News

Thursday 2026-07-23

02:00 AM

The Corrupt, Xenophobic Hysteria Behind The ‘TikTok Ban’ Will Soon Be Mirrored Across U.S. AI Policy [Techdirt]

You might recall how the press and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers suffered a four-year embolism about the purported privacy and national security threat of TikTok, before “fixing” the problem by ultimately offloading TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends. You know, the exact sort of authoritarian-friendly people keen on doing everything critics had previously accused ByteDance and the Chinese of.

The politics, policy, and press coverage of that entire saga were a profound embarrassment. And it’s hard to think of a bigger tech policy own goal by Democrats anytime in the last half century.

Countless news outlets and politicians endlessly overstated the TikTok threat, and downplayed how the “ban” and subsequent sale had nothing to do with protecting national security or consumer privacy, and everything to do with basically stealing a company that U.S. tech couldn’t out-compete, in the process coddling companies like Facebook that can’t innovate their way out of a paper bag.

It was lazy, corrupt protectionism with no shortage of xenophobia, and a variation of that same effort is about to be repeated across AI. Except much bigger, much louder, and much, much dumber.

Worried that cheaper, open source, and on-device Chinese models could disrupt U.S. efforts to dominate, enshittify, and over-charge for walled-garden AI, the Trump administration is already signaling that they’re gearing up to wage war on overseas and open source AI models after they failed to block China’s access to next-generation chipsets:

“The Trump administration is showing signs it could ban cutting-edge Chinese AI models — a momentous move that could lock in dominance by OpenAI and Anthropic.”

Of course it won’t stop there. It will be a hop, skip, and a jump from banning more powerful Chinese AI models to trying to outlaw open source alternatives, models from smaller overseas non-Chinese competitors, on-device models, and anything that might challenge the walled-garden hegemony of U.S. tech giants.

U.S. AI isn’t profitable. It’s nowhere close. It may never be. U.S. tech companies sunk hundred of billions of dollars into costly and ultra-energy intensive AI models that for many companies, like Microsoft, people don’t actually even want to use. Nobody outside of the Musk fashy cult likes Grok. OpenAI is potentially poised to implode. And even more popular companies like Anthropic are contemplating a price war when they already don’t make money.

U.S. tech companies had been busy jacking up the cost of model access to try and claw their way toward profitability (unsuccessfully), resulting in a lot of companies (like Uber) publicly stating they’re paying too much money for too little actual utility. That’s caused many U.S. companies, like DoorDash, to flock to cheaper Chinese models:

“DoorDash, which, according to a post on X on Wednesday by co-founder and CTO Andy Fang, will be launching DoorDash CLI, an experimental tool in limited beta that will allow users to order DoorDash through an AI agent, or even directly from the terminal. Earlier this month, Fang said using a model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI is “better quality” and comes at a “cheaper cost.”

Enter the protectionists, who talk a good game about “free market competition” and forging innovative products in the hot irons of competition, but turn into gargantuan, blubbering crybabies the second Chinese products come into frame (see: TikTok, EVs, 5G, and now AI). This performative gyration always comes with a fake concern for U.S. privacy and national security by people too lazy and corrupt to genuinely protect either (see the ongoing U.S. failure to pass even a baseline internet-era privacy law).

Not only are many Chinese AI models cheaper and improving in quality, they’re often “open-weight,” meaning their parameters or values are entirely visible to the user, which appeals to enterprises that want deeper insights under the hood. As models like China’s Kimi K3 see surging demand, it’s resulting in a rising freak out in the U.S. about what to do about the Chinese threat (sound of thundering timpani drums):

It shouldn’t be too long before the Trump administration, with enthusiastic Democrat support, steps in to try to not only ban higher-power Chinese AI models but also to force Americans to use more expensive U.S. walled garden efforts from our biggest domestic giants.

That’s of course not going to magically stop the rest of the world from adopting cheaper Chinese AI. Or protect U.S. markets from a potential bubble collapse. And it’s not going to magically and suddenly make U.S. AI profitable or well-liked, since many Americans have inextricably tethered their anger at AI to the endless bad decisions by U.S. techno-fascists and domestic enshittification merchants who demand to be shielded from competition and regulatory accountability in equal measure.

You could open the door to international competition, but ensure your well-staffed regulators create a safe and level playing field across privacy, national security, labor, and consumer rights. We don’t want to do that because that might cause domestic U.S. companies to lose money. So instead we’re going to try and ban cheaper overseas alternatives, leveraging a lot of bad faith rhetoric on privacy and NatSec along the way.

That’s then going to be parroted by a lot of lazy news outlets too feckless to explain that Trump policy architects are neither competent nor operating in good faith when it comes to AI.

Things are moving so quickly that it’s hard to parse out exactly what this new era of AI protectionism will look like, but if the TikTok ban was anything to go by, you can be absolutely sure our next steps in domestic U.S. AI policy will be very stupid, filled with a lot of people talking endlessly out of their ass on NatSec and privacy, and tinged with no shortage of gross xenophobia.

01:00 AM

State champs [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Compared to what?

98% of the time, the state champ loses at nationals.

Every billionaire but one isn’t the richest person in the world. Only one of the 300 people who direct a feature film each year will win an Academy Award.

And only one public company has the greatest share price growth.

Competition is often a useful source for fuel. In our scarcity-driven world, looking for external metrics might be a productive way to focus our energy or gather resources.

But it’s also a trap.

A trap that seduces us into accepting someone else’s priorities.

A trap that causes us to forget what got us here and to ignore our good fortune.

And a trap that takes us out of this moment as it pushes us to imagine another one, less likely, in the future.

When we’re captured by the death spiral of scarcity and dominance, we’re signing up for a journey that’s all about the destination, a destination we’re quite unlikely to reach.

Consider what made this worth doing in the first place. Why isn’t that enough?

12:00 AM

Pluralistic: Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (22 Jul 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Trump's America can't even win a rigged game: America has created a post-American world.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: "Fagin"; Scott McCloud on comics' future; Laurie Penny on Milo Yiannopoulos; Singaporean regulator rap; Conservatives as bitter rubes.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (permalink)

Here's a sentence that stopped me in my tracks last week: "The statement that 'the cemeteries are full of indispensable people' is just as true of nations, and in particular the US":

https://crookedtimber.org/2026/07/16/55382/

The writer is John Quiggin, writing about the fact that, under Trump, the world has raced through a series of seismic shifts in how it organizes itself, rushing to fill an America-shaped void in its dealings.

This is a subject that's very much on my mind. As November Kelly says, Trump inherited a poker game rigged in his favor and then flipped the table over because he resented having to pretend to play at all. The "international rules-based order" that gave America oversight and control over the world's militaries, finances, trade, and communications was always a better deal for America than it was for the rest of the world.

The long persistence of this system doesn't mean that other countries liked it. The reason the American century endured for as long as it did was that the toll that America extracted from the world was always lower than the cost of making a new system. Just as people stay on Facebook because they love their friends more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, the nations of the world let America control their systems because they feared the cost and difficulty of building a new system more than they resented letting America dictate and tax every part of their politics and economies.

That's where Trump comes in. The price of doing business with Trump is, effectively, infinity. If you buck Trump, he doubles down and demands twice as much. If you capitulate to Trump, he interprets it as weakness and comes back for three times as much. There are no deals to be made with Trump, only temporary measures that last until his next Fox and Friends binge or chance encounter with a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Take Canada: in 2018, Trump tore up NAFTA – the deal that Bush Sr and Clinton crammed down Mexico and Canada's throats – and replaced it with USMCA, a trade treaty that was even more advantageous to America. Then, within months of his 2024 election, Trump tore up USMCA and replaced it with a chaotic series of tariffs that swung around wildly from 25% to 100% to (as of this week) 50%:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-imposes-additional-tariffs-on-canada/

Trump has no coherent reason for this new tariff. Canada has bent over backwards to give Trump everything he wants and more. Despite some high-minded words at Davos about the need for "middle powers" to decouple from the USA, PM Mark Carney has given Trump everything he could ask for. Carney allowed Palantir – a company that makes no bones about being an agent of Trump's will – inside the most sensitive parts of the Canadian military. Carney dropped his plan to charge US tech companies a 3% tax. Carney is firing tens of thousands of civil servants and replacing them with chatbots, the majority of which will be operated by US companies, running on US servers.

Sure, Canada's imposed some retaliatory tariffs on US products, but that's just a way of making everything Canadians buy more expensive, which is a weird way of punishing America. It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can in the hopes that the downstairs neighbour says "ouch." Meanwhile, Carney has consistently ignored US interference in Canadian politics, including the tsunami of dark money pouring into the Alberta separatist movement – a bid by Trump to literally steal an entire province.

Give Trump everything he asks for and he'll demand more. Deny Trump anything and he'll demand more. Sign a contract with Trump and he'll break it. Send Trump an invoice and he'll stiff you. For Trump, "the art of the deal" can be summed up in one word: renege.

This is why – as David Dayen writes – there will likely be no peace deal in Iran for so long as Trump is in office. Why would the Iranians sign any deal with Trump when they know Trump will break it?

https://prospect.org/2026/07/10/aftermath-wars-on/

Last Christmas, I gave a speech in Hamburg about "the post-American internet" that the rest of the world has the chance to build now that Trump has zeroed-out all the value it used to get from playing by America's tech policy rules, even as Trump has weaponized US tech companies to attack world officials who buck his agenda:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

After that speech, I wrote a book (The Post-American Internet) that Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in August 2027. In the book, I describe the role that "trusted third parties" (T3P) play in complex transactions. Think of an escrow agent who holds onto the deed for the house you're buying from the seller until you hand over the money, and then forwards the deed to you and the money to the seller.

The more complex a transaction is, the more it needs a T3P. For most of the past century, the US has been the world's T3P. Most of the world's transoceanic fiber optic lines make landfall in the US and interconnect to one another in US data centres. Most of the world's international transactions are conducted in dollars and are cleared through US-controlled platforms like SWIFT. Through its aid programs, the US sets the health and public services agenda for billions of non-Americans, and the US has military installations in more than 100 countries. The US trains the world's militaries, it supplies (and withholds) information from the world's intelligence agencies, and it runs the IT infrastructure powering the world's government agencies and critical infrastructure, from tractors to medical equipment.

Right from the start, the US was never an entirely trustworthy "trusted third party." There were plenty of moments where the US abused its control over its "neutral" platforms to serve the American national interest at the expense of the countries that relied on those platforms.

But those violations were either covert or carried out under some kind of legal rubric ("the rules-based international order"). You'd probably continue to trust an escrow agent that obeyed court orders to hold onto the money after handing over the deed. That trust might persist even if the escrow agent withheld the money on the say-so of a DA or sheriff, even without a court order. You might even continue to trust the escrow agent if they sometimes said, "I'm going to hang onto this money for 72 hours because I think there might be something weird in this deal."

Same goes for the escrow agent who has a secret side-hustle with the local land-registry office and realtors that lets them skim a few points off every deal and scoop up the best properties through a shell company. Provided you never find out about this, you'll happily hire that escrow agent to handle your property deal.

Trump is the escrow agent who keeps the money and the deed, then announces he did it because the seller was a fentanyl dealer and the buyer was a lizard-person; and then publishes a long screed on Truth Social calling everyone who criticises him a terrorist, promising to do it again next time.

Even if you need to sell your house, and even if Trump is the only escrow agent you can find, you're just not going to trust him with your deed or the money. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."

Back to Quiggin: the US was the world's indispensable nation, and the cemeteries of history are full of indispensable nations. As Quiggin writes, Europe and Ukraine have largely given up on US military protection from Russia and are building their own capacity, already surpassing the US in drone and artillery capabilities. The US can no longer credibly provide missiles and anti-missile defenses, not after Trump used up America's stockpiles in his pointless, endless war in Iran.

Quiggin notes that the consensus case against the EU as a military power held that Europe "lacks the capacity to project power globally" and that it is "too disunited to act effectively." Per Quiggin, these only matter if you believe that the post-American military order will look and act like the American system that Trump just trashed. Trump has a chud "Secretary of War" who kidnaps foreign leaders and can't reliably get oil through the Strait of Hormuz – if that's the dividend from "unity" and "projecting power," you can keep it.

On finance, Quiggin notes that the EU is racing to break its reliance on SWIFT, Visa and Mastercard, and the more Trump weaponizes these against institutions like the International Criminal Court, the faster this transition will go.

America's load-bearing private institutions – like the Big Four accounting firms and the bond rating agencies – have self-immolated, thanks to decades of lax regulation by successive US administrations through scandal after scandal. Quiggin points out that there's no reason to replace these giant, structurally important (but terrifyingly unreliable) cartels with trustworthy versions. It's cheaper and more robust to rebuild our economy so that it no longer serves the finance system, returning finance to "its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy."

On manufacturing, Quiggin points to the twin facts of Trump's chaotic tariffs and China's "economic nationalism," which have put the EU in the centre of a new trade order. Here, too, we're getting something new, not a Made-in-Europe version of "the failed globalist dream of the WTO" nor "Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying":

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/opinion/america-trump-nato-europe-world.html

As I said, Quiggin's article has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it last week, but there's one area where I think Quiggin's got it wrong: the relative difficulty of building a post-American internet.

