Tuesday 2026-09-15

03:00 AM

Trump Told Supporters To “Cheat Like Hell.” The NY Times Went With “A Bit Tired Of Politics.” [Techdirt]

By now it’s old hat to point out that the mainstream media bends over backwards to pretend that Donald Trump is a “normal” president. The number of times you could point to the coverage and question how the media would cover things if a Democratic president did anything even remotely similar is impossible to keep track of.

But there were two separate things that happened at Trump’s fake GOP “midterm convention” (there was no convention, it was just a rally) and the way the media handled each tells you plenty about how stupid things have become. First up, Trump stated that if the Republicans win the midterms, every American would get a $5,000 check. This is both illegal and ridiculous.

It’s illegal because 18 USC 597 makes it a crime to offer an expenditure to induce someone to vote a particular way — which is precisely what dangling $5,000 checks in exchange for a Republican Congress is. It’s ridiculous because Trump promises this kind of bullshit all the time and never delivers. Here’s a compilation of him making unfulfilled promises of “dividend” checks over and over again:

The proper way to cover this story is something along the lines of “President Trump, facing dismally low approval ratings, tries to illegally bribe voters to support the GOP.” The checks are never going to happen, and everyone (including Trump) knows it’s never going to happen. But, instead, the mainstream media pretended that this was a serious proposal worth taking seriously.

A collection of news headlines from various media outlets reporting on Donald Trump's promise to give $5,000 checks to U.S. adults if Republicans win the midterms.

Yes, some of those headlines express skepticism, but within the range of normal policy proposal skepticism. The NY Times coverage, for example, focuses on what “experts say” about the proposal, and how much it would cost (over $1 trillion) and that it would require Congressional approval. It gets quotes from people to argue both the pros and cons of the whole thing, and literally says “it’s complicated” after asking whether such payments “could face legal challenges.” It even tries to “both sides” it by comparing it to a totally distinguishable situation where — in the midst of COVID shutdowns — some Democrats expressed policy support for general stimulus checks.

Then, the next night, in his next speech, the President of the United States — who has spent years falsely accusing others of “rigging elections” and “cheating” despite the near total lack of evidence of any significant voter fraud in the US — had people pledge allegiance to him personally (not the flag, not the Constitution, not America, but to him personally). He then literally told them to cheat and commit voter fraud in the election, before adding that anyone who doesn’t vote (presumably for MAGA candidates) would go to hell.

“Please raise your right hand,” Trump told a stadium packed with his supporters as he was met with some laughter.

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends,” he continued.

“I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. I don’t care,” he said. “I am going to go out and I am going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on Nov. 3rd or we are going to vote before that.”

Trump said it went without saying that people would vote Republican.

“OK. So help me God,” he concluded the pledge.

“You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell,” he added. “You know that, OK? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you. So please go and vote, because together we will defeat the communists.”

Here’s video of the first part of that, with the pledge and telling everyone to cheat and commit voter fraud:

And yes, Trump defenders will claim that he was joking. And everyone is laughing. Or they will claim that he’s only saying this because (as he notes as he says it) he claims (falsely) that the Democrats are cheating. But this kind of facetiousness is the whole point: to anyone offended, he can claim he was joking and mock you for taking him literally, while the MAGA faithful hear it and know exactly what he means.

Frankly, if any Democratic president (or, hell, almost any other Democratic politician) did either thing — having supporters pledge loyalty to them personally, or telling them to cheat in the election — it would generate headlines for weeks. There would be all sorts of hand-wringing among the pundit class about how un-presidential it was, and how the president is expected to bring decorum and support election security and isn’t supposed to be part of a personality cult.

Hell, when Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, the NY Post had a freakout that he would do so on a stage with Greek columns, attacking him for acting like a Greek god with the headline: “Temple of Dem on Mt. O-Lympus.”

But the mainstream media basically played the whole thing down. There were a few headlines about it, but mostly side stories, or just the video clip, not a story about the statement or what it means. But just look at the NYT’s “midterm” coverage the day after (this screenshot is from Friday morning):

A screenshot of The New York Times website featuring a section titled "2026 Midterm Elections" with various political news articles and images.

Nothing in any headline or promo line gets at the pledge or the demand to cheat. The main article goes with the title that he’s “a bit tired of politics” (which is hardly newsworthy), and then the text totally plays down what Trump actually said:

In 2026, he closed out an unusual midterm convention organized in his honor by saying he was a little bored of politics. He seemed more interested in telling supporters to swear on something holy — which seemed to be himself — that they would go out and vote for Republican candidates in November.

“Please raise your right hand,” Mr. Trump instructed a rowdy crowd of thousands inside a Dallas arena on Thursday evening. Many of them complied. “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” (Mr. Trump usually frowns on election fraud.)

He added: “I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.”

And that’s basically it on the topic. Even the parenthetical “usually frowns on election fraud” is laughably misleading. All of this just seems like an attempt to sanewash the insane.

Yes, covering every crazy thing that Trump says or does makes you seem like you’re crazy too. But it’s incredible which stories the media focuses on and which they minimize. These two examples in quick succession make it clear that in an attempt to make the Trump presidency seem more “normal” than the out-of-control authoritarian cult-of-one-man that it actually is, they will treat an illegal and ridiculous bribe as a legitimate policy proposal, while burying the part where he has supporters swear fealty to him personally and then tells them to break the law.

12:00 AM

Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

But do you use keyboard shortcuts?: AI people are WEIRD.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: "Changeling"; Sony Rootkit vs CD drives; Google's scumbag lobbyists; NJ's e-voting coverup; Spying sex toys; Scott Walker dark money leak; "REAMDE"; Snowden's pardon.
Upcoming appearances: 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.

But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (permalink)

Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done.

That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."

Not bosses, though. Bosses love AI and there's plenty of evidence that they're positively harassing the people who work for them with demands to use AI in their work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1weztw9/anyone_elses_boss_obsessed_with_chatgpt/

Beyond the widespread belief that AI is what you use if you don't care about quality, insisting that people use AI is weird for another reason: why should anyone care which tool was used to do the job? I mean, provided the job was accomplished correctly, on time and to budget, why would anyone care how it was done? My illustrator friends whose clients want to be assured that the work is being done "with AI" were never before asked "Did you use a Wacom tablet to draw these lines? Did this element start life as a vector or as rasters? Are you more into using cage transforms, or do you like to stroke the image with the warp tool?"

It's not just illustrators. I've heard this from bookkeepers. "Please tell me you got a chatbot to help you with the syntax for this Excel macro" is a genuinely weird thing to ask someone. By all means, concern yourself with whether the accounts are correct, but caring about how the macros are written is like caring about whether someone jots notes to themselves by tabbing to a new document window or by scribbling on a yellow pad by the keyboard.

I've heard this from writers, architects…all kinds of professionals. "Did you use AI to help you outline this?" What a stupid thing to ask a writer! That's like asking "Do you use keyboard shortcuts, or do you mouse over the Word ribbon and click on the little scissors icon when you want to cut some text?" The actual, finished document is right in front of you. Is it a good document? Are those good words? Why are you concerning yourself with the writer's pencil-sharpening technique?

There's precedent for this: indeed, it's the very origin of management consulting. The first management consultants were the Taylorists; these were con artists that charged bosses vast sums of money to stand over workers with stopwatches, timing each step of their jobs to the instant in order to produce a mandatory choreography of "the best way" to do the job:

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

None of these "scientists" knew anything about how to do the job, and critically, they never asked the workers why they used an "inefficient" technique to accomplish a task. Rather, Taylorists concerned themselves with getting workers to move like precision machines, transforming the factory floor into a stage upon which workers pantomimed "efficiency" for bosses who also didn't know how to do the workers' jobs.

If this produced inferior goods, or caused the workers pain by forcing them to repetitively move in injurious ways, that was a small price to pay. Bosses claimed they were buying improved efficiency, but what they were really after was reassurance: reassurance that the workers whom they relied upon were engaged in nothing more than a set of reducible, mechanical steps. Taylorized workers were required to act out a role in a play in which they were easily replaced, mindless appendages to the boss's skill, discernment and ambition. A Taylorized workplace is a colony organism whose brains are in the C-suite and whose busy workers are nothing more than drones and pismires.

AI is the apotheosis of this fantasy. A boss who lays hands upon an AI tool doesn't have to know how to draw a picture, balance books, or write technical documentation. They only have to prompt the production of these things. For bosses, AI is a great leveler: it is sold as a way to distill and package up the skill and discernment of workers and infuse them into a pliable automaton.

If you give workers instructions that reveal your ignorance, they might roll their eyes at you and make you feel bad about yourself. Even if they restrain themselves in the moment, they might make fun of you in the break-room later. To be the boss is to sit alone at your desk, haunted by the suspicion that you are not in the driver's seat, but rather, you are in the back seat playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is sold as a way to wire the toy steering wheel directly into the corporation's drive-train:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Seen in this light, bosses' insistence that workers use AI makes perfect sense. Once you reassure yourself that your subordinates produce the things you need by prompting a model, you reassure yourself that you could do their jobs. At that point, you're not relying on their skill – you're doing them the favor of paying them to do a job that you're too busy and important to do, but which you could do. With AI, you can tell yourself that you're in the driver's seat, even if someone else has their hands on the wheel.

