After years of preparations, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) will kick off this Sunday at Rabat’s Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Morocco.
Hosts Morocco will get the tournament underway by taking on Comoros in the opening match, where a win would extend Morocco’s winning streak to 19 consecutive matches. The hosts are favored to come out on top in Africa’s biggest sporting event, which is expected to attract around two billion viewers across 180 countries.
How many will watch the tournament via an illegal IPTV or web-based streaming platform is naturally a hot topic.
In a January 2025 report to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the International Intellectual Property Alliance recommended that Morocco should be placed on the USTR’s ‘Watch List’ (pdf).
The reasons include “extremely high rates” of piracy for film and music, a weak legal framework that fails to empower authorities to tackle digital piracy, administrative authorities that do have the power to act, but fail to do so, and a public that “lacks basic understanding of copyright principles.”
The report dedicated six full pages to Morocco, laying out exactly what needs to be done to meet standards acceptable to the United States.
Describing IPTV piracy as “rampant” and inaction by the Moroccan Copyright and Related Rights Office (BMDAV) as a source of frustration, IIPA added that despite receiving complaints, BMDAV had initiated zero enforcement actions to date.
Yet taken on face value, there are now signs of unexpected improvement.
BMDAV Summit Supported by a Who’s-Who of Anti-Piracy Players
With the Africa Cup of Nations approaching, local news outlet SNRT caught up with BMDAV director Dalal Mhamdi Alaoui who spoke about the need to prevent the “proliferation” of pirate platforms broadcasting football matches without authorization.
The report revealed that an international anti-piracy summit would take place on December 16, organized by BMDAV in partnership with the French National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) and the Delegation of the European Union to Morocco.
The summit was also supported by INTERPOL, which held its 93rd General Assembly in Marrakech, Morocco, in late November, and the Motion Picture Association (MPA), whose members’ content regularly appears on pirate services, including those based in Morocco.
“Vast” Anti-IPTV Piracy Operation
The MPA is one the five members of the IIPA and the driving force behind anti-piracy coalition ACE, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. ACE was also listed for the anti-piracy summit, where one of the central topics was how to tackle unauthorized broadcasting of sporting events.
Despite the alleged lack of enforcement in Morocco, BMDAV informed SNRT that, in partnership with her office, broadcasting rightsholders are preparing to conduct a “vast anti-piracy operation” in which “all necessary legal measures” would be taken to prosecute illegal platforms.
A separate local report from Morocco World News provides more context.
“Recent investigations by ACE reveal a high concentration of piracy operators in Morocco in recent years, particularly in IPTV services, streaming, and content ripping. The organization’s research shows that some of these networks operate vast criminal systems targeting audiences across North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East,” the report notes.
“With AFCON 2025 approaching, experts anticipate a significant increase in illegal live match streaming attempts. The conference aims to strengthen coordination between regulatory authorities, the judicial system, security services, and the private sector while raising awareness about the economic, social, and cultural impact of piracy.”
Working on the assumption that ACE and its partners would play key roles in local enforcement action, telegraphing a “vast” anti-piracy operation via the media isn’t the type of strategy the coalition has ever been known to deploy. Of course, indicating the scale of an operation says nothing about timing, even in the days leading up to an event that will almost certainly be heavily pirated.
In the background, meanwhile, broadcaster beIN has been exploring the potential for site-blocking measures in Morocco.
beIN sues Morocco ISPs
In the second half of 2024, beIN Sports was preparing to launch legal action against three local ISPs, including the largest telecoms company in Morocco, Maroc Telecom.
Details on the specifics are thin, but it appears that beIN’s goal was to obtain a ruling that forced the ISPs to block the illegal sports streaming site live-kooora.com. At the time it was one of the most popular sites of its type in Morocco and may have originally been part of a longer list of targets.
Whether blocking depends on a finding of ISP liability for pirated content isn’t clear, but since beIN’s demands aimed to force the ISPs to block the site to prevent their customers from accessing it, that’s one possibility.
At what stage these are lawsuits are currently at isn’t clear, but on December 10, beIN Media Group announced the launch of its TOD platform in Morocco, from where the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations will be available to stream in 4K.
Not for free, of course, but for those who simply must have uninterrupted, flawless 4K, beIN’s offer is likely to be the only option available.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
If there’s anything the GOP/MAGA party can’t stand, it’s people who won’t fall in line. It openly courts fascism while still pretending its ultimate concern is the protection of (certain) civil liberties. It cheers on politically motivated prosecutions while still making mouth noises about “activist judges.” It’s a land of contrasts, to be sure. But the US — under this leadership — certainly isn’t “a place of honor.”
Today, Governor Larry Rhoden announced Operation: Prairie Thunder – a comprehensive, targeted public safety initiative to protect South Dakotans, especially in the Sioux Falls metro area.
“We are keeping South Dakotans strong, safe, and free. When it comes to safety, one of our biggest opportunities to move the needle is right here in Sioux Falls, and that’s where Operation: Prairie Thunder comes in,” said Governor Larry Rhoden. “We are taking decisive action to hold criminals accountable and protect our communities.”
Whew. Sounds like a lot. This July announcement claimed all kinds of good things would be happening in terms of crime prevention and enforcement. But it was actually just more of the usual “war on drugs” stuff: saturation patrols, a few more helicopters in the air, and a concentrated effort to round up anyone who may have given law enforcement the slip while paroled or on probation.
But the part that meant the most is this:
The comprehensive effort to support ICE’s work includes:
Equipping the South Dakota Highway Patrol to assist with ICE’s actions to keep America safe – a partnership that the Governor previously obtained;
Activating six SDNG soldiers to assist ICE with administrative functions; and
Enabling DOC to work with ICE to deport offenders and transfer violent offenders for federal incarceration and assist ICE with processing and transportation of illegal alien criminals.
In other words, it was just a convenient excuse to roll hard with local law enforcement while riding shotgun with Trump’s bigots-in-masks kidnappers.
Since this announcement, “Prairie Thunder” has moved past Sioux Falls and into other towns, including Yankton, Belle Fourche, and Huron. Press releases and appearances from Governor Rhoden claimed this saturation+ICE had been a huge success.
Troopers jailed 75 people in total across the two operations, according to the release — 42 on drug charges and 33 on non-drug charges — and 19 people were charged with drug offenses but not detained.
