News

Monday 2026-07-13

04:00 AM

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

This is a useful term. It helps us understand a topic or theory that can be considered from multiple points of view by people engaging with good intent.

“Pluto is a planet” was a controversial statement among some people who study the solar system.

On the other hand, it’s not controversial that Pluto actually exists.

Choosing to engage in a conversation about something that’s controversial gives us a chance to share our insights and engage in dialogue. And it also comes with the knowledge that we’ll need to devote time and care to having that conversation.

On the other hand, inventing false controversy is simply a tool to keep people away.

If you insist that the world is flat, and that talking about its spherical nature is controversial, then you’ve made it hard to be a travel agent, a geologist or a sailor. You’ve scared people away from a productive conversation because you’re claiming something without good intent.

The key element of ‘controversial’ is possibility. If that’s not there, it’s simply an empty argument.

      

03:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 化 [Kanji of the Day]

✍4

小3

change, take the form of, influence, enchant, delude, -ization

カ ケ

ば.ける ば.かす ふ.ける け.する

文化   (ぶんか)   —   culture
強化   (きょうか)   —   strengthening
変化   (へんか)   —   change
化する   (かする)   —   to change (into)
悪化   (あっか)   —   deterioration
活性化   (かっせいか)   —   stimulation (e.g., of an economy)
進化   (しんか)   —   evolution
少子化   (しょうしか)   —   declining birth rates
郵政民営化   (ゆうせいみんえいか)   —   postal privatisation (privatisation of Japan Post)
高齢化   (こうれいか)   —   population ageing (aging)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 窒 [Kanji of the Day]

✍11

中学

plug up, obstruct

チツ

窒息死   (ちっそくし)   —   death by suffocation
窒息   (ちっそく)   —   suffocation
窒素   (ちっそ)   —   nitrogen (N)
液体窒素   (えきたいちっそ)   —   liquid nitrogen
窒素酸化物   (ちっそさんかぶつ)   —   nitrogen oxide
一酸化二窒素   (いっさんかにちっそ)   —   dinitrogen monoxide
亜酸化窒素   (あさんかちっそ)   —   nitrous oxide (N2O)
窒素肥料   (ちっそひりょう)   —   nitrogenous fertilizer
窒化物   (ちっかぶつ)   —   nitride
二酸化窒素   (にさんかちっそ)   —   nitrogen dioxide

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Sunday 2026-07-12

09:00 PM

Security support for Bookworm handed over to the LTS team [Debian News]

On 12 July 2026, three years after the initial release, the regular support for Debian 12, alias bookworm, has come to an end. The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team is taking over security support from the Security and Release Teams.

07:00 AM

This Week In Techdirt History: July 5th – 11th [Techdirt]

03:00 AM

Mel’s back [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Last year, the recording session I did with Mel Robbins was going so well that her producers asked me to stick around–four hours later, we had recorded enough for two episodes.

One never knows how these things will feel until after the fact, but part 2 is live now. I hope you get as much out of it as I did…

My day with Mel inspired my new book, which ships in 9 weeks. And the limited-edition multi-pack is well on its way to being fully subscribed. I just added a new spiral-bound booklet for the first 700 orders. Photos to come when it comes back from the printer.

You can find the conversations with Mel here.

Problems can be solved.

Here’s a short riff on the world’s worst boss:

And here’s a page for Mel fans who are new to the blog.

And the episode…

      

A captive audience [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The moment you start treating your customers as captives, they begin to make other plans.

It might take a while, but they always end up leaving. The first step is warning away their friends.

On the other hand, when we treat our customers like the free agents they are, they often choose to stick around (and bring the others).

Before you reward an analyst for jacking up the price and making some money this week, it might be worth focusing on what that short-term move is going to cost you.

      

Just for Skeets and Giggles (7.11.26) [The Status Kuo]

The week began with a crash. At the Great American State Fair, that is. This patriotic hang glider’s landing captured the whole event. (Thankfully, he and the MAGA onlookers were uninjured.)

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Note: Some browsers, such as Firefox, aren’t opening Xcancel links. Others, such as Chrome and Safari, appear to open these links just fine. If a link won't open, cut and paste the URL, remove the word “cancel” then view the original X link.

I like this version even better.

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Following musical act cancellations, poor attendance and crushing heat waves, the weak sauce celebration ended with authorities ordering another evacuation as dangerous thunderstorms approached. That went over well.

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My favorite part of the finale was where much of the MAGA crowd had to take shelter.

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A bunch of losers marched through the streets of D.C. in masks.

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With the algae-filled Reflecting Pool still closed, this became a common theme of the Fourth of July festivities.

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If you haven’t seen Larry David’s new mockumentary, here’s a taste:

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And how’s this image for a bizarre meta moment?

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The comparison was inevitable.

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Trump attended the NATO summit and, amid his dementia haze, referred to Zelenskyy as “Putin.” For his part, Zelenskyy was on target.

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Trump also did this there:

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Best July 4 post:

And in honor of our independence, this now-classic SNL skit recirculated widely.

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The big news, of course, was Trump’s meddling in the World Cup. Here’s Ronny Chieng again to explain what happened.

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You can imagine the internet's response.

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There was something deeply funny about Trump intervening on Balogun’s behalf.

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So exactly how far would FIFA go to help Trump?

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Slow clap for this deep commentary.

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Marco Rubio, you’re in.

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That SNL skit got a makeover:

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In the end, it wasn’t even close.

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But we’re still America, right?! You’re damn right!

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This whole attempt to win through political pressure was too much for many.

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I like my humor dry like my martinis.

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The stollen is a nice touch.

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A friend sent me this.

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The Belgians offered some top-notch trolling.

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Even this woman on the street had it out for us and, well, we deserved it.

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A gentle reminder:

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Politics and sports weren’t limited to the U.S. game.

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Besides the World Cup scandal, there was the “Is he actually dead?” scandal back home surrounding Sen. Mitch McConnell. But maybe it’s been a while already?

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Read the caption, then the headline out loud.

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With so many GOP figures claiming they’d each talked to him for 20 minutes, Rep. Thomas Massie couldn't resist dunking on the absurdity.

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The Sick Sense?

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Who ya’ gonna call?

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Along the same lines:

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The humor soon went morbid.

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But let’s not weep too much for Mitch.

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Leave it to Borowitz…

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Few will forget what this man did.

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On our side, we had our own scandal that rocked our politics.

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Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) had the nerve to lecture Dems about Platner.

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Back in Oz, incredible things are happening.

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And this is rather uncanny when you think about it.

And The Onion seizing InfoWars from Alex Jones may be the best thing ever.

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How much is laughter worth in these rough times? How about sound, independent political and legal analysis? Enough to support yours truly by buying me coffee once a month? If you think that’s fair and reasonable, upgrade your account to a paid subscription today. And if you’ve already signed up as a paid supporter, thank you! You’re my hero!

Subscribe now

A few doggo entries this week. Here’s RxCKSTxR with a voiceover only he can deliver.

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Always remember to leave at least one toy out of the wash!

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My cat keeps trying to get out of the house, but when he succeeds, he just sits on the porch. Probably because he knows what’s really out there. Unlike this little guy. Sound up!

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This was high drama! The buck… stops here?

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Time for some kidding around.

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The World Cup happily found other things than Trump’s interference to focus on.

First came the Norwegian machine, Erling Haaland, whose face, hair and lurch are pretty much everywhere.

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The guys are man crushing hard.

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But if you see Haaland online, there’s a good chance it’s actually this woman.

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Wait, there’s more!

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Even though the host countries are out of contention, excitement hasn’t waned. Even the sportscasters are losing their damn minds.

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This made me giggle. Oof!

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This meme still had some life in it.

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It took me way too long to figure out what I was watching here.

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I started writing 10-page papers every day after the 2020 election, so…

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Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tied the knot, but in case you missed it…

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We all need a bit more of this in our lives right now! Well, I get plenty, but for the rest of you…

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OK, two dad jokes to round out this week! Here’s one for the Trekkies.

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If you don’t get this at first, just say the last sentence out loud.

Have a great weekend!

