customers and turned over a significant amount of money. A police cryptocurrency analysis revealed clusters of Bitcoin wallets linked to the man, which received roughly 308 Bitcoin in the period 2018 to 2022, and worth over US$20 million at the rates prevailing at the time, authorities said.

Convicted and Sentenced

In comments to local tabloid Expressen in 2020, the man reportedly boasted of an annual turnover of 12 million kronor, with 80% of that amount being profit. The paper also published snippets of chats which it linked to the operation of Viking IPTV. One message claimed that it had taken just 20 days to generate €75,000, an amount subsequently spent on a new Italian kitchen.

After being convicted of copyright crimes in May 2024, a total of 12.7 Bitcoin seized by the police were always headed in the wrong direction. Yet, things could’ve been much worse. Rights Alliance reported that the man was handed a suspended prison sentence and ordered to pay daily fines. The length of the suspended sentence and level of daily fines weren’t revealed.

State Disposes of Pirate Booty

In an announcement on Monday, Rights Alliance said the convicted man filed an appeal against his conviction but subsequently withdrew it. That meant that the judgment handed down by the Patent and Market Court in 2024 became legally binding.

In late November, revealed that the Swedish Enforcement Authority (Kronofogden) was preparing to dispose of four batches of digital assets in separate auctions.

The 12.7 bitcoin from the Viking case would have a reserve price of 9 million kronor (US$958.3K) versus a market price at the time estimated at 10.6 million kronor (~US$1.13 million)

“The preliminary investigation indicates that the man earned significant proceeds from the crime,” Rights Alliance commented on Monday.

“That criminals earn enormous sums from illegal IPTV is not news; it is evident in most judgments and investigations. The convicted man withdrew his appeal last autumn, and the Patent and Market Court’s ruling thus became legally binding. The Swedish Enforcement Authority has now sold the seized 12.77 Bitcoins for SEK 9,550,000 [~US$1.02 million]. The media describes the sale as a “record auction.”

While the film and TV company plaintiffs in the case won’t see any return from the money now headed to the public purse, the Court awarded damages to Svensk Filmindustri, Nordisk Film, and several companies from the TV sector.

Rights Alliance previously said that total damages claims were just under US$1.5 million.

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

04:00 PM

Maximum Chaos: Latest Top FDA Regulator Peaces Out After Only 3 Weeks [Techdirt]

In mid-November, we talked about yet more chaos occurring under RFK Jr., this time at the FDA. At issue was George Tidmarsh, who joined the FDA in July as the agency’s chief drug regulator. Tidmarsh had been accused of using his position to exact a vendetta campaign against a former business partner, Kevin Tang, and companies related to him. Tang had pushed Tidmarsh to resign from three companies years back and Tang recently sued Tidmarsh, claiming he’d dangled the approval of a drug ingredient over his head unless he made monetary payments to an organization associated with Tidmarsh for decades.

Tidmarsh resigned amidst the accusations, putting his tenure at the FDA at less than half a year. In his place came Richard Pazdur, an FDA veteran of over 25 years. His appointment was received well by many in the medical community, seen as a consummate professional stepping into the role. For example:

Cancer Nation applauds the choice of Dr. Richard Pazdur as the Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We can think of no better person than Dr. Pazdur for this position, as he will bring scientific rigor, evidence-based regulatory review, and a commitment to patients to his work as CDER head.

“We are grateful that someone with both scientific rigor and lived compassion will be leading CDER, and we look forward to continuing our shared work to make sure every survivor gets the care they need to live well,” said Shelley Fuld Nasso, Cancer Nation CEO.

Unfortunately for all those feeling the warm fuzzies about Pazdur’s appointment, Padzur decided last week to retire entirely from the FDA. While he will serve in the role through December, his resignation comes a mere two-and-a-half Scaramucci’s after his appointment. (For the uninitiated, a Scaramucci is 11 days, termed due to the length of time Anthony Scaramucci served as White House Communications Director in Trump’s first administration.)

Why is Pazdur retiring so soon after his appointment to be the top drug regulator for the FDA? Simple: his professionalism is at complete odds with the Kennedy-appointed assclowns with whom he’d have to work.

Just days on the job, Pazdur expressed deep concerns about the legality and public health risks of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary’s plans to overhaul and expedite agency operations. On November 21, the Post reported that Pazdur disagreed with Makary’s plans to reduce the number of studies needed to make drug-related decisions, such as label changes. Pazdur was further concerned that Makary’s plan to shorten drug review times was not sufficiently transparent and could be illegal. Pazdur also pushed back on Makary’s plan to exclude agency career scientists from some drug review processes deemed political priorities.