The patrol interviewed 25 people on behalf of ICE, the release said, 21 of whom were held for the federal agency.
But a lot of locals in a red-coded state weren’t convinced this had anything to do with real crime. The towns targeted by “Prairie Thunder” weren’t exactly hotbeds of criminal activity. Huron, in particular, is the state’s most diverse city, which raised obvious questions about why it was next on list after the Thunder had rolled through the state’s most-populous city, Sioux Falls.
[T]he November patrols raised concerns for the city’s Hispanic community, according to Republican state Rep.Kevin Van Diepen, who’s also a former police chief.
He said many residents believed that ICE — not state law enforcement — was behind the saturation patrols in the city of 14,000.
The governor had never announced this unexpected expansion of the program to other South Dakota cities. But it’s clear that Prairie Thunder is still an ongoing program. The city of Brookings (pop. 23,377) decided it wasn’t going to play nice with ICE or the governor’s desire to keep all of this under the radar. An extremely short post on the city’s official website let every resident know what was headed their way, as well as making it clear the city had no desire to pitch in with ICE’s deportation efforts:
The City of Brookings has been made aware that Operation Prairie Thunder, an anti-crime task force with the State of South Dakota, will be in the Brookings area Dec. 17-19. The City of Brookings will not be participating in these operations.
The governor voiced his disapproval with the city of Brookings Friday afternoon, suggesting that the broadcasting of when and where stings, saturations or any other temporary, concentrated policing will take place undermines law enforcement operations — and the men and women carrying out that work.
“For security reasons, we are not going to comment on operational specifics. It’s unfortunate that the City of Brookings would jeopardize an anti-crime operation and put the safety of our officers at risk by publishing this information,” he said in a statement provided to The Dakota Scout. “In South Dakota, we enforce the rule of law.”
This is dumb for several reasons. First, even the mayor of Sioux Falls issued statements distancing himself and his city’s police officers from ICE activity related to “Prairie Thunder.” So, even at the initial flash-point of the operation, politicians knew it would be bad for political business to be thought of as complicit in ICE raids.
Second, saturation patrols are often announced ahead of time by the cities and law enforcement agencies engaging in them. We hear radio announcements for these patrols ahead of every major holiday. Local cops also let people know ahead of time if they’re going to be running sobriety checkpoints. None of these notifications have ever been portrayed as “jeopardizing anti-crime operations” by local politicians.
Finally, go fuck yourself, Governor Rhoden. What ICE does has almost nothing to do with the “rule of law.” And the administration overseeing ICE only cares about the “rule of law” when it needs to get the Supreme Court to sign off on its latest constitutional violations. You’re nothing but a Kristi Noem understudy, which means you’re incapable (or unwilling) of doing anything that doesn’t align exactly with the New MAGA Order.
If ICE wants to perform a bunch of crimes of opportunity in Brookings, it should still be able to do so even if its officers are being filmed, insulted, or otherwise treated like the pariahs they are. You serve the state, not Donald Trump and his fleeting whims. If it won’t hurt your brain too much, try to remember that now and then.
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment.
The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large investment involvement by the Chinese:
“The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years ago. Just shifting around the ownership structure to give Trump and his friends a “win.”
It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S. tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was decorative.
You might recall that Democrats made a point to join forces with Republicans during election season in support of a ban unless a big chunk of ownership was divested. Now that it’s happened, it’s basically shifting ownership of TikTok to a huge chunk of Trump’s authoritarian allies, while somehow still maintaining the supposed problematic tethers to the Chinese? Impressive. Great job.
You might also recall that folks like Brendan Carr spent literally years whining about the propaganda, privacy, and surveillance threats posed by TikTok. And their solution was ultimately just to shift a small part of ownership over to Trump’s autocratic buddies while still retaining Chinese involvement. Now, with the problem made worse, you can easily assume that Carr will probably never mention the threat again.
Republicans obviously take majority responsibility for this turd of a deal and the corrupt shifting of TikTok ownership to Trump’s buddies. But it can’t be overstated what an own-goal supporting this whole dumb thing was for Democrats, who not only helped Trump’s friends steal partial ownership of TikTok, they saber-rattled over a ban during an election season where they desperately needed young people to vote.
As I’ve spent years arguing, if these folks were all so concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern internet privacy law applying to all U.S. companies and their executives.
If they cared about propaganda, they could have fought media consolidation, backed creative media literacy reform in schools, or found new ways to fund independent journalism.
If they cared about national security, they wouldn’t have helped elect a New York City real estate conman sex pest President, and they certainly wouldn’t have actively aided his cronyism.
This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Ultimately this bipartisan accomplishment not only makes everything worse, it demonstrates we’re absolutely no better than the countries we criticize.
In a world where standardized streaming portals have become a commodity, Hayase is a breath of fresh air.
The standalone torrent client, formerly known as Miru, offers a clean and organized media player interface to stream anime content.
The torrent streaming functionality is similar to the likes of Popcorn Time, while Hayase’s reliance on third-party extensions is reminiscent of Kodi. On the official GitHub page, the dev team bills its multi-platform software as a bring-your-own-content streaming tool.
“Hayase is a bring-your-own-content torrent streaming client designed for anime enthusiasts. It provides the technology to stream torrents in real-time, with no waiting for downloads to finish,’ they write.
The decision not to include any content is in part legally driven. After all, most anime torrent sources rely on pirated content. These third-party sources are something Hayase explicitly distances itself from in a disclaimer.
“Hayase is purely a torrent client and media player. It does not provide, index, host, or link to any content sources, torrent files, or unofficial repositories. Users are fully responsible for sourcing their own content legally and in compliance with their local laws.”
Disclaimer
Crunchyroll Asks GitHub to Take Action
While Hayase does not host or link to any infringing content, many users configure it as a pirate streaming anime player. This is a thorn in the side of rightsholders including the American subscription service Crunchyroll, which would rather see it gone.
Through their Indian takedown partner, MarkScan, Crunchyroll recently asked GitHub to remove links to various Hayase releases. Notably, the notice cites Indian IT regulations alongside U.S. copyright law to support its demands.
The takedown notice
“This notice is to bring to your attention that we have found copyright infringement on the application named ‘Hayase’ that is using your services,” MarkScan writes.
“Hayase enables unauthorized access to anime content, an activity which is well established as copyright infringement under applicable laws and relevant case law,” the notice adds.
