“Vanity” has the same root as “in vain.” Emptiness.
Staring at the mirror, focusing on our appearance. It’s an empty pursuit of a not-very-worthwhile goal.
But modern vanity is amplified. Culture hooked the toxic emotion of shame to vanity. Now, instead of a chance to be seen and admired, vanity is mostly about avoiding the risk of being shamed for not being enough, not successful enough, or, worse, of failing.
This new version of vanity isn’t about being the prettiest, it’s avoiding being not-pretty.
If we erect the deal-killer of shame around not-pretty, then society can extend that shame into all sorts of not. Not-competent. Not-respected. Not-fit. They call social media numbers “vanity metrics” for a reason.
It’s selfish. Not the selfish of hoarding resources, but the defensive decision to hold things back. To sabotage our process and our practice so we’re not exposed.
And it scales:
Aspiration has a ceiling. You can become pretty enough, accomplished enough, respected enough — and stop. There’s a destination.
Avoidance has no floor. The threat of not-pretty (or not-competent, not-respected or any other imagined failure) is always right behind you. You can never outrun it permanently. Every achievement resets the clock. It can feel like a useful fuel, but it’s not.
Society industrializes this. Once we’ve established that not-X is shameful we have a permanent threat that leads to self-policing behavior. We enforce it on ourselves and those we care about.
If you didn’t care about blame or credit, what would you ship? What would you teach, invent or contribute?
The answer tells you what you’re withholding — and from whom.
Disappearing into apparent safety isn’t safe. It’s an empty and selfish way to make yourself small.
In this week’s episode, Ben is joined by Katie Harbath, Meta’s former director of public policy for global elections and now founder of technology policy firm Anchor Change. She is also the author of Disrupting Politics, out on Tuesday. Together they discuss:
A few days ago I wrote about the anti-SLAPP motion filed by “Reckless” Ben Schneider against Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) over the ridiculous RICO suit they filed against him for his efforts to get BAM to pay back the money owed to Bryan Mansell. The original suit was based on the laughable claim that Ben and Mansell were involved in a conspiracy to extort money from BAM — a claim that is undermined by the fact that BAM then turned around and settled with Mansell, returning some of his Lego sets and cutting him a check (while still insisting it did nothing wrong, of course. For what it’s worth, even after the settlement, Mansell says BAM returned only about 35 of the 387 sets its own records showed as unsold, and seven of those weren’t even his, which makes me wonder what exactly the settlement said and how that didn’t get worked out ahead of time).
In researching that previous article, I came across the site used for that last link, The BAM Map, which is an invaluable journalistic goldmine, in that whoever is behind it is cataloging in great detail basically every sketchy or nefarious thing that BAM is doing.
But digging through that site, I discovered that BAM (and the McNeff family behind it) appear to have launched a new censorial bit of SLAPP litigation and general lawfare against The BAM Map as well.
Sites that catalog corporate shenanigans aren’t always the most trustworthy, but The BAM Map goes out of its way to detail and post their evidence, and flag whether particular claims are merely asserted as opposed to proven as fact. It’s actually quite impressive.
Anyway, it appears that the lawfare against the BAM Map started with some highly questionable DMCA takedown claims, aka the coward’s censorship tool. BAM first issued a DMCA notice to The BAM Map’s host because the site had posted an internal BAM document that analyzed the impact on their stores from Reckless Ben’s reporting on how BAM refused to abide by the consignment agreement they had taken over. While it is an internal document, so long as The BAM Map itself broke no laws in obtaining the document, they had every legal right as journalists to publish it. The idea that it’s copyright infringement is laughable on its face. That’s not what copyright is for, and also there’s no indication that BAM ever even registered the copyright, which it would need to do before it could even sue for copyright infringement. Indeed, since any registration would then come after the alleged infringement, statutory damages are also completely off the table, leaving only “actual damages” from… being unable to license their internal documents?
In other words, the DMCA takedown is bullshit.
And then they did it again. Just last week they filed a second DMCA notice, once again demanding that BAM’s internal documents that The BAM Map published be removed (even though, as far as I can tell, the first notice had already gotten them taken down).
Let’s be clear: this is abuse of copyright law by BAM. DMCA notices are supposed to be for stopping actual infringement: someone distributing your work in a way the law doesn’t allow. But publishing documents as part of news reporting is a strong fair use case (especially for factual material like sales data and PR talking points). Not to mention, if you could just DMCA any internal corporate files that journalists received from whistleblowers, you would basically end whistleblowing completely. Using copyright this way isn’t just abuse of the DMCA, it’s an attack on First Amendment-protected reporting.
But BAM didn’t stop there. It then filed a John Doe suit against the site’s anonymous operators, once again using Dentons, the massive global law firm that it used to file the SLAPP suit against Schneider and Mansell. Notably, while the lawsuit mentions the DMCA notice and the existence of “copyrighted materials,” it does not include any copyright claims. Instead, it claims that Google Drive audit logs show someone with “franchise-level access” downloaded the files. So, according to the lawsuit, whoever runs The BAM Map is likely a current or former franchisee (or some other insider) who is breaching their contract with BAM and misappropriating trade secrets under both Utah’s trade secrets law and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act. For what it’s worth, the operators of the site claim that the knowledge base that is central to the claims was not only accessible to those who had specific permissions but rather “was open to anyone on September 26th” and that it was only earlier this week that BAM locked it down.
This case is marginally stronger than the lawsuit against Reckless Ben, but only barely. Even if the documents are coming from an insider, it’s hard to see how BAM can credibly claim that its crisis PR talking points about Reckless Ben qualify as “trade secrets” that “derive economic value” from being kept secret. The entire point of this lawsuit just seems focused on creating massive chilling effects for whoever is operating the site to silence them. To me, that makes it a pretty clear SLAPP suit.
The key point of the lawsuit is BAM trying to unmask who is behind The BAM Map, and to that end, after filing the lawsuit, BAM got a magistrate judge to approve expedited discovery, authorizing subpoenas to Vercel and GoDaddy for subscriber records and IP logs to identify who is behind the BAM Map, in order to properly serve them and include them in the lawsuits. While magistrates granting subpoenas like this isn’t uncommon, it’s a bit worrisome that it was done with no supporting declaration, and the order has no notice provision or period to object.
Under the First Amendment, you have a right to speak anonymously, but it’s not absolute. The way this generally works is that a court will allow the subpoena to issue, and then (one hopes) the companies on the receiving end (GoDaddy and Vercel) alert the site’s operators so they can move to quash. There are a couple of different standards that courts use to determine when it’s okay to unmask an anonymous speaker, with Dendrite and Cahill being the most common. In the past, the federal courts in Utah have recognized the Dendrite test in quashing a subpoena when Koch Industries tried to unmask an anonymous critic.
Hopefully the anonymous operators of The BAM Map have access to lawyers who understand this, and can step up in response to the subpoenas, in order to protect their anonymity. At the very least, they’ve started a GoFundMe for legal support.
Bricks & Minifigs’ continued efforts to abuse the legal system to suppress reporting by critics says an awful lot about the McNeff family, both in how they run their business and in how they treat the people who call out their practices. It’s an attack on First Amendment protected speech and an attempt to create a chilling effect to scare off future reports or whistleblowers.
And, finally, shame on Dentons. A giant global law firm putting its name on this is just embarrassing.
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Becca Good has stayed out of the public eye since Jan. 7, the morning an ICE agent shot and killed her partner, Renee Good, on a residential street in south Minneapolis. (Becca and Renee referred to each other as wives, but according to her attorney, the two weren’t legally married.) On Thursday, she broke her silence, talking about their 6-year-old son. She bought him new shoes and a backpack for first grade and went to Back to School Night by herself. Halloween is his favorite holiday, but this year his mom’s absence will be profound. “I’ll take him trick or treating, without her hand in mine,” Becca Good said.
Renee Good, 37, a U.S. citizen and a mother of three, was fatally shot in the head by ICE agent Jonathan Ross as she turned slowly to drive away from him. Federal officials immediately called her actions domestic terrorism and claimed she had tried to run agents down. But bystander video showed agents giving conflicting orders as she tried to pull away, one telling her to leave and another demanding she get out of the car. Ross has still not been charged with any crime.
On Thursday, her family filed two federal lawsuits. One asks the United States to pay for what its agent did. The other names Ross and the officials who ran the operation that put him on Portland Avenue, relying on an 1871 law against those who “go in disguise on the highway” to strip others of the equal protection of the law.
Renee Macklin Good was born in Colorado and moved to Minneapolis with Becca, where the two were raising Renee’s youngest son. According to the pleadings, she won a poetry prize in 2020, was preparing to start a master’s degree in English and sat on the school board at her son’s school, where she had recently applied as a substitute teacher. She had no criminal record.
Two parties brought the suits. Becca Good is suing on her own behalf for the emotional distress she suffered watching her partner being shot from a few feet away. Brent Ganger, Renee’s brother, is suing as the court-appointed trustee for her family: her three children, who were 15, 12 and 6 when she died, plus her parents and siblings.
The first lawsuit names a single defendant: the United States. The second names Ross along with six officials sued personally: White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, whom the complaint calls the architect of the regime’s anti-immigration policy; Kristi Noem, who led the Department of Homeland Security during the operation; border czar Tom Homan; Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and Noem’s adviser at DHS; Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE; and Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who led the operation on the ground. Ten more agents are listed only as John Does because they wore masks and the government has still not released their names.
The family’s lead lawyer is Antonio Romanucci, whose firm helped George Floyd’s family win a $27 million settlement from the city of Minneapolis in 2021. Romanucci noted that no one in the car was armed and that the women had their dog with them. “They were exactly as their name says – Good folks,” he said.
Eleven cars went around her
According to the complaint, the couple had just dropped Renee’s son at school when they stopped their SUV on Portland Avenue, where federal agents were working. Renee honked to warn her neighbors while Becca got out to film. About 11 vehicles drove around the stopped car, including Ross’s unmarked Tahoe. Ross then got out and circled the car, filming one-handed. Through her open window, Renee told him, “That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you. I’m not mad at any of you.”
Two more agents pulled up. One ordered her out of the car with an expletive, and an agent tried to open her door. The complaint alleges another agent told her to leave, matching the conflicting commands bystanders described the day after the shooting. Renee turned her wheels away from Ross and pulled slowly forward. Ross fired once through the windshield, then twice more through her open window as the car turned away from him. One round struck her in the left temple. As her car crashed into a parked vehicle, the complaint alleges, Ross cursed, “fucking bitch.”
No agent gave her aid. A bystander identified himself as a physician and offered to help, but an agent told him, “I don’t care.”
The Trump regime offered a different story within hours. Noem called it “an act of domestic terrorism.” Trump said Good “viciously ran over the ICE officer,” though the video he shared showed no officer being run over. DHS later claimed that Ross suffered internal bleeding to his torso but gave no other details. Video showed him and other officers walking without obvious difficulty after the shooting.
On Thursday, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said the White House would “vigorously defend these baseless civil lawsuits.”
Sending Washington the bill
The first lawsuit is the more conventional of the two. Under federal law, people injured by federal employees acting within the scope of their employment can sue the United States for damages under the ordinary personal injury rules of the state where the harm happened. If the family wins, the U.S. Treasury pays.
The family’s case starts with DHS’s own rulebook. Department policy permits deadly force only when an officer reasonably believes someone poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. It also says deadly force “shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject,” unless the officer reasonably believes the person poses a significant threat of death or serious harm to the officer or others.
The complaint alleges Ross broke both rules, since he fired his last two shots from beside a car that was turning away from him. It also blames him for creating the danger in the first place by stepping in front of the vehicle with his phone in one hand, filming.
The family also took the required first step. Brent Ganger and Becca Good filed formal claims with DHS in March, which gave the department six months to respond. It never did.
In such cases against the U.S. government, the way the law is written, a federal judge gets to decide both the facts and the damages, with no jury. The government is likely to argue that officers’ decisions in the field are judgment calls that the law shields from lawsuits. The family’s answer is that DHS’s own rules prohibited his use of deadly force in these circumstances.
Minnesota law, which governs the claims, may also tilt things toward the family. Gregory Sisk, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas, noted that, as he understands state law, the burden of proving that Ross’s use of force was justified falls on the government.
If the judge agrees that it’s the government’s burden here, the facts weigh in favor of Renee’s family. After all, if the mere turning of the wheels and slow driving of a car away from an agent who places himself in front of it justifies the shooting of the driver, then there is really no limit to what ICE can do during a street encounter.
The Klan Act rides again
The second lawsuit makes a bigger and more novel claim. It argues that Operation Metro Surge was built to target Somali and Latino Minnesotans because of who they are, and to frighten the neighbors who watched, filmed and warned. As her family points out, Renee was killed doing exactly that.
Her lawyers turned to the Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law Congress passed to break the Klan’s coordinated terror against formerly enslaved people and those who stood with them. It reaches conspiracies to deny people equal protection of the law, including those carried out in disguise. The complaint notes that the agents who confronted Renee wore masks.