First, because Quiggin says that the real challenge is building a post-American AI. Sovereign AI is, frankly, nonsense. If Trump turns off all of your country's chatbots, nothing changes. If Trump orders Microsoft to shut off your country's access to Office 365 (as he did to the International Criminal Court and a Brazilian judge who pissed him off), your country would simply cease to function:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/18/their-trillions-our-billions/#eyes-on-the-prize

And if Trump orders John Deere to brick all the tractors in your country, you're gonna starve to death:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

In the face of these real, non-speculative, immediate, grave threats, focusing on AI – the money-losingest technology in human history, which has consistently underperformed relative to its boosters' promises – is just misguided. If you really want an "AI strategy" for your country, it should be this: wait for the bubble to burst, then buy hardware and talent at fire-sale prices in the wave of ensuing bankruptcies, and use them to extract more performance from free, open source models.

The real digital challenge is building apps and data centres to run everyday administrative, telecoms and e-commerce software on, and then moving your country's, ministries', companies' and households' data over to the new platforms. The hardware and software are challenging, but ultimately straightforward. Raising capital for data centres is just a matter of convincing people to invest in being a kind of landlord, which is among the easier sells to make (and there's plenty of investors who are looking for real alternatives to getting sucked into the AI bubble).

Getting the apps is hard, but there's an army of technologists who are ready for more, after decades of doing fake startups for a Big Tech company to "acqui-hire" and/or toiling to improve ad click-throughs. These people yearn to follow Steve Jobs's injunction to "make a dent in the universe" and they are being chased out of Silicon Valley by ICE chuds who want to send them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.

There's plenty of talent and capital for the taking.

The real hard part isn't writing or running the code – it's extracting the data, replacing the firmware, and bridging new systems – like post-American social media platforms – into the existing ones. This part is hard because every country in the world has agreed to a trade deal with America wherein they agreed to make it illegal to reverse-engineer US tech exports, in exchange for tariff-free access to US markets. Trump has made the case for abandoning these deals better than I ever could have:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

Hey look at this (permalink)

Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose
The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired https://pydantic.dev/articles/the-human-in-the-loop-is-tired
HP fined 1.4 billion rupees for “cartelization” of ink cartridges, toner, PCs https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/hp-fined-1-4-billion-rupees-for-cartelization-of-ink-cartridges-toner-pcs/
The Healthcare Industry Is Coming for Your Face https://www.karenschoellkopf.com/writing/biometric-data-healthcare.html
My Ebike Delivery Went Missing. When I Tried to Recover It, I Ended Up in Chatbot Hell https://www.wired.com/story/ebike-delivery-missing-when-i-tried-to-recover-it-i-ended-up-in-chatbot-hell/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Fagin: Will Eisner’s retelling of Oliver Twist https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/22/fagin-will-eisners-retelling-of-oliver-twist/

#20yrsago 95 Theses of Geek Activism: how to defend freedom with tech https://scienceaddiction.com/2006/07/23/95-theses-of-geek-activism/

#20yrsago Plane made of printed parts flies https://web.archive.org/web/20060823102012/http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn9602&feedId=online-news_rss20

#20yrsago Scott McCloud on the future of comics https://web.archive.org/web/20060822133933/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/1,71434-0.html

#10yrsago Middle aged Singaporean media regulators rap about the national public-private content strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksw2UqTyhhc

#10yrsago Laurie Penny on hanging out with Milo Yiannopoulos and the gay trolls of the RNC https://medium.com/welcome-to-the-scream-room/im-with-the-banned-8d1b6e0b2932#.ftai0i9ra

#1yrago Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA
Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc
How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919
AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ
Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Wednesday 2026-07-22

05:00 PM

DNS Bypass Tweets Keep Uptobox Employee’s €197K Frozen in Disney Piracy Case [TorrentFreak]

At the height of the cyberlocker boom in the early 2010s, Uptobox was already an established name.

The platform remained online despite a fierce anti-piracy crackdown that led to the demise of Megaupload, Hotfile, and many other file-hosting services.

Uptobox eventually met its fate in September 2023, when a coalition of entertainment companies including Disney, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros. obtained a court order to seize its servers at various data centers.

Uptobox Crackdown

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment claimed responsibility for the operation, which was carried out simultaneously in France and the UAE. While Uptobox put up a fight in court, hoping for a comeback, the courts disagreed and kept it offline.

Behind the scenes, Disney was pursuing a parallel case against a French national residing in the UAE. Local news site L’Informé previously identified the defendant by his X.com pseudonym “Starouille”, who previously described himself as the CTO of Uptobox.

In October 2023, Disney obtained an order from a Paris enforcement judge, authorizing seizures of up to €16.127 million against his personal bank accounts. In the legal paperwork, Disney described the defendant as one of the “founders, operators, and de facto co-directors” of Uptobox.

When the seizure was executed at the BNP Paribas bank, it froze approximately €197,000. Two additional seizures followed under separate orders. These seized assets are not damages awards, but they are kept as a security while the case is fought on its merits.

Not a Director

Starouille, who is identified in the legal paperwork as ‘M. [U]’, did not agree with the way Disney described him. His lawyer Me Damien Faupin argued that he was a technical contractor who managed server infrastructure, not a co-director. The CTO title on social media did not reflect reality, the lawyer clarified.

In January 2025, the enforcement judge agreed that Disney could not prove the defendant’s director role, ordering the seized funds released. However, Disney objected and requested a stay of execution while they appealed. This decision eventually came this month.

After considering all evidence, the Court of Appeal upheld the finding that Disney failed to prove Starouille was a de facto director. The evidence showed he began as a freelancer in 2012, but there’s no evidence that he actually had a managerial function.

“The fact that [the defendant] presented himself on social media, notably on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, as ‘Chief Technical Officer’ (CTO) of Uptobox does not in itself constitute, even assuming this title to be accurate, a sufficient element to establish that, beyond operations of installation, maintenance, and upgrading of servers, he was more generally engaged in management or technical development of the service,” the court said (all quotes are translated).

The Court of Appeal noted that there was insufficient evidence to prove the defendant was engaged in the general management of the service. Instead, his role was strictly limited to operations, maintenance, and server upgrades. This was corroborated by evidence seized at hosting provider Opcore, which listed him as “interlocuteur technique N1” (Technical Liaison Level 1).

While the court concluded that Disney failed to prove that the defendant had a director role, it ultimately ruled that the funds should remain frozen for another reason.

DNS Tweets Keep Funds Frozen

The court order notes that the defendant was not ignorant of the alleged piracy-facilitating activities of Uptobox. In fact, his own social media posts showed that he was aware of site blocking efforts and shared information on how these could be bypassed.

For example, in one of the X/Twitter posts that are no longer public, Starouille wrote (translated): “for those who can no longer access Uptobox/Uptostream, change your DNS on all your devices (procedure here: uptobox.info/dns). You can also use uptobox.link.”

When a user asked whether this was about “yet another court order,” Starouille replied: “yes, where Uptobox is not condemned, just 4 ISPs. As usual…” He later posted specific instructions for changing DNS settings in a Freebox router’s download manager.

According to the Court of Appeal, these posts show that the defendant was aware of the blocking orders, as well as the copyright-related reasons for these blocking measures. His defense that the DNS instructions were meant to help rightsholders contact the service was dismissed.

“[The defendant] cannot validly maintain that his message, far from enabling the circumvention of an institutional block, was solely intended to allow users, rightsholders such as the appellant, or any other natural or legal person to be able to contact the company or the service, in particular to report a copyright infringement problem.”

This was not the first time Starouille’s social media activity was used against him in court. As L’Informé previously reported, a since-deleted tweet showing a car entering a parking lot tagged “@online DC2” helped entertainment companies locate Uptobox servers at Scaleway’s second data center in Vitry-sur-Seine, facilitating the September 2023 raid.

Importantly, this is not a finding on the merits. Starouille is not held liable, the court merely concluded that Disney’s claims are plausible enough to keep the funds frozen for now.

From €16 Million to €306,000

The defendant also booked a win, at least on paper. Disney previously calculated its claim using the lost Disney+ subscription revenue over 2020-2023, applying its 15% streaming market share to Uptobox’s estimated one million monthly unique visitors.

The Court of Appeal adjusted this number downward, citing a study which concluded that roughly 80% of pirates already subscribe to legal streaming services. This means that these would not necessarily result in lost revenue.

Additionally, the court found that Starouille’s alleged wrongful conduct was limited to his July-August 2023 social media posts, which further limits the claim.

Ultimately, this shorter ‘liability’ window and the reduced lost subscriptions, slashed the authorized asset freeze of more than €16 million to €306,000. However, since this is still more than the €197,000 that’s frozen at BNP Paribas, nothing is returned yet.

For now, Starouille’s savings remain frozen and the merits case is pending. No piracy damages have been awarded yet, but the ruling shows that publicly instructing users to circumvent court orders can be used to justify piracy-related asset seizures.

—

A copy of the Paris Court of Appeal ruling is available here (pdf).

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

03:00 PM

You Don’t Need $200 Million To Make A Blockbuster Film Any More [Techdirt]

Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These are people who love an artist’s work and are happy to support it directly. This allows those works to be made available for no cost, since they have already been funded by fans. That, in turn, means creations can be shared – no need for punitive copyright infringement laws here – thus spreading the word about the artist, and bringing in new true fans and additional financial support.

This system is already working well for books, music and graphical art. But a common criticism of the approach is that it could never work for films, which therefore require copyright protection for them to be made. In support of that claim, people often point to the extremely large budgets of many films, often running to hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, the argument goes, such sums could never be amassed through the donations of true fans.

One issue with that argument is the widespread practice of “Hollywood accounting”, which Wikipedia explains as:

the opaque or “creative” set of accounting methods used by the film, video, television and music industry to budget and record profits for creative projects. Expenditures can be inflated to reduce or eliminate the reported profit of the project, thereby reducing the amount which the corporation must pay in taxes and royalties or other profit-sharing agreements, as these are based on net profit.

In other words, those huge budgets may not reflect the real costs of making a film, but are often a scheme for depriving people such as actors and others of their promised share of the profits by minimizing or even eliminating the latter. Moreover, a recent development certainly suggests that successful films do not requires such inflated budgets, discussed here on the BBC site :

Which film would you expect to be a summer hit – a family-friendly action-adventure which is based on tried-and-tested IP (intellectual property)? Or a creepy low-budget horror film dreamt up by a first-time director? Until very recently, most of us would have put our money on the first option.

But this summer, it’s looking as if low-budget horror will be triumphant, with two indie films, Backrooms and Obsession, vanquishing two megabudget extravaganzas, Masters of the Universe and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu.

The figures speak for themselves:

The difference between the appeal of tired IP and original movies is illustrated by this weekend’s US box office figures. Masters of the Universe, which derives from a 1980s Mattel toy range and cartoon about a loincloth-sporting, perma-tanned warrior prince, is a new release which made just $29m (£21.7m). The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in May, is faring poorly for a Star Wars film: this weekend it made $10m (£7.5m).

By contrast, Backrooms “took $81m (£61m) in the US on its opening weekend. It’s total in the US is now $135m (£101m).” Obsession did even better:

Not only did it have a healthy opening weekend, but it’s also the first film since ET the Extra Terrestrial in 1982 to have its takings go up rather than down in its second and third weekends in cinemas. Its total take is now $152m (£114m) in the US and $225m (£169m) globally.

Those figures are impressive, but what is really noteworthy is the gulf between the respective production costs of the two classes of film. According to the BBC article:

The budget of The Mandalorian and Grogu is reported to be $165m (£124m), and the budget of Masters of the Universe is reported to be $200m (£150m). Take into account the marketing costs, and those films have to make between $300m and $400m (or £225m and £300m) just to break even.

…

The budget for Backrooms, on the other hand: $10m (£7.5m). And Obsession? $1m (£750,000), tops. Suddenly, spending a fortune to make a fortune no longer seems like a winning formula.

The latter sum in particular is easily something that true fans’ funding could amass.

The dynamics behind the growing success of low-budget films – something the BBC article calls “a Hollywood earthquake” – are precisely the ones discussed in the closing chapter of Walled Culture the book. An article on the Guardian Web site puts it this way:

“Going to the movies has become a way to connect with friends and share the moviegoing experience in person. Somewhere you can turn your phone off for a few hours and just disconnect from the world,” says 22-year-old film TikToker Florence Rose.

It is about the sense of community, which lies at the heart of the true fans idea, one that extends beyond the cinema experience:

Apps such as Letterboxd – essentially the Goodreads of cinema – allow users to distil their reactions into sharp, ironic one-liners and scroll through the takes of other viewers. “Gen Z are yearning for community, and through apps like Letterboxd, which continues to see an increase in popularity, people can find that community of like-minded individuals and share their thoughts and feelings about films,” says Rose.

The rise of Letterboxd is indicative of the hunger for precisely this kind of community-based experience:

The platform, whose core audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, has grown from 1.7 million users in 2020 to 26 million in 2026, adding more than nine million since January 2025 alone. “When a movie is released in the cinema, online conversations are sparked, which drives more people to the cinema so they can feel like they can join in and be a part of those conversations,” Rose adds.

This move from the Hollywood-style blockbusters to low-budget films made by new directors – often emerging from the world of YouTube – and new production houses is great news for audiences eager for new experiences and a sense of community. It not only brings fresh talent to the art form, it also opens up the possibility of fan-funded films that manage the difficult trick of being thoughtful and popular.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

01:00 PM

Pattern of Failure [The Status Kuo]

Headlines about the war in Iran piled up last night, making it difficult to fully digest what was happening, other than a general sense that the war isn’t going well. Two American soldiers are dead in Jordan, with a third killed in Iraq. Oil is spiking toward $90 a barrel again. The Houthis are threatening a new blockade. Even Fox anchors sounded confused about how Iran’s military, which Trump insists has been obliterated, is still killing American soldiers.