Crunchyroll’s DMCA notice requests the removal of nearly two dozen URLs but provides no detail on the alleged infringements. Instead, it refers to screenshots in Appendix B, which are not included in the publicly posted notice.
Hayase Takes Action
Speaking with TorrentFreak, the Hayase team notes that GitHub did not send them the references appendix. This means that the developers also have no clue what the alleged infringements are. Consequently, they lack the required information to file a proper counter-notice.
Hayase’s developers could, in theory, try to follow this up with GitHub. However, instead of dragging the matter out, the team simply chose to remove the contested files. These URLs all point to 404 errors now, so GitHub was not required to take action.
The removals don’t appear to impact Hayase, as the links are no longer actively used as live download links on the official website. Also, it’s worth noting that even if the entire GitHub repository is removed, installed applications would still work.
Hayase.watch
Google Play, Discord, and Other Takedown Attempts
Given recent history, it is likely that this won’t be Crunchyroll’s last attempt to disrupt Hayase. Previously, its takedown partner MarkScan sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub in October.
Hayase has also been targeted outside of GitHub. On Discord, for example, various messages in the channel were removed for alleged copyright infringement. Whether Crunchyroll is behind these takedowns is unknown, as Discord did not share that information.
The most problematic takedown effort targeted Google Play, where it was indeed removed. The Play Store was the go-to destination for many Android users to download the app. While these people can still download the Hayase APK on the official site, that’s a hurdle for some.
With recently announced changes at Crunchyroll, anti-piracy enforcement will arguably become even more important in the new year. At the end of 2025, Crunchyroll will officially discontinue its free ad-supported service, presumably to convert more fans into paying customers.
Ironically, however, one of the most popular reactions to the news, which generated over 5 million views on X, mentions Hayase as something worth looking into.
Work to do…
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
As RFK Jr. continues to dismantle public health in this country policy brick by policy brick, there have fortunately been some consistent sources of sanity for the public to turn to. One of those sources has been the American Academy of Pediatrics, an important organization that provides guidance and dispenses funds to healthcare professionals and researchers to provide for the public health of American children writ large. Because the AAP is made up of medical professionals that are sane, it has been a vocal critic of many of Kennedy’s policy decisions, particularly when it comes to Kennedy’s war on childhood vaccines and his misinformation about autism.
While Kennedy used to fashion himself a liberal, he has become a remarkably quick learner when it comes to the finer points of facism from his boss. His latest move is downright Trumpian: HHS has yanked back millions in approved grants to the AAP.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has canceled millions of dollars in grants awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it said on Wednesday, including ones the group said were aimed at reducing sudden infant death and early detection of autism.
The move comes as the AAP, a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenged vaccine policies enacted under his leadership in federal court. Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccines, has accused the organization of accepting funding from drug and vaccine makers to further their interests.
“These grants, previously awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, were canceled along with a number of other grants to other organizations because they no longer align with the Department’s mission or priorities,” an HHS spokesperson said.
SID and autism detection are the headliners and for good reason. This is a cruel move that will likely result in some increase in the deaths of babies. It also takes away detection of Kennedy’s favorite hobbyhorse in autism spectrum diagnoses. Those are two things that Kennedy claims to very much care about, yet here we are.
But those aren’t the only things those grants funded. There are also things like mental health services and healthcare access in rural areas, the latter of which tend to be Trump territory. It seems that those who voted for Trump often times are his preferred victims.
CEO Mark Del Monte explains how bad this is and what they try to do about it.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” said Del Monte, adding that the group is assessing its options, including potential legal action.
No explanation I can find has been given for these clawbacks of previously approved grants. In lieu of such an explanation, we can but speculate, and the most reasonable speculation out there is that Kennedy is big mad that AAP has disagreed with him, and denounced him, at times. And so he punished American children and rural areas in desperate need of more access to healthcare.
He’s an egomaniac, in other words. And while that sure does make him fit in nice and comfy in the Trump administration, he remains likely the worst HHS Secretary in its nearly 50 years of existence.
Cookies. A core feature of web browsing since the 90s. Likely something you never thought all that much about. That is, web cookies. I’m sure we’ve all thought about real cookies. I’m personally a Snickerdoodle fan.
Anyway, if you’re working to build an audience, you have to think about cookies. They’re a key piece of the way the internet works and vital to helping you understand your audience.
Why? Let’s start by breaking down where cookies come from and what they do.
What Are Web Cookies?
At the most basic, cookies are information packets a web server creates and sends to a web browser. The cookie is held by the browser, usually until the session ends. And most importantly, the web browser will know to attach that relevant cookie for future use.
The cookie contains some information about you that will get used to improve your experience. Online stores use cookies to track what you have in your cart while you shop. Sites with a log-in will use cookies to keep you logged in across various site pages.
These cookies are stored on your machine, usually in a folder created by your browser, and accessed while you are on the web.
Why Did We Need Cookies?
Cookies broadly serve three purposes: session information, personalization, and tracking. There’s a lot of nuance that I’m not going to get into, but these three purposes encompass most of the ways you’ll interact with cookies.
Session cookies hold information about your session. My example of keeping you logged in to a site while you navigate various pages is a session cookie.
Personalization cookies are exactly what they sound like: cookies to store details to help personalize your experience. When you tell a site to remember your user name, that’s a personalization cookie.
Tracking cookies are the ones that cause you to see ads for the products you most recently searched. The website stores that cookie and allows other sites that use the same tracking to see that information. Tracking cookies are also how websites track their users’ behavior—important information for any growing business.
The Difference Between First-Party & Third-Party Cookies
This is key. And thankfully simple.
A first-party cookie is placed in your browser by the site you’re currently visiting. A third-party cookie comes from some other site than the one you're visiting.
As I’m sure you can guess, first-party cookies allow for session data, personalization, and for the site to understand how you use it. Third-party cookies are largely used for advertising to you based on the sites you visit and your interests.
If you’ve ever wondered why those sneakers you were looking at on nike.com are suddenly being advertised to you on Instagram, blame the cookies.
What’s the Deal with Third-Party Cookies and Google?
Unless you manage your own website or are involved in SEO work, you might not know much about Google’s proposed change to third-party cookies.
A brief history: back in 2020, Google announced they were getting rid of third-party cookies for their Chrome browser. This change would have had a major impact on how sites gather information for advertising to you.