The complaint builds its case on the regime’s own words. At a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2, the day before street-level enforcement began in the Twin Cities, according to the complaint, Trump said of Somali immigrants that “we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” On Dec. 26, YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a viral video accusing Somali-run daycares of stealing millions. State inspectors visited nine of the centers he featured and found them operating as expected, with children present at eight. On Jan. 2, the White House leaned into its pretense, describing its Minnesota campaign as “fueled by shocking video from Nick Shirley and tenacious reporting by Alpha News exposing the Somali-dominated scams.”
ICE’s arrest records tell the real story. Somalis made up fewer than 3 percent of the more than 3,600 people arrested in the operation. Most of those arrested came from Ecuador, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas, observed that the suit turns one of the regime’s own tactics around. Federal prosecutors have brought conspiracy charges against people protesting the immigration crackdown, and now the family accuses the officials themselves of conspiring. “No mask, no badge and no title in the administration puts anyone above that law,” said Ben Berkman, one of the family’s lawyers.
Three walls for the Trump White House
While the lawsuit against the federal government has a decent shot of moving forward, we should be clear-eyed about the other. The barriers to suing individual officers and officials are very high. Federal agents can be personally sued for damages directly under the Constitution only in narrow circumstances, and in 2022, in a case involving a Border Patrol agent, the Supreme Court all but closed that door to new kinds of constitutional claims. That restriction does not itself bar the family’s separate claims under the Klan Act. Even where a suit can proceed, officials generally enjoy what’s called “qualified immunity” unless their conduct violated clearly established law—often requiring an earlier court ruling that nearly identical conduct was illegal. Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project said courts have applied that rule so strictly that cases have been thrown out over whether a person had their hands up while sitting or while standing.
The conspiracy claim under the Klan Act sets a high bar of its own. The family must demonstrate that Miller, Noem and the others agreed to target people because of their ethnicity, and that Renee’s killing occurred in furtherance of that plan. As Sisk noted, the regime’s unusually public statements make this somewhat more plausible than most conspiracy claims against federal officials, though persuading a judge is another matter. Expect the government to call Metro Surge a routine immigration enforcement action and to argue that senior officials conferring with one another is simply how government works. The government will also note that Renee belonged to neither allegedly targeted community. The complaint itself casts her as an ally, a neighbor who watched and warned.
Then there is the clock. Officials who lose a qualified immunity fight in the trial court can appeal right away on legal questions, without waiting for the case to end, under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling. That can freeze the case while an appeals court, and possibly this Supreme Court, weighs in.
Discovery may be the true goal
The government’s first move will likely be a motion asking the court to throw out both cases before they really begin. When considering a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim—a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, for you legal nerds—the court must accept the family’s adequately pleaded facts as true and ask whether those facts plausibly support a legal claim.
Surviving that motion could open the way to discovery, the phase where each side has to turn over documents and answer questions under oath. For the Good family, that phase could be the point, because so much of what happened that morning on Portland Avenue is still locked away. The government has never released the names of the masked agents who were at the scene. Federal prosecutors shut Minnesota investigators out of the case the day of the shooting, cutting off their access to the evidence. Discovery could produce the other agents’ names and accounts, Ross’s own version under oath, and whatever internal reviews followed. The family’s lawyer Romanucci called the lawsuits “the beginning of the ultimate legal weapon in uncovering the truth.”
The suit against the United States has better odds of clearing the law’s hurdles. Its focus is the shooting itself, and the evidence looks objectively bad for the United States.
The conspiracy suit, in my view, is a long shot, though it reaches much higher. Discovery would target Stephen Miller’s daily calls ordering deployments, the regime’s decisions to embed right-wing influencers with agents in the field, and the arrest quotas that drove the street sweeps.
On that front, the family has a card to play. In March, after hearing testimony from people stopped during the operation, U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud preliminarily found that “defendants have adopted a policy authorizing federal immigration officers to conduct investigatory stops based on ethnicity or race without reasonable suspicion.” Tostrud declined to block the practice, reasoning that the operation was winding down, but that preliminary finding could help keep this suit alive long enough for critical discovery to proceed.
Flock is in the middle of a long losing streak. It’s one thing to lose hearts and minds via PR work. It’s quite another to lose actual dollars because you’ve lost a ton of hearts and minds by being on the losing end of mainstream media coverage for most the past two years.
If it bleeds, it leads, as every cop PR team knows. The problem for Flock is that it leads so often it’s bleeding customers, which has forced the company to finally start pitching some fixes rather than just pitching fits when confronted with (legitimate) criticism.
No longer able to ignore the bylined writing on the collective wall of US journalism, Flock stepped up to say it would do the bare minimum to stave off even more reporting on cops using its systems to stalk ex-wives, ex-significant others, the current partners of their ex-wives/significant others, protesters, critics, and anyone else officers wanted to take a peek at without having any legitimate law enforcement-related reason to do so.
In response to nationwide criticism, Flock Safety promised to make some optional features on-by-default. This announcement — paired with the outrageous claim that only Flock cared about police accountability — only raised more questions. Dropping the retention period to seven days made us wonder why that hadn’t always been on by default — especially when the company is collecting 20 billion plate reads per month.
Requiring case codes for searches should always have been the default, but only now seemed to be a thing Flock wanted to implement. The same thing goes for the newly announced “Audit Assistance,” which would allow interested agencies more control and oversight of searches performed by officers. Once again, we were forced to ask “why the fuck hasn’t this always been in place?”
The problems are no longer local. I mean, it’s still local agencies divesting themselves of Flock cameras and contracts, but even the those on Capitol Hill are starting to make noise about Flock, its pervasive surveillance network, and the apparently continual abuse by people in law enforcement who have access to Flock databases.
This congressional noise even includes Josh Hawley, who is perhaps best known for encouraging violent insurrectionists to continue with their insurrection — one that targeted his place of business but presumably wouldn’t target him personally.
So, it’s with that lump of presidentially pardoned salt that we take in this recent news: Hawley is all heated up about Flock and constant abuse of its systems by law enforcement. And Flock, for its part, is willing to make soothing noise in the general direction of Washington DC. Here’s the Wall Street Journal with the underwhelming details:
The Atlanta-based company has made changes to the information users provide when explaining their searches, Flock’s chief legal officer said in a letter to Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri. Flock has said its cameras scan about 20 billion plates a month. While users have always been required to justify their searches of the company’s database, the information was entered “in a free-text field,” yielding answers that weren’t always specific, the company said in the letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Flock has now added a drop-down menu with standardized categories modeled after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s data-reporting system. Law-enforcement searches will require a case number in order to conduct a search by the end of the year, although the system can be bypassed in an emergency, Flock said.
The only people who actually think a lack of accountability can be addressed — much less fixed — by a “drop-down menu” either work for Flock or the cop shops employing stalkers that just haven’t been caught yet.
Adding a case number field doesn’t really solve anything either, not if cops can bypass this supposed roadblock by typing anything from “lmao” to “jkjkjkjkjkjkj” in the field before proceeding with their illicit searches.
And it’s at this point that I start to side with Flock. A case number field only works if Flock knows which case numbers are valid (or, at the very least, follow case number nomenclature). Flock can’t because it’s something stapled on top of police stuff, rather than being intertwined from its genesis.
A drop-down menu may help classify searches should anyone decide to audit them, but all this really does is apply a veneer of legitimacy to illegitimate searches.
Flock’s failures to place location restrictions on searches (rather than just allow any local cop to search the entirety of Flock’s network) and limit data retention periods are on the company. That much it can definitely control. The other stuff it’s doing now means about as much as doing nothing, since the default settings can easily be overridden and most of the restraints are meaningless if law enforcement supervisors aren’t regularly checking search logs for anomalies like thousands of non-justified searches targeting certain plates or cops justifying their searches by hammering out some random letters until the “case number” field turns green.
Josh Hawley’s personal interest may be to ensure future pro-Trump insurrectionists arrive in DC without leaving a permanent Flock record behind. Then again, he may actually care about the issue he currently cares about, but I generally don’t trust anyone who thinks the civil liberties you should have access to depend largely on who you’ve voted for.
As for Flock, the best way out of this mess is probably the least profitable. It should be proactively terminating contracts any place officers have been criminally charged for abusing the system. It should also apply geofences to searches and require law enforcement agencies to enter agreements with agencies outside of their geofence to perform expanded searches. Finally, it should create contractual language that requires case management software cross-referencing. If cops aren’t willing to give Flock the information its needs to block unjustified searches, they shouldn’t be allowed to access Flock’s network and databases.
Tough times call for tough measures. Unfortunately, the last people willing to be tough are tech companies with shareholders to satiate with year-over-year growth and the law enforcement agencies which have steadfastly shown they’re unwilling to police themselves.
GIMP is Free and Libre Open Source Software, but none of it is possible without
the people who create with and contribute to it. Our project maintainer Jehan wanted to interview the volunteers
who make GIMP what it is, and share their stories so you can learn more about the awesome people behind GIMP!
The second set of interviews were conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil during the
2017 Libre Graphics Meeting. The first one shared was with Brazilian artist
and free software advocate Nara Oliveira.
The next subject of the LGM interviews was Liam Quin. Liam is a multi-talented individual whose impact is difficult
to sum up in a single sentence - but which includes their involvement with creating XML, their award-winning typography
work, and their efforts to improve accessibility and the text tool in GIMP!
This interview took place during April 21 - 23, 2017. In addition to Jehan and Liam, Simon Budig,
Aryeom Han, and Americo Gobbo were also involved and asked questions.
Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Jehan: Hello Liam!
Liam: Good evening.
Jehan: First of all, could you introduce yourself?
Liam: My name is Liam Quin. What do you want to know about me? I’ve been using GIMP for over 300 years,
since 1997 or 1998. I’m not sure – ‘98 I think.
Jehan [laughing]: Not very good with mathematics.
Liam: Not very good with mathematics, numbers, no - I’ve heard of them. Computer science, got that – don’t need
to be very good at maths to get a degree in computer science. Although I should have specialized in maths – and digital
typography is my background, and I think my first love.
I work today for the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C,
where I’ve been in charge of our XML work.
Now I do CSS and accessibility and some payment stuff and some SVG stuff, all sorts of things.
[Editor’s note: Since this interview, Liam has left W3C and founded Delightful Computing]
Jehan: Okay, so what has been your involvement with GIMP?
Liam: I’m just a hanger-on, a time-waster. I throw bricks from the side, I make suggestions.
For a while I was the
official spiritual advisor to the GNOME project, but I believe I had to give that
up when Bush was elected. I was, actually, if you look at the foundation page you’ll see me there.
I just met the people at a GNOMEGUADEC conference years ago, and decided they were really good people.
I’ve been using GIMP professionally. I run a small stock image company
and the images, both photographs and scanned images from old books, I clean them up with GIMP and do
creative work with them and sell them. The GIMP team has been responsive when I needed changes or when
I wanted changes, and very occasionally I’ve even made some patches, although not very many.
Jehan: Maybe you can tell us what you like about GIMP, what you don’t like about GIMP?
Liam: What I like least about GIMP is the name, because I work in accessibility. So for example,
I can’t wear the GIMP shirt at work because there will be people who are upset.
But what I like most about it is that is Free Software. That I have a right to change the code, or to pay
someone else to change the code if I can’t. That it runs on free platforms, such as GNU/Linux systems.
I like that it’s in a language I can read. I particularly like that it’s got a lot of functions,
it does a lot. It does pretty much everything I need. I can imagine it doing more, I can imagine a
program that I would just say, “Scan this image and clean it up for me”, but we’re not there yet.
I actually have to do work, including creative work, to repair image. GIMP is actually the best program
I have used for that, and I’ve used both commercial and other free software – free in both senses.
I’ve found that GIMP has features that are really good for cleaning up scanned images.
Americo: What do you think about artists using GIMP?
Liam: I think artists, people approach art from all sorts of different angles and direction.
And some people want something very immediate, which you might find in
MyPaint for example, where you open MyPaint and you don’t even have
to do File → New, it’s just there, and you can start drawing.
And at the other extreme, there are people who plan a drawing for a long time, maybe draw careful
pencil sketches and build something up over a period of hours, days, months, even years. And within
those, there’s people who are very precise, work with numerical angles, will write a little programming
script to create a particular effect – and there’s other people who will want to do lots of experiments
and choose the one that works best.
I think what we’ve been seeing is that the user interface of GIMP has been changing. There’s been a move
towards supporting the spontaneity a lot more. The early GIMP was really aimed at the people who thought
about their art more than – as I see it – more than just sitting down and painting. That’s actually why I
think my husband would prefer MyPaint to GIMP. He said he hated GIMP, and part of that was because he was
taught Photoshop at university. Universities shouldn’t be teaching specific programs, they should be
teaching the underlying skills, they should teach image editing, not a particular version of a particular
program. But you spend so long learning one program that you get really tied to it.
But we also have the fact that GIMP has been more – um, people have this left-brain, right-brain
categorization which turns out to not have much basis in reality, our brains don’t actually work
that way – but GIMP is more “left-brain” than “right-brain”. Not as extreme as Inkscape or
Illustrator for example, where you can’t even do a brush stroke, you do an outline really,
unless you fight the tool.
[Editor’s note: While not quite the same as a raster tool, Inkscape has brush-like features such as the Calligraphy Tool, no fighting required!]