Jay

02:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 后 [Kanji of the Day]

✍6

小6

empress, queen, after, behind, back, later

コウ ゴ

きさき

皇后   (こうごう)   —   empress
太后   (たいこう)   —   empress dowager
皇太后   (こうたいこう)   —   Empress Dowager
皇后陛下   (こうごうへいか)   —   Her Majesty the Empress (of Japan)
王后陛下   (おうこうへいか)   —   Her Majesty the Queen
王后   (おうこう)   —   queen
母后   (ぼこう)   —   empress dowager
太皇太后   (たいこうたいごう)   —   Grand Empress Dowager
天后   (てんこう)   —   queen of heaven
后宮   (こうぐう)   —   empress's palace

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 鹿 [Kanji of the Day]

鹿

✍11

小4

deer

ロク

しか か

鹿児島県   (かごしまけん)   —   Kagoshima Prefecture (Kyushu)
馬鹿   (ばか)   —   idiot
馬鹿に   (ばかに)   —   ridiculously
馬鹿にする   (ばかにする)   —   to make fun of
大鹿   (おおじか)   —   large deer
馬鹿馬鹿しい   (ばかばかしい)   —   absurd
馬鹿馬鹿しい   (ばかばかしい)   —   absurd
鹿狩   (ししがり)   —   hunting (of animals such as boar, deer, etc.)
馬鹿らしい   (ばからしい)   —   absurd
馬鹿げた   (ばかげた)   —   absurd

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Saturday 2026-07-11

10:00 PM

Pluralistic: Workplace "flexibility" isn't (11 Jul 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links



A giant arachnoid woman arched backwards on the banks of a tropical river alongside which stand armed men. Behind loom palms, mountains and a smoking volcano. Rain sleets down over the scene.

Workplace "flexibility" isn't (permalink)

Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.

The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.

Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.

But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.

In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":

https://prospect.org/2026/07/09/dangerous-myth-of-flexibility-uber-lyft-gig-economy/

This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.

On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.

Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.

In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).

This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.

This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.

For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.

But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.

Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.

This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.

Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2025/Uber-Expands-AI-Data-Platform-to-Power-Next-Gen-Enterprise-and-AI-Lab-Needs/default.aspx

(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)

Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).

As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.

Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.

Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."

Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":

https://onlabor.org/a-win-for-platform-workers-ilo-convention-no-193/

The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3435961/america-must-lead-gig-economy/

But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.

The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.

What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:

https://vimeo.com/1203473793

This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.

This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5729723

The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/23/become-unoptimizable/#downward-redistribution

Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.


Hey look at this (permalink)



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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Alanya to Alanya: feminist science fiction adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/12/alanya-to-alanya-feminist-science-fiction-adventure/

#20yrsago Soviet jokes https://web.archive.org/web/20060708144926/http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7412

#10yrsago Empirical proof that Terms of Service are “the biggest lie on the Internet” https://web.archive.org/web/20160712233511/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos-agreements-even-ones-that-demand-first-born-as-payment/

#10yrsago Fox’s employee contracts may mean Gretchen Carlson will never get her day in court https://web.archive.org/web/20160712123858/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/11/3797060/dirty-trick-fox-news-using-undercut-gretchen-carlsons-sexual-harassment-suit/

#10yrsago To see the future, visit the most remote areas of the GBAO https://medium.com/studio-d/6-1-glimpses-of-the-future-e3fdb510dcc1#.iwyo4x141

#10yrsago Benjamin Frisch’s “Fun Family”: good old American narcissism https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/12/benjamin-frischs-fun-family-good-old-american-narcissism/

#5yrsago The Sacklers will get to keep billions https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/12/monopolist-solidarity/#sacklers-billions


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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



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

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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Google Opposes Site Blocking in Europe as U.S. Piracy Blocking Plans Gain Momentum [TorrentFreak]

google dnsGoogle rarely addresses pirate site blocking in public, but it is a significant concern now that these measures directly impact the company’s own infrastructure.

The American tech company has been ordered to block access to pirate domain names through its DNS resolver in France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, for example.

In a recent submission to the European Commission’s call for evidence on the review of the Copyright Directive, Google lists its site blocking critique in detail. The filing is marked “Privileged and Confidential” but it was posted publicly on the commission’s website, alongside other submissions.

Blocking Harms Outweigh Benefits, Google Argues

Google’s submission addresses a variety of topics, including the company’s opposition to broad site blocking measures. This includes VPN and third-party DNS blocking, which is seen as disproportionate and ineffective. The same applies to IP-address blocking, which risks targeting infrastructure of legitimate sites and services.

“Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, VPNs, is ineffective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily circumvented by using alternative DNS resolvers. It is disproportionate, catching lawful services, raising extra-territoriality concerns and blocking entire domains,” Google writes.

“Similarly, blocking IP addresses neither removes the content nor achieves proportionate outcomes, as many lawful services may be using the same IP address,” the company adds.

From Google’s EU Submission

google eu submission

The submission cited several real-world examples to support these claims. It mentions that Italy’s Piracy Shield blocked a Google Drive subdomain, as well as IP-addresses hosting over 42 million domains of Cloudflare customers. Meanwhile, in France, CISCO stopped offering its OpenDNS service after a local court ordered DNS resolver blockades.

Google also highlights a December 2019 incident in Portugal where ISPs blocked Google-hosted Virtual IP addresses, disrupting “core Google services and cut off legitimate traffic for other innocent Google Cloud customers sharing the same virtual IPs.”

These concerns are not incidental. A large-scale empirical study published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) recently found that following a LaLiga blocking order in Spain, more than 554,000 domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts. This included website from Amnesty International and the ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, Stanford Law Review, and Amazon S3 endpoints.

Clear Guardrails

In addition to the overblocking concerns, the submission notes that any expansions of the blocking regime in Europe should be proportional and keep the safeguards in mind that are already provided by EU law. Google specifically notes that courts “should not serve as mere rightholder ‘mail boxes’, by simply rubber-stamping blocking demands.”

Google believes that blocking injunction should only be used as a last resort if regular takedown options failed. These injunctions should be transparent, limited in time, while both rightsholders and the intermediaries share the implementation costs.

The submission shows that Google is not outright opposed to site blocking, as long as it’s restricted to targeted and proportional measures. The real solution to piracy does not lie in enforcement, Google argues, but in creating superior legal alternatives.

“In our experience, unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives,” Google writes.

U.S. Site Blocking Gains Momentum

Google’s EU filing was submitted a few days before U.S. lawmakers doubled down on their site blocking intentions. On June 30, the House IP subcommittee held a hearing on copyright protection and enforcement on the Internet, with planned site blocking legislation as a key topic.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa told The Capitol Forum that he planned to introduce a site blocking bill that week. While there is no record of an introduced bill, it suggests that momentum is building.

This was also confirmed during the hearing, as Issa closed by signaling that the educational phase of the lawmaking process is over.

“Language is being distributed on what we’ll believe is final compromises to get to legislation,” he said. “It’s going to be my intention, with the help of my chairman and old friend, Mr. Jordan, that we will move it out of this committee.”

IP Subcommittee Chairman Issa

issa

Rep. Issa is retiring at the end of his current term. Whether the bill has been formally introduced since his stated deadline is not clear. TorrentFreak has reached out to Issa’s office for comment, but we didn’t hear back.

Issa’s bill isn’t the only proposal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who introduced the competing FADPA bill last year, told The Capitol Forum she is negotiating a bipartisan, bicameral “four corners agreement” with Issa and Senators Blackburn, Coons, Schiff, and Tillis. That formally confirms out earlier reporting.

Meanwhile, the hearing made clear that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony only intensified the call for site blocking. The Supreme Court concluded that ISPs cannot be held secondarily liable for user piracy unless they actively induce or tailor their services for infringement, which means that rightsholders will need an alternative enforcement tool.

Google is Silent on U.S. Plans

Google has not commented on the U.S. site blocking plans yet, but it is a member of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) whose president, Chris Mohr, did testify at the recent subcommittee hearing.

According to Mohr, his members are “genuinely split” on site blocking. At the same time, he stressed that a U.S. blocking bill should have robust judicial backing, while the technical measures should be precise enough to prevent overblocking and protect shared infrastructure.

