Object permanence: 9/11 v spam; PalmOS x WTC collapse; Wifi x WTC rubble; Berlusconi sex rings; Tesco bans writing down prices; AI psychosis and the warped mirror; Conspiratorialism's causal chain.
Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Berkeley, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Montreal.
The word "fascist" comes from the Latin fasces, a bundle of sticks; the symbology here is that a single twig is weak and brittle, but bundled together, many twigs are strong. It's a sound political theory, because in politics, coalitions are everything:
The problem with fascism isn't the idea of bundling together different groups: it's the incoherence of that bundle. The fascist coalition is a collection of people who want mutually incompatible things. When one part of the fascist coalition wins (say, if Nick Fuentes's neo-Nazis triumph), the other faction loses (Fuentes gets to murder Stephen Miller and turn his skin into a lampshade). The fascist coalition is a coalition of enemies who all hate each other and dream of exterminating one another, held in check by a strongman who uses flattery, favors and threats to keep a lid clamped tight on this pressure-cooker:
In this regard, fascism is simply one end of the continuum of conservative movements, which are always about finding a way to "get turkeys to vote for Christmas." That's because, at root, conservativism is the belief that some minority (rich people, white people, bosses, men, etc) were born to rule and everyone else was born to be ruled over:
By definition, "a minority that was born to rule" can't win an election, because they are a minority. Conservatives win electoral races by convincing people they intend to oppress, cheat and maim to vote for them through appeals to fear and hatred (racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc):
Conservative political victories are always followed by economic misery for the conservative base, because the senior partners in the conservative coalition are the bosses who get richer by making workers poorer. Conservative rulers try to offset this with spectacular acts of cruelty against disfavored minorities, but this tactic only carries so far. Eventually, the electorate notices that despite terrorizing migrants and trans people, diesel is now $10/gallon and the guy responsible is now $1.4b richer than he was before the election:
Workers and bosses aren't the only fracture line in the conservative coalition. Within conservativism, there are leaders who want mutually incompatible things and abhor one another: the white nationalists hate the Zionists; the misogynists hate the TERFs; the imperialists hate the isolationists:
These fracture lines can be papered over while things are good, but they crack when things go wrong, and this is even more true of fascist movements than it is of other conservative coalitions.
This is true of all fascists, so it's true of technofascists, too. The best-ever reference work on technofascism was just published: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End-Times Fascism, which unpacks the apocalyptic ideology that dominates Silicon Valley, especially the AI cultists:
In a recent interview about the book with the QAA podcast, Astra Taylor explained how the contradictions of the technofascist movement are to be expected, because fascism is always an "incoherent bundle":
Understanding technofascism's inherent incoherence is vital to making sense of the chaos roiling the AI cult at this moment, wherein you have AI people insisting that there must be a moratorium on AI development lest the word-guessing program awaken and devour the human race. This week on the Better Offline podcast, Ed Zitron discussed the outlandish, science-fiction inspired cult beliefs that dominate AI boardrooms with Adam Becker and Cal Newport:
Becker is well-placed to discuss this. Like the hosts of the QAA podcast, he started paying close attention to the bizarre beliefs of conspiratorialists long before the rest of us realized that no matter how preposterous their certainty about the imminent machine intelligence Singularity was, these beliefs are sincerely held by some very wealthy and driven people. Becker's 2025 book More Everything Forever is a tremendous field guide to these delusions and their profound philosophical and technical deficits:
In the interview, Newport dismisses the theory that the warnings about imminent AI apocalypse are self-serving criti-hype intended to serve as both marketing pitch and regulatory capture gambit, through which the hyperscalers get the government to step in to interrupt the beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop:
Rather, Newport says that these people sincerely believe that they are about to immanentize the eschaton and are pants-wettingly terrified about the AI god they will conjure forth any day now. He makes a good case for this, pointing to the long history of words and deeds on the part of various AI bosses that suggest that they are true believers who are genuinely high on their own supply.
I don't doubt that there are sincere believers in the AI technofascist coalition, but that does not preclude the possibility that they share their boardrooms and executive rows with cynics for whom this is all a shuck, a scare-story to convince the rubes that their modestly useful utility software is really a nascent "superintelligence" and thus capable of replacing all their workers, which means they should fire all those workers and start sending their salaries to AI companies.
This is an example of one of those "incoherent fascist bundles." Just as Mike Pence (a misogynist Christofascist) was happy to share the White House with Trump (a godless pedophile rapist), AI companies can and do thrive by filling their executive ranks with Singularity-crazed maniacs and sharp operators who are happy to spread this superstitious nonsense if it helps them pump up their stock swindle.
Each group thinks they're using the other one, and they are…up to a point. When it comes to the current AI nonsense, that point came when Nvidia's best customers started to demand that everyone stop buying Nvidia's products, whereupon Nvidia's CEO suddenly remembered that his chips weren't being used to make god, but rather, to power regular-degular "cloud software":
When it comes to technofascists (and all fascists) this kind of division isn't an exception, it's the rule. The billionaires behind AI are split between solipsists who don't believe other people are any more real than bots; and cynics who think that bosses will be easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing mouthy workers with pliable chatbots:
To be a senior member of the fascist coalition, you must be capable of both sincere belief while not openly dismissing your fellow senior members' contradictory sincere beliefs. Behind closed doors, they may make fun of each other (or fantasize about murdering one another), and they may periodically erupt into plots to oust one another from the coalition. But every one of them must be able to go along to get along…
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 501 (15980 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Cape Burhan with Shamanka Rock. The rock formation is made of white marble, dolomite, limestone, with inclusions of garnet, quartz and graphite. Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal, Russia.
Larry and David Ellison are desperate to get their unpopular $111 billion merger between Paramount/CBS and Warner Brothers across the finish line. So they’ve been engaging in no shortage of dodgy behavior to try and derail the only thing left standing in their way: the 12-state antitrust lawsuit claiming that more media consolidation is anti-competitive and will result in thousands of new layoffs.
In recent weeks the Trump-allied billionaire and his nepobaby son have taken to trying to claim all merger opponents are somehow “antisemitic,” at one point even going to far to create a fake consumer group that used AI to generate bogus support for the megadeal. They’ve also endlessly threatened to leave California if the lawsuit isn’t shelved, despite that being logistically unlikely.
This week, the company funded, and then “leaked” a study claiming that California faces imminent disaster if California AG Rob Bonta doesn’t immediately settle with Paramount.
The study, from the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation’s Institute for Applied Economics, tries to claim that if Paramount is “forced” to leave California as the result of the lawsuit, California could see 58,000 lost jobs and up to $21 billion a year in ambiguous losses:
“Once Paramount completed the entire relocation of its headquarters and other operations out of California, the state would experience the permanent loss of approximately 28,990 to 57,980 full-time jobs statewide across all industries, and losses of between $10.6 billion and $21.2 billion annually in economic output.”
A few things. One, the news outlets that covered this story (like The Hollywood Reporter and The Wrap) either downplay or omit mentioning this study was funded by Paramount. The “Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation’s Institute for Applied Economics” also isn’t a government agency or objective entity, it’s an industry-sponsored organization designed to sound authoritative and official.
Most of the outlets played along with the idea that the study was “leaked,” when it clearly was part of a strange little stage play being put on by Paramount and a group it hired to conducted a lopsided study filled with a lot of magic math. To come up with the 57k layoffs and $21.2 billion, the study authors have to engage in an impressive amount of baseless patty cake:
“It should be emphasized that these estimated job losses include direct, indirect and induced jobs, capturing the ripple effects through Paramount’s supply chains in California as well as the economic activity of household spending,” the study says. “Consequently, the job losses pertain to all California industries rather than solely to motion picture and television production.”