It’s important to note that Safari and Firefox, two other popular browsers, already block third-party cookies by default. So it’s not like there isn’t precedent to do this.
But because of Google’s existing marketing tools and their huge piece of the search market, there was a lot of pushback to removing third-party tracking by default. Earlier in 2025, Google walked back their plans, announcing they would continue to make third-party cookies the default.
That means those useful tracking cookies are still happening on Google. With a bit of a catch, though.
Privacy Regulations Impacting User Tracking
In recent years, the EU and some US states (particularly California) have introduced regulations to protect individuals’ data privacy and to force businesses that capture and track data to do so in more transparent ways. The most significant one, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requires that sites ask before applying any cookies.
This regulation technically only applied to nations within the European Union, but because of the nature of the web, sites have universally adopted some form of ‘opt in’ before they apply cookies. For example, here’s what the Lulu homepage looks like when you visit it for the first time (or through an incognito browser).
The consent banner allows you to opt in so that we can apply cookies or to manage which cookies we use. Some, like session cookies, are necessary for the site to operate. Others, like tracking cookies for marketing purposes, are not required. Consent managers like the one we built allow you to manage which cookies you allow.
All legitimate sites today have some form of opt-in to get your consent before they apply cookies. Not offering this option could lead to running afoul of GDPR, leading to potentially large fines.
Data privacy regulations like GDPR are a good thing. They give consumers and users control over which companies can access their data and what data they access.
For businesses and individual creators, these regulations are both a burden and a boon.
Content Marketing & User Data
Going back to my earlier explanation of cookie data, it breaks down like this:
Third-party data is information a third party gathers about you based on activities you take on another website.
First-party data is information a site gathers from you as you use it.
Zero-party data is information you voluntarily give to the site you are using.
One of the most common and useful pieces of zero-party data is your name and email. If a user gives you those details, you can email them marketing materials and apply personalizations like ‘Hi Gary!’ instead of ‘Hi person using my site.’
Personalization builds trust; trust leads to returning customers who might even recommend you and your products to someone else.
First Party Data is Critical
GDPR makes it harder to apply third-party cookies, which in turn makes it harder to leverage paid advertising to find new customers. If a user isn’t letting Meta or Amazon scrape their browsing history, they’ll see fewer and less targeted ads.
For many, this is a relief. Having our activities monitored and used to market to us is not something many people are excited about. That means it is harder for us to ‘naturally’ come across new products and services unless we are actively searching for them.
BUT… that’s actually a good thing. It means the people who do find you and your products/services are actively looking for them. They want to know what you offer, how much it is, and if it’s the right solution for them.
Can you guess what this kind of consumer is also more likely to do?
Give you their information willingly.
So, in a world where advertising cookies are something we have to actively choose to engage with, the data people are willing to give you is more important than ever. That willingness shows they are interested in what you’re offering, opening the door to more specific, targeted marketing that speaks to their interests or needs.
The trick, then, is to find ways to encourage and reward people for offering you their information.
4 Ways to Earn & Respect Customer Data
Asking for and using your customer’s data is important and something you need to take seriously. So, to close us out today, I’ve got four methods we employ at Lulu and we’ve observed successful businesses and creators use to help inspire people browsing their site or searching to offer up zero- and first-party data.
1. Give Them a Reason
This might seem painfully obvious, but you should try to give people a reason to share their information with you. One popular thing to do is to offer access to a white paper, a chapter from your book, or some other piece of content in exchange for their name and email.
One great example of this tactic is Australian author Phoebe Garnsworthy. Her homepage has a banner offering you a free ebook in exchange for your name and email. If you’re interested in her work, a free ebook is a great way to learn more and it serves Phoebe’s marketing goals by adding more subscribers to her mailing list.
2. Be Transparent & Honest
When you ask for personal data, be very clear and open about how you’ll use it. Something like “Enter your name and email address to get the first chapter of my new book and updates on the full book release.”
Be clear and be direct. Then follow through on it. If you tell them you’ll send them updates about an upcoming book launch, do so. Don’t share a bunch of spammy marketing encouraging them to pay for a service or something else that they didn’t explicitly ask for information about.
You can gently offer up other products or services, but the primary communications you send should be tied to the promise you made when they offered their information to you.
3. Carefully Manage Their Data
This is twofold:
You need to monitor and manage your lists to ensure you’re sending communications your subscribers are interested in.
You need to make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe and remove their personal data from your site.
Maintaining your list of followers and subscribers is a general task that you should do periodically. Look for folks that haven’t engaged in a long time or aren’t clicking through your content to see if there might be an adjustment you can make. Or maybe it’s time to suppress that follower and stop sending them content for a while.
But most importantly, anyone who has given you their information should easily and quickly be able to remove it. If you offer account creation on your site, make sure it’s easy for logged in users to request their data be removed. If you don’t offer a log in, then be sure to include a procedure, even if it’s as simple as them emailing you a request.
4. Create Valuable, Personal Content
Finally, create content people want. If you write blog posts that are well-optimized for SEO and are showing up in search results, you’re going to get some traffic.
But once that reader is on your site, you know the final goal is for them to sign up for emails (and eventually purchase a product/service from you). People only drop their email and name into a sign up box if they’re enjoying what you’ve offered and they want more. Remember that—you need to be continuously creating valuable content that speaks to your readers and their needs.
This is another way that zero- and first-party data can be useful.
If you’re asking your subscribers and fans for information about themselves, use it to guide your content.
Managing Data & Marketing
Cookies and access to data from people browsing the web will certainly continue to change and shift. Big retailers will always want to apply third-party cookies to enhance their advertising, but it seems likely that regulations like GDPR will also continue to build a barrier around our personal information.
For you and your content business, the most important thing you can do today is to build a list of followers/fans who willingly offer you their data. That severs any reliance on third-parties and creates a direct connection between you and that subscriber. Building those kinds of connections will be the path forward—for you and for consumers.
Direct relationships built on asked for and offered data are strong relationships. You might not have as much reach, but you’ll have a core group of people who are interested in what you do and want to hear from you. That is immensely valuable in today’s crowded digital landscape.
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In the last Ctrl-Alt-Speech of the year, Mike and Ben round up the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation with the following stories:
We filed our own comment with the USPTO regarding their attempt to weaken the important inter partes review (IPR) process that has been hugely helpful in getting rid of bad patents. Over at EFF, Joe Mullin wrote up an analysis of some of the comments to the USPTO, which we’re running here as well.