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2Coalition), which represents major tech companies including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, has previously critiqued broad blocking plans. Last year the organization launched its DNS at Risk campaign, warning the public about DNS blocking threats.

Google’s EU submission is also quite outspoken. While it does not refer to the American plans, Google is clearly opposed to requiring blocking measures from third-party DNS resolvers, while noting that blocking is ineffective, disproportionate, and harmful to lawful sites and services.

Whether the company will make the same arguments publicly as the American bill moves forward remains to be seen.

Google’s submission to the European Commission’s consultation is available here (pdf).

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

09:00 PM

Updated Debian 12: 12.15 released [Debian News]

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifteenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 12 (codename bookworm). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.

Updated Debian 13: 13.6 released [Debian News]

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

02:00 PM

His Name Is Lorenzo Salgado Araujo [The Status Kuo]

Image from the family’s GoFundMe page

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke at 5 a.m., just as he had most mornings for the last 35 years. He kissed his wife Maria goodbye, loaded his tools into his work van and drove out to collect the last members of his construction crew before sunrise. Most evenings, he came home to a meal Maria had prepared for him, sat on the porch with his dog and listened to music before doing it all again the next morning.

Salgado Araujo was 52, was applying for a work permit after decades of being undocumented, and had no criminal record. By his family’s account, after filing a year and a half of paperwork, he was near to his goal. “My father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a hardworking Mexican man… has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother,” his son Ronaldo wrote in a statement.

That day, Salgado Araujo didn’t return to his family, his porch or his dog. An ICE agent shot and killed him, adding his name to the growing list of people whose lives have been violently ended by ICE, an agency operating with little transparency and even less accountability. Salgado Araujo’s dream of living and working legally in American was snuffed out. His family, friends, colleagues and community were left grieving, enraged and rightfully demanding answers.

Share

The morning of July 7

Surveillance video places Salgado Araujo’s white van on Canal Street at 6:46 a.m., according to a timeline FOX 26 Houston reconstructed from surveillance footage, bystander cellphone video, family interviews and ICE’s own statements.

A second surveillance clip obtained by CNN shows him driving on Canal Street as a black SUV trails him on his left. Seconds later, another black SUV cuts through a nearby shopping center parking lot, moving toward his van and the first SUV. CNN also reported that video obtained by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) shows Salgado Araujo’s van turning onto Canal Street with a black SUV following. Neither clip shows markings identifying the vehicles as law enforcement.

According to a CNN source familiar with the investigation, ICE vehicles attempted to box in the van, which struck at least one of the ICE vehicles as the stop unfolded. No publicly available footage captures the moments immediately before the shooting. An ICE agent fired at least one shot, striking Salgado Araujo in the abdomen.

Juliet Martinez, A Houston resident, recorded the aftermath. Her video, shared with CNN, shows a wounded man lying face down near a barbershop, with a federal agent kneeling over him while speaking by phone. “He was screaming for help and screaming that he was in pain,” Martinez said. “He yelled, ‘Help me! They shot me!’” Three other men are seen in handcuffs nearby—among them, his family later confirmed, Salgado Araujo’s brother.

Houston Fire Department paramedics arrived within roughly ten minutes, according to video obtained by KPRC 2. Salgado Araujo was taken to Ben Taub Hospital with CPR in progress. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

ICE never contacted his family directly. Ronaldo Salgado learned that his father had been shot from a video circulating on Facebook, recognizing him not by his face but by his voice, crying out from the pavement. He and his brothers later learned of their father’s death the same way: through social media reports, not from any official notification. “They haven’t sent anyone to speak to myself or my family, no contact at all,” Ronaldo said. “We still don’t have any answers. There has been no communication between us and our DHS.”

ICE’s questionable account

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, ICE described the shooting as the outcome of a “targeted enforcement operation.” The agency said officers tried to conduct a traffic stop in the 6800 block of Canal Street at approximately 6:50 a.m. Salgado Araujo, ICE claimed, attempted to flee.

“From information we’re receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense,” ICE said.

But newly obtained footage, analyzed for KPRC 2 by a former Houston police homicide detective, shows Salgado Araujo was struck on the right side of his abdomen. This calls ICE’s account into question, since it is hard to see how an agent who feared being run over would have fired from that angle. Separately, the New York Times reported that ICE’s operation that morning was actually aimed at two individuals from Guatemala who had no connection to Salgado Araujo or his van.

DHS has since acknowledged that Salgado Araujo was not the target of the operation. According to a Homeland Security official, agents had been surveilling a property where they had previously observed two white vans, tied to the two people believed to be in the country without legal status. Salgado Araujo drove a van that resembled the one they were looking for. The agents moved to box him in before confirming that he was the person they were after. Only after the stop was underway did they determine, from the vehicle’s registration, that he lacked legal immigration status.

Neither ICE nor DHS has said whether agents identified themselves as law enforcement before or during the stop.

What’s missing and what contradicts it

There are strong reasons to doubt ICE’s account, as numerous other cases have shown when video or witness evidence directly contradicted the agency’s initial version of events.

More than two days after the shooting, federal officials still have not released any video, photographs or physical evidence supporting their account. No body camera footage exists; DHS claimed in a Thursday statement that the officers involved “had not been issued body-worn cameras due to back-to-back Democrat shutdowns,” and that cameras had been deployed to more than half of ICE’s field offices, with the rest—including Houston’s—expected to receive them within 60 days.

No dash camera video, dispatch logs or photographs of the alleged vehicle damage have been made public either, and that’s a central problem. LULAC says still images taken from witness videos appear to show little or no visible damage to Salgado Araujo’s van. That doesn’t square well with ICE’s account of a van used to ram an agent’s vehicle and then allegedly weaponized against an officer. While CNN’s source did describe some contact with an ICE vehicle during the stop, it did not describe the severity of the collision.

“We need the facts,” said Lupe Torres, LULAC’s national vice president for the Southwest, adding that the organization had not yet reviewed all the evidence.

LULAC national president Roman Palomares underscored the underlying distrust. The immigration crackdown, he said, has created conditions in which it is “open season on Latinos” by officers who believe they can “shoot and explain later.”

That skepticism is warranted. In the March 2025 killing of Rubén Ray Martinez, a U.S. citizen, federal officials claimed he had accelerated and intentionally driven over an agent before he was shot. But video obtained later showed his vehicle stationary or moving at very low speed when agents opened fire.

In January, DHS accused Renée Good of trying to run over and murder an agent before he shot her. The department separately claimed that Alex Pretti had been “brandishing” a weapon during a struggle in Minneapolis. Video in both cases told a different story.

Here, agents reportedly removed Salgado Araujo’s identifying belongings before he reached the hospital, leaving staff unable to register him under his own name. The circumstances prompted commentator Bill Kristol to ask whether they pointed to “a coverup or attempt to manage information” from the outset.

Who Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was

While the ICE agents had tried hard to anonymize his killing, his family and community insisted upon uplifting his humanity.

At a Wednesday news conference, flanked by LULAC, Houston-area members of Congress and Harris County officials, his eldest son, Ronaldo, a teacher, introduced his father to the country that had just taken him. “I want to tell you about my dad,” he said. “He was a hardworking family man who never wanted his name to be known by anyone outside of his family. He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people.”

Salgado Araujo had met Maria when they were teenagers in Mexico. They came to the United States together, and over the decades that followed, built their own home in Houston with help from the men who worked beside him. He spent his career in construction, building homes across the suburbs while raising three sons, all American citizens, and putting each of them through college. He eventually ran his own business, and was known for his work ethic, his fairness and his willingness to help anyone who needed it, according to a GoFundMe page created on his family’s behalf.

He had also completed a biometric scan and fingerprinting earlier this year as part of his work permit application.

His son believes that same care is part of why his father may not have stopped for the vehicles now identified as belonging to ICE. Salgado Araujo had studied, with his lawyers, what to do if immigration agents ever pulled him over. But the agents who approached him Tuesday were driving unmarked vehicles. If his father sped away, his son believes it was more likely from fear that someone wanted to steal his van and his tools—his livelihood—than an attempt to escape federal agents he didn’t know were there.

