News

Tuesday 2026-09-08

12:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 郡 [Kanji of the Day]

郡

✍10

小4

county, district

グン

こおり

郡部   (ぐんぶ)   —   rural districts
郡役所   (ぐんやくしょ)   —   county offices
郡長   (ぐんちょう)   —   district headman
郡県制度   (ぐんけんせいど)   —   county and prefecture system
郡県   (ぐんけん)   —   counties and prefectures
郡制   (ぐんせい)   —   county system
共産国家郡   (きょうさんこっかぐん)   —   Communist bloc

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 祈 [Kanji of the Day]

祈

✍8

中学

pray, wish

キ

いの.る

祈願   (きがん)   —   prayer (for something)
祈り   (いのり)   —   prayer
祈る   (いのる)   —   to pray
お祈り   (おいのり)   —   prayer
合格祈願   (ごうかくきがん)   —   prayer for success in an entrance exam
祈念   (きねん)   —   prayer
祈祷   (きとう)   —   prayer
祈とう   (きとう)   —   prayer
加持祈祷   (かじきとう)   —   incantation and prayer
祈祷師   (きとうし)   —   medicine man

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Open Source Conference 2026 Tokyo/Fall に出展します [OpenStreetMap Japan]

OpenStreetMap Japan は、2026年10月17日（土）に東京都立産業貿易センター台東館で開催される「Open Source Conference 2026 Tokyo/Fall（OSC2026 Tokyo/Fall）」に出展します。 OpenStreetMap（OSM）は、誰でも自由に編集し、誰でも自由に利用できるオープンな地理情報データベースです。 今回のブースでは、OpenStreetMapそのものの紹介に加えて、コミュニティメンバーによるさまざまな活用事例を紹介します。 Web地図やアプリケーション、地域活動で作成した地図、マッピング成果の可視化などを通して、OpenStreetMapのデータが実際にどのように活用されているのかをご覧いただけます。 当日は、持ち込みPCによるデモや印刷した地図などを通して、次のような内容を紹介する予定です。 - OpenSt

Open Source Conference 2026 Hiroshima に出展します [OpenStreetMap Japan]

OpenStreetMap Japan は、2026年9月12日（土）にサテライトキャンパスひろしま（広島県民文化センター 5F）で開催される「Open Source Conference 2026 Hiroshima（OSC2026 Hiroshima）」に出展します。 OpenStreetMap（OSM）は、誰でも自由に編集し、誰でも自由に利用できるオープンな地理情報データベースです。 今回のブースでは、OpenStreetMapそのものの紹介に加えて、コミュニティメンバーによるさまざまな活用事例を紹介します。 Web地図やアプリケーション、地域活動で作成した地図、マッピング成果の可視化などを通して、OpenStreetMapのデータが実際にどのように活用されているのかをご覧いただけます。 展示は10:00〜16:00の予定です。OpenStreetMapをまだ使ったことがない方

The Why of My Labor [The Status Kuo]

It’s hard to process, but my little angel Riley turned two last weekend! She had a birthday party with her classmates at the Little Gym…

And then a celebration at home with her family! She wanted a princess butterfly theme. ❤️

Ronan particularly loved the cake!

This is how that happened…

Over this Labor Day holiday I took the kids on the local Catskill Mountain Train—Ice Cream Express!

Kids certainly love riding trains, but both of them love to fly, too!

This has been a magical summer for us in Kingston, NY, our new home. And Windsor has been really enjoying her time outside playing with the toddlers!

Ronan has not yet figured out that ears can serve as better handles than faces.

And Riley will sing at all occasions, even in French like her second cousins!

The innocence and joy of my children gives me so much hope for our future, and so many reasons to work hard to preserve it. Thanks to all who help me secure their future by supporting my work, and who help preserve our democracy by sharing my pieces with others.

Have a great Labor Day!

Jay

09:00 AM

Missing Pension Contributions Can Cost You for Life [General Union]

When people think about social insurance (shakai hoken, or 社会保険), they usually think about health insurance or the deductions from their monthly paycheck. But one of the most valuable parts of the system is often overlooked: your future pension.

If your employer does not enroll you in Employees’ Pension Insurance when they are required to do so, you aren’t just losing benefits today—you may be losing retirement income for the rest of your life. 

Employees’ Pension Insurance is designed to build your retirement income throughout your working life. Every month that you are properly enrolled contributes to your future pension. When an employer illegally keeps an eligible employee out of the system, gaps are created in that record. Those missing months can mean a lower pension after retirement.

Unlike unpaid wages, pension losses often go unnoticed for years. Many workers only discover the problem when they check their pension record or begin preparing for retirement. By then, the financial consequences may last a lifetime.

Why Does This Happen?

Japanese law requires employers to enroll eligible employees in social insurance. Yet some businesses still avoid their legal obligations by:

  • Keeping employees just below enrolment thresholds.
  • Misclassifying workers as independent contractors.
  • Manipulating working arrangements to avoid enrolment requirements.
  • Simply failing to enroll eligible employees.

These practices can save employers hundreds of thousands of yen per worker each year by avoiding their share of health insurance and pension contributions, while leaving workers to bear the long-term cost through reduced retirement security. 

One of the most frustrating aspects of illegal non-enrolment is that the true financial impact often isn’t known until retirement. A worker may know they were denied social insurance years earlier, but the full effect on their pension may not become clear until they begin receiving pension payments. By then, the employer has already benefited from years of unpaid contributions, while the worker faces a reduced pension for the rest of their retirement.

This is what makes these cases so serious. The damage isn’t limited to the years you were employed – it can continue for decades after you stop working.

General Union Is Fighting Back

For more than twenty years, General Union has helped workers obtain the social insurance coverage they were legally entitled to receive. We negotiate with employers, assist members in filing complaints, and work to ensure that workers are properly enrolled before years of pension contributions are lost.

But when employers refuse to take responsibility, the union is prepared to go further. We are currently pursuing legal action against employers that illegally failed to enroll eligible workers in social insurance. These cases seek not only to hold employers accountable for breaking the law, but also to establish that workers should not bear the lifelong financial consequences of an employer’s illegal actions. We expect these cases to have important implications for workers across Japan.

Don’t Wait Until Retirement!

Many workers assume they have been correctly enrolled in Employees’ Pension Insurance simply because they have been working for years.  Don’t assume – check!

Review your pension record and make sure your enrolment history is complete. If you believe you should be enrolled in social insurance but are not, seek advice as soon as possible. The earlier a problem is identified, the greater the opportunity to protect your future retirement.

An employer who illegally fails to enroll an eligible worker isn’t simply breaking an administrative rule. They may be reducing that worker’s retirement income for years—or even decades—to come. General Union believes every worker deserves the pension they have earned.

Your pension is built one month at a time. If those months are stolen, your retirement security can be stolen with them.

08:00 AM

02:00 AM

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Was Built on Concealed ‘Mass Piracy’, Authors Tell Court [TorrentFreak]

openai logoOver the past three years, authors have filed a series of lawsuits accusing AI companies of training their models on pirated books.

Some of those cases have already produced rulings, with a bittersweet victory for Meta in California for example.

In New York, several other cases were bundled into a single proceeding where Judge Sidney Stein is overseeing claims against OpenAI and Microsoft.

This includes the Authors Guild’s class action, a case filed by a group of nonfiction writers who were the first to name Microsoft as a defendant, and the Tremblay and Silverman lawsuit, which started in California in 2023 and survived a partial dismissal before moving to New York.

This week, these authors filed a motion for summary judgment. Ahead of any trial, they want Judge Stein to rule that OpenAI copied their work without permission, and that this can’t qualify as fair use. The motion covers 194 titles and asks for a finding of liability, not damages.

“OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books,” the brief states, while adding that “AI-generated books of all types are already flooding the market.”

Built on Mass Piracy

The authors start by accusing OpenAI of obtaining the book copies through unauthorized sources. While the filing is heavily redacted, OpenAI stands accused of using torrented copies downloaded from LibGen,

“OpenAI did not even buy the books it used. Instead, it began by torrenting [REDACTED] books from the notorious and illegal pirate library Library Genesis, also known as LibGen,” the motion reads.