So there’s people doing fabulous, professional artwork - really good quality artwork with GIMP.
It doesn’t suit everyone, but if it does suit you, it’s absolutely awesome. It’s got lots of features.
I don’t know of any other art program where you can control the brush size with a MIDI keyboard, right.
That might sound really weird, and yet, I can imagine holding a MIDI device in one hand, or using one
foot to control a MIDI device, because it exists, a pedal for example, and wiring that to brush size
and that could be really interesting.
So yeah, GIMP is fine for doing professional art, but as an artist you’ve got to figure out which
tools you’re going to use. When you walk into a gallery and you see paintings by the old masters,
you look at them and they stand out. They’re called masters because they’ve mastered the technique,
and they think about what they want to do, and the technique becomes – as far as the observer is
concerned, watching them work – they’re not thinking about how to achieve the effect they want,
it just happens. In actual fact, some of them probably spent a long time thinking about the effect they want,
but it doesn’t seem that way.
Some people say it takes about 10,000 hours of work to become a master in something if you practice it.
I think you can become a master in digital painting, in multiple tools, and GIMP is one of them. It’s
a strong one, but it doesn’t have to be the end of it.
Jehan: Does your work in W3C have maybe any relationship or link with GIMP?
Liam: We have stronger links to Inkscape actually. The strongest link to
GIMP a long time ago was the PNG support, because the PNG image format was jointly developed with W3C
and IETF. The Inkscape work, SVG, is on-going, and even though it hasn’t been implemented the same way
in all programs, it’s already pretty useful. But there have been other overlaps such as color management
and compositing, for example.
Liam Quin (right) in costume at W3C conference, CC-BY-SA
At one point I reached out to someone from Adobe who was working on CSS compositing, and who knew about
the internals of Photoshop, and he came and joined the GIMPIRC channel and talked with people there about
color models and compositing. So in some ways I’ve tried to encourage communication. And I think the culture
of the web, the web has really done a lot for free and open source software. More people are using free
software now than ever before, because of free web browser and free web tools. So the work that we’re doing
at W3C certainly relates to the GNU project, the GNOME project, the GIMP project – both technically, legally,
socially. So there’s links in that kind of way. But I don’t think we have a whole lot of direct contact.
Jehan: What do you see in the future of GIMP?
Liam: I suspect that the long term future of GIMP is that these native toolkits are going to get replaced
with webpages and Javascript.
Jehan: So you mean GTK+?
Liam: I expect eventually there will be a Javascript to replace GTK. In ten years time, I think GIMP
will be running in a web browser as a web app in some way.
Jehan [laughing]: Seriously, or is that a joke?
Liam: No, I was completely serious. And the reason I think that is, what the web has done is it’s
assimilated – like the famous Borg – it’s taken over all sorts of things. Native clients for particular
applications have gone away whenever it was feasible to replace them with a web app. 25 years ago –
can that be right? In 1995, how long ago was that? 22 years ago… I was in a conference in Ottawa, for
document management systems. And these all had proprietary desktop clients that were basically GitHub.
That you loaded a proprietary client, and it had a button to check out a file, another one to check it
back in, open it in editor, show differences.
And there still are proprietary clients for git and CVS on Windows, for example, there’s
TortoiseCVS and friends, but I wouldn’t want to bet my
business on something like that today. Because someone else would come along and make a web-based one,
and it would work almost as well as mine, as best as I could do. And it would cost them a tenth a cost
to develop it. They could sell it for much less than I could sell mine, it would be easier to support –
I’d be out of business. And in fact, almost all of those document management companies have gone out of
business. I think there’s two left of the ones that was at that show, and one of them has been bought by
AutoCAD. So, I think we’re going to be replaced – the question is when, not whether.
Jehan: So we will be replaced, or GIMP will go to that format?
Liam: One way or another. That will depend on the people, whether the people are willing to do
that change, and they’re around when it happens.
Jehan: And so GIMP would run remotely on some server?
Liam: It’ll run in your web browser.
Jehan: So still locally, but on your web browser?
Liam: Yeah, I think so.
Serpentin-Tanzerin,
from Moderne Kunst in Meister-Holzschnitten Band XV (1901), scanned and restored by Liam Quin, CC-BY-SA
Simon: So this is my question. When you say Web page or Web browser, you’re not talking aboutSoftware as a Service.
Liam: No, I’m actually talking about a program written in Javascript or something that compiles
into Javascript, more likely. What they call a transpiler these days.
Simon: But users doesn’t necessarily have to realize it’s doing this, right?
Liam: No, correct. They’d look identical for all we know, because every GIMP window would just
be a browser window.
Jehan: It’s funny because Mitch had basically a question about this. Did you read Mitch’s message?
Simon: Yeah, but this was a different Javascript approach.
Jehan: Javascript for the UI.
Simon: Yes, but not necessarily via a browser.
Liam: I’m expecting gegl.js to happen, let’s put it that way.
Simon: In some ways I think it’s even already happened.
Liam: It has already, because people have done the automatic translation. But what you really
want is something written to take advantage of the browser’s own image processing capabilities
whereever it can, so it actually goes fast.
Simon: And, for example, having a WebGL backend or something.
Liam: Yeah. I mean, things written in the browser, in Javascript, can actually be reasonably
performant now, they can go reasonably fast. I just think it will happen. If it doesn’t happen,
what will happen is someone will write – people are already writing – one of the many photo-editing
applications and art applications that are happening as web apps now, will take over. Because there
will be 20 million users of the one, and 5,000 users of the other, probably. But that would be sad
because there’s so much work that’s gone into GIMP. I would like to see it carry on, but I just
think that the future may be running in web browsers.
I don’t know for sure. I mean I’m not sure I like it. I’m not saying drop everything and do this
now, but I am saying
“keep your sword at your side, for you know not when the hour will come”.
That’s a Biblical quote – they’re actually referring to the end of the world [laughing].
Jehan: Is there something regarding your work with GIMP, for your stock image company - is there
anything in GIMP that you’re really looking forward to? A feature or planned change, to really
help your daily work?
Liam: Yeah, actually. I think that non-destructive editing when that happens will really help me.
Because the ability to go back and conceptually edit the graph, for example, to have a check box –
not saying you’d do it this way – but imagine having a checkbox by each entry in the undo history,
and being able to deselect one of them and see what the image would be like if I didn’t do this.
You can’t actually implement it like that inside GIMP, but that’s a way of thinking about how it
might look.
Because quite often I would do something like a 10, 15, 20 pixel radius blur to get rid of screening
artifacts, and then I have to do several other operations and scale the image down and sharpen
before I get an image I can sell. I can’t sell a blurry image, but I can’t sell one that’s made
up of lots of dots either. So I have to get rid of the dots and I do that either by blurring or
wavelet decompose or something like
that. And then I do other operations, and I discover some time later that I didn’t use the right radius
for my blur, because the challenge is to use the smallest radius that gets rid of all the dots. If I use
too big a radius, I get an image that’s too blurry to sell. If I use too small a radius, when I scale the
image down, the dots come back when I sharpen it. So I can imagine being able to go back and just change
that radius, and have GIMP show me the result of the scaled down image, and I can see “Yes, great, that
was the right number!”.
So the non-destructive editing will be a big plus for me.
[Editor’s note: Non-destructive editing was added in GIMP 2.99.18, and officially released in GIMP 3.0 in 2025!]
Jehan: You also have a very interesting use case, which is that you work on very, very big images.
Liam: I hear that a lot from GIMP people. I hear it a lot from photography people. I never hear
it from print people. People doing graphic design with print, are not surprised if an image says it
takes a gigabyte of memory for one layer.
[Audible gasp of shock from the audience]
We have people who come to the GIMPIRC channel, say they do work for print, and they’re editing
a 20,000 by 15,000 pixel image in RGB mode and it’s going a bit slowly, and what should they do
about this?
Jehan: Yes, of course you always have people who have bigger images, but what is a typical size for you?
Liam: Well, that is a typical size. I was editing one yesterday that was 3.6 gigabytes when I first
opened it, just one layer. And I scan in high resolution because people typically want a detail of an
image at large size, and also because I can produce higher quality images than most other people. And
if you’re a small company, you’ve got to have an advantage over the big companies. The big companies
have millions of mediocre images and I’ve got thousands of really good ones, so people come to me.
And it works.
There are some issues with GIMP. I mean, 16 gigabytes of memory is a minimum. My laptop’s not really
good enough for the larger images, it has 8 gigabytes. My desktop has 32 gigabytes and that’s okay,
as long as you don’t use multiple layers. You start using too many layers then you have to be careful.
Jehan: Do you think that GIMP handles the images well?
Liam: Pretty well. I understand that compared to two or three other image editors that I’ve use,
it seems very slow with these images. An example is if I do
Curves, after pressing Okay I might
have to wait 5 minutes, whereas in the other editors I don’t have to wait at all.
The reason for that though is that they’re doing the work in the background, and they’re just showing
me the preview image, what I can see on the screen, and then they’re applying curves in the background
to the full image. And every now and again you catch up and the program tells you to wait for no
obvious reason, so it’s a trade-off.
Jehan: So do you think it’s better what we’re doing, or do you think…?
Liam: I actually think in most cases it’s better to do the work in the background, because after
I’ve done Curves, I probably want to look at the image and think for a minute about what to do next,
and the program could make use of that time. But I’m also aware that there’s a lot of optimizations
that has not been done to GEGL yet, and it could well be that the bottlenecks could be improved a lot.
So I’m not too worried about it right now. It’s usable, there are places where it’s slow, and I’m not
too worried.
Liam: I do, I’ve done other art, yes. I do calligraphy as well. But the calligraphy I do is
done with pen and ink and gouache and paper. That’s partly because I don’t have a tablet. So
this week I actually got to try graphics tablets, thank you, although I discovered it didn’t
work with GIMP 2.9 properly, the preview version. It did work with 2.8, and I think I could
get use to drawing with a tablet. So that was quite interesting – I wasn’t sure before. And
it would be quite interesting to do some calligraphy with a tablet. But with calligraphy I’m
use to looking at the pen, positioning it between pencil lines and thinking about each stroke.
I think working with a tablet would be more like brush calligraphy than paint calligraphy, but
I don’t know.
The hardest thing I’ve found is that the tablet’s surface is too smooth. So the bite of the paper,
as they call it, which slows you down when you’re drawing, is an important part of calligraphy.
Jehan: Someone was telling me about Wacom tablets, and other tablets I think, where you can put
paper on the tablet and you actually draw on it. Have you seen that kind of stuff?
Liam: I see! I hadn’t thought of that, that would be really interesting. And the computer
would record the drawing while I made it.
Jehan: You can even do it while the tablet is unplugged, because it will record it and then
later you can plug it in.
Aryeom: Yes, but it’s vector.
Jehan: Maybe vector, yeah.
Aryeom: Can you send us your work?
Liam: Yes I can. I can send you some pictures, yeah. Some of it has been published so
that’s quite nice. I had a calligraphy piece that was used on the front cover of Time magazine,
so that was quite nice. I don’t often get phone calls from the art director of Time magazine,
so that was a surprise.
Front cover of
Time Magazine,
featuring calligraphy by Liam Quin
Americo: I have a question. Do you have any advice for users, artists, photographers who think
about or consider using GIMP? Do you have any advice on how we should approach it?
Liam: I suppose it depends on what you’re trying to achieve and your personality. So if
your personality is that you just like to go and do things quickly, as I said earlier. If you
want the MyPaint style where you just go and do, but you want more richness, which GIMP gives you.
For example, you might make a set of images which are blank or mostly blank, and basically use them
like templates. You just double-click on an image and GIMP comes up with that blank image, and then
you start. Which is much easier than doing File → New and
using a GIMP template. Then you can just
start painting.
I mean you could ask people who paint. We have people like Americo here, who is doing fabulous
stuff with making his own brushes from patterns in the clipboard and with paint dynamics, and
really spending a lot of thought into exploring the tool and what it can do.
And you have other people who say, “All I want is something like a charcoal stick with undo”.
Or you have people who want things more like an engineering drawing. I occasionally do text-based
art with GIMP. I’m more likely to use Inkscape because it has slightly better typography. And
these days I’m more likely to use a web browser and CSS, because I can get the OpenType features
which I can’t in GIMP or Inkscape. If you’re a typographer, being able to use the font properly
is important to you. GIMP is very, very limited at this time, it really is. But it has it, and
it’s the only thing you can go back and edit afterwards. So from that point of view… [laughing]
I think the biggest two problems I hear with people using GIMP, one of them is they haven’t found
Single Window Mode. If you’re not someone who grew up with the X Window System and applications
having 25 windows, you might find it really cluttered and difficult to manage. So then you get switched
to Single Window Mode, which I use. Even though I used the X Window System as early as 1988 I think.
Simon: It’s the default now, at least for 2.9.
Liam: I’m glad it’s the default. It’s not perfect, it was never finished, but it’s more approachable.
The other default that people often have to change is the
tile cache size. If you’re working with
print images especially, then you need to change the tile cache size to be three-quarters of your
physical memory or maybe more, depending on what else you’ve got running. You want as much in memory
as possible without crashing your system, and it can be a hard trade-off.