(Image: ArwinJ, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

LONG | PLAY https://longplayplatform.com/
Prospect welcomes recognition agreement at Skyscanner Technology Ltd https://prospect.org.uk/news/prospect-welcomes-recognition-agreement-at-skyscanner-technology-ltd
They stopped 57 shootings. Everyone was just fired. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgcfcRFrMYc&list=PLFVDwNAJdY2w
No Country for Tech Bros https://thepointmag.com/politics/no-country-for-tech-bros/#
VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/02/cancer-capital/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Changeling, a fairy tale of contemporary New York
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/14/changeling-a-fairy-tale-of-contemporary-new-york/

#20yrsago Sony’s rootkit disables CD drives when combined with AOL software https://web.archive.org/web/20071006050933/http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2006/09/14/sony-drm-woes-continue

#20yrsago Google’s new lobbyists: lying, astroturfing, push-polling scumbags https://web.archive.org/web/20071010112656/https://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009776.php

#15yrsago New Jersey e-voting coverup https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/09/13/nj-election-cover/

#15yrsago Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-perfectly-executed-mammoth-ambitious-technothriller/

#10yrsago Class action suit: smart sex toys spy on their owners and transmit their masturbation habits https://web.archive.org/web/20160915002121/http://www.vocativ.com/358530/smart-dildo-company-sued-for-tracking-users-habits/

#10yrsago Leaked: damning Scott Walker dark money docs that judge ordered destroyed https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2016/sep/14/john-doe-files-scott-walker-corporate-cash-american-politics

#10yrsago The DoJ is using a boring procedure to secure the right to unleash malware on the internet https://web.archive.org/web/20160915072648/https://www.wired.com/2016/09/government-will-soon-able-legally-hack-anyone/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden sets out the moral case for a pardon from Obama https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/13/edward-snowden-why-barack-obama-should-grant-me-a-pardon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/12/naomi-klein-extreme-wealth-has-a-deranging-effect-it-turns-you-into-a-supremacist
Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17
https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow
Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ
What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture)
https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456
Pod Save the UK
https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why
Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM
Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

“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

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

Rightsholders Can’t Use OpenAI and Anthropic to Dismantle Meta’s Seeding Defense [TorrentFreak]

Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.

Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly infringing activity. This includes a class action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, which accused Meta of training its Llama models on pirated books, and of sharing those books with other BitTorrent users in the process.

Last summer, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the AI training itself was fair use, leaving the BitTorrent distribution claims as the last live part of the case. Earlier this year, Meta added a new line of defense to those claims. In a supplemental interrogatory response, the company argued that any uploading of pirated books during its torrent downloads was “part-and-parcel” of a fair use purpose.

Meta stated that BitTorrent was “a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets,” and in the case of Anna’s Archive the only way to get them in bulk. Since torrent users upload to each other by design, any sharing was simply “an inherent characteristic of the BitTorrent protocol.”

Both of Meta’s torrenting claims are now being tested in three related lawsuits, filed by Chicken Soup for the Soul, academic publisher Cognella, and John Carreyrou’s Cambronne Inc. These three cases are all assigned to Judge Chhabria and target the same shadow library torrenting activity.

The coordinated cases

Ask Torrenting AI Rivals

Instead of waiting for Meta to document the technical details of its torrent client setup, the publishers went to the two AI rivals that could potentially disprove the seeding requirement.

In August, they subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic for the identity, versions and configurations of every torrent client the companies have used since 2019. This specifically includes any records of efforts to prevent seeding.

In similar lawsuits, both companies have admitted that they used books from shadow libraries. If they configured a torrent client not to upload, Meta’s “necessity” argument would be in trouble.

“If OpenAI torrented but configured its clients to suppress uploading, then the redistribution Meta calls an ‘inherent characteristic’ of the protocol was a setting Meta declined to change,” the publishers told the court.

“Inherent characteristic”

That argument builds on an earlier finding in the legal battle, which revealed that a Meta engineer wrote a script to prevent seeding, but apparently not leeching.

OpenAI and Anthropic Won’t Talk

Instead of insisting on all requested documents, the publishers also offered an alternative. If OpenAI or Anthropic would simply explain how they acquired the shadow-library data and whether they tried to prevent uploading, the torrent document demands would be dropped.

The AI companies didn’t take the offer, however, and they pushed back instead. Both companies informed the court that examining the technical features of the relevant torrent client directly would be better, adding that their own practices say nothing about Meta’s.

“Clients are not interchangeable, they differ in their default upload settings, in whether those defaults can be reconfigured, and in their capacity to suppress uploading during and after a download,” Anthropic’s lawyers wrote.

“What Anthropic’s client allowed shows nothing about what Meta’s did.”

It says nothing

OpenAI made the same point, noting that there is no evidence that it used the same torrent clients or “built ‘comparable corpora’ to Meta.”

Judge Sides With AI Rivals

In a new order released last week, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson sided with the two AI companies. Without deciding on Meta’s seeding arguments, the court concluded that the torrent logs of AI rivals are not the best place to gather evidence.

“To the extent Meta’s fair use defense hinges on the assertion that its use of BitTorrent was the only way BitTorrent can be used, that assertion can be tested by examining the BitTorrent client itself,” Judge Hixson writes.

Asking OpenAI or Anthropic for their logs says little about Meta’s technical setup or the technical capabilities of torrent clients.

“Any user of a torrent client would be relevant in that sense. Why can’t Plaintiffs’ expert use the torrent clients to show how torrent clients can be used?” the order adds.

Similarly, the claim that shadow library data could only be downloaded in bulk through torrents, would be something the publishers can check with the libraries directly, instead of trying to get that information through other AI companies.

Meta’s Own Server Data

In these three cases, the court decided that getting data from AI rivals is off limits. However, the same doesn’t apply to data from Meta’s own servers.

On September 11, Judge Hixson granted a motion in the related class action case filed by Kadrey and other authors. This order covers the command history files for every server Meta used to torrent, including its virtual machines and AWS instances.

Command histories are the logs a server keeps of every command an operator types. For a torrenting machine, that presumably includes how the torrent client was installed and any changes made to its upload settings.

The order goes back to early 2025, when Meta admitted that it had held back relevant documents until after the discovery deadline had passed. To make up for that, Judge Chhabria gave the authors extra discovery, including records showing how Meta’s torrent clients were set up and used.

Meta argued that the log files it had already handed over were enough. Judge Hixson disagreed, however, ordering Meta to hand over the command histories as well.

The authors hope these command histories will also reveal exactly which copyrighted works Meta torrented. Whether the data will show any of that has yet to be seen.

For now, whether Meta could have downloaded the books without seeding is a question for the plaintiffs’ experts, who will have Meta’s own server records to work with. Their opening reports in the Meta cases are due later this month.

—

A copy of Judge Hixson’s order on the OpenAI and Anthropic subpoenas is available here (pdf). The joint letter briefs can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). The command history order in Kadrey v. Meta is available here (pdf).

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

Monday 2026-09-14

11:00 PM

Streaming TV Prices Rising Faster Than Cable Ever Did [Techdirt]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.

That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.

Streaming TV prices hikes are coming so fast and furious, they’re outpacing many of the ridiculous traditional cable TV price hikes we saw during the cord cutting revolution:

“Over the course of the past 12 months, streaming rates have collectively risen 11.8 percent. The biggest year of increase was 2023, when the streamers shot up an average of 17.7 percent. A Hollywood Reporter analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows cable and satellite prices, by comparison, rose an annual average of 3.9 percent — excluding a deregulation surge of the late 1980s, when the index peaked at 14 percent. But that was a seismic shift provoked by a federal intervention rather than, say, because Widow’s Bay is a good show, or “we’re pretty sure we can get away with this.”

That shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Many of the same cable TV executives that enshittified traditional cable TV have moved on to streaming. And all the same quarterly growth pressures still apply. It’s not good enough to offer a good, affordable product people like; impossible scale is a siren song that, sooner or later, leaves many of these companies thrashed on the rocks.

There remain some notable positives though. Users are still free to subscribe to a streaming service, binge watch everything of interest, and then cancel to save money. That’s a big improvement from the traditional days of the bloated cable TV bundle.

Initially, streaming TV providers saw significantly higher customer satisfaction scores that big TV providers like Comcast. But that’s slowly changed over the last few years, as frustration with streaming TV grows and traditional cable TV providers try a little harder to improve. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores now show tech companies and traditional cable companies neck and neck:

“The results arrive during a period of rising subscription costs and mounting consumer fatigue. Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey found that 73% of streaming consumers are frustrated with rising prices, around 40% cancel at least one paid service each year, and 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if monthly costs rose by just $5. The average subscribing household spends $69 per month on four streaming video services.”

What happens next? Well you can see that with growth saturated, media giants have started shifting their attention to mergers and consolidation, just like traditional cable, phone, and media companies did. That means even more price hikes to pay off debt, significant layoffs, and corner cutting that results in lower-quality overall product.

I suspect once they’re more meaningfully consolidated and fully enshittified, they’ll find some creative way to make cancelling and resubscribing annoying, especially if the U.S. continues its steady trend of lobotomizing its regulators at the behest of corporate power.

That could most likely come in the form of telecom and media companies merging and then tethering your subscription tightly to wireless phone and internet discounts. Or simply going the AOL route and make cancellation annoying as hell. Who is going to stop them? The Trump FTC?

Ultimately this enshittification will result in more and more users flocking to free or cheap short form video alternatives. Or simply reverting to piracy, at which point (and I’m sorry to keep beating this dead horse) all the execs responsible will blame everything (VPNs, generational entitlement, China) but themselves.

04:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 希 [Kanji of the Day]

希

✍7

小4

hope, beg, request, pray, beseech, Greece, dilute (acid), rare, few, phenomenal

キ　ケ

まれ　こいねが.う

希望 (きぼう) — hope
希望者 (きぼうしゃ) — applicant
希望小売価格 (きぼうこうりかかく) — manufacturer's suggested retail price
希少 (きしょう) — scarce
希薄 (きはく) — thin (air)
希望退職 (きぼうたいしょく) — voluntary retirement
参加希望者 (さんかきぼうしゃ) — those interested in participating
希求 (ききゅう) — longing
古希 (こき) — 70th birthday
希代 (きたい) — uncommon

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 烈 [Kanji of the Day]

烈

✍10

中学

ardent, violent, vehement, furious, severe, extreme

レツ

はげ.しい

強烈 (きょうれつ) — strong
痛烈 (つうれつ) — severe
猛烈 (もうれつ) — fierce
熱烈 (ねつれつ) — ardent
鮮烈 (せんれつ) — vivid
激烈 (げきれつ) — violence
熾烈 (しきれつ) — fierce (fight, competition, etc.)
苛烈 (かれつ) — severe
烈火 (れっか) — raging fire
烈風 (れっぷう) — gale

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

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

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the problems with the latest court ruling against Elon Musk:

Heads I win, tails you lose

Problematic law is passed:

A) Company or individual rushes a legal challenge out so they aren’t accused of waiting too long and having their challenge thrown out as a result. However because they rushed it their filing has one or more serious flaws and is thrown out as a result anyway.