Taken individually, each story reads as a separate piece of bad news. Zooming out, they form a pattern of failure this White House has now repeated three times since February: an operational setback on the ground, followed by a credibility gap between what officials claim and what the public can see for itself, then a further erosion of political support for the White House and its war.

Subscribe now

Operational failures pile up

At least 17 U.S. service members have been killed since fighting began Feb. 28, per Reuters. Two of those deaths were confirmed Monday: the soldiers killed at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base were 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas.

A third serviceman, Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, died separately in northern Iraq on July 18 during the controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance from a downed Iranian drone, and a fourth service member was wounded in the same incident.

The deaths are the most visible cost, but they’re not the only one straining the war effort. A Pentagon official told the Washington Post that U.S. forces lack sufficient THAAD interceptors to safely sustain the air campaign against Iran, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates Patriot, THAAD and Tomahawk stockpiles could take three years or more to rebuild at current production rates. Congress now has an $87.6 billion supplemental request in front of it. That’s more than triple Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own $29 billion estimate of the war’s cost just a month earlier.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the war is spreading, including to a front the White House doesn’t control directly. Yemen’s Houthis declared a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia this week, threatening to close off a Red Sea shipping route Saudi Arabia has relied on since the Strait of Hormuz shut down. The Houthis are more than a Yemeni faction; they’re one of Iran’s most reliable proxies. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has armed, trained and advised the group for over a decade. Iran has funneled drones, anti-ship missiles and precision-strike ballistic missiles through them, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The embargo announcement essentially means Tehran has opened a second maritime front by proxy, without itself striking a single tanker in Hormuz.

The world’s eyes had been on Hormuz, but now they may be on a single pipeline far west of it. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively shut for months, Saudi Arabia has been routing crude overland through the East-West Pipeline, built in the 1980s for precisely this scenario. It runs to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, moving several million barrels a day that would otherwise have to transit Hormuz. That workaround has kept a full-blown global supply shock at bay. A Houthi blockade at the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the Red Sea chokepoint that oil has to pass through to reach Asian and European buyers, would cut off that relief valve entirely.

Iran also struck U.S.-aligned Kurdish forces in Erbil, Iraq, the same week, with Iraqi air defenses shooting down the drones involved. Jordan stated that it also shot down 10 Iranian missiles on Saturday.

The credibility gap widens

If the operational picture is straining, the story the White House tells about it is fracturing on multiple fronts, including over injuries to American service members that the Pentagon never publicly disclosed.

According to the New York Times, in the week before Friday’s attack that killed two soldiers, Iran carried out three additional strikes against U.S. forces in Jordan that injured dozens of service members and damaged several helicopters. That made three strikes by Iran that the Pentagon never disclosed to the public. They came to light only after U.S. officials described them to the Times on condition of anonymity.

U.S. Central Command’s own public statements about retaliatory airstrikes never mentioned the earlier hits on Jordan. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has pushed back on the idea that this amounts to concealment, calling such claims “fabrications meant to further distress the American people,” and noting the Pentagon’s casualty database is updated regularly. But that database only shows aggregate figures. It doesn’t break out the mass-casualty incidents in Jordan the Times identified, and the number of casualties since July 7 has climbed to nearly 100, according to Parnell’s own account.

Four Iranian strikes on U.S. forces in a single week, three of them kept quiet, are hard to square with the idea that Iran has been militarily neutralized, as Trump often claims. Even Fox hosts had trouble squaring that claim with the reality this weekend. Maria Bartiromo pressed former Trump national security adviser Victoria Coates on air about the contradiction, and Coates acknowledged Iran’s capabilities are “lessened, but not zero.”

Trump’s own words aren’t helping. Asked about the weekend’s deaths, he said the country “feels very badly” about the soldiers killed, then, in nearly the same breath, described Iran as having lost almost everything militarily, with very little left to fight with.

Oil traders don’t appear to believe the “almost nothing left” version either. Brent crude jumped nearly 4% overnight and briefly crossed $90 a barrel after confirmation that at least three U.S. service members had died in the latest fighting, before easing back to $88.87.

Americans, of course, don’t need a White House briefing to notice gas prices. They can watch the numbers rise at the pump in real time. And it’s not hard to see the cause.

Three times since February, Trump has announced that the fighting was ending. Three times, it started back up. The first came March 26, when he paused strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure for what he called a good-faith gesture toward talks. But the pause barely held through the weekend before the Houthis opened a new front by launching missiles at Israel.

The second came April 7-8, with a Pakistan-brokered two-week truce that Trump extended on April 21. The lull lasted longer, but the ceasefire broke down as talks in Islamabad collapsed and Washington answered with a naval blockade of Iranian ports.

The third came June 17. The parties even ceremoniously signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding that lifted the blockade, reopened the Strait of Hormuz and opened a 60-day window for a permanent deal. The agreement survived just eight days before an Iranian drone struck a ship in the Strait on June 25, and it collapsed for good on July 7 when an Iranian vessel struck three commercial ships transiting Hormuz.

The political damage worsens

That gap between claim and reality is costing the White House political support, not just credibility. A Republican-controlled Congress has voted twice to rein in a Republican president on his ill-rated war, and collapsing poll numbers are bleeding into the midterm map.

Congress has noticed the pattern, and it’s not just the Democrats. The House passed a war powers resolution June 3 by a vote of 215-208, with four Republicans crossing over to join Democrats. Three weeks later, the Senate passed its own version 50-48, with Sens. Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Rand Paul breaking from their party. It was the first time such a resolution had advanced in the Senate after seven earlier attempts failed.

The White House moved fast to contain the damage: Trump berated Senate Republicans at a closed-door lunch the next day and, according to multiple sources, called Cassidy a “lunatic,” while Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff were dispatched to personally brief the senator that afternoon. By that night, Cassidy and Paul had flipped their votes on a separate, nearly identical resolution, sinking it 47-50-1.

Both outcomes are nonbinding, and operations continued regardless. But a White House that has to deploy its vice president and a special envoy to talk two senators out of a symbolic vote is spending real political capital just to avoid a second rebuke from its own party.

Polling shows why Republican confidence is cracking. An Economist/YouGov poll this month put Trump’s approval at 37%, with 57% of Americans saying the war was the wrong decision. That’s up from 51% in April. Only 18% of Americans believe the U.S. achieved its goals in the conflict, according to a separate Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, and Democrats now lead the generic congressional ballot by seven points among registered voters, 50% to 43%.

Less than four months from a critical midterm election, a war that was supposed to demonstrate U.S. strength is instead the issue voters cite most often when they say they want change.

The pattern of failure is now the story. More deaths and injuries, depleted weapons stockpiles, tens of billions already spent with huge costs still looming, and an expanding front that no one seems able to contain all feed a widening credibility gap between what the White House says and what Americans can see for themselves. Anger over a disastrous war of choice is showing up in congressional votes and polling, and it could easily carry over to the ballot box in November.

09:00 AM

Victory! Flock Ends Rollout Of Audio “Distress Detection” Of Human Voices [Techdirt]

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.”

In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection). This feature purported to use high-powered microphones scattered throughout a city to search for sounds of human distress, with original advertisements from the product indicating it would search for “screaming.” (Since the publication of our original blog post, Flock quietly amended the ad on this webpage to say “distress” instead of “screaming.”)

Now, Flock has published a blog post stating that “[a]fter careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.” Good riddance.

We said it when the product was announced and we’ll say it again: this was a misguided and dangerous feature because of the civil liberties concerns it poses, the possibility it could summon armed police to every loud interaction happening on the street, and because in several places this type of spying would be illegal under state eavesdropping laws.

We were not quiet about this potential new feature. Flock even mentioned our concern about Distress Detection in an attempt to rebut our opposition to the mass surveillance their products enable.

The suspension of Distress Detection, however, does not mean that these high-powered microphones are now magically safe or beyond our concern. Acoustic gunshot detection is still a dangerous and often highly inaccurate technology that has resulted in real world harm, as in Chicago where it resulted in police shooting at children lighting fireworks. As Flock itself states, “No acoustic system is perfect, and we don’t claim otherwise.” But police response to a situation where they believe guns are actively in use seems like a pretty high-stakes situation to be making, selling, and deploying technology known to be imperfect. Flock’s devices also listen for more than just gunshots. Their marketing materials admit to be listening for “community disruption,” which includes “non-violent” threats like car sideshows and fireworks.

Flock’s failed attempt to roll out Distress Detection teaches us a few important lessons about the current state of police surveillance. First, we should not assume that just because these companies are large and well-funded, that does not ensure that they are complying with local privacy laws before floating new products to customers. Second, companies roll out and police adopt invasive technology under the justification that it will be used to address our society’s very worst crimes. However, both the companies and police will leverage deployed surveillance infrastructure to introduce new uses without necessarily seeking the consent or approval of the public. Gunshot detecting microphones eventually being used to listen for screaming is exactly the type of mission creep that we’ve seen happen with other pieces of surveillance technology, including Flock’s license plate readers. Finally, gun violence is too serious and complex of an issue to purport to solve with one flawed piece of technology. It has become too easy for police and cities to listen to the fancy marketing pitches of tech companies claiming they’re going to solve all crime instead of doing the hard work of addressing the root causes of societal issues. And, in the meantime, that technology creates more problems and hazards for the communities they blanket in police surveillance.

As we’ve also seen with people across the country pushing back on Flock license plate reader contracts in their communities, public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products. Flock’s decision to end “Distress Detection” for human voices is a win.

Originally posted to EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

xAI, Which Is Being Sued Over Grok’s CSAM Problem, Sues a User Over Grok’s CSAM Problem [Techdirt]

You may recall that at the end of last year and very beginning of this year there was a big story over Elon Musk’s LLM tool Grok being willing to produce non-consensual images of people (including children) in bikinis or otherwise stripped down in objectifying ways. Elon played into and promoted this “trend” at one point by asking Grok to modify an image someone had already asked Grok for putting a bikini on the famous Ben Affleck smoking meme, asking it to replace Affleck’s head with Musk’s own. Grok complied and while the resulting image has since been removed, Musk responded “perfect.”

While some will argue this is more acceptable, as it was Musk doing it to himself, it still generated a ton of extra attention to the idea that Grok would gladly, publicly, undress just about anyone and put them in a bikini. To Musk, apparently, it all seemed like good fun.

As more and more of the media pointed out that this was being done to children, in some cases potentially creating illegal child sexual abuse material, Musk eventually came out with a statement claiming that anyone using Grok that way will “suffer consequences.”

In the interim, a number of people have been arrested for using Grok to produce CSAM, in some cases based on X’s reports to NCMEC. Of course, the company is also being sued by a bunch of people, claiming that it should be liable for the non-consensual imagery that it created. Some of the details of the lawsuit linked above are particularly horrifying:

Jane Doe 4, a female from Wyoming, said her stepfather uploaded a photo of her when she was 11 and lying on a couch to his phone. Using Grok, the stepfather created more than 7,000 CSAM-related images of her. He also shared and traded the images with others on social media platforms.

The lawsuit alleges that the stepfather opted for Grok “because the platform was less restrictive than other AI models and responded to his prompts to generate sexually explicit material using an image depicting a prepubescent minor.”

It also claims that in February, xAI did generate a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children regarding the images, but the company only submitted the original, authentic image as evidence. According to the suit, xAI did not respond when law enforcement requested the thousands of Grok-generated images based on the photo and IP address information that would have quickly helped identify her stepfather as the perpetrator.

Perhaps recognizing that this story is getting worse, xAI (the parent company of X since it acquired the social network in yet another deal of Elon “selling” one of his companies to another of his companies) has now directly sued one of its own users, Terry Harwood, for creating CSAM with Grok, arguing that the indemnification clause in the terms of service means that the court should order Harwood to pay for xAI facing lawsuits from Harwood’s victims.

The lawsuit, filed in Musk’s favorite federal court — the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas — was immediately assigned to Musk’s favorite judge, Reed O’Connor. It sure seems like the company is trying to get out ahead of this story before it gets even worse — by suing one of its own users for doing, in a horrific and illegal way, exactly the kind of thing Musk himself had promoted.

The filing, of course, tries to play up the claim that X is a good actor in this space, taking its responsibility seriously:

There are bad people in the world and not all users have good intentions, so Plaintiff draws a bright line on permissible usage: the tool may be open and truth-seeking but is not a safe harbor for illegal, harmful, or abusive conduct. Plaintiff takes violations of this rule extremely seriously. It enforces its rules against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (“NCMEC”). Indeed, Plaintiff has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests.

In addition and when necessary, Plaintiff will pursue civil accountability against bad actors who abuse its tool to harm others.

Plaintiff strictly prohibits any use of Grok in connection with illegal, harmful, or abusive activities. These prohibitions are set forth in plain language in the xAI Terms of Service and the xAI Acceptable Use Policy. Among the expressly forbidden activities are:

“Using [Grok] in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates a person’s privacy or their right to publicity”;

“Undressing or nudifying real persons, or otherwise altering a real person’s image or likeness to depict them in an intimate or sexual context”;

“Depicting likenesses of persons in a pornographic manner”; and

“Sexualizing or exploiting children.”

Which all sounds well and good if you simply ignore the whole “yeah, but your CEO kinda laughed about and promoted this use of the tool” part.