Three other men were in the van that morning: his brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two employees, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and José Trinidad Rojas Pliego. ICE detained all three at the scene, and they remain in custody.

The consequences of that were immediate. LULAC CEO Juan Proaño said: “There was nothing to identify him when he arrived at the hospital and as a result the hospital took him in as a John Doe. In doing so, it set off a bunch of triggers, a bunch of extra hurdles that the family has had to effectively navigate through.” Officials required a biometric and DNA verification before confirming his identity, and he was not officially declared dead until roughly 24 hours after the shooting. His widow, Maria, was told she must be the one to claim his body. But because she lacks legal status, the family has had to bring in lawyers simply to retrieve him.

The community of Houston has been stirred to action. Hundreds gathered in Magnolia Park on Wednesday evening, marching along Canal Street chanting “ICE out of Houston” and building a memorial of candles, flowers, and handwritten notes at the site where he was killed. Local artist Sarah Fisher spent the day painting his portrait, incorporating dry-cleaning ID stickers into the piece to spell “SOS” and “XOX”—a cry for help, she said, and a symbol of love.

A statement from the family, read at a candlelight vigil that night, asked for three things: a full independent investigation, an end to what the family described as ICE’s ambush-style tactics and for the neighborhood to look after Maria, his widow. U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee, who joined the vigil, connected the case to a pattern he said Houston shouldn’t have to relearn from Minneapolis: “This is not the first time this has happened,” he said, “and every single time they come and they tell us their version of events, but we don’t see any evidence.”

President Sheinbaum of Mexico responds

Salgado Araujo’s killing reached the highest levels of the Mexican government. President Claudia Sheinbaum called it another regrettable death of a Mexican national in the United States, and she said Wednesday that Mexico intends to escalate. “Our objective is to go beyond diplomatic notes and the measures we have already raised before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, because we cannot allow the mistreatment of our fellow Mexicans in the United States,” Sheinbaum said.

By Thursday, that pledge had taken concrete shape. Mexico’s foreign secretary, Roberto Velasco, announced the government will formally request that U.S. state prosecutors and the Department of Justice investigate Salgado Araujo’s killing, and it will pursue separate civil action against the private companies that operate ICE detention facilities. Velasco tied the case to a broader tally: 17 Mexican nationals have now died in the United States in immigration-related cases during the current administration, 14 in ICE custody and three in ICE operations, including Salgado Araujo. Sheinbaum, for her part, said his killing “seems targeted.”

Where things stand

The Harris County Medical Examiner has ruled Salgado Araujo’s death a homicide, caused by a penetrating gunshot wound.

DHS’s Office of Inspector General is reviewing the shooting, while the FBI is separately investigating the alleged assault on a federal officer. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has launched a parallel review, though Houston city officials say the city lacks jurisdiction to investigate federal agents directly.

Per reporting by The New Republic, the three men detained alongside Salgado Araujo are now facing pressure to sign self-deportation orders, according to Juan Proaño, CEO of LULAC. Proaño said that relatives in contact with the men confirmed the pressure, and that some of the men may be inclined to sign rather than face longer detention. He called it “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.”

Separately, Cesar Espinosa of the Houston civil rights group FIEL said the men are being told to cooperate with ICE’s version of events, under threat of criminal charges or expedited removal if they refuse.

On Thursday, four Houston-area members of Congress sent a formal letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director David Venturella demanding the release of all video and evidence supporting the agency’s account. So far, none has been made public.

His name is Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

Most people killed by ICE this year have not had cases like Alex Pretti’s or Renée Good’s, which generated national coverage, congressional attention and sustained public outrage. Most were not U.S. citizens. Many were Latino, Black or otherwise nonwhite immigrants whose deaths registered only as local news, if they registered at all.

Salgado Araujo’s case has broken through in a way many others have not. It has drawn national coverage, brought Houston’s congressional delegation to a podium and reached the president of Mexico.

Every name on the list the Mexican government read aloud this week belonged to someone with a Ronaldo and a Maria of their own: people who loved and knew everything about that person, who to them was “el mundo entero,” as Salgado Araujo’s family described him. “The whole world.”

01:00 PM

Xbox Lays Off 20% Of Staff, Cut Studios, Largely Impacting Acquired Devs It Promised It Wouldn’t Layoff [Techdirt]

The long-rumored layoffs at Xbox have come and they are massive. We just recently discussed the mess that Microsoft’s Xbox division has become. An internal email that was sent to staff by CEO Asha Sharma laid out just how bad things were, essentially preparing the staff for the forthcoming staffing cuts. Interestingly, this is the latest in a series of staff cuts, many of which have been at studios that Microsoft recently acquired and told the FTC and the courts that there wouldn’t be layoffs in order to get the acquisitions approved. Those were lies, of course, but there won’t be any punishment for those lies. Regulation is just so un-American, you know.

This round of layoffs will effect over 3,000 staff members eventually, or about a fifth of the Xbox division workforce. The appetizer this past week accounts for about half that number. Working at Xbox right now must be buckets of fun, where you get to try to perform quality work while wondering if your name is on some list somewhere. An email went around again acknowledging the layoffs, as well as several Xbox studios going independent.

This email, shared with Kotaku, says that 1,600 of those layoffs will take place today, while the rest will take place later. Compulsion Games and Double Fine will become independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs “have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3,” though the specifics of that have not yet been disclosed. Arkane Lyon is entering legally required “consultation” in France to review its options, and its fate remains unclear.

Layoffs will also take place in varying sizes across Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and Xbox Game Studios, though Sharma stated that none of Xbox’s first-party, publicly announced games or projects are being canceled as a part of these cuts. Mojang and King will now report directly to Sharma.

Again, several of these studios experiencing layoffs were recently acquired by Microsoft and, during regulatory proceedings, Microsoft said that layoffs wouldn’t occur. And, again, there will be no consequences for these lies, other than those felt by these ex-employees who no longer have a job.

Interestingly, these layoffs came along with a message that Xbox was going to start getting real lean on where it focuses its staff and money investments, primarily into “core franchises” in the gaming space. Despite that message, we’re already hearing about how these layoffs will result in the delay of current production of games in those very core franchises.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their careers, current and former staff have told me that job losses across Bethesda Game Studios locations have removed more than 50 employees, including “key, high-performing people in the trenches” building the company’s long-awaited Skyrim successor. This in turn, they say, has shattered morale, raised the risk of future development crunch, and increased the likelihood that the game’s already far-off completion date will be delayed.

If you’re interested in how Xbox management is behaving in the midst of all of this turmoil and the obviously negative emotions of the remaining employees, well, it’s been awfully fucking shitty, honestly. Several Bethesda offices saw employees setting up “Celebrations of Service” in common areas, where staff members put up pictures of and messages to ex-coworkers to show their appreciation for all they’d done. That same day Xbox HR ordered that those memorials be taken down, all under the bullshit excuse that you can’t do that sort of thing in a common area.

“Unfortunately, HR made our office manager take this down almost immediately,” posted the union account. “They said because it’s in a common area, it had to be removed. We’ve used common areas for many things as a team, including fan works, but HR seems to believe that a Celebration of Service is inappropriate.”

And, since you can’t have real American capitalism in the modern era without getting a heavy dose of irony to go along with it, Asha Sharma herself was recently named to a task for at the Federal Reserve to advise on “jobs and productivity.” This is a bit like the FDA putting Hannibal Lecter on its advisory panel for a proper nutritional diet.

“The Federal Reserve’s commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering. As is our resolve to pursue our mandate with rigor,” Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said in a press release on July 9. “The U.S. economy has changed significantly over the last generation, and never more so than right now. Each task force will carefully consider whether policymakers’ means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon. I am honored that the best minds from a range of disciplines have agreed to work with us to sharpen our performance as an institution. The goal is straightforward: to ensure the Fed is best positioned to achieve our objectives in this consequential time.”

Maximum employment? What an interesting concept for someone who just instituted historic layoffs to advise on.

