News

Thursday 2026-04-23

06:00 PM

New Release: Tails 7.7 [Tor Project blog]

New feature

Detection of outdated Secure Boot certificates

Since 2023, Microsoft has started replacing the Secure Boot certificates originally issued in 2011. These older certificates begin expiring in June 2026.

Tails now notifies you if the computer that you are using has outdated Secure Boot certificates and needs an update.

Changes and updates

Update Tor Browser to 15.0.10.
Update Thunderbird to 140.9.1.

Fixed problems

Make the /root folder only readable by the root user. (#21514)

For more details, read our changelog.

Get Tails 7.7

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.7.
If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails 7.7 on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions.

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 7.7 directly:

Support and feedback

For support and feedback, visit the Support section on the Tails website.

Sflix, Myflixerz, HDtoday, and other Pirate Sites Go Dark as Backend Infrastructure Fails [TorrentFreak]

In piracy circles, names like Sflix, Watchseries, HDtoday, and Fmovies are essentially “zombie” brands.

While the original iterations of these sites were shut down or “retired” years ago, their names remain immensely popular with users.

The pirate streaming sites continue to draw in millions of monthly visitors without much hassle. However, that changed this week when dozens of domains suddenly became unreachable, all pointing to a Cloudflare 521 error.

Web server is down (Error 521)

The error indicates that the origin web server refuses the connection. This does not mean that Cloudflare intervened. Instead, it suggests that the backend server, which hosts the website, has stopped responding.

None of the affected sites have offered an explanation, nor has any anti-piracy organization claimed credit for a takedown. However, it is clear that these sites were seen as a major threat.

The Motion Picture Association (MPA), for example, identified the Myflixerz and Sflix networks as a priority threat in its notorious markets submission to the U.S. Trade Representative last fall. This piracy ring alone was good for 622 million visits in August 2025, MPA reported.

Those domains, including sflix.to, sflix2.to, moviesjoytv.to, myflixerz.to, and hdtodayz.to, are now among those returning 521 errors.

A Shared Backend

Why would so many sites go down simultaneously? They are not necessarily all operated by the same people. However, there is likely a common denominator, which was also cited by the MPA’s report.

Many of the affected sites rely on a shared backend infrastructure, which anti-piracy groups have dubbed “Piracy-as-a-Service” (PaaS). Instead of hosting video files themselves, the front-end piracy sites use services such as MegaCloud and VidCloud that actually serve the streams. And more recently, these PaaS services have also offered website hosting.

The MPA described exactly this setup in its notorious markets recommendation, specifically referring to the Sflix and Myflixerz network:

“These sites rely on their own PaaS infrastructure (formerly known as 2embed[.]to, which ACE took down in June 2023) and despite enforcement, they continue to thrive through alternative domains and backend hosting on platforms such as MegaCloud, VidCloud, and RapidCloud. Unlike the previous CMS model, which explicitly enabled pirate sites to embed movies and monetize streams, this new model functions as a backend hosting network powering popular pirate domains such as those mentioned above. These services act as a media source server, serving video files directly allowing a myriad of sites to provide streams to users.”

If many sites indeed rely on the same backend hosting network, similar Cloudflare errors would appear across all dependent sites if it goes offline. This would explain what we’re seeing today.

Shared infrastructure?

If the backend PaaS infrastructure has indeed been targeted, it would represent one of the most significant blows to the streaming piracy landscape since the original 2embed takedown in 2023.

For now, the cause of this massive outage remains unconfirmed. Whether the affected domain names will make their way back online or if the 521 error is the final curtain call has yet to be seen. However, the “zombie” brands will likely reappear in some shape or form.

—

Below is an example of some of the affected domain names, but there are many more.

– myflixerz.to
– sflix.to
– moviesjoytv.to
– flixhq.to
– hdtoday.cc
– hdtoday.tv
– watchseries.pe
– watch32.sx
– myflixtor.tv
– theflixertv.to
– zoechip.cc
– fmovie.ws
– 9animetv.to
– hdtodayz.to
– fboxtv.com
– freehdmovies.to
– freemoviesfull.com
– actvid.rs
– dopebox.to

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

09:00 AM

Digital Hopes, Real Power: The Rise Of Network Shutdowns [Techdirt]

Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored to shape what people can see, say, and share. In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded.

In 2011, when protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and beyond used social media to broadcast their uprisings to the world, many observers heralded a new era of networked freedom. Governments, however, responded quickly by developing and refining systems of control that have only grown more sophisticated over time. Today’s landscape of regulation, blackouts, and degraded networks reflects that trajectory, as early experiments in censorship and disruption have hardened into a durable system of control—what began as an emergency measure has become a normalized infrastructure of control.

A Brief History of Internet Shutdowns

Egypt’s 2011 internet shutdown wasn’t the first. Although the government’s heavy-handed response after just two days of protests caught the world’s attention, Guinea, Nepal, Myanmar, and a handful of other countries had previously enacted shutdowns. But Egypt marked a turning point. In the years that followed, shutdowns increased sharply worldwide, suggesting that governments had taken note—adopting network disruptions as a tactic for suppressing dissent and limiting the flow of information within and beyond their borders.

On January 28, 2011, at 12:34 a.m. local time, five of Egypt’s internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their networks. At least one provider—Noor, which also hosted the Egyptian stock exchange—remained online, leaving only about 7% of the country connected.

In the aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, rights groups sought to understand how such a sweeping shutdown had been possible—and how future incidents might be prevented. There was no centralized “kill switch.” Instead, authorities leveraged the country’s highly consolidated telecommunications sector, which all operate by government license. With only a handful of ISPs, a small number of directives was enough to bring most of the network offline.

In the years following Egypt’s 2011 shutdown, telecommunications companies—many of which had been directly implicated in enabling state-ordered disruptions—began to organize around a shared set of human rights challenges. Beginning that same year, a group of operators and vendors quietly convened to examine how the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights applied to their sector, particularly in contexts where government demands could translate into sweeping restrictions on access. By 2013, this effort had formalized into the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, bringing together major global firms to develop common principles on freedom of expression and privacy and, through a partnership with the Global Network Initiative, engage more directly with civil society. The initiative reflected a growing recognition that telecom companies—unlike platforms—operate at a critical chokepoint in the network. But it also underscored the limits of voluntary approaches: while the Dialogue helped establish shared norms, it did little to constrain the legal and political pressures that continue to drive shutdowns—or to prevent companies from complying with them.

From Emergency Measure to Legal Authority

If the early aughts were defined by improvised shutdowns, the years since have seen governments formalize their power to control networks. What was once exceptional is now often embedded in law.

In India, the 2017 Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services Rules—issued under the Telegraph Act—provided a clear legal pathway for cutting connectivity. The Telecommunications Act, 2023, further entrenched the government’s ability to enact shutdowns, granting the central and state governments, or “authorised officers” the power to suspend telecommunications services in the interest of public safety or sovereignty, or during emergencies. The government has used these measures repeatedly, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir. India’s Software Freedom Law Centre’s Shutdown Tracker shows India as instigating more than 900 shutdowns, 447 of which were in Jammu and Kashmir.

In Kazakhstan, shutdowns have also become common. Over the years, the government has passed legislation that allows state agencies to shut down the internet. The 2012 law on national security enabled the government to disrupt communications channels during anti-terrorist operations and to contain riots. In 2014 and 2016, laws were further amended to expand the number of actors able to shut down the internet without a court decision, and a government decree in 2018 enabled shutdowns in the event of a “social emergency.”

Elsewhere, governments have built or expanded legal and technical frameworks that enable similar control over information flows. Ethiopia’s state-dominated telecom sector has facilitated sweeping shutdowns during periods of conflict, including the war in Tigray, where the internet was disconnected for more than two years. In Iran, authorities have developed regulatory and infrastructural capacity to isolate domestic networks from the global internet, allowing them to restrict external visibility while maintaining limited internal connectivity. This year alone, Iranians have spent one third of the year offline. And amidst the ongoing war, Iranian officials have made it clear that the internet is a privilege for those who toe the government’s official line.

Even where laws do not explicitly authorize shutdowns, broadly worded provisions around national security or public order are routinely used to justify them. The result is a growing legal architecture that treats network disruptions not as extraordinary measures, but as standard tools for managing populations.

When that authority is exercised over a population beyond a state’s own citizens, the consequences can be even more severe. Israel’s Ministry of Communications controls the flow of communications in and out of Palestine and has used that power to shut down internet access during periods of conflict. Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has experienced repeated outages, and experts now estimate that roughly 75% of its telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged—leaving essential services severely disrupted.

Elections and the Expansion of Control

Historically, most blackouts have occurred during moments of intense political tension. But authorities are increasingly using them as a tool to preempt dissent.

In 2024, as more than half the world’s population headed to the polls, shutdowns followed. That year alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries—the highest number ever recorded, surpassing the previous record set just a year earlier. The geographic spread also widened significantly, with shutdowns affecting more countries than ever before. The Comoros imposed a shutdown for the first time, while other countries, such as Mauritius, instituted broad bans on social media platforms during elections.

At least 24 countries holding elections in 2024 had a prior history of shutdowns, putting billions of people at risk of disruptions during critical democratic moments.

What stands out is not just the scale, but the normalization. Notably, the number of shutdowns in 2025 broke the record set the year prior. Whereas network disruptions were once a rare occurrence, they are now a routine measure, increasingly treated by authorities as a standard response to periods of heightened political sensitivity.

Civil Society Fights Back

Governments use all sorts of justifications—national security, curbing the spread of disinformation, and even preventing students from cheating on exams—for internet shutdowns. But civil society is watching, and documenting, network disruptions and their impact on citizens.

In 2016, as shutdowns became an increasingly common tool of state control, Access Now launched the #KeepItOn campaign to coordinate global advocacy against network disruptions. The campaign includes a coalition composed of 345 advocacy groups (including EFF), research centers, detection networks, and others who work together to report on, and fight back against, internet shutdowns. Anyone can get involved by signing on to campaign action alerts, sharing their story, or reporting a shutdown in their jurisdiction.

Ending this harmful practice remains the goal. In 2016, the UN passed a landmark resolution supporting human rights online and condemning internet shutdowns, and UN agencies have continued to warn against the practice. But the fight to change government practices remains an uphill battle, leading civil society—and even companies—to get creative.

During repeated shutdowns in Gaza, grassroots efforts mobilised to distribute eSIMs so Palestinians could stay connected. In 2024, EFF recognized Connecting Humanity, a Cairo-based non-profit providing eSIM access in Gaza, with its annual award for its vital work. Satellite internet such as Starlink has been supplied to people in Ukraine and Iran, though it, too, is not immune to state control. Alongside these efforts, civil society continues to share practical guidance on circumventing shutdowns and maintaining access to information.

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world—and we’ll continue to fight back against internet shutdowns wherever they occur.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog. This is the fourth installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. Read the rest of the series here.

07:00 AM

Arkansas Tried To Pass An Unconstitutional Social Media Law. Again. It Lost. Again. [Techdirt]

Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill’s own sponsor couldn’t accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube while the sponsor publicly claimed those were the exact platforms being targeted. When the state’s own expert witness testified that Snapchat was covered, the state’s own attorney disagreed with his own witness in the same hearing. That law was struck down on First Amendment and vagueness grounds, and then permanently enjoined earlier this year in a suit brought by the trade group NetChoice.