At the time, LibGen had already been featured in the U.S. Trade Representative’s list of notorious piracy markets. According to the authors, OpenAI was well aware of the controversial nature of the site.

OpenAI “took steps to conceal their piracy from the public,” the motion notes, pointing to the paper that introduced GPT-3. In that paper, OpenAI relabeled book compilations it previously called “Libgen1” and “Libgen 2” as the more “nondescript” “Books1” and “Books2.”

“OpenAI employees understood at the time that they had sourced books from an illegal site,” the filing reads.

Concealed

concealed

The renaming was not the end of it. OpenAI “deleted its LibGen files in the summer of 2022 due to legal concerns,” the motion notes, adding that these are “the only two training corpuses OpenAI has ever deleted.”

Before deleting the books, OpenAI allegedly used them to train the early GPT models. Or as the authors write, the company “built the foundations of its business on mass piracy.”

Replacing George R.R. Martin

The torrenting and piracy angle is one part of the filing. The motion also alleged that OpenAI built its models to replace the human writers it copied, and as evidence it highlights controversial tweets from a key employee.

In 2022, OpenAI hired Tarun Gogineni to lead its work on the writing quality of its models. According to the motion, Gogineni knew the models he was training would displace authors but considered that “acceptable economic disruption.”

This is notable because Gogineni specifically mentioned one of the plaintiffs, author George R.R. Martin, known for writing A Song of Ice and Fire which the HBO series Game of Thrones was based on.

In 2025, nearly two years after Martin sued, Gogineni tweeted that his “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books of [Martin’s] A Song of Ice and Fire.”

Even if…

martin

Even if Martin “dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series,” he added, suggesting that AI can replace the author.

Not Fair Use

OpenAI and other AI companies argue that training models on books is fair use. Courts have partly agreed with this, but with an important caveat.

The authors cite Bartz v. Anthropic, the 2025 California ruling that classified model training as potentially fair use, while stressing that downloading from a pirate library was not. Pirating books that can be purchased legally is “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” that court found.

The authors also argue that the copying was avoidable for training purposes, as their books were not per se necessary to create a general-purpose model.

Broader Claims

The motion is not limited to OpenAI. It also asks the court to hold that Microsoft is vicariously liable for OpenAI’s copyright infringement, since Microsoft could supervise the conduct and profited from it.

Microsoft invested roughly $13 billion across three agreements signed in 2019, 2021, and 2023, the authors stress.

conclusion

OpenAI has yet to respond to the authors directly, but it clearly believes that the evidence points in its favor.

In a cross-motion for summary judgment, filed on the same day, the company argues that its use of the books was fair use as a matter of law and that any regurgitation is vanishingly rare.

The filings highlighted here are part of a much broader push. Over the past days, plaintiffs including The New York Times, Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting all submitted a combined summary judgment motion of their own against OpenAI and Microsoft.

With many millions of dollars at stake, as well as the future of AI training, these cases will be fought tooth and nail, so we certainly haven’t heard the last of it.

—

A copy of the authors’ redacted motion for partial summary judgment is available here (pdf), filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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

12:00 AM

The reality of sunk costs [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Culture is built on the stability of persistence.

Pop musicians have farewell tours that last for decades. The local print shop is still there, reliably getting the job done. We want things that last.

And yet…

When it’s time for a company to raise another round of investment, the smart investor treats the new round as if the old one never happened. Today, right now, is this the best use of my capital?

And the person at the buffet does the same thing. Right here, right now, which dish appeals the most?

We don’t get tomorrow over again. We can choose to spend it on the best option, not the option we committed to ten years ago.

      

Monday 2026-09-07

07:00 PM

Pluralistic: How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (07 Sep 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A fake Harvard Business Review cover, dated September-October 2026. It features a large Roach Motel under the headline 'THE NEW CUSTOMER RETENTION' with the subhead 'Why acquire customers when you can take hostages?'

How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (permalink)

"If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" -Ely Devons

Half a century ago, a group of lavishly financed economists from the University of Chicago (the "neoliberals") convinced governments all over the world to completely upend the way they treated monopolies. Up until then, the purpose of competition enforcement was to reduce corporate power, with the understanding that once a corporation became more powerful than the government, it would be impossible to force it to follow any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But for the "Chicago Boys," monopolies were evidence of efficiency. When you encounter a company in the wild that has acquired a commanding market share, your first assumption should be that it has taken over its sector by being better than anyone else – you should not assume that the company cheated its way to glory. After all, if a company with a large market share was cheating – say, if it was increasing its profit margins by reducing quality or jacking up prices – then smaller companies would rush into the market to poach its dissatisfied customers.

Thus, all competition enforcement was reduced to an empty syllogism: monopolies are the result of excellence and any less-than-excellent monopolist will have its advantage "competed away." Therefore, any monopolist you encounter in the wild is definitionally not a bad monopolist, otherwise it would already have disappeared.

To quote another economist joke:

Two economists are walking down the street when one notices a $20 bill on the sidewalk. "It's not a real $20 bill," the other declares. "If it were a real $20 bill, someone would have picked it up off the sidewalk already."

Half a century later, our entire economy is dominated by monopolies, duopolies and cartels, who boast of gigantic margins, whose products are palpably worsening at an accelerating clip, and yet there is no sign of the "new market entrants" who should be flooding into the market to "compete away" those amazing margins. It turns out that asking "What would I do if I were a horse?" does not yield a series of accurate predictions about horses.

Things have changed. Today, the University of Chicago's Stigler Center harbors a cluster of influential economists who largely or entirely repudiate the orthodoxy of the Chicago Boys. The Center hosts an annual, rather radical conference on antitrust; runs an excellent heterodox podcast (Capitalisn't); its house organ, Promarket.org, regularly hosts work that torches the received wisdom of High Chicago Neoclassicism; and the school's researchers publish papers that dare to actually "go and look at horses."

A recent horse-looking excursion has yielded some distressing, alarming, and thoroughly documented equine facts. In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and still dominate its market:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf

The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer satisfaction over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade."

How to explain the falling divorce rate between customers and businesses? That's where the researchers got very clever. They realized that when a company seeks permission to acquire another business, it must publish truthful and comprehensive information about how the merger is expected to increase the profits of the new combination. These disclosures are validated by external auditors, boards of directors, and/or audit committees. There are legal repercussions for falsifying them or making material omissions to them, and they are matters of public record.

Crucially, these disclosures must include the business's plans to retain its customers, and its plans to increase the profits from those customers. That's where the researchers struck gold. They amassed a novel data-set of 9,500 acquisitions that disclosed over $1t worth of "customer relationship-related intangibles," more than 20% of all the assets that changed hands.

They supplemented this data by mining earnings calls (also subject to strict penalties for omissions and falsehoods), finding CEOs boasting about "practices that may impede switching or increase customers’ dependence on the firm." Executives bragged about their "contractual restrictions, bundling and ecosystem lock-in, and switching costs."

You can get a sense of these in a short accompanying article by the study's co-author Christopher Stewart:

https://www.promarket.org/2026/09/04/american-companies-expect-their-customers-to-stay-much-longer-that-may-be-making-the-economy-less-competitive/

The article recounts how Sirius XM's execs celebrated the news that an appeals court had struck down the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule, which required companies to make it as easy to resign from a subscription service as it was to sign up for it. Click to Cancel is a response to increasingly sleazy, increasingly pervasive tactics that make it all but impossible to stop being someone's customer. Trump's FTC walked away from defending the rule, which let the court kill it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole

After Click to Cancel died, Sirius XM's C-suite got on a call with their shareholders to project "better outcome(s) as a result of not having that in place." Sirius believed that a rule that made it easy for customers to resign from their monthly subscriptions would hurt its business. Put another way: Sirius believes that its profits come in part from the fact that dissatisfied customers can't figure out how to cancel their service.

Then there's the online insurance company eHealth, whose execs crowed about a new "innovation" that forced senior patients to painstakingly enter a long list of their medications and doctors, but did not give them any way to export that data. The lengthy investment of time in getting set up on eHealth would stop customers from leaving, because they wouldn't want "to repeat all of that information over the phone."