So, how are things going at Xbox? Pretty fucking horrible. Layoffs, tone-deaf executives, delayed games, poor morale, and a workforce living in fear that they might be next. And I just can’t help but to return the point that much of this is a result of overextending acquisitions of enormous developers and publishers in the last five years, during which the company promised this very thing would not happen.

09:00 AM

How Google And AI Nearly Made A Seasoned Reporter Spiral [Techdirt]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo. 

At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.

Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.

Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story? 

“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.

On the main page of Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals there is a large photo of an energy site on the water with “Strategic Oil Hubs Worldwide” written over it.
Screenshot by ProPublica

Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, per the website, had more than 850 employees and 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity across six global hubs. This was puzzling: Our reporting had led us to believe Calce was struggling to raise enough money for a single project in the U.S., not overseeing a massive, multinational oil storage corporation. 

Had we been wrong? 

We turned to Google to learn more about the company’s top executives. Its CEO, Sarah Jenkins, had more than 20 years of experience at major energy firms. And its chief technology officer, David Chen, “built the company’s proprietary inventory management portal and integrated AI-driven predictive maintenance systems,” according to his bio. But we couldn’t find any trace of either of them online. Chalk it up to common names? 

We then Googled one of the more distinct names: Vice President for Sustainability Dr. Sofia Rossi, who had “spearheaded the ‘Future Fuels’ program, preparing assets for biofuels and hydrogen.” But, again, nothing. The links to their LinkedIn profiles were dead.

On the page about the executive leadership of Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals there are four employees with their credentials listed.
Screenshot by ProPublica

When we searched the company’s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.

We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead. 

We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website. 

What was going on with this website? We looked at the source code and noticed an odd notation, “This feature isn’t implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”

A collection of numbers and letters making up the code of a website.
Screenshot by ProPublica

We checked the site’s domain registration, and we had our (apparent) answer: It was created this year and traced back to a company called Hostinger that offers an AI website builder for $2.99 per month. “Describe it, and AI builds it,” its homepage says. “Appear on Google and AI search automatically.”

Indeed, Google’s “AI Overview” search response, now thrust on users by default with more and more regularity, seemed to ratify the company’s bona fides:

A Google search of “what is Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals” reveals a long “AI Overview” response.
Screenshot by ProPublica

When I searched for an award the company claimed on its website to have won, the Google AI Overview said that “Recent notable recipients include Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals, recognized for their rapid expansion in the independent oil and terminal operations sector.”

A Google search of “‘energy review’ magazine ‘Emerging Tech Award’” reveals a long AI Overview response.
Screenshot by ProPublica

Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is a real LLC. But everything on its website — from its history of the company, to its job postings, a diversity and inclusion policy — appears to be fictional. But perhaps more troubling is that Google, the proprietor of the world’s primary research tool, has rolled out AI Overviews that can indiscriminately take in fake material and authoritatively spit it back out as real.

In response to questions, a Google spokesperson said in a statement: “AI Overviews are rooted in our core Search ranking systems, surfacing reliable and high-quality information for the vast majority of queries. For uncommon search terms like these, there might not be high quality information published that matches the query — and we use these examples to improve our search systems.”

After we reached out to Hostinger, the company pulled down the site. “After receiving your inquiry, we carried out an internal review. Based on the violations identified, we suspended the website and the account behind it in line with our Terms of Service,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

What we encountered is a particular species of a larger problem that is beginning to be better understood. In April, The New York Times reported on an analysis that found Google’s AI Overviews were accurate approximately 9 out of 10 times, noting that that added up to “tens of millions of erroneous answers every hour” given vast search volumes. (A Google spokesperson told the Times that the study has “serious holes.” The company has acknowledged that AI Overviews “can make mistakes.”) 

A BBC reporter wrote a fictional article naming himself the best tech journalist at eating hot dogs, and Google’s AI as well as ChatGPT quickly picked it up and parroted it back.  

And the source material for the AI Overviews also appears eminently gameable, even when not trafficking in actual fiction. “It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests,” ran a recent headline in 404 Media. 

The mystery website ended up as just a single paragraph in our story. But the larger implication is obvious: fakes, counterfeits and frauds that would have taken considerable effort to create just a few years ago can now be churned out pretty much instantly.

While preparing this piece, we reached out to Calce asking about the site. An attorney for his company, America First Refining, replied to us with a letter dated June 24 that the attorney sent to Hostinger. The attorney also addressed the letter to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals website.  

“I write to demand immediate removal from the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website of all unauthorized references to America First’s office address on your website,” the letter said. “As you are aware, America First has no connection or affiliation with the brownsvilleenergyterminals.com website and has not authorized the use of its corporate address there.”

I’m left with lingering questions about the website: What was it for? Was it put up by some malicious actor who simply found the company’s LLC records and decided to create a website? Was it a test site that was mistakenly put online? Or could it have been designed for consumption by someone who was meant to think it was real? 

We don’t know, and our emails to the press contact listed on the website, media@brownsvilleenergyterminals.com, bounced back.

06:00 AM

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Sell Me Lies, Sell Me Sweet Meta Lies [Techdirt]

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

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

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

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

Our fun links this week are Roost, the “slow-cial” messaging app, and PlotLines for visualizing classic novels on a map.

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

FCC General Counsel Channels Founding Fathers To Falsely Claim First Amendment Allows Banning Porn [Techdirt]

Another senior Trump administration official is gleefully showing off his true colors: The current general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published an opinion column with the Heritage Foundation’s news outlet The Daily Signal calling for stronger obscenity regulation. 

From the Founding through most of American history, courts allowed the legislature to control pornographic material. Judicial reactions to internet pornography broke this tradition to our great detriment.

That’s by Adam Candeub, the general counsel for FCC chair Brendan Carr’s censorship regime. Among other things, he was the lawyer who represented the racist Jared Taylor when he unsuccessfully sued Twitter for being moderated. He also was a key player in the first Trump administration’s effort to get rid of Section 230. Lately, he’s been one of the driving forces behind model legislation that helped lead to mass adoption of age verification laws around the United States. Candeub also contributed the section on Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulatory actions for regulating online speech to the public policy treatise for Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 effort. 

His resumé aside, Candeub’s latest contribution to wider discussion on free speech, pornography, and obscenity law is replete with culture war talking points of very little substance. He frames his arguments as a patriotic call to action referencing the founding fathers of the United States on the occasion of our country’s semiquincentennial year. 

He says they would have “supported” stronger obscenity regulations and a resumption of obscenity prosecutions, echoing recent calls by figures in the religious right and anti-porn movements to do so. It’s easy to claim what people 250 years ago would have said or believed since they’re not around to defend themselves.

But a casual look shows that several of the founding fathers were not particularly pure or morally superior when it came to sex and relationships. Even if you look past their somewhat infamous extramarital affairs, Ben Franklin was famous for both writing and sharing materials that might not even pass the test for obscenity today. Thomas Jefferson expressed deep outrage at the concept of censoring literature based on religious morality tests. Writing to bookseller Nicolas Dufief in 1814 after a magistrate threatened prosecution over a controversial text, Jefferson demanded, “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy?” 

These are not the actions of men who would quickly embrace anti-obscenity laws.

I wrote for Techdirt not too long ago about the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, calling pornography a “national security threat” and urging the Department of Justice to resume prosecuting alleged obscenity as a way to fight pornography’s accessibility. 

Republican Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana also sent a letter to Trump’s Justice Department in May, arguing that the feds “[ending] obscenity prosecution was a mistake.”

This all matters, given that Candeub is expected to move to a top-level DOJ position soon.

His anti-porn screed is full of nonsense:

“Americans born after the mid-1990s have lived their entire lives in a world awash with hardcore pornography. Never has so much pornography been so available to so many at so little cost. Our laws leave much pornography effectively unregulated. Our technology, especially smartphones, brings portable, private porn shops to everyone’s phone.”

Aside from the clear misinformation about an “unregulated” pornography industry, Candeub proposes a supposed moral restoration of obscenity laws such that anything viewed through the lens of non-traditional sexual expression could be fair game for legislatures to heavily restrict or outright ban. 