The immediate tensions led Pazdur to first consider retirement last month, according to the Post’s sources. He has now filed paperwork to retire at the end of this month, according to Stat News, which was first to report his planned departure. The outlet noted that he could still change his mind as the retirement plan is not finalized. But a source for the Post said such a reversal is unlikely.

“This is a very sad day for science and for patients,” Ellen Sigal, chairperson and founder of advocacy group Friends of Cancer Research, told the Post. “Rick was our guiding light and this loss is profound.”

The retention of talent is typically a primary metric by which those in management are judged. And during Kennedy’s time at DHS, retention is best used as a word for delivering a punchline. Susan Monarez was also CDC Director for a mere three weeks, or two-and-a-half Scaramuccis, before being fired by Kennedy, reportedly over her refusal to rubber stamp Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer nonsense.

Whatever you think of RFK Jr., even if you’re a huge fan, this draining of talent over his management style and his anti-scientific bullshit is having a deleterious effect on American health. And that’s sort of the opposite of what a Secretary of HHS should be hoping to achieve.

12:00 PM

10:00 AM

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Was Ordered To Release Some Of His Emails With Elon Musk. Most Are Blacked Out. [Techdirt]

This story was originally published by the Texas Tribune and the Texas Newsroom and co-published with ProPublica. Republished under the Texas Tribune’s republish feature.

Months after fighting to keep secret the emails exchanged between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s companies, state officials released nearly 1,400 pages to The Texas Newsroom.

The records, however, reveal little about the two men’s relationship or Musk’s influence over state government. In fact, all but about 200 of the pages are entirely blacked out.

Of those that were readable, many were either already public or provided minimal information. They included old incorporation records for Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, a couple of agendas for the governor’s committee on aerospace and aviation, emails regarding a state grant awarded to SpaceX and an application from a then-Musk employee to sit on a state commission.

One is an invitation to happy hour. Another is a reminder of the next SpaceX launch.

The documents were provided in response to a public records request by The Texas Newsroom, which asked Abbott’s office for communications with Musk and the businessman’s employees dating back to last fall. Abbott’s and Musk’s lawyers fought their release, arguing they would reveal trade secrets, potentially “intimate and embarrassing” exchanges or confidential legal and policymaking discussions. 

Abbott’s spokesperson, Andrew Mahaleris, said the governor’s office “rigorously complies with the Texas Public Information Act and releases any responsive information that is determined to not be confidential or excepted from disclosure.” 

Open government experts say the limited disclosure is emblematic of a larger transparency problem in Texas. They pointed to a 2015 state Supreme Court decision that allowed companies to oppose the release of records by arguing that they contain “competitively sensitive” information. The ruling, experts said, made it harder to obtain records documenting interactions between governments and private companies.

Tom Leatherbury, who directs the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, said companies took advantage of the ruling. Among the most prominent examples of the ruling’s effect on transparency was McAllen’s refusal to disclose how much money was spent to lure pop star Enrique Iglesias to the city for a concert. The city argued that such disclosures would hurt its ability to negotiate with artists for future performances. Eventually, it was revealed that Iglesias was paid nearly half a million dollars.

The problem has been exacerbated, Leatherbury added, by the fact that the Office of the Attorney General, which referees public records disputes, does not have the power to investigate whether the records that companies want to withhold actually contain trade secrets.

“Corporations are willing to assert that information is confidential, commercial information, and more governmental bodies are willing not to second-guess the company’s assertion,” Leatherbury said. (Leatherbury has performed pro bono legal work for The Texas Newsroom.) 

Musk and his companies’ representatives did not respond to questions about the records. 

One of the richest people in the world, Musk has invested heavily in Texas. He’s relocated many of his businesses’ headquarters to the state and hired lobbyists who successfully pushed for several new laws that will benefit his companies.

As part of an effort to track Musk’s clout in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom on April 20 asked Abbott’s office for communications with employees from four of the businessman’s companies: SpaceX, car manufacturer Tesla, the social media site X and Neuralink, which specializes in brain nanotechnology.

The governor’s office said it would cost $244.64 to review the documents, which The Texas Newsroom paid. After the check was cashed, lawyers representing Abbott’s office and SpaceX each sought to keep the records secret.