Both the study and the stories make a big deal about Paramount’s promise to release 30 major brick-and-mortar films per year. But neither the study nor the coverage explore the real-world impact of the most likely outcome: that all of Paramount’s pre-merger promises are completely meaningless, and untold thousands of people lose their jobs to try and pay down deal debt.
Again, a study about the impact of the deal on California didn’t even consider what happens if Paramount isn’t being honest about the deal’s benefits.
This isn’t tea-leaf reading: higher prices, mass layoffs, and shittier overall product is literally what happens every single time there’s major U.S. media consolidation — especially whenever Warner Brothers is involved. We literally just watched it happen with bumbling AT&T executives, who were arguably more ethical and competent than anything we’ve seen out of Ellison’s Paramount.
Again that these deals are bad for workers, consumers, and markets isn’t even an opinion. There are fifty years of very clear historical evidence. Paramount is positively desperate to frame the simple act of actually enforcing antitrust law as somehow “extreme leftism” and radical, when the real radical act is U.S. policy endlessly embracing harmful consolidation with zero consideration for real world impact.
With the absence of coherent federal governance in the age of corrupt authoritarianism, there’s really very little holding Paramount’s feet to the fire in terms of pre-merger promises, which are generally meaningless. While empty promises of 30 major releases a year may have excited Tom Cruise and James Cameron, that isn’t something they can even realistically promise given market challenges.
What historically always happens is these companies (and their think tanks and assorted proxies) promise no shortage of amazing synergies, so the merger either gets rubber stamped or affixed with meaningless conditions. About a year later the mass layoffs and price hikes start, at which point all the people responsible for blowing smoke up everybody’s ass regarding the merger benefits have nothing to say about any of it, because they’re off propping up some other shitty deal.
If America genuinely valued free market innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, we’d stop rubber stamping shitty deals based on the empty promises of terrible rich people.
There’s no single big story today, but rather a smattering of smaller ones I’m keeping an eye on. So let’s do a Status Kuo Lightning Round!
Three stories involving some of the worst people make up today’s round-up: Donald Trump Jr. and his “wedding gift” from a Russian oligarch; Kash Patel’s rough and frankly weird day testifying before senators on the Hill; and the president’s unceasing, tiresome quest to affix his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
It’s not everyone who has billionaire oligarchs pay for their shindigs. So when it happens, we ought to treat it with deep skepticism.
ProPublica broke this story earlier this week. Don Jr.’s three-day wedding celebration in the Bahamas this past May was financed in part by Umar Kremlev. If you’re not familiar with that name, he’s a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin. ProPublica reviewed records and conducted interviews with three people familiar with the event, finding that Kremlev paid to rent one of the private islands where the reception was held and guests stayed. The island rents for roughly $100,000 a night. He also covered a fireworks display over the water, valued at about $70,000.
The money was funneled through IB Challenger, a Dubai-based entity affiliated with the International Boxing Association, which Kremlev leads.
Trump Jr.’s spokesperson did not dispute the payments when ProPublica asked, describing Kremlev as “a personal friend” with no business relationship, someone Trump Jr. met through a mutual friend in the hunting world. His wife, Bettina Trump, sought to pass this off as totally normal and legit, writing on Instagram that Kremlev “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations” and calling it “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend,” adding, “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive.”
Kremlev was born Umar Lutfulloyev and changed his surname in 2010, following convictions for extortion and battery in his twenties. He rose through the Kremlin-aligned “Night Wolves” motorcycle club, where he built a relationship with Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service.
Kremlev became president of the International Boxing Association in 2020. Under his leadership, the organization struck a sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the Russian state energy company, that helped pull it out of debt. Amid longstanding concerns about the IBA’s governance and finances, the International Olympic Committee stripped the organization of Olympic recognition in 2023.
Putin awarded Kremlev the Order of Friendship in April, and Ukraine has sanctioned him specifically for his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.
Kremlev’s publicly documented association with Don Jr. is fairly recent. The two appeared together at an IBA panel in Istanbul in September 2025, months after Kremlev publicly wrote to Trump seeking help in the IBA’s fight with the IOC. So for him to pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars so soon after apparently striking up this friendship is notable.
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI counterintelligence official, offered the plainest read. “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”
Kash Patel’s Senate hearing: election ambiguity, an Epstein accusation and 40 minutes on…bestiality
The FBI director testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 15 for his first oversight hearing since the May controversy over his drinking and lavish travel. With federal shows of power now a flashpoint ahead of November’s midterms, Patel did not rule out sending agents to polling places should problems arise, saying each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has an election coordinator tasked with responding to alleged election interference. Senators also pressed him on his decision to assign hundreds of FBI analysts to review election records in Fulton County, Georgia, following a January raid on an election warehouse that seized ballot boxes and voter rolls.
Ranking member Dick Durbin (D-IL) also accused Patel of playing a role in the White House’s cover-up of the Epstein files. He alleged that Patel diverted more than 1,000 FBI agents from other assignments to flag any records mentioning Trump’s name, based on information from a 2025 whistleblower. Patel countered that the bureau had complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and had released 3.5 million pages of documents.
In a bizarre, if on-brand, example of where the FBI’s time and energy are being spent, senators repeatedly questioned Patel about the FBI’s decision to end an automatic hiring disqualification for applicants with a history of (checks notes) bestiality. Patel said the change was meant to protect trafficking victims from automatic exclusion because the bureau did not want to “punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked.” GOP Sen. John Kennedy pushed back, asking Patel, “When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect: The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say what planet did you parachute in from?” Patel conceded that was in fact his first reaction, but he stuck with the change anyway.
Let the record reflect that the FBI claims it was concerned about excluding victims of bestiality, and that’s why it needed to change the hiring policy.
A judge, again, tells Trump his name can’t go on the Kennedy Center
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued an order Tuesday blocking the Kennedy Center board’s latest attempt to inscribe Trump’s name on the building. He ruled that the board’s attempted end-run violated his earlier injunction and a congressional statute. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
This was Cooper’s second ruling against the effort. He had ordered Trump’s name removed from the building in May, after the board had voted in December to add it. His Tuesday ruling noted that “the drama at the Kennedy Center continues” despite his earlier injunction.
The board argued Trump’s name was necessary to unlock his fundraising help and secure the center’s finances. But Congress had already appropriated $257 million for renovations; the board hoped Trump would raise an additional $100 million.
Cooper rejected that reasoning, noting the board already had access to the appropriated funds and that Trump had indicated at an August 13 meeting that he was prepared to use that money regardless. He also noted that the renaming push had coincided with declining revenue, artist cancellations and the Washington National Opera ending its 50-year residency at the center.
Within an hour of Cooper’s ruling, in what looked suspiciously like sour grapes, the board voted to immediately close most of the center, citing structural and financial emergencies, including a partial ceiling collapse during a recent rainstorm. Trump posted soon afterward that renovation “cannot begin” until the board is allowed to proceed with the tribute to him.
Cooper is still weighing whether the board has the authority to order the closure During a morning hearing, he asked, “Is it possible to turn down the temperature a little bit? I’m not ordering you to do it, but there is a larger public interest here.”
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), the Democratic board member whose lawsuit produced both rulings, was understandably exasperated. “The law is extremely clear: The John F. Kennedy Center is named for President Kennedy — and no one else.”
I’ll leave you with her description of her meeting with Trump, which is so very satisfying.
Techdirt has just written about concerns that AI development is proceeding more quickly than human oversight can monitor and control it. Since then, there has been lively debate about whether those fears are real or overblown. They mainly focus on the possible future threats from AI systems using RSI — recursive self-improvement — to drive their own development, at an ever-faster pace, by re-writing their own code. But a recent report from Anthropic underlines that AI is already being used by conventional threat actors — state-sponsored groups, financially-motivated criminals, commercial spyware vendors, state propaganda institutions, and politically-motivated individuals — in attempts to cause a wide range of harm, exploiting today’s powerful AI systems to amplify the reach and impact of their actions.