Americo: Something I often discover is that people try to “get” GIMP by trial and error, and I’m notsure if this is the right approach to software as complex as GIMP. I’ve tried this with Paint Shop Proand also Photoshop, and I didn’t get far either. I always have to turn to the manual.
Liam: I believe it’s deliberate that you can’t in Photoshop. Paint Shop Pro I don’t know about,
it’s been years since I used it. But I suspected – don’t know this for sure – I suspect that in
Photoshop, what they’re trying to do – you use to get this from the Debian community as well –
the idea is to make something hard enough, it’s a trial by fire. You make something hard enough,
that people have to put real emotional effort into learning it. And then they’ll stick with it
through thick and thin. Because they’ve put so much emotional effort into learning something so hard.
Photoshop and Illustrator have an interface where there’s hidden buttons in the toolbox. You
hold down the mouse pointer over one of the little squares in the toolbox and eventually a
hidden secret drawer opens and more tools appear. There’s no way you would discover something
like that, right, it’s not discoverable. The way that you find it is the manual or a tutorial.
[Editor’s note: In GIMP 2.10, we ended up adding an option for these “hidden buttons”, known as tool groups]
So for GIMP, probably the best of the books I’ve seen for learning GIMP is called
“The Artist’s Guide to GIMP”,
and I love that guy’s tutorials. He says things like, “To start with, press D on the
keyboard to get the black and white default colors. Now press X to exchange them.
Now you’re drawing with white.”. And telling you things like that, mean that the tutorial will
work regardless of your previous settings. He’s teaching you a way of using GIMP where you
don’t mess yourself up, and if you don’t mess yourself up, you have much more confidence to explore.
Cover of ‘The Artist’s Guide to GIMP’, by Michael Hammel
So I really love his tutorials. He explains, he says how you can do things by clicking, or by
using the keystroke or by using the menu. It’s really, really well done. So that’s what I have
suggested to people who want to learn GIMP, is that particular book. But other people prefer
video tutorials. I don’t have patience for video tutorials – just tell me! But a lot of other
people like them.
Aryeom: If I want to make a tutorial, is there any advice on the best way?
Liam: I’ve done some tutorials that people didn’t like, and some that they really did like.
And the tutorials that people really did like are the ones where you’re teaching, and at the
same time you’re not assuming. So you don’t assume that people know jargon, you don’t assume
that people know special names. If you start off in a tutorial saying “The first thing you’ve
got to do is add an alpha channel to your image, and then divide the hypotenuse by the cosine
of the vertex”, you’ve lost three-quarters of your audience.
If instead you say, “We need our layer to be transparent so that we can see things in the
lower layers through it, and to do this, we have to use a menu item called Add Alpha Channel”,
then what you’ve done is you’ve taught someone what alpha channel means and why they want to use
it. So instead of just saying “Do this, do this, do this”, if you teach people a little while,
you’re also writing a tutorial that’s more robust. Because it might be that in a future version
of GIMP, the menu moves. So you can build in notes. You can do things like say, “If you can’t
find this, you can use the slash key to search for things in the new release. This is how you do
that”. And then you might make a tutorial that’s robust and that people follow. Because people get
really upset if they find a tutorial for GIMP version 1.2 and they try to follow it and it doesn’t
work. So then they find a tutorial for some other image editor and they try to follow that and it
doesn’t work, obviously. And they get angry and swear at us, and maybe they come to IRC and say
your program is full of worms and your mother was a raspberry tart! And we say, “Why are you saying this?”
and they say this tutorial doesn’t work!
You can’t write something that’s going to be proof against future completely, but you can write
something that’s going to be a little bit robust, and that teaches people and keeps the sense of
delight and fun. And if you do that, people will enjoy using your tutorial and learn from it,
and you’ll have fun.
Aryeom: Thank you for the advice!
Liam: I’m hoping to do some tutorials this year for scanning images, working on scanning
images from books, old books, published, printed books.
Jehan: That’s good – for gimp.org?
Liam: Yeah, I hope so. One of the things I’m really hoping for is the
XSane project makes a version of their
GIMP plug-in that works with the new release, with 2.9, to do high bit depth images. Right now it’s
restricted to 8 bits per channel. My scanner can do 16 bits per channel, RGB, it’s A4 or Tabloid size.
But in fact XSane crashes if I try to do that.
Jehan: So you scan with another software?
Liam: I scan with XSane, but I have to save it to a file and then I have to open the file in GIMP.
And that’s actually a pain for me, because the point at which I choose the file name, the book is still
on the scanner, and my file names are usually the page number in the book and the caption as the file name.
But if the book is on the scanner then I can’t see what page number it’s on, so I have to remember beforehand
to write down the page name, so it’s a pain. So if I’m scanning six images or something at once with the
plug-in, it arrives one after the other in GIMP. And a fabulous GIMP feature, not in any of the other
software I’ve used, is that I can be scanning one image with a progress bar going along, cleaning up
another one, and saving a third one, all at the same time. And that’s three times the throughput that I
get with other software.
Happy New Year
from Moderne Kunst in Meister-Holzschnitten Band XIII (1897), scanned and restored by Liam Quin
I’ve been to places where they’re scanning books professionally, and they have three, four, five computers
in a row, with multiple scanners. So you start scanning on one, then you move to the next one, start
scanning on that, go back to the first one, start cleaning it up, go to the next one, start that one
scanning, go this one, start saving the image – because that other proprietary software could only do
one of those things at a time. That’s still true today.
So by using the plug-in I get much more throughput, so I can have the scanner going – and it can take
up to 20 minutes to scan an image, and it can take up to 5 or 10 minutes to save an image. For GIMP to
export an image to PNG for example, can take 5 or 10 minutes if it’s a several gigabyte image going to
a hard drive. So, it’s really nice to be able to work effectively with multiple threads. I like that.
So I should write some tutorials because GIMP really is better than anything else I’ve used.
Aryeom: I will translate it to Korean because I’ve seen someone on a Korean website asking how toscan in GIMP like this.
Liam: Okay! Maybe they’ve already written a better tutorial than I will, we’ll see. I’ve been doing it
for more than ten years. 1999, I think, I started my website,
fromoldbooks.org. So it’s going to be coming
up to 20 years old before too long. Some of the books are 500 years old.
Jehan: And you’ve been using GIMP since the beginning?
Liam: I used GIMP early on. I had a period when I was writing a book and the publisher required me to
use Microsoft Office, so I was on Windows. For a lot of that time I was using other software. I actually
end up using Paint Shop Pro because it had something like, what GIMP calls a corrective or reverse transformation.
Jehan: And GIMP did not have it?
Liam: GIMP had it, but GIMP wasn’t doing well on Windows at the time. And the other software I had,
Photoshop, did not have anything like a corrective mode that was as useful. GIMP’s corrective mode is
actually better because it’s a grid and not just a line. The Photoshop one, as I recall, you draw a line
on something that should be horizontal or vertical. But in most scanned images I’ve got, they’re
hand-made engravings, there isn’t going to be a definite horizontal or vertical, because it’s an
artist’s sketch. So I have to choose what looks best. I start out by getting the grid roughly right,
clicking rotate and seeing what happens. Flatten the image to get rid of the corner artifacts and
seeing what it looks like. And if it looks okay – with experience you can most of the time do it
first time.
One of my few patches to GIMP in fact, was to change the undo history to say what the angle was.
This way, I can do an undo, even half an hour later, I can see what the angle was and I can say,
“Well, that was just a bit too much, I’ll try reducing it just a bit and try again”, and usually
second go I get it right. And that’s an example of it being an open source free/libre software.
I was able to contribute a patch, which Mitch kindly rejected, and I was able to redo it, and
get it in the right format. And he incorporated it – and then I think he wrote it even more.
Looking at the code yesterday I discovered – it’s a year or two since I did the patch – I looked
at the patch and discovered it’d been rewritten even more, which is good. But that simple patch
has saved me, cumulatively, hours and hours of work, just knowing that information. Because I
might do two or three rotations in a sequence, then go back and undo them and do a single
rotation, because you degrade the image slightly when you rotate it. And if it takes 10, 15
minutes to do a rotate of a large image, then saving two or three attempts at rotation everyday
has saved me a lot of time, you know.
Screenshot of Undo History with Rotation Angles shown, from Liam’s patch
So that’s all part of why GIMP is so fabulous. That, and being able to come onto the IRC
channel and say a particular thing is really slow. The first time I did that, it was Sven
at the time years ago, he couldn’t believe it was taking me 20, 25 minutes to rotate an image.
He looked at the code, and he had me do some profiling, and then he said “Oh”, and made a one
line fix. And it went down from 20 minutes to 2 minutes the next time I recompiled GIMP, ten
minutes later. Same day! A fix on the same day. In the libre graphics world, in the free software
world, that’s not unusual. In the “I’ll make a support ticket with my vendor” world, it’s not
unheard of but it’s pretty rare. So that’s been a real plus.
Sometimes the developers will say “No, we can’t make that faster because…”, or “We won’t,
because we’re going to replace it”. But there’s been a few occasions when GIMP has been
faster because I’ve gone into the IRC channel and said I profiled this, or here’s a patch,
or can someone fix that. So it’s been fabulous.
Jehan: I think we’ve asked most questions. Is there anything you’d like to say that we didn’t ask you?
Liam: Yeah. The biggest thing I think we have to do, is get a message out to the world
that GIMP is perfectly suitable for professional use. It’s aimed at professional use, and
people are using it professionally, successfully. It’s not a second choice, it’s a first
choice. It’s not because I can’t afford this other program, or because my principles say
I don’t eat meat, or I don’t use programs beginning with P. It’s a first choice – it’s
actually better for what I’m doing then any other program I’ve used, and I’ve used a lot.
So we need to get that message out a lot more, and we need to have more confidence in
talking about GIMP. We’re close to it, we see all the problems, we have visions that
we know are not happening, and yet, we forget sometimes that we’ve got something really
really good there. And we need not be ashamed to say that.
Aryeom: Why do you think people are sometimes ashamed or don’t have confidence to use GIMP?
Liam: I knew a chemist once who worked in a jam factory, where they made marmalade and jam.
And he saw what the jam did to the steel containers where they mixed it. And they had huge steel
vats like the size of a small building, like a big mixing bowl. And the jam is highly acidic,
and it would eat the steel. And he said he would never eat jam again, after seeing how jam was
made. But you know, if you make jam at home it’s no better. It’s no better than any other food,
or worse – alright, it may have too much sugar in it. Or it’s like the sausage maker who knows
what goes in the sausage.
We’re aware of all the problems, and we’re aware that we have visions of how GIMP could be in
some other universe, and it isn’t. But that’s okay, it’s what it is. The fact we can say, the
text tool could be improved so that after you scale the image, text is still text for example.
We can look at that and say “Yeah, that’d be fairly easy to fix but we’re busy”. But we still
have a better text tool than a lot of other programs, you know, even without making any other
changes. We’re too busy to go look at other programs – and perhaps worried too about intellectual
property, about using someone else’s design. But the truth is, GIMP is better than, in many ways –
not perfect, not saying that – but it’s better in many ways than we realize.
But any time there’s an actual threat to broadcasting integrity or the public interest he’s unsurprisingly nowhere to be found. Like last week when his FCC rubber stamped heavy Saudi and Chinese investment in the Paramount merger despite obvious foreign influence concerns.
A new set of rehashed ads feature Donald in black and white as he walks down a hallway promising to smite all of his enemies, including “the deep state,” “warmongers,” the “fake news media,” “Marxists,” and “fascists.” A notice at the bottom of the ad states it was “paid for by the US government.”
“Under federal communications law, broadcast stations are strictly prohibited from censoring or rejecting ads sponsored by legally qualified political candidates. Even if a candidate’s ad contains graphic imagery or disputed claims, stations generally must air it. But there are clear exceptions to this rule.
Broadcasters may be held liable for airing any advertisement that is in violation of federal law. Federal law explicitly prohibits using appropriated public funds for government propaganda, self-aggrandizement, or partisan political advertising. Yet, that is exactly the nature of Trump’s recent campaign ads that began airing on September 23, 2026. Furthermore, Donald Trump is not a candidate for any elective office. The FCC and broadcasters are not constrained by the special rule protecting candidate advertisements.”
According to Public Citizen, the ad ran during NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Fox News Sunday, and several college and NFL football games this past weekend. While the Trump administration is trying to dodge the law by falsely claiming the ad is a “public service announcement,” it doesn’t actively promote any real programs or services, making it a very clear violation of existing law.
In addition to Public Citizen’s complaints, Senate Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin this week stating that Trump is “illegally using Americans’ tax dollars to fund government propaganda and to put ads from his 2024 campaign back on the air.” It’s quite the waste of cash, given that associating yourself with a historically unpopular and corrupt president appears to be polling and political suicide this midterm season.
The Trump FCC will, of course, do nothing. Brendan Carr told the media that these are just “normal” “public service announcements” that “don’t raise any red flags.” He also insisted it’s fine because, he claimed falsely, the “left” does this all the time:
“Carr brushed off the concern, telling reporters that “there’s groups on the left that have, you know, long worked and pushed to weaponize the FCC’s license renewal process” but that the ads “don’t raise any red flags.”