This is also a feature of business-to-business relationships. In 2019, US Silica's execs described how they had launched a program to become embedded in their customers' supply chains, because that "really locks in the business," making it "much more difficult for customers to switch and go to someone else."

That's the first half of the story: an empirical account of how the business world switched from "acquiring customers" to taking hostages.

But the second half of the paper is even more interesting: an empirical investigation into the effects of this customer lock-in. For starters, increased customer retention is "associated with higher gross profit margins": that is, the companies whose customers can't leave squeeze those customers for more profit. What's more, once a company has its customers locked in, it starts to capture a larger share of all the profits in its entire sector: these hostage-takers become so profitable that their profits dwarf the profits of their competitors.

The paper also solves the mystery of the missing market entrants that the neoclassical horse-ponderers insisted would be conjured up to compete away an abusive monopolist's margins. The more locked in the customers of a monopolist are, the fewer companies try to enter that market. This makes sense: who would invest in a new business in a market where none of its potential customers can switch to its new business?

This is the opposite of what the horse-ponderers have insisted upon for 50 years. The more lock-in a company attains, the more profitable it becomes, and the less it has to worry about new competitors coming after those incredible margins. This is obvious to everyone, except the monopolist-funded "social scientists" and the governments they captured.

This is bad news, and not just for those locked-in customers. New businesses are the source of new jobs, and, yup, it turns out that sectors dominated by firms with high lock-in create fewer jobs. Of course, as workers chase fewer jobs, bosses are able to suppress their wages by forcing workers to bid against one another. Once again, the study finds that the sectors with the most lock-in also see declining wages in addition to declining jobs.

These are not the horse-ponderers' "efficient" monopolists. Once a company has its customers locked in, it innovates less – as measured by the number of patents a company is awarded, and by how often those patents are cited in other patents (this second measure helps distinguish companies that file mountains of bullshit patents from companies that actually invent useful things). Naturally, R&D spending also declines in companies with more lock-in.

All of this is entirely compatible with the theory of enshittification. Once a company knows its customers can't leave, it can switch from treating them well to abusing them in order to extract money from them. The same goes for companies whose workers can't leave – because they're bound by noncompete clauses, or because their employer has bought out all their rivals:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

It's like the old Lily Tomlin sketches on SNL and Laugh-In, where she played Ernestine the telephone operator narrating satirical ads for AT&T. Those sketches would end with her obviously true catch-phrase: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw

Decades later, Tomlin's phone company joke is a perfect distillation of modern management philosophy. As a famous NBER working paper showed, when a family business is handed over to a professional manager with an MBA, the company doesn't become more profitable overall; it just finds ways to pay its workers less:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf

That's why Tim Wu named this "the age of extraction." "Growth" no longer means "making something new that people want" – now it means "finding ways to take a larger share of the pie, even if that makes the pie smaller overall":

https://www.wired.com/story/tim-wu-age-of-extraction/

This is something we can all feel. We experience it in our daily lives, through "shrinkflation" and "junk fees" and a million other gross and petty scams. But it's rare that we actually catch executives explicitly admitting that their job is to find ways to take you hostage and squeeze you.

Historically, those revelations have come from extraordinary circumstances, like when Frontier (the worst ISP in America) went bankrupt and we learned that the company had 1.6 million customers who had no access to competing broadband connections. Frontier carried these hostages on their balance sheet as a special, highly valued asset, since they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fiber-millions

In assembling this novel, high-quality data-set, the researchers on this paper have performed an important service, capturing a vast number of sworn confessions of highly paid enshittifiers, and then showing how their hostage-taking wrecked competition, prices, wages, jobs and innovation.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Three-hole punch debut, April 1940 https://web.archive.org/web/20061119140057/https://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/09/06/three-hole-paper-punch-debut/

#20yrsago New Zealand redefines open source as “code you can’t modify” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/07/nobel-prize-sperm-bank-human-tragicomedy-about-eugenics/

#20yrsago MSFT quicker to patch DRM than security vulnerabilities https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/microsoft_and_f.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia’s dumbest arguments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

#10yrsago Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland https://web.archive.org/web/20211024071400/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/09/how-internet-pirates-became-political-force-iceland

#10yrsago Sampling bias: how a machine-learning beauty contest awarded nearly all prizes to whites https://web.archive.org/web/20160906154712/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-an-ai-judged-beauty-contest-picked-nearly-all-white-winners

#10yrago Warner Bros flags its own website as a piracy portal in copyright takedowns https://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-flags-website-piracy-portal-160904/

#10yrsago The privacy wars have been a disaster and they’re about to get a LOT worse https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorowthe-privacy-wars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-worse/

#10yrsago Weapons of Math Destruction: invisible, ubiquitous algorithms are ruining millions of lives https://memex.craphound.com/2016/09/06/weapons-of-math-destruction-invisible-ubiquitous-algorithms-are-ruining-millions-of-lives/

#10yrsago Pro-democracy reformers win big in Hong Kong’s elections https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/06/hong-kong-voters-elect-pro-democracy-legislators-to-defend-the-citys-autonomy-from-china/

#1yrago Stock buybacks are stock swindles https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/06/computer-says-huh/#invisible-handcuffs

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

12:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 種 [Kanji of the Day]

種

✍14

小4

species, kind, class, variety, seed

シュ

たね　-ぐさ

種類   (しゅるい)   —   variety
接種   (せっしゅ)   —   inoculation
機種   (きしゅ)   —   model (of machine, device)
種目   (しゅもく)   —   item
車種   (しゃしゅ)   —   car model
各種   (かくしゅ)   —   every kind
職種   (しょくしゅ)   —   type of occupation
一種   (いっしゅ)   —   a kind
品種   (ひんしゅ)   —   type (of goods)
業種   (ぎょうしゅ)   —   type of industry

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 訴 [Kanji of the Day]

訴

✍12

中学

accusation, sue, complain of pain, appeal to

ソ

うった.える

訴え   (うったえ)   —   lawsuit
起訴   (きそ)   —   prosecution
訴訟   (そしょう)   —   litigation
訴える   (うったえる)   —   to raise
提訴   (ていそ)   —   presenting a case
控訴   (こうそ)   —   appeal to a higher court
不起訴   (ふきそ)   —   nonprosecution
起訴状   (きそじょう)   —   indictment
控訴審   (こうそしん)   —   appeal trial
敗訴   (はいそ)   —   loss of a (legal) case

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

05:00 AM

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt [Techdirt]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.’s resignation coming entirely from Democrats:

And that’s why trying to distill partisan politics down to just “team blue” vs. “team red” is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death issues break down on pretty clear partisan lines, and it’s entirely clear which party is right and which one is wrong.

Christ knows the Democrats aren’t perfect. But of the two major parties they’re the one that’s not a eugenicist death cult.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment on our post about monitor makers hitting owners with annoying ads, and our characterization of how it happened:

No, that’s not how computers work. Microsoft Windows identifies the connected monitor, and then, on its own authority, checks whether the manufacturer has “recommended” any software to go with it; if so, Windows installs that without telling the user. The monitor isn’t installing anything.

Of course, we should also be criticizing monitor manufacturers for taking advantage of this misfeature. But the root problem is with Microsoft. More than 2 decades after the Sony rootkit, they haven’t learned their lesson (or maybe they have: people will put up with this shit, and the blame will mostly be misdirected).

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a pair of comments from. MrWilson. First, it’s one about giving Elon Musk credit when his products work:

Nope. Not at all. Screw that noise.

Teslas might function as a car some of the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to give Musk any credit whatsoever.

Starlink is a money pit from whence nothing can be recovered. Even the most corrupt broadband fiber deployment can be dug up or reused. Comcast could, in a just judicial system, be broken up as an illegal monopoly and their infrastructure that we paid for could be reused by other service providers.

And not every dollar was going to go to big monopolistic companies, whereas any money going to Starlink funds literal authoritarian, anti-democratic election interference.