It is a measure of just how fast those threats are multiplying that the latest Anthropic report on “Detecting and countering misuse of AI” runs to 154 pages, whereas the three published in 2025 barely hit double digits. It covers activity that the company disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, and involved the use of its Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models. An obvious application of AI is to carry out cyber attacks. The key development in recent months is the following:
The cybersecurity skills of AI models means that AI has collapsed the labor and tooling gap that used to separate well-resourced, state-sponsored operations from individual operators. In the case studies we report below, a hacktivist using stolen API keys, disparate financially motivated individuals, and a state espionage operator each sustained multi-victim campaigns that, even just a year ago, would have required many skilled operators and specialist knowledge.
For threat intelligence investigators, sophistication has stopped being a reliable signal of who is behind an operation. Every layer of offensive operations has been uplifted by AI, from reconnaissance and tool development to data processing and exploitation.
AI’s sophistication in this sphere has reached the point where “vibe hacking” is now possible:
The use of AI during intrusions and data theft operations often resembles “vibe hacking,” wherein operators direct AI to achieve general goals like using a credential for an entity or retrieving data from a broad set of targets, then allow the AI to evaluate the environment, author and execute scripts, provide summaries, and repeatedly execute until the task is complete.
It is not just single hacking attempts that are being automated; the entire exploit development chain is being outsourced to AI:
Historically, cyber operations have been limited in their scale and impact by two key constraints: the supply of working offensive exploits, and the supply of skilled operators capable of deploying those exploits. We have identified multiple threat actors who have effectively established automated exploit foundries with AI. In doing so, they have designed and implemented autonomous workflows by which they can direct Claude to conduct vulnerability and exploit research agentically around the clock. Across multiple instances, we identified Claude being used to meaningfully accelerate the pace of vulnerability research, testing, and exploit design.
As a result, everything is at risk:
The old adage of “security through obscurity” is no longer viable in this new AI-assisted world: everything connected to the internet is a potential target for exploitation.
Alongside cyberattacks, two other obvious applications of AI are influence operations and surveillance. The Anthropic report discusses examples of both, which exploit AI capabilities much as you might expect. But one notable feature is scale:
AI is now being used in place of an engineering workforce. A single consultant working for Malian national security authorities used Claude to engineer a mass-interception platform capable of surveilling communications on all of the country’s mobile operators and generating dossiers on targets.
And:
a religious affairs intelligence collection unit in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that once comprised many teams of analysts has been reduced to a single office, using an AI assistant to produce thousands of investigations per month
It is striking that Chinese-based threat actors figure disproportionately in the influence and surveillance section:
The targets ranged from domestic petitioners and rights defenders to prominent pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, organizers of Tiananmen Square commemorations, Uyghur advocacy organizations, and Western human rights institutions. In the most serious case, the actor directed Claude to produce pre-operational venue intelligence (i.e., scouting locations ahead of an operation) on overseas protests.
Several Iranian operations too were spotted by Anthropic:
An Iran-nexus threat actor that used Claude to build an automated, open-source intelligence identity-profiling harness targeting Israeli governmental and non-governmental individuals, and Jewish diaspora organizations. Separately, the actor used Claude to make it harder to tell that its malware was malware.
One new category of AI misuse that appears in the latest report concerns conventional weapon development, using Claude to develop software for firearms, missiles, armed drones, bombs, and other munitions, as well as the targeting and control systems that operate them:
We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the “R2000” set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.
The actors used Claude Code in place of human software engineers to develop the guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) software that steers and stabilizes a flying vehicle. For example, they used Claude to integrate an open-source autopilot onto a phone-class flight computer, writing the control and position estimation software, tuning the control settings, running a firmware build pipeline, and performing a flight simulation. The actors managed several Claude instances at once, assigning each one a role, much as a lead would delegate work on a small engineering team: the actors tasked one instance with writing the code, another with research, and a third with reviewing the code the first instance produced.
Russia-based actors tried to use Claude for something more innovative:
We identified likely freelance Russia-based threat actors who set out to build a full-stack autonomous first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drone swarm. The actors used Claude Code to write and test the code and save it directly into the actors’ own project files. In addition to Claude Code, the actors used a software-in-the-loop simulation stack and a rented graphics processing host for model training.
The actors designed the platform for autonomous lethal engagement; the onboard model could select targets (including a “person” target class) and issue detonation commands without a human in the loop. The actors’ activity—including flashing the low-level firmware to live development boards, provisioning single-board computers, and wiring up a simulation environment over a mesh network—confirmed that they were using real hardware-in-loop testing within their sessions.
But perhaps the most chilling threat discussed in the Anthropic report is the following:
Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models. It has long been a concern that AI models might one day reach the level of capability where they can help to make existing pathogens more dangerous—or create entirely new ones. Without the correct safeguards, such capabilities could have catastrophic consequences.
Anthropic provides five case studies of actors using its products that could support biological weapons development:
In the first example, a reseller platform evaded regional blocks to serve virologists working on a state-sponsored grant to pursue chikungunya gain-of-function work, later routing refused prompts to models with more permissive safeguards. In the second, a researcher in an unsupported region spent weeks planning avian influenza mammalian-adaptation experiments with Claude, but classifiers confined the work to our weakest models. In the third case study, a reseller relay serving a dozen customers had Opus 5 draft a complete orthopoxvirus immune-evasion grant application in about an hour. In the fourth example, a state-supported researcher built a venom peptide atlas and generative optimization pipeline of molecules directed at paralytic and analgesic targets. And in the final case study, a researcher computationally redesigned toxins for a national program, asking Claude to keep the agents’ identities deliberately vague in progress reports.
In some ways, the detail provided by the Anthropic report is comforting. It shows that the company managed to spot and block many sophisticated uses of its AI offerings. But these, of course, are only the ones that it noticed (and the ones that it is willing to talk about). The question has to be how many escaped detection, and succeeded in their goals. Moreover, Anthropic is only one company, albeit one of the leading ones in its field. Similar attempts to use AI for such dangerous purposes are doubtless being made around the world on many AI systems. Although discussions about RSI wiping out humanity grab the headlines, maybe it’s time to focus much more on the lesser but very real threats that AI already poses in the hands of the wrong people, as revealed in the Anthropic report.
In particular, we need to talk about how to respond to this malicious activity. Should we rely on a few dominant companies to police everyone’s use of AI to spot and block the bad actors? As AI becomes embedded in everyday life, that effectively means constant surveillance of everyone by those companies. What about the legal frameworks for handling these abuses? Who should bear the liability when threat actors succeed in circumventing the built-in safeguards and cause real-life harm? And how would increasingly capable open weight/open source systems that exist outside the control of any company fit into new legal and liability frameworks? It’s going to be an interesting few years finding out — assuming we have that long…
You may recall that back in July we had the ridiculous story of how ICE decided to go all gestapo on its critics, including tracking down and threatening David Streever, who had emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons back in January, after federal agents killed some peaceful protestors in Minnesota. Streever’s email was pretty straightforward:
“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.
“The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.
“You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
Honestly, pretty mild, given what monsters nominal immigration officials have become. But, alas, DHS couldn’t handle someone being mean on main to their boss. They sent federal law enforcement officials to try to find him at his home to leave him a “warning” about his email. When they found out that Streever was out of the country (taking his daughter to an amusement park in Finland), they tracked his flight home and showed up at the hotel near JFK where he was staying overnight, hoping — unsuccessfully — to meet with him. Agents also left a ridiculous “warning notice” with Streever’s wife:
As our initial article made clear, everything about this was bizarre, intimidating, and stupid. ICE’s “Office of Professional Responsibility” is supposed to be making sure that ICE agents are acting professionally and responsibly — not engaging in unprofessional and irresponsible investigations of people who are criticizing ICE leaders.