So Arkansas went back to the drawing board and passed Act 900, which was supposed to fix all the problems with the original. Judge Timothy Brooks of the Western District of Arkansas has now preliminarily enjoined that law too, in a ruling that reads like a patient teacher explaining to a student why the homework still doesn’t work despite a rewrite.

The legislature did manage to fix the content-based definition problem that sank the first law, but the progress stops there. Act 900 imposes four main new requirements on social media platforms: a prohibition on “addictive practices,” default settings for minors (including a nighttime notification blackout), privacy default settings at the most protective level, and a parental dashboard requirement. Every single one of these provisions fell apart on review, each in its own special way.

The “addictive practices” provision might be the most impressively broken. Here’s what it actually says platforms must do:

Consistent with contemporary understanding of addiction, compulsory behavior, and child cognitive development, ensure that the social media platform does not engage in practices to evoke any addiction or compulsive behaviors in an Arkansas user who is a minor, including without limitation through notifications, recommended content, artificial sense of accomplishment, or engagement with online bots that appear human.

“Contemporary understanding of addiction” is doing a lot of work here, and it’s not up to the job. There is no consensus that social media constitutes addiction in any clinical sense. So it’s entirely unclear what a company would need to do here, which is fatal in a First Amendment context. And yet, the law is designed such that violations are strict liability and ridiculously broad. A plain reading of the law shows that it is not limited to addiction to the platform itself; a platform can apparently be held liable if its practices “evoke” addiction to off-platform activities. And the statute uses the singular “user,” meaning a single child’s response triggers liability.

As the court puts it:

Not only does Act 900 impose liability based on a single child’s response to the platform, it does so on a strict liability basis—a platform is liable for a practice the evokes addiction in a single child even if it could not have known through the exercise of reasonable care that the practice would have such an effect. “Businesses of ordinary intelligence cannot reliably determine what compliance requires.”

The state, realizing belatedly that it had written an unworkable law, asked the court to just sort of ignore the strict liability language and read in a specific intent requirement that doesn’t exist anywhere in the text. As the judge notes, that’s not how any of this works. The courts interpret the law as written and are not there to fix the legislature’s mistakes:

Instead of defending the statute the General Assembly enacted, Defendants ask the Court to rewrite it by ignoring the strict liability provision altogether and inserting a specific intent requirement that appears nowhere in the text. The Court cannot do so.

Then there’s the default provisions. The court was actually somewhat sympathetic to the idea that the state has a legitimate interest in helping kids sleep. The problem is that the law itself undermines that interest by letting parents flip the nighttime notification blackout off. And the government is not there to fix what parents refuse to do:

While Defendants justify the notification default as an aid to parental authority, they ignore their own evidence that parents are part of the problem. If parents wanted to prevent their children’s sleep from being disrupted by late-night notifications, they have a readily available, free, no-tech solution already at their disposal: taking devices away at night. Yet “86% of adolescents sleep with their phone in the bedroom.” …. The State has provided no evidence that parents lack the tools to assert their authority in this domain, so it appears unlikely that the State’s deferential approach to restricting nighttime notifications will actually serve its stated interest in ensuring minors get enough sleep. This “is not how one addresses a serious social problem.”

The privacy default is worse. It requires platforms to set privacy controls to their most restrictive level for minors — but says nothing about who can change them. Meaning, as the court notes, the minor can just… change them. The state argued this was necessary to protect children from sexual exploitation online. The court points out the obvious problem:

On the other hand, because the default can be changed by the minor, this provision is also wildly underinclusive. Defendants say children need this law to protect them from sexual exploitation online. But the law, in effect, allows children to decide whether they need protection from sexual exploitation online because they are free to depart from the protective default. As Defendants’ evidence shows, teenagers’ developing brains make them less likely than adults to appreciate the risks associated with, for example, making their profiles public… Like the notification default, while the burdens imposed by the privacy default may be slight, they do not appear likely to serve the State’s asserted interest at all. Imposing small burdens on vast quantities of speech for no appreciable benefit is not consistent with the First Amendment. Arkansas cannot sentence speech on the internet to death by a thousand cuts.

Any law that burdens First Amendment speech has to be tailored precisely to a compelling goal. And if it’s either under or over-inclusive, it’s going to have problems surviving. Making it such that kids could just turn off the privacy controls fails that test.

But the dashboard provision is where things get genuinely hilarious, in that dark way where you wonder if anyone read the bill before voting on it. Act 900 has three separate definitions for people who interact with platforms: “account holders,” “users,” and “Arkansas users.” The problem is that, according to the statute’s own definitions, a “user” is specifically someone who is not an account holder — in other words, just a visitor to the site who doesn’t have an account. Yes, it’s confusing. The court is confused. Everyone is confused.

Act 900 has one particularly noteworthy problem: “users.” Act 900 has three different definitions for relationships a person can have with a platform. First, an “account holder” is “an individual who primarily uses, manages, or otherwise controls an account or a profile to use a social media platform.” Id. sec. 1, § 4-88-1401(1). “Account holder” is not used in any of the Act’s operative provisions. Second, a “user” is “a person who has access to view all or some of the posts and content on a social media platform but is not an account holder.” Id. § 1401(12). Third, an “Arkansas user” is “an individual who is a resident of the State of Arkansas and who accesses or attempts to access a social media platform while present in this state.” Id. § 1401(2). “Arkansas users” include both “account holders” and “users,” but “users” are definitionally not “account holders.” The addictive practices provision and the default provisions therefore apply to all Arkansas minors, whether they have a social media account or are merely a website visitor. Worse, the dashboard provision applies only to minor “users,” not account holders.

Again: the dashboard provision requires platforms to build parental supervision tools for minor “users.”

Not account holders. Users. Which, as the court notes, definitionally does not include “account holders.” Meaning it only applies to… random anonymous visitors to the website. Those who have accounts… apparently aren’t covered?

As the court explains, taking the statute at its word would require platforms to:

(1) collect age information from everyone who visits a covered platform to identify minors; and (2) collect and store identity information for every minor who visits a platform to track their “use habits,” connect them with their parents, and effectuate “tools for a parent to restrict his or her minor child’s access.”

This is a law that claims to be about children’s privacy that accidentally requires mass surveillance and identity collection on every anonymous visitor to a website, just in case one of them turns out to be an Arkansas minor. The court openly “questions whether this was the General Assembly’s intended result” but notes it can’t just rewrite the statute because the legislature picked the wrong word. That’s on them. Just like the earlier provision that the state asked the court to quietly rewrite.

The Arkansas legislature does not appear to be a detail-oriented body.

Oh, and there’s also an audit requirement directing platforms to conduct quarterly audits to ensure their products aren’t “causing minors to engage in compulsory or addiction-driven behavior” — again, including off-platform behavior, apparently. How a platform is supposed to audit for behaviors that happen when users aren’t on the platform is left as an exercise for the reader.

What makes this all so maddening is that none of these problems are subtle. The “user” vs. “account holder” mixup is the kind of thing that any lawyer should catch on a close read. The strict liability plus singular “user” combination in the addictive practices provision is exactly the drafting error that made the 2023 law fail. The defaults that can be changed by the very minor they’re supposed to protect — that’s not a hard problem to spot.

There is a reason this pattern keeps repeating.

Passing an unconstitutional law to “protect the kids” from Big Tech generates headlines, press conferences, and signing ceremonies. Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders got to tweet about how “social media companies have gotten away with exploiting kids for profit” when she signed the original law. That made the news. The permanent injunction three years later, overturning that same law? Barely a ripple. Act 900 itself got its own round of celebratory press. The injunction we’re discussing here will get a fraction of that coverage.

The political asymmetry is kind of the point. State legislatures have figured out that there is essentially no downside to passing obviously unconstitutional social media laws. The upside is maximal: you get to posture as tough on Big Tech, protective of children, and responsive to moral panics about screens and teens. The downside — losing in federal court, wasting state resources on legal fees, and getting lectured by judges about basic First Amendment doctrine — happens quietly, years later, long after the political benefits have been banked.

Arkansas will almost certainly lose its appeal, and either way the legislature will be back next session with a new hastily drafted law that fixes some of Act 900’s problems while introducing fresh ones. And then that will get struck down. And then they’ll try again. Texas, Florida, California, Ohio, Utah, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and a growing list of other states are running the same play on roughly the same schedule.

The courts keep doing their jobs. NetChoice keeps winning. Judges keep writing careful opinions explaining, for what feels like the hundredth time, that strict scrutiny means what it means, vagueness doctrine exists for a reason, and you cannot simply compel platforms to do whatever you want because you have invoked The Children.

None of it matters to the incentive structure. The headline from the signing ceremony is worth more than the opinion from the courthouse. Until that changes — until voters start holding legislators accountable for passing laws that can’t survive even the most basic constitutional review — we’re going to keep reading rulings like this one. Arkansas just provided the latest installment. There will be more.

Kanji of the Day: 松 [Kanji of the Day]

松

✍8

小4

pine tree

ショウ

まつ

浜松 (はままつ) — Hamamatsu (city)
松原 (まつばら) — pine grove
若松 (わかまつ) — young pine
赤松 (あかまつ) — Japanese red pine (Pinus densiflora)
小松菜 (こまつな) — Japanese mustard spinach (Brassica rapa var. perviridis)
市松 (いちまつ) — check (pattern)
松林 (まつばやし) — pine forest
松葉 (まつば) — pine needle
門松 (かどまつ) — New Year's pine decoration
松明 (しょうめい) — torch (made of pine, bamboo, reed, etc.)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 喫 [Kanji of the Day]

喫

✍12

中学

consume, eat, drink, smoke, receive (a blow)

キツ

の.む

喫煙 (きつえん) — smoking (tobacco)
喫茶 (きっさ) — tea drinking
喫茶店 (きっさてん) — coffee shop
満喫 (まんきつ) — having one's fill (of food or drink)
喫煙者 (きつえんしゃ) — smoker
非喫煙者 (ひきつえんしゃ) — non-smoker
喫緊 (きっきん) — urgent
喫する (きっする) — to eat
喫煙所 (きつえんしょ) — smoking area
受動喫煙 (じゅどうきつえん) — passive smoking

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

The banal djinni [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Technology changes things. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.

When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us trivial conveniences.

We’re in the biggest moment of technical change of our lifetimes. What are you using your wishes for?

Hypocritically, The Origin Of The Supreme Court’s ‘Shadow Docket’ Was An Attempt To Curb Executive Power [Techdirt]

I originally began this headline with the word “ironically.” But it would only be ironic if it wasn’t by design. Irony suggests something slightly out of the control of the principal figures resulted in something somewhat unexpected.

That isn’t the case here. This was by design. The New York Times has obtained the behind-the-scenes memos issued by Supreme Court justices back in 2016, as they discussed responding to an “emergency” appeal related to questionably authorized application of the Environmental Protection Agency’s powers by then-president Barack Obama.

Here’s how that went, once the Supreme Court was finished with its backroom “discussion:”

For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

The Supreme Court never bothered to hear the case on its merits. The emergency appeal never resulted in the appellants being asked to submit briefings or engage in oral arguments. Instead, the 5-4 conservative majority decided to block Obama’s “Power Plan” via a single paragraph that made it clear Chief Justice John Roberts had not only pushed for this behind-the-scenes handling of the case, but had gotten what he wanted from the other justices.

But the internal discussion was anything but indicative of a majority view. John Roberts — citing no case law (but referring to TV interviews and EPA website posts) — claimed Obama was abusing his executive power by putting this plan into action. He also claimed this “emergency” ruling needed to be issued prior to the scheduled court recess because if SCOTUS failed to do so, immediate irreparable harm would be the result.