Next, it’s one on our post about the “Darnella Test” for social media regulation:

Unfortunately, “kids won’t be able to post videos that make authorities look bad and fuel significant protests” is an appealing argument to the authoritarians who are already in favor of curbing social media access for kids which those authoritarians can’t directly control.

Over on the funny side, things are extremely quiet this week, so we’re going to truncate it and just feature the only comment that received enough votes to earn a funny badge. It’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a comment calling Mitch McConnell a vegetable:

How dare you insult vegetables like that. Unlike Mitch McConnell’s political career, vegetables are actually good for the average person.

That’s all for this week, folks!

Sunday 2026-09-06

11:00 PM

The lab, the factory and the dentist [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

At the lab, they don’t know the right answer. They are explorers and scientists. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. The work at the lab requires mutual support, shared information and a commitment to the process of discovery.

At the factory, the answer is known. It’s productivity that’s being pursued. Do it a little faster, a little better and a little more reliably than yesterday. Cut costs. Repeat.

And the dentist? It’s not rote work, but it’s not a dance with the unknown. Meet a client, diagnosis the problem and do the work efficiently as well. Different than yesterday, but it certainly rhymes.

Where do you work?

It could be that you’re getting exactly what you signed up for.

      

05:00 PM

Online Piracy Costs the UK 9,400 Nurses a Year, If Pirates Keep Their Word [TorrentFreak]

poundsEvery new Premier League season starts with a warning about the cost of piracy, and this year is no different.

BeStreamWise, the anti-piracy campaign backed by Sky, the Premier League, FACT, the BBC and the UK Intellectual Property Office, among others, released a new report this week to highlight the ongoing challenge.

The campaign commissioned consultancy WPI Economics to put a number on illegal streaming. This resulted in a report titled “The Price of Piracy,” which estimates that illegal streaming results in £1.35 billion in missed revenue by UK broadcasters every year. That figure is then translated into 10,400 lost jobs and £366 million in missing tax income.

The Price of Piracy

the price of piracy

To stress the point, the report highlights that missed taxes could pay for a variety of public services. The £366 million could pay 9,400 qualified NHS nurses, for example, or it could provide 140 million free school meals to children.

A £1.35 Billion Poll

The billion-pound estimate is based on a poll of 2,501 UK adults, conducted in February. In this survey, almost a third (31%) said they had used illegal streaming in the previous three months. Extrapolating this percentage to the entire population suggests that 16.8 million people could be video pirates.

To find out how this then resulted in £1.35 billion missed revenue, we reached out to BeStreamWise, which informed us that it is based on a scenario where piracy is no longer an option.

BeStreamWise explained that the respondents who admitted to pirating were asked which services they would be willing to pay for, if they were no longer able to access pirate services. WPI Economics then multiplied these answers by the average cost of the services, before extrapolating it to the entire population.

The campaign stresses that the report only counted people who said they were willing to pay in this hypothetical scenario.

£1.35bn / £366m

price

Put differently, the £1.35 billion does not measure lost sales. It is the extrapolated subscription fee that pirates said they would pay, at full price, if piracy ceased to exist tomorrow. That is then translated to tax revenue, which can pay for the 9,400 nurses.

Pirate’s Pinky Promise

The calculation is straightforward on paper, but it’s not without caveats. While self-proclaimed pirates may be just as trustworthy as the general population, behavioral research has shown that people generally say they would pay more than they actually do.

There are ways to correct for this gap, which economists refer to as a hypothetical bias, but BeStreamWise’s spokesperson informed TorrentFreak that the WPI study did not apply any correction. The survey answers were taken as given.

The lack of a discount factor is not unique in piracy research, and previous studies have sometimes put pirates in a positive spotlight because of it. However, it definitely signals that the £1.35 billion is far from guaranteed

In fact, the same poll shows that many pirates are still primarily driven by saving costs. The most common justification for pirating was that it’s cheaper than paying (38%), followed by convenience (31%) and a desire to avoid subscriptions (24%). Over half (52%) said they are likely to continue pirating regardless.

Social Media as Primary Piracy Source

One of the most surprising findings of the survey is that social media is the top source to access pirated content. This covers all forms of video piracy, not just streaming.

“[The research] shows that a majority (54%) of active illegal streamers access illegal content via social media platforms, compared to just 26% who access using purchased devices and illegal subscription services, and 28% streaming or downloading via unofficial websites.”

“Less popular methods included downloading content via torrents or cloud sharing services (15%), and illegally buying logins or passwords for legal services (7%),” the report adds.

The survey’s definition of piracy is quite broad. It includes “Watching via social media platforms” as a separate category, next to using a VPN to access content only available in other countries.

Defining piracy

piracy

This means that someone watching a single (unauthorized) clip of a goal or TV-show on X or Instagram is considered an illegal streamer. How the questions were worded is not known to us, because BeStreamWise has not made the polling data available to us.

An ‘Oven-Ready’ Solution

Putting a price on the piracy problem is only part of the report, as it also offers solutions. The first recommendation is for the UK Government to amplify existing consumer awareness campaigns through its official channels.

The prime candidate for this, according to the BeStreamWise-commissioned report, is BeStreamWise. These awareness campaigns could also focus on the estimated £270m in harms consumers face through malware, fraud and identity theft.

“Amplifying BeStreamWise’s data and insights would be an ‘oven-ready’ move that would be game-changing in signposting the risks of piracy, including the potential fraud and data security risks, and would begin to combat the £270m of financial harms illegal streamers face each year,” the report reads.

The second recommendation calls for a voluntary cross-sector framework, in which online platforms, connectivity providers and content services work together to combat online piracy. These efforts could be overseen by the UK government.

The report does not propose new legislation or blocking powers. Instead, it argues that current enforcement has failed because consumers are not aware of the risks.

While awareness campaigns and voluntary agreements may help to nudge some people in the right direction, rightsholders should not count on getting a significant share of the £1.35 billion pirates promised anytime soon.

—

A copy of The Price of Piracy report, produced by WPI Economics for BeStreamWise, is available here (pdf).

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

11:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 呼 [Kanji of the Day]

呼

✍8

小6

call, call out to, invite

コ

よ.ぶ

呼ばれる   (よばれる)   —   to be called (a name)
呼びかけ   (よびかけ)   —   call
呼び   (よび)   —   call
呼ぶ   (よぶ)   —   to call out (to)
呼び掛け   (よびかけ)   —   call
呼びかける   (よびかける)   —   to call out to
呼吸   (こきゅう)   —   breathing
呼び出し   (よびだし)   —   call
呼吸困難   (こきゅうこんなん)   —   labored breathing
連呼   (れんこ)   —   calling repeatedly (e.g., someone's name)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 苗 [Kanji of the Day]

苗

✍8

中学

seedling, sapling, shoot

ビョウ　ミョウ

なえ　なわ-

苗木   (なえぎ)   —   seedling
早苗   (さなえ)   —   rice seedling
苗字   (みょうじ)   —   surname
苗代   (なえしろ)   —   rice nursery
育苗   (いくびょう)   —   raising seedlings
種苗   (しゅびょう)   —   seeds and seedlings
苗床   (なえどこ)   —   seedbed
苗族   (ミャオぞく)   —   Miao (people)
痘苗   (とうびょう)   —   vaccine
桑苗   (そうびょう)   —   mulberry seedling

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

10:00 AM

Just for Skeets and Giggles (9.5.26) [The Status Kuo]

Donald Trump is busy claiming that the economy is great and that people love him.

42402da2-1820-4156-b04b-1afa75a870b4.jpeg

But he can’t even convince his own followers that prices are falling and things are normal.

Image.heic

While he spouts his nonsense, the rest of us are here thinking…

Image.heic

That damn strait really has him in a bind.

Image.heic

To make himself feel better, he put his face on a coin. But folks noticed something on it:

Image.heic

Every day it’s a new trauma, a new low.

Image.png

Trump recently picked yet another fight with our northern neighbor.

IMG_0756.jpeg

Our allies are getting creative in their responses.

Image.heic

Last week, we had the whole “Lake America” distraction.

Image.heic

At least we're getting some amazing content in response.