Also, it’s quite a move to sue a user for using a tool that you offer in a manner that you enabled the tool to work. I’ve long argued that users themselves are the ones who should be liable for any violative actions they make rather than the platform but I don’t recall ever seeing a platform actually sue one of its own users for using their own tools. It really feels like them looking at all the lawsuits coming their direction for Grok’s usage and… pulling the whole “we’re all looking for the guy who did this” hotdog costume meme in the form of a lawsuit.

I have no idea if it’ll work, but suing your own users for the very thing that other people are suing you over is quite a statement. Yes, in this case it involves potentially criminal behavior (the guy was arrested after all), but are Musk and X suggesting that if you violate any part of their terms of service, Musk can take you to court in front of his favorite judge? Because it sure seems to suggest that. Much of the argument is based on laying out X’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy and detailing why this guy violated them. This kind of argument does not at all appear to be limited to law-breaking activity:

Defendant breached the xAI Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy by leveraging Grok to generate non-consensual sexually explicit images and CSAM.

Among Defendant’s various other breaches described herein:

a) Defendant manipulated Grok to create sexually explicit images of others without their consent, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, using Grok to aid in violating a person’s privacy or their right to publicity.

b) Defendant manipulated Grok to create CSAM, in contravention of the xAI Terms of Service, which prohibit, among other conduct, the sexualization or exploitation of children.

Plaintiff has been damaged by Defendant’s breaches of the xAI Terms of Service.

The lawsuit leans heavily on the indemnification clause in their terms of service to argue that they want the court to order Harwood to cover any legal expenses that might stem from potential lawsuits from the people Harwood victimized with his CSAM.

The xAI Terms of Service contain a clear and conspicuous indemnification provision that states: “You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless xAI, its affiliates, officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any and all claims, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees and court costs) arising out of or in any way related to (a) your access to or use of the Services, (b) your User Content or Outputs, (c) your violation of these Terms or any applicable law or regulation, or (d) any third-party claim resulting therefrom, including but not limited to claims of privacy violation, right-of-publicity infringement, or harm caused by content you generate or distribute using the Services.”

Defendant’s conduct directly triggered this indemnity obligation. As detailed above, Defendant knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM and NCII.

There is no indication as far as I can tell that Harwood’s victim(s) have taken legal action against xAI at this point, so it’s a little unclear what they’re hoping to get out of the indemnification here other than to present themselves as taking a (somewhat late) stance against this kind of illegal usage of a tool that they failed to properly lock down while wink-winking at how they expected people to use the tool.

Harwood, assuming the allegations and criminal charges hold up, did something genuinely monstrous, and his victims deserve real justice. But it does feel very wrong that the same company whose CEO demonstrated this use of Grok on himself for laughs, and whose product made this kind of abuse trivially easy to produce at scale, is now standing in front of Musk’s favorite judge asking to make one user personally responsible for some of the fallout — while the “we built and promoted the machine” part stays out of the complaint entirely.

And, honestly, given how much Musk has promoted X as “the anything app” where you can do and say anything, it does seem notable that he’s now suing a user for… doing exactly that.

Kanji of the Day: 町 [Kanji of the Day]

町

✍7

小1

town, village, block, street

チョウ

まち

小町 (こまち) — belle
町長 (ちょうちょう) — town mayor
市町村 (しちょうそん) — cities, towns and villages
町村 (ちょうそん) — towns and villages
市町 (しちょう) — cities and towns
町内 (ちょうない) — neighborhood
同町 (どうちょう) — the same town
町内会 (ちょうないかい) — neighborhood association
町立 (ちょうりつ) — established by a town
町民 (ちょうみん) — townspeople

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 誘 [Kanji of the Day]

誘

✍14

中学

entice, lead, tempt, invite, ask, call for, seduce, allure

ユウ

さそ.う　いざな.う

誘致 (ゆうち) — attraction
誘い (いざない) — invitation
誘導 (ゆうどう) — guidance
誘う (いざなう) — to invite
勧誘 (かんゆう) — invitation
誘拐 (ゆうかい) — abduction
誘惑 (ゆうわく) — temptation
誘発 (ゆうはつ) — inducing
誘拐事件 (ゆうかいじけん) — kidnapping
誘引 (ゆういん) — enticement

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

05:00 AM

Florida Fires Expose Violations Of Over 100 Court Orders By ICE, DOJ [Techdirt]

The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don’t have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary — losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees.

While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment’s existence, the rest of nation’s courts have resoundingly made it clear that detainees are owed a bond hearing, rather than simply be expected to ride out an indefinite detention with zero options until the administration finds some random country to dump them in.

With ICE and a compliant DOJ doing everything they can to prevent detainees from filing habeus corpus motions — using methods ranging from shuffling detainees from state to state to deny them standing to multiple purges of DOJ attorneys who aren’t sufficiently loyal to Trump — lots of judges aren’t actually seeing the entirety of the administration’s illegal actions. The administration is “flooding the zone” to create a “fog of war” in a way that’s as inelegant and brutish as my mixed metaphor.

But the administration can’t stop acts of God from exposing what ICE and the DOJ would have preferred remained hidden. Brush fires in Miami-Dade County forced the evacuation of an ICE detention facility. And that let a judge handling cases in that jurisdiction see clearly exactly how many times the administration had flouted direct court orders.

[The fires] opened a can of worms in federal court after a federal judge was notified that 47 of those detainees were shipped outside the Southern District of Florida in direct violation of court orders. When Miami-based Judge Michael Moore was alerted to the 47 violations, he ordered a deeper look into how often ICE had violated similar court orders in recent months.

The answer alarmed him, and prompted him to respond with force in a hearing on Thursday morning.

Attorneys at the Department of Justice alerted Moore that an estimated 116 detainees have recently been removed from South Florida in direct violation of court orders, a significant increase from the original 47 number. Some of those violations were never reported to the court until Moore started asking.

While Judge Moore understood the fires might mean moving detained migrants to other locations, the government was supposed to inform the court if it attempted to move people with pending petitions out of the court’s jurisdiction. This never happened. And it was happening even before wildfires created this crisis. According to the judge, the DOJ and ICE had done this previously, including one case where the judge wasn’t informed of a relocation until the date of the hearing, which was weeks after the court had told the government to bring this migrant to a bond hearing.

Moore’s takedown of the administration occurred before a packed house of observers, including dozens of interns and federal court clerks. And Moore lit them up:

“I don’t want you to hide behind the brushfire, because there are cases that didn’t have to do with the brushfire,” Moore told ICE and DOJ attorneys. “There have been a number of transfers over the previous months that had nothing to do with the brushfires.”

He noted that some detainees not only had been moved to other states, but some have been “removed from the United States” in direct violation of court orders.

The law is settled (at least for the moment) in this circuit. The Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court ruled two months ago that the government had to provide bond hearings to all detained migrants — something that has always been the case prior to this administration’s refusal to respect the Constitution.

This is how the administration wants to play it, which meant the judge had minimal patience for the DOJ lawyer caught up in the middle of this mess.

Matthew Feely, the DOJ attorney on the case, apologized for the court order violations and said the Southern District of Florida’s office has been overwhelmed with habeus corpus petitions, stemming from the Department of Homeland Security’s stance that it does not have to offer bond hearing to immigrant detainees.

[…]

In 2022, there were only 23 habeus corpus petitions filed in the district, he said. In 2023 there were 31. But between June of 2025 and July 10, 2026, there were about 1,800 petitions filed.

At the same time, Feely said the amount of attorneys handling civil cases in the Southern District of Florida has plummeted by 40% since last year.

“We’re struggling here, your honor,” said Feely, while adding that the DOJ is trying to hire to fill the vacant positions.

“I’m sympathetic, but it looks like a crisis of your own making,” responded Moore, who was appointed to the court by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “If you didn’t advance these legal theories you would not be getting sued.”

There it is. This administration does not follow court precedent. It does not respect the Constitution. It makes up its own rules that are completely unsupported by case law. Then it fires everyone who won’t assist the administration with its dirty work. 1,800 petitions in a single federal district, being handled by a DOJ office that has seen 40% of its workforce resign or get fired for refusing to play by Trump’s rules. And as court orders continue to pile up, the administration still refuses to comply with them.

It’s an unmitigated good that this played out in the open. The problem that hasn’t been addressed is how you rein in a rogue regime that deliberately ignores a co-equal branch of the government. Courts need to start considering their options, including this one:

In cases where federal marshals fail to act to enforce court orders (or contempt of court findings), courts can turn to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Federal judges have the authority to deputize state law enforcement officers to carry out federal court orders, particularly in cases of contempt or defiance by federal officials. State attorneys general, governors, and local sheriffs can be called upon to enforce judicial rulings.

The usual stuff isn’t working. Extreme measures are needed. The question is whether anyone in the court system — or in state law enforcement — has the will to get this done.

Daily Deal: AdGuard Personal or Family Plan [Techdirt]

Welcome to the world of seamless browsing with AdGuard Personal or Family plans. This intuitive ad blocker offers an unparalleled web experience, powered by its three core features: an advanced ad-blocking module, a comprehensive privacy protection tool, and a robust parental control system. Say goodbye to annoying banners, intrusive pop-ups, and disruptive video ads as AdGuard ensures a clutter-free browsing experience. Designed for Windows, Android, macOS and iOS, AdGuard is a versatile software that works seamlessly on your smartphones and mobile computers. A personal plan (3 devices) is on sale for $11 and a family plan (9 devices) is also on sale for $11 for a limited time (available for new users only).

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

03:00 AM

Tom Homan Again Promises That ICE Will Keep Murdering People Until Democrats Stop Calling Them Murderers [Techdirt]

Earlier this year “Border Czar” Tom Homan, with an apparently straight face, told the media that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed, then they would have no choice but to murder more people. A few weeks later, when ICE did murder another person, he doubled down and blamed people for calling ICE murderers for the additional murder. So it’s little surprise that he’s at it again. He’s taking the fact that ICE has been on something of a killing spree over the last few weeks as… vindication for the batshit crazy statement he made earlier about how calling ICE murderers makes them only more likely to murder.

This is classic psychopathic abuser language. “Baby look what you made me do.”

It should never be coming out of the mouth of a government official. It’s horrifying and disqualifying. No, calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed should have zero impact on future murders, and if (accurately) calling ICE murderers leads them to murder more people, then what the fuck are we doing here? Shut down ICE. Fire everyone associated with them, including Tom Homan.

Of course, Homan wasn’t just blaming people for calling murderers murderers. He also wanted to blame the people they murdered for not “complying.”

Once again, saying shit like that should lead to an immediate firing and possibly an investigation. First of all, it’s clear from the videos released after some of the recent ICE shootings that it had nothing to do with people not complying, and appeared to be almost entirely about raging ICE agents who had no interest in de-escalating situations and seemed to be looking to cause harm.

But, more to the point, not complying with a law enforcement demand (especially a ridiculous one) should not result in your execution.

Tom Homan has been credibly accused of accepting $50,000 in a fast food bag to try to curry favor with President Trump. Does Tom Homan think it would have been okay for law enforcement to shoot Tom Homan dead in a Cava restaurant, claiming that he was clearly violating the law in accepting a bribe? Or does he only accept due process when it comes to himself and his friends?

And just as bad, Tom Homan, like so many MAGA leaders, absolutely positively refuses to take any responsibility at all for his own mistakes. First he claims that the mess in Minnesota he inherited didn’t involve any mistakes at all.

Of course it’s funny because in that clip he suggests that he was the one who refused to buy ICE body cams because of the government shutdown (which is a lie; ICE received a ton of money in the earlier budget bill, and Homan knows this. ICE can afford body cameras). But then a couple minutes later, when a reporter asks about the now-revealed anger issues and mental health problems of one of the ICE murderers from last week, suddenly Homan deflects and says to talk to someone at ICE instead.

Dude. Weren’t you just talking about how you were in charge of properly outfitting ICE.

It’s truly astounding how this MAGA administration appears to be fundamentally allergic to ever taking responsibility for anything. This seems like an impossibly short-term strategy. Or simply the product of a government run by people who are in way, way over their heads, but too vain to admit it.

DSA-6393-1 linux - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6393-1

12:00 AM

The Having/Doing job gap [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

It’s a dance between workers, bosses and the market.

The most stable quadrant happens when a thoughtful and consistent boss hires the right person, pays them fairly, creates positive working conditions and useful training. In return, the company gets extraordinary performance. That’s someone doing a good job who also has a good job.

A particularly unstable quadrant is the worker who gets all of the above, but because of culture, choice or lack of enrollment, simply doesn’t do a good job. That mismatch could last for a while, but it’s shaky.

Consider for a moment the boss who takes advantage of people (and the system) by creating lousy conditions and paying too little but still manages to enforce output that they consider acceptable. Once workers realize that they don’t have a good job, they leave, if the culture and the economy permit it. Government is critical in helping people doing a good job get unstuck once they realize they don’t have a good job.

And the last quadrant is all too common: you don’t have a good job and you don’t do a good job. It’s not clear which came first, but they often go together.

Everyone deserves to have a good job. And smart bosses show up to help make that possible.

Paramount Forced To Delay Warner Bros Merger After California Antitrust Lawsuit [Techdirt]

Paramount has been forced to pause consummation of its controversial $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers after a state antitrust lawsuit resulted in the courts granting a 14-day restraining order. There’s a not insubstantial chance that the pause could prove fatal for the deal.

California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, and result in layoffs, higher consumer prices, and product quality hits as the merged company attempts to pay down a massive debt load. As we’ve previously mentioned, every deal involving Warner Brothers has resulted in such an outcome.

Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin granted a 14-day restraining order after hearing arguments from both sides last Friday. The delay has the potential to be doubled as the courts debate the merits of the state antitrust case. Such delays can sometimes prove fatal for transactions of this size, resulting in mergers being scrapped before antitrust litigation can fully debate the deal merits.

“Plaintiff States’ showing at least demonstrates that serious questions going to the merits remain, weighing in favor of preliminary injunctive relief,” the judge wrote. “Paramount and Warner Bros. will continue to operate as separate, viable companies competing in the marketplace while they wait for the Court to adjudicate this case. The balance of equities, combined with the public’s vital interest in antitrust enforcement, therefore tips sharply in favor of the requested injunctive relief.”

Paramount had previously indicated that the company wouldn’t be harmed by delays until at least the end of September, at which point things could get complicated for Paramount’s merger, and Larry Ellison’s broader media domination ambitions.

Ellison and Oracle are aggressively over-leveraged on AI, and should an AI bubble pop trigger economic reverberations during the antitrust debate, Ellison’s ability to manage the deal debt load and financing could prove less tenable. Especially given that as of September 30, Paramount has promised shareholders a “ticking fee” compensation amounting to about $7 million per day if the deal isn’t closed.

As the antitrust lawsuit loomed, Paramount executives seemed increasingly desperate to rush the deal to completion, at one point (falsely) threatening to leave California, and at another point (falsely) claiming that opponents of the deal were engaged in antisemitism.

Tuesday 2026-07-21

09:00 PM

Pluralistic: Dealing with dickovers (21 Jul 2026) dickovers [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->->-> Top Sources: None -->

Today's links

Dealing with dickovers: The web is an open platform, and that matters.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Broadcast's bad week; Congress v wifi; EFF v DRM law; Snowden and bunnie's smartphone smartcase.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

Dealing with dickovers (permalink)

One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for

a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover

These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.

These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/global-privacy-control

But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.

If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."

What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:

https://www.cliffordchance.com/content/dam/cliffordchance/briefings/2023/07/european-court-of-justice-in-facebook-ruling-clarifies-interplay-between-eu-competition-law-and-data-protections-enforcement.pdf

This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.

But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.

Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:

https://protonprivacy.substack.com/p/google-is-finally-killing-ublock

So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."

Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.

Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.

That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).

Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):

https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked

Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:

https://adblockplus.org/

Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…".

Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.

If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:

||media.wired.com/photos/6a565246c8e0799a2981818e/1:1/w_*c_limit/WEB_2026-06-21_EA-WIRED-NBNO-FullQual_0011.jpg

If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.

Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:

https://www.removepaywall.com/

It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages.

Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.

It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").

But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.

But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.

Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.

There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw

All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:

https://www.fosslinux.com/158206/linux-on-older-hardware-revival-guide.htm

Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.

Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.

A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.

We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.

No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.

(Image: Kanerva T, CC BY 4.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA, WEST, INC., and WRITERS GUILD OF AMERICA EAST, INC., Plaintiffs, vs. PARAMOUNT SKYDANCE CORPORATION, and WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY, INC https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/news_and_events/public_policy/wga-v-paramount-warner-bros-complaint.pdf
Deliria 2, Cyberpunks Mutants & Mondoids https://grayarea.org/event/deliria-2-cyberpunks-mutants-mondoids/
Can machines replace human workers? Notes on agency, automation, and AI https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC147594
Scorpions bite again https://jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com/2026/07/14/scorpions-bite-again/
Mandatory Update: A Short Story https://micahflee.com/mandatory-update-a-short-story/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Worst week in the history of broadcast TV https://web.archive.org/web/20060717100605/http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060711/ap/d8iq1l8g0.html

#20yrsago Pen with built-in WiFinder https://web.archive.org/web/20060808191736/https://informatica.shopwprintit.com/index.cfm?action=ViewDetails&ItemID=135&Category=95

#15yrsago Russian Pirate Party must change name, contemplates “Pira7e Party” https://torrentfreak.com/judge-pirate-party-name-ban-decision-stands-110722/

#15yrsago Public special ed employee has $0 paycheck after health insurance deductions https://web.archive.org/web/20110726080414/http://www.educationvotes.nea.org/2011/07/20/a-special-education-worker-talks-candidly-about-empty-paychecks-organizing/

#15yrsago Act now! Congress wants to kill WiFi-like spectrum, sell it off to highest bidder instead https://web.archive.org/web/20110722113231/https://publicknowledge.org/dont-let-cos-buy-way-out-regulation

#15yrsago New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fd9mzfRoQ

#10yrsago Advances in transparent, brain-revealing skull-windows https://web.archive.org/web/20160722140424/https://www.medgadget.com/2016/07/transparent-skull-implant-repeat-brain-laser-therapy.html

#10yrsago EFF is suing the US government to invalidate the DMCA’s DRM provisions https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court

#10yrsago Ed Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang announce a malware-detecting smartphone case https://www.tjoe.org/pub/direct-radio-introspection/release/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc
How To Think About AI Before It’s Too Late (This Is Hell)
https://thisishell.com/episodes/1919
AI Won't Replace You… But This Might (Deep Focus)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorWq_m48AQ
Who Owns Your Tractor? (Growing the Future)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU9eBPUZBI4
You Bought it, They Break It (What Now? with Trevor Noah)
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ir36t-2f4a1ac6

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"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

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

07:00 PM

New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.19 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 15.0.19 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

Send us your feedback

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

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 15.0.18 is:

All Platforms
- Updated NoScript to 13.6.31.1984
- Bug tor-browser#44748: Revert Funding the Commons Implementations
- Bug tor-browser#45117: Rebase Tor Browser stable onto 140.13.0esr
- Bug tor-browser#45124: Backport Security Fixes from Firefox 153
Windows + macOS + Linux
- Updated Firefox to 140.13.0esr
Android
- Updated GeckoView to 140.13.0esr
Build System
- All Platforms
  - Bug tor-browser-build#41838: Update personal_access_tokens URL in tools/fetch_changelogs.py
- Windows
  - Bug tor-browser-build#41819: Fix windows-rs URL in projects/firefox/config

03:00 PM

USPTO Denies MLB’s Insane Attempt To Trademark ‘Play Ball’ [Techdirt]

There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn’t played in Brooklyn for over five decades at that point. The league, at one point, tried to bully a local Little League for using the names of MLB teams, but not their logos, which is something that roughly every Little League team everywhere does. It attempted to trademark the names of three cities in which MLB teams play. And, my personal favorite and most appropriate for this post, the league opposed a finance company’s trademark application because it claimed two of its separate teams both owned the rights to the letter “W”.

The real lesson in all of this is that the League can’t be trusted with anything other than very narrow trademarks. Anything more broad than that causes them to act the fool. And perhaps this is a lesson the USPTO has actually learned, given that it recently denied MLB’s attempt to trademark the phrase “Play Ball”.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied MLB’s application to trademark “Play Ball” for clothing, the USPTO wrote in a final action filing on Friday.

“In this case, the applied-for mark is a commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources that merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment,” the USPTO wrote in its denial.

The USPTO also wrote phrases “that merely convey an informational message are not registerable.”

Those are things that MLB’s well-dressed lawyers absolutely know, of course. But they attempted to bank on a complacent trademark office to try to sneak one past the goalie anyway, to mix metaphors. And if the league had gotten the mark, you can be one hundred percent certain it would have gone on yet another bullying campaign targeting apparel makers, other sports leagues, and who knows who else.

In fact, the most surprising part of all of this is that it appears to have taken 4 years for the USPTO to reach this decision. Josh Gerben breaks it all down like this.

Gerben said the rejection and public domain nature of phrases could depend on the class. Other companies have trademarked “Play Ball,” including a food company for bubble gum, a minerals company for surfacing playgrounds and “The Play Ball” for the gala fundraiser for the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

“In this case they are saying that the phrase has become so ubiquitous and it has this underlying meaning,” Gerben said. “For a clothing brand, the government doesn’t think it’s unique enough to be registered.”

Somehow, some way, we have to get past this practice of looking at trademarks as some kind of retroactive profit center, where a business gobbles them up and then corners a market that was already in existence. That’s all that this sort of attempt to lock up language is. The term “play ball” can be associated with Major League Baseball, certainly. It can also be associated with other sporting activities, or business negotiations, or any other number of things. That’s because it has become a generic phrase, no longer an identifier of the source of a good or service.

Again, MLB’s lawyers knew all of this before applying for the mark. They just didn’t care.

11:00 AM

Safe Under Trump? Tate Necessarily So… [The Status Kuo]

U.S. Marshals arrested Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan in Miami on Saturday, acting on a sealed warrant tied to an extradition request from the United Kingdom.

Within hours, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced a dramatic expansion of the case against the brothers. Andrew Tate, 39, now faces 42 charges, including rape, human trafficking and offenses involving indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. Tristan Tate, 38, faces 17 charges, including rape, sexual assault and human trafficking. Combined, the brothers face 59 charges tied to alleged offenses against victims in the East of England region between 2010 and 2017.

The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the arrests were made “pursuant to extradition proceedings” and “in accordance with the treaties and law enforcement agreements governing Justice Department extraditions.” A law enforcement source told CNN the brothers will appear in federal court in Miami today.

The Tates’ attorney called the arrests a “political hit” in a statement released after their detention and predicted a judge would ultimately find the case wanting. As discussed below, that claim does not appear to hold much water. But what happens if a court certifies the brothers for extradition could carry far greater legal—and political—consequences.

Subscribe now

The rise of “Top G”

Andrew Tate is best known, unironically, to millions of young men as “Top G”—in reference to “Top Gangster.” The claim would be laughable if Tate’s influence weren’t so damaging and dangerous.

Tate first drew mainstream British attention in 2016 when he was kicked off the UK version of Big Brother after a tabloid obtained video of him striking a woman with a belt. Both Tate and the woman said the act was consensual.

He eventually parlayed his “bad boy” image into a massive audience on Instagram and TikTok. Tate’s clips on wealth, dominance and “success” spread rapidly among teenage boys and young men. But his content crossed the line for many platforms: Meta permanently suspended Tate’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2022 for violating policies on dangerous individuals and organizations, while YouTube and TikTok took similar action. Elon Musk restored Tate’s account on Twitter after buying the platform in 2022, and Tate has since built a following there of more than 10 million.

Georgie Laming of Hope Not Hate, which has monitored Tate for years, has noted that Tate projects confidence, wealth and lifestyle as aspirational to millions of young people. His misogyny functions as an entry point to far-right figures and conspiracy theories. Tate’s content follows a consistent pattern: wealth, cars and status dominate over any single ideological theme. The lifestyle is the hook, with the misogyny embedded inside it rather than leading it.

Tate’s business model was built around the same appeal. Heidi Blake’s recently published New Yorker investigation, drawing on private messages, sealed prosecutorial files and interviews with more than a dozen alleged victims, detailed how Tate’s Hustler’s University, priced at $49.99 a month, leveraged an affiliate-marketing scheme that paid members commissions for reposting his content. The scheme turned subscribers into a distribution network that pumped his videos into millions of additional feeds.

More than 160,000 people enrolled in Hustler’s University. At its peak, Blake reported, the brothers’ own network involved roughly 75 women working under them, recruited primarily through direct messages on social media and dating apps. Even members of the Tates’ team acknowledged the nature of their tactics, with one describing their approach to a witness as “textbook victim intimidation.”

Researchers who study the online “manosphere” describe Tate as a template for the movement: fitness and hustle content as the on-ramp, with misogyny and anti-feminism lurking beneath.

UK prosecutors allege, for example, that the violent misogyny promoted by Tate propelled the actions of Kyle Clifford, who murdered his ex-girlfriend, her sister and their mother with a crossbow and knife in 2024. Clifford watched several of Tate’s videos less than 24 hours before his bloody spree.

But the alleged harm goes far beyond the Tates’ social media poison. In a 2023 BBC Panorama investigation, two British women gave firsthand accounts alleging Andrew Tate raped and strangled them. A third woman alleged the same conduct by Tristan Tate. Both brothers have denied all such allegations.

When in Romania

Andrew Tate has said he moved to Romania in 2017. The move came after a 2015 UK investigation into assault allegations against Tate from three women, which British police declined to pursue.

Tate boasted that the move was in part because authorities in Romania were less likely to look into sex crimes allegations. “I’m not a rapist, but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want,” Tate declared in a since-deleted YouTube clip. “I like being free.”

His assessment of Romanian law was apparently true, at least at the time. The U.S. State Department’s 2024 trafficking assessment found Romania did not fully meet even minimum standards for eliminating trafficking.

That brazen confidence about Romania was misplaced. Local authorities arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate near Bucharest in December 2022, along with two Romanian women. DIICOT, Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, alleged the four had formed a criminal group to traffic women across Romania, the U.S. and Britain. The Tates allegedly recruited victims who were then sexually exploited and subjected to physical violence.

The arrest came a day after Tate went viral sparring online with climate activist Greta Thunberg over his car collection, capping the exchange with a video in which he was handed pizza boxes on camera and joked he wouldn’t recycle them. The boxes bore the logo of Jerry’s Pizza, a Romanian chain, and the timing fueled instant speculation that Tate had inadvertently tipped police to his location. Thunberg joked that his failure to recycle had caught up with him. A DIICOT spokeswoman told AFP the theory was false, saying the arrest warrant and searches were already in place before the pizza boxes appeared on screen.

Prosecutors formally indicted the brothers in June 2023 on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. Authorities seized assets including 15 luxury cars and roughly $3 million in cryptocurrency. In April 2024, a Bucharest court ruled the case met the legal standard to proceed to trial.