[Justice Roberts] argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.

This faux concern about immediate harm was contradicted (far more immediately) by the dissenting justices, beginning with Justice Stephen Breyer, who pointed out what the plan actually demanded in terms of timelines:

Justice Breyer responded later that day to the chief’s memo but did not address all its points. Such stays were unusual, he wrote, stating his objections mildly.

He skipped over the question of whether the plan was lawful, asking only: Why the rush? The circuit court had already set a date to hear the case in June. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions was six years away; full compliance was not required until 2030. That was plenty of time for the case to play out through the legal system.

John Roberts didn’t care. He wrote back, claiming the burdens placed on the power industry were too onerous. Why, if the plan were allowed to be enacted, Roberts said, companies across the entire nation might be expected to spend $480 billion over the next 15 years. To put that in context, the electric sector of the US power industry has made over $200 billion in profit over the last five years alone. Had this plan been allowed to move forward, states and utilities would have easily absorbed the cost of compliance. More likely, they would have just passed on the cost of compliance to customers, ensuring their profit margins remained where their investors preferred them to be.

Roberts claimed that without emergency back-door action, these utilities were “highly unlikely to survive.” Elena Kagan responded by pointing out that even if that might be the case, the nation’s top court was obligated to hear the case in court and rule on the merits, rather than issue a non-opinion that said nothing more than the majority was unwilling to allow Obama’s alleged executive power overreach.

That prompted Justice Alito to pitch in his expected two cents, which was this:

Echoing the chief justice’s sense of insult and suspicion about the Obama administration, he wrote that the E.P.A. appeared to be trying to render the court irrelevant.

And that, of course, is a sticking point for Alito, who has definitely done everything he can to prevent the Trump administration from… um… rendering the court irrelevant.

The context matters. First, this was a conservative majority trying to dump a “liberal” plan to make the US more reliant on clean energy because conservatives generally hate clean energy and it definitely looked like the Democratic Party might continue to hang on to this executive power when the only GOP candidate of interest was a pussy-grabbing loudmouth with zero political experience.

Second, another justice decided to exit the mortal plane at an inopportune time for the conservative majority:

The following Saturday morning, Justice Scalia failed to appear for breakfast at a weekend hunting retreat in Texas. Hours later he was found dead. As far as the public record reveals, the vote on the Clean Power Plan was his last. Had the court not acted with exceptional speed, the case would have ended in a deadlock and the Obama plan would have stayed in place.

The current makeup of the Supreme Court — as well as its newfound deference to executive power and excessive utilization of the “shadow docket” — can be traced back to these two events. The GOP managed to stonewall Obama’s Supreme Court appointee, allowing Trump to stack the court. And with the court now heavily tilted toward whatever it is that passes for “conservatism” these days (mostly white Christian nationalism, peppered heavily with president-as-king assertions), the shadow docket allows the justices who once pretended to be concerned about reining in executive power to allow this power to expand to the limits of its imagination.

Since this moment — now exposed by the publication of previously secret memos — two-thirds of the Supreme Court are now Constitutional Crisis hotline operators who refuse to answer any call that isn’t coming from the White House. Should the regime change following the next presidential election, we can only expect this hypocrisy to continue.

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Pluralistic: It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (22 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app: It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex machine.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: PKD named names; Weird Al v Lada Gaga; South Korean Olympic torture camps; McDonald's v ice-cream hackers.
Upcoming appearances: San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Barcelona, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC.
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.

It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (permalink)

If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."

(If I could abolish two pieces of received wisdom about tech policy, the other one would be "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Decent treatment is not a customer reward program, and "voting with your wallet" only works if you're a billionaire whose wallet is thicker than all the other wallets put together.)

To be clear, there are times when tech enables new forms of conduct that don't fit neatly into the existing policy framework. For example, we apply copyright to anyone who makes or handles a copy of a creative work, and that used to be a pretty good proxy for "someone in the supply chain of the media industry."

The problem is that computers work by making dozens and dozens of copies every time you click your mouse, and we all use computers for everything, and clicking a mouse doesn't make you part of the entertainment business. The fact that we've had hyperinflation in "making and handling copies" but continued to apply an esoteric industrial framework to pretty much everything everyone does all the time is a huge problem that desperately needs fixing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/

Copyright notwithstanding, tech generally does not outrun our capacity to regulate it. Rather, tech bosses come up with incredibly flimsy reasons why their business doesn't fit into the existing regulatory framework, and policymakers accept these ridiculous excuses so readily that one can only assume they're in on the racket.

Take "fintech," all those neobanks and the cryptocurrency junk and shitcoins and stablecoins and NFTs and so on that a group of pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers have pushed for more than a decade now. As Trashfuture's Riley Quinn says, "Whenever you hear 'fintech,' you should think 'unregulated bank.'" It's not hard to apply existing regulations to these companies: they fall under banking law, usury law, securities law and gambling law.

There's no (good) reason not to apply these legal frameworks to the crypto industry – but there are plenty of bad reasons not to. The most obvious reason not to apply those regulations is that you are on the same side as the pump-and-dumpers, money launderers and stock swindlers. The reason we struggle to regulate fintech is that we just don't want to.

Then there's Uber, which claimed that it wasn't a taxi company, it was a "transportation network company," which meant that none of the regulations we apply to taxis should apply to Uber. To call this a transparent ruse is to do great violence to the good, hardworking transparent ruses putting in the hard yards to run honest scams. "Uber isn't a taxi company, it's a transportation network company" is about as plausible as those t-shirts that read "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar-panel for a sex-machine."

Emboldened by the success of the "transportation network company" wheeze, Uber launched Uber Eats, claiming that it wasn't a "food delivery company" but rather a "delivery network company." This set up the template for a remorseless tide of new sex-machine solar-panels that have pushed Uber's system of wage-theft and worker misclassification into an expanding constellation of labor categories.

From fintech to price-fixing to gig-work, the entire industry runs on the very stupid proposition that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

One of the worst of these sex-machine solar-panels is to be found in nursing, where a cluster of heavily capitalized apps that nurses must rely on to get shifts insist that they aren't "healthcare staffing agencies," rather, they are "healthcare worker platforms" that should be exempted from the regulations that we started applying to the former after a string of calamities and disasters.

This phenomenon is detailed in eye-watering detail in "Uber For Nursing," a must-read new report by Katie J Wells, Maya Pinto, and Funda Ustek Spilda for the AI Now Institute:

https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing

If "Uber for nursing" rings a bell, you might be thinking of "Uber for Nursing: How an AI-Powered Gig Model Is Threatening Health Care," an earlier report that Wells and Spilda wrote for the Roosevelt Institute in late 2024:

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing/

The Roosevelt Institute report contained many eye-popping findings, most notably that at least some of the leading national nursing gig-work platforms were using data-brokers to find out how much debt nurses were carrying, and offered lower wages to the nurses with the most debt, on the grounds that the most economically desperate nurses will accept the lowest pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

The new report describes how, in the absence of a muscular policy response, these nursing gig-work companies have raised fantastic sums of money, some of which they have diverted to regulatory capture projects in a bid to states to recognize their solar-panel sex-machines, with great success. These companies haven't merely refined their lobbying game, either – as a sphincter-puckering appendix detailing the experience of nurses with these apps shows, they have also made great strides in immiserating nurses and transferring their earning power to gig platforms and the hospitals that rely on them.

This degradation of the work experience is characteristic of the new world of AI-powered jobs. AI isn't taking workers' jobs, but it is enshittifying them, with degrading, neurosis-inducing surveillance and high-handed discipline:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-does-it-mean-to-work-under-algorithmic-eyes

Algorithmic oversight is a terror for any worker, but it's particularly bad when applied to healthcare workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

But gig-work companies remain laser-focused on healthcare workers, likely because that is one of the only growing professions left in America. They're trying to screw over healthcare workers for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is." The implication here is that the 15% of the American workforce that is employed in the healthcare industry is on the front lines of the battle against gig-work and algorithmic management.

Like parasites that attack the sick and weak, gig-work and algorithmic management come first for industries that are already bad for workers and the people they serve, making things much worse while insisting that they're just trying to apply a cool digital fix to a broken analog system. That, too, was Uber's playbook: attacking the medallion taxi system as corrupt and sclerotic – while replacing it with a system that's corrupt, extractive and dynamic, able to evade all attempts to improve things for drivers and riders (such as drivers' unions).

That's what's happened with healthcare staffing agencies. These have long been a fixture in healthcare, partly because there was always a large cohort of skilled healthcare professionals who valued the flexibility of short term contracts (for example, "travel nurses") and partly because hospitals love hiring contractors who aren't part of their workers' unions.

Staffing agencies weren't good. A string of scandals led to waves of regulations in states like Colorado, Minnesota and New York that required agencies to "register annually, disclose shareholders and executive officers, certify worker credentials, report to state authorities on the number of workers employed, document service rates charged to facilities, and list average wages paid to workers by job category." These regulations also banned staffing agencies from locking up workers with noncompete agreements and ripping them off with finder's fees.

Rather than strengthening these protections, gig nursing platforms avoid them. Where staffing agencies secure multi-week contracts for travel nurses, gig platforms typically assign workers to single-day shifts. Where staffing agencies let nurses bargain for their scheduling needs, gig platforms present take-it-or-leave-it offers and no opportunities to speak to a human when things go wrong. And where staffing agencies evaluated the workers on their roster based on employer feedback, the gig platforms install apps that continuously surveil and evaluate workers, downranking them and cutting their hours and pay based on algorithmic judgments that are never explained and cannot be appealed.

Platforms match nurses with shifts, claiming to regulators that they're little more than a "job-notice board." But when they pitch hospitals, they tell a different story, about their ability to use algorithms to erode wages and blacklist workers who make trouble. Healthcare gig-work apps push workers to accept shifts that require more travel and pay less, at facilities they don't want to work at. Refusal to accept a shift can permanently compromise your ability to get future shifts, and/or lower the wage you're offered in future.

In addition to these poor working conditions and low wages, gig platforms have resurrected the prohibited practice of charging workers "finder's fees," by layering on junk fees that take money out of every paycheck. Staffing agencies aren't allowed to do this, but the gig-work platforms' "solar panel for a sex-machine" gambit transforms the finder's fee into a "platform fee" that somehow escapes regulators' grasp.

How is it that a regulator can't see that a "platform fee" is exactly equivalent to a "finder's fee?" This is not a case of technology outpacing regulation – it's a case of lawmakers colluding with profitable firms to evade regulation in order to steal from workers.

The platforms are aslosh in investor cash – Clipboard Health, Intelycare, and Shiftkey are all valued at more than $1b, and Shiftkey just completed a $300m private equity raise. This leaves them with lots of ready cash to spend on regulatory entrepreneurship. In Georgia, Clipboard lobbied "to exempt gig nursing platforms from state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation laws." In Ohio, Shiftkey and Clipboard are pushing a bill "to classify gig nurses as independent contractors, exempting gig platforms from minimum wage and other worker protection laws." In Utah, Nursa is praising a bill that a state senator called "lightest-touch regulation." All in all, 17 states have nurse gig platform deregulation bills underway.

In 2022, the healthcare gig-work platforms tried to get a California ballot measure to carve nursing platforms out of all state labor laws. They withdrew it, but pursued an "under the radar" approach to get the same thing by seeking changes in administrative rules, rather than state laws. Lobbying for administrative law changes to exempt healthcare gig-work platforms from regulation is also underway in Missouri, Louisiana and Utah.