B) Company or individual carefully crafts their legal challenge, doing exhaustive research to make sure that their challenge takes into account legal precedent and applicable laws, a process which takes a while and means their legal challenge takes a week, weeks or a few months depending on the size of the relevant legal minefield that needs to be navigated and is accused of taking too long with their filing and having it tossed as a result.

I loathe being on Elon’s side on anything and especially on a case like this where he’s suing because his AI was removing clothing from pictures of real people but I simply cannot agree with the judge’s reasoning in shooting down his legal filing against the law due to the absolute mess it’s likely to cause and the significant power judges would have to decide what counts as ‘too late’ on legal filings.

Elon may be a world-class asshole and loser but taking a hatchet to the legal system and inventing out of whole cloth new requirement to undermine his legal filings is crossing the line because other people have to deal with the resulting havoc and unlike Elon those people might not deserve or be able to deal with the mess.

In second place, it’s an anonymous comment about the new time limit on Microsoft’s cloud gaming offering:

What kind of “ultimate” gamer plays less than 15 hours a month? I’m guessing many gamers would exhaust a 5-hour limit in one day. Microsoft are sending a clear signal here: cloud gaming is not to be taken seriously.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Paramount astroturfing support for its merger:

What would it even mean, really, to “move Paramount out of California?” Pack up all their multitudinous studio shit and flatbed-convoy it to Texas (or wherever else)?
How much would that cost their dumb asses?

I kinda want to see them do it, just to see them have to deal with the self-inflicted headache.

Next, it’s Nimrod with a simple comment about ICE’s pathetically low vetting standards for new hires:

It’s probably easier to get a job with ICE than it is to vote by mail.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about the DOJ refusing to dismiss its reflecting pool case with prejudice:

Somebody should tell the DoJ that doing something without prejudice is kind of woke.

In second place, it’s MrWilson making a small edit to another comment about the macho nonsense from Hegseth’s DOD and other federal agencies:

But I guess that’s what happens when an entire political ideology is ~~obsessed with penises~~ led by dicks.

FTFY

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with one more comment from MrWilson, this time in response to another commenter who corrected our use of “less” when it should have been “fewer”:

To be fair, “fewer” is used for things you can count and Republicans can’t count fictional illegal voters, so…

Finally, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to that comment:

If Republicans could read, they’d be very upset with you for implying they can’t count.

That’s all for this week, folks!

05:00 AM

My Shingetsu News Agency VM 78: “Kimi Onoda and the Trauma of History”, on how the Cabinet Minister in charge of policy towards “foreigners” is basically removing them from Japan. I see it as the natural outcome of Japan’s legacy of abuse towards its Visible Minorities. [debito.org]

Opening excerpt: Making much news in foreign quarters is Kimi Onoda, Minister for a “Society of Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals” since October 2025. She is the public face spearheading policies making it more difficult Japan’s foreign population to stay. Soon, foreign residents who want to live longer-term or permanently in Japan must prove that they consistently make more than the average Japanese household’s income. Even if they manage that, there will be stringent and tested Japanese language requirements, fees for visa renewals jumping more than 12-fold from 6000 yen to 75,000 yen, and Permanent Resident fees skyrocketing 20-fold to 200,000 yen... Onoda is a peculiar messenger for this policy. A Chicago-born daughter of an American father, she is a subset of Japan’s Visible Minorities called a haafu (half-Japanese). As such, one might expect her to be a bit more sensitive towards other diverse Japanese, as she has faced their hardships herself. Abandoned by her father and educated in Japan’s homogenizing education system, she admits to growing up in poverty and being bullied for “looking foreign.” However, compassion for diversity is not Onoda’s thing. She has made easily falsifiable comments about foreign crime and incarceration rates, plus defamatory claims about foreigners damaging Japanese society and the social safety net. That nastiness is embedded in her policy justifications, claiming these revisions will prevent foreigners becoming public welfare recipients now or in old age. (Even though that’s why everyone pays into the system in the first place.) And it was also seen when Onoda got snippy about the status of Permanent Residency (eijuken) no longer being “permanent,” pedantically saying is not a “right” but a “permit” for foreigners. So it’s just another revocable visa.... Thus Onoda reveals a cruel assumption that foreigners can never truly earn the “right” to permanence no matter how long they contribute... Why such bile and personal animus in her public exercise of power? My theory is that this is what happens when Japanese of diverse roots, bullied and scarred by their inability to fit into Japan’s “homogeneous society” narrative, become bullies themselves. This essay will now discuss the history of Japan’s Postwar “homogeneous society” narrative, demonstrate how it stigmatized Japan’s its Postwar mixed-blood Japanese children, and argue that Onoda’s bile is a product of that. Instead of showing support and solidarity for her haafu peers, she went in the other direction, overcompensating to prove herself as a “real Japanese” by pandering to the “pure-Japanese” adherents...

DEBITO.ORG READERS’ ISSUES OF CONCERN, SEPT 2026 [debito.org]

I write Debito.org SNA "Visible Minorities" columns once a month (SNA website here) and send Debito.org Newsletters to subscribers sporadically. After sending, I archive them here, and below, Debito.org Readers have been adding recent issues and articles that concern them regardless of the content of the post over the past several years. It’s been a good way to allow Readers to be heard and engaged. I still put out Debito.org Newsletters, but since I’m only posting on Debito.org approximately once a month, there’s only one article to repost (my SNA column), and I have it here as Debito.org post anyway. So it’d only be a repeat if I dedicated another post to the Newsletter. But I don’t want to deprive Readers of a forum, so let me continue this “Issues of Concern” section (still categorized under “Newsletters”) and let it be a free space for articles and comments germane to the mission of Debito.org. Past "Issues of Concern" pages are getting filled with comments that are running farther afield than the original title, so let's create a new one now. Thanks as always for reading and contributing to Debito.org.

When does it become a speech? [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

One person isn’t a lecture, it’s lunch.

Three people is office hours.

Six people is a seminar.

At some point, we shift from interaction to performance–but the people are the same people, the very ones that were happy to simply sit and have lunch with us.

Bring in some cameras and it goes from a lecture to a broadcast. And that brings all sorts of other requirements, anxiety and noise.

Perhaps we should act as if it’s just lunch.

Visible Minorities: Kimi Onoda and the Trauma of History [SNA Japan]

The Cabinet minister in charge of policy towards “foreigners” is basically removing them from Japan. I see it as the natural outcome of Japan’s legacy of abuse towards its Visible Minorities.

SNA (Tokyo) — Making much news in foreign quarters is Kimi Onoda, Minister for a “Society of Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals” since October 2025. She is the public face spearheading policies making it more difficult for Japan’s foreign population to stay.

Soon, foreign residents who want to live longer-term or permanently in Japan must prove that they consistently make more than the average Japanese household’s income. Even if they manage that, there will be stringent and tested Japanese language requirements, fees for visa renewals jumping more than 12-fold from 6000 yen to 75,000 yen, and Permanent Resident fees skyrocketing 20-fold to 200,000 yen.

And there’s a weird requirement, according to the Mainichi Shinbun, “that they be expected to receive a future pension comparable to that of someone who had paid into the employees’ pension system for 30 years at that income level.” Whatever that means.

Onoda is a peculiar messenger for this policy. A Chicago-born daughter of an American father, she is a subset of Japan’s Visible Minorities called a haafu (half-Japanese). As such, one might expect her to be a bit more sensitive towards other diverse Japanese, as she has faced their hardships herself. Abandoned by her father and educated in Japan’s homogenizing education system, she admits to growing up in poverty and being bullied for “looking foreign.”

However, compassion for diversity is not Onoda’s thing. She has made easily falsifiable comments about foreign crime and incarceration rates, plus defamatory claims about foreigners damaging Japanese society and the social safety net.

That nastiness is embedded in her policy justifications, claiming these revisions will prevent foreigners from becoming public welfare recipients now or in old age. (Even though that’s why everyone pays into the system in the first place.) And it was also seen when Onoda got snippy about the status of Permanent Residency (eijuken) no longer being “permanent,” pedantically saying it is not a “right” but a “permit” for foreigners. So it’s just another revocable visa. One could be forgiven for misinterpreting, since the word for “right” (ken) is embedded in the official status. Thus Onoda reveals a cruel assumption that foreigners can never truly earn the “right” to permanence no matter how long they contribute.

Finally, there’s Onoda’s disdain for accountability. According to scholar and journalist David McNeill, she lays out her policies in curt and defensive language “with little nuance… and gives every impression that she dislikes journalists.” She only holds carefully scripted press conferences, refuses to comment on questions she doesn’t like, and eschews debate or explanation about her policy positions.

Why such bile and personal animus in her public exercise of power?

While I am not a psychologist, as a columnist I can still hypothesize about Onoda’s motivations. My theory is that this is what happens when Japanese of diverse roots, bullied and scarred by their inability to fit into Japan’s “homogeneous society” narrative, become bullies themselves.

This essay will now discuss the history of Japan’s Postwar “homogeneous society” narrative, demonstrate how it stigmatized Japan’s Postwar mixed-blood Japanese children, and argue that Onoda’s bile is a product of that. Instead of showing support and solidarity for her haafu peers, she went in the other direction, overcompensating to prove herself as a “real Japanese” by pandering to the “pure-Japanese” adherents.

Japan’s Toxic Postwar “Homogeneity” Narrative

The following is adapted from my book Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Press, Second Edition), p. 43-5:

During the American Postwar Occupation (1945-52), Japan was shedding the trappings of its empire, sending its imported conquered workers back to their countries of origin, and overwriting the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’s narrative of “liberating fellow Asians from Western colonialism” with a “homogeneous, island-nation Japan” narrative.