But that ruling didn’t hold. In December 2024, the Bucharest Court of Appeals sent the case back to prosecutors after finding multiple legal and procedural irregularities. Contrary to a widely circulated claim that the case had been fully dismissed, the ruling did not end the case or find the brothers innocent. Prosecutors retained the option to amend the case file or bring new evidence. But the Tates’ spokesperson, Mateea Petrescu, portrayed the ruling as an exoneration, claiming the ruling “confirms the lack of credible evidence or consistency in the accusations” by prosecutors.

The investigation remained open. And the Tate brothers remained in Romania, under judicial control, barred from leaving the country.

“Hey, how are the Tate boys?”

By February 2025, just a few months later, there was a plan in place to get out of Romania. And it involved some help from highly placed new Trump officials.

The Trump White House had reportedly begun pressuring Romania to lift the brothers’ travel restrictions. The issue was first raised by U.S. officials on a call with their Romanian counterparts, then again by Trump presidential envoy Richard Grenell at the Munich Security Conference.

This raised the obvious question of “why?” What motivation did the White House have to free the Tates from Romanian jurisdiction?

Grenell was defensive about his involvement, noting that his advocacy for the Tates predated any known involvement from the Trump family. He said publicly that he supported the brothers, citing his own tweets on the subject, and separately accused USAID of being weaponized in Romania against political figures he considered unfairly targeted—a framework he had already applied to the Tates’ prosecution.

Heidi Blake’s reporting offers an insider account of the Munich episode. Petrescu's team had been actively lobbying Grenell and had staged the moment for a reporter to overhear. Grenell, she told Blake, “only asked, ‘Hey, how are the Tate boys?’” A senior Romanian law-enforcement source told Blake it was unusual for people accused of child trafficking to travel freely, and said the decision appeared to have come from outside the judicial system.

On February 27, Romanian prosecutors lifted the travel ban. The brothers flew by private jet to Fort Lauderdale that same day. Their investigation remained open, and prosecutors stressed nothing had been dropped. Their attorney, Joseph McBride, was direct about why they felt safe returning: “They feel secure in America for several reasons, the primary one being that Donald Trump is the president.” Asked whether his administration had pressured Romania to release the brothers, Trump told reporters he knew nothing about it.

The brothers’ arrival in Florida came with its own complication after Customs and Border Protection seized their electronic devices when they landed. According to ProPublica’s reporting, a White House official intervened days later. Paul Ingrassia, then the administration’s DHS liaison and a former member of the Tates’ legal defense team (!!), told senior DHS officials to return the devices, saying the request came directly from the White House. ProPublica reported that Ingrassia’s written request chided investigators for the seizure, calling it a poor use of time and resources. The intervention alarmed DHS officials, who worried that complying could mean interfering with a federal investigation. Ingrassia has denied intervening, and his lawyer has denied that he ordered the devices returned or said such an order came from the White House.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters opened a congressional inquiry into the episode, calling it “brazen interference with a federal investigation” in letters to the White House and DHS, and asking the DHS Inspector General to investigate whether Ingrassia’s actions were directed by the White House.

The brothers briefly returned to Romania in March 2025 for scheduled check-ins, then returned to Florida. In April 2026, a Romanian court lifted the last of their supervisory restrictions. Andrew Tate called it a “monumental victory.”

The Claimed Closeness to the Trump Family

Andrew Tate has boasted about his connection to the president’s family. In July 2024, speaking to reporters after the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally, Tate described himself as close with the Trumps. The relationship, according to Blake, traces back to the aftermath of the 2016 Big Brother incident, when Tate began messaging Donald Trump Jr. and posting pro-Trump content. He secured an invitation to Trump Tower, and posted a photo of himself with Trump Jr. afterward.

By 2025, the connection had reportedly extended to Barron Trump. Manosphere influencer Justin Waller, who calls himself the Tates’ “third brother,” told reporters he developed a relationship with Barron during the 2024 campaign, dining with him at Mar-a-Lago multiple times and helping arrange the suit Barron wore to the second inauguration. Waller said he arranged a Zoom call between Barron and Andrew Tate in 2025, during which the two discussed a shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates. Blake’s New Yorker reporting independently corroborates the Mar-a-Lago visits and the tailor introduction, and places the Zoom call during a fitting. Waller separately told reporters that Barron did not offer to help the Tates with their legal case.

Blake also reported that presidential counselor Alina Habba appeared on a podcast with Tate and told him, “I’ve got your back.” Separately, longtime Trump ally Roger Stone posted on X that “Richard Grenell secured the release of the Tates,” then deleted the post.

The public proximity between the Tates and the Trump family has continued into this year. Photos from a UFC event in Miami on April 11, 2026—an event Trump attended—show the Tate brothers among the VIPs in the crowd.

A political hot po-Tater

The 2015 UK investigation resurfaced this year because of new reporting by Blake. Her New Yorker piece, published in June, found British police had mishandled the original case by failing to properly record one woman’s statement and mismanaging evidence, including Tate’s own phone. A longtime Hertfordshire detective told Blake the case was “completely cocked up because of poor policing.” Blake’s inquiries to current and former officers while reporting the story prompted the UK’s Independent Office for Police Conduct to open its own gross-misconduct inquiry, and Hertfordshire Police announced it was reopening the case the day after she contacted them.

The brothers are scheduled to appear in federal court in Miami today, where the extradition process will begin. An extradition hearing is narrow by design and functions nothing like a criminal trial: The government must establish that the treaty and statutory requirements are met, including sufficient evidence of criminality, while the fugitive’s ability to contest the government’s evidence is sharply limited under existing law.

The judge will look at three things.

First, dual criminality. The alleged conduct has to be a crime under both U.S. and UK law. The exact legal label doesn’t need to match. Only the underlying conduct needs to qualify as criminal in each country. Given the charges at issue—rape, trafficking and offenses involving indecent images of children—this bar is not expected to be a serious obstacle for prosecutors.

Second, probable cause. This is a considerably lower bar than proof beyond a reasonable doubt at a criminal trial. The government’s case at the hearing can rely heavily on the formal extradition request and its supporting documents. The ordinary Federal Rules of Evidence don’t apply. Hearsay is admissible, as are summaries of witness statements.

Third, authentication. Foreign governments don’t need to produce trial-ready evidence, such as depositions or live witness testimony. Properly authenticated foreign documents, including affidavits and other papers, may be admitted if authenticated in the manner required by federal extradition law.

If the magistrate finds all three are satisfied, the case is certified for extradition. There is no direct appeal from the certification itself, though the brothers could seek review through a habeas corpus petition.

If the brothers are certified as extraditable, the decision does not end there; a political component remains. And here’s where things get quite dicey and interesting. The question then passes to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who holds statutory discretion under federal law to approve or refuse the surrender.

Rubio may weigh humanitarian and foreign-policy considerations that a court cannot touch, per the State Department’s own account of the process and a 1997 federal appeals ruling.

That discretion places Rubio in a bind of the regime’s own making. The same White House that pressured Romania to free the brothers and intervened with DHS on their behalf could have to decide whether to hand them to the UK for trial on nearly five dozen charges. Blocking the extradition would extend a pattern of intervention the White House has already tried to minimize. But allowing it to proceed raises the question of why so much was done to bring the Tates to American soil in the first place, while potentially enraging the MAGA right.

For now, the immediate question is the narrowest one: whether a Miami magistrate finds enough to certify the Tates as extraditable on this relatively low legal bar. Then Marco Rubio could inherit the political question and the power to stop their extraditions.

If Rubio, via Trump, decides to protect yet another pair of sexual predators, the midterm ads will write themselves.

09:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 壇 [Kanji of the Day]

壇

✍16

中学

podium, stage, rostrum, terrace

ダン　タン

壇上 (だんじょう) — on a stage
土壇場 (どたんば) — last moment
仏壇 (ぶつだん) — Buddhist (household) altar
花壇 (かだん) — flower bed
登壇 (とうだん) — taking the podium
教壇 (きょうだん) — platform
祭壇 (さいだん) — altar
教壇に立つ (きょうだんにたつ) — to stand on a podium
文壇 (ぶんだん) — literary world
画壇 (がだん) — artists' world

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Checking the Distance. Working with Measuring Tools [OsmAnd Blog]

Running every morning is just what you do. No discussion — just the street and whatever distance feels right that day. Your running partner lives on Yonge Street. So do you. Same street, different ends — and when he suggested a 7 AM run "somewhere in the middle", it sounded simple enough.

Yonge Street is 56 kilometres long. The longest street in the world, according to Guinness. It starts at Lake Ontario and runs straight north through Toronto until it quietly disappears near Holland Landing. "Somewhere in the middle" turned out to be a question neither of you had actually answered. You were both on Yonge Street — technically neighbours — and had absolutely no idea how far apart you were standing.

A few taps in OsmAnd, and the guessing stopped. Distance by tap, radius circles, a straight line to your meeting point — tools that turn a vague sense of scale into something exact.

Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash

Distance by Tap: Quick Gestures on the Go

You're three kilometres into the run and there's a park ahead. Is it worth the detour, or is it further than it looks? You don't want to stop, open a route planner, and wait for a calculation. You just want a number. That's exactly what Distance by Tap is for. Enable it in Menu → Configure screen → Other → Distance by tap, and the tool is ready whenever you need it .

Tap anywhere on the map and a straight line appears from your current location to that point, with the distance shown right on the line. Tap somewhere else, and the line moves. It stays on screen as you keep going, giving you a live read on how far something is.

For measuring between any two points — say, from a subway entrance to a coffee shop — place two fingers on the map simultaneously. OsmAnd draws the line between those two points and shows the distance between them, independent of where you are.

If the label is hard to read while moving, go to Menu → Configure screen → Other → Distance by tap → Text size and switch from Normal to Large. The label becomes 1.5× bigger, with extra spacing added between the line and the text. The change applies instantly. No interruptions to the pace.

Ruler: A Permanent Scale on Your Screen

Distance by Tap answers a specific question: how far is that point? The Ruler answers a different one: what does distance actually look like on this map right now?

It sits at the bottom of the screen as a thin line segment labeled with its real-world length — 100 meters, 500 feet, whatever fits the current zoom level. No setup needed, no widget to add. It's simply there, adapting quietly as you pan and zoom. Closer in, the scale shrinks to show finer distances. Zoomed out over the whole city, it stretches to represent kilometres.

Running along an unfamiliar stretch of Yonge Street, you glance at the map and see a segment marked 200 m. The next intersection looks about two segments away — roughly 400 metres. So, to change the units between metres and feet, go to Menu → Configure profile → General settings → Units & formats → Units of length. The scale updates instantly across the whole map. It's a small thing, permanently useful.

Radius Ruler: Visualizing Spheres of Reach

Sometimes the question isn't how far a specific point is — it's what's actually reachable from where you're standing.

Enable the widget via Menu → Configure screen → Widgets → Choose a panel → Add widget → Radius ruler, and the map fills with concentric circles centred on your location. Each ring is labeled with its distance — 1 km, 2 km, 3 km and so on. The intervals adjust automatically as you zoom in or out.

On a long run down Yonge Street, this changes how you read the map. Instead of measuring point to point, you can see at once which parks, subway stations, or coffee shops fall within a comfortable distance — and which ones don't.

Tap the widget to cycle through three display modes — Hide, Light, and Dark — depending on what works best against the map underneath. For a wider view of the surrounding area, go to Menu → Configure screen → Other → Display position and switch your location from Center to Bottom — this shifts your position lower on the screen and expands the visible radius above you. You can also tilt the map into 3D view with a two-finger swipe up, which gives the circles depth and makes distances easier to read across the landscape.

Map Markers and Target Line: Tracking Points in Real Time

You've agreed to meet your running partner at Jaye Robinson Park. You drop a marker on the map — a quick long-tap, then add marker and a flag appears at that point. That's your target.

Enable Arrows on the map and Direction line in Menu → Map markers → Appearance, and the map connects your current location to the marker with a straight line. As you run, the line updates continuously — the distance to the marker counts down, and the bearing shifts as your angle to the target changes. If the marker moves off screen, an arrow takes over and keeps pointing you in the right direction.

The Map markers bar widget at the top of the screen shows the distance and direction to your marker at all times — so even when you're zoomed in and the marker isn't visible, you always know how far you are and which way to go.

Straight Line Routing: Building Complex Measurement Paths

Today's run has a few more moving parts: starting on Yonge Street, cutting across a park, following a trail that isn't on any road map, finishing somewhere several kilometres away. For that, you need something more structured.

Open Menu → Plan a route and select the Straight line method. A dashed line connects each point you place, and as you build the route, the points list below shows the distance and azimuth for each segment. You're not following roads — you're drawing directly across the map, which makes this tool particularly useful for off-road areas or anywhere the street network doesn't match where you actually want to go.

Add points one by one using the pointer at the centre of the screen, then tap Add point. Move the map to position the next point, add it, and the segment builds. Each entry in the points list shows the cumulative distance and the bearing from the previous point — so at any stage you can see not just the total length of your path, but the exact direction of each leg.

When you're done, the route can be saved as a GPX track — a standalone file you can reopen, share, or use for navigation later. What started as a rough measurement exercise becomes a reusable track.

From Guesstimate to Exact Numbers

Running 56 kilometres of Yonge Street in one go was never the point. The point was knowing — at any moment, from any spot — exactly how far something is, what falls within reach, and where a route actually leads. Each tool in this article answers a different version of that question.

Before you head out, take a moment to explore the full documentation — you'll find links to each tool throughout this article. Once you're ready, try the interactive quiz below to see how well you can put it all together.