Streever, along with lawyers from FIRE, sued Homeland Security, and just received a big initial win. Judge Rudolph Contreras is not at all impressed with DHS’s arguments, and points out that criticizing public officials is kind of a big deal here, what with our First Amendment and all:
Americans have long voiced their displeasure with their government. The Declaration of Independence itself is a list of grievances between Americans and the British government. And Americans have not always indulged in the elevated prose of the Declaration. Government officials have long endured “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks.” N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964).
Today is no different. Plaintiff David Streever expressed his displeasure with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) by sending a three-paragraph email to the agency’s Acting Director, Defendant Todd Lyons. Mr. Streever compared Acting Director Lyons to an infamous Nazi and predicted that he would become “a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at [his] own pathetic weakness.”
What is different is how the government responded in this case. ICE dispatched agents to Mr. Streever’s home and delivered to him a “WARNING NOTICE.” The notice threatened him with prosecution if he did not “discontinue” his criticism of ICE. Because that notice likely violates Mr. Streever’s First Amendment right to free speech, the Court will grant, in part, Mr. Streever’s motion for preliminary injunction, enjoining Defendants from relying on the Warning Notice, issuing similar threats, or making good on the threats in the Warning Notice.
Note — as the court does — that nothing in Streever’s email to Lyons came anywhere close to being a “true threat” that would take it out of the protective cloak of the First Amendment. Hell, it’s not even remotely near what could be read as a threat:
More importantly, the email does not contain a physical threat. The email registered displeasure with Acting Director Lyons’s official conduct, forecasted that the Acting Director will lose favor with the President, and warned that the moral weight of the Acting Director’s actions will haunt him in the future…. Although Mr. Streever’s email was not kind, and may not have been particularly productive, it was a far cry from a “[t]rue threat[ ] of violence” sufficient for the email to shed its First Amendment protections.
The court notes that ICE had apparently “closed” the investigation after delivering that bizarre notice to Streever’s wife, but never informed Streever that the investigation was closed. However, when Streever sued, DHS decided to respond publicly to a post by FIRE about the lawsuit:
If you can’t see that, it’s DHS angrily posting:
Any allegation DHS and its components are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE.
ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations.
Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, child sex abusers, and rapists. They are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them and facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them, a 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats.
ANYONE who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences.
Thing is, a federal judge now says that’s bullshit, and that this was obviously an attempt to squash free speech. Indeed, this very tweet comes back to hurt DHS, as the judge sees that it is clearly designed to further intimidate Streever and others.
Still, the judge rejects part of Streever’s request for an injunction against being investigated, noting that ICE claims they closed the investigation into him. Streever points out that the tweet suggests otherwise, but the judge accepts that ICE’s investigation is over.
But he is greatly troubled by that bullshit “warning notice” left at his home, and notes that even if the investigation is closed, the “warning notice” and its speech suppressing statements are still in effect:
The Warning Notice is a different matter. Defendants have not disavowed the Warning Notice, nor do they deny that it remains in effect. The Warning Notice therefore provides a continuing injury over which Mr. Streever has standing to sue.
The Supreme Court has recognized that when the government directly threatens a party with future enforcement actions targeting their First Amendment activity, it creates an on-going injury at least where there is a “distinct possibility of” enforcement.
And since the notice orders Streever to self-censor to avoid future trouble, the court sees it as a real First Amendment problem for DHS:
Mr. Streever likewise faces a distinct possibility of prosecution for future speech. The Warning Notice requests that Mr. Streever “discontinue” his political speech and threatens prosecution, if he does not.
And here’s where that raging tweet harms DHS’s case even further:
Even if the Warning Notice were not explicit enough, a DHS spokesperson later posted on social media, in response to a post about Mr. Streever’s lawsuit, specifically referencing a purported “credible threat towards . . . the ICE Director” and warned that “ANYONE who assaults or threatens our law enforcement officers will face the consequences.” Homeland Security (@DHSgov), X (July 6, 2026, at 3:06 p.m.). This public statement and the reference to “consequences” further underscores that Mr. Streever faces a credible threat of government reprisal.
Judge Contreras does not buy DHS’s retort that they’re simply warning Streever not to violate federal law, pointing out that there’s no way you can read the Warning Notice that isn’t an attempt to suppress Streever’s speech:
Defendants dismiss the Warning Notice as merely a reminder to Mr. Streever “not to violate federal law” and argue it represents at most a past injury. Defs.’ Opp’n at 19. The Warning Notice, however, is not quite so innocuous. In the opening paragraph, it identifies Mr. Streever’s January email and states that OPR “has reason to believe [it] may constitute a violation of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.” Compl., Ex. 2. It then requests that Mr. Streever “promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior.” Id. (emphasis added). Defendants seem to understand “aforementioned behavior” to refer to criminal threats generally. But because of the immediately preceding reference to Mr. Streever’s email to Acting Director Lyons, this request is fairly read as a demand that Mr. Streever refrain from criticizing Acting Director Lyons.
The notice also warns Mr. Streever of the potential for prosecution. After describing Mr. Streever’s email as a potential “violation of Title 18,” the notice goes on to describe various crimes under that title and remind Mr. Streever that “[v]iolations of these or related laws could subject you to both federal and state prosecution.” Id. (emphasis removed). If that were not enough, the letter closes by telling Mr. Streever that “[r]eceipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above.” Id. The use of “continue” implies that Mr. Streever’s email already exposed him to criminal liability and, critically, that any similar speech by Mr. Streever in the future will be viewed the same way.
All told, the Warning Notice demands that Mr. Streever “discontinue” his political speech criticizing Acting Director Lyons. It does so while reminding Mr. Streever of the risk of prosecution and warning him that if he “continue[s]” to criticize Acting Director Lyons and ICE, the fact that he has been warned for his past speech “will be taken into consideration,” implying future prosecutions. Political speech is not a crime, so that is hardly a reminder to follow the law. And because the Warning Notice speaks of “discontinu[ing]” Mr. Streever’s political speech and threatens consequences if he “continue[s]” to speak out, it represents a continuing, rather than a past, injury.
The court also rejects the argument from DHS that Streever is trying to block a “speculative” future harm of being arrested and or prosecuted. But as the judge points out, that’s not the issue here. The existing chilling effect on speech is already a harm:
Mr. Streever is not merely alleging that he will be injured at some point in the future because he will face an investigation or prosecution down the line. That would be closer to the risk of being subjected to a chokehold in the future in Lyons because it would rely on predicting the future actions of Mr. Streever and law enforcement. …
Mr. Streever’s injury is the loss of his freedom to engage in political speech now because the threat of such an investigation or prosecution looms over him like the sword of Damocles, and he is forced to self-censor under that threat…. That loss of speech is both imminent and certain because it does not rely on Defendants actually opening a new investigation. The Warning Notice works because Mr. Streever is too intimidated by the threat of future government action that he will not test whether the government will follow through on its threat. As the Supreme Court recently explained, “[t]he value of a sword of Damocles is that it hangs—not that it drops.” First Choice, 608 U.S. at 192 (quoting Arnett v. Kennedy, 416 U.S. 134, 231 (1974) (Marshall, J., dissenting)).
DHS also claims that because Streever doesn’t have any “concrete plans” to engage in more such speech in the future, then he can’t show harm. The court (rightly) finds that argument to be quite silly:
Even viewed through the lens of a future injury, Mr. Streever’s case is distinguishable from those cited by Defendants because the type of speech at issue here is different. Mr. Streever seeks to engage in speech through off-the-cuff emails and comments on social media…. This spontaneous speech is different in kind from the sorts of premediated future activities for which courts have expected concrete plans. … Given the spontaneous nature of the speech at issue here, it would be pedantic to require Mr. Streever to detail exactly when he anticipates speaking out against the government next and what he plans to say.