Image.heic

In the Michigan U.S. Senate race, El-Sayed is pulling no punches.

Image.heic

God isn’t either!

Image.heic

Nor The Onion.

Image.heic

On that note, God had a follow-up PSA.

Image.heic

The Canadians have an excellent sense of humor about all this nonsense.

Image.heic

Slow clap for their wordplay.

Image.heic

There’s another funny thing about changing it from “Ontario” to “America.”

Image.heic

Since our entire country is in the shitter, we’re flush with ideas.

d09f98f2-7171-48cb-a122-8b3b71663c4b.jpeg

It really does feel like headlines these days be like,

Image.heic

Since we’re doing the correction thingie:

Image.heic

Trump, of course, is only the orange tip on a bent spear. There are a number of dangerous kooks working for him.

Image.heic

Randy Rainbow roasted the whackjob HHS secretary as only he can:

Image.heic

But it’s not just RFK Jr. At every agency, the worst person imaginable seems to be in charge.

IMG_1118.jpeg

Like this genius who landed Kristi Noem’s old job as chief immigration zealot.

Image.heic

There’s a new Grand Theft Auto out for all the gamers and critics to opine on. But the thing is…

Image.heic

Speaking of murderers,

Image.heic

The people have a new more local enemy these days.

Image.heic

This post made me both wince and laugh because of all the misguided MAGAs who regularly comment to this effect.

Image.heic

That crazy lady at Fox (I know, that doesn’t narrow it down) lost her job.

Image.heic

“That crazy lady who always looks wasted” doesn’t narrow it down either, huh.

Image.heic

If you’re gonna put out a generic tweet, remember that pronouns actually do matter.

Image.heic

We haven’t heard from the incels much lately…

Image.heic

Speaking of getting owned online, the Chess.com account checkmated Elon Musk quickly.

IMG_1168.jpeg
IMG_1169.jpeg
IMG_1170.jpeg

That last line though. Awkward, humorless Musk trying to go toe-to-toe with an actual social media professional? Priceless.

I’m hoping at least three readers who are currently free subscribers will upgrade to support this newsletter today. That’s all it takes to keep this free for those less able to afford it! Will you be one of my heroes today?

Subscribe now

Dog owners, does your pooch chase the mop like mine? Have any of you tried this?

Image.heic

Always watch where you’re going!

Image.heic

The face on this fella, hahaha!

Image.heic

A compilation of puppers freaking out over W-A-L-K time. My corgi can barely sit still for her harness when she knows what’s coming!

Image.heic

Your heart-melt moment of the week.

Image.heic

Since I can’t use Xcancel anymore, sadly I don’t have much kitty content except to say, Happy Caturday!

Image.heic

I must have watched this like 10 times. Still funny! Sound up.

Image.heic

Polling my married-women readers: Is she spot on?

Image.heic

I hosted my 20-year-old nephew this summer, and this felt very familiar.

Image.heic

My nanny is from the old country and probably goes through the same thought process.

Image.heic

This was a Swede moment of hilarity.

Image.heic

For anyone who has attempted to type in that password, this is for you.

Image.heic

What a generous way to pay it forward!

Image.heic

In honor of Dolly Parton’s famous song, a moment of pure vocal brilliance.

Image.heic

It was, of course, also covered by the incomparable Whitney Houston. Which led to this classic moment.

Image.heic

I actually have friends just like this guy.

Image.heic

Entry for funniest one-liner this week:

Image.heic

Keeping this tool in my back pocket for when my kids start to ask for stuff.

Image.heic

I may need to get this book to read aloud to the kiddos. You know, for my own purposes.

Image.heic

A father-daughter conspiracy. The best kind. Also, adorable.

Image.heic

I shouldn’t have laughed at this, but I had exhausted Ba brain and it was exactly what I needed.

Image.heic

If it weren’t on camera, we might never know what caused this.

Image.heic

No words here.

Image.heic

Oh, a dad joke. I get it.

Image.heic

Okay, and another.

Image.heic

All right, just one more, I promise!

IMG_0964.jpeg

Have a great long weekend! I’ll be off for the rest of it, enjoying the final days of summer with the family and friends. Hope you can as well!

Jay

06:00 AM

This Week In Techdirt History: August 30th – September 5th [Techdirt]

This Week in 2016

This Week in 2011

This Week in 2006

Saturday 2026-09-05

09:00 PM

Homo Habilis [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

We called them this because they used tools. The first proto-humans to clearly do so.

The question that we need ask ourselves today, “Are you a tool user or a tool maker?”

Everyone uses tools. But only a few people, even with access to AI and systems of leverage, choose to make tools.

Part of the gap is failing to ask the question. It generally doesn’t occur to a productive tool user to decide to slow down, risk failure, and take responsibility by making a new tool.

But new tools are one way we change things for the better.

Homo Faciens

      

Pluralistic: Google skates (05 Sep 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why Wikipedia works.
  • Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Górnicza, Warsaw, Brighton, London, Budapest, Edmonton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
  • 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.


A woodcut engraving of a courtroom scene in which the divorcee has thrown herself into the arms of one of the lawyers and they are about to kiss. The image has been altered: the heads of the judge, the court clerk and both lawyers have been replaced by green Android 'droid' mascots in judicial powdered wigs. The judge's bench sports a pixelated, 1998-era 'I'm feeling lucky' Google button.

Google skates (permalink)

Rome wasn't overthrown in a day. Oligarchies are stubborn, and by the time they've established and entrenched themselves, they have resources, power blocs and even mercenaries they can deploy to repel would-be dethroners.

The USA got its first antimonopoly law, the Sherman Act, in 1890, but it took 22 years before that law could be used to crush John D Rockefeller's corrupt, sprawling empire. Senator John Sherman promoted his law as a way of preventing monopolies from emerging, warning the Senate that they would struggle to overthrow the "autocrats of trade" that monopolies created:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The Senate passed his law and Harrison signed it, but then successive administrations left the Sherman Act to gather dust on a shelf as Rockefeller went on a spree, accumulating the kind of power that made him a true "autocrat of trade," so powerful that he and the US government were practically evenly matched.

Allowing Rockefeller to create, expand and consolidate his monopoly power was a terrible tactical blunder, giving him decades in which he was able to loot America and its trading partners, pauperizing ordinary people and smashing anyone who got in his way. No one was willing to admit that Rockefeller was a threat to democracy and prosperity until he had amassed all that power, and once he had all that power, it took heroic effort to break him.

The Rockefeller story is like the punchline of that joke: "When it doesn't rain, the roof don't leak; and when it's raining, it's too wet to fix it." Alternatively, there's my other favorite punchline: "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

The Rockefeller blunder wasn't a one-off. The Apple ][+ hit the shelves the same year Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the tech industry's rise occurred simultaneously with the dismantling of competition law enforcement. Tech companies were the first "post-antitrust" industry, and it wasn't until these companies became palpable, terrifying, undeniable, existential civilizational risks that we remembered that we had all these laws on the books that were designed to curb excessive corporate power.

Under Biden, a group of generationally talented, visionary trustbusters were given access to those dormant enforcement powers: Lina Khan at the FTC; Rohit Chopra at the CFPB, Tim Wu in the White House, and Jonathan Kantor at the DOJ Antitrust Division. Together with a staff of canny and skilled lawyers and economists, these people scored incredible victories against Big Tech. During the Biden years, Google lost three federal antitrust cases. Three!

But if we wanted to get there, we wouldn't start from here. After a series of stinging defeats in the US and abroad, after watching the EU, the UK, Japan, Singapore and South Korea make common cause with Biden's enforcers, Big Tech threw everything it had into Trump, who promised them a system of regulatory forbearance in exchange for low-cost bribery, backstopped by a xenophobic, belligerent geopolitics that would rain down punishments on any country that dared to regulate or tax Big Tech:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62553ywn77o

And then the other shoe dropped: the federal judges who convicted Google of operating an illegal monopoly handed down their "remedy" decisions. In an antitrust case, the "remedy" phase is like sentencing – the stage of the legal proceeding where the judge decides what punishment the company should face for breaking the law.