A massive wave of public comments just told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO): don’t shut the public out of patent review.
EFF submitted its own formal comment opposing the USPTO’s proposed rules, and more than 4,000 supporters added their voices—an extraordinary response for a technical, fast-moving rulemaking. We comprised more than one-third of the 11,442 comments submitted. The message is unmistakable: the public wants a meaningful way to challenge bad patents, and the USPTO should not take that away.
The Public Doesn’t Want To Bury Patent Challenges
These thousands of submissions do more than express frustration. They demonstrate overwhelming public interest in preserving inter partes review (IPR), and undermine any broad claim that the USPTO’s proposal reflects public sentiment.
Comments opposing the rulemaking include many small business owners who have been wrongly accused of patent infringement, by both patent trolls and patent-abusing competitors. They also include computer science experts, law professors, and everyday technology users who are simply tired of patent extortion—abusive assertions of low-quality patents—and the harm it inflicts on their work, their lives, and the broader U.S. economy.
The USPTO exists to serve the public. The volume and clarity of this response make that expectation impossible to ignore.
EFF’s Comment To USPTO
In our filing, we explained that the proposed rules would make it significantly harder for the public to challenge weak patents. That undercuts the very purpose of IPR. The proposed rules would pressure defendants to give up core legal defenses, allow early or incomplete decisions to block all future challenges, and create new opportunities for patent owners to game timing and shut down PTAB review entirely.
Congress created IPR to allow the Patent Office to correct its own mistakes in a fair, fast, expert forum. These changes would take the system backward.
A Broad Coalition Supports IPR
A wide range of groups told the USPTO the same thing: don’t cut off access to IPR.
Open Source and Developer Communities
The Linux Foundation submitted comments and warned that the proposed rules “would effectively remove IPRs as a viable mechanism for challenges to patent validity,” harming open-source developers and the users that rely on them. Github wrote that the USPTO proposal would increase “litigation risk and costs for developers, startups, and open source projects.” And dozensofindividualsoftware developers described how bad patents have burdened their work.
Patent Law Scholars
A group of 22 patent law professors from universities across the country said the proposed rule changes “would violate the law, increase the cost of innovation, and harm the quality of patents.”
Patient Advocates
Patients for Affordable Drugs warned in their filing that IPR is critical for invalidating wrongly granted pharmaceutical patents. When such patents are invalidated, studies have shown “cardiovascular medications have fallen 97% in price, cancer drugs dropping 80-98%, and treatments for opioid addiction becom[e] 50% more affordable.” In addition, “these cases involved patents that had evaded meaningful scrutiny in district court.”
Small Businesses
Hundreds of small businesses weighed in with a consistent message: these proposed rules would hit them hardest. Owners and engineers described being targeted with vague or overbroad patents they cannot afford to litigate in court, explaining that IPR is often the only realistic way for a small firm to defend itself. The proposed rules would leave them with an impossible choice—pay a patent troll, or spend money they don’t have fighting in federal court.
What Happens Next
The USPTO now has thousands of comments to review. It should listen. Public participation must be more than a box-checking exercise. It is central to how administrative rulemaking is supposed to work.
Congress created IPR so the public could help correct bad patents without spending millions of dollars in federal court. People across technical, academic, and patient-advocacy communities just reminded the agency why that matters.
We hope the USPTO reconsiders these proposed rules. Whatever happens, EFF will remain engaged and continue fighting to preserve the public’s ability to challenge bad patents.
For the past three years, the Tor Project has been working to improve the tools, resources, and protocols used to monitor the health of the Tor network. This work aims to strengthen the Tor network's resilience and resist relay attacks.
As part of this effort, in October 2025, 7aSecurity conducted a code audit of those tools.
The code audit focused on the following projects:
TagTor is a Flask web app to display metrics about the Tor network and its nodes.
DescriptorParser is a small, standalone Java app to import Tor network descriptors into a PostgreSQL DB and a VictoriaMetrics time series.
Margot is a Rust command-line application using Arti that provides a series of commands for the network health team.
Exitmap is a fast and modular Python-based scanner for Tor exit relays.
Tor_fusion parses Tor network documents in the Rust programming language.
Simple Bandwidth Scanner is a Tor bandwidth scanner that generates bandwidth files to be used by directory authorities.
C Tor protects your privacy on the internet by hiding the connection between your Internet address and the services you use. This software is the one that runs on each relay of the Tor network.
Arti is the implementation of Tor in Rust. The code to be audited is the one that changed during this project.
The audit found six vulnerabilities and highlighted eleven hardening recommendations. All findings have been reviewed by the Tor Project, and remediation work is being tracked as part of our ongoing security and maintenance processes.
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
Note: Rations and population sizes represent an Aug. 11 food distribution in Kakuma. ProPublica extrapolated the 100% ration amounts from the 20% ration. Amounts vary between distributions. Source: Documents obtained by ProPublica. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
But most of the day got hung up on a very simple question: is the FCC an independent agency, or is it dutifully bound to obediently do whatever the president wants without question? If you’re new to this, the answer is supposed to be the former, but Carr, ever the dutiful Donald Trump earlobe nibbler, really struggled with this line of questioning all day long:
LUHAN: Is the FCC an independent agency?CARR: I think th—L: Yes or noC: There's a test for this in the la—L: It's yes or no, Brendan! On your website, it simply says, man, 'the FCC is independent.' This isn't a trick questionC: The FCC is notL: So is your website lying?C: Possibly
This was apparently such a sensitive line of questioning for Carr and the Trump FCC that it actively changed its website during Carr’s testimony to falsely state the agency was no longer independent:
Just so people understand: Carr has always been shameless liar and opportunist, whose underpinning legal and “intellectual” logic for what he’s doing will just randomly change, at whim, to justify his actions. Republicans, and a lot of our press, will then work tirelessly to normalize this as serious adult policymaking.
Something important to note that highlights Carr’s hypocrisy: back during the net neutrality wars in 2014, Barack Obama publicly stated that he supported imposing some basic rules, which was perfectly normal and legal. At the time, Republicans positively freaked out, insisting that the president’s vocal support was among the greatest indignities ever conceived and violated FCC independence.