In the end, the court won’t bar the government from investigating Streever (again, ICE insists the investigation is closed) but it does vacate the “Warning Notice” outright, and bars DHS from leaning on it going forward. While the judge considers Streever’s request to block future investigations of his speech, the judge notes he’s not sure he can really do that. If future speech actually contains true threats or violates laws in other ways, an investigation has to be allowed. But clearly mindful of the chilling effects here, the court makes it clear that continuing to harass Streever over his political speech is not allowed.
The Court will, for the time being, vacate the Warning Notice; it will preliminarily enjoin Defendants from relying on the Warning Notice and Mr. Streever’s January email in future prosecutions and investigative demands; and it will preliminarily enjoin Defendants from issuing similar warnings to Mr. Streever that suggest he cannot engage in non-threatening criticism of the government.
DHS whined to the judge that ICE is facing oh so many threats (based on very bullshit claims by DHS), but the judge notes that this is a narrow injunction, one that still leaves ICE free to investigate actual threats. But it does mean that you are free to let ICE officers know that they are monstrous human beings who will be reviled in history, and that they are sad and despised.
The Premium Microsoft Office Training Certification Bundle has 11 courses geared to help you master essential skills and raise your expertise. Popular programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams are covered, while more advance programs get introduced as well, including SharePoint, Access, PowerBI, and Microsoft SQL Server. You’ll gain a better understanding of how each program works and how they can all interact together. It’s on sale for $30.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Yet another data point on the whole grift/graft aspect of (particularly) the second Trump administration. While Trump was endlessly bragging about how much war he was going to wage, while simultaneously bragging about how much war he was going to end, his Israel-enabled Iran War refused to submit to his vacillating bluster.
After claiming to be the best thing that had ever happened to Americans since… I don’t know… colonialism? Slavery? Jim Crow?, Trump insisted he’d beat the pesky Iranians, steal all of Venezuela’s oil, tariff the fuck out of nations that don’t even have any exports, and nationalize a bunch of stuff to deliver Americans the low, low prices they wanted.
While some of this has happened (especially the oil theft and the nationalization), the falling prices have yet to materialize. And, of course, they won’t. So, as gas prices shot up, Trump did what no president has ever done: announced some weird combination of patriotism and gasoline, which would be appearing (in very limited areas) under the name of the “Freedom Fuel Network.”
To be sure, the participating gas stations did (at least for awhile) provide much cheaper gas than their competitors. How they were able to do this remained a mystery, as did anything that might explain why these gas stations were Trump’s chosen few. The immediate assumption was corruption — that Trump was siphoning off some sort of subsidy in exchange for political donations or perhaps raking in a percentage of the sales via one of his many trust funds.
Neither the White House nor the network’s owners would explain exactly how the stations were able to sell fuel far cheaper than their competitors. The White House told reporters that Freedom Fuel was simply a private company lowering its margins for patriotic reasons and declined to disclose the people behind it — who turned out to be a former New Jersey mayor and NFL special teams coach for the Baltimore Ravens, a GOP donor.
POLITICO’s reporting also linked six of the stations via business records to a New Jersey fuel businessperson named Shamikh Kazmi who, along with his brother Syed Kazmi, have been involved in several lawsuits.
Trump’s lawsuit involvement tends to be a two-way street. Not only is he a vexatious litigant, but he also regularly does stuff that prompts lawsuits. The Kazmi brothers experience with lawsuits runs one way: they’re always the defendants.
The operator behind at least six of the mysterious Freedom Fuel discount gas stations had faced a stream of nearly 200 penalties in New Jersey before President Donald Trump touted the network last month, according to state records POLITICO reviewed.
The penalties pertaining to safety and environmental violations laid out in New Jersey public records raise questions about how much the administration knew about the network that the White House promoted and Trump praised in social media posts and official press releases.
It doesn’t matter whether Trump knew or whether he knew but didn’t care. The end result is the same thing: Trump getting in bed with questionable people who have a long history of illegal activity. These penalties incurred by the Kazmi brothers were anything but minor. One station was forbidden from purchasing gas due to an unregistered tank in need of repairs. Two other stations in the “Freedom Fuel Network” were hit with similar legal action due to lack of registration. Another station was hit with a fine for ignoring a delivery ban that had already been imposed by regulators.
The lawsuit was filed by the Georgia-based Mansfield Energy against KRSM, a company based in New Jersey, and its president, Syed Kazmi. From May 21 to July 7, KRSM picked up 1.1 million gallons of fuel worth nearly $4 million from a fuel supply terminal in Pennsylvania, the suit claims.
Then, KRSM sold that fuel to gas stations that were part of the Freedom Fuel Network, which was able to sell gas at lower prices than its competitors did, the lawsuit claims.
Yep, if you lower your cost to near-zero, you can charge whatever you want and still turn a profit… at least for a little while. The lawsuit [PDF] claims this non-payment is part of what Makes America Great makes it possible for Freedom Fuel to undercut its competitors. While it’s true that some of this “free” gas went to other stations with FFN branding, it still ended up in the hands of the Kazmi brothers, whose past doesn’t exactly make a great case for “this is all just a misunderstanding” counter-arguments.
At this point, it’s tough to tell how far this lawsuit will proceed or what sort of discovery might be in the offing. But those of us interested in finding out what makes this personally profitable for Donald J. Trump will definitely be rooting for protracted litigation. There’s no way Trump isn’t making something off of this because if he wasn’t, he never would have said anything about it. The president isn’t supposed to be picking winners and losers in the market… at least not via highly visible social media posts. Any real president would know to keep this shady shit on the DL, rather than publicly attempt to take second-hand credit for engaging in barely disguised graft.
If the allegations turn out to be true, it will be the Trumpiest of Trump-brand populism: the equivalent of buying votes by not paying vendors for gas. What a time to be alive.
[Quick postscript on this: discovery requests are in and the plaintiff is demanding the court allow it to find out how millions just disappeared from a KRSM account it had previously moved to have frozen during litigation. This looks shady as fuck:
As set forth in the pending motion for contempt of this Court’s August 27, 2026 Order, Plaintiff’s M&T Bank account is now underfunded by approximately $2.25 million, while KRSM financial statements admitted into the record on August 27 represented KRSM had over $30,000.00 in cash assets.
In an ideal world it’s certainly possible that the U.S. federal government could implement meaningful guardrails for AI development that protect innovation, national security, consumer privacy, public safety, and labor/creatives, while preventing market monopolization by the sector’s biggest players.
But we don’t live in that ideal world. We live in a country where an historically corrupt autocrat with a bad comb-over has disemboweled all of our public interest regulators and Congress is too corrupt to function. Thanks in no small part to a tech sector bankrolled by people who openly hate democracy.
With Chinese AI development resulting in a surge of significantly cheaper options that threaten U.S. dominance, and a bipartisan coalition of people violently opposed to data centers (or justifiably terrified by the unsubtle lack of ethics in big tech), it’s extremely likely that 2027 sees some form of AI regulation.
It’s also extremely likely these new laws are going to either be terrible and ghost written by the tech industry’s biggest players — cementing and legalizing all of their worst impulses and locking in their dreams of cloud software domination. Or terrible and written by people who think they’re helping, but have no idea how any of this works, resulting in bad proposals that confuse people and don’t pass.
“The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules. It would also direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.”