Much of his column summarizes a report he produced on the topic for the Heritage Foundation, which was published on July 6. The report is aptly titled, “Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age.” It is replete with the same talking points from the most extremist elements of the anti-pornography movement who desire to ban all pornography.

He praises the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Free Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxton, which found that Texas could require age verification for online adult content, despite it going against previous Supreme Court First Amendment precedent.

The report also calls for the return of Comstock laws and the patchwork of anti-vice statutes that were historically used to prosecute individuals for “obscene” devices, the transmission of “prurient” content, and other prohibitions that lasted into the 20th century. 

Most alarming, he views the high court’s 6-3 decision in the Paxton case as an optimistic but quite unclear step to modern Comstock prosecutions in state-level courts:

Paxton may signal the reinvigoration of a dual-track approach to the regulation of obscenity: States can require oversight for minors, and mostly anything goes for adults. At the least, it is unclear what effect, if any, Paxton will have on obscenity for adults.”

He adds:

“The most optimistic result under current law would be a reinvigorated Miller with the national government again able to regulate the transmission of obscenity. The case’s flexible terms could allow for obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission. Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity.”

The bolded text is Candeub’s silver bullet. By his interpretation of the current Comstock law, the incumbent FCC’s general counsel is essentially calling for criminal prosecution for transmitting “obscene” web content across state lines because, well, the internet exists and it transcends borders. 

This is exceptionally problematic for two reasons. First, Candeub works for the FCC and is backing a legal strategy that’s been used, historically, to aggressively prosecute women, LGBTQ+ individuals, entire communities of color, consensual sex workers, and pornographic and non-pornographic publishers for their speech. 

This is the FCC presenting itself as the morality speech police.

Second, Candeub’s advocacy in this report and column conforms to Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s call for the prosecution of “pornographers” who spread “the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography.”

We’ve seen this idiocy before. 

Candeub’s arguments are about far more than pornography. He is contributing, from his position as a top government legal official, to a much broader effort to revive long-discredited obscenity and vice legal doctrines and expand government authority over lawful expression and activity. All of this is done in the guise of “restoring public morality” and “protecting children” from a supposed cultural decay. 

Coming from the lead attorney for Trump’s FCC, one of the architects of Project 2025, and a likely to be senior DOJ official, this signals a terrifying push forward towards a public policy agenda to enable greater and greater censorship by dubbing things like LGBTQ+ content and legal adult pornography as something that can be banned.

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

Daily Deal: The All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle [Techdirt]

The All-in-One Adobe Creative Cloud Suite Course Bundle has 10 courses designed to teach you about video editing, animations, photography, design, and more. Courses cover popular Adobe products like Lightroom, After Effects, Photoshop, and Adobe XD. The bundle is on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

04:00 AM

Adults Broke The Internet, And They’re Trying To Fix It By Kicking Kids Off [Techdirt]

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of developmental psychologist Candice Odgers. I’ve mentioned her and her work on the site many times, and she was a guest on my podcast as well. She actually has expertise and has done the work to look at the impact of social media on kids. In many ways she’s the anti-Jonathan Haidt with actual facts, not made up nonsense (which is why when she debated Haidt, he came out of it looking pathetic).

Odgers gave a TED Talk recently, which is now online. It’s worth watching in its entirety (only about 12 minutes) as she details how the moral panic about kids and social media is bullshit, and how banning kids from social media will do way more damage to their mental health:

A few choice quotes (though, again, watch the whole thing). First, she points out that on many important metrics (including the metrics many teenagers were judged by in past generations), we’re doing incredibly well:

in the past 20 years, we’ve had some major wins.

Rates of teen violence, alcohol use, pregnancy have plummeted to historic lows.

You are looking at the most educated generation ever in terms of high school graduation. Young people are inventors. They’re activists. They’re leaders. They’re amazing singers. They’re Olympians. They’re amazing.

And, yes, in some cases they’re more anxious and sadder about the world. Though, some of that may just be the state of the world today. And while she doesn’t say this, I know I’ve heard her talk about it before: some of her work from way back started from the premise that the reason kids were stressed out and anxious was because of social media, but repeated studies failed to find any indication of that (some of which we’ve reported on).

As Odgers points out, the reality is that it’s the adults that are the problem. There’s a mental health crisis among adults, and much of it may be driven by issues like the opioid epidemic:

Now, since 2008, we’ve seen an uptick in youth suicide risk. But perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, because adult suicide has been increasing dramatically in the United States since 1999.

Remember when I said that adult mental health and caregiver mental health is the most important predictor of child mental health? Well, with that in mind, I want to take a look at this slide.

This graph here shows you that between 2011 and 2021, the rate of overdoses due to drug use among parents more than doubled. People ask me all the time: what could have happened during this period other than social media coming online?

The answer is that adults were in distress and parents were dying.

And, she points out that the data suggests no significant impact for young boys, and for young girls the correlation is reversed. Those who are facing mental health problems and don’t have support go online more — not the other way around.

She also discusses how adults keep closing off spaces for kids to be kids, and banning them from social media just takes away yet another space for kids to be a part of a community.

We are punishing victims.

We’re kicking them out of the spaces they go to be with friends, to consume youth culture, and yes, sadly, many times to escape people that are harming them offline.

We’ve already kicked teenagers out of public spaces.

In the US, we’ve created a society where firearms are the number one killer of our children, and now we’re telling our kids that we’re going to take away the spaces that they’re going to virtually gather and create community, because adults broke that, too?

Yeah, I’m saying adults broke the internet and they’re trying to fix it by kicking kids off.

So a social media ban might feel good for the adults in the room, but teens tell me, and I believe them — it’s not going to work.

It’ll push them into less safe and less regulated spaces, and it will prevent us from doing what we really need to help them be well.

And, no, contrary to some of the YouTube comments on the video, she’s not giving a talk in support of social media platforms. She admits that there are issues there, but notes that kicking kids off doesn’t solve them. It also makes it more difficult to fix the actual underlying societal problems. She comes up with a list of solutions which I won’t spoil, but it involves taxing some of the tech companies to pay for better support for children.

It’s a 12-minute TED talk, so it’s designed to be quick and straightforward, without going too deep into the data and the science, but given how those in favor of banning social media have taken over the narrative, it’s good to have the counter narrative out there.

As Odgers herself said about this talk when she posted it to Bluesky, the kids can be alright. “This isn’t an anxious generation, it’s a resilient one. Let’s start treating them that way.”

Scary stories about teens sell. The data tells a different story.After decades studying adolescent mental health, here's what I found: This isn't an anxious generation. It's a resilient one. Let's start treating them that way. go.ted.com/candiceodgers

Candice Odgers (@candiceodgers.bsky.social) 2026-06-23T16:21:04.853Z

The real work, then, is making sure kids have the tools, spaces, community, and knowledge to be safe in the world — both online and off.

02:00 AM

Riff-o-matic [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

More than 345 riffs, worthy of a calendar, all in one place. They don’t fit in a blog post, so I made a page of them. Hit the refresh above to see another one, or see them all, and vote on your favorites, at sethsriffs.com

On the riffs page, you can click the ? icon and launch a search of the blog for more details and discovery. Share links are also there.