“President Obama’s one minute and 57 second video was the culmination of an unprecedented and coordinated effort by the Executive Branch to pressure an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.”
That FCC independence had been somehow destroyed because Obama legally vocally supported net neutrality has been a central talking point for Republicans for years now. It was the centerpiece of phony Republican congressional inquiries and reports for the better part of a decade.
Yet here you have a Republican president openly ordering the FCC to censor critics, journalists, and entertainers. And Carr, shamelessly trying to now claim the FCC serves entirely at the whim of the president:
KIM: I want to read you a quote & see if you agree with it. 'Congress long ago determined that the FCC is an independent expert agency.' Is that correct? CARR: Senator, there has been a sea change in the law & approach since I wrote that sentenceKIM: Yes you did. You said it in front of Congress
This is who Carr is (and who modern Republicans are). For decades they’ve wanted to have their cake and eat it too. When it’s time to implement even modest oversight of predatory telecom monopolies or media giants, folks like Carr will insist the FCC is just a helpless puppy with no authority. When it comes time to offload TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends, censor journalists critical of their mad king, or bully comedians, suddenly the FCC has all the authority in the world.
There’s absolutely zero legal coherence to any of it. It’s kakistocracy. It’s authoritarianism at the hands of the dimmest, least ethical people imaginable. It’s frequently illegal. And it’s embarrassing.
One downside of the day’s focus on FCC independence is that Congress didn’t really pressure Carr on any of the other ethically problematic and illegal things he’s been doing, whether it’s a fake “investigation” into public media, his abuses of the merger approval process to require that companies be more sexist and racist, or his complete decimation of FCC consumer protection and media consolidation limits.
Where do you show up, what do you publish? Who do you ask, and what do you answer to? What gets better because you persist?
Are there systems you support or work to change?
What do you do when you don’t feel like it? Especially then.
The ocean is made of drops. And our practice turns those drops into something of significance.
It’s a practice if we show up even if it’s not working (yet). And it’s a practice if we understand how to make it better.
Our actions become our habits, and our habits attract others. That becomes our community, and our community builds systems. Those systems feel awkward until they become normal, and then, once normal, they become the status quo.
Bolts of lightning rarely change the world, but erosion does. Streams turn into rivers, and rivers persist.
A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (permalink)
I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.
The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:
It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.
Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."
The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.
The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.
Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.
Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.
That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.
This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involves the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.
This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.
If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.
So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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My piece out later today in The Big Picture takes a look at where everything stands today, as we near the end of the first calendar year of Trump’s second term. And I gotta say, it’s not looking good for Dear Leader.
Instead of a hard powering executive leading us ahead full throttle, the Trump train is a hodge podge of railcars, with random cargo booked by competing factions and personalities. The result is that on every major policy issue, from inflation to healthcare to military deployment, we are seeing things go quite badly.
The entire Trump project is backfiring, and voters are noticing.
Look for my round up of the year’s failed Trump policies in your inboxes later today. If you’re not yet subscribed, you can do sign up for free using the button below. But please do consider becoming a paid supporter if you can spare it! My team and I depend on voluntary support for our work and offer some great benefits for our paid subscribers.
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll cover not just data types, but also dive into their functions and how to perform conversions to make analysis and programming a greater experience. It’s on sale for $30.
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President Trump, who keeps pretending he’s for free speech, but who has filed more defamation lawsuits against more media organizations than any president in history (combined), has done so again. This time, he has sued the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Florida (naturally). For context: the only other president to come anywhere close was Teddy Roosevelt, who sued a Michigan newspaper for calling him a drunk—and that was while campaigning as an ex-president, not while actually holding office.
At issue was a BBC Panorama documentary about January 6th, in which there is (at worst) a slightly awkward edit: two separate sentences of Trump’s speech were shown one after another, despite being separated by over half an hour of Trumpian ramblings. The original claim was that this edit somehow changed the meaning of what Trump said, though in the past few days, Trump has been falsely claiming that the documentary used AI to make him say things he didn’t say.
The lawsuit makes zero mention of AI. Instead, it claims that they edited the two sentences together in a way that was misleading.
The lawsuit isn’t a surprise. He’s been talking about this for a few weeks now, even though (1) the BBC did nothing wrong, (2) the BBC still apologized, (3) the BBC effectively fired those who did the controversial edit, (4) the BBC has promised never to show the documentary again, and (5) the BBC has since bent over backwards to portray Trump positively.
The suit “does not have any legal basis, either on defamation or jurisdictional grounds,” said Bob Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“This is nothing more than the president’s latest effort to intimidate media companies that he sees as adversarial to his administration,” he said.
As he notes, the first hurdle is going to be the jurisdiction. Suing in Florida is a choice, given that the BBC only showed the documentary in the UK, not anywhere in the US, let alone Florida. Showing that the documentary somehow harmed Trump’s reputation in Florida will be virtually impossible if it actually got to that point (which it won’t).
The complaint tries to get around this by—I shit you not—claiming that because VPN usage is up in Florida, it likely means people are using VPNs in Florida to appear to be in the UK in order to watch BBC streams that are geo-locked to the UK. No, really:
According to vpnMentor, a VPN research firm, VPN usage in Florida has skyrocketed since 2024, with a 51% increase in demand on December 19, 2024, and an over 1,000% increase in VPN usage at the beginning of 2025.
Florida streamers have opted to use VPNs to increase their “streaming freedom.” Among the most popular streaming services accessed by viewers using a VPN is BBC’s online streaming platform, BBC iPlayer.
To that end, an article published by Tom’s Guide, a reputable technology news outlet, revealed that a VPN usage survey showed that approximately 41% of VPN subscribers use the service to stream content, citing BBC iPlayer as an example of what a VPN subscriber could view using a VPN.
The Panorama Documentary’s publicity, coupled with significant increases in VPN usage in Florida since its debut, establishes the immense likelihood that citizens of Florida accessed the Documentary before the BBC had it removed.
That is the kind of argument that should get a lawyer sanctioned.
Then there’s the actual malice part of this. It’s unlikely that Trump can show actual malice here, since (as a public figure) that would require showing that the BBC knew this was “false” or that they ignored evidence of the falsity of the statement. But that’s a problem since it wasn’t false. Florida is a state that recognizes a version of “defamation by implication,” in which true statements presented in a way that implies a defamatory fact can still be defamation, but it’s difficult to see how this edit rises to the necessary level, which would require the BBC to have deliberately decided to misrepresent the facts in this way.