Carr’s referring to a single event in 2023 when the volunteer-run Media and Democracy Project (MAD) petitioned the FCC to pull the license of a Fox Philly affiliate for repeatedly running lies about election fraud. What Carr leaves out is that while there was that one effort from “the left” to stop the renewal of a Fox license, at the same time there was an even bigger effort from a far right group to block the renewal of licenses for three CBS stations that aired an interview with Kamala Harris that the MAGA faithful deemed was edited to make Harris look good.
He also leaves out that his predecessor (the Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel) rejected all four of those requests, citing the First Amendment and pointed out that all such attempts to block license renewals for partisan reasons was an attack on free speech and a free press. Oh and he also leaves out that after he took over, he reinstated the efforts against the CBS affiliates, but not the Fox one.
In other words, only one side (Carr and his MAGA minions) appears to be engaged in partisan attempts to suppress speech.
Carr’s far more interested in dismantling all oversight of telecom monopolies, illegally dismantling media consolidation limits, trampling free speech, and forcing broadcasters to air discounted midterm ads. Broadcasters, meanwhile, are also unlikely to balk at running the ads, lest they want to face a fake Brendan Carr inquiry into “DEI” or some other, manufactured nonsense.
Another day in a corrupt autocracy run by the shittiest zealots imaginable.
Last October, DISH Network sued the people it believes are behind Kemo IPTV and Lemo TV, together with Florida reseller 1 Dollar IPTV.
When none of the defendants responded in court, DISH asked for a $28.65 million default judgment in March. At the time, it appeared that the case would be over soon.
That changed in September when one of the defendants, Ammar Towir, asked the court to set aside the default. DISH argued that the defendant owns and operates the Kemo and Lemo domains, as well as the financial accounts behind them. However, Towir argues that he was never properly served, saying that he lived in Dubai and not at the Malaysian address where the complaint was sent.
Court Denies $28.65m Default
This week, U.S. District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell denied DISH’s request without prejudice. According to the judge, DISH’s motion simply stated that the defendants were properly served, without explaining why.
“DISH fails to set forth any facts or Malaysian legal authority in its motion establishing the propriety of service on Defendants,” the order reads.
Default Judgment Denied
DISH can refile its $28.65 million request. First, however, the court has to decide whether the defendant was indeed properly served. That question is now before the magistrate judge.
This is the second setback for DISH’s campaign against Kemo and Lemo this year. In March, a California court dismissed its lawsuit against UK hosting provider Innetra for lack of jurisdiction. However, the Florida case also revealed that Towir faces criminal allegations in Dubai, where a separate enforcement action unfolded.
Criminal Probe in Dubai
In his declaration, Towir explains that he stayed out of the Florida case because he is the subject of a criminal complaint in Dubai. He initially believed DISH was behind it, but later learned that it was filed by Apple, Warner Bros., Paramount, Columbia Pictures, Disney, Netflix, and Amazon.
These companies are all members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) and, when we asked, the anti-piracy coalition confirmed its involvement.
“We can confirm that ACE is behind the complaint filed in Dubai in late July 2025 against the alleged operator of the Kemo Lemo IPTV service, Mr. Ammar Towir. The matter was subsequently referred to a specialized law enforcement unit,” ACE informed TorrentFreak.
The July 2025 date means that ACE filed its complaint nearly three months before DISH filed its lawsuit in Florida, and more than three months after DISH’s initial Lemo/Kemo case in Texas, which likely helped to identify the alleged operator.
The Dubai prosecution is ongoing and ACE says that the Public Prosecutor referred the case to the Dubai Criminal Court last month, where it is currently pending. Given the ongoing proceedings, ACE can’t comment further but Towir’s declaration in the DISH case adds additional color.
Travel Ban
The alleged Lemo/Kemo IPTV operator said he was interviewed by the Dubai Police several times and handed over his computers and smartphone. He is also not allowed to leave the country.
“Interestingly enough, as the travel ban that is automatically instituted when a criminal complaint is filed in Dubai was about to expire, another criminal complaint was filed against me further prohibiting me from traveling,” he writes.
Dubai Investigation
Towir notes that, on advice he received in Dubai, he chose to await the outcome before responding in the U.S. case. DISH, however, describes his wait for the Dubai report as a “pretext for delay.” The two sides also discussed a settlement, but no deal was reached.
Evidence and Next Moves
In his declaration, the defendant also admits that he buys from a wholesaler and resells to customers outside the U.S. However, he says these sales had nothing to do with Kemo IPTV or Lemo TV.
DISH doesn’t buy it. In an opposition brief, the company points to PayPal records listing Towir as the owner of accounts named ‘KEMO IPTV’ and ‘KEMO E MARKETING SDN. BHD.’, and to credit card payments in his name for the Namecheap account that renewed Kemoiptv.com and Lemotv.com.
PayPal records
This and other evidence could become relevant again in the DISH case after the court decides whether the default against Towir stands. The criminal case in Dubai, meanwhile, remains pending.
For now, at least one Kemo IPTV storefront is still selling subscriptions at Kemoiptv.io, which is one of the domains DISH wanted taken over. Whether the defendant indeed controls this domain name is not confirmed.
—
A copy of the order denying DISH’s motion for default judgment is available here (pdf). Towir’s motion to set aside the default and his declaration are available here (pdf) and here (pdf). DISH’s opposition can be found here (pdf).
We reached out to Towir’s lawyers but they did not respond before publication.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Among the many promises that RFK Jr. offered in his confirmation hearings, promises that he has gone about breaking in spectacular fashion, one was a promise of “radical transparency”. His approach, in his own words, was laid out directly to Congress.
My approach to administration HHS will be transparency. If members of this committee or other members of Congress want information, the doors are open. I’ve spent many years litigating against HHS and its sub-agencies, NIH, CDC, FDA on FOIA issues trying to get information that we the taxpayers paid for and oftentimes getting back redacted copies after a year or two years of litigation. That should not be the case and if Congress asked me for information, you will get it immediately.
In the most recent news involving Kennedy-style fuckery, the CDC was mysteriously prohibiting the procurement of seasonal COVID vaccines through the Vaccine for Children program, designed so that states can get these shots at no cost for children who lack insurance, who are on Medicaid, and for Indigenous children. Why? Nobody seemed to be able to answer that question.
The CDC made some vague claims that the months-long delay was due to the need to finalize the procurement process (bullshit), or perhaps the need to have an outside expert consult on the final procurement process (bullshit). How do I know those statements were bullshit? Well, this is a statement from HHS to Ars Technica made on Wednesday, September 23rd, after media outlets began reporting on the shots being delayed:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told Ars on Wednesday that “CDC has not yet finalized procurement decisions” for the shots. The department’s statement further suggested Trump officials were questioning whether children should receive them. “HHS and CDC are committed to responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources and to ensuring that vaccines purchased through federally funded programs are appropriate for the populations those programs serve,” the department said.
Then, on that very same day, mere hours later, the Washington Post reported that procurement of the shots was now open and states could order the shots.
However, The Washington Post reported late Wednesday that ordering was opening. An unnamed source told the Post that part of the reason the vaccine ordering was held up was a delay in finalizing the CDC’s clinical guidance, which is written for health care professionals and public health officials. The guidance reportedly needed to be reviewed by an external expert.
According to further reporting, this explanation was also bullshit.
The Post also reported that CDC career officials had previously finished preparations for making the vaccines available. All Trump officials needed to do was essentially push a button to open ordering, sources said. Further, a spokesperson for the Minnesota Department of Health suggested to the Post that CDC leadership was behind the hold, saying the state had been told “that CDC leadership approval is needed before distribution of the vaccine can begin.”
In a response to Ars on Thursday, HHS again did not respond to questions about what caused the delay or how it was resolved. The department did, however, confirm that ordering for COVID-19 vaccines is now open.
So let’s call this what it is: Kennedy got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and reversed course once he’d been found out. And let’s also note that if any of this is supposed to be “radical transparency”, then I must be working off of a different dictionary than Kennedy and HHS.
None of this is transparent. There is no actual explanation on offer here for why the shots were delayed. And I have no doubt that if it had somehow gone unnoticed, the COVID shots never would have been made available at all. Kennedy, after all, has claimed that the COVID vaccine has killed lots and lots of people, and maimed others.
So we have another promise made to Congress broken. That same Congress should be demanding answers, at a minimum.
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
Part IV: The Digital Climate
Part III argued that the map can never fully capture the territory. This part looks beyond individual controversies to the changing environment itself and asks whether the assumptions that once made platforms successful still fit the digital world they helped create.
Every generation believes that it is living through an unprecedented period of change. Usually, this is little more than historical vanity. The technologies differ, the political actors change, and the crises acquire new names, but the underlying patterns often remain remarkably familiar. Societies innovate, institutions adapt, markets expand, and eventually each encounters the same fundamental challenge: success changes the environment in ways that success itself rarely anticipates.
Biologists have long understood this phenomenon. Evolution does not prepare organisms for the future; it prepares them for the past. Every adaptation reflects conditions that once existed, not necessarily those that are emerging. A species that becomes exquisitely suited to one environment may discover, often too late, that the environment itself has changed. Extinction is therefore not always the consequence of weakness. More often, it is the inability to recognize that the conditions which rewarded one form of intelligence have quietly given way to another.
Economists describe a similar phenomenon as path dependence. Institutions continue investing in strategies that have historically produced success because those strategies appear rational when viewed through the lens of accumulated experience. Military historians often note that generals tend to prepare for the previous war. Financial regulators strengthen oversight after the last crisis, rarely before the next one. Organizations, almost by definition, learn retrospectively. Their accumulated knowledge is also their greatest constraint. Technology companies are no exception.
If anything, the extraordinary success of the major platforms may have made them particularly vulnerable to this form of institutional lag. The models they developed during the internet’s age of expansion proved astonishingly effective at connecting people, organizing information and lowering the costs of participation. The metrics through which they evaluated success, such as growth, engagement, scale, and network effects, were not arbitrary inventions of venture capital. They reflected a period during which connecting more people genuinely created more value for everyone involved. The problem is not that these metrics were wrong. It is that they gradually became targets in themselves. The world changed while the metrics remained stable.
For much of the first decade of social media, the dominant challenge was abundance. The internet was expanding faster than anyone could meaningfully navigate it. There were too many websites, too many videos, too many blogs, too many voices competing for attention. Search engines, recommendation systems and social networks addressed this problem by filtering complexity. Their algorithms reduced uncertainty by pointing users toward content they were likely to find useful, interesting, or entertaining. In a world defined by informational overload, curation felt like liberation.
Today’s challenge is almost the inverse. Few people now struggle to find information. Instead, they struggle to determine which information deserves trust. The scarcity that once characterized knowledge has been replaced by a scarcity of confidence. We inhabit an environment saturated with images, opinions, analyses, commentary, and increasingly synthetic media. Artificial intelligence has accelerated this transformation still further, reducing the cost not only of distributing information but of producing it in almost limitless quantities. The bottleneck has shifted. Discovery matters less than discernment.
Yet the architecture of the dominant platforms remains largely optimized for the earlier age. Systems originally designed to maximize relevance increasingly operate within an environment where reliability has become the more precious commodity. Recommendation engines still reward attention because attention remains measurable. Trust, by contrast, is extraordinarily difficult to quantify. It develops slowly, depends on context and often requires forms of human judgment that resist computational simplification. The result is a subtle but increasingly consequential mismatch between what societies need and what platforms are designed to provide.
This helps explain why so many contemporary debates about social media seem oddly unsatisfying. Discussions about misinformation, disinformation, harmful content, or political polarization often assume that these are discrete policy failures awaiting technical solutions. Better moderation, greater transparency, more sophisticated artificial intelligence, or improved regulation are presented as though they might restore an earlier equilibrium. Each proposal addresses an important part of the problem, yet none fully confronts the possibility that the problem is structural rather than operational.
Climate science again offers a useful analogy. For decades, public debates about climate change focused overwhelmingly on individual weather events. Every hurricane, wildfire, or flood generated renewed discussion about global warming, only for the conversation to subside once the immediate crisis had passed. Scientists repeatedly pointed out that this way of thinking misunderstood the phenomenon itself. Climate change is not the accumulation of disasters but the gradual alteration of the conditions that make particular kinds of disasters more likely. Focusing exclusively on the storm obscures the atmosphere that produced it.
Something similar has happened in our understanding of digital platforms. We have spent years debating individual scandals as though each represented an isolated malfunction: election interference, extremist content, privacy violations, online harassment, conspiracy theories, mental health, child protection, deepfakes, artificial intelligence. Each deserves careful attention. Yet viewed collectively, they begin to resemble not separate failures but different manifestations of the same underlying transformation. They are symptoms of an ecosystem whose governing assumptions increasingly diverge from the societies that depend upon it.
This is not to suggest that the companies involved acted with malicious intent. Structural problems rarely emerge because individuals make consistently immoral choices. They emerge because institutions continue behaving rationally according to incentives that no longer correspond to external reality. A recommendation algorithm that prioritizes engagement is not malfunctioning when it amplifies emotionally charged content. It is doing precisely what it was designed to do. The more uncomfortable question is whether the objective itself remains appropriate for the world in which the system now operates.