      

Kanji of the Day: 永 [Kanji of the Day]

✍5

小5

eternity, long, lengthy

エイ

なが.い

永遠   (えいえん)   —   eternity
永田町   (ながたちょう)   —   Nagata-cho (Japan's political center; equiv. of Downing Street)
永住   (えいじゅう)   —   permanent residence
永久   (えいきゅう)   —   eternity
末永く   (すえながく)   —   forever
永世   (えいせい)   —   eternity
永続的   (えいぞくてき)   —   permanent
永の   (ながの)   —   long
安永   (あんえい)   —   An'ei era (1772.11.16-1781.4.2)
永徳   (えいとく)   —   Eitoku era (of the Northern Court) (1381.2.24-1384.2.27)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 沈 [Kanji of the Day]

✍7

中学

sink, be submerged, subside, be depressed, aloes

チン ジン

しず.む しず.める

沈黙   (ちんもく)   —   silence
沈没   (ちんぼつ)   —   sinking
沈む   (しずむ)   —   to sink
沈静   (ちんせい)   —   stillness
地盤沈下   (じばんちんか)   —   land subsidence
沈痛   (ちんつう)   —   grave
浮き沈み   (うきしずみ)   —   ups and downs
撃沈   (げきちん)   —   sinking (a ship)
沈着   (ちんちゃく)   —   composure
沈める   (しずめる)   —   to sink (e.g., a ship)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンス2026 [OpenStreetMap Japan]

# OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンス2026 ## テーマは「ファースト」 初めての出会い、初めての一歩が、未来の可能性をひらくきっかけに。 初心者も経験者も、それぞれの“初めて”にチャレンジする一日にしましょう! OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンスは、OpenStreetMapに関心のある人たちが集まり、交流し、学び、アイデアを共有するカンファレンスです。 OpenStreetMapを初めて知る方、地図づくりに興味がある方、地域活動やまちづくりに地図を活かしたい方、オープンデータの活用事例を知りたい方など、どなたでも歓迎します。 ## 主な内容 ### OpenStreetMapに関わる人たちの交流の場 普段オンラインで活動している方、地域で地図づくりをしている方、これから関わってみたい方が、関西でゆるやかにつながる機会をつくります。 ### 様々な

Interview with Nara Oliveira, Free Software Artist [GIMP]

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!

Early interviews from co-maintainer Michael Natterer and Michael Schumacher were published shortly after the first Wilber Week. The remaining interviews from this event, about Simon Budig and Øyvind Kolås were published years later as a revival of the series. While these interviews are a bit old and reference outdated versions and features of GIMP, we believe they still have value and show the evolution of our community.

This next interview is the first one recorded at the 2017 Libre Graphics Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The subject is Nara Oliveira, co-founder of Estudio Gunga. She is a Brazilian artist and advocate who uses free software exclusively to develop professional works in many fields, including design, illustration, and animation.

This interview took place over April 21 - 23, 2017. In addition to Jehan and Nara, Simon Budig, and Aryeom Han were also involved and asked questions.

Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA
Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA

Jehan: Hello Nara. Can you introduce yourself to the people?

Nara: My name is Nara Oliveira. I am a Brazilian designer. I am from Brasília, the capital. The city name is Taguatinga. I study design and today I work with free software. I have my own company with some partners and we work in audio, video, design, and animation.

Jehan: What is the name of your company?

Nara: Gunga. Gunga is an instrument from Capoeira. We have the berimbau with the “calabash”, I think – it’s an instrument from Capoeira.

Jehan: Okay. From what we understood, you mainly use free software

Nara: Yes.

Jehan: Mainly, or only?

Nara: Only.

Jehan: And which ones in particular?

Nara: I use GIMP, Inkscape, MyPaint, sometimes Krita – I’ve tried it – Scribus, FontForge, FontMatrix, and others like everybody uses.

Jehan: Do you use Linux?

Nara: Yes, Arch Linux.

Jehan: So full free software from start to end! Okay, and why do you do this?

Nara: When I heard about free software and Linux, I was working in a cultural space. I was working with theater and with drawing, and we already have that culture of sharing things and sharing knowledge. So when I met these guys in free software, they told me about what GNU and Linux were and the philosophy – and when I heard about it I fell in love with it. Because I already think that way, and so free software is applying what I think is right onto software and onto technology. So for me it just makes sense.

So I started to use this software. In the beginning it was difficult to make the transition, but with some time I got into it.

Jehan: So you made a transition from proprietary software?

Nara: Yes, from proprietary software to Linux.

Farid: When was this?

Nara: When? Ah, let me count…

[group laughter]

I was not finished studying then, so like around 2006 or 2007 I started. I really started to use Linux and everything for working in 2008, for everything.

Jehan: So you studied design in university?

Nara: Yes, in university.

Jehan: With proprietary software?

Nara: Yes, with proprietary software only. But my university was not so focused on software. In five years of studying, we only had one class about software. And as the class went on, everyone already knows how to use it! So it’s like a class that has to be on the curriculum, but it’s not like you have to use – it’s more like conceptual.

Estudio Gunga Presentations and Workshops, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025
Estudio Gunga Presentations and Workshops, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025

Simon: Something I do a lot is that - I’m a software developer mainly, so I do a lot of my own tool development. Like I have a specific problem and I know there is an algorithm in my mind that I know would solve the problem (or might solve the problem), so I start implementing my own tools for very specific, very weird tasks, because I can’t do it with GIMP.

Nara: I would like to do that!

Simon: So this is what I wanted to ask – do you have programming experience? Do you have an idea of what it means to develop software?

Nara: No, but I think I have an idea – but I do not develop programs. I’ve studied a little, but it’s not like I can do something. I can see the code lines and know more or less what’s happening, but I can’t write lines by myself.

Jehan: You’ve told me that sometimes you will see some scripts and guess what it can be, and change the numbers…

Nara: Yeah, but more in insights and not in the programming itself.

Jehan: Since we’re doing this interview for gimp.org, what can you tell us about GIMP? How do you like it? How do you hate it? Tell us everything!

Nara: [Laughing] The first thing is, I like GIMP. I use it a lot. My work and style is more vector, but I use GIMP a lot and I like it.

When I made the transition to free software, until today one thing I didn’t like is that you don’t see the effects. You have do something, turn back, “Oh no!” - I have to change two, three points here, then I have to undo and do it again and come back. For me, it’s one of the things that makes the work not fluid.

I’m so happy to see GEGL on-canvas effects.

[Editor’s note: This feature was already implemented in the development version of GIMP 2.10, officially released about a year after this interview.]

Jehan: So, some other comments on GIMP?

Nara: Yeah, I really like it but, for example, I have some problems with my tablet. When I bought my first tablet, it simply didn’t work on GIMP. And I think it’s because of that, I use MyPaint. Because I have to work, and I have to work right now and the pressure doesn’t work, so what can I do with my tablet – so I found MyPaint, and I started to work with MyPaint, and it’s because of that I use it. Not because I think it’s more powerful than GIMP – it’s just because of that. At the time I liked it, and today I still use it.

[Editor’s note: GIMP 3.0 improved many issues with tablet support that were mentioned here.]

Jehan: So MyPaint is your main software?

Nara: For drawing, yeah. Because I am a designer, but I’m an illustrator too. So for illustration I use MyPaint, just for that. For small drawings, I use vectors in Inkscape, and so on.

I use GIMP more for photos, for editing, composing, correcting photos.

Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025
Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025

Jehan: Yesterday when we spoke, you had this nice example of a job you did with Scribus. Like your first job with free software, I think?

Nara: No, my first book.

Jehan: Ah, your first book, not your first job with free software. Could you tell it again, now that we’re recording?

Nara: I was called on to make a big book, like three hundred pages. There was little time to do it, like three, two weeks. I am from Brasília, and they said you have to do it here with us to get it quicker. I traveled to Bahia to do it, and when I arrived there, there were two other designers. It was funny because I worked in Scribus, one worked in Corel Draw, and the other one in InDesign. So you had three designers, three different software.

Jehan: And three different operating systems.

Nara: Yeah, and three different operating systems, and we had to do one book, the same book!

So we met each other and said “Okay, let’s do it!”. We separated the book into pages, so I would do the first one to 100, the other designer would do 101 to 200, and so on. And we together figured out how the design of the book would be, and the rules to make each part feel like the same book.

So we started, and just like that, I finished first! I was worried, because I had not used Linux for too long, and if there was something wrong in the software or in the distribution, I would not know how to fix it. One of the designers had Mac and the other had Windows and I was so worried.

But it went well and I finished first – and it was very encouraging for me. It’s just a tool you know? I can do it, he can do it, she can do it – everyone can make it, so I was very happy. Because in the beginning I was worried about everything going wrong, and that there would be problems when I saved the PDF and printed it, but it was all okay.

The book was about experiences with, we call it here “apprentice to Griô”. It’s from the French language, because it came from Africa but a country that speaks French.

It’s like an old master who teaches the people around them, the community, something – knowledge about herbs, which can be medicinal herbs, or teaches about techniques about how to construct instruments, or make music, or dancing – like masters of Brazil, of all Brazil. So it’s because of that it’s a big book!