One bright light in all this comes from New York state, where a 2025 law "affirmatively recognizes gig nursing platforms as entities that must comply with the state’s healthcare staffing agency rules." The existence of this law proves that the crisis of gig-work healthcare platforms is not an example of tech racing ahead of regulation. If New York's state leg can figure out that a gig-work platform is just a staffing agency in app form, then other states can do so as well. If they don't figure that out, that's because they don't want to.

Sometime in this century, our political class and our financial class arrived at a consensus that Douglas Rushkoff describes as "go meta," in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

The "go meta" ethos insists that the most important, smartest and most valuable move is always away from productive labor. Don't drive a cab: go meta and own a medallion that you rent to a cab driver. Don't own a medallion, go meta and start a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't start a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company. Don't invest in a gig-work ride-hailing company, go meta and buy options in a gig-work ride-hailing company – and so on and so on, into ever more abstracted forms of gambling and rent-collection.

The reorganization of the economy around parasitic middlemen and financial gamblers (but I repeat myself) is the real reason that we can't regulate tech. Once you've decided that the most important party to a transaction is the person who has the option on the share on the platform on the license that the worker who actually does the job requires, of course you're going to see a solar-panel for a sex-machine in every bald spot.

Hey look at this (permalink)

At Long Last, InfoWars Is Ours https://theonion.com/at-long-last-infowars-is-ours/
JD Vance Gave A Speech To Almost No One, And The Photos Are Wild https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/jd-vance-empty-appearance-pictures
Meanwhile, Zohran Is Just Getting Things Done https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/meanwhile-zohran-is-just-getting-things-done
America’s True Fascist Architectural Legacy https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ice-logistics-warehouses-detention-center-immigrant/
Allbirds shares soar on a very 2026 pivot to AI https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/15/investing/allbirds-pivot-to-ai

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago PKD ratted out other SF writers to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010428121230/https://www.linguafranca.com/print/0105/cover.html

#15yrsago Weird Al snubbed by Lady Gaga, releases his parody without permission as fair use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxXKfQkswE

#15yrsago How do you compete with free? A taxonomy of reasons to pay for digital files https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

#15yrsago iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go, transfer to your PC and subsequent devices https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears

#10yrsago Before 1988 Olympics, South Korea sent ‘vagrants’ to camps where rape and murder were routine https://web.archive.org/web/20160420234916/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants

#10yrsago Luxury overnight bus with sleeper cabins shuttles between LA and San Francisco https://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/sleepbus-gets-you-from-sf-to-la-for-50.html

#10yrsago Volkswagen’s internal Dieselgate probe stuck because the company used code-words for its cheat software https://web.archive.org/web/20160419095045/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-19/vw-cheating-code-words-said-to-complicate-emissions-probe

#10yrsago Chinese opsec funnies: your foreign boyfriend is a western spy! https://web.archive.org/web/20160420125125/https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/nsed/

#10yrsago UK Chancellor exempts families of “Politically Exposed Persons” from money laundering scrutiny https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/uks-osborne-exempts-members-of-parliament-other-politically-exposed-persons-from-money-laundering-oversight.html

#10yrsago Colorado school district wants to arm security staff with assault rifles https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2016/0419/Colorado-school-district-to-equip-security-workers-with-semiautomatic-rifles

#5yrsago McDonald's corporate wages war on ice-cream hackers https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

#5yrsago Real penalties for covid evicters https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

San Francisco: 2026 Berkeley Spring Forum on M&A and the Boardroom, Apr 23
https://www.theberkeleyforum.com/#agenda
London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
NYC: Enshittification at Commonweal Ventures, Apr 29
https://luma.com/ssgfvqz8
NYC: Techidemic with Sarah Jeong, Tochi Onyibuchi and Alia Dastagir (PEN World Voices), Apr 30
https://worldvoices.pen.org/event/techidemic/
Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
SXSW London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612
The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P
Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech

Latest books (permalink)

"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 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/)
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
"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, 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. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish [The Status Kuo]

Virginia voters approved a ballot referendum on Tuesday that could hand Democrats four additional congressional seats in November. It’s the latest move in a nationwide redistricting war that Donald Trump ignited less than a year ago and that has now, by most measures, backfired bigly.

The result was closer than advocates had hoped, but Virginia is still a more purple state than, say, California. And when all the votes are counted it will still be a comfortable win—around 3 to 4 points—driven by lopsided “yes” margins in the Northern Virginia suburbs, where many recently fired federal workers do not like Trump one bit.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) deserves credit for beating back the White House’s gerrymandering push. And he had this to say following the election results:

Last July, Donald Trump demanded that Texas draw five new Republican seats in the middle of a decade, igniting a chain reaction of corrupt MAGA state legislators attempting to rig the midterm elections. While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite.
Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.
We won Prop 50 in California, reclaimed a seat in Utah, pushed back extremists in Ohio and halted toxic GOP efforts in Indiana, New Hampshire, Nebraska and Kansas.

With this victory, it’s a good time to step back and review how we got here and what challenges lie ahead, even as we take a much-deserved victory lap! Go Virginia!

Subscribe now

Brushfire in Texas

In the summer of 2025, Trump summoned Texas Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map mid-decade. His express goal was to lock in a Republican House majority long before the 2026 midterms could punish his party. It was a calculated act of political arson, but because the universe has a good sense of humor, that same fire is now threatening his own party’s House majority.

This redistricting push did not emerge organically. Planning began among Trump’s advisers before his inauguration, spearheaded by the National Republican Redistricting Trust. The pitch was simple: Republicans hold a razor-thin House majority, just a couple seats above the 218 threshold to govern. The midterms historically punish the party in power. The only way to survive the 2026 cycle was to gerrymander key maps before any votes were cast.

Texas was the first state to oblige. The Lone Star State’s scheme to steal the election led to a dramatic walkout by state House Democrats who fled the state to deny quorum during the first special session and to draw national attention to the crisis. When the realities of staying away so long forced their return, a second legislative session produced a map targeting five Democratic-held seats, redrawn to favor Republicans by margins of R+10 to R+17 based on 2024 presidential results (keep that in mind for our later discussion).

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the maps into law on Aug. 29, and Missouri and North Carolina followed within weeks.

California knows how to contain infernos

The Texas Dems’ walkout had its desired effect: It lit the warning fires and put all Dems on notice of the danger. The Democratic response was swift and unambiguous. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had spent years championing the state’s independent redistricting commission, pulled a 180. He pushed hard for a ballot measure, Prop 50, to be decided in November 2025. If passed, it would enact a Democratic gerrymander designed to flip five or so Republican seats—all in response to the Texas steal.

The California GOP and Trump’s Justice Department sued, but a federal panel rejected the claim, finding the map was partisan gerrymandering permissible under current Supreme Court precedent. What’s good for the goose, as they say.

Prop 50 passed by a wide margin, and on Feb. 4, SCOTUS declined to hear an appeal, without comment or dissent. California’s temporary map was locked in for the 2026 midterms, effectively canceling out Texas’s map.

The Old Dominion raises the stakes

The 2025 Virginia elections changed what was possible in that state. Democrats swept all three statewide offices and retained their majorities in the House of Delegates and state Senate, delivering a clean trifecta. Democratic legislators then moved in October 2025 to propose a constitutional amendment allowing the legislature to take back redistricting power from the state’s own bipartisan commission. It was the same commission that Virginia voters had approved by nearly a 2-to-1 margin just five years earlier.

This was a bold and controversial move, driven in large measure by a political force of nature: L. Louise Lucas, the president pro tempore of the Virginia state Senate. After Trump announced his Texas plan, Lucas announced she would pursue a map producing a 10-1 House delegation, eliminating four Republican seats.

They passed that map last night.

Republicans labeled the move a blatant gerrymander, and in fairness, it was. But Democrats offered an important distinction. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who had once supported the bipartisan commission the map was now circumventing, said the national context had forced the issue: “What has changed is what we’re seeing in states across the country — and a president who says he is ‘entitled’ to more Republican seats before this year’s midterm elections.”

Both California and Virginia submitted their maps to voters via ballot measure. By contrast, Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina passed their maps through captured legislatures, behind closed doors, with no public ratification.

Moreover, the Democratic changes are temporary. Virginia’s amendment explicitly returns redistricting to the bipartisan commission after the 2030 census. California’s ballot measure carries a similar sunset provision. Republicans built their gerrymanders to last a decade, while Democrats built theirs to expire.

Trump, for his part, called the Virginia amendment “a blatant partisan power grab” during a tele-rally the night before the vote, warning that a “yes” result would leave Virginia Republicans “wiped out in terms of representation in Washington.” It was the best messaging he could have given voters who actually want to see that happen. Of course, Trump neglected to mention that he had personally launched the redistricting wars by pressuring Texas to engineer exactly that outcome for Democrats there.

The Scoreboard

Let’s pull back from Virginia for a moment and look at the full battlefield.

On the Republican side: Texas drew a map targeting five Democratic seats, currently in effect after a Supreme Court order blocked a lower-court ruling that found it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. North Carolina passed a map aimed at flipping the state’s one remaining swing seat now held by Rep. Don Davis (D-NC), whose district has had continuous Black congressional representation for over 30 years. Missouri passed a gerrymander targeting one seat, despite a citizen petition drive to force a public vote, only to have the Republican secretary of state and a partisan judge run out the clock. Ohio’s bipartisan commission produced a map favoring Republicans by one to two additional seats. GOP gross seat potential: roughly eight to nine seats.

On the Democratic side: California’s map is set, potentially gaining five or even six seats. A court-ordered map in Utah adds one to two more. Virginia, if tonight’s result survives the courts, adds four. Democratic gross potential: ten to twelve seats.

That means that before Virginia’s vote, the running count had Republicans up by a couple seats on the redistricting battlefield. Virginia flipped that margin.

Republican dummymanders are a real thing now

When a party gerrymanders so aggressively that it backfires, political scientists somewhat derisively call this a “dummymander.” It has happened in Texas before: In 2018, backlash against Trump’s first term flipped two Texas seats that Republicans had considered safe. The 2025 GOP map may be running the same dumb play.

To create five new Republican-leaning seats, Texas mapmakers had to crack Democratic-heavy urban districts and push displaced Democratic voters into neighboring Republican-held districts, making those districts “softer” targets.

Moreover, the new GOP-leaning seats were drawn using 2024 presidential election data, when Trump was at the peak of his strength with Latino voters in South Texas. That assumption is now wobbling badly. A University of Houston/Texas Southern University poll last September found only 41 percent of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 would do so again, down from 53 percent. That number is likely far lower today. A recent Democratic win in a Tarrant County special election underscores this. The Democratic candidate won by 14 points in a district Trump had carried by 17. That’s a stunning swing.

The Brookings Institution has concluded the new Texas map will most likely net Republicans two seats, not five, and that in a genuine wave, Republicans could actually lose seats they believed were safe.

Florida could be walking into the same trap this week. Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map. But Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political scientist, warned of the risk: “It’s possible you end up with, instead of a gerrymander, what we might call a dummymander. You’ve tried to help yourself but ended up hurting your own party and you lose seats.” That warning came right after Democrats flipped a Florida state House seat in Palm Beach—the county that includes Mar-a-Lago.