That distinction matters because it shifts responsibility from individual decisions to institutional imagination. The challenge is no longer simply how to improve content moderation or reduce harmful behavior online. It is whether platforms can rethink the assumptions embedded within business models that were developed for a different internet, a different political environment, and, indeed, a different conception of human interaction.
Perhaps the most striking evidence that this shift has already occurred lies not in regulation or public opinion but in the behavior of users themselves. Increasingly, people describe social media less as a place they enjoy than as a place they feel obliged to inhabit. Creators remain because audiences are there. Businesses remain because customers are there. Politicians remain because voters are there. Journalists remain because news breaks there. Ordinary users remain because leaving often means losing access to relationships, professional networks, or cultural conversations that have become difficult to reproduce elsewhere. This is a curious form of success.
Historically, the most admired technologies inspired affection. They expanded human possibility in ways that people found genuinely exhilarating. The telephone shortened distances; the airplane compressed geography; and the web rewarded curiosity. By contrast, many of today’s dominant platforms increasingly resemble public utilities that happen to be privately owned: indispensable, deeply embedded in everyday life, and frequently resented by the very people who rely upon them.
That emotional transition, from enthusiasm to resignation, may prove more significant than any quarterly earnings report or competition case. Institutions rarely lose their influence all at once. More often, they lose something subtler first – the confidence that they understand the age they inhabit.
The great irony is that no organizations in history have possessed more information about human behavior than the leading technology companies of the twenty-first century. They know where we pause, what we share, whom we follow, when we lose interest, and what captures our attention again. They have become extraordinarily skilled at modelling behavior. But behavior is neither culture nor society. And behavior, however precisely measured, is certainly not the same thing as wisdom. That is the digital climate we have entered. The storms still occupy our attention. Meanwhile, the atmosphere has already changed.
Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.
Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in Rust.
We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 2.7.0.
This release continues our ongoing development towards using
Arti as a relay and as a directory authority,
with much of the work focusing on document parsing, directory mirror support,
and DNS stream handling.
Additionally, arti now has RPC support for modifying and inspecting its configuration.
This release has a number of fixes for low- to high-severity security issues.
We encourage arti, arti-client, and arti-ureq users,
especially those running onion services,
to upgrade as soon as possible.
As usual, there also are many under-the-hood improvements
to our infrastructure, testing, and documentation,
along with multiple bug fixes and internal cleanups.
For full details on what we've done, including API changes, security fixes,
and for information about many more minor and less-visible changes,
please see the CHANGELOG.
For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README,
and the documentation for the arti binary.
Thanks to everybody who's contributed to this release, including
Gaith Hallak, iqdecay, manthan-lab, and pryty26.
Also, our deep thanks to our sponsors for funding the development of Arti!
Donald Trump has been claiming for years that all elections he hasn’t (or won’t) win are rigged. This also goes for mid-terms — especially this one — where Republicans seem likely to lose seats to Democratic Party members. We won’t know if Trump will try to become President For Life until 2028, but it seems immediately clear he won’t leave anything to chance. And by “chance,” I mean a “fair democratic process unimpeded or derailed by Donald J. Trump.”
The administration continues to make wild, baseless claims about “illegal” votes being cast by non-citizens. This dovetails nicely with the administration’s “remove all the (non-white) foreigners” operations, which shifted from merely overenthusiastic to the defining feature of the second Trump administration.
This form of voter fraud is almost nonexistent. And there’s good reason to believe most of the extremely few “illegal” votes being cast are a mistake, rather than acts of people hoping to sway an election with their ill-gotten democratic processes. States have combined processes for voter registration and drivers licenses/identification cards in hopes of increasing participation in the democratic process. Unfortunately, this may lead a few non-citizens to believe obtaining an ID card also gives them the right to vote.
Instances of actual voter fraud by non-citizens are so rare as to be less than a rounding error when it comes to total votes. Nevertheless, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (for some fucking reason) is taking the lead in Trump’s voter suppression efforts and its principal officials continue to make outlandish claims about voter fraud while simultaneously making outlandish (and likely illegal) demands for states’ voter data.
Nevada — a state that swings towards Trump except where it matters most, the cities with the largest populations — is one of Trump’s primary targets as he advances his lies about rigged elections and widespread voter fraud.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin kissed the ring and delivered the message, claiming without any facts in evidence that nearly 16,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in Nevada. Note that this is not the same thing as claiming these 16,000 people had actually ever voted. But the DHS encouraged the MAGA faithful to believe it was the same thing because Trump himself appeared to believe it was the same thing.
The state of Nevada pushed back against this claim (as well as the DHS’s demand for state voters’ identifying info). That pushback forced the DHS to walk back its previous, social media-broadcasted claims. In a telephonic meeting a few days later, DHS officials actually admitted the number of voters they suspected to be registered illegally was less than 200.
Even with this reduction, the DHS refused to turn over the information it possessed that it claimed supported its accusations against 185 Nevada voters. The state continued to press the DHS for more info, pointing out that it couldn’t do anything on its own end if it was only given “voter case” numbers generated by the DHS.
The DHS still continued to claim more than 6,000 residents might be registered illegally, but said its internal vetting had only “confirmed” the 185 “voter cases” it was willing to share with Nevada officials.
That number is even lower now. In fact, it’s one of the lowest numbers you can use when you’re counting entire human beings, as the New York Times reports:
When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
“As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens,” Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote, according to a copy of a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials obtained through open records requests. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”
Trump and his DHS hyped the alleged discovery of nearly 300,000 “illegal” voters across four states where Trump did less business than he had hoped during the past two elections. What’s been exposed in Nevada is sure to be echoed in other states the administration claims are letting non-citizens vote.
It took less than a month to whittle down the DHS’s bullshit claims from nearly-16,000 to zero. This won’t be an anomaly. Voter fraud by non-citizens happens roughly 0% of the time anywhere during any election. Just like every other criminal act, immigrants commit voter fraud far less often than actual citizens do.
The administration is throwing people, time, and money at this attempt to suppress voter participation and it still can’t come up with anything that demonstrates it’s worth the resources being expended. But proving this isn’t the point. Generating a culture of distrust in local elections is the real game, which will allow Trump to pretend any election result he doesn’t like was the result of criminal activity.
When Sony launched its cheap portable radio more than sixty years ago, it came with a headphone. For the first time in history, teenagers could listen to music without their parents eavesdropping. This opened the door to Chuck Berry and then the Beatles.
AM radio needed hits, the top 40, mass music, and the Beatles made it work.
Steely Dan came from FM radio. Once the number of stations doubled, these new stations needed an alternative to the more common AM hits. And so we get the Doors and Jimi Hendrix.
Rap and hip hop had a hard time getting past the primarily white program directors, and it wasn’t until MTV began featuring it that it spread to millions.
And Taylor Swift and Elle Cordova would have had a hard time catching on without YouTube.
It extends far beyond music. The launch of the Gutenberg press changed the politics of Europe for a century, and the rise of radio in the 1920s did the same. The smartphone has transformed our discourse and created division in the same way.
We’re now facing the biggest shuffling of media in our history. The messages will inevitably change as a result.
Riverside County, California sheriff Chad Bianco is definitely one of those guys. You know the ones I mean. The kind of “law and order” hypocrite who loves the law as long as it can be used to hurt the people he doesn’t like and protect the people he does like. In other words, he’s a guy who loves the stuff Trump does that violates the law because those laws aren’t part of his narrow “rule of law” view.
You may remember Sheriff Bianco from his hysterical comments in response to California governor Gavin Newsom signing a law that would ban law enforcement officers from hiding behind masks — something prompted by the federal government’s reliance on masked kidnapping squads to round up undocumented migrants.
“They didn’t ban criminals from wearing masks, they didn’t tell criminals that they had to identify themselves,” Bianco said while campaigning in Northern California on Friday. “Every single person that voted for that needs to be eliminated in the next election. Anyone that votes for those people are absolute idiots.”
No, this law didn’t do this. Bianco is right about that. But that’s because it didn’t need to. California law already outlaws mask use by criminals who aren’t working for the federal government. That’s why the new law didn’t need to do something that was already being done — something the “absolute idiots” cheering on/voting for Chad Bianco might want to remember the next time they storm the Capitol building and/or engage in other racist, violent acts.
Bianco is in the bag for Trump. This is not disputable. Shortly after the Trump administration engaged in the (very likely illegal) seizure of ballots in Georgia (a transparently vindictive act prompted by the Georgia’s secretary of state refusing to “find” the ~12,000 votes needed to flip the state in Trump’s favor following the 2020 presidential election), Chad Bianco (who’s currently running for Congress) decided he needed to right some wrongs by doing the wrong (and illegal!) thing by seizing more than 600,000 ballots from election offices.
Bianco claimed this was necessary to investigate “irregularities” apparently only he had witnessed during the state’s 2025 Proposition 50 voting. As is to be expected by all the spectacularly stupid and slimy shit going on here, Prop 50 was put up for a vote in response to rampant mid-term gerrymandering by a suddenly desperate GOP.
The state Attorney General, Rob Bonta, immediately stepped in to ask the courts to block any further actions by Sheriff Bianco, pointing out that this was something that had never happened in the state’s long history of democratic voting and employment of various sheriffs.
Bianco continued to insist this was a necessary part of protecting the integrity of elections and waved away multiple issues raised by his actions, including his apparent judge-shopping trip which put his (plainly defective) warrant in the hands of judge who the sheriff had endorsed during the judge’s 2022 election campaign.
The state’s top court has sided with reason, democracy, and logic in general, as Cal Matters reports:
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco broke the law and created “a substantial risk to election integrity” when he seized more than 650,000 ballots California’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday morning.
The justices ruled unanimously that Bianco must return the ballots to the county’s top election administrator and “refrain from further handling” them. In a second ruling, the court also held that Bianco broke the law when he ignored directives from the state’s attorney general to hold off on his plans to execute a search warrant to seize the ballots last March.
That’s right: Bianco lost twice in one day in the same court. That’s because his obviously illegal act generated plenty of litigation, all of which Bianco seems doomed to lose.
It’s hard to tell from the filings which “you lose, Bianco” ruling came first, but we’ll take a brief look at both.
This one [PDF] was filed by Riverside County voters. The California Supreme Court says some stuff that’s repeated in its other decision, but it’s the sort of thing dipshits like Sheriff Bianco need to be told more than twice.
We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful.California law long has recognized that voted ballots require special care and handling to safeguard them from alteration or tampering. Consistent with this principle, the Elections Code narrowly limits the circumstances in which a court may order the production of ballots for inspection, and even in those narrow circumstances, requires that ballots remain in the physical custody of the responsible elections official. Bianco’s seizure of the ballots violated the plain language of section 15551, subdivision (d), commanding that “[i]n no event” shall voted ballots “be taken from the custody of the elections official.” This provision manifests a legislative intent that ballots remain in the elections official’s custody even in the event of a criminal investigation.
Even if Bianco were doing more than pretending whatever “irregularities” necessitated this seizure, it still wouldn’t matter. At best, Bianco could perhaps secure access to them via a judicial warrant, but state law makes it clear the ballots were to remain in the possession of election officials.
The court orders Bianco to return the ballots and refrain from doing anything else with the records but that. The second ruling [PDF] addresses the challenge raised by State AG Rob Bonta. The end result is the same, but the beginning is a bit more interesting, as the court notes it has never been asked before to determine whether or not an AG has the power to issue “binding directions” to a state sheriff because… well… it has never seen this particular form of bullshit from a sheriff before.
In this case, time is of the essence and without the court’s intervention, Sheriff Bianco would likely just continue to ignore the AG’s order to return ballots and preserve records of this so-called “investigation.” While the AG is in the right, the extreme abnormality of this situation places Bonta’s attempt to rein in Bianco in a legal dead zone. The court says Bianco loses because he cannot possibly point to precedent that justifies his actions or his refusal to comply with the state AG’s orders:
Lastly, we address whether the Attorney General has an adequate remedy at law. We conclude he does not. With the November 2026 General Election nearing, the Attorney General reasonably regards respondents’ investigation as requiring his immediate attention and prompt intervention. Only this court can provide a definitive explication of the Attorney General’s powers and duties and appropriately tailored writ relief. In light of the exigencies involved here, no other remedy would be as effective as a writ issued by this court in securing the timely and conclusive relief needed.
Of course, this isn’t over yet. Bianco has already made it clear he intends to appeal both of these decisions. But his success relies on the US Supreme Court being interested, much less willing, to help a pro-MAGA sheriff extricate himself from a mess of his own making. I doubt it will, even if the resident anything-for-Trump justices will fall all over themselves to write lengthy dissents about the court’s refusal to carry water for a sheriff who clearly has no respect for the rule of law.