The first of these remedies came out a year ago, in September 2025. Judge Amit Mehta had presided over Google's "search" case, where we learned that Google had deliberately made search worse so that you'd have to search more than once in order to get your answer, which would allow the company the chance to show you more ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google was able to do this because it had cornered the market on search. The company had spent years paying a $20b annual bribe to Apple to stay out of the search market, and they'd bought the default search placement for every operating system, browser and carrier. If you encountered a search box in the wild, it was almost certainly wired into Google's servers. They knew that there was approximately zero chance that you'd ever stumble upon another search engine, which meant they could make their own search as shitty as they wanted and keep your business.

Confronted with these proven findings, Mehta decided that Google's punishment should be…nothing. They wouldn't be forced to delete the personal data they'd taken from billions of people. They wouldn't be forced to spin off Chrome or Android – two of the key tools Google uses to keep people from discovering other search engines. They wouldn't even be forced to halt the $20b annual bribe to Apple – the judge fretted that without that $20b annual bribe, Apple wouldn't be able to pay researchers to come up with cool new iPhone features (never mind that Apple spends all that money – and more – on stock buybacks, a recently illegal form of stock manipulation):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/03/unpunishing-process/#fucking-shit-goddammit-fuck

Then, a year later, another federal judge – Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Google "ad-tech" case – decided that Google's penalty for monopolizing the ad market should also be…nothing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/us-court-rules-google-will-not-have-to-sell-ad-exchange-after-losing-antitrust-case/

Oh, maybe not exactly nothing. We don't actually know the full extent of Judge Brinkema's "remedy," because it's sealed for two weeks. What we do know is that Google will not be forced to take the most obvious, effective and necessary step to prevent it from abusing its monopoly: Google will not be forced to sell off part of its ad-tech stack.

Let me unpack that for you, because unless you're an ad-tech weirdo, chances are you have no idea how any of this works and don't think it affects you. But the reality is that this is costing you money. It's one of the dirtiest, most profitable scams in the entire tech economy, which is saying something, because that is an economy that is made of scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier

Unlike older ads, which were targeted based on content (say, an ad for a hotel might run next to a newspaper article about a beachside town) modern ads are built on surveillance. Companies like Google amass vast, nonconsensual dossiers on the personal characteristics and behavior of billions of people, supplemented with information purchased from the unregulated data-broker sector.

When you visit a website, the site fires off a piece of software called "sell-side agent" to message a server called an "ad exchange" in order to announce your visit, soliciting bids for the right to show you an ad: "I am about to serve a web-page to a 18-34 year old man-child from New York's outer boroughs, who owns an Xbox and has been recently searching for information about gonorrhea: who wants to cram some ads into this guy's eyeballs?"

That ad-exchange server is haunted by "demand-side agents" – these are pieces of software fired off by advertisers that monitor all these advertising opportunities announced on the ad exchange and bid for the right to show you an ad. The highest bidder gets to show you an ad, and the fee is remitted to the exchange, which takes a cut and passes the remainder on to the sell-side platform, which also takes a cut and gives the balance to the website publisher.

So the ad-tech stack has three main components: the "sell-side platform" (SSP), which lets web publishers announce auctions for the right to advertise to their visitors; the "demand-side platform" (DSP) that lets advertisers bid to show those visitors ads; and the "ad exchange" – the marketplace where the sell-side and demand-side agents meet to collect bids, finalize the sale, and exchange ads for money.

When this all started, there were lots of companies in all three roles. Publishers and advertisers had their choice of SSPs, DSPs and exchanges, and all three types of middleman competed to offer the best deals to advertisers and publishers.

Then, Google and Facebook started buying up the leading DSPs, SSPs and exchanges. They used contracts and technical countermeasures to force anyone who used any part of their "stack" to use them for all parts of the transaction. The CEOs of Google and Facebook personally colluded to rig the market, dividing it up between them so that publishers would get less, advertisers would pay more, and Googbook would pocket the difference. The codename for this conspiracy was "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Jedi Blue was just the icing on the cake. The reality is they didn't need the conspiracy: once Google was selling services to advertisers and publishers on an exchange that Google owned, they created an entire universe of ways to rip off both advertisers and publishers. Now consider that Google is also an advertiser and also a web publisher, and the opportunities to cheat are just wild.

The numbers tell the story. Before Googbook captured 80% of the display advertising business, the total share of the advertising industry's revenues that went to "intermediaries" (middlemen like ad agencies, ad buyers, etc) was about 15%. Today, that number is 51%. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been moved out of publishers' and advertisers' bank accounts and onto Google and Facebook's balance sheets.

This isn't hard to understand. Google runs an ad business that locks in buyers and sellers on a marketplace Google owns and controls, where it also competes with those buyers and sellers. Buying or selling an ad through Google is like going to court to get a divorce, only to discover that you and your soon-to-be-ex- are both represented by the same lawyer, who promptly ascends the bench and dons a judge's wig, and then spends the whole trial trying to match with both of you on Tinder, and who concludes the trial by banging their gavel and announcing that they've decided that the family house will be awarded to…the judge!

The most absurd part of this whole farce is the lawyers who defend it on behalf of companies like Google. If a Google lawyer ever showed up to defend the company in a trial where the judge was working for the plaintiff, they would scream blue murder and refuse to proceed until the judge was removed from the case. But when Google operates a business where it presides over transactions where it has nothing but conflicts of interest, these same lawyers argue that Google would never cheat a seller or a buyer.

The fucking absurdity of this arrangement is so obvious that a bill to force a halt to it was co-sponsored…by Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz:

https://gizmodo.com/google-facebook-america-act-ads-break-up-cruz-warren-1850287725

Why would Warren and Cruz care about this? Because the hundreds of billions that have been moved from publishers and advertisers to Google and Facebook are hundreds of billions of dollars that are no longer paying for news and entertainment production, and they're hundreds of billions of dollars that businesses have to recoup by raising prices on you to pay their advertising bills.

Google (and, apparently, Judge Leonie Brinkema) dispute this. They say that "larger forces" have "changed the dynamic" that "restructured the industry." But, I mean, come on! This is a situation where hundreds of billions of dollars are divided up by a thrice convicted monopolist who is mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars richer, while the other parties to the transaction are mysteriously hundreds of billions of dollars poorer. Anyone who can't draw the obvious causal inference from these facts has so little object permanence that they would lose a fucking game of peek-a-boo.

This is so goddamned demoralizing. For a couple years there, it really looked like the tide was turning. Then Judges Brinkema and Mehta came along to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The only thing that's keeping me going is object permanence. I know my history. I know it took decades from the passage of the Sherman Act until the defeat of John D Rockefeller. Our forebears brought down Rockefeller because they didn't give up, despite setbacks as bad as this one, and worse. Stein's Law of finance holds that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops," and MLK told us that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This can't go on forever, and despite Dr King's phrasing, I know he understood that the arc doesn't just "bend" – it is bent – by people like us, hauling on it with all our might.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Advertisers claim they can hack your childhood memories https://web.archive.org/web/20010921022846/http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=92386

#25yrsago Wind-up cellphone charger https://web.archive.org/web/20011031122531/http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001310179,00.html

#20yrsago Steven Brust’s Dzur: witty and exciting heroic fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/05/steven-brusts-dzur-witty-and-exciting-heroic-fantasy/

#20yrsago America to US gov’t: kill the Broadcast Treaty! http://www.cptech.org/ip/wipo/bt/jointletter5sep06usptoforum.pdf

#20yrsago New Zealand wants a Ministry of DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20070108042834/http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/NZ_draws_line_on_DRM_and_trusted_computing/0,130061733,339270846,00.htm

#20yrsago Is it legal to look at the Web in Canada? https://web.archive.org/web/20061010120919/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1411/135/

#15yrsago Advice for self-publishers: why should anyone care about your book? https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-why-should-anyone-care/

#5yrsago A letter to a discouraged young writer https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/05/why-bother/

#1yrago Why Wikipedia works https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Saturday's words: 504 (12397 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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02:00 PM

Take-Two’s Leak Burying DMCA Attempts Snared GameStop & Gaming Journalist That Did Nothing Wrong [Techdirt]

I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don’t think any of this was some attempt to Streisand what is perhaps already the most anticipated game of all time into wider news coverage, and that is backed up by the DMCA blitz Take-Two has gone on to try to bury all of these leaks.