As a whole I’m bored with Dem lawmakers proposing legislation they know won’t pass to convey the idea they’re “doing something” (Elizabeth Warren loves this). The argument is that this at least “starts a conversation” about what a real law would look like, but I’m not sure that’s true. We spent the last two decades endlessly talking about the need for privacy laws and data broker regulation, only for corruption to cripple every last effort.
I also don’t really love Dem lawmakers thinking the best way to reach Trump voters is to appear on stage with fascists, lending fascists tech policy credibility they don’t have (it’s what resulted in years of people deluding themselves that you could partner with fascists on antitrust).
That’s not to say I don’t think people like Sanders’ shouldn’t propose new laws. And maybe the final law actually has some salient teeth, whenever he finally unveils it. But I do think those proposals need to be very simple and extra well considered and crafted to gain any meaningful momentum in a sea of hysteria, noise, corruption, and hypercapitalism.
Sanders’ short summary tries to define “superintelligence” this way:
An artificial intelligence system that exhibits or can easily be modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance and capabilities across a broad range of domains or tasks.
AI systems that have sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity, including by overthrowing or undermining the U.S. government.
Technically all sorts of software could be “easily modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance across a broad range of domains or tasks.” You could argue your current spreadsheet or music software can do that.
Recent videos suggest Sanders may not really understand how AI works, which is a problem if you’re going to be proposing major tech policy. It’s also pretty clear Sanders is one of many people freshly spooked by software superintelligence they don’t understand and can’t actually define.
The last week or two have been flooded with a lot of young AI industry folks, high on their own science fiction farts and spooked by the rapid pace of software development, publicly insisting that modern software automation has become self-aware and superintelligent and has a not insignificant chance of simply deciding to wipe out humanity (this is, to be clear, not true).
These folks aren’t necessarily worried that AI is going to be used by rich people to ratfuck creatives and labor (it is), or automate a lot of flawed human systems in a way that provide corporations accountability cover from heartless and greedy systemic policy (also true; see: AI adoption in Medicare rejections).
These guys are out here insisting, falsely, that software has achieved human-level sentience and will, on a lark, simply decide to decimate the eastern seaboard for fun. This is, again, not a thing that’s actually true or happening, not that it matters to the ad-engagement based clickbait press. A lot of these folks are also coming to the party very late, after they’ve been well paid and the horses are all out of the barn.
The worries are driven by the very real threat of agentic AI hacking at incredible new speed and scale (see: Hugging Face). While those worries are real, in the process a lot of these folks have anthropomorphized software in a way that’s just not accurate, misrepresented what’s happening, and are very clearly terrifying people in a way that misdirects attention away from the more realistic but mundane harms of AI.
Many of the early issues with automated hacking software doing precisely what it was programmed to do have involved very basic human errors, like failing to double check that a third-party vendor properly isolated your agentic hacking swarm from the internet. Or failing to monitor your automated hacking software in real time. There are problems, but they’re human problems, not HAL 9000 type problems.
Some of the actual human problems could simply be addressed by the U.S. actually enforcing antitrust law without treating it like “anti-business” or “extremism.” Or funding and staffing the regulators we currently have. Or finally passing simple privacy and campaign finance reform laws. It often feels like we’re trying to build new bridges without first ensuring the ground is stable.
Sanders’ bill also proposes establishing a new cabinet-level federal agency to “safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” Ideally this agency would be staffed with objective experts with genuine public interest bonafides, though historically that’s not how the corrupt U.S. works (see: the FTC, FCC, or EPA, where genuine public interest officials, like Gigi Sohn, can’t pass a corrupt congressional nomination process).
Sanders’ bill also proposes a total “pause” on all development while we figure things out:
Pausing advanced AI development until a new, federal AI regulatory body is up and running and has established clear rules and model review process to ensure safe and secure development and deployment of AI.
Obviously none of this is happening. Congress is too corrupt to pass meaningful public interest legislation surrounding privacy, gun rights, health care, or much of anything else. Into that intentional vacuum will step the wealthiest tech executives, who are dead set on ghost writing their own AI legislation in 2027.
All of the top AI executives this week responded to the hyperbolic “Skynet will kill us all” news cycle with claims they want to voluntarily slow the rate of AI development. I tend to think that given the dawning realization that none of this stuff is profitable, they’re preparing investors and the press for slowed CAPEX ahead of a market correction caused by their own hype and funny math.
But the idea that big tech companies are going to create a self-regulating body that limits their pursuit of wealth and power is silly. In reality, they’re going to flood Congress in the new year with all sorts of bad laws that ban cheaper Chinese alternatives, open source models, open weighted models, on device models, and anything that imperils their dreams of walled garden software automation domination.
I don’t pooh-pooh Sanders for at least trying to get the ball rolling on AI legislation not crafted by the planet’s shittiest oligarchs, but if we’re going to have alternative visions to the shitty AI laws tech giants dream up in the new year, they’re really going to need to be exceptionally well crafted and not driven by vibes. They also can’t, you know, inadvertently ban the entirety of modern software.
Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance.
Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa.
How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses (permalink)
There's lots of reasons to believe the "hyperscaler" model of AI can never be profitable, and not just because of its gigantic expenditures and negative unit economics (the companies lose money with every new customer and every new use, and they lose more money with each generation of their products):
The industry strenuously denies this, of course. They insist that they are only days away from turning their balance sheets right side up. All they have to do is fix those unit economics, then they can make back the cost of producing their models by selling access to them. The problem is that the evidence for those improving unit economics is weak, while the evidence that they're faking their finances is very strong:
Same goes for the claims that these companies are already profitable. Dig into those claims and you'll learn they depend on a new, special meaning of "profitable" that does not match the generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) definition, which is to say, these companies are claiming that they are so cool that their profitability can only be measured using a novel, secret form of mathematics:
This is the same wheeze that Softbank tried with Wework. Speaking in my capacity as an author of internationally bestselling technothrillers about accounting fraud, I can tell you that it was accounting fraud then, and it's accounting fraud now:
But let's give the AI bosses a momentary benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they are on the verge of acquiring positive unit-economics, which will let them start to pay off the massive expenditures they incurred by training their models and enter their long-anticipated profitability phase, when the money-furnaces they've been running for years turn into money printers, to the delight of the investors who've supplied the vast bales of $100 bills the companies have been shoveling into their models' coalboxes for years now.
Basically, they're saying, "Sure, it cost us a lot to get these rails laid, but now that the railroad is complete we can start running cars over them and make a profit." Unfortunately (for bosses and investors), this proposition is every bit as dubious as their claims to improving unit economics.
To understand why, just look at what happened the last time Anthropic shipped a major Claude update. Virtually overnight, all of OpenAI's best customers stopped paying for ChatGPT and started paying for Claude. That's because chatbots have very low switching costs: going from one chatbot to another costs almost nothing:
Everyone using AI knows this to be true. When I walked the floor at CES last year, I asked every AI-powered gadget maker, "What will you do if your chatbot provider jacks up their prices?" and to a one, they said, "No problem, we've designed this thing so that we can switch chatbots with the click of a mouse":
That means that you can't just "build the railroad and run the cars over it." The minute you finish your railroad, your rivals will announce that they've got a new, adjacent railroad that's even faster than yours, and you will have to get to work laying another set of tracks to support even faster trains.