The supposed smoking gun in the lawsuit is an internal memo that was made public recently, in which some employees raised concerns about the edit, which the lawsuit uses in its weak attempt to manufacture actual malice.
As set forth in a damning and recently leaked BBC internal whistleblower document, the BBC intentionally used the Panorama Documentary to maliciously, falsely, and defamatorily make it appear that President Trump explicitly called for violent action and rioting, and that he “said something he did not,” by splicing together footage from the start of the Speech with a separate quote that he said nearly 55 minutes later, while omitting his statement calling for peace, made less than one minute after his first statement urging supports to cheer their senators and congressmen at the Capitol. Such distortion of the President’s speech by the BBC “materially misled viewers.”
Here’s the problem with that theory: Internal editorial debate about whether an edit works is not evidence of actual malice under its legal definition. It’s evidence of editorial standards. If anything, it shows the BBC was wrestling with how to responsibly present the material—the opposite of reckless disregard for the truth. Trump’s lawyers are trying to weaponize normal journalistic process as proof of bad faith, which is both legally nonsensical and a chilling attack on newsroom deliberation.
There’s a separate issue in Florida, as well, which is that Florida defamation law gives news orgs the ability to limit the damages to “actual damages” by issuing a correction, an apology, or a retraction. And the BBC has, in fact, issued an apology (unnecessarily). This alone should cap any potential damages at actual harm suffered, which would be… what exactly? Trump won the election. His reputation, to the extent it can be harmed by accurately showing his own words about January 6th, certainly wasn’t damaged enough to cost him anything measurable. The man is president.
Oh, I guess we should mention, just for the sake of laughing at it, Trump is actually demanding a very Dr. Evil like “$10 billion” for an edit of a single TV program not shown in the US and which did no actual damage to his reputation.
Still, like nearly all of Donald Trump’s SLAPP suits, the point is not to win the lawsuit. Rather it’s to continue the same streak of intimidation tactics that he’s done for years. He sues media properties on no basis whatsoever, knowing that it causes not just the media targets of his lawsuits to be a lot less willing to report on the president’s words and actions in the future, but also scares others into silence as well.
Donald Trump is a serial filer of SLAPP suits, which serve no purpose other than to intimidate the media away from reporting negatively on him. It is just one of many reasons that he is the most censorial president ever. Hopefully the courts drop kick this case off the docket in record time.
Tech Policy Press has a series of posts titled “Symposium on Digital Markets Act (DMA) Enforcement” that you might find interesting, since you read this. The latest one, “Making the Digital Markets Act Developer-Friendly”, touches upon the hardship we at F-Droid, and FLOSS devs everywhere, encounter when trying to thrive in a monopoly ruled world. The full series covers more topics like users’ data in the AI age, tech experts and what DMA achieved so far and what’s next, so make sure to read them all.
Authnkey, Passkey credential provider for hardware security keys, makes your security keys (Yubi, Solo, Nitro, etc) usable without proprietary components.
Billionaire device companies run marketing campaigns for new devices focused on an app that takes a screenshot of the screen? That can’t be true, right? I mean “circle to search” can’t be the technical innovation that sells new devices in 2025. I refuse to accept such a thing, and a FLOSS dev did the same as we’ve just included their CircleToSearch App, with multi search engine support, that allows you to do that magic on your current device, without buying anything.
QUIK SMS, Open source replacement to the stock SMS app on Android. A revival of QKSMS had its signing key changed and now has a new appid. At the same time, Messages(a fork of QUIK) was updated to 1.0.3. If you’re still running the old app (now archived, see below), test these two and switch to one of them now.
Removed Apps
2 apps were removed
Canta: Uninstall any(*) app without root (Switch to the newer app, named exactly the same: Canta)
QUIK SMS: Open source replacement to the stock SMS app on Android. A revival of QKSMS. (Key change, appid change, see News above)
Apparently, Jared Kushner and his investment firm Affinity Partners didn’t like the attention the partnership was generating, and have announced their tactical retreat:
“The dynamics of the investment have changed significantly since we initially became involved in October,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to believe there is a strong strategic rationale for Paramount’s offer.”
And by “dynamics,” Affinity means that the the president’s son-in-law partnering with Saudis and the planet’s second-richest technofascist billionaire to gobble up the remnants of dying U.S. corporate media was generating a few too many negative headlines for their liking.
The $108 billion hostile takeover bid is still being backed (for now, apparently) by the Saudis. And, of course, it’s still the brainchild of right wing Trump billionaire ally Larry Ellison, who will assuredly receive favorable treatment should the dispute wind up being settled by the Trump DOJ or Trump-corrupted courts.
For his part, Trump is trying to pretend Ellison isn’t a close ally and massive campaign donor, because, one can only presume, he assumes you’re all very stupid:
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that ’60 Minutes’ has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover’ than they have ever treated me before,” Trump wrote. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”
The whole fracas puts Democrats in a bit of a bind. In an ideal world with functioning regulators, you’d advocate for the rejection of all additional media consolidation, because these deals — whether Netflix or Paramount — routinely result in mass layoffs and higher prices for consumers.
But because Congress and U.S. regulators no longer function due to corruption (despite a lot of pretense to the contrary), it’s unlikely that all deals will be blocked. And while Netflix is certainly no saint, keeping consolidated corporate media ownership out of the hands of extremist authoritarian zealots hell bent on dismantling democracy with propaganda is pretty clearly the better option.
Which means that Democrats and organizations keen on actually helping (and keeping U.S. Democracy semi-operational) are probably better off finding common cause with Netflix. There’s dogshit Netflix homogenized consolidation, which is definitely bad, and then there’s authoritarian state television dominated by the planet’s second richest techno-fascist asshole, which is significantly worse
Mountaineers descending into Chola Valley, 5,200 metres (17,100 ft) a. s. l., in good weather conditions, with a panoramic view over snow-capped Himalayan peaks to the south of the Great Himalayan Range in Mahalangur Himal, Nepal, Himalayas. Today is International Mountain Day.
A 2-week-old baby hamster with red eyes. Today is voice actress Haruna Ikezawa's birthday. She voiced Laruna Haruna, the owner of the titular hamster, in the 2000 anime adaption of Hamtaro.