Those attempts shouldn’t surprise anyone, honestly. Take-Two and Rockstar have historically abused copyright law to try to bury all kinds of content it doesn’t like, whether it’s been game leaks in the past, or cheats for its games, or mods it doesn’t like.

But it sure would be nice if the partners Take-Two has doing the abusing of the law could bother to be somewhat accurate and not ensnare a gaming journalist for the crime of posting publicly available court documents.

On August 26, Stephen Totilo — the longtime Kotaku editor-in-chief who now runs the Game File newsletter — was locked out of his X account over a DMCA notice filed on Take-Two’s behalf. Totilo’s offense, by his own account, was an August 21 post reporting that judges in New York had cleared Take-Two to subpoena Microsoft and Discord in the leak hunt.

Attached were three screenshots: the two court orders, and a tweet from Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet pledging Microsoft is “working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games.” No leaked footage. No gameplay. The orders are public records that never once use the words Grand Theft Auto.

After Totilo complained both to ExTwitter and on ExTwitter, his account and the original tweet were restored and the DMCA claim had been rescinded. There is no indication that Take-Two or the vendor it was using to police the internet for these leaks have said anything publicly or privately to Totilo. They just nuked his account over a bullshit claim that ten seconds of review would indicate contained no infringing material, then restored it when the mistake was called out, and now are trying to Homer Simpson back into the bushes as though nothing happened.

But what makes this all the more frustrating is that the DMCA notice doesn’t make a copyright claim. It appears to make a trademark claim, instead.

It asserts Take-Two’s international figurative trademark on Grand Theft Auto — a trademark on the logo — and argues there is a likelihood of confusion, the legal test for whether the public might mistake someone else’s goods for the brand’s.

In plain English: a copyright takedown form was used to make a logo complaint, against images that contain neither the logo nor a single frame of the game.

The notice describes the reported content — federal court orders included — as “video/audiovisual recording,” and certifies all of it as accurate under penalty of perjury, the line that makes knowingly lying on the form a federal offense.

Everyone in this portion of the story, save Totilo, sucks at their jobs. Take-Two has clearly partnered with a company, Ebrand, that is not up to the task of properly policing IP on the internet. Ebrand messed this up badly, asserting a trademark claim via a copyright mechanism. ExTwitter, for its part, apparently demonstrated just how little review is done on this sort of thing, having taken down the tweet and suspending a journalist’s account over this absolute mess of a DMCA claim. It’s a full cornucopia of stupid on display for the world to see.

And this isn’t a one-off. Gamestop was also ensnared in Take-Two’s DMCA blitz. Its crime appears to be sharing a promotional screenshot for GTA6 that Rockstar specifically made available for use publicly.

Its August 20 post promoting a story on the billions in market value Take-Two shed as the leaks spread got struck, and the image X wiped was Rockstar’s own official GTA 6 screenshot, straight from the press gallery on Rockstar’s site.

That exact shot has run on dozens of outlets since May 2025, IGN and Mashable included. Take-Two’s vendor filed federal paperwork against a promotional asset Rockstar distributes so that outlets will use it.

There is simply no point to the DMCA’s “under penalty of perjury” language if it can’t be employed in a situation like this. At the very, very best, Ebrand and Take-Two are guilty of unbelievable negligence in issuing these DMCA takedowns and copyright strikes. When we’re talking about even temporary takedowns of the work of journalists, the First Amendment implications become obvious.

To allow these companies to simply slink away without penalty is why this sort of thing keeps happening. If there are no consequences to a carpet-bomb approach to copyright (trademark?) takedowns, then they will, and do, continue.

11:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 返 [Kanji of the Day]

返

✍7

小3

return, answer, fade, repay

ヘン

かえ.す　-かえ.す　かえ.る　-かえ.る

繰り返し   (くりかえし)   —   repetition
返し   (かえし)   —   reversal
振り返る   (ふりかえる)   —   to turn one's head
返事   (へんじ)   —   reply
返済   (へんさい)   —   repayment
繰り返す   (くりかえす)   —   to repeat
返還   (へんかん)   —   return
返信   (へんしん)   —   reply (e.g., email, fax, letter)
返す   (かえす)   —   to return (something)
恩返し   (おんがえし)   —   requital of a favour (favor)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 玩 [Kanji of the Day]

玩

✍8

中学

play, take pleasure in, trifle with, make sport of

ガン

もちあそ.ぶ　もてあそ.ぶ

玩具   (おもちゃ)   —   toy
愛玩   (あいがん)   —   caring for (esp. a pet or a small object)
食玩   (しょくがん)   —   small toy included with food
愛玩動物   (あいがんどうぶつ)   —   pet (animal)
玩具屋   (おもちゃや)   —   toy shop
玩味   (がんみ)   —   tasting
食品玩具   (しょくひんがんぐ)   —   small toy included with food
賞玩   (しょうかん)   —   appreciation
玩弄物   (がんろうぶつ)   —   plaything
玩弄   (がんろう)   —   toying with

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

OsmAnd 5.4 (Android) [OsmAnd Blog]

OsmAnd 5.4 for Android is now available on the Google Play Store. Please update to the latest version to enjoy the new features and improvements.

At this release, we focused on improving the search experience, making it easier to find places and discover objects around a specific location. We also added the ability to attach media files to Favorites and Waypoints, making them more informative and useful for your travels.

🔄 Update Now!

Thanks to all our users for their feedback and suggestions. Your input is invaluable in helping us improve OsmAnd and make it the best navigation app for Android.

OsmAnd 5.4 for Android

What's new​

Refreshed search UI​

We introduced a refreshed Search interface designed to make finding places faster and easier.

You can now quickly choose where to search — around the Map Center or My Location — and select how results should be sorted: by Nearest or Relevance.

It is also easier to narrow down the results by selecting one or multiple POI categories, so you can focus only on the places you are interested in.

UI SearchUI Search

The updated interface makes Search more flexible, easier to understand, and faster to use.

History search and filtering​

The Search History menu now gives you more control over what is displayed.

You can filter history by item type and choose one or several categories:

  • Tracks
  • Locations
  • Addresses
  • POIs
  • Favorites
  • Photos
  • Destinations

By default, all history items are shown.

You can also sort history by:

  • Recent
  • Nearest
  • Nearest to Map Center

An additional Type filter lets you display:

  • All
  • Search
  • Navigation

The History settings menu also includes an option to back up your history, helping you preserve your previous searches and navigation activity, make back up as file or clear all history.

UI SearchUI Search

Attach photos and media to Favorites​

We've made Favorites and Waypoints more informative by allowing you to attach media files directly to them.

Similar to the Audio/Video Notes feature, you can now add photos, videos, and audio notes to a saved Favorite or GPX Waypoint. You can take a new photo, record a video or audio note, or choose existing media from your device.

Attached files are displayed in a new Media section directly in the Favorite or Waypoint context menu, so photos and recordings connected to a place are easy to access when you need them.

This makes Favorites and Waypoints useful not only for saving a location, but also for keeping additional visual or audio information connected to that place.

MediaMedia

Subgroups support and pinnable folders for Favorites​

Managing large collections of Favorites is now much easier.

Favorites can now be organized using folders and subfolders, similar to the folder structure already available for Tracks. This allows you to create a clear hierarchy instead of keeping all Favorite groups at the same level.

For example, you can organize places like this:

Netherlands / Amsterdam / Museums

or create even deeper folder structures when needed.

In My Places → Favorites, folders are displayed separately from individual Favorite points. You can create new folders, rename them, and move Favorites between folders and subfolders.

The full folder path is also shown where it is useful, including the Favorite context menu, making it easier to understand where a saved place belongs. For long folder structures, OsmAnd automatically shortens the path while keeping the most important folder names visible.

You can also pin important folders for quicker access to the Favorite groups you use most often.