SpaceX’s lawyer sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton dated June 26, saying that publicly releasing the emails would hurt its competitive advantage.

Abbott’s public information coordinator, Matthew Taylor, also asked Paxton’s office for permission to withhold the documents, arguing they included private exchanges with lawyers, details about policymaking decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Taylor said some of the records were protected under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consisted of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public.”

Releasing the Musk emails, he said, would have a “chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

Ultimately, Paxton’s office mostly sided with Abbott and Musk. In a Aug. 11 opinion, Assistant Attorney General Erin Groff wrote that many of the documents could be withheld. Groff, however, ordered the release of some records determined to be “either not highly intimate or embarrassing” or of “legitimate public interest.”

A month later, the governor’s office released 1,374 pages of records, the vast majority of which were completely redacted.

Some records included a note that appeared to explain why. A note on page 401, for example, cited the exemption for competitive bidding records for 974 redacted pages. Names and emails of Musk’s employees were also removed.

“The fact that a governmental body can redact more than 1,000 pages of documents that are directly related to a major business’s activities in Texas is certainly problematic,” said Reid Pillifant, an attorney specializing in public records and media law. (Pillifant has represented a coalition of media outlets, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, in lawsuits seeking the release of public information related to the May 2022 mass shooting at an Uvalde elementary school.)

He and other experts said such hurdles are becoming more common as legislation and court decisions have weakened the state’s public records laws.

Four years after the 2015 Supreme Court decision, legislators passed a new law that was meant to ensure the release of basic information about government deals with private businesses. But open government experts said the law did not go far enough to restore transparency, adding that some local governments are still objecting to the release of contract information.

Moreover, lawmakers continue to add carve-outs to what qualifies as public information every legislative session. Just this year, for example, legislators added the following exceptions to public records and open meetings laws: information relating to how government entities detect and deter fraud and discussions during public government meetings about certain military and aerospace issues.

Even with the increasing challenges of accessing public records, Leatherbury and Pillifant were stumped by the governor’s decision to release thousands of pages only to black them out fully. Leatherbury said that the governor’s office may have wanted to show the volume of records responsive to the request.

“They wanted you to see what little you could get in the context of the entire document, even though that’s kind of meaningless,” he said.

The Texas Newsroom has asked the Office of the Attorney General to reconsider its decision and order the release of the Musk emails. There is little other recourse to challenge the outcome.

If a member of the public believes a government agency is violating the law, they can try to sue. But the experts noted that a recent Texas Supreme Court decision made it more difficult to enforce the public records law against the governor and other executive officers. Now, Leatherbury said, it’s not clear how challenging such a records decision would work.

“Every Texas citizen should care about access to these kinds of records because they shed light on how our public officials are making big decisions that affect the land where people live and how their taxpayer dollars are being spent,” Pillifant said.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

09:00 AM

Paramount (With Jared Kushner And Saudi Help) Launches $108 Billion Hostile Takeover Bid For Warner Brothers [Techdirt]

Last week Netflix announced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, elbowing out rival acquisition bids (for now) by Comcast/NBC and Paramount/CBS. But the deal still needs regulatory approval from Trump, who has already stated several times that he’d prefer it if his bestie new owner of CBS, right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, comes away victorious.

Even before the deal was finalized, Paramount and/or the Trump administration had begun seeding complaints in Republican-friendly media that the bidding process was unfair to Larry Ellison and CBS/Paramount, and that the Trump administration is concerned about the antitrust impact of a Netflix Warner Brothers combination.

Now Paramount has announced that it’s trying to appeal directly to shareholders with a $108 billion hostile takeover bid:

“The tender offer is for $30 per share, all in cash, a contrast to Netflix’s offer, which is a $27.75 mix of cash and some stock, with shareholders also getting a stake in the linear TV spinout. Netflix is also only buying WBD’s streaming and studios business, while Paramount is pursuing the whole company, making for a complicated comparison, depending on how you value the linear TV business.”

Curiously omitted from Paramount’s press release is the fact that the $108 billion bid includes money from Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners, as well as funding from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. This is pretty clearly part of the Ellison family bid to dominate the entirety of U.S. media after their successful acquisition of CBS and Paramount.

If that’s not clear enough: one of the president’s top billionaire donors and son in law are working alongside Saudi Arabia and other foreign autocrats in a bid to dominate the shitty remnants of U.S. mainstream media. It sounds hyperbolic and alarmist when you say it out loud, but it’s no less true.