Short-nosed unicornfish (Naso brevirostris), Red Sea, Egypt. This species has a maximum published total length of 60 centimetres (24 in). It occurs in the Indian and western Pacific Oceans. Adults feed mainly on gelatinous zooplankton, while juveniles mainly feed on benthic algae. The switch from grazing to preying on gelatinous zooplankton coincides with the development of the bony protuberance.
The emergence of new technologies that appear to undermine provisions in existing law can present problems for those hoping to protect their content.
In Denmark, the government believes that laws designed to protect against older technologies are now too specific to tackle today’s challenges. Draft proposals submitted earlier this month aim to modernize the law but have already sparked controversy.
The Stated Need For Amendments
The draft proposals submitted by the Ministry of Culture in early December include measures to combat viewing of content on “illegal IPTV services” and the “illegal use of VPN connections.”
Legal standing under existing law doesn’t appear to be in doubt as both are clearly labeled “illegal”. Yet as things stand, both are considered “not suitable for cracking down on” since existing law is tailored towards older broadcasting technologies.
“[T]he rules are primarily aimed at illegal decoders and other decoding equipment. Pirate decoders and pirate cards are out of date, and it is therefore necessary to update the rules so that they can handle today’s piracy activities,” the proposals read.
The proposals go further than a simple update to tackle piracy as it stands today. The goal is to “future-proof” the law to ensure that it is able to deal with a “continuously and rapidly developing technical landscape.”
More specifically, the aim is to ensure that the “prohibition against online piracy becomes technology-neutral and can thereby take technological development into account. It is further clarified that the prohibition against online piracy in accordance with current law applies both for commercial purposes and for private use.”
Proposed Amendments
Among other things, provisions first introduced in 1997 targeted “pirate decoders and pirate decoder cards” which were used to circumvent signal encryption and avoid paying broadcasters for a subscription. Advertising and promoting these devices and similarly capable equipment was also banned.
In 2000, the existing commercial piracy ban was expanded to the private space; possession of a pirate decoder was rendered illegal, to send a “preventative message” to households that may have been considering purchasing one. In today’s environment, banning devices alone is insufficient, so the amendments envision the following:
“[I]t is not permitted to manufacture, import or sell equipment, software or other technical solutions with the purpose of providing unauthorized access to the content of an encrypted radio or television program or the content of any other content service where access is restricted by technical measures or arrangements. It is also prohibited to acquire, possess, install or use equipment, software or other technical solution, for the purpose of obtaining unauthorized access..”
This represents a core change. Rather than focusing on banning the sale and possession of physical devices, there’s a shift towards targeting the circumvention of access restrictions of all kinds, and providing the means to do so.
Focus Shifts From Devices to Circumvention
Most obviously this outlaws illegal access to content only available via legitimate services in exchange for a fee; in this case a fee the user hopes to avoid paying. In isolation that’s hardly a ground-breaking amendment, but the intended scope is substantially broader than that.
The same restrictions also apply when a user accesses content for which they have already paid the appropriate fee, but geo-restrictions dictate that the content is not ordinarily available in the user’s region.
In other words, accessing geo-blocked content will become illegal, regardless of whether the user paid for the content or not. As much is clearly signaled in the proposals, which also reveal that there are no limits on the type of content either.
The concept of ‘other content from any other content service, access to which is restricted by technical measures or arrangements’ should be understood broadly. It is noted that online piracy is no longer limited to radio and television broadcasts. The proposed amendment will mean that all audiovisual content, including films, television series, music, (e-)books, articles, etc., where access may be limited by a requirement for subscription or fee payment, etc., is covered by the protection in Section 91. Television or streaming transmissions of live events, such as sporting events and concerts, will also be covered by the provision.
And the potential legal violations for accessing pirated and/or geo-blocked content – paid for or not – don’t stop there.
Since the proposals also prohibit the acquisition, possession, installation, or use of equipment, software or other technical solutions, buying and using a VPN to access pirated content – or even geo-blocked content the user has paid for – would constitute an offense.
The same also applies to using any technical means to bypass Denmark’s existing site-blocking measures
Minister of Culture “Never Proposed” a VPN Ban
Public discussion over the proposals inevitably led some to conclude that what the government really wants is a “total VPN ban” in Denmark. While that claim is not supported by the current text, it’s sufficiently extreme to provide cover for denial on the details which, depending on the user, may have that type of effect nonetheless.
“The purpose of the bill was, among other things, to combat illegal streaming of football matches. Since then, debate has arisen about whether the government wants a total ban on VPN connections, which is not the case,” the Ministry of Culture wrote in a statement this week.
Minister of Culture Jakob Engel-Schmidt added the following:
“I am not in favor of making VPN illegal, and I have never proposed that. But I must admit that the bill has not been formulated precisely enough, when someone can see so many ghosts in the current wording. Therefore, I am removing the part about VPN in the bill, so that there can no longer be any doubt that I in no way want to ban the use of VPN.”
Removing ‘VPN’ From Future-Proofed Proposals Changes Nothing
Considering the intent underpinning the proposals, and the shortcomings in current legislation that the proposals aim to fix, removing the term ‘VPN’ seems unlikely to have any effect. After all, the enduring strength of the proposed amendments are due to their technology-neutral framing. Indeed, removing references to VPNs means nothing when the proposals state the following:
“The concept of ‘other technical solution’ should be understood broadly. The broad wording is intended to mean that the proposed amendment will cover any technical solution used to provide unauthorized access to media content.”
Posting on X, the Culture Minister described claims of a total VPN ban as “Fake news”.
“I do not advocate for criminalizing VPN and will certainly not propose that. In all honesty, this seems like a deliberate misunderstanding of a fairly modest bill, which solely establishes that it is illegal to stream sports without paying.”
In 2024, a legal battle in Denmark involving LaLiga and Rojadirecta, already concluded that live sports broadcasts are protected copyright works.
Under the proposals, advertising or promoting VPNs to unblock geo-protected content would also be an offense. Not necessarily VPNs either – anything capable of achieving the same result.
Denmark’s Supreme Court confirmed in 2020 that providing information on how to use Popcorn Time was a criminal offense.
After years of preparations, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) will kick off this Sunday at Rabat’s Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Morocco.
In a world where standardized streaming portals have become a commodity, Hayase is a breath of fresh air. 
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The emergence of new technologies that appear to undermine provisions in existing law can present problems for those hoping to protect their content.