As Jeffries warned in his statement last night,

If Florida Republicans proceed with this illegal scheme, they will only create more prime pick-up opportunities for Democrats, just as they did with Trump’s dummymander in Texas. We will aggressively target for defeat Mario Díaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Kat Cammack, Anna Paulina Luna, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills and Brian Mast. We are prepared to take them all on, and we are prepared to win.
Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.

Now, that is the fighting spirit Dems need to retake the House.

Court challenges

We’re not out of the woods yet. Republicans have repeatedly sought to stop the Virginia plan in the courts. A Tazewell County circuit judge, who had run for the Virginia House of Delegates in 1999 as a Republican, twice ruled the amendment was unlawful, once in January and again in February, each time on different grounds. But the Virginia Supreme Court overruled both injunctions and allowed the election to proceed, setting oral arguments for April 27, six days after the election.

No one can predict how that court will rule, but it would certainly be unusual for a traditional conservative-minded court to overturn the will of both the legislature and the people on the kinds of technicalities that the Republicans raise. We’ll know more in a week.

The larger wild card is at the federal level. The Supreme Court is set to issue its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A broad ruling could allow Republican-controlled states to redraw majority-minority districts in states like Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. This would reopen the redistricting board in ways that could dwarf anything Democrats gained in California or Virginia.

Election watchers are paying close attention to the opinion’s timing. If it arrives in June, that may not be enough time for red states to change their maps ahead of November’s midterms.

Trump’s hubris and his nemesis

The ancient Greeks had a precise word for what Donald Trump did in the summer of 2025. It wasn’t pride exactly. It was hubris.

To the Greeks, hubris referred to a specific kind of public overreach: the act of a powerful man who, flush with victory, reaches for more than the gods have allotted. The offense isn’t ambition. It is the assumption that the cosmic rules governing lesser beings no longer apply.

What followed in their telling was nemesis, named after the goddess of retribution. It describes how overreach generates its own undoing. With hubris and nemesis, a powerful man does not fall because someone defeats him. He falls because his own act of reaching throws the cosmos out of balance and sets forces in motion he cannot control.

Trump won the presidency, the Senate and the House—the latter by a thread. But he decided that wasn’t enough. He reached for the map itself, pressuring states to redraw district lines before voters could render a verdict on his administration. It was not enough to have power. He wanted power insulated from accountability.

Instead, he handed his opponents both a playbook and a rallying cry. California was the first to answer, Utah’s courts followed, and Virginia joined the fight last night. The forces Trump set in motion—i.e., mid-decade redistricting as a legitimate tool of political warfare—will outlast his administration and remain available to any Democratic majority that chooses to use them. (Hello, New York…) Trump has handed his opponents the very weapons he could least afford them to use.

The redistricting wars have shown that democratic institutions don’t preserve themselves through the virtue of one party alone. To end gerrymandering, in many key states Democrats had created non-partisan redistricting commissions, but the GOP took advantage of their good faith efforts. So Democrats adapted, moved quickly and came out fighting. They learned that preserving democracy sometimes requires battling on the terrain your opponents have chosen, with the very tools they normalized.

Border Message [xkcd.com]

04:00 AM

Stop Begging Big Tech To Fix Your Social Media Experience. You Can Do It Yourself. [Techdirt]

Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate.

I’ve written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking back control over the open web. I know this is not a popular opinion with many Techdirt readers, but I’m hoping some of you will read through this to try to understand and engage with the points I’m making here. I truly do believe that if used well and appropriately, these tools can serve to put power back into the hands of users, rather than giant centralized companies who are more interested in exploiting your attention.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with an AI-powered tool that Bluesky has released (much to the chagrin of many users) to a relatively small group of early beta testers. I think the negative reaction to the product announcement is understandable, given the general distrust of all AI tools, but it’s really worth examining what this tool is and what it can enable, including really empowering people to take back control over their own social experience. It literally gives you a path to routing around Bluesky’s own design features if you don’t like them.

Yes, a lot of AI is overhyped garbage being shoved at people who don’t want it — but that doesn’t mean the underlying tools can’t be useful when applied carefully by those who choose to use the tools appropriately.

It means not outsourcing your brain to the tool, but rather using it the way any skilled person automates some aspect of work that they do. I’ve sanded and restained the floors of my house, and while I could have done the whole thing by hand with a stack of sandpaper, it was helpful to rent a floor sander from a local hardware store, learn how to use it properly, and then use it so that I could finish the job in a day rather than weeks. I view AI tools the same way. If you learn how to use them properly, as an assistive tool rather than a replacement for your brain, they can help you accomplish useful things.

Let me give an example: a couple of weeks ago, law professor Blake Reid wrote a short thread on Bluesky about how he needed to take a break from social media, because he worried that it was eating up too much of his time and he was better off just stopping cold turkey, to avoid getting sucked into unproductive discussions that push him to (as he put it) “get over my skis” in engaging in conversations where he’s tempted to weigh in despite not having much expertise (a common thing on social media). It’s a worthwhile thread.

But in that thread he mentioned that he was hopeful that maybe some day technology itself could help him use social media in a healthier way, to dial back how much time he spent on it, and get him focused on the more productive and useful discussions (which he admits also happen regularly on Bluesky).

What was amusing to me was that the only reason I saw that post by Reid was because I’ve been beta testing a new tool that… kinda does that. When he wrote that thread, I was actually on vacation, hiking in the National Parks in Utah, and mostly offline. But in the evenings, I would check in, and rather than sorting through everything I missed on social media that day, I had a tool just show me things that I would find useful that I might have missed.

But using an AI tool, I had built an entirely personalized news aggregator, which had access to my Bluesky account, Techdirt’s RSS feed, and the knowledge that I had been out all day and wanted not just a summary of what news might be interesting to me as the editor of Techdirt, but also what people on Bluesky were saying about it. Here’s a screenshot of what my first attempt at this looks like:

The tool that let me do this is an advanced version of Attie, which I also recognize is extremely controversial among users on Bluesky, many of whom vocally have expressed their hatred of the very idea of it when it was announced last month. But, my main interest is in figuring out to empower users who want to take control over their own social experience, and this seems like a clear example of that. I’ll note that this version of Attie has not yet rolled out to most of the beta testers (I believe some have access to it — but this is one small benefit of being on the board).

Honestly, I think the way Bluesky announced Attie may have done it an injustice, positioning it as a kind of AI-powered feed generator. There are multiple other feed generator tools for Bluesky out there, many of which are really fantastic. For a while now I’ve used both Graze.social and Surf.social to make AI-powered feeds (which never seemed to generate much controversy).

But generating feeds alone isn’t all that interesting. With the more advanced version of Attie, I can take much more control over my entire social experience. The fact that with a single prompt I could build that personalized aggregator (based not just on my own feed, but Techdirt’s RSS) is something more powerful, including the fact that the tool knows to summarize a whole days’ worth of posts, because I’m trying to see in a glance if there’s anything relevant for Techdirt and I’d been offline the entire day.

Rather than just letting a single company (in this case Bluesky) define my entire experience for me, I can vibe-code my social experience. I can tell it not just the types of content I want to see, but how I want to see it. And for what reason. And how much (or how little) content to show me. And with what context around it. It’s all based on what I expressly want. Not what any company thinks I want.

And I keep experimenting with other versions of this as well. In one test, I had it also try to summarize stories and tell me why it thought I’d find them useful for Techdirt:

In this case it not only found a story that is interesting to me, but it suggested multiple sources for me to read about it, even noting (for example) that Professor Eric Goldman’s blog post is “the definitive blog post” for my coverage (it’s not wrong).

I go back to the piece I wrote a little while back about the kind of learned helplessness of social media users. We’ve had two decades of billionaires deciding exactly how they wanted to intermediate your social experience. How your feed looks. What kind of algorithm you’ll see. What sorts of content will be put in your feed. They got to focus on engagement maxxing. You just had to deal with it.

In such a world, the only thing users felt they could do in response was to yell. They could yell at the CEOs of these platforms. Or at the government, telling them to yell at the CEOs of these platforms.

But with an AI tool that explores an open social ecosystem, you don’t need to yell at a CEO or a regulator. You can just tell the tool what you want, what you don’t want, how you want (or don’t want) to see it, and what context would be useful. It puts you in control.

And yes, sometimes it makes mistakes. It can recommend a story I’m not interested in. But, then I can just tell it that such and such story isn’t useful and why… and it will update the system for me.

Once again, I understand that some people hate any and all uses of AI. And I’m not suggesting you have to run out and use the tools yourself. You do you. But showing concrete use cases where these tools actually deliver more user agency — more control over your online environment, rather than deferring to the whims of any particular company — matters.

The larger point here isn’t really about Attie specifically (indeed, anyone could build their own version of this thanks to open protocols). It’s that for two decades, users have been trained to believe their only options are to accept whatever a platform gives them, or yell loudly enough that someone powerful might change it. That’s the learned helplessness I wrote about earlier, and it’s corrosive.

Tools like this — built on open protocols, not locked inside a corporate walled garden — represent a different path. One where you don’t petition a billionaire for a better feed algorithm. You don’t petition the government to try to put time limits on social media. You just build the experience you want. You tell it to make you a better interface that matches what you want. You tell it you don’t want to spend that much time. That’s what “protocols, not platforms” actually looks like in practice, helped along by agentic tools, and it’s why I think this matters well beyond whether any particular AI tool is good or not.

02:00 AM

DSA-6228-1 cpp-httplib - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6228-1

DSA-6227-1 strongswan - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6227-1

DSA-6226-1 packagekit - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6226-1

Wednesday 2026-04-22

11:00 PM

The Broken U.S. Press Sits Down For Cocktails And Giggles With Fascists [Techdirt]

This Saturday is the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCA). And there’s been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corrupt administrations in U.S. history.

This year, because an actual comedian might get somewhere close to the truth about the country’s collapse, the whole thing is being hosted by a “mentalist.”

The WHCA organizers have been largely weak-kneed about the event, stating they are “happy” Mr. Trump accepted their invitation, and are looking “forward to hosting” a guy who has murdered whatever was left of U.S. public media, filed countless baseless lawsuits against press outlets for doing journalism, and consistently threatened network broadcast licenses just because comedians made jokes.

A coalition of more than 250 journalists wrote a letter to the WHCA and attendees, begging them to demonstrate something resembling a backbone. But even these calls for action from other journalists feel pathetic:

“We understand that some journalists plan to wear pocket handkerchiefs or lapel pins with the words of the First Amendment. And continuing in that spirit, we believe the White House Correspondents Association should take stronger action by issuing — from the podium — a forceful defense of freedom of the press and condemnation of those who threaten that freedom, followed by a standing toast to the First Amendment and a pledge to continue upholding such a critical cornerstone of our democracy.”

This would all be slightly more palatable if U.S. journalism hadn’t so catastrophically failed to meet the moment during our authoritarian era. As far as the eye can see, corporate journalism (with occasional and welcome exception) has been a pathetic mess; normalizing, validating, and often even encouraging our bumbling, violent, and extremely racist kakistocracy.

It’s a little late for jokes. And a toast to the First Amendment over smoked salmon-potato chip canapés doesn’t mean much at this point, if it ever did.

The coverage of the event has been almost as pathetic as the journalists planning to attend. New York Times columnist Michael Grynbaum, for example, actually put these words down in print:

“Mr. Trump, whose instinct for crowd work and note-perfect timing have drawn comparisons to the insult comic Don Rickles, will almost certainly take a few potshots. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on social media that the evening “will be fun!”

Good times.