This is a disaster all around: the AI companies are locked in a Red Queen's Race, a fatal beggar-thy-neighbor doom-loop. The only way they could escape that trap is by signing a nonaggression pact amongst themselves promising not to compete anymore. But there's two giant problems with this: first, it is incredibly, fantastically illegal under antitrust law, because it represents a conspiracy among the dominant players to cease to compete with one another, and; second, it leaves the field open for the further development of Chinese "open weight" models that customers can run on their own modest, low-powered computers, which are presently lagging the US "frontier models" by a mere four months:
But what if there was a way for the AI companies to get government permission to violate antitrust law and cease to compete with one another, and secure a ban on the use of Chinese open weight models? Turns out, there is a way to call time on the Red Queen's Race: merely insist that you are on the verge of teaching so many words to the word-guessing program that it will wake up and devour us all, and call for a ban on "superintelligence":
Once the government stipulates that "superintelligence risk" is an existential crisis, it must grant the hyperscalers a consent decree absolving them from any violations of antitrust law stemming from a conspiracy to halt direct competition with one another:
Freaking out about "superintelligence" is a canonical example of "criti-hype," where critics repeat boosters' claims but append, "(and that's bad)" to them:
Remember, the tech giants want to stop competing. Mark Zuckerberg and Sudar Pichai colluded to rig the ad-market with a secret program called "Jedi Blue":
And the biggest tech companies in the world had a secret "no poach" agreement where they illegally promised not to try to hire one another's top engineers by offering them raises:
When an industry that is eating itself alive through "hyperscaling" demands that the government bless a conspiracy to halt competition and ban open source alternatives, you should be suspicious. When that industry is pursuing a venture that has lost more money than any other venture in human history, you should be very suspicious, especially when its "rogue AI hacking" story turns out to be a story about how a hacking tool did exactly what it was designed to do:
Peter Thiel is right: AI is full of wasteful competition, but not because competition is a waste – rather, it's because the companies are competing to convince people to use their expensive products for the cheapest applications.
Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO depended on him losing billions of dollars by letting the world's stupidest chuds produce mountains of child porn and images of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs. That is indeed wasteful (and reprehensible).
That doesn't mean we should allow the AI companies to get the government to bless their conspiracy in restraint of trade; rather, it militates for having the government investigate them for securities fraud, trafficking in child sex abuse material, election finance violations, and a long list of other crimes and misdemeanors.
"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
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 555 (15487 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
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.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
Earlier this year, a wave of hypervisor bypasses allowed pirates to ‘crack’ Denuvo-protected games on the day of release.
However, those bypasses weren’t Denuvo’s only headache. For those who preferred a less invasive approach, an anonymous cracker going by the name “voices38” continued to release many old-school cracks that patch Denuvo’s checks directly.
These traditional cracks don’t require users to disable Windows security features, which makes them quite popular. Catering to this demand, voices38’s output accelerated this summer, resulting in five Denuvo releases on a single day earlier this month. This didn’t go unnoticed at the Denuvo headquarters.
Denuvo Takes ‘voices38’ to Court
On Monday, Denuvo GmbH took legal action. In a complaint obtained by TorrentFreak, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Austrian company accuses voices38 of bypassing its Anti-Tamper technology on 26 games. This is a violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, it argues.
Denuvo explains that the person using the ‘voices38’ handle has targeted the protection measures of a wide range of titles. This includes older titles such as FIFA 20 and PES 2020, as well as recent blockbusters including Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages.
“Defendant is a computer hacker who is focused on reverse engineering, hacking, or ‘cracking’ video games employing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper product,” Denuvo writes in the complaint, while mentioning that Reddit is one of their release channels.
“Defendant has bypassed DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict who may access their works, and allowing for pirated versions of those copyrighted works,” it adds.
Circumvention, Not Copyright Infringement
Denuvo doesn’t actually own the copyrights to any of these games. This means that Denuvo can’t sue “voices38” for traditional copyright infringement, as the game companies could.
Instead, Denuvo’s complaint relies on the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Under this section of US copyright law, it is prohibited to bypass a digital lock that controls access to a copyrighted work, or to distribute tools and instructions that help others to bypass copyright protections.
From the complaint
Importantly, the DMCA allows anyone that’s harmed by these bypasses to file a lawsuit. Denuvo argues that, since its entire business revolves around selling tamper protection to game companies including EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, and Sony, the cracks are directly hurting its business.
As far as we know, this is the first time Denuvo has sued a cracker in a U.S. court. While the lawsuit mentions game titles and their respective owners, none of the rightsholders are part of the lawsuit.
Reddit User, Steam Accounts and a Discord ID
The obvious problem is that nobody knows who voices38 is. The complaint names the defendant as “an unknown individual or entity,” together with ten unnamed Doe defendants.
Denuvo has done some homework, though. The filing lists a Discord user ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles that it believes are linked to the cracker.
Denuvo hopes the information linked to these accounts will eventually unmask the cracker. Games have to be bought before they can be cracked, for example, and Steam purchases come with payment details.
With a case on file, Denuvo can ask the court for permission to subpoena Valve, Reddit and Discord for the associated account details. There’s no discovery request in the docket yet, but that will likely follow soon.
The complaint includes two DMCA anti-circumvention claims and requests damages, as well as an injunction that would bar voices38 from circumventing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper protection in any games, including future ones that have yet to be created.
Persona 3 Reload, cracked this month
The ‘future’ part will be needed, as the list of 26 games was already outdated when the complaint was filed. In recent weeks, ‘voices38’ has released several new cracks, including Persona 3 Reload and Star Wars Outlaws.
What’s Next
Whether Denuvo will be able to identify ‘voices38’ has yet to be seen. Typically, these types of crackers take their precautions. But even if the subpoenas don’t deliver, the lawsuit is not necessarily pointless.
If Denuvo obtains a default judgment with an injunction, it will be easier to have accounts and download links removed.
A ruling in Denuvo’s favor could act as a deterrent, as confirmation that Denuvo can sue crackers directly may spook some people involved.
For now, the case is in its early stages. Time will tell what information Denuvo will request from Reddit, Discord and other third parties, and whether ‘voices38’ will make an appearance in court.
—
Update: responding to the news, voices38 shared the following comment on Reddit: “All is fine. Everything will continue as normal.”
—
A copy of Denuvo’s complaint against voices38, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, obtained by TorrentFreak, is available here (pdf).
The 26 games listed in the complaint, with the publisher named by Denuvo:
1. Need for Speed Heat (Electronic Arts)
2. EA Sports FIFA 20 (Electronic Arts)
3. Star Wars: Squadrons (Electronic Arts)
4. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered (Electronic Arts)
5. EA Sports FIFA 21 (Electronic Arts)
6. Hi-Fi Rush (Bethesda)
7. F1 2021 (Electronic Arts)
8. Dead Space Remastered (Electronic Arts)
9. Doom: The Dark Ages (Bethesda)
10. Mafia: The Old Country (2K Games)
11. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (WB Games)
12. Hogwarts Legacy (WB Games)
13. Total War: Three Kingdoms (SEGA)
14. Starlink: Battle for Atlas (Ubisoft)
15. Shining Resonance Refrain (SEGA)
16. PES 2020 (Konami)
17. Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster (SEGA)
18. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Ubisoft)
19. Anno 1800 (Ubisoft)
20. Sonic Frontiers (SEGA)
21. Assassin’s Creed Mirage (Ubisoft)
22. Pragmata (Capcom)
23. Resident Evil Requiem (Capcom)
24. Black Myth Wukong (Game Science)
25. Stellar Blade (Sony)
26. 007 First Light (IO Interactive)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
We all need to feed our family, find shelter and contribute to the community.
Finding useful work is a key part of the human condition.
But that doesn’t mean the thing you’re being asked to do right now is required. In fact, it’s optional. It might come with this particular gig, but it’s still a choice. In the short run, most of it is not up to us, in the long run, it all is.
Once we voluntarily engage with our choice of project, things get easier.
Coloring books have always been popular with kids. But the audience has grown in recent years as more adults turn to unique and custom coloring books as a way to unwind or spark creativity. With the surge in interest from people of all ages, the market for these unique products has never been higher.
And interest is continuing to grow. Children’s activity books, a category that includes coloring books, sold 16.7 million print copies in 2025—an 18% increase from the previous year. According to Publishers Weekly, sales were up another 18% through May 2026.