But getting in the way of the “monocultural, monoethnic, pure-blooded Japan” mantra were the mixed-blood Japanese children from Japanese relationships with American soldiers. Stigmatized as byproducts of the oldest profession, these children were soon differentiated in the vernacular with labels and racialized epithets (konketsuji, ainoko, haafu, etc.).

The national government decided to address this, but did it so ham-fistedly that, according to scholar Hwaji Shin (2010), it set the template for how Japanese who “look foreign” would be treated to the present day.

Scholar Robert Fish (2009) described the government’s five-step solution as follows:

Step One: Politicians and bureaucrats drew attention to a looming “problem” (mondai) that would soon need addressing so that Japan may return to its “peaceful, tranquil homogeneous state.” Japanese society would axiomatically create problems for children who were not themselves “homogeneous” because they lacked a “pure” Japanese bloodline.

Step Two: The government drew up a policy proposal with high-level inputs from intellectuals, politicians, bureaucrats, and specialists through special deliberation councils (shingikai). The shingikai’s conclusions were on their face constructive: Make sure these children were educated properly in the Japanese school system like any other Japanese.

But the framing went awry in application: The “problems” to be resolved were riddled with negative assumptions: (a) konketsuji would bear the shame of being branded as children sired by American soldiers; (b) konketsuji would face financial hardship and stigma by being in a single-mother family of a prostitute; (c) konketsuji would not be accepted by school peers, and (d) konketsuji would be unable to function in Japanese society because they don’t “look Japanese.”

So without any scientific basis or evidence, overcautious policymakers reflexively assumed Japanese who didn’t “look Japanese” would not fit into Japan, and by saying so out loud, created an official permission structure for it to happen. As scholar Paolo Freire notes, “In order to exist, one must be named,” and branding konketsuji as a social “problem” created policies of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Step Three was the public debate institutionalizing the stigma nationwide: Politicians at all levels of government offered ponderous musings on how Japan’s “character” and “Japaneseness” would be affected by this dilution of Japan’s race/ethnicity. The contemporary media and public discourse repeatedly cited inaccurate statistics of 100,000 “children of assignations” (ainoko) and made them into a shameful reminder of the American Occupation.

The Ministry of Education even explicitly portrayed konketsuji as objects of pity, according to Fish, as children “who carry the destiny of misfortune on their backs.” This narrative spread through popular culture, including films, newspapers, memoirs, poetry, and even school speeches and essays.

In Step Four, data was collected to substantiate the anticipated outcome, then disseminated again through the mass media to officially demonstrate that konketsuji in fact did not do as well in school as their “regular” “pure-blooded” counterparts.

Finally, Step Five firmly embedded the racialized mindset into the national narrative for generations. If there were any “problems” with those children who “looked different,” they would be attributed to, yes, racism, but also just socioeconomics, difficulties fitting into Japan’s homogeneous society, being abandoned by foreign fathers, or, as the Ministry of Education officially claimed, quote, “rough personalities” from the mixed breeding.

In sum, the “Konketsuji Problem” was soon smoothed over as a postwar aberration, but by entangling it in public narratives of shame, pity, and parental irresponsibility, it created a generational environment where Visible Minorities became “Japanese with an asterisk.” It also meant, if you were outside the “normal” gene pool, you spent a life of constant psychological taxation to somehow find your way in.

Out from this toxic history steps a wounded haafu Minister Onoda.

Flawed Public Policy from Psychological Scars

Let’s pause and give some credit to Onoda: In addition to being a Visible Minority, she grew up in Okayama Prefecture, a famously conservative area that elects rabidly xenophobic diet members like Takeo Hiranuma. Nevertheless, she persisted, getting a good education in civics and getting elected to local office at age 29. She proved a quick study. Only a year later she was elected to the Diet. Within four years, she had a Cabinet post and has since served in several before getting a Cabinet position on “coexistence with foreigners” essentially designed for her.

Onoda is clearly a talented politician with a lot of future potential, only aged 43 in a system where politicians hold office well into their eighties. Her political and ideological patron, former Prime Minister Taro Aso (aged 85), is said to be grooming her for the next generation of leadership in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

But there has been some speculation about Onoda’s psychological scars and misanthropy. In public statements, she has said she prefers relationships in her private life only “with 2D characters” (not “3D,” as in real people). Fine, but if she only gets personally involved with fictional characters, she doesn’t face the reality of pushback or consequences from people she affects.

And that matters in a person given public power. As journalist Jake Adelstein notes, “the Overton window on immigration has clearly shifted to the dehumanizing end… 2-dimensional characters are not actually able to take care of the aged. They don’t change bedpans, nor do they do the work of construction workers, or even 7-11 clerks.”

That’s why I argue that Onoda’s apparent lack of empathy for actual human beings, coupled with a visible grievance towards the foreign side of her, makes her particularly ill-qualified to design policy for “peaceful coexistence” toward them.

Now let me speak as a Political Scientist instead of a shrink:

I believe Onoda is where she is because she is a politically convenient lightning rod. As a willing tool for ultraconservative factions, she’s helping the LDP compete for votes against the even more xenophobic “Japan First” Sanseito party by tacking further nativist right.

Essentially, as I’ve written before, she’s making herself look good by making foreigners look bad, perpetually proving to her minders that she’s “one of the good ones.”

Going in Precisely the Wrong Direction

Some caveats: First, Onoda isn’t doing this alone in a vacuum. All national-level shingikai on “international coexistence,” etc. I have ever witnessed or investigated have lacked diversity. There’s at best maybe one token foreign-born academic on their panel. And the panel’s overall attitude to their object of study is instructive: Listening to their debates, I get the impression that these councils often treat foreign residents like wild animals that have taken over Japanese housing projects and neighborhoods, with onsite reports depicted almost like a safari to an exotic land. At worst, they don’t even distinguish between foreign residents and tourists.

Point is, even before Onoda got involved, the national government usually produces public policy on foreigners without meaningful input from the people being affected by it. Blind spots abound.

Second, there’s always the argument that Japan can run its society how it likes, and if foreigners are not part of the plan, so be it. But as we have argued for decades, this is not good for Japanese society. Onoda’s policies do not defuse the demographic time bomb of Japan’s accelerating aging, depopulation, and national pension insolvency; they accelerate it. Instead of encouraging settlement, stability, and economic revitalization, Onoda’s policies are making sure foreign residents cannot be a part of it.

For example, the revised Business Manager Visa will now require current foreign business owners to provide thirty million yen in capitalization, a master’s degree, three years of business-management experience, and at least one costly full-time employee certified in Japanese Level N2. Even the whiff of this looming policy has already caused nationwide closings of shops and restaurants and an exodus of foreign business owners in recent months.

This will negatively impact the small towns and cities that are literally dying off. As the Irish Times recently reported (Sept. 9), Japan’s population has shrunk every year for the past 19 years, now a net loss of nearly 1 million people per annum. Consequently, “896 municipalities — nearly half in Japan — are facing extinction in 2040 because of population decline.”

As Adelstein puts it, “Japan’s got a bureaucracy that runs like a man who wants to lose weight, so he burns down the kitchen.” Immigration and assimilation of “new Japanese” is the clear solution, but we’re heading in precisely the opposite direction.

Third, Japan has a schizophrenic labor migration policy. Despite all the false bravado about foreign crime and all the evils that foreigners do in Japan, the LDP’s cronies have for decades demanded cheap labor and more consumers. Hence the policies that brought in foreign labor and tourists and revitalized the economy.

More of that is on the way: The plan is to more than double the foreign workers under the Specified Skilled Worker Program and to increase foreign tourism from its record 42 million in 2025 to 60 million by 2028. So all the nativists are doing is stoking their own boilers of grievance.

Finally, think of the other people with Onoda’s background in Japan. Her policies destroy whatever progress they have made. Instead of demonstrating to everyone that people who have gone through life as a haafu can still reach the highest echelons of government and be productive, loyal Japanese—that diversity is not a threat to Japanese society—she’s affirmed exactly the opposite and enshrined it in public policy.

Not only is she pulling up the ladder behind her, making it more difficult for Japan’s minorities to follow in her footsteps and assimilate, she’s helping make sure fewer feet remain to fill those footsteps.

Conclusion: Bad Blood and Bad Policy

There’s a truism in cinema: If a movie director disdains his subject, he will make a bad movie about it.

Likewise in politics: If a policymaker disdains the people she’s making policy for, she will make bad policy.

And Kimi Onoda is doing just that. Rewarded with real power after pandering to Japan’s far right, she’s using it to rid her environment of the foreign elements that have plagued her life. Her denialism not only of the reality of an internationalizing Japan, but also of her place in it, has resulted in monstrous public policies that will ethnically cleanse Japan.

Brought up in Japan’s toxic history of race relations, Onoda will only wind up perpetuating it. And Japan will continue to suffer from all the wasted potential.

Sunday 2026-09-13

04:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 村 [Kanji of the Day]

村

✍7

小1

village, town

ソン

むら

市町村 (しちょうそん) — cities, towns and villages
町村 (ちょうそん) — towns and villages
農村 (のうそん) — agricultural community
山村 (さんそん) — mountain village
村長 (そんちょう) — village headman
選手村 (せんしゅむら) — Olympic village
町村派 (まちむらは) — Machimura Faction (of the LDP)
町村合併 (ちょうそんがっぺい) — merger of towns and villages
村民 (そんみん) — villager
村有 (そんゆう) — village-owned

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 震 [Kanji of the Day]

震

✍15

中学

quake, shake, tremble, quiver, shiver

シン

ふる.う　ふる.える　ふる.わせる　ふる.わす

地震 (じしん) — earthquake
大地震 (おおじしん) — major earthquake
阪神大震災 (はんしんだいしんさい) — Great Hanshin Earthquake (January 17, 1995)
震災 (しんさい) — earthquake disaster
震度 (しんど) — seismic intensity
耐震 (たいしん) — resistant to earthquakes
震源 (しんげん) — hypocenter (of an earthquake)
震え (ふるえ) — shivering
火山性地震 (かざんせいじしん) — volcanic earthquake
激震 (げきしん) — severe earthquake

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

09:00 AM

As U.S. Trade Pressure Mounts, Vietnam Prepares to Prosecute 74 ‘Xoi Lac’ Sports Pirates [TorrentFreak]

For many years, Vietnamese football fans who wanted a free Premier League stream with local commentary knew exactly where to go.