Brendan Carr will be in attendance. I’m sure there will be some good natured ribbing about his efforts to illegally censor critics of the administration, destroy legitimate journalism, and dismantle the First Amendment. Some real zingers about his total destruction of consumer protection and corporate oversight (just kidding, nobody in the U.S. media cares about any of that). Maybe some light guffaws at his most recent efforts to harass comedians for telling jokes.

After that, maybe some light quips about the fact this administration used a masked gestapo to murder American civilians in the street. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Granted there are some that correctly argue that schmoozing with the wealthy and powerful you cover was never a good idea in the first place. Especially in a country where the press is so increasingly and clearly captured by the extraction class and corporate power:

“As elite journalists wring their hands over whether it is hypocritical to attend this year’s dinner or mount a quiet protest by wearing First Amendment lapel pins and pocket squares, I would rather they acknowledge that a red-carpet schmoozefest with the powerful sources they cover was never a good idea. The annual rationalizing that it’s just a show of civility to party with the people one covers doesn’t overcome the public’s skepticism about our independence. What was once (a fairly long time ago) a well-intended night of fundraising and camaraderie among professional adversaries is now simply a bad look.”

There will certainly be some spotty (and maybe even genuinely funny) useful criticism of Trump on Saturday. He’ll probably mostly love it, because it normalizes his vile corruption and makes for good television. But there’s very little attendees could do or say at this point that can make up for the broader industry’s abject failure to meet the moment. The cost has simply been too high and the failure too great.

Give your money to worker-owned and independent media organizations (like Techdirt!) with a backbone.

09:00 PM

DSA-6225-1 firefox-esr - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6225-1

DSA-6224-1 xdg-dbus-proxy - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6224-1

DSA-6223-1 flatpak - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6223-1

03:00 PM

Amazon Prime Broadcast Fails Completely During Several Minutes Of NBA Playoff Game [Techdirt]

With the streaming world turning into a wild, chaotic, fractured mess, there is no better example of how terrible this can all be than with live sports. We’ve already seen all kinds of issues among streaming services when it comes to sports. Buffering live games piss people off. Exclusivity deals worked out among several services for a single league can make finding where a game is being showed a Sherlock-ian experience. Local blackout rules abound and suck for the consumer.

But if there is one thing a streaming service cannot do, it’s got to be buying the exclusive rights to important games and then throwing “technical difficulties” at the viewer. And that’s exactly what happened during part of an overtime period in an NBA playoff game between the Hornets and the Heat. For several minutes at the start of the overtime period, the stream simply cut out.

As reported by ESPN, Prime Video started showing a message that read “technical difficulties” seconds after cutting off the game’s commentator in the middle of a sentence. Viewers missed a Hornets possession that included a score by LaMelo Ball. By the time the stream came back online, 22.1 seconds of playing time had passed, per ESPN, and viewers were dismayed.

“Tell me the game didn’t just cut off?!!? Am I trippin?? WTH,” LeBron James, a Los Angeles Lakers player who previously won two championships with the Heat, said, adding a face-planting emoji, on X.

Prime Video’s fumble is made worse by the fact that the streaming service had exclusive rights to air the game. The only other way to experience the game was in person or by listening to select radio stations.

Imagine someone signed up for Prime because of this deal with the NBA. Sure, that isn’t going to be a huge percentage of the viewership, but it won’t be zero percent of it, either. To have the stream cut out in the opening minutes of overtime is going to be incredibly frustrating.

It’s also worth noting that more traditional broadcasts also have had equipment failures, but they don’t have the resources Amazon has. And, frankly, Amazon’s streaming service doesn’t have the best reputation to begin with.

The latter point is especially concerning because, after four years of this, viewers are still complaining about audio-syncing problems on Prime Video this season. We’ve experienced this firsthand at Ars Technica and have heard commentators announce a completed three-point shot before the stream shows it happening.

“The entire year the audio has been a split second ahead of the video on half of the Amazon games we’ve watched,” Bill Simmons, a former sportswriter and current host of The Bill Simmons Podcast, said in today’s episode: “The three-pointer’s halfway toward the basket. It’s like, ‘BANG! It’s good!’ And you hear the crowd, and it’s, like, the ball hasn’t even gone in yet. How have we not figured this out yet? You guys, [Amazon], have 8 kajillion dollars.”

At some point, the NBA itself is going to have to step in here, because its reputation is going to take a hit along with Amazon’s. The league risks alienating fans that are pissed off that the league foisted broadcast partners that apparently can’t deliver a product of the quality of cable TV, of all entities. And I refuse to believe that these streaming contracts don’t come with contractual requirements for quality of service.

Streaming is both the present and the future. It isn’t going away. Neither are live sports. This has to be figured out and delivered in a way that fans don’t completely miss important parts of games. The alternative is lost fans for the leagues and I can promise you that won’t be stood for.

09:00 AM

Kash Patel’s Defamation Suit Against The Atlantic Is Designed To Generate Headlines, Not Win In Court [Techdirt]

There are defamation lawsuits designed to win, and then there are defamation lawsuits designed to generate headlines for your fans on social media, punish journalists, and maybe — if you’re lucky — force a settlement or intimidate future reporting. FBI Director Kash Patel’s brand new defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic is very obviously the second kind.

On Friday, The Atlantic published a truly devastating profile of Patel, reporting that “more than two dozen” current and former officials described a director who shows up to Ned’s in DC and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas to drink until he is visibly drunk, and who has been difficult to wake on occasions when his security detail needed him. There’s also this fun anecdote in the opening, talking about a time, earlier this month, when Patel had trouble logging into his computer:

He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”

That’s just kinda amusing, but there are a lot more serious concerns, such as the fact that the nation’s top cop is (according to the article): “often away or unreachable, delaying time-sensitive decisions needed to advance investigations.”

The article included a response from Patel, attributed to him by the FBI: “Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court — bring your checkbook.”

On Monday, represented by MAGA-world’s go-to lawyer Jesse Binnall, Patel did exactly that, filing a 19-page complaint in federal court in DC seeking $250 million in damages.

The complaint is, to put it charitably, not great. To put it less charitably, it reads like a press release with a case caption stapled to the top.

Let’s start with the central legal problem, because it’s kinda fatal. Patel is indisputably a public official — he runs the FBI — which means under New York Times v. Sullivan, he has to plead and eventually prove that The Atlantic published with “actual malice,” meaning with knowledge that the statements were false, or with reckless disregard for their truth or falsity — a legal term of art that requires showing the publisher actually suspected the statements were false and deliberately avoided finding out, not merely that they moved quickly or relied on anonymous sources. This is a very high bar. It’s been a high bar since 1964. Every lawyer who files a defamation case for a public figure is supposed to know that this is the hill they have to climb.

Here is how the complaint attempts to plead actual malice:

Defendants’ conscious decision to ignore the detailed, specific, and substantive refutations in the Pre-Publication Letter, and their refusal to give a reasonable amount of time for the FBI and Director Patel to respond, is among the strongest possible evidence of actual malice.

In other words: Patel denied it, The Atlantic published anyway, therefore actual malice. There is no real attempt to plead actual malice beyond that.

That’s not actual malice. That’s just how journalism works. Every news story that anyone has ever complained about in history has been published after the subject denied it. If “the subject denied it and you published anyway” were sufficient to establish actual malice, the First Amendment would be a dead letter and every investigative story ever written would generate a winning lawsuit.

Yes, those filing SLAPP lawsuits often claim that their subjects’ denials constitute actual malice — but that’s not how it works in court, and it never has been.

And we know this argument doesn’t work because we just watched a judge throw out Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal for making essentially this exact argument. That was all of a week ago. A public figure’s denial, followed by publication, is not actual malice. A court said that a week ago. This is well-known, settled law. Binnall surely knows this. Patel’s filing this suit anyway.

The complaint does gesture weakly at some other theories — that the anonymous sources were “partisans with axes to grind,” that The Atlantic imposed a two-hour comment deadline, that there was “editorial animus” evidenced by prior Atlantic coverage. But even stacked together, these don’t get you to actual malice. Relying on anonymous sources isn’t reckless disregard—it’s how journalism works. Short deadlines for comment aren’t evidence of malice either; they’re standard operating procedure for breaking news. Prior negative coverage doesn’t even come close to the legal standard, since public figures doing controversial things tend to get criticized.

There’s also the fact that the complaint tries to twist statements by anonymous sources which the Atlantic reported on as The Atlantic’s own speech. Almost every one of the 19 allegedly defamatory statements enumerated in paragraph 18 is, on the face of the article, attributed to anonymous sources. For example, count 18(e) claims that a request for ‘breaching equipment’ — “normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings” — was made because Patel was unreachable. The complaint states:

Fitzpatrick knows that her anonymous sources, unwilling to go on the record, are partisans with axes to grind and are not in a position to know the facts.

“Partisans with axes to grind” is not relevant to the actual malice standard. And, come on. Anonymous sources not willing to go on the record accusing a man who runs the FBI and is famously vindictive toward his perceived enemies… is not exactly a shocking revelation.

Almost all of the claims are like this. “According to multiple people familiar with the request.” “According to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials.” “According to the more than two dozen people I interviewed.”

The Atlantic’s defense (if it even gets that far) is therefore not going to need to be “we can prove Kash Patel was drunk at Ned’s.” It’s going to be “multiple credible sources told us this, we reported what they said along with corroborating evidence, and we have our notes, emails, and recordings to prove that’s what they told us.” That’s a fundamentally different — and far easier — thing to defend. Publishers aren’t required to prove the absolute truth of everything their sources say. They’re required to not publish with reckless disregard for the truth, which requires evidence about what the publisher knew or suspected, not what turned out to be the ultimate truth of the matter.

The Atlantic had multiple sources for each of its claims. It has corroborating evidence to support the claims. That is not a situation that says actual malice. It’s a situation that says “we did careful reporting.”

The complaint doesn’t grapple with this distinction at all. It just keeps repeating that the FBI told The Atlantic the claims were false before publication, as if that’s the end of the story. It isn’t. Subjects of investigative reporting deny things all the time. Publishers weigh denials against their sources and decide whether to publish based on all of the evidence they’ve collected. The First Amendment protects that decision-making process precisely so that powerful officials can’t just deny critical stories into non-existence.

In theory, there’s also the issue of discovery. Whenever cases like this get filed, people on social media say things like “can’t wait for discovery.” But cases like this rarely even get to the discovery stage. The Atlantic will almost certainly file for a motion to dismiss, which almost always happens pre-discovery, and a failure to competently plead actual malice is a good reason for the case to be tossed at that stage, without any discovery.

But also, given that Patel was famously seen on video chugging a beer at the Olympics in the Men’s Hockey locker room, it seems like Patel himself might not be all that interested in discovery either.

Of course, the goal was never to win. The goal was to file. And, sure some people will point to Trump’s settlements with news orgs, but those were to the president himself, and quite clearly designed to curry favor. As powerful as the FBI director is, it’s doubtful that the Atlantic is looking to curry favor with the FBI director via a settlement.

And that brings us to the other tell: the Streisand Effect. The complaint itself complains how much attention the article — again talking about how various officials in the FBI were concerned about situations where the FBI director appeared to be blackout drunk — got some attention on the internet.

The Article was widely disseminated on the internet, through AMG’s magazine and associated platforms, and was foreseeably republished, summarized, and discussed throughout national and international media.

Ya think?

Patel’s response to this alleged injury was to file a $250 million lawsuit — an action guaranteed to drive far more traffic to the very article he says is destroying his reputation. Every news outlet that covers the lawsuit links to or summarizes the original piece. Every social media post about the suit reintroduces the allegations to people who had never seen them. If your complaint is that too many people read the story, filing a splashy nine-figure lawsuit is a strange way to handle it.