We appreciate your interest in us and thank you for taking the time to read this article. Join us on social media to keep up to date with the latest news and share your experiences. Your opinion is important to us.

Follow OsmAnd on Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter), Reddit, and Instagram!

Join us at our groups of Telegram (OsmAnd News channel), (EN), (IT), (FR), (DE), (UA), (ES), (BR-PT), (PL), (AR), (TR).

08:00 AM

Banning Transgender Kids From School Sports Affects All Children – Strangers Scrutinizing Kid’s Bodies Put All Kids At Risk Of Harassment [Techdirt]

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

Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness.

What happens to these spaces when adults are given permission to inspect a child’s body to determine their gender?

The Supreme Court rulings on Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. decided that transgender girls cannot play sports that align with their gender identity. Not only does this ruling essentially prohibit transgender kids from participating in most youth sports – codifying the exclusion this vulnerable population already experiences – it also puts all children at risk of the harmful consequences of body surveillance.

I am a social work scholar who studies LGBTQ+ belonging and organizational climate. I’m also a former NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete, and I know firsthand what it’s like to have uninvited scrutiny of your body because strangers doubt your gender.

Based on my research and experience, when policies allow for the bodily surveillance of children, all children are at risk of losing the benefits of youth sports – not just transgender children.

Youth sports as developmental spaces

School sports are not just about competition. They can provide children an important developmental space.

Youth sports can help children improve their sense of competence and confidence. They offer opportunities to practice life skills, such as setting goals, solving problems and thinking positively. Sports can also help protect against depression and stress by bringing supportive adults and positive role models into children’s lives.

However, when youth sports environments become overly stressful, unfair or humiliating, they can also serve as grounds for potentially harmful experiences. For example, coaches and parents can negatively affect a child’s body image by repeatedly criticizing their weight. Teammates and peers can also pressure each other in destructive ways.

The developmental value of youth sports depends on the environment it creates. It stands to follow that ensuring youth sports spaces have as many positive influences as possible is in the best interest of all children.

Research suggests that policies legalizing bodily surveillance are not a positive influence for any child in youth sports.

Bodily surveillance as an avenue for harm

Bodily surveillance plays out in significant ways for all children in youth sports, not just transgender youth. Policies that legalize bodily surveillance for youth open the door to causing harm in unsuspecting children.

Researchers define bodily surveillance as “viewing the body as an outside observer” through active judgments of a person’s physicality, superficial appearance or perceived gender presentation. While bodily surveillance claims to regulate women’s sports in the name of fairness, experts contest the scientific basis of these claims.

Women’s sports have been the site of bodily surveillance for decades, and the cisgender women involved in those sports are all too aware of the ways their bodies are judged through the lens of sexism. Often, how their bodies are judged are influenced by a definition of femininity based primarily on white bodies.

Bodily surveillance can involve assessing how tall is too tall for someone to be a girl? How strong is too strong? How fast is too fast? Who decides when a child exceeds that threshold, and what happens to that child if they do?

Children who compete at the top of their division or class will have to contend with invasive procedures. To evaluate claims of unfair advantages, strangers may request hormone or genetic testing to look for common biological variations that cisgender children and their parents may not even be aware of. Testing may also include genital or pelvic inspection to look for the presence or absence of a penis, or even transvaginal ultrasounds to detect the presence of ovaries.

Strangers are already policing children’s bodies

Bodily scrutiny is not restricted to just transgender children – it already affects cisgender children, too.

In 2022, a high school athlete in Utah was secretly investigated after she defeated other children in a sports competition. Parents of the second- and third-place finishers raised a complaint that led the high school athletics association to analyze her school records back to kindergarten to determine the child’s gender, without consulting her parents. This is a strong example of how people can initiate investigations simply because the child does not look “feminine enough.” In this case the child in question was indeed a cisgender girl.

In 2023, two adults harassed a 9-year-old child at an elementary school track meet. The adults, claiming the girl was transgender, stopped the entire event and demanded she show “certification of her sex.” This was also a cisgender female child.

Strong, athletic women are often subject to suspicion because of their so-called “masculine traits.” As a taller-than-average person who was assigned female at birth, I personally experienced countless moments of bodily scrutiny during my time as a NCAA Division II women’s volleyball athlete. These experiences made me want to shrink out of public view and did not give me confidence in my athletic performance. Moreover, the effects of this scrutiny bled into my personal life, significantly affecting my self-esteem and self-perception throughout my young adulthood.

Imagine if that scrutiny happened when I was much younger, when I did not yet possess the emotional maturity or life experiences to cope with it. Research shows that such bodily scrutiny is already damaging transgender youth and that bodily shame can significantly affect young people’s mental health, leading to disordered eating and other physical and psychological harm.

When societies give formal permission to scrutinize a child’s body and question whether they belong in a sport, it opens the door to potential harm against all children. Children’s bodies, regardless of their gender identity, become open for people to inspect, create rumors about or render public judgment against them, often without any recourse for the children experiencing harm.

Children who had previously never faced the harms of bodily surveillance may soon be subject to its violence because of this law.

Inclusivity benefits all children

Just as all children can potentially suffer from bodily surveillance regardless of their gender identity, embracing inclusivity can improve the well-being of all children.

Research shows that LGBTQ+-inclusive environments can help all children succeed in school. A 2012 study of nearly 16,000 students in 45 schools found that the presence of a gay-straight alliance reduced truancy, smoking, drinking and suicide attempts. A 2020 study of over 895,000 children found that those in LGBTQ+-inclusive environments reported doing better in school, lower substance use and better mental health.

On the other hand, a 2024 study found that anti-LGBTQ+ language in youth sports negatively affected the self-esteem of all children, including those who do not identify as LGBTQ+.

Youth sports, just like schools and churches, are not just places where children compete, learn facts or practice their faith. These community institutions are places where children build the confidence, relationships and sense of belonging that can shape their adult lives and the impact they’ll have on their family and community in the future.

The scope of sex-based bodily surveillance by necessity extends beyond transgender students, and the effects of this surveillance negatively affects all children involved in youth sports, regardless of identity.

Megan Gandy is Associate Professor of Social Work, West Virginia University

Everything Is For Sale In The Trump White House, Even His Truth Social Posts [Techdirt]

Over the last few months especially, there has been renewed attention to the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s ability to profit off the presidency. The efforts to do so only become more brazen every week. Leaving aside the crypto business that he got a ton of people to fund, the free airplane from a foreign government, the “donations” for things like the east wing “renovation” (which is still somehow supposed to be funded by taxpayers), and the attempt to sue his own government for $10 billion, it feels like there is no end to the grifting.

Just recently there were reports of an insane level of market manipulation, in which Trump would buy certain stocks and then pump them up on Truth Social. That alone feels like an impeachable offense, but why stop at merely one layer of corruption when you can profit off of others getting in on the corrupt bargain? Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the company that runs Truth Social, is now going to start selling “early access” to Trump’s posts via an API.

The product, called ‘Truth API’, will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said.

The feed is designed for organizations “most impacted by the cost of a delay in information”, such as algorithmic trading firms, the company said in a statement. “Until now… firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring. Truth API closes the gap.”

The move is TMTG’s first step into data licensing, and opens up a new revenue stream for the company, which has faced challenges in scaling its media business amid stiff competition from larger social media firms.

I can pretty much guarantee that delivering such posts from the “10 most influential accounts” is nine accounts too many. This offering is entirely about giving high frequency trading firms that millisecond advantage to front run the market and execute trades based on Trump’s posts to try to get ahead of the chump trades from retail investors swayed by Trump.

TMTG’s CEO doesn’t even try to claim it’s anything else:

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts … As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company,” TMTG’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn said.

And, yes, lots of other internet companies offer licensed API access to content, but for other reasons. The only reason anyone could possibly want this is to get a split second advantage to trade on pronouncements the President of the United States makes. The value of this offering does not grow over time. It has a clear limit: the day Trump is no longer president, the value drops back down close to nothing at all.

If there were an actual legitimate reason to offer such a service, then McGurn could have expressed it, but he just out and out admits that it’s because markets move based on Truth Social posts (he conveniently leaves out that those posts all come from a single user: the president himself, who just happens to own the platform and directly profits off of any of its success).

Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm before taking office to avoid even any whiff of potential conflict. Donald Trump is leaning into the conflict and putting a price tag on it. He’s announcing to the world that they can get early access to pronouncements from the President of the United States… for a price. There is no world in which that should be allowed.

Arthurian Connector [xkcd.com]

04:00 AM

Daily Deal: Digi Pen for iPads [Techdirt]

Equipped with a 1.2mm fine tip, the Digi Pen for iPads provides durability, sensitivity, and pixel precision. No lagging, no skips, no scratches. Perfect for drawing, sketching, painting, and writing. With palm rejection technology, you can use it directly without wearing gloves and write on the screen as if you’re writing on paper. You can also tilt the stylus at different angles to draw strokes of different thicknesses and depths. The stylus pencil body is made of Aluminum alloy material which is sleek and comfortable to the touch, not too heavy or too light. Get one pen on sale for $40.

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

Australia’s Next Target In The War On Kids Online: Your VPN [Techdirt]

We — and plenty of others — have been warning that the global rush to mandate age verification wouldn’t stop at “let’s make sure kids can’t see porn” or even just “keep kids off of social media.” It would inevitably expand into treating anonymity and privacy tools themselves as the enemy. Australia is now proving that in real time: Its eSafety regulator has gone from checking whether porn sites gate their content to treating VPN use — one of the best tools people have for protecting their privacy online — as a compliance problem to be stamped out.

Last month the VPN company Mullvad put out a blog post about how age verification would be the beginning of the end for a free internet. It’s a good read:

The correct term for age verification as it is implemented today is therefore identity verification. Given today’s internet infrastructure, it is unreasonable to assume that this information will not be shared through commercial agreements or with governments.

The consequence of introducing identity verification is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. You cannot be certain that your criticism of the government will not be followed up by the authorities. You can no longer start a digital initiative on a social media platform aimed at gathering people to criticize an authority without facing a significant risk of consequences. Depending on the country you live in, this could even endanger your life. In its current form, social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous.

Freedom of expression is threatened not only in a direct sense (you post something and then the police knock on your door), identity verification also creates a chilling effect. It becomes a cornerstone of censorship machinery in the sense that people begin to self-censor if they know that expressing opinions may have personal consequences. This is also something that changes over time. What is considered acceptable to post online is determined by whoever currently holds power. Different sides of politics often have different views on what constitutes harmful content. Just because what you post today is not considered inappropriate does not mean it will remain acceptable in the future.

Some can argue that they’re biased since they’re in the business of selling VPN service, though arguably, more age verification laws increase demand for VPNs. But, the reality is that as age verification laws spread, so too do the attacks on VPNs and the ridiculous and dangerous threats to somehow outlaw their usage.

The latest is in Australia, where their teen social media ban has been an abject failure. Have no fear, however, they’re going to just start targeting VPN usage. Of course, they’re not framing it as a response to the failure of their social media ban, but rather a response to adult content websites’ age verification being beaten by people using VPNs, because it’s always easier to start your attacks on privacy, security, and anonymity by blaming a more marginalized industry like adult content:

Nine in 10 of the most visited adult sites used by Australians now have age checks for users, according to the online safety regulator, but eSafety has said it will assess whether those sites are allowing users to bypass restrictions with virtual private networks (VPNs)….

But, of course, it’s not just about adult content. They’ll go after VPN usage for social media as well:

Similar to the expectations of the social media companies for the under-16s ban, eSafety said it was expected under the codes that sites “must take reasonable steps” to prevent workarounds like VPNs, and eSafety “will look at this when considering compliance”.

The sheer irony of an agency named “eSafety” claiming that VPN use was a “workaround” that must be blocked? VPNs provide way more safety than anything that the “eSafety” Commission has done regarding internet usage.

Age verification is surveillance. Full stop. And it’s increasingly being closely tied to law enforcement and governments. Tech policy expert Heather Burns recently pointed out that age verification providers were literally reporting people to law enforcement for the crime of… using an alternative OS. As she notes:

age verification providers now hold themselves to be delegated law enforcement and extensions of the judiciary, using the guise of age verification for child safety but for reasons which have nothing to do with it.

This should be a concern to everyone. Hell, it’s getting so bad that the dude who runs the trade association for age verification providers is talking about punishing parents for helping their kids get around age checks.

Iain Corby: Yeah, just briefly to add, I think there is a distinction here between when we just accept the parent’s word for the child’s age and when services need to get an independent verification of that age. We do know, this was mentioned earlier, that often, parents are complicit in helping their kids to access services which are age-limited when they shouldn’t be accessing those services. So, sometimes you will need to do an independent age verification rather than simply relying on a parental attestation. So, it’s sort of one step up from self-declaration, but it’s not an independent view of the age of that user.

So Australia is just confirming the point privacy folks have been screaming about for years: age verification is inherently an attack on privacy and security. It will absolutely be used to remove anonymity, decrease security, enhance law enforcement surveillance, and, as the last quote shows, diminish even parental decision-making regarding our children.

Age verification was never going to stop at the age gate. VPNs are just the next thing on the list. Other user empowerment tools (Tor? encrypted DNS?) will be next. There’s simply no version of this that ends with your privacy intact.

Attempted Murder Charges Dropped After Bystander Recordings Expose ICE Officer’s Lies [Techdirt]

Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they’ll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to.

Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration’s attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to the government’s witnesses noted a plethora of “untruthful statements” or “material misrepresentations.”