Do you have art, photographs, or an interesting concept? Then you’ve got what you need to make your own coloring book.
Why Create Your Own Coloring Book?
If you’re an artist or illustrator, a coloring book can serve as an additional product to offer your audience. A print of your work might be more expensive than most can afford, but a coloring book gives customers access and allows them to interact with your work. You can create a themed book, a collection from existing illustrations, or a series that complements your prints or other merch.
Coloring books also make great, unique gifts. Family pictures, pets, vacation photos, and wedding pictures can all be converted into line drawings for a personalized coloring book. Modern tools, often assisted by AI, can quickly change existing images into line art, making it perfect for coloring book pages.
In fact, entirely new businesses are springing up doing just that. They offer services that allow you to upload images and use inputs like names or interests, then generate coloring book pages for you.
Coloring has a huge appeal among consumers. A 2026 randomized study found reduced anxiety symptoms among students after coloring and signs that mandala coloring supported relaxation and focused attention.
For creators and businesses selling coloring books, it’s also notable that coloring books get used up. It’s not like a novel that can be reread multiple times. Once someone finishes coloring in their book, they need a new one. That creates ensured, repeatable demand.
Plan Your Coloring Book
Like any product you might create, the first thing you should do is think about who it is for.
If you’re making a traditional children’s coloring book, you’ll need simple subjects, thick outlines, and plenty of open space. Older children can handle more detailed scenes. And adult coloring books can feature more intricate patterns.
It’s also smart to decide on a single, clear theme. A focused collection of nature images, fantasy creatures, landmarks, or family memories will feel more complete than a collection of unrelated pages.
Next, you’ll need to think about the construction of your book.
Uncoated paper is a necessity for coloring books. Be careful to select only uncoated paper so the pages can easily be drawn on. You should also look for premium ink in black & white. A standard or economy ink may not create thick enough lines to make coloring easy.
For example, using Lulu, you would want to select these options.
You most likely will want to choose a paperback binding option too. Hardcover can work, but they don’t lay flat as nicely as paperback options. Being able to keep the book open while coloring is a key feature.
Finally, decide whether to print your designs on one side or both. Single-sided designs reduce the risk of markers bleeding onto another illustration. Double-sided pages require less paper and cost less to print.
Here’s a rundown of our top three design specifications for coloring books.
How to Create Coloring Book Pages
How you create your pages will depend on your skills, source material, and goals. I’m going to break this down into three categories that we see the most often: artists, gift givers, and businesses.
Creating Pages as an Artist
If you draw by hand, it’s smart to start with a pencil sketch before inking the final lines. Scan your completed artwork at a high resolution, then use photo-editing software to remove shadows, smudges, and unwanted marks.
Your final illustrations should have consistent line weights and plenty of open space for coloring. You absolutely need to review the artwork at the page size you’ll use for your coloring book to be sure you’re getting the right amount of white space and line thickness. A line that looks fine while zoomed in may disappear or become difficult to see in print.
Tools like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Procreate, and Affinity all work well for creating or cleaning up coloring book line art. The specific software matters less than your ability to export a high-resolution file. Illustrator and Photoshop are the top-tier choices from Adobe, but come with hefty subscription fees. Affinity is free design software from Canva—this is my top recommendation for free software. It’s really amazing. Procreate is an app created by and for Apple devices. It’s very affordable, with a one-time purchase price. It’s also really nice if you’re using an iPad for your pages.
Creating Pages From Photos
Okay, maybe you’re not an artist. That’s fine. I’m not either.
Luckily, there are a ton of tools available now that can turn your photos into line art that will work for a coloring book. From my experience, I recommend Canva above any others, both because it’s a well-known and reliable brand and because it works really well. Their service lets you upload an image and turn it into a line drawing. Then you can open that image in the Canva editor for any corrections.
Here’s a sample.
Here’s a totally unflattering headshot of me.
And here is the initial line art version. Automatic conversions will always need cleanup. Hair, shadows, patterned clothing, and busy backgrounds can create a lot of stray lines.
As you can see, it’s not quite right for a coloring book yet. The hair and clothes are too textured, eliminating white space we should leave open for coloring.
I could do some manual editing to add more space for coloring. Or use Canva’s AI features to automate this (which requires paying for a Canva account). That would likely get me a decent headshot that could be used for an adult coloring book.
Canva also has some conversion features you can access for free to adjust your image.
I used Canva’s ‘doodle’ conversion to make this image. This would probably only be good for a children’s coloring book, but we’re getting close. Next, I would need to remove the dark hair and beard so those could be colored in, and maybe make the lines slightly thinner.
But as you can see, Canva has the tools to make individual images into line art with relative ease.
When selecting your images, look for ones with:
A clearly defined subject
Strong contrast
Good lighting
A simple background
Creating Personalized Coloring Books
If you’re a business and you want to allow your customers to do what I just did—upload images and convert them to coloring book pages—you’ll also want to pair that with on-demand printing. The Lulu Print API integrates with any site to allow you to send files to production and automatically fulfill the order.
With the API, you can build a site that creates and sells custom coloring books, shipping them directly to customers while you can remain mostly hands-off the process.
First, you’ll need to develop your software to turn those inputs into coloring pages. That might come from images, as I did with Canva above, or it could be simple prompts. Something like, “make a line art drawing of a bird over a mountain,” would be enough for most modern LLMs to generate something pretty good.
Here’s what ChatGPT gave me with that very prompt:
Simple, but effective. For a business, you’d preset the instructions to output the image with the right line thickness, at the right size for the pages, and with any necessary bleed. But once the background work is done, these tools can quickly use photos or prompts to generate the coloring book pages.
The system would then need to assemble a print-ready PDF, set to match Lulu’s specifications.
Building a business around custom coloring books requires more development work and quality control, but it creates an opportunity to sell a different coloring book to every customer without manually processing orders. Decide what information you need from your customers (pet pictures, vacation photos, hobbies, etc.), set up how that information will be processed on the backend (AI can be helpful here), and then connect your website to Lulu's Print API for automated order fulfilment.
Prepare & Publish Your Coloring Book
Your coloring book interior must be a single, multi-page print-ready PDF. Each illustration should be on an individual page, not exported as a two-page spread.
You can upload a complete cover PDF. That should be a single-page PDF including the front, back, and spine. Or use Lulu’s Cover Creator to add your title, artwork, and text.
Color a few pages with the pencils, crayons, or markers to make sure the coloring book meets your expectations.
How to Sell Your Coloring Book
If you’re not trying to create an entire business using the API and just want a way to sell your coloring books, Lulu has three options:
Lulu Bookstore - A simple way to sell your coloring book quickly. Lulu creates a product listing page and checkout for you, allowing buyers to choose shipping options.
Lulu Direct - Sell your coloring books directly from your own site. Includes integrations for Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce, and a bulk order upload tool.
Direct Buy Buttons - Create a buy button or direct sales link to sell from any site, social profile, email newsletter, or QR code. Checkout is secured via Stripe.
Bringing Your Coloring Book to Life
Coloring books are an increasingly popular type of interactive book, made easier to create thanks to technology quickly turning existing photos or art into line art that can be colored in.
With the quality, uncoated paper and lay-flat binding options that print-on-demand provides, anyone can create, print, and sell coloring books with ease.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a free Lulu account today to self-publish your book and have your book printed for you, a friend, or readers all over the world.
Since Tails 7.10, you had to confirm shutting down in a
Power Off dialog. For faster shutdowns, we removed this dialog when no
application needs to be closed and no document needs to be saved before
shutting down.
Get Tails 7.13
To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage
Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.13.
If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.
_02.jpg)
_with_chicks.jpg)
.jpg)
Earlier this year, a wave of 