None of this is an accident or a rookie mistake. This is how Binnall — and his predecessor in this particular niche, Steven Biss — have always done it.

Long-time Techdirt readers may recall that we first covered Kash Patel filing a SLAPP suit all the way back in 2019, when he was a White House staffer and former Devin Nunes aide. He used Steven Biss — Nunes’s own go-to lawyer for suing critics, satirical Twitter cows, and journalists — to sue Politico over accurate reporting about Fiona Hill’s congressional testimony. That complaint, like this one, read more like a press release than a pleading, opening with a tirade about “weaponized media” and “partisan hacks and character assassins who work to advance the interests and agendas of dark money.”

Biss specialized in filing SLAPP suits for MAGA figures. Most of them lost. He filed so many of them that when he had a stroke in 2023, his law license was eventually suspended on impairment grounds, and a bunch of his cases had to be handed off to someone else. That someone else was mostly Jesse Binnall, who promptly continued the losing streak. The Flynn family’s SLAPP suit against CNN? Tossed. Patel’s own 2024 threat letter to MSNBC commentator Olivia Troye? Answered with a Monty Python reference.

Filing is the point. Winning is beside it. These suits generate favorable headlines in friendly media, signal aggression to critics, raise the cost of covering the subject, and — if everything goes perfectly — get a defendant to settle just to make the expense go away. Whether they actually prevail on the merits is beside the point for the filer. Binnall has built a practice around this model. Patel has used that practice repeatedly across multiple roles over the last few years.

This is a textbook SLAPP, and it’s a good reminder of why we need anti-SLAPP laws to begin with.

Which brings us to a frustrating final wrinkle: the case was filed in federal court in DC, and while DC has an anti-SLAPP statute, the DC Circuit ruled a decade ago that it doesn’t apply in federal court. On top of that, the DC Court of Appeals more recently invalidated part of the law’s fee-shifting provisions. So even though DC ostensibly has protections against exactly this kind of lawsuit, The Atlantic basically can’t use them here. This is a pattern repeated across the country — patchwork state laws, some strong, some weak, many with large loopholes, and many federal circuits have barred their use in federal courts.

This is why we need a federal anti-SLAPP law, and why we need strong anti-SLAPP laws in every state and territory. The people who file these lawsuits know exactly which jurisdictions lack them, and they file accordingly. The asymmetry — where the cost of filing a meritless suit is minimal for the plaintiff, while the cost of defending it is substantial for the defendant — is exactly what makes the SLAPP tactic work. Anti-SLAPP laws with robust fee-shifting flip that equation, making bad-faith plaintiffs think twice.

Absent that, we’re left with the situation we have now: the head of the nation’s federal law enforcement agency uses a $250 million defamation suit as a political messaging tool, filed by a lawyer whose track record of losing these cases is long and detailed. The Atlantic will likely win on a motion to dismiss. Patel will get his headlines. And a lot more people will have read about Kash Patel’s alleged drinking habits than ever would have otherwise.

For the supposed “free speech party,” filing vexatious SLAPP suits against investigative reporters has become a rite of passage — a way of making clear there’s a price for making the people in power look bad.

08:00 AM

You Can’t Vote Out Amazon Web Services: Fighting Internet Contracts One Library At A Time [Techdirt]

For nearly twenty years, I’ve used Google Docs for most of my writing: class notes, personal notes, a novel in progress, research, activism, and my day job. It’s become an essential piece of infrastructure for me, an archive of my life and evolving interests.

In order to sign up for Google Drive, I presumably had to read a Terms of Service agreement provided to me by Google. Every once in a while I’ll get an email telling me that the Terms of Service have changed, which I almost always immediately delete without reading. Even if I tried to read what’s been changed, I’d be faced with a 4,500 word document that contains approximately 43 outbound URLs to Terms of Service for other Google entities, which links me out to others indefinitely, an infinity of terms. Even if I could read the terms and didn’t like them, I’d still be stuck with Google Docs; eventually someone at work would ask me to review a document.

We sign these contracts constantly, a kind of digital decision fatigue that’s overlooked in most conversations about tech law and policy. Whether or not you believe that participation in digital life requires a contract at all, clickthrough and wraparound contracts that contain thousands of words, links, and subsections are disempowering to the public and potentially disastrous when enforced.

Want to reserve a table at your favorite restaurant? You’re now subject to OpenTable’s arbitration clause. Texting your friends? You’ve granted WhatsApp a worldwide license to reproduce and create derivative works from everything you send or receive. I couldn’t even sign my own divorce paperwork without consenting to Docusign using my agreement in AI training data.

The contracts attached to most digital services are called “contracts of adhesion,” “take it or leave it” contracts where the terms are set by a stronger party and the only way to walk away is if you can choose another service, which you generally cannot in a world where a handful of companies control the majority of commerce and cloud services on the internet.

Clickthrough contracts of adhesion live in a gray regulatory area, but even though they function as a “mutant form of contract law,” they are generally considered enforceable. Last year, Cathy Gellis wrote on this blog about a particularly egregious case concerning the arbitration clause in a Disney+ agreement. After a woman died of a severe food allergy at one of the parks, Disney argued that they could not sue the company because her husband had signed up for a free trial of Disney+ several years prior.

Lots of scholars point out that laws and constitutions act like contracts of adhesion in certain ways – I live in North Carolina and I vehemently oppose recent transphobic House bills. However, I can, at least in theory, vote those motherfuckers out. I cannot vote out Amazon Web Services or Zoom, which I need for my work. Unlike bad legislation, I can’t organize my neighbors to throw them out either.

Binding contractual agreements for every single digital service has become a tool companies exploit at the expense of consumer rights that makes us even less safe on the internet, and it’s pure enshittification. Even if negotiability is impractical, contracts should be short, human readable, and consumer friendly. Using the internet shouldn’t force me to waive my right to a class action lawsuit, my ability to own a book, or to my own palm print.

How are we supposed to build democracy as an informed electorate when we have, in the words of Brendan Ballou, “lost access to our own justice system” through the nearly universal forced arbitration provisions in terms of service? How am I supposed to participate fully in a market economy when basically every contract I sign online creates an “accountability sink” where no one is responsible for a company’s failings except the system itself? How can I learn to exercise informed consent when I’m constantly clicking through terms of service that I both can’t read or actually consent to? How can I participate in society if everyone is using a tool but I object to its terms of use?

Combatting terms of service and licensing abuses takes a proactive and practical approach. Under the Biden administration, the FTC began to regulate these contracts, but now the regulatory locus has shifted back to the consumer. Even though the government is not coming to save us, we don’t have to live out the rest of our lives as digital peons in a rentier economy.

My organization Library Futures has launched a program to provide counsel in contract negotiation and terms setting for libraries – a DIY contract center in the public interest. No other institution is buying digital content at the same rate as libraries, where one private equity owned digital vendor (Overdrive) provides almost 97% of all ebooks to public library systems. Every single one of those contracts, terms of service agreements, and licensing deals have to run through a process at either the local or or the institutional level. This often happens without a full review of terms and no access to a lawyer. Publishers and library vendors can’t afford to lose this business; through a flex in monopsony power that builds coalitions on both the institutional and collective level, we believe that libraries can force major publishers to the table, rewrite the digital terms of service, take back their collections from the control of large corporations, and reject language that’s unfavorable to the public.

Libraries have always been opposed to onerous terms of service, but like most of us, they’ve felt powerless in the face of corporate overreach. We’re not the first to fight the power in libraryland – the seminal privacy case Doe v Gonzales concerned whether librarians had to violate their own privacy policy and turn over computer records to the government. In 2020, librarians staged a boycott of Macmillan over their shifting and consumer unfriendly digital terms – and won.

In identifying a locus of power with significant buying power and a mandate to serve the public, we’re fighting contractual overreach one library at a time, publishing our results and providing organized, compassionate guidance so institutions and individuals can take back their right to transparency, a fair trial, privacy, and their right to own the content they buy. We’ve been signing away our rights one click at a time at the expense of democracy, civil rights, informed consent, and the well being of a digital generation. If we want to take them back, libraries are the most powerful place we can start.

Jennie Rose Halperin is the Executive Director of Library Futures

07:00 AM

AI Meets Print: Lulu Unlocks the Next Phase of the Personalization Economy [The Business of Printing Books]

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, N.C. – April 15, 2026

Lulu.com, the global leader in publishing technology and print-on-demand fulfillment, announced significant growth across its B2B and API-driven business segments in the first quarter of 2026. This accelerated growth is due to the widespread interest in personalized and customized products.

As businesses and creators increasingly prioritize individualized products, Lulu’s platform is enabling scalable, high-quality print customization powered by automation and artificial intelligence. Books such as customized meal planners, exercise guides, children’s books featuring the child’s name, and other similar products are exceedingly popular among consumers.

Recent data from Lulu show that, among accounts leveraging AI-driven personalization for books, the top five collectively sold more than 167,000 customized units across 124,000 orders in the past year alone. This surge reflects a broader market shift: personalization is no longer a niche tactic, but a core driver of revenue and growth.

“Customers now expect products that feel uniquely theirs,” said CEO Craig Petersen. “What was once considered premium or experimental is quickly becoming the baseline for competitive differentiation.”

AI Meets Print: Lulu Unlocks the Next Phase of the Personalization Economy

Lulu’s B2B segment saw 15.6% revenue growth in 2025 over 2024, fueled by enterprise demand for scalable print solutions that integrate customization. This includes the option for true ‘book-of-one’ printing by automating file generation and storage, enabling personalized book generation with the minimum amount of manual work from large organizations.

Companies across industries, including ecommerce, education, and content platforms, are using print-on-demand to create customized products while reducing inventory risk and expanding product offerings. All with a streamlined global fulfillment process.

At the center of this transformation is Lulu’s robust API, which allows businesses to automate and scale print fulfillment directly within their own platforms. New API users grew 113% from 2024 to 2025, and Q1 2026 has already seen a 523% increase in new API users compared to Q1 2025. This rapid adoption signals a fundamental shift: print is no longer a standalone function but an integrated component of modern digital ecosystems.

While enterprises scale personalization across global operations, entrepreneurs and independent creators are leveraging the same tools to build agile, customer-centric businesses.

“Personalization levels the playing field,” Petersen added. “Whether you’re a global brand or a solo entrepreneur, the ability to create meaningful, customized books at scale is now within reach.”

Your Free Lulu Account

Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world

Create a Free Account

Kanji of the Day: 質 [Kanji of the Day]

質

✍15

小5

substance, quality, matter, temperament

シツ　シチ　チ

たち　ただ.す　もと　わりふ

質問 (しつもん) — question
体質 (たいしつ) — constitution (physical)
品質 (ひんしつ) — quality (of a product or a service)
実質 (じっしつ) — substance
物質 (ぶっしつ) — material
実質的 (じっしつてき) — substantial
本質 (ほんしつ) — essence
悪質 (あくしつ) — malicious
性質 (せいしつ) — nature
神経質 (しんけいしつ) — nervous

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 淑 [Kanji of the Day]

淑

✍11

中学

graceful, gentle, pure

シュク

しと.やか

淑徳 (しゅくとく) — womanly virtues
淑女 (しゅくじょ) — lady
貞淑 (ていしゅく) — chastity
私淑 (ししゅく) — looking up to a person as one's own master or model
淑やか (しとやか) — graceful
淑女風 (しゅくじょふう) — ladylike

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

OsmAnd 5.3 (Android) [OsmAnd Blog]

OsmAnd 5.3 for Android drops: Stars align, Earth curves!