Every so often a piece of reporting is so thorough that I don’t have much to add. So let me start with this: everyone should watch Mikhail Klimentov’s comprehensive investigation, into how former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick appears to have used the infamous lawyers at Clare Locke to suppress negative reporting about himself. The People Make Games YouTube channel was willing to publish the piece, which is deeply researched (and I’m sure reviewed by some pretty serious lawyers):
Much of the real story in the video is about the law firm Clare Locke, which we’ve covered in detail before. They’re the boutique firm that seems downright proud of how good it is at killing media reports, and at shielding the rich and powerful from public criticism.
We’ve had David Enrich on our podcast talking about Clare Locke and their extremely aggressive approach to silencing journalists from reporting the truth, and the Kotick story suggests they’re going to even greater lengths to chill reporting. That can eventually backfire, as it did here — though it appears to have worked successfully for a while.
Klimentov’s reporting goes above and beyond. You can tell how much work went into it, and how carefully every claim was nailed down, precisely because everyone involved knew Clare Locke would likely come after them. I want you to watch the entire video, so I won’t spoil it, but I will also suggest you read that WSJ article, because as Klimentov details, Kotick’s lawyers have gone to extraordinary lengths to claim that the WSJ’s article has been debunked. However, as Klimentov notes, the WSJ has never issued a correction or a retraction of that article.
Rather, Kotick’s lawyers have taken a variety of steps that might seem odd in isolation, but all seem focused on giving the impression that the Wall Street Journal story has been debunked and then using that to pressure other journalists from repeating the claims in that article. But, again, the WSJ still stands by that story, and Clare Locke’s evidence of the article being “debunked” doesn’t pass the sniff test (again, details in Klimentov’s reporting).
What’s interesting to me is that this is the same old story all over again: the coverup shines way more light on the original actions. We have a term for this. Kotick could easily have let that story die, and it would have faded into the background. Yes, people would mention the allegations that you can read in the WSJ such as:
Activision has been thrown into turmoil in recent months by multiple regulatory investigations into alleged sexual assaults and mistreatment of female employees dating back years. Mr. Kotick has told directors and other executives he wasn’t aware of many of the allegations of misconduct, and he has played down others, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents.
Those documents, which include memos, emails and regulatory requests, and interviews with former employees and others familiar with the company, however, cast Mr. Kotick’s response in a different light. They show that he knew about allegations of employee misconduct in many parts of the company. He didn’t inform the board of directors about everything he knew, the interviews and documents show, even after regulators began investigating the incidents in 2018. Some departing employees who were accused of misconduct were praised on the way out, while their co-workers were asked to remain silent about the matters.
Instead, the lengths Kotick’s lawyers at Clare Locke went to, threatening (and even suing) games media outlets to kill the story, have made it a story all over again. Nice work, guys.
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If the GOP and DOJ were hoping the Epstein files would finally, magically go away, they were sorely mistaken.
On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, dashed those hopes. In a letter, he accused the Justice Department and the FBI of hiding an FBI Form FD-302, the bureau’s official write-up of a witness interview. The witness is a banker tied to Jeffrey Epstein who was interviewed as part of a criminal investigation of Epstein and his associates.
Aaron Parnas at The Parnas Perspective first reported the letter. Wyden’s office announced it under the headline “Wyden Demands Immediate Release of Epstein Investigation Document Illegally Concealed by Trump’s DOJ and FBI.”
Wyden has long accused the Trump regime of covering up the money behind Epstein’s trafficking operation. Last December, when the legal deadline to release the Epstein files arrived but Todd Blanche said only a portion would come out, Wyden blasted it as “a continuation of this administration’s coverup on behalf of a bunch of pedophiles and sex traffickers.”
The banker’s Form 302 is the first specific document he has identified to support that charge—but he believes there’s fire behind this smoke. The missing report, he wrote, “indicates that it is likely that the FBI possesses additional, related, FBI 302s that have not been released.” Wyden demanded every 302 from the investigations into Epstein and his associates, specifically naming interviews with employees of JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America. His office reported in August that those three banks likely broke federal anti-money-laundering law by failing to flag at least $1.4 billion in suspicious Epstein transactions on time.
Wyden tirelessly followed the money. His inquiry began in June 2022, when he chaired the Finance Committee. He wanted to know why Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, had paid Epstein $158 million for tax and estate advice, a sum disclosed by a review Apollo’s own board had commissioned. That’s a heck of a bill.
By the following summer, committee investigators had examined a transaction Epstein devised to help Black avoid more than $1 billion in future gift and estate taxes. Black’s representatives acknowledged that the IRS had not audited it or any of the related trusts. In February 2024, bipartisan committee staff sat in a Treasury Department reading room and reviewed the suspicious activity reports banks had filed on Epstein.
In March 2025, with Republicans now controlling the Senate, Wyden made public Black’s settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands. The billionaire had paid $62 million for immunity from criminal prosecution in the territory. The agreement states that “Jeffrey Epstein used the money Black paid him to partially fund his operations in the Virgin Islands.” Wyden put Black’s true total at $170 million and reported that a major bank had waited seven years to flag the payments to Treasury. He sent his findings to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and FBI Director Kash Patel and asked for their records.
On July 7, 2025, the Justice Department and the FBI announced the “end” of their review of the Epstein case. Investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” and no further charges were expected.
Wyden was incredulous. Ten days later, he took to the Senate floor to describe the contents of Treasury’s Epstein file. It showed 4,725 wire transfers worth nearly $1.1 billion (with a b) moving through a single Epstein account. It also showed payments processed by Russian banks now under U.S. sanctions. “If you ask me, that’s 4,725 potential lines of investigation right there,” he said.
He then wrote to Bondi that “it is obvious that the DOJ failed to conduct a real investigation into the funding of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.” He attached seven leads for prosecutors, including these recommendations:
subpoena internal bank records
examine the sanctioned Russian banks
investigate banks that reported Epstein’s payments years late
take transcribed interviews of the bankers who oversaw Epstein’s accounts and the wealthy men who funded him
The DOJ did none of this, revealing the terrible cost of having a politicized DOJ bent on protecting pedophiles and their financiers rather than prosecuting them.
In December 2025, Wyden and four other Democratic senators asked Bondi and Patel why federal investigators had reportedly never questioned men such as Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, Epstein’s longtime lawyer and accountant, respectively, who held signing authority over his bank accounts and now serve as co-executors of his estate. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan had (finally) opened an investigation into Indyke and Kahn, interviewing witnesses and requesting documents.
When the “final” batch of Epstein files came out in January, Blanche dismissed the idea that the department was “choosing not to prosecute” men it knew about. At his confirmation hearing in July, he told senators there were “no closed investigations.”
What the bank records show
In November 2025, Wyden released an 18-page staff memo on JPMorgan Chase. While Epstein was alive, JPMorgan flagged just over $4.3 million of his transactions to the U.S. Treasury. After his death, the bank filed retroactive reports covering nearly $1.3 billion in thousands of transactions dating back to 2003, close to 300 times as much as it had initially reported.
In January, Wyden turned to Bank of New York Mellon. A 2019 BNY filing showed Epstein had moved $378 million through 270 wire transfers, none of which the bank could tie to a legitimate business purpose. BNY reported them to Treasury more than a decade after they took place.
Wyden’s August 2026 report, titled “Looking the Other Way,” concluded that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America likely violated federal anti-money-laundering law.
With respect to Bank of America, Black used his accounts there to wire Epstein about $170 million between 2012 and 2017. By the report’s calculation, Black supplied roughly 90 percent of the revenue of Southern Trust, Epstein’s only income-producing company from 2013 through 2017. Bank of America waited until February of 2020 to report the payments, well after Epstein’s arrest and death in custody, when it concluded they had no verifiable business purpose.
Deutsche Bankheld Epstein’s money from 2013 until his death. It later flagged more than $250 million in suspicious transfers, including payments to women in Russia and Eastern Europe.
The report also names the executives. According to internal JPMorgan records it cites, senior leaders who reported to CEO Jamie Dimon oversaw the Epstein relationship. After Epstein’s 2008 conviction, senior executive Jes Staley and general counsel Stephen Cutler decided to keep him as a private banking client. In 2012, John Duffy, then head of JPMorgan’s U.S. private bank, told a risk executive that he had asked Epstein to shift his cash withdrawals to his aviation accounts.
JPMorgan forced Epstein out as a client in 2013. That August, Duffy asked Mary Erdoes, now the bank’s head of asset and wealth management, whether bankers could keep working with Epstein through client accounts such as Black’s. Erdoes replied, “Y.” The report lists 13 bankers across the three institutions whose conduct, it says, merits investigation by federal prosecutors and regulators.
JPMorgan told Axios it “strongly disagree[s] with the report’s conclusions, which are based on many false claims contradicted by easily-found public information.” Deutsche Bank said it regrets its past with Epstein, and Bank of America said it did not facilitate wrongdoing. Despite these protestations, the banks have paid massive amounts in settlements. A federal judge approved Bank of America’s $72.5 million settlement with Epstein’s survivors this summer. JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank paid $290 million and $75 million, respectively, to settle similar suits in 2023.
Leon Black’s refusals
In March, drawing on the newly released Epstein files, Wyden sent Black another round of questions. “You were among Jeffrey Epstein’s primary sources of income, flooding him with cash at a time when he was already a registered sex offender,” he wrote. The letter laid out new findings:
Black paid Epstein at rates 30 times higher than those of the elite tax advisers he already employed.
$10 million of the payments was routed through a charity, an arrangement Kahn wrote would keep it out of public view.
Emails indicate Black paid women using Epstein as a middleman.
Epstein gave Russian government officials the location of women on Black’s payroll.
Black’s lawyers answered in April with a complaint that no other private citizen had faced “more written requests” from Wyden over the same period. (But perhaps there’s a reason for that, no?) In June, Wyden sent his findings to the leaders of the House Oversight Committee, Chairman James Comer and ranking Democrat Robert Garcia. He urged them to press Black on the size of his payments to Epstein, the Virgin Islands settlement and the payments to women.
Black appeared voluntarily before the committee on June 26 and walked out after members pressed him about nondisclosure agreements with women. Comer served him with two subpoenas that day, one for a deposition and one for the agreements. Black skipped his Sept. 3 deposition and sued the committee, arguing that the subpoenas exceeded its authority. On Sept. 15, the Oversight Committee voted 41–0 to recommend holding him in contempt. The next day, the full House agreed by unanimous consent and referred the matter to the Justice Department.
Black denies any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, and his lawyers say he has already turned over the only confidentiality agreement Epstein knew about. Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor carrying up to a year in prison. The Justice Department said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia “will review the referral of Mr. Black carefully and will not hesitate to pursue additional cases where the evidence supports.”
I’m not holding my breath.
The closed doors
The Trump regime has been less than cooperative, to no one’s surprise. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent turned down Wyden’s requests for Treasury’s full Epstein file three times in 2025. Treasury later provided the records to the Republican-led House Oversight Committee. When Wyden sought unanimous consent on March 3 to pass a bill compelling their release, Senate Republicans objected.
Two weeks later, Wyden disclosed that Blanche had stopped the Drug Enforcement Administration from giving him an unredacted 2015 memo. The memo came from a multiagency investigation that had targeted Epstein and 14 others over wire transfers tied to drug and prostitution activity. “I am at a loss to understand why you are blocking further investigation of this matter,” Wyden wrote.
Wyden’s new letter places the missing 302 report alongside that long record of obstruction and cover-up. It asks for every 302 from those investigations. It names employees of the same three banks whose conduct anchors Wyden’s August report.
Wyden’s demands arrive after another federal judge rejected the department’s reasons for withholding a different set of FBI interview records. In a transparency lawsuit brought by journalist Katie Phang, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the department to submit to him for private review handwritten FBI notes underlying four 302 reports. He wrote that the court “rejects Defendant’s assertion that the underlying handwritten FBI notes that formed the basis for certain FD-302 reports were properly withheld because they are ‘substantially similar to’ and therefore duplicative of the typewritten reports.”
Meanwhile, the House is on an imposed recess while another discharge petition—aimed at fixing the shortcomings and loopholes in the Epstein Files Transparency Act—stands at 216 signatures, with two more solid commitments to bring the count to the 218 needed to force a vote on the House floor. More than a billion dollars moved through Epstein’s accounts while the banks, which failed to flag or investigate the highly unusual transfers, helped keep his sex trafficking operation funded. The bankers, lawyers and accountants who enabled Epstein or looked the other way well understand what Democratic control of the House could mean for the ongoing investigations of their misdeeds and alleged crimes.
Object permanence: Gilberto Gil v WIPO; Censored Apple wifi hacker talk; Wells Fargo crime-spree started in 1998; Stencils "may not be reproduced"; DVD Jon v Apple DRM; Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of corruption; Tortured Canadian was not a terrorist; Decarbonization at a distance.
Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (permalink)
Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.
From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).
Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.
If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:
For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise.
He let the bank executives who created the Great Financial Crisis off the hook and encouraged them to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans, the very same public that had bailed them out:
Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays.
I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home.
It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it":
Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground:
Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words.
Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda:
Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done.
Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible.
In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously.
The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and striking).
It's also the same move that transformed "boycotts" into "shopping." Boycotts are a collective enterprise. Before a boycott takes place, small-p political groups hold meetings, organize alternatives and communicate their demands. During a boycott, organizers work to insulate participants from reprisals, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott organizers who reasoned and remonstrated with employers who disciplined workers whose participation made them late for work.