If you read this recent profile piece on Paramount’s new executives under Larry and David Ellison, you walk away with the sense that they’re kind of assholes. The kind of men who loathe actual creatives, don’t understand what “no” means, and are mostly interested in a company that builds lowest-common denominator engagement bait barfed from the dreams a dim 12-year-old boy trapped in 1989.

To be clear, any media consolidation, including a Netflix acquisition of Warner Brothers, is likely bad for the sector, consumers, and labor. The huge debt accumulated from these deals always involves a ton of layoffs, corner cutting, quality erosion, and price hikes as the remaining company tries to dig out from under the debt while still providing Wall Street its demand for impossible quarterly growth.

The correct antitrust play here, which wouldn’t happen under either U.S. political party (but is even less likely under Trump), is to put an end entirely to harmful, pointless consolidation to protect labor, consumers, and market competition, and to viciously protect independent, diverse media ownership.

But in a country too corrupt to engage with serious antitrust enforcement, of the three bidders for Warner Brothers, Netflix is likely the least bad option.

They’ve historically been the least lodged up the Trump administration’s colon (though that will change as they curry favor for regulatory approval), and their lack of as many redundant business units means there theoretically should be fewer layoffs.

Ellison ownership of CBS, CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and a part of TikTok could prove to be significantly more problematic. And not just because of consolidation. The Trump administration and Ellison clearly want to build an authoritarian-friendly propaganda machine propped up by its infotainment arm. Think Fox News and Fox, but somehow worse and even less ethical.

They’re following the media domination playbook seen in other authoritarian-led countries like Hungary. Consolidate and acquire everything, and steadily replace already shaky journalism with gibberish and agitprop ahead of efforts to permanently retain power. The only upside here is that many of these zealots and nepobabies may not have the competency to pull it off.

The Netflix Warner Brothers bid includes a $5.8 billion breakup fee, suggesting that Netflix is likely to fight tooth and nail against any hostile takeover bids or any sort of strange, pro-Ellison shenanigans by the Trump administration and its Saudi allies (which as we noted last week, were going to be all but guaranteed in the months and weeks to come).

The hostile takeover bid guarantees months or years of legal fighting. But it also guarantees months of performative bullshit by Trump, Ellison, Kushner and right wing media about how Netflix ownership would be a woke antitrust nightmare, but letting the Saudis, Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David dominate U.S. media would be a delightful, populist spritzer.

Expect a lot of shitty establishment corporate journalism on this that normalizes and helps prop up the phony gambit by Ellison and Trump. And a lot of kayfabe from all of these authoritarian-enabling assholes, suddenly pretending they appreciate “robust regulatory scrutiny” and a “healthy debate on market impacts based on the merits,” despite having a violent disdain for both.

But if Netflix truly digs in and doubles down (again probably the best of a bunch of bad options), it’s a fight that could outlast an unhealthy Trump and his increasingly unpopular administration entirely.

08:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 美 [Kanji of the Day]

美

✍9

小3

beauty, beautiful

ビ　ミ

うつく.しい

美術館   (びじゅつかん)   —   art museum
美しい   (うつくしい)   —   beautiful
美人   (びじん)   —   beautiful woman
美少女   (びしょうじょ)   —   beautiful girl
美味しい   (おいしい)   —   good(-tasting)
美術   (びじゅつ)   —   art
美味   (びみ)   —   good flavor
美容   (びよう)   —   beauty
美容院   (びよういん)   —   beauty parlour
美容師   (びようし)   —   beautician

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 蚊 [Kanji of the Day]

蚊

✍10

中学

mosquito

ブン

か

蚊帳の外   (かやのそと)   —   being excluded
飛蚊症   (ひぶんしょう)   —   myodesopsia
蚊帳   (かちょう)   —   mosquito net
蚊取り線香   (かとりせんこう)   —   mosquito coil
蚊遣り   (かやり)   —   outdoor fire with dense smoke to repel mosquitoes
蚊柱   (かばしら)   —   mosquito swarm
蚊屋   (かや)   —   mosquito net
赤家蚊   (あかいえか)   —   common house mosquito (Culex pipiens)
豹脚蚊   (やぶか)   —   Aedes (genus of mosquitoes)
蚊食鳥   (かくいどり)   —   bat

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

07:00 AM

Your Job Was Stopping CSAM? Trump Says No Visa For You! [Techdirt]

You want to see actual government censorship in action? And have it done by people claiming they’re doing it to stop censorship? Check out last week’s revelation (originally reported by Reuters) that the US State Department will now start denying H-1B visas for anyone who has anything to do with trust & safety, fact checking, content moderation, or mis- or disinformation research. The government is now punishing people for speech—specifically, punishing them for the false belief that their work constitutes censorship.