‘Xoi Lac TV’ and its sister sites offered pirated streams featuring all major leagues, switching to new domains each time a blocking order caught up with the last one.

For the operators involved, these free streams became serious business. Betting banners were shown with every match and generated substantial revenue. That lucrative business model also drew Vietnam’s cybercrime police, who raided the operation in February and charged 30 people a month later.

However, that was only the opening chapter in a story that carries international weight today. Last week, police in Hung Yen province closed their investigation and asked prosecutors to charge 74 people.

Massive Piracy Operation with its Own Commentators

The investigation’s conclusion, as reported by Dan Tri and VnExpress, describes two linked piracy operations.

The first pirate site, ’90 Phut’, was founded in late 2018. Investigators say Hanoi technology entrepreneur Pham Nguyen Dung put up the money, programmer Nguyen Cong Dinh wrote the code, and the two split the profits.

When the operation was shut down in February, it ran XoilacTV, 90PhutTV, VeboTV, ThapcamTV, BanhkhucTV and CakeoTV, while Dinh also ran the ‘Cakhia’ network with another defendant.

Some of the defendants

The 74 suspects are allegedly part of the operation’s staff. This includes more than 30 Vietnamese commentators who were paid 200,000 to 500,000 dong per match, roughly $8 to $20. The other defendants managed servers, streams and the financial side.

The commentary was the brand, and its best-known voices used names such as ‘Batman’ and ‘Scarecrow’. ‘Batman’, it turned out, was Dinh himself, who investigators say made more than 12 billion dong, roughly $470,000, from the operation.

The investigation also found that the sites streamed 1,529 matches without permission, infringing the rights of the Premier League and local broadcasters, while generating revenue from betting brands including 8XBET, LU88, Man88 and HBET.

Police estimate that these ads brought in more than 130 billion dong, roughly $5 million, between April 2025 and January 2026. Rightsholders, meanwhile, claim losses that are much higher.

Vietnam’s pay TV service K+ preliminarily estimates its losses at more than $83 million, and the Premier League, which licenses its rights to K+ for Vietnam, at more than $4.6 million. The figures have yet to be confirmed at an eventual trial.

Gambling Charges Carry the Weight

The 74 defendants face a variety of charges, including copyright infringement, organizing gambling, gambling, and distributing obscene material. Fifty-one, including Dung and Dinh, are recommended for prosecution on both the copyright and organizing gambling counts.

The sites are known for piracy, but the gambling charges carry more weight. Vietnam’s Penal Code caps copyright infringement at three years in prison, no matter how profitable it is. Meanwhile, organizing gambling as a professional operation carries up to ten years in prison.

This means that the betting ads, which are illegal in Vietnam, could make up the bulk of the sentences. For now, however, nothing is final yet.

Xoilac

In Vietnam, police close an investigation with a written conclusion and a proposal to prosecute, which is the stage this case is at now. The prosecution now has up to 30 days to indict, send the file back for more work, or drop the case.

Thanks From London, Pressure From Washington

The ‘Xoi Lac’ crackdown has not gone unnoticed outside of the country’s borders. In May, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced that the British Embassy in Hanoi had sent a letter thanking it for the takedown. According to the ministry, the letter praised the enforcement effort that protected copyright holders.

Washington was not immediately convinced. At the end of April, the U.S. Trade Representative designated Vietnam a ‘Priority Foreign Country’ over its failure to tackle online piracy, the first country to receive that label in thirteen years.

A month later, USTR opened a formal Section 301 investigation into Vietnam’s intellectual property enforcement, a process that can end in widely feared tariffs. USTR said that Vietnam has taken some steps, but added that infringement “continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators.”

While the original Xoi Lac raids came weeks before the USTR’s decision, Vietnam is now using it as a defense, mentioning it in tandem with the takedowns of Rophim and Y2Mate in its July response to the investigation, asking to be taken off the priority list.

Vietnam’s response also cited the HiAnime case. The Ministry of Public Security only announced criminal proceedings against seven HiAnime suspects on July 2, the same day Vietnam filed its rebuttal in Washington.

Whether the 74-defendant recommendation is in any way influenced by the international pressure is unknown. It is now up to the prosecutor to decide what steps to take next. Meanwhile, a search for ‘xoi lac’ and its related brands still returns a long list of copycats, whose operators are unknown.

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

DSA-6497-1 xorg-server - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6497-1

07:00 AM

This Week In Techdirt History: September 6th – 12th [Techdirt]

This Week in 2016

This Week in 2011

This Week in 2006

05:00 AM

The daily review [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The office worker has learned to dread the annual review. For many good reasons.

It’s going away.

Now, like workers on the factory floor, it’s likely that the metrics will be exposed and the system will be contributing a review, not just the boss. AI will show up with your score, once a day, or even more often.

It will read your email, watch your clicks and listen to your calls. The relentless deskilling pursued by bosses is pushing each of us to work for an AI.

The better alternative is to have an AI work for you. Upskilling is the best response to the race to the bottom–leadership and projects, not tasks. We can start now before it’s too late.

Just for Skeets and Giggles (9.12.26) [The Status Kuo]

Before we get started, a reminder that today is the final day of my Labor Day (week) sale! Take 20 percent off your first year’s subscription to The Status Kuo and help support independent reporting and analysis!

Sign Me Up for 20% Off!

This week marked the 25-year remembrance of 9/11. But some memories were not as solid as others. Take the president’s, for example. He now claims two big, strong firemen lifted him out of a building’s danger zone. (Buzzer, false.)

It was cause for alarm about his clearly failing brain and an occasion ripe for internet mockery.

Reaching way back here, but the meme checks out.

As fall arrives and we look forward to some spooky days, something to remember:

Okay, we can only throw his acolytes out of Congress, but that is a good start. The people seem ready to vote like he’s on the ballot, just like he asked.

A guy can dream, right?

The contractor who installed the Reflecting Pool finally owned up to user error.

Slow clap for the new name here.

Former President Obama made his feelings about 47 pretty clear in this video that made the rounds again this week.

With the midterms just over 50 days away, Trump has landed on a theme that would have made his mentor Roy Cohn proud.

At Dear Leader’s insistence, the embattled GOP held a two-day pep rally in Dallas. Here’s how it opened. Well played, Lincoln Project.

This is the next thing that happened, which was also very on brand.

As one person offered,

Here to explain to the trad wives what’s going on is their Lavender Husband (warning: spicy chat!)

At one point they did a montage of DSA officials and influencers, including a thirst trap pic of Hasan Piker.

The low point of the whole affair was when a visibly struggling Sen. John Fetterman did a one-minute video introducing his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Republican Dave McCormick.

The event overlapped the first anniversary of the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, which gave the evening added Erika Kirk-level emotions.

The only substantive takeaway from the event was a promise—really, a bribe—by Trump to send each American adult $5,000 if the Republicans hold onto Congress.

The MAGA folks are the target audience, of course.

And they may just get suckered again.

I love Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA).

RFK Jr. got to the podium and accused the Biden administration of trafficking children, which is so painfully “I know you are but what am I?”

Speaking of the failed HHS secretary,

New definition of MAHA dropped from none other than Heaven.

Pete Hegseth’s focus on upping testosterone among our troops isn’t helping the war effort or perceptions about his priorities one bit.

He’s truly paranoid about anonymous Pentagon sources talking to the press.

There were solemn 9/11 ceremonies in NYC and at the Pentagon.

Angry grandpa needs a La-Z-Boy.

Let’s get a close-up on that droop.

There were many stories posted about 9/11, and some of them were on the lighter side. This kid was a chaos agent.

Thanks for this important clarification, Wikipedia.

The best 9/11-adjacent content so far:

25 years. Too soon?

The left is winning the culture wars, as usual.

Even if society still has a long, long way to go.

Riley Gaines keeps trying to speak up. She should just take the Fifth and call it a day.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

And another:

In tech news, Apple unveiled a new phone design.

The messaging is on point with this troupe of guerilla tech protestors.

With AI dystopian fears on the rise, are agentic AIs really exhibiting general intelligence? Some say it’s in our own heads.

Relatedly,

A top safety expert who worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI warned that humanity could be wiped out by the end of the decade. Meanwhile…

But hey, at least we now get really bad AI slop from the White House!

Today is the final day of my Labor Day (week) sale! This is your last opportunity for a while to join as a paid supporter of this newsletter at 20 percent off your first year’s subscription price. I am looking for 10 new paid subscribers to help keep this newsletter going with no paywall, so that those less well off can still access it free of charge. Will you be my personal hero today?

Yes! Count Me In, Jay, at 20% Off!

And thanks to all who stepped up this week to keep The Status Kuo going strong!

On to the doggos! This one did not expect this level of pushback.

Here’s a hack for those whose pups hate trim days.

Dying from the adorbs here.

Keep this in mind if you take your dog out on the water!

Halloween approaches, which means more pet costume content!

Here are a couple of stairway moments. The woos:

Plus whatever this is lol

Time passes quickly but love remains.

They say there’s a reason not to get these tattoos! Imagine what she thinks each time she sees him now.

Feed the other one already!

This is rather amazing. Sound up!

I have never played the Powerball. But I imagine if I won, it might go something like this.

Caught in the act! Wait for the end. Ha!

I could not stop laughing at this. I have a fourth grader’s sense of humor sometimes.

This is one of the best duo acts I’ve seen.

What lies beneath…

Star Trek turned 60 this week. In honor of that, a fun moment on set:

Like I said, fourth grader’s sense of humor. Really dumb dad joke!

Have a great weekend! I’m going to enjoy this crisp fall air up in New York’s Hudson Valley!