And yes, as part of a boycott, you make some consumption choices. You buy X instead of Y. But "shopping" by itself isn't a boycott. You can't "vote with your wallet" (especially not when billionaires get to vote against you with their wallets):
Shopping isn't politics, and while voting is Politics (Big P), it's also not politics (small p). A boycott, on the other hand, is politics. What's more, "shopping" has the same relationship to "boycotts" that "voting" has to "politics." It's a step you take, after you've laid a lot of groundwork with other people, as part of a mass movement.
I understand why shopping and voting are more attractive than boycotts and politics. Meetings suck. Hell is other people:
But changing the system requires systemic work. Hell is other people because other people are great but it's so hard to get them to do things your way. That takes time and understanding and togetherness and arguing and forgiving.
Not everyone has time or capacity for that, and at any given time, we don't all have to be doing that work. We can take turns, spelling each other off at times in our lives when we have more or less slack. But lots of us have to be in the fight, or all of us will get screwed. There aren't enough of us doing politics right now. We can tell, because our politicians are so contemptuous of the grassroots that they will sell us out without a moment's hesitation, smugly certain that they will face no consequences for doing so:
Oligarchs have it easy. Where we have to convince people to fight, they can pay or threaten people to bring them into line. But oligarchs' power is wearing thin. The data-center uprising shows how much fury there is out there, looking for a productive outlet:
Data centers are very bad and very visible, so they make for good targets. But data centers are only the physical extrusion of a vast, brutal, extractive system. The most important way to fight data centers is to take everyone you meet protesting one and organize with them to scare the shit out of "your" politicians so they don't dare compromise on anything.
"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: 509 (20770 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
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Not long ago, we released the newest addition to the Lulu Direct product line: the Direct Buy Button.
It’s a pretty simple tool. You connect to a secure Stripe account through your Lulu Direct dashboard, then connect a Lulu project (print book or calendar, no ebooks at the moment), and we generate a bit of code you can add to your site. The result is a product listing, including a thumbnail, title, description, and a button to add the book to a cart.
Quite literally, it has never been easier to start selling your Lulu books from your own site.
But the Buy Button includes one additional feature that has proven surprisingly popular and versatile: a Direct Checkout Link.
What is that? Let me tell you all about it.
Spoiler: You won't need a website for this.
What is a Direct Checkout Link?
It’s a link that, when clicked, puts a copy of the connected book into a cart. The buyer can then add more copies if they want, and check out. It’s very much that simple.
If you’re not familiar with our new direct sales options, I recommend taking a few minutes to watch this tutorial. It will show you how fast and easy it is to set up.
Watch: Setting Up a Sales Channel
See, super easy.
Now, once you’ve got the sales channel set up and linked a published, printable project from your Lulu account, you’ll have a few options. The button comes in three flavors:
Product Showcase - A full product description with a thumbnail, title, description, and button to add to cart.
Product Preview - A stripped-down version of the Showcase for a more compact shopping experience.
Button Only - Just the button to add to cart and nothing else.
Each of the button options is customizable.
But right above those options, you’ll see this:
This is your Direct Checkout Link. It is a link that just adds a copy of the connected book to a dedicated cart. From there, the buyer can add more copies and check out. That’s all it does, but it’s powerful.
Benefits of Direct Checkout Links
Beyond the simplicity of it, a Direct Checkout Link has a ton of benefits. Most importantly, it’s versatile. It’s a simple link that can be copied and pasted anywhere on the internet. That includes images, text, or a QR code. There’s nothing to install, integrate, embed, or build. It’s just a link.
Simplified Selling
The biggest benefit of the Direct Checkout Link is that you can sell from anywhere.
For example, here is the link I created for the example above:
If you click it, a cart will open, and you can buy this book! Please don’t buy it; the book is literally just 100 blank pages.
But the point is that it’s really that simple. Add the link in an email, on your social media profile, or in the bio on your blog.
No Logistics
By that I mean you won’t need to worry about:
Shipping - Lulu handles that with our available shipping options based on your buyer’s address.
Taxes - Lulu applies them, again based on the region and applicable tax requirements.
Inventory - As always, your book is printed on demand and shipped directly to your reader.
Payments - Your buyer pays Lulu directly for printing and shipping, then we pay you the revenue you earned.
All you need to do is set up the link with a print project from your Lulu account, and you’re ready to sell.
That Sweet Customer Data
Here is the checkout experience. As you can see, there is an option to opt into updates. Innocuous, and I’m sure you’ve seen these in nearly every checkout experience you use online.
This single line is one of the most important parts of your broader marketing strategy.
When your buyer checks this box, you’ll be able to grab their email address from your Lulu Direct dashboard and add it to your email list. Email remains one of the best ways to engage your dedicated fans and encourage them to buy more from you.
These are people who have actively said, ‘yes, I want to hear from you again’ by checking that box. I cannot overstate how valuable that is.
Building Simple Revenue Flows
That H2 is a little bit on the marketing-lingo side, but it’s true. For most creators, the hardest part of building a business (after the distinct challenge of marketing) is making it easy for your customers to buy from you. Lulu’s Direct Buy Button and Direct Checkout Link are the absolute easiest way to make your book available for sale at the maximum profit for you.
If you have any kind of direct connection with your audience—be it an email list, website with some traffic, a blog, or social media presence—these direct sales tools are what you need to ensure you earn the most, can collect user data, and continue to build your creator business.
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.
Lulu Direct is the perfect way to sell your book on your website, but like any new tool, there’s a bit of a learning curve. Instead of wading through help articles and poking around on the Lulu Direct Dashboard until you discover how everything works, get started faster with this full Dashboard tour/walkthrough.
Welcome to your comprehensive guide to the Lulu Direct Dashboard’s features and functionality!
What is Lulu Direct?
Lulu Direct connects your print-on-demand book to your own website through popular ecommerce platforms:
Lulu Direct is free and simple to use and provides valuable benefits for authors, creators, and entrepreneurs alike, such as:
Full control of your brand with white-label fulfillment and custom packing slips
Customer data retention to maximize marketing efforts
Keep 100% of profits
Global print network
No inventory management
Automated print fulfillment
If this sounds like a dream come true, pinch yourself! Whether you're ready to integrate Lulu Direct with a full ecommerce store or looking for a simpler way to sell books directly, we have a solution to fit your business needs.
Lulu Direct Dashboard
To access the Lulu Direct Dashboard, create a free account and log in. The main Dashboard is the first page you reach when you click My Stores from the top of the Lulu Homepage. Take note of the Dashboard, Channel Orders, Billing, and Order Import tabs at the top of the page.
Once you have reached the Dashboard, the first thing you will see is your Notifications, which will alert you to any orders that need attention. In the example below, you can see I currently have nine orders that require payment before they will enter production.
Below your Notifications, you will see your Direct Sales Channels. Note that you can connect more than one store to Lulu Direct, and this is also where you can create a Direct Buy Button Channel. Click Connect or Create Channel to get started.
For the examples below, I connected a WooCommerce store to my Lulu Direct dashboard. The process is the same for all integrations available (Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce) through the Lulu Direct dashboard.
Beneath the Direct Sales Channels, you will find Order Statistics and Top Products in descending order. These sections are a convenient place to view your store analytics and can help you easily identify areas where you need to improve your marketing efforts (and to see where you’re doing really well).
You can filter both of these sections by Date Range and Store.
Channel Orders
The Channel Orders page is accessed by clicking Channel Orders from the top navigation bar. This is where you can view all of your orders in one place and get status updates for each order. You can filter your orders by Date and Status, and you can also search by Order Number.
Clicking on an order from this page will bring you to the Order Details page for that specific order.
You can do several things on the Order Details page depending on the status of the order, but for the Unpaid example above, you can do the following:
Update the shipping address associated with the order
If an order is In Production or Shipped, you will only have the option to contact support from this page. Shipped orders will also have tracking information available, if applicable.
The Billing page is exactly what it sounds like—a place to view your billing and payment information. From this page, you can view your Payment History and manage your Automatic Payment and Billing Address.
Similar to the Store Orders page, you can filter your Payment History by Order Number, Date, and Status. You can also download a spreadsheet of order details from this page.
Order Import
Clicking Order Import in the top navigation will bring you to the Order Import Tool. This tool is separate from the WooCommerce and Wix integrations available through Lulu Direct and allows you to import a CSV or an XLSX file containing multiple orders for Lulu projects. These orders may have been gathered from various sources outside of Lulu, including in-person events, pre-orders on your website, or campaigns through platforms like Kickstarter.
Using the Order Import Tool is simple: First, prepare your orders spreadsheet according to the template we provide, create a Channel Name for the import (such as “Kickstarter 2024”), and upload your order sheet.
On the next page, you will map each order in your import to an existing, published Lulu Project.
Lastly, select a shipping option and pay.
Once completed, leave the printing and white-labeled dropshipping to us for each order.
Direct Buy Buttons and Direct Checkout Links provide a simple way to sell print-on-demand products without building a full online store or integrating an ecommerce platform.
To begin, click Create Channel and complete the Stripe onboarding steps.
Once Stripe is connected, you can begin creating Direct Buy Buttons and Direct Checkout Links. Click your Buy Button Channel, then Add Product.
Select a published print project, give it a name, description, and price, then click Add Product.
Once the product is connected, you can then customize your buy button’s appearance.
And just like that, you have a customized buy button with different display options AND a checkout link that you can paste anywhere.
The possibilities aren’t endless, but they’re pretty close, and selling direct doesn’t get much easier.
Store Details
You can access the Store Details page for a store connected to Lulu Direct by clicking on your URL from the Dashboard page.
On the Store Details page, you can access the Store Settings, add a new product, and search through your products by title and status. You can also access your product details from this page. Let’s start at the top and work our way down to learn what each button does.
Store Settings
The first thing you’ll see on the Store Settings page is a place to add your contact information. If we have any issues printing or shipping an order, this is the information we'll use to contact you.
Next on the page is a place to add a custom packing slip logo, a return address, and a personal message for your buyers.
The orders your customers receive are always white-labeled, but this section is your opportunity to add your branding and personalization to their packing slips.
Next up are three sections crucial to fulfilling your orders—Production Delay, Automatic Order Approval, and Automatic Payments.
Why are these sections so important?
Production Delay: The Production Delay is the period during which you can cancel an order, and it can range from 60 to 1,440 minutes. Say you want to allow customers to cancel an order for up to 24 hours after they place it. Extending the Production Delay to 1,440 minutes allows you to manually cancel an order from your account for up to 24 hours after it has been paid for.
Automatic Order Approval: All orders require manual approval at first, but clicking Enable Automatic Order Approval will bypass the need to approve orders manually after the Production Delay ends.
Automatic Payments: Just like manual order approval, your orders will require manual payment. Enabling Automatic Payments will bypass the need to manually pay and use a saved payment method for each order instead. Instructions for setting up Automatic Payments can be found right on the page.
Returning to the Store Details page, it’s time for the information you’ve [possibly] been waiting for… how to connect a Lulu project to Lulu Direct!
Click Add A Product, and a window will appear with two options. You can connect to an existing store Product or make a new Product directly from this page.
Lulu Direct Tutorials
After you have connected your Lulu projects to your ecommerce store, you can also click on individual products from the Store Details page. This will bring you to a page where you can revise, deactivate, and remove the product.
Creating Bundles & Variants
You can enhance your website’s product pages and the buying experience by setting up bundles and variants. These options help you present your books in different ways and give customers more reasons to buy.
Variants enable you to create multiple book options under a single listing. For example, you might sell the same title in both hardcover and paperback, or offer different trim sizes. Variants keep your store organized while giving buyers the flexibility to choose the format they prefer.
Bundles allow you to sell multiple books together in a single listing. Popular uses include pairing a book with a companion journal, offering a special price on a complete series, or selling a discounted classroom workbook set. Bundles are a simple way to add value for your audience and encourage larger orders.
When used together, bundles and variants can help you maximize sales opportunities and better meet your customers’ needs, while Lulu handles the fulfillment behind the scenes.
Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
Whew, that was a lot of information! Hopefully, this guide helped you get acquainted with the features and functionality of the Lulu Direct dashboard. Are you feeling stuck or have a question you didn’t find the answer to? We have a dedicated support team to help answer your questions about Lulu Direct, plus a Knowledge Base full of commonly asked questions and tutorials. Contact our team through our Contact Support page, and we’ll be glad to help you get your WooCommerce store connected with Lulu Direct.
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.
昭和 (しょうわ) — Showa era (1926.12.25-1989.1.7) 昭和史 (しょうわし) — history of the Showa period (1926-1989) 昭和時代 (しょうわじだい) — Showa period (1926-1989) 昭和恐慌 (しょうわきょうこう) — Showa Depression (Japanese part of the Great Depression) 昭和の日 (しょうわのひ) — Showa Day (national holiday; April 29) 昭代 (しょうだい) — glorious reign 昭和一桁 (しょうわひとけた) — the first nine years of the Showa period (1926-1934) 昭然 (しょうぜん) — manifest 昭昭 (しょうしょう) — clear 昭昭 (しょうしょう) — clear