Six months later, the losing streak created by unforced (but deliberate) “errors” continued. Federal immigration officers just couldn’t stop lying, forcing DOJ prosecutors to voluntarily dismiss a bunch of felony assault cases that were completely reliant on statements made by officers who were later shown to be lying.

Here’s another case that’s hit a dead end because an ICE officer lied and an ICE supervisor decided to pass on these lies to a federal prosecutor. (h/t Aaron Reichlin-Melnick)

A Venezuelan man arrested by ICE was hit with a slew of escalating charges, most of which have vanished now that the truth is involved.

Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco, 31, was referred to by DHS as a “criminal illegal alien” and a “known Tren de Aragua terrorist.” The agency said he “violently attacked an ICE agent” by slamming her head into the ground and attempting to choke her to death. At a preliminary hearing, a Homeland Security agent and a federal prosecutor said Hurtado-Cariaco received “special forces-type training” in the Venezuelan military and may have been involved in “killing people, hurting people, [and] committing human rights violations.”

The only thing true here is that Hurtado was once a member of the Venezuela military. But he deserted, fled to the US, and filed an asylum claim. He was paroled into the US in 2024 and, since then, had been steadily working as a delivery driver.

The arrest of Hurtado didn’t look great. Two ICE officers tried (and failed) to subdue him. He managed to escape custody, but was arrested successfully shortly after he fled the scene of the first attempted detention.

Perhaps the (attempted) arresting officer was too embarrassed to tell the truth. But the lies he told had serious consequences.

The initial narrative of what happened during Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest was provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Craig Allrich. Allrich, who was not at the scene of the arrest, penned the affidavit that would be used to secure a criminal complaint against Hurtado-Cariaco.

The first complaint actually told the truth. It simply said that Hurtado had resisted arrest. But that apparently wasn’t good enough for Allrich and/or the officer who failed to subdue Hurtado during his first encounter with him. Things got worse for Hurtado in a hurry.

It was in the amended complaint that Allrich laid out how Hurtado-Cariaco allegedly attempted to murder the female ICE officer, referred to as “Victim 1” throughout the document.

[…]

[A]s the two agents struggled to detain Hurtado-Cariaco, he was “able to get control of Victim 1 and place [her] in a chokehold.” Allrich said the male agent gave repeated commands to Hurtado-Cariaco to release the chokehold, but he “chose to continue choking Victim 1 rather than simply fleeing the scene.”

This assertion was a lie. Two recordings made by bystanders who witnessed the attempted arrest made it clear Hurtado had definitely resisted arrest, but at no point did he pin down the female ICE officer, nor did he ever place her in a chokehold.

At no point in either video is Hurtado-Cariaco seen choking the female agent. Instead, the videos show agents placing Hurtado-Cariaco into a chokehold on two separate occasions as he attempts to break free.

Hurtado’s federal public defender, Richard McWilliams, says federal prosecutors sat on these recordings and refused to remove the attempted murder charge despite having evidence proving otherwise. US Attorney Lesley Woods says this isn’t true, claiming the public defender refused to turn over the recordings he had obtained.

But Woods’ claims are difficult to believe, especially when prosecutors waited months to rewrite the indictment, excising the bogus attempted murder charge just so that they could replace it something nearly as damaging.

By November, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment, which abandoned the attempted murder charge and replaced it with another serious felony – providing material support to a terrorist organization.

According to prosecutors, the mere existence of a tattoo — one that doesn’t actually demonstrate a connection to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — was enough to hit Hurtado with terrorism charges.

(And that charge is only possible because the Trump administration unilaterally declared this gang to be foreign terrorist organization — something it only did in an attempt to legalize its unconstitutional detain-and-deport program.)

None of this bullshit impressed the judge handling Hurtado’s criminal case.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said at the sentencing that the allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence.” Though Rossiter said there is “no doubt” that Hurtado-Cariaco committed the offense that he pleaded guilty to by fleeing the officers and struggling with them, he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”

That’s a polite way of saying either the ICE officer at the scene lied or that the ICE supervisor who prepared the affidavit didn’t care whether or not he was being lied to.

And the judge isn’t happy with the government’s last ditch attempt to stick Hurtado with a lengthy sentence by belatedly adding some terrorism charges to the mix. As it stands now, Hurtado’s guilty plea to resisting arrest nets him a 14-month sentence, most of which he has already served because he’s been in jail since his arrest last June.

“To refer to him as a terrorist, attempted murderer, that he had put a chokehold on these victims… It’s just not borne out by the evidence,” Rossiter said. “And it’s troubling.”

If you can’t do your job without lying, you can’t be trusted to hold that position. If the administration can’t find enough people to arrest and deport without having to make up stories about murder or terrorism, then it needs to restrain itself to the promise that has always been empty: go after the worst of the worst. These lies were caught. Dozens or hundreds of others will go undetected.

Given what we know about the people “leading” this country and these agencies, I firmly believe they’d lie even if they didn’t have to. That’s just the kind of people they are. And the foot soldiers willingly serving this rolling atrocity of an administration need to be filmed whenever possible, because it’s the only way to keep them honest.

01:00 AM

Hollywood Wants Vietnam to Slay the Piracy Hydra [TorrentFreak]

Earlier this month, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced it had dismantled the network behind the high-profile HiAnime piracy ring.

While the associated site already closed its doors in March, the action is vital for Vietnam since the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) recently classified it as “Priority Foreign Country,” because of its lacking anti-piracy enforcement.

Last month, USTR formally started a Section 301 investigation which opened the door to potential trade sanctions. As part of this process, stakeholders were requested to provide input on Vietnam’s alleged shortcomings. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which are highlighted as the primary concern.

One of the key submissions for the USTR investigation comes from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents the major Hollywood studios, Netflix and Amazon. The MPA has vast experience in the country through its anti-piracy arm ACE and assisted in local copyright enforcement efforts for years.

This cooperation resulted in the takedown of the Fmovies piracy ring, for example, and ACE also provided key intelligence for the recent HiAnime action. While the MPA is pleased with the enforcement efforts, it hasn’t been pleased with how Vietnamese courts and prosecutors deal with the matter.

MPA: ‘Mild Sentences are the Problem’

When MPA submitted its commentary the HiAnime arrests had not been announced yet. The MPA has since applauded the arrests, but its USTR filing suggests that the eventual sentences will be crucial.

Previously, the prosecutions of key defendants in the Fmovies piracy ring, dubbed the largest piracy operation ever, resulted in suspended prison sentences and relatively low fines. The same applied to the operator of the popular BestBuyIPTV service.

MPA’s SVP Global Policy and Government Affairs, Gail MacKinnon, informed the USTR that the lack of deterrent penalties in Vietnam are the main reason why online piracy remains a significant problem in the country.

“Without sentences and monetary penalties that outweigh the financial gains from copyright infringement, online piracy operations originating in Vietnam will not be sufficiently deterred,” MPA’s submission reads.

“There needs to be visible and credible consequences to effectively deter infringement and counter the perception that piracy is a low-risk, high-reward activity,” MacKinnon adds.

Copycats, Successors, and Resurgents

MPA notes that, as a result of the mild sentences, major takedowns are often only a short-lived success. Pirate brands or operations often reappear swiftly, a problem India’s High Court previously likened to a “hydra-headed” threat.

In its recommendations to the USTR, MPA urges Vietnam to make sure that such copycats and successors are also addressed properly.

“Take effective and deterrent enforcement action against the notorious piracy services identified by MPA, including timely follow-up actions against any successor, mirror, or copycat sites that emerge”

“Criminal enforcement action must be taken against the operators of these pirate syndicates to ensure that they do not resurface. Consistent enforcement is also necessary to deter the emergence of copycat
services that fill the gap left by these shutdowns.”

MPA’s recommendations

Much of the same critique is shared by International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which highlighted the same problem in their submission to the USTR’s Vietnam investigation.

The IIPA documents the same pattern in more detail, tracing a rather obvious branding shift that started in 2023, when Zoro.to was shut down by ACE, but not before it was rebranded as AniWatch. A year later, Aniwatch became HiAnime, which eventually went offline this year.

IIPA’s submission, which also predates the HiAnime crackdown announcement, also calls for tougher enforcement and deterrent sanctions.

“It is critical for responsible enforcement authorities, including the relevant police units, the MPS, and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (MOCST), to follow through on infringement complaints, take meaningful and effective enforcement actions, and impose deterrent sanctions against infringing websites.”

Dispatch 38

Both the MPA and IIPA acknowledge that Vietnam has started to take the piracy problem more seriously. In May, the Vietnamese government issued Official Dispatch No. 38, asking agencies nationwide to intensify IP-related enforcement efforts, including actions against piracy websites.

Dispatch 38 also requests prosecutors and courts to prioritize serious copyright cases, improve prosecution timelines, and to strengthen deterrence. The MPA separately notes that the Ministry of Public Security is drafting amendments to the Penal Code to better address high-tech crimes and cyber offenses.

Whether the recent wave of enforcement actions and policy signals will be enough to change Vietnam’s piracy image has yet to be seen. The HiAnime arrests are recent, and the planned prosecution of the site’s operators will be the first real test of whether the judicial system is ready to move along.

—

The IIPA’s Section 301 comments are available here (pdf). The MPA’s filing can be found here (pdf).

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

Monday 2026-07-20

11:00 PM

The power of positive argument [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Hank Green has an interesting take on the scientific method: We advance because scientists work to persuade others that they’re correct. Every paper, statistical analysis and experiment is nothing but an argument designed to persuade an intelligent critic.

The method of argument is determined by the audience–if they require double-blind studies and useful statistical models, then that’s what you’ll need to use to change their minds.

Priya Parker’s new book is about fighting. It’s useful to realize that signing up for listening to what works and then doing it more is an argument toward better.

Positive argument is the generous act of approaching someone on their terms to persuade them to move forward.

The upside of free market capitalism (and the marketing that goes with it) is that every product and every campaign is an argument. An argument to win over customers, to solve problems in a new and better way. Different cultures require different arguments, but that’s what we do to grow.

The most effective form of marketing isn’t an ad, it’s a better product.

And thus one of the key problems with monopolies: they don’t have to argue! The customer has no choice. The monopoly stops listening, innovating and working for improvement, because they don’t need to.

The same is true for democracy vs autocracy. The despot has no need to make an argument, so they don’t.

Find a place where positive arguments are welcome, and use them to make things better by making better things.

RSS	Site	Updated
XML	About Tagaini Jisho on Tagaini Jisho	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	Arch Linux: Releases	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Carlson Calamities	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Debian News	2026-07-23 04:00 AM
XML	Debian Security	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	debito.org	2026-07-23 04:00 AM
XML	dperkins	2026-07-23 01:00 AM
XML	F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository	2026-07-22 05:00 AM
XML	GIMP	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Japan Bash	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	Japan English Teacher Feed	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	Kanji of the Day	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Kanji of the Day	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Let's Encrypt	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Marc Jones	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Marjorie's Blog	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	OpenStreetMap Japan	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	OsmAnd Blog	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	Popehat	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Ramen Adventures	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Release notes from server	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect	2026-07-23 01:00 AM
XML	SNA Japan	2026-07-23 01:00 AM
XML	Tatoeba Project Blog	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	Techdirt	2026-07-23 04:00 AM
XML	The Business of Printing Books	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	The Luddite	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	The Popehat Report	2026-07-23 01:00 AM
XML	The Status Kuo	2026-07-23 01:00 AM
XML	The Stranger	2026-07-22 09:00 AM
XML	Tor Project blog	2026-07-23 04:00 AM
XML	TorrentFreak	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	what if?	2026-07-23 12:00 AM
XML	Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed	2026-07-15 10:00 AM
XML	xkcd.com	2026-07-23 12:00 AM

News

Thursday 2026-07-23

02:00 AM

01:00 AM

12:00 AM

Today's links

Trump's America can't even win a rigged game (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

Wednesday 2026-07-22

05:00 PM

Uptobox Crackdown

Not a Director

DNS Tweets Keep Funds Frozen

From €16 Million to €306,000

03:00 PM

01:00 PM

09:00 AM

05:00 AM

03:00 AM

12:00 AM

Tuesday 2026-07-21

09:00 PM

Today's links

Dealing with dickovers (permalink)

Hey look at this (permalink)

Object permanence (permalink)

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Recent appearances (permalink)

Latest books (permalink)

Upcoming books (permalink)

Colophon (permalink)

How to get Pluralistic:

07:00 PM

Send us your feedback

Full changelog

03:00 PM

11:00 AM

09:00 AM

Distance by Tap: Quick Gestures on the Go​

Ruler: A Permanent Scale on Your Screen​

Radius Ruler: Visualizing Spheres of Reach​

Map Markers and Target Line: Tracking Points in Real Time​

Straight Line Routing: Building Complex Measurement Paths​

From Guesstimate to Exact Numbers​

08:00 AM

Youth sports as developmental spaces

Bodily surveillance as an avenue for harm

Strangers are already policing children’s bodies

Inclusivity benefits all children

04:00 AM

01:00 AM

MPA: ‘Mild Sentences are the Problem’

Copycats, Successors, and Resurgents

Dispatch 38

Monday 2026-07-20

11:00 PM

Distance by Tap: Quick Gestures on the Go

Ruler: A Permanent Scale on Your Screen

Radius Ruler: Visualizing Spheres of Reach

Map Markers and Target Line: Tracking Points in Real Time

Straight Line Routing: Building Complex Measurement Paths

From Guesstimate to Exact Numbers