Jay

02:00 AM

Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

LLMs are real, AI is fake: No, it didn't "go rogue."
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Why 9/11 Means We Must Support My Politics; Blogs x 9/11; Jimmy Wales v Britannica's EiC; Hollywood astroturfs Australia; Agents v queer YA; Soft landings for dirty cops; Leaked Stingray manual.
Upcoming appearances: 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.

LLMs are real, AI is fake (permalink)

Once you understand the corporate culture of AI "hyperscalers" consists primarily of everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, a lot of things snap into focus:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity":

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all

Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces):

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

Take the story about how OpenAI's chatbots hacked the servers of Hugging Face, another AI company, as a way of cheating on a hacking challenge called "Exploit Gym." Even the technical press can't help itself when it comes to this kind of thing, and the reportage has been full of references to Skynet and other science fictional conceits:

https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/ethics/skynet-day-openai-hugging-face-hack

These accounts are cooking the brains of everyone, not just AI insiders. Last night, a man at my event in Manchester started shouting that AI was "setting its own goals" and wouldn't stop interrupting to insist that this was going on. He left shortly thereafter, so he didn't get a chance to hear me explain what actually happened, which is a pity.

To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation on Ed's "Better Offline" podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-ai-is-not-autonomously-hacking-with-cal-newport/id1730587238?i=1000785935670

Newport does an admirable job of breaking down how these "autonomous hacking" tools work. The first thing to understand is that a chatbot isn't really directing the operation. Instead, the chatbot serves as a kind of front-end to a database of earlier hacking challenges that is repeatedly queried by a simple program written in Python, an easy-to-master programming language.

Here's how that works: the Python program starts by prompting the chatbot with the nature of the challenge: "I'm participating in a hacker capture the flag (CTF) challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. How should I start?"

The chatbot consults its training data – years' worth of captured CTF sessions in which human teams competed to achieve an objective like this one (CTF matches are a routine feature of hacker conferences, and the server logs and chat transcripts from the competing teams are published afterward for the edification of other hackers and security pros). The chatbot then outputs something like: "The first thing is to find out more about your target server. Run the following command-line instructions to locate the server's IP address and find out which server software it's running."

The Python program relays these command-line instructions to normal Unix utilities running on its own hardware. Then it takes the output of those programs and goes back to the chatbot, which isn't really following the action, so the Python program has to include everything that's happened to this point in its prompt: "I'm participating in a CTF challenge where I have to break into a remote server and retrieve some information. I ran the following commands to learn more about the target server, and here's what came back. Now what?"

The chatbot feeds the Python script more likely commands to try, and after running those, the Python script loops back to the top, appends the output to its prompt, and goes back to the chatbot. This is a very reckless way to operate a piece of autonomous malicious software.

The most likely outcome is that the chatbot will cough up a bad guess about what to do next, and steer itself into a dead-end. You may have encountered something like this yourself, when you've asked a chatbot for help with a complex task and been confidently provided with several steps to take in series, and then, an hour later on step 10, you discover that everything went wrong at step 3 and now you're screwed.

But there are much worse ways this can go wrong. The chatbot might look in its training data and find instances in which teams broke out of the containment set by the game-masters, for example, by finding random insecure message boards on the internet to pass messages to one another.

This is a time-honored internet tradition! The first time I ever heard about someone doing this was in the 2000s, when Mitch Wagner – then the editor of Information Week – discovered some teenaged girls using the comment section of one of his old blog-posts to evade the school firewall's blockade of chat tools. When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.

What's more, the content of those messages is easily understood once you have a grasp on the training data that generated them. Hackers are notorious trash-talkers who are prone to narrating their own escapades in highly dramatic – even cinematic – language. This goes double when hackers are performing for their peers, like when they're participating in a game of CTF that they know will be pored over by other hackers once it's over.

Hacker braggadocio has always had a symbiotic relationship with their adversaries and critics. When corporate security people wanted to stampede the FBI and Secret Service into kicking down hackers' doors in the 1990s, they used those hackers' own profane zine articles and message board shit-talk to make the case:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/101

Much has been made of the OpenAI chatbots' dialog during the Hugging Face incident. No wonder: it reads like a rejected script for a reboot of the movie "Hackers." But that's not because the chatbots are waking up and applying to join the Cult of the Dead Cow: it's because they were trained on a corpus of chat transcripts from excitable young people who love to fantasize about starring in a reboot of the movie "Hackers."

Every part of the Hugging Face incident has precedents in the training data, including the OpenAI chatbots' tactic of hacking into a rival's servers. That happens in Capture the Flag games at hacker cons: teams break into each other's systems to get a peek at the parts of the problem they've solved. That's allowed! It's a hacking competition.

Not only that, it's a tactic used by spy agencies: the NSA has a doctrine called "third-party collection," where they break into other spy agencies' systems to harvest all the intel they've gathered. There's also fourth-party collection, when the NSA hacks into another security agency that, in turn, has hacked into another security agency, and the NSA steals all the secrets of both agencies:

https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/21/snowden-documents-show-nsa-cant-keep-its-eyes-its-own-papers-harvests-data-other-surveillance-agencies/

Which is not to say that the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack is nothing. It's something, all right: but it's a specific something, with an explicable, even foreseeable trajectory. Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers.

Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"

The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA. The NSA has a division that researches bugs in widely used software like Windows. Sometimes when it finds a serious bug it will warn Microsoft about it so that Microsoft can fix it and keep Americans (and others) safe from malicious actors who also discover this bug and use it to attack them.

But sometimes, the NSA (and other "security" orgs, like the CIA) will discover a really juicy bug and then keep it secret, so that they can use it to attack their adversaries. This is a doctrine called "NOBUS," which stands for "No One But Us" – as in, "No one but us is smart enough to find this bug, so we can leave it unpatched without putting Americans in danger."

NOBUS is a terrible idea. How terrible? Well, in 2017, the NSA lost track of a Microsoft Windows vulnerability that they'd discovered and hoarded, code-named "EternalBlue." After EternalBlue found its way into the wild, some halfway competent hackers spliced it into some boring, everyday ransomware, giving that ransomware a new lease on life. Within a few months, the stupidest people on the internet were shutting down some of the most important systems in the world, demanding cash to return them:

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

They shut down whole cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_attack

They took over hospitals:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35584081

They seized oil pipelines:

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

They stole the British Library, whose postmortem on the attack is one of the clearest, most informative cybersecurity documents ever written:

https://cdn.sanity.io/files/v5dwkion/production/99206a2d1e9f07b35712b78f7d75fbb09560c08d.pdf

The NSA's irresponsible handling of EternalBlue ended up giving a gigantic force-multiplier to otherwise incompetent and inconsequential cyber-criminals. It's as though they found some guy under a Prius removing the catalytic converter with a Sawzall and handed him a piece of software that could shut down major American cities. That was – and is – very bad.

The hacking tools that the chatbot companies are developing stand to carry on this very stupid tradition. It is scary, but not because the chatbots are waking up. It's scary because the world's IT systems are indifferently created and poorly maintained and riddled with vulnerabilities:

https://xkcd.com/2347/

This week, I had a couple of opportunities to hash this over in public with Riley Quinn; first at a book launch in London and then on the Trashfuture podcast:

https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456

Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.

"AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Why OpenAI Hired Chuck Schumer’s Daughter Away From Amazon https://prospect.org/2026/09/11/openai-chuck-schumer-daughter-amazon/
MAKERphone 2.0 – an educational DIY mobile phone https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/albertgajsak/makerphone-20-an-educational-diy-mobile-phone
fatcousin — 5200 free local-first browser tools https://fatcousin.com/
The Fall to Nowhere https://jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/the-fall/
Birthmarks https://www.macdermog.com/birthmarks

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015537/http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271

#25yrsago How blogs are covering 9/11 https://web.archive.org/web/20010917015712/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00.html

#20yrsago Wikipedia founder debates Britannica editor-in-chief https://web.archive.org/web/20061005041001/http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115756239753455284-A4hdSU1xZOC9Y9PFhJZV16jFlLM_20070911.html?mod=blogs

#15yrsago Deceptive “independent research” from Hollywood front suggests Australians are easily frightened https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lobby-misleads-aussie-press-for-three-strikes-campaign-110912/

#15yrsago Agents tell YA authors: lose the gay characters and I’ll get you a deal https://web.archive.org/web/20110913010328/http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

#10yrsago IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords https://securityaffairs.com/50929/malware/linux-mirai-elf.html

#10yrsago Oppps.ru: patient zero in Russia’s fake news epidemic https://globalvoices.org/2016/09/12/how-fake-stories-reported-in-russias-news-media-regularly-fool-everyone/

#10yrsago It’s really easy for fired, dirty cops to walk into a new police job in a new town https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/whereabouts-of-cast-out-police-officers-other-cities-often-hire-them.html

#10yrsago Donald Trump used $20K worth of charitable donations to buy a 6′ tall painting of Donald Trump https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-donald-trump-retooled-his-charity-to-spend-other-peoples-money/2016/09/10/da8cce64-75df-11e6-8149-b8d05321db62_story.html

#10yrsago Autocratic regimes systematically deny internet access to opposition ethnic groups https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf5062

#10yrsago Leaked Stingray manual shows how easy warrantless mass surveillance can be! https://web.archive.org/web/20160912203446/https://theintercept.com/2016/09/12/long-secret-stingray-manuals-detail-how-police-can-spy-on-phones/

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Budapest: Brain Bar, Sep 17
https://brainbar.com/munkatars/cory-doctorow
Edmonton: Elbows Up (Edmonton Public Library), Sep 28
https://www.epl.ca/blogs/post/elbows-up-with-cory-doctorow/
Boston: The Paradox of Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs (Harvard Berkman Klein), Sep 30
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/running-harder-falling-faster-paradox-enshittification-and-reverse-centaurs
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Hudson, OH: Hudson Library, Oct 7
https://engagedpatrons.org/EventsExtended.cfm?SiteID=3850&EventID=596952&PK=
Calgary: Wordfest, Oct 8
https://wordfest.com/2026/show/wordfest-presents-cory-doctorow-2026/
Winnipeg: McNally Robinson, Oct 9
https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/event-18991/An-Evening-with-Cory-Doctorow
Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01
Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20
https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