Discover the cosmos with the Astronomy plugin's interactive star overlays, rearrange widgets effortlessly with flexible map layouts, marvel at beta 3D buildings and Globe View's spherical Earth, plus smarter track folders, speedy trip widgets, colour palettes editor for tracks and terrain visualization, bike width routing, and other improvements.

🔄 Update Now!

Thanks for trusting OsmAnd on your epic journeys!

What's new

Astronomy plugin with an astronomical overlay that shows the paths of the Sun, planets and stars on the map, with time and date selection and a dedicated activity screen;
More flexible layout for widgets and map buttons;
3D buildings;
Globe view;
Added new Trip recording widgets: Average Speed and Moving Time;
Introduced visual speeding indication to the Speedometer widget with tolerance warning and limit-exceed states;
Introduced a new Palette Editor for creating and editing custom color schemes for tracks and terrain visualization;
Bicycle routing now takes bicycle width;
Other improvements and optimizations, including smart GPX track grouping, enhanced search result details, improved track waypoint navigation, and new activity profiles;
Bug fixes.

Astronomy Plugin

Astronomy plugin displays an interactive star sky overlay with stars, constellations, the Sun, the Moon, and planets. It helps you identify celestial objects above your current location, preview their paths for a selected date and time, and plan stargazing sessions using built-in time controls and viewing options:

Plugins → Astronomy

Interactive Sky Search

The plugin includes a dedicated Search tool specifically for celestial objects. You can browse through categories like the Solar System, Constellations, Stars, and Deep Sky objects. The "Watch now" section highlights objects currently visible from your location, while advanced filters allow you to sort by magnitude (brightness) or upcoming rise/set times.

Earth Map Integration

To help you orient your observations, you can enable an Earth Map view directly beneath the Star map. This feature allows you to relate celestial positions to your real-world geographic surroundings. Additionally, the AR Star Finding (Camera mode) uses your device's sensors to overlay the astronomical data onto your live camera feed, making it easy to find exact stars and planets in the real sky.

Map Screen Layout

The Map screen layout setting allows you to control how widget panels are arranged on the map screen. It helps prevent widgets and buttons from overlapping and improves screen space usage, especially when switching between portrait and landscape orientations.

OsmAnd menu → Configure screen → ⋮ → Map Screen Layout

Panels layouts

Once you enable Separate layouts, you unlock the ability to choose how the top and bottom widget panels interact with the rest of the interface: Wide or Compact.

OsmAnd menu → Configure screen → Panels Layout

3D Buildings

3D Buildings feature displays buildings as volumetric 3D models instead of flat shapes.

Confgure map → Topography → 3D Buildings

Selection & Highlighting

As part of our ongoing 3D map improvements, you can now highlight specific buildings on the map. When the 3D buildings option is enabled, selecting a POI will automatically highlight the corresponding building polygon, making it easier to identify your target in dense urban environments.

Globe View

Globe View allows you to display the map as a spherical Earth instead of a flat projection. This mode changes the geometry of the map surface and adapts map interaction to spherical navigation.

Confgure map → Topography → Globe View

New Trip Recording Widgets

Multiple Display Modes

Some Trip Recording widgets support multiple display modes. They let you switch between overall trip values and metrics for the most recent uphill or downhill section of the currently recorded trip. See the list of available modes here.

Average Speed

Average Speed widget shows the average speed for the currently recorded trip, or the average speed during the last uphill or downhill section, depending on the selected mode.

Moving Time

Moving Time widget shows the moving time for the currently recorded trip, or the time for the last uphill and downhill, depending on the selected mode. |

Speedometer widget now shows visual speeding alerts with color-coded tolerance and limit-exceed states, including animated transitions when crossing speed thresholds.

Menu → Configure screen → Other → Speedometer

Palette Editor for Terrain & Track Visualization

We've introduced a powerful new palette editor that gives you full control over how data is visualized on your map. Whether you are analyzing a GPX track or viewing terrain relief, you can now customize the color transitions to suit your needs.

Step-by-Step vs. Gradient Modes

The editor now supports two distinct ways to transition between colors:

Gradient: Creates a smooth, continuous transition between colors, providing a fluid visual representation of data changes.
Step-by-step: Allows you to define strict color boundaries. For example, you can set 0–15 km/h to Yellow and 15.1–30 km/h to Red. This mode eliminates the gradient, making it easier to identify specific data ranges at a glance.

For GPX Tracks

Tracks Context menu → Appearance → Colour → + or All colors

Tracks colored by Speed, Altitude, or Slope now support Editor Colour Palettes. You can create Relative palettes (auto-scaled to your specific track data) or Fixed value palettes (based on absolute numbers), define custom color steps, and even set a unique color for missing data points.

For Terrain Coloring

Configure map → Terrain → Modify → + or All colors

This same editor has been integrated into terrain coloring options. You can now create your own custom color schemes for Altitude and Slope layers, allowing for a more personalized and readable terrain relief.

Bicycle Width Parameter

Cycling profiles now support a bicycle width parameter. The router takes this value into account to help avoid narrow cycle paths that may not be suitable for wider bicycles.

Other Improvements

Auto-organize tracks by year, length, activity & more: Managing large collections of recordings is now much simpler with our new "Smart Folder" system. Organize your tracks dynamically by year, activity, or distance to keep your history clean and accessible.
The new grouping mechanism allows you to create dynamic groups with any granularity you want. For example, you can group your entire library by Year, then sub-group by Activity type, and finally by Distance (e.g., 0-10km, 10-50km) or Duration. These folders provide helpful summaries, including total distance, duration, and average speed for each specific filtered group.
Enhanced Search Result Details: Navigating search results for common locations is now more intuitive. By displaying the city and street name directly in the results list, you can instantly distinguish between identical POI names without needing to open each one individually.
Improved Track Waypoint Navigation: We’ve refined how you interact with waypoints within a track. You can now tap through the waypoint list to center the map on each point sequentially. Crucially, the list remains open during this process, allowing for a much faster and more seamless route-review experience.
New POI Share Links: Sharing specific locations has been upgraded to support a new link format (aligned with our Web version). This ensures that when you share a POI, the recipient sees the exact same point and context across different platforms and devices.
Expanded Activity Profile Icons: To better support diverse outdoor activities, we are expanding our library of profile icons. Dedicated new icons for running, sailing, skateboarding, and etc are being added to make switching between your favorite activities more visually intuitive.
Multi-Selection for Favorites: Managing "My Places" is now more efficient with the addition of multi-selection support for Favorites. Just like with tracks, you can now select multiple saved points at once to move them to a different folder, share them, or delete them in bulk.
Refining Plugin Organization: We are restructuring how custom plugins are presented to help users distinguish between core built-in and custom plugins. This reorganization makes the app's extensive functionality more discoverable and less overwhelming for new users.
GPX Start/Finish Icon Optimization: To improve performance and prevent app freezes, we’ve updated how Start/Finish icons are handled for complex tracks. These icons are now disabled by default for tracks with more than 10 points and are force-disabled for very heavy tracks (over 100 points) to ensure a smooth map-viewing experience.
ODB-II Adapter Voltage Widget: For users with OBD2 integration, we've added a new dedicated widget to monitor "Adapter Voltage." This allows you to keep an eye on your vehicle's electrical health directly from the main navigation screen.
OBD-II Vehicle Metrics in Track Graphs: Vehicle data recorded via OBD-II can now be analyzed directly on the Analyze on map graph for tracks. This allows you to visualize parameters such as engine speed, temperature, fuel metrics, and more alongside standard track data.

Bug fixes

Fixed the ability to delete all downloaded maps by country at once.
Enhanced the Popular Places tool by resolving crashes during map zoom interactions.
Improved GPX database maintenance with a new light analysis mode.
Corrected the missing center-point crosshair on the Weather screen.
Fixed UI overlaps where the map scale bar covered the Plan-a-Route tool.
Stabilized Android Auto navigation starts when a destination is set via the phone.
Improved track filtering by fixing a bug where secondary edits to "To" values were ignored.
Fixed UI layout issues where the Plan-a-Route overlay slider was incorrectly centered.
Corrected button overlaps between "Search" and "Close" on tablet layouts.
Enhanced the route start process to reduce user interaction requirements for map inconsistencies.
Improved the "Analyze on map" feature to remember user-selected X and Y axis settings.
Fixed visual offsets occurring in Landscape Mode during route planning sessions.
Resolved empty detail views for generic or untagged buildings in the "Within" menu.
Stabilized application performance by addressing frequent crashes during route creation.
Enhanced Wikipedia integration by adding support for full-screen photo descriptions.
Improved Android Auto routing stability by ensuring navigation persists when switching apps.
Restored the color scheme preview in the Terrain menu.
Corrected UI insets and layout overlaps for Quick Action buttons after importing settings.
Resolved duplicate entries and language-filtering bugs in the Popular Places feature when using Wikipedia and offline maps.

If you have suggestions for improving the Android version of the app, please get in touch with us. We appreciate and welcome your contribution to the further development of OsmAnd.

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Join us at our groups of Telegram (OsmAnd News channel), (EN), (IT), (FR), (DE), (UA), (ES), (BR-PT), (PL), (AR), (TR).
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06:00 AM

DSA-6222-1 ngtcp2 - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6222-1

04:00 AM

The right sort of friction [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

If we remove impediments that are in the way of where our customers seek to go, they support us.

But when we remove the friction that gives people traction on their journey, they flounder.

Remove the hassles that people don’t care about, but celebrate the hassles that make it worth the effort.

Daily Deal: The Complete Big Data And Power BI Bundle [Techdirt]

The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It’s on sale for $40.

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News

Thursday 2026-04-23

06:00 PM

New feature

Detection of outdated Secure Boot certificates

Changes and updates

Fixed problems

Get Tails 7.7

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

To install Tails 7.7 on a new USB stick

To download only

Support and feedback

A Shared Backend

09:00 AM

From Emergency Measure to Legal Authority

07:00 AM

06:00 AM

Today's links

It's not a crime if we do it (to nurses) with an app (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:

04:00 AM

02:00 AM

Wednesday 2026-04-22

11:00 PM

09:00 PM

03:00 PM

09:00 AM

08:00 AM

07:00 AM

Your Free Lulu Account

What's new​

Astronomy Plugin​

Interactive Sky Search​

Earth Map Integration​

Map Screen Layout​

Panels layouts​

3D Buildings​

Selection & Highlighting​

Globe View​

New Trip Recording Widgets​

Multiple Display Modes​

Average Speed​

Moving Time​

Speedometer Widget​

Palette Editor for Terrain & Track Visualization​

Step-by-Step vs. Gradient Modes​

For GPX Tracks​

For Terrain Coloring​

Bicycle Width Parameter​

Other Improvements​

Bug fixes​

06:00 AM

04:00 AM

What's new

Astronomy Plugin

Interactive Sky Search

Earth Map Integration

Map Screen Layout

Panels layouts

3D Buildings

Selection & Highlighting

Globe View

New Trip Recording Widgets

Multiple Display Modes

Average Speed

Moving Time

Speedometer Widget

Palette Editor for Terrain & Track Visualization

Step-by-Step vs. Gradient Modes

For GPX Tracks

For Terrain Coloring

Bicycle Width Parameter

Other Improvements

Bug fixes