The new hierarchy is supported when moving and exporting Favorites and works with OsmAnd Cloud synchronization, while preserving the existing file-based Favorites structure.

Favorites subfolders

New widgets appearance​

We introduce new appearance settings for map widgets, giving you more control over how information is displayed on the map.

Instead of configuring widgets only individually, you can now customize the appearance of each widget panel — Left, Right, Top, and Bottom — from a dedicated Appearance screen.

For each panel, you can adjust:

  • Widget or row size — Original, Small, Medium, or Large
  • Widget icons — keep individual settings, show all, or hide all
  • Text and secondary text colors
  • Background color — Default, Transparent, or Custom

A live preview shows how the selected settings will look directly while you configure them.

For custom colors, Day and Night modes can be configured separately, helping keep widgets readable with different map styles and lighting conditions.

You can also copy appearance settings from another widget panel or another profile, making it easier to keep a consistent layout across different OsmAnd profiles.

Widget Appearance

Updated 3D Buildings​

OsmAnd 5.4 brings another major update to 3D Buildings, making cityscapes more detailed and closer to the real-world geometry stored in OpenStreetMap.

Buildings can now display different roof shapes instead of being rendered only as simple flat-topped volumes. When the corresponding roof information is available in OpenStreetMap, OsmAnd uses it to create a more recognizable building silhouette.

Rendering of complex buildings and building parts has also been improved. OsmAnd now handles structures divided into multiple building:part elements more accurately, including cases where only building:levels information is available instead of an explicit height.

We also improved the rendering of buildings created from relations and multipolygons, fixing cases where individual sections or lower parts of complex structures could be missing from the 3D model.

These changes make landmarks and detailed urban areas significantly more realistic when exploring the map in 3D.

To enable the feature, go to:

Menu → Configure map → Topography → 3D buildings

3D Buildings

Coordinates EPSG systems​

We expand support for coordinate systems, making the app more useful for professional mapping, field work, surveying, amateur radio, and other activities that rely on specific coordinate formats.

You can now use EPSG coordinate systems and the Maidenhead Locator System across different parts of OsmAnd, including:

  • Coordinate Search
  • Map Grid
  • POI and map context information

In Coordinate Search, you can select recently used formats or browse the full list of available coordinate systems. You can also quickly find the required system by searching for its name or EPSG code.

The Maidenhead Locator System is also supported on Android. It represents locations using a compact combination of letters and numbers and is commonly used by amateur radio operators.

Coordinate formats can be configured separately for each OsmAnd profile. You can choose a Primary coordinate format, add other formats to the list, reorder them, or remove formats you do not need.

OsmAnd 5.4 improves navigation in situations where a route crosses regions with outdated or inconsistent offline maps.

Previously, route calculation could be interrupted by several dialogs asking you to update maps or manually continue using the downloaded maps. In some cases, this could even happen during route recalculation while navigation was already active.

Now, OsmAnd can handle these situations more smoothly. If the selected routing method cannot calculate the route correctly, the app can switch to an alternative calculation method and continue navigation without unnecessary interruptions.

NavigationNavigation

You can also control this behaviour manually in:

Navigation settings → Route parameters → Route calculation method

Here, you can choose the preferred routing calculation method depending on your needs.

Navigation

This makes route calculation more reliable when travelling across map borders or when not all downloaded maps were updated at the same time.

Android Auto updates​

OsmAnd 5.4 brings several improvements to Android Auto, making the search, and navigation experience more convenient on the car display.

More Useful Search Results​

Search results in Android Auto now show more information at a glance.

For POIs, OsmAnd can display opening hours in a compact format, together with distance and address information. This makes it easier to see whether a restaurant, shop, fuel station, or another place is currently open before selecting it as your destination.

Address presentation has also been simplified for nearby POIs, reducing unnecessary information on the limited Android Auto screen.

Android Auto

Improved Navigation Controls​

Navigation controls have also been refined. The X button next to the ETA now correctly stops the active navigation, making it easier to finish a trip directly from the Android Auto interface.

We also fixed interface issues on the arrival screen, including the duplicated Search button that could appear after reaching a destination.

Together, these changes make Android Auto cleaner and easier to use while keeping important map, search, and navigation information accessible on the road.

Astronomy added solar & lunar eclipses​

The Astronomy plugin continues to grow in OsmAnd 5.4 with new tools for exploring solar and lunar eclipses directly on the Star Map.

Solar Eclipses​

You can now explore solar eclipses around the world and see how an eclipse develops over time.

The new Solar Eclipse Explorer shows the eclipse shadow on the map and provides a timeline that you can move through to see how the event changes. Information is calculated for the selected location, making it possible to check whether and how the eclipse will be visible there.

You can also quickly switch between previous and next solar eclipses and explore their paths in different parts of the world.

EclipsesEclipses

Lunar Eclipses​

The Star Map now also includes a dedicated Lunar Eclipse Explorer, supporting:

  • Penumbral eclipses
  • Partial eclipses
  • Total eclipses

The eclipse timeline shows the different stages of the event, while the visualization demonstrates how the Moon moves through the Earth's penumbra and umbra.

You can check the current eclipse phase, obscuration, Moon altitude, and where the eclipse is visible. A dedicated visibility layer on the map helps show the regions where the Moon is above the horizon during the event.

Together, these additions turn the Astronomy plugin into a useful tool not only for exploring stars and planets, but also for planning and observing upcoming eclipses.

EclipsesEclipses

AIS improvements​

OsmAnd 5.4 brings several improvements to the Vessel Tracker (AIS) plugin, making it easier to configure AIS connections and monitor nearby vessels.

The plugin settings have been reorganized into clearer sections for Connection, Object visibility, and Collision avoidance alarms (CPA).

You can configure AIS data reception using TCP or UDP, with connection information and status displayed directly in the interface.

New Object visibility settings give you more control over outdated AIS targets. You can define when a vessel should be marked as outdated and how long it should remain visible on the map after its signal is lost.

The Collision Avoidance Alarm (CPA) settings have also been redesigned. You can configure:

  • Warning time (TCPA) — how far in advance OsmAnd should warn about a potential collision.
  • Closest Point of Approach (CPA) — the minimum safe distance between your vessel and another AIS target.

When another vessel is predicted to come too close within the configured time, OsmAnd can highlight it as a potential collision risk.

AIS visibility can also be managed as a dedicated map layer through Configure Map, making it easier to enable or disable vessel information when needed.

Experimental feature: In OsmAnd 5.4, the new spatial search algorithm is available only when the OsmAnd Development plugin is enabled. This allows us to collect feedback and continue improving the feature before enabling it by default in a future release.

Search in OsmAnd 5.4 has received a major upgrade. A new spatial search algorithm makes it easier to find places and discover objects around a specific location.

Previously, search was largely tied to your current location and the way individual words in a query were interpreted. The new approach takes geographical context into account, making combinations such as a place name + POI, category, street, or address much easier to understand.

For example, you can find a city or another place first and then search for cafés, restaurants, hotels, shops, fuel stations, or other POIs around that location. This is especially useful when planning a trip somewhere else instead of searching only near your current position.

The new search engine also improves how OsmAnd handles more complex queries, including combinations such as "Hotel Berlin", a POI together with a street or city, different street-name formats, translated category names, and other location-based searches.

Under the hood, this is more than an interface update. Our backend team introduced a new search architecture called Spatial Search by Name, designed to provide more relevant results and resolve many limitations of the previous search system. Search by supported POI categories has also been optimized for faster results.

Others updates and improvements​

  • More track details in What's Here. Track information now makes it easier to distinguish between tracks on the map, including identifying the folder where a track is stored.

  • More icons for profiles. The profile icon selection has been expanded, giving you more options to visually distinguish profiles for activities such as running and other use cases.

  • Extended AIDL support for external apps. External apps and plugins can now organize their OsmAnd widgets into groups and use custom widget icons, providing more flexibility for third-party integrations.

  • Correct altitude on Android 16. Fixed an issue where OsmAnd could display ellipsoidal altitude instead of altitude above mean sea level (MSL) on Android 16 devices.

Bug fixes​

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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