Recent appearances (permalink)

Fascists may come after the AI bubble bursts (You&AI)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WN64aQeYQ
What Would a Normal Person Do (Trashfuture)
https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/posts/what-would-do-169247456
Pod Save the UK
https://audioboom.com/posts/8950533-radicalised-organised-and-thick-as-s-t-nish-has-had-it-with-far-right-protests-plus-why
Stop Saying AI Can Do Your Job (Factually)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3gABvwZCM
Be Skeptical of the AI Sales Pitch (Trumponomics)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2026-09-09/trumponomics-cory-doctorow-questions-the-ai-hype-podcast

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

“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

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

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

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

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

DSA-6496-1 nginx - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6496-1

Saturday 2026-09-12

08:00 PM

Updated Debian 13: 13.7 released [Debian News]

The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian 13 (codename trixie). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

03:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 隊 [Kanji of the Day]

隊

✍12

小4

regiment, party, company, squad

タイ

部隊 (ぶたい) — force
自衛隊 (じえいたい) — Japan Self-Defense Forces
隊員 (たいいん) — troops
海上自衛隊 (かいじょうじえいたい) — Maritime Self Defense Forces (Defence)
戦隊 (せんたい) — squadron
隊長 (たいちょう) — commanding officer
陸上自衛隊 (りくじょうじえいたい) — Japan Ground Self-Defense Force
治安部隊 (ちあんぶたい) — security force
海兵隊 (かいへいたい) — Marine Corps
機動隊 (きどうたい) — riot police

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 伸 [Kanji of the Day]

伸

✍7

中学

expand, stretch, extend, lengthen, increase

シン

の.びる　の.ばす　の.べる　の.す

伸び (のび) — growth
伸びる (のびる) — to stretch
伸ばす (のばす) — to grow long (e.g., hair, nails)
延伸 (えんしん) — stretching
伸び伸び (のびのび) — comfortably
伸び伸び (のびのび) — comfortably
伸び率 (のびりつ) — growth rate
続伸 (ぞくしん) — continuous rise (in market price)
伸び悩む (のびなやむ) — to be sluggish
背伸び (せいのび) — standing on tiptoe and stretching one's back to make oneself taller

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Working with Color Palettes for Tracks and Terrain [OsmAnd Blog]

You've ridden the Transfagarasan three times now, and the story you tell afterward never changes: good climb, brutal hairpins, freezing at the top. Same three sentences, every time, because that's genuinely all a memory holds onto.

Your phone remembers more. It was recording the whole ride — every meter of elevation, every km/h, the exact spot where you stopped pretending you weren't struggling. None of that shows up in a photo. It shows up in the track, if you know how to ask it the right question.

Photo by Tiberiu Potec on Unsplash

Giving Color to Your Ride

Standard monochromatic lines on a map tell you where you went, but they remain completely silent about how the ride actually felt. OsmAnd solves this by allowing you to color your tracks using real ride data — Speed, Altitude, or Slope.

Color transforms a flat line into a visual profile of your physical effort. A steep climb up the southern approach of the Fagaras Mountains shifts into warm, intense gradients, while steady valley roads cool down into gentle tones.

However, default track coloring relies on generalized scales that don't always capture the nuances of specific terrain or activity types. To give your map absolute visual accuracy, OsmAnd Pro includes the Color Palette Editor — an advanced tool available with an OsmAnd Pro subscription that gives you complete control over how data thresholds map to visual colors.

Relative vs. Fixed Values: Choosing the Right Scaling

When creating or customizing a palette in the editor, you choose between two fundamentally different ways to interpret data.

Using a Relative palette, colors scale automatically based on the specific track's minimum, average, and maximum values. If your ride spans from 600 meters at the base to 2,034 meters at the Bălea Tunnel summit, the gradient stretches evenly across that exact range. This mode is ideal for isolated rides where you want the highest possible visual contrast across a single trip.

A Fixed Values palette operates differently by assigning colors to specific, absolute numbers, such as 10 km/h, 50 km/h, or exact elevation steps like 600 m, 1,200 m, and 2,000 m. The scale remains constant regardless of which track it is applied to. This approach is essential when comparing multiple rides or setting personal benchmarks, as 2,000 meters of elevation or a 10% slope gradient will always render in the exact same color across every track on your map.

Working with the Color Palette Editor

Accessing the editor is seamlessly integrated into your track's appearance settings. Opening the track's Appearance menu, selecting a data-based color mode, and tapping the palette icon opens the All colors screen. Here, tapping the + button allows you to build a new palette in either Relative or Fixed Values format.

The editor provides an intuitive set of tools for fine-tuning your data visuals. At the top of the screen, a live gradient preview reflects your changes in real time as you adjust values. You can add new threshold steps using the + Add step button, assign custom colors, or remove unneeded steps to simplify the scale.

The editor also automatically respects your system profile settings, seamlessly displaying values in metric or imperial units — such as meters, feet, km/h, or mph — without disrupting your underlying color scales.

Mountain terrain frequently introduces data gaps. As you ride through the 900-meter Bălea Tunnel near the summit, GPS reception naturally drops. To handle these moments, the editor includes a dedicated No Data step, letting you assign a distinct, neutral color to track segments where logging was temporarily interrupted.

Managing your personal collection of palettes on the All colors screen is equally simple. Opening the three-dot menu next to any custom palette provides quick options to rename, edit, duplicate, or delete it whenever your preferences change.

Harmonizing Track and Terrain Colors

A custom track palette works best when it stands out clearly against the underlying map background. If your elevation track uses deep red shades for high mountain peaks, those segments might blend into intense terrain contour lines or dark relief shading.

OsmAnd allows you to customize map background palettes as well, giving you the flexibility to adjust elevation and slope visualizations under Menu → Configure map → Terrain → Color scheme on Android, or Visualization on iOS. Selecting complementary terrain color scales keeps your track lines sharp and legible, whether you are navigating dense forest valleys or barren, high-altitude alpine passes. While custom palettes can be applied across various terrain layers, keep in mind that Hillshade relies on a fixed shading algorithm and operates independently of custom palettes.

Customize Your Map Experience

Custom color palettes allow you to turn complex GPX data into clear, meaningful visual stories. Whether you are analyzing steep mountain passes or setting up standardized color scales for daily training routes, full control over your track visuals is right at your fingertips.

This feature is part of our latest release updates. Take a moment to explore our new release blog posts to discover all the new tools, optimizations, and features we've recently added to make your navigation experience even better!

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

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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).

01:00 PM

Microsoft Slaps Hours Limits On Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming [Techdirt]

There’s enshittification, and then there’s enshittification. Allow me to give you an example of each. For what we’ll call enshittification classic, there’s Xbox’s Game Pass service. A mere two years ago, Microsoft made all kinds of changes to Game Pass to coincide with a serious slowdown of subscriber adoption. Those changes included doing away with previous service tiers, introducing new tiers that came in at higher prices, the removal of day-1 access to first party titles for some of the tiers and some hardware even at those higher prices. So, Microsoft shifted the offering for Game Pass in a way that made it cost significantly more, while providing less value.

But for the next tier of enshittification, there’s… Xbox’s Game Pass service. If you thought the devaluing of the service the last go around was shitty, wait until you get a load of Microsoft’s plan to slap an hours limit for its cloud gaming onto those same subscriptions.

Microsoft has announced big changes to Xbox cloud gaming, including a switch to monthly hour limits. From November, Game Pass plans will include a set number of cloud gaming hours each month:

Game Pass Ultimate: 15 hours

Game Pass Premium: 10 hours

Game Pass Essential: 5 hours

Now, if confronted, Microsoft has a couple of things to say about all of this and why you shouldn’t worry about it. First, anyone that exhausts their subscription hours can, you guessed it, simply buy more. Want to engage in as much cloud gaming as you did before? No problem! Fork over even more money than the already raised tier prices and you can go right ahead.

Second, and this is where I’ll engage in some blatant speculation, Microsoft said these changes will barely effect anyone at all.

The change means those who use cloud gaming most via Game Pass will end up having to pay more, although Microsoft said this impacts 4% of Game Pass subscribers.

See? It’s only 4% of subscribers that will run out of these tiered hours. Where does my speculation come in? Oh, simple: I think Microsoft is full of shit on that number. What informs that speculation? Oh, simple: Microsoft also says more people are engaging in cloud gaming and playing it for longer periods of time.

In a blog post, Microsoft said it was making the changes because the cost of providing cloud gaming has grown as more people use it and play for longer. The monthly limits, Microsoft continued, will mean it can invest in reliability and performance.

So, to summarize, Microsoft had to put in these hours limits because more and more people are gaming in the cloud for longer and longer amounts of time… but those limits are no big deal because very few people game long enough to exhaust those hours? I’m no mathematician, but I don’t think those two statements can exist in the same reality.

What’s really driving all of this is a combination of the predictable enshittification process tech offerings like this tend to travel down and the explosion in cost of the hardware needed to run the backend of it all, thanks to the adoption of A.I. platforms. And, hey, those rising additional costs to Microsoft are very real.

But so is the reduction in value of Game Pass as a result of all of this. Cloud gaming is likely the future of gaming. But I’m no longer sure Game Pass is going to be a player in that future.

DSA-6495-1 spip - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6495-1

DSA-6494-1 kamailio - security update [Debian Security]

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6494-1

09:00 AM

Pro-Cop Red States Latest To Kick Flock To The Curb [Techdirt]

Whatever wasn’t already going poorly for Flock Safety is just going to keep getting worse. Data collected by privacy activist group Secure Justice pointed out what Flock already knows: it’s losing customers at an unprecedented rate. More than 214 cities and counties have dropped Flock since 2021. More than 90 of those have done that in the last month alone.