The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants – and family members who would be traveling with them – to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.

“If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,” under a specific article of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the cable said.

It’s like JD Vance’s “the rules were you weren’t going to fact check me” taken to a new level.

This policy censors non-censors for not doing the thing that the White House and MAGA folks are actively doing every day. MAGA knows content moderation is necessary—they’re super eager to have it applied when it’s speech they don’t like. As we’ve recently discussed, they’ve suddenly been demanding social media companies stop foreign influence campaigns and remove anything mean about Charlie Kirk. At the same time, the White House itself is engaged in a twisted version of what it claims is fact checking and demanding that media orgs hire MAGA-friendly censors.

The hypocrisy is the point. But it’s also blatantly unconstitutional. As Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to this news:

People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren’t engaged in ‘censorship’— they’re engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional.

Incoherent and unconstitutional is being too kind.

The real work that trust & safety professionals do makes this policy even more perverse. As trust & safety expert (and occasional Ctrl-Alt-Speech guest host) Alice Hunsberger told (the recently defunded) NPR:

“Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it,” she said. “Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it’s so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer.”

So the administration is now barring entry to people whose work includes stopping child sexual abuse material and protecting Americans from foreign bad actors—all while claiming to oppose censorship and demanding platforms remove content about Charlie Kirk. The only way this makes sense is if you understand what the actual principle at work is: we get to control all speech, and anyone who might interfere with that control must be punished.

There are no fundamental values at work here beyond “we have power, and we’re going to abuse it to silence anyone who stands in our way.”

05:00 AM

Understanding carriage [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The announcement of the planned Netflix acquisition of Warner Bros, one of the last remaining major studios, is shedding light on a key issue we often overlook when thinking about culture, creativity and creation.

Carriage is the term for the method that books, movies, TV shows and other media get from the producers to the public. It’s about who controls user access to the medium.

Until recently, bookstores were a largely open system. Any publisher had a chance to get any book into any bookstore, sometimes with prime placement and promotion.

Radio stations offered carriage to record labels. When labels tried to bribe the program directors (‘payola’) the power of this carriage was clear and the practice was banned. Even so, major record labels had power because they, and they alone, had a chance to get a record heard and played.

Throughout the 1930s, film production in the US was controlled by about eight studios, and five of the studios had their own movie theaters. With this advantage, they could force the independent movie theaters to take a block of movies, exerting control over what got seen.

It’s this control of carriage that amplifies power. With just three major TV networks, an independent producer of shows had almost no chance to have their shown seen without their participation. Middlemen control carriage, and that gives them the key to the gate.

The internet was supposed to change the way creators dealt with carriage issues. If you wanted someone to visit your website, no one could step in the way. This was a breakthrough, the first in a century. Songs, books, videos–put them up and bring your own audience.

Of course, once Google gained traction, they offered to engage in thinly veiled payola–pay Google for search ads, and traffic would come to your site. Don’t pay, no play.

Amazon started out as an everything store, treating all books–and then everything else they sold–evenly. If an author or publisher could get the word out, Amazon ensured that the item would be found. Widespread and open carriage of ideas and products. Alas… if you’ve noticed that the Amazon shopping experience has gotten a lot worse, it’s because they’re maximizing their ad profits (payola) and burying (taking efficient carriage away from) those that won’t pay or partner.

And Netflix?

Hollywood is petrified. If Netflix further integrates into production, as well as buying another large library of previously produced content, they fear that there will only be one streaming platform, and, with control over carriage, one company will control what gets made and what gets seen. It doesn’t really matter how many studios there are–it’s not hard to start one–what matters for the future is that carriage, and the profits that go with it, are available to anyone with a studio.

The solution, one that Netflix would probably benefit from, is to offer to adopt more of a YouTube approach to carriage–allow anyone who produces video content to show it on Netflix. Pay them based on views. As we’ve seen with YouTube, creators don’t mind if there’s just one place to be seen, as long as carriage is available fairly.

Creators of everything–from Linkedin posts to podcasts to documentaries–need to think hard about carriage. Attention is one of our precious resources, and our culture benefits when it’s not centrally controlled.

      
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