It’s not just the persistent surveillance angle working against Flock. While Flock insists its cameras increase public safety, there’s no data out there that supports those claims. The bigger problem is how easily its tech can be abused. Flock allows officers to search a nationwide network of cameras — one that collects 20 billion plate reads a month — while providing very little in terms of restrictions.

In the last month, Flock has attempted to respond to persistent criticism of its tech. It will now limit retention periods and install some mandatory reporting features, most of which are being put in place to prevent cops from committing crimes. That’s how bad it’s gotten. Cops have dragged Flock into their ex-stalking gutter for years and only now is Flock attempting to distance itself from the miscreants it has enabled.

While it must be noted there are several competitors absolutely loling at Flock’s misfortune and slurping up tax dollars to deliver taxpayers more of the stuff they thought they had voted down, the upside of all of this is that Flock has now realized it can’t do business the way it always has.

What’s even more surprising about this backlash is that even cops are turning against it. And it’s not just cops. It’s the people running some of the most MAGA, pro-cop states in the US.

Welcome to the resistance, Ron DeSantis:

Florida has banned local police from placing cameras that read license plates on its state highways in response to growing divisions over law enforcement’s use of technology supplied by Flock Safety and others to track vehicles in many parts of ‌the U.S.

Florida’s Department of Transportation said it would revoke previous permits for the cameras and no longer issue new permits within its jurisdiction.

[…]

The memo ⁠followed remarks from Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who last week said the use of automated license plate readers has “gotten out of control.”

The caveats are plainly apparent. This only affects state-level cameras, allowing towns and counties to decide whether or not they want to subject their residents to surveillance and stalking. As long as the locals keep their cameras on local streets, the ban does not apply.

But it’s something. And it’s far more than we might have expected from a state where every cop is sacred and every person who doesn’t like the current management an antifa.

The same thing can be said for Texas, which has also delivered its own quasi-ban of Flock products. This one may have less to do with Flock’s enabling of officer-involved crime and more to do with the governor getting caught out by his own appointees’ misuse of public funds:

Abbott’s order blocking state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras came Aug. 27, amid the Tribune’s inquiries about a small state agency tapping at least $30 million from a fund dedicated to catalytic converter theft to help pay for at least 3,200 Flock cameras for law enforcement agencies across the state. Six of the seven board members of the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority are appointed by Abbott.

Caveats all over, starting with the fact that there’s nothing retroactive about this “ban.” Flock cameras obtained with misappropriated funds will apparently still be allowed to operate. This only prevents the CPA from misusing more public funds to buy more Flock cameras.

That obviously means cities and counties can still do whatever they want when it comes to Flock products. And the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) is making it clear the governor’s memo doesn’t change a damn thing:

Asked if Abbott’s directive affected the state police force’s camera network, a DPS spokesperson said it will pause installing additional cameras. But a spokesperson said the agency will continue using existing cameras for a variety of “legitimate public safety efforts.”

That’s a bit much to take when the root cause of the quasi-ban was the misuse of funds that were supposed to be used to address a specific “public safety effort.” The fact that more than 206 Texas law enforcement agencies have access to DPS cameras is similarly concerning, considering (by its own admission) DPS has done nothing whatsoever to limit access, much less track abuse of its database.

Still, it’s notable that these two states are doing anything at all to address public concerns about law enforcement misuse of surveillance tech. That’s never seemed to bother them before as neither has shown any resistance to giving federal officers unauthorized access to hunt down migrants or utilizing the surveillance network to do things like track people who are seeking abortions.

These aren’t wins. And the “bans” are so limited you can’t even call them “ties.” But it’s more than we had before Flock repeatedly shot itself in the proverbial foot. Hopefully, this is just the beginning, rather than a “will this do” act of lazy performance that refuses to address real, ongoing problems in favor of “looking busy” for a week or two until the next news cycle rolls through.

06:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Duty Of Careful What You Wish For [Techdirt]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Mike and Ben cover:

Australians will be able to switch off social media algorithms under planned legislation (BBC News)
Australia’s social media ban has an enforcement problem. These new laws aim to fix it (The Conversation)
The Netherlands forced Meta to let users ditch algorithmic feeds. Here’s what happened (The Conversation)
What We Know About Prosocial Feed-Ranking Algorithms (Prosocial Design Network)
Anthropic researcher quits over AI labs ‘gambling with our lives’ (Financial Times)
AI Agents Are Not Going “Rogue,” But Recent Developments Lead Increasingly-Concerned Researchers To Call For AI Slow Down (Techdirt)
“We will not be silenced”: Imran Ahmed responds to court ruling (Center for Countering Digital Hate)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

Our fun links this week include the multi-view website browser and the internet roadtrip.

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

DHS Claimed It Had Found 16,000 Illegal Voters In Nevada. Now It’s Admitting It’s Less Than 200. [Techdirt]

As we move closer to mid-term elections, the Trump administration continues to lie about election integrity, sowing the seeds for bullshit “rigged election” claims should the GOP fail to win the elections Trump wants them to win.

There’s another reason this administration lies constantly about elections, voters, and anything related to it: Trump still thinks he won the 2020 election and won’t take facts for an answer. That’s why there have been so many efforts to re-litigate the 2020 election results by Trump and his party members. And this is something that continues despite this supposedly rigged system somehow managing to deliver an election win for Trump in 2024.

It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone believes Trump or his enablers. All that matters is that Trump believes it. And if he does then a whole lot of his voting base will be willing to do anything from raid the Capitol building in DC to ask ICE to engage in voter suppression this November.

Trump is leveraging the bigotry he’s stoked with his anti-migrant efforts and the billions his budget bill has added to the DHS’s bottom line to make the case (without any facts in evidence) that there are hundreds of thousands of non-citizens voting in every election.

So far, the administration has yet to demonstrate that the number of non-citizen voters is enough to be concerned about at all, much less evidence of a deliberately broken system the libs are using to keep the GOP out of office.

When facts aren’t conducive to the preferred narrative, the narrative takes the lead. That’s how things started in Nevada, when the DHS claimed thousands of illegal voters recently participated in elections. Here’s the current DHS boss making outlandish claims on X, which is where this government does most of its social media business:

Of that 250,000 total, Mullin and the DHS claimed more than 190,000 were detected in California. Nevada’s total came in as nearly 16,000 illegal voters, according to the DHS. Things have drastically changed in the last month, as NPR reports, based on public records it has obtained, including a recent video conference involving both DHS and Nevada state officials.

DHS initially announced it had found close to 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter list. But a DHS official acknowledged in the meeting with Nevada officials that number was “the ceiling” and each voter still had to be manually reviewed. Then, a day later, DHS provided the state with a list of 185 ID numbers pertaining to voters the agency said it was confident were noncitizens.

Holy shit. That’s a false positive rate that puts Flock to shame. That means the DHS is about 99% wrong when it comes to “illegal” voters.

But even after admitting it could possibly only pinpoint 185 of the alleged 16,000 non-citizen voters, the DHS continues to pretend it will somehow get a lot closer to 16k than it is to zero at this point.

Nevada asked for more information on that smaller group of 185 voters, and the data points used to match them to noncitizens. DHS declined to provide that. The agency did say it still had more than 14,000 Nevada voters that “need additional review,” and it also provided the state with a list of more than 6,000 voter IDs the agency said were “higher confidence” matches but had yet to be reviewed.

Read that through carefully. Not only is the DHS continuing to pretend it still needs to re-review 14,000 voters and claiming it may have located another 6,000 voters of dubious citizenship, it won’t even provide Nevada with information pertaining to the 185 voters it insists have actually voted illegally.

And there’s a good chance the DHS will never turn over any information to any of the states it has accused of permitting thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of non-citizens to vote. Doing so would mean undoing Trump’s narrative, so the DHS will maintain the upper hand by regularly “citing” its made-up number (250,000+ “illegal” voters) while stiff-arming, sand-bagging, and stonewalling any requests for data that might support these obvious lies.

What makes this even stupider, more corrupt, and more dangerous is that even if the DHS is right (it fucking isn’t) that there are 16,000 non-citizens casting votes in Nevada (and — in addition — only casting votes for Democrats), it still wouldn’t make up the difference in Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss in that state. He lost that state by more than 35,000 votes in 2020, which means he still would have lost, even if every non-citizen had voted for Joe Biden.

What makes it even stupider is that Nevada flipped in 2024, giving Trump a win by 46,000 votes. Even if we assume — using the same bad faith arguments as Trump uses — that every “illegal” vote was cast against Trump, he still would have won by 30,000 votes.

This bitter husk of man still wants the entire nation to join him in his psychosis and firmly believe, with their entire American hearts, that the 2020 election was rigged, but the two elections he won were fair and square.

What follows from here will just be voter suppression in whatever form this administration thinks it can get away with. By pretending nearly 250,000 illegal voters are on the nation’s rolls, Trump can start prepping ICE deployments to “blue” states — something that’s going to be a lot easier to do since they’ve already been flooded with federal officers and National Guard units.

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News

Tuesday 2026-09-15

03:00 AM

12:00 AM

Today's links

But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (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:

Ask Torrenting AI Rivals

OpenAI and Anthropic Won’t Talk

Judge Sides With AI Rivals

Meta’s Own Server Data

Monday 2026-09-14

11:00 PM

04:00 PM

06:00 AM

05:00 AM

Sunday 2026-09-13

04:00 PM

09:00 AM

Massive Piracy Operation with its Own Commentators

Gambling Charges Carry the Weight

Thanks From London, Pressure From Washington

07:00 AM

05:00 AM

02:00 AM

Today's links

LLMs are real, AI is fake (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:

Saturday 2026-09-12

08:00 PM

03:00 PM

Giving Color to Your Ride​

Relative vs. Fixed Values: Choosing the Right Scaling​

Working with the Color Palette Editor​

Harmonizing Track and Terrain Colors​

Customize Your Map Experience​

01:00 PM

09:00 AM

06:00 AM

Giving Color to Your Ride

Relative vs. Fixed Values: Choosing the Right Scaling

Working with the Color Palette Editor

Harmonizing Track and Terrain Colors

Customize Your Map Experience