Years later, in the north of Brazil, when the waters came and filled the houses in the city – a flood. I was seeing that on the TV there was an old lady with her flooded house beside her, everything destroyed. And she had that book in her hand. She was crying because her house was destroyed, but she had the book, and she was happy she still had the book even though she didn’t have her house anymore.

So it was a meaningful project, and it was the beginning of my using Scribus.

Jehan: Are there things sometimes you feel you are not able to do with free software? You already answered this yesterday, so I’m just asking again to hear you saying it.

Nara: When I see art – art is everything, design is everywhere – I can’t see something and think about “I can’t it do with free software”. I can do it – maybe I can’t do it because of my creativity or because I don’t think about it, but technically I can do it, you know. We have the tools to do it. We have other ways, but we have the tools I think – in my area of design.

Simon: What would interest me is, you mention that you use quite a lot of different tools, like GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Scribus -

Nara: Blender not yet, though I started animating in the timeline. In the movie that we showed, the first one that was in 2D, I animated parts of that.

Simon: But there are a lot of different tools that you and your colleagues use. When you start a project, do you pick one of the tools and stick to it, or is more like you start using one tool then transfer the result to a different tool?

Nara: Yes, it was like each tool was like a room of a house. I live in the house, there’s a lot of rooms, and sometimes I’m in the living room, other times I’m in the bed room, other times I go to the kitchen. It’s like I have a bottle, and I take the bottle here and there.

I don’t choose the software. I plan the project, I think about it, and think “How am I going to make this?” So I will start drawing in MyPaint. But I need it to be a vector, so I save it, open in Inkscape and add a vector. But ah, I need an image in the background. So I open the image in GIMP, I work with the image there, then import into Inkscape, okay. But oh, now I have to print it. So I save what I can save in vector I save in vector, and what I can’t save, I export. And I go to GIMP, transform it and edit it, and I take everything, go to Scribus, put them together, and make a PDF. More or less like this. I’m always going back and forth between the programs.

Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025
Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025

I think it’s very complicated, but for me it’s very simple. But when I teach things like that it sounds very complicated.

Jehan: Do you have any questions, Aryeom?

Aryeom: I feel like I am in her head. I totally understand – I work the same way. Maybe later if I have any questions I’ll ask.

Nara: I learned everything by myself. So I don’t like tutorials, you know?

Aryeom: You don’t like tutorials?

Nara: Yeah, I don’t have the mind to read or watch them. I learn all by myself. I think my way of working is just my way, because I learn by myself. And sometimes I get in touch with people who use the software too, I like to watch them because people do things very different that I do, and things more easily. And sometimes I teach the software to someone, and in two weeks or three, I go to see what the people are doing. “Oh my God, I’d never think of that way!”. It’s very fun because of this.

I don’t like to do workshops because of that. I think my style of work is very crazy. But we can talk about it!

Jehan: So right now you have a big animation project. So maybe can you speak about it?

Nara: Well, Farid is the director. He writes the script. I am the art director, but I also help him with the script and doing all the storyboards. I do it in MyPaint. I was a little worried because I’ve never done a storyboard before. So I study a little, see other’s storyboards, and make it for the animation. And we are talking with people who want to work with us on the animation – and I was happy because people always say “You have a beautiful storyboard!”. I was worried about that.

I think we are, I don’t know, opening ways. Because we are not a 3D studio but we want to do 3D animation, so we have to contact on a lot of other people in Brazil and Latin America, and even in Europe. It’s been like a dream to make it. And we want to make it very fine, very good, because today if you are seeing bad 3D, then you don’t watch it. Because you have Pixar, you have Disney, you have a lot of others. I don’t think that we’ll be like Pixar, but we have to do something very good and great to be seen, you know? I think this is our goal. We want to make something very nice, very good that everyone wants to see.

We’re telling Brazilian history of Quilombo, when there was slavery. Some slaves ran away and made a tribe, a community of their own and lived there. And these communities survive until today. And some of them have a lot of different cultures. It’s like they’re isolated. And the story is about one of these communities. In Brazil the agriculture is taking the lands of these people, because they have a paper that says “We own these lands”, but actually these peoples have been there for 300, 400 years.

So we are telling the story of a girl who lived in a community like this. And they’re being pressured to go out and leave their lands. The story is a fiction, but it’s based on real facts. This is the history. It’s going to be like 10 minutes, it’s a short one, but it’s a real movie and after it’s finished, we want to continue it. Make like episodes or a long movie – it’s just like a pilot. But we need the pilot to get a bigger step.

Aryeom: I feel so moved, because our ZeMarmot project is also like this.

Nara: Here in Brazil there’s a law, I’m not quite sure, that for free television and private television, 50% of programs have to be Brazilian programs. Because it’s all foreign programs, so the government says that 50% have to be produced here in Brazil. So I have a lot of opportunities in that way for animated series.

Jehan: So you plan to distribute on TV.

Nara: Yeah.

Aryeom: Why did you choose 3D? Why not 2D?

Nara: Because we love it! We really love 3D, we’re really passionate. We started using Blender, even for 2D, but we want to go to 3D you know. We have some experiences, and we like the visuals of the movie – we actually don’t work with 3D, but we want to. A lot of people do that – I think 2D is less expensive and -

Jehan & Aryeom [in unison and laughing]: I don’t think it’s less expensive!

Nara: No? We like 3D. We want to make it – it’s so popular for the kids, for everyone. We want this movie not to go to the festivals and stay there. A lot of good films here are made this way. The very good films go to the festivals, earn their prizes, and no one’s ever seen the movie. “Oh you’ve seen that movie? No!”. It will never go to the cinemas.

We want it to have the chance to become popular, you know, a lot of people really watching it. And 3D has this affection, people really like these.

Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025
Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025

Jehan: I know you said you also appreciate Creative Common licenses and stuff like that, so is this movie going to be under such a license?

Nara: Yes, it’s going to be an open movie! You can take the characters and make another animation by yourself. If you want to take everything, the characters, the background, everything, and animate another story, you can do this.

Jehan: Which license?

Nara: We haven’t thought about it yet, but the kind of license where you can make anything.

Simon: You said 3D. I sometimes have the impression that 3D in some way is more limited in what you can do artistically compared to 2D.

Nara: Yes, it is.

Simon: So this is not a factor for you?

Nara: No. Because in 3D, it’s like you said. If you’re doing a 2D animation, I don’t know, you can do a lot of types of techniques. Like it can be black & white, it can be color, or so many types – it’s like art in stop motion. 3D is different – you have a character, and you have the scenery, and the scenery is just the scenary. You can make some tricks with lighting and shading and colors, but it stops there. It’s an artistic limitation, I agree with that.

Aryeom: In your team, no one had any experience making 3D animations?

Nara: I animate, but I know how to take the characters and make them move. But I’m not an expert. Farid knows that too and know how to make a 2D animation in Blender. But 3D is a new challenge for us.

Jehan: I think also the question was, you are a designer so you usually work in 2D. So we would expect something who draws would want this drawing to come to life, than just doing the drawing and give it to someone else to make the actual final thing.

Nara: I have difficulties with this. I get tired of drawing very quickly. I can’t imagine myself drawing the same character more than, I don’t know, 10 times. I think I would die if I did that.

Aryeom: Haha, I’m dying!

Nara: It’s like my style. This book was difficult to me, because I had to draw the characters the same. They have to look the same every time I draw it. I don’t like that. I like to do one drawing and it’s over. They have to repeat and be the same. I like the work, but the process of doing the same thing is difficult for me.

Jehan: So you prefer to just draw something and let someone else repeat it again and again.

Nara: Yes, like the computer!

Aryeom: To make a series, an episodic drama, it’s easier to make in 3D. For long form, it’s good I think.

Jehan: Yes, for long form, but for short movies it takes longer due to preparations.

Nara: So it’s not my kind of thing.

[Nara hands out a book]

Nara: It’s by a friend of mine who wrote the story and he asked me to make the drawings. I don’t do a lot of kid stuff, but I like it. And it invites kids to draw at the end of it. It talks about what city do kids want to live in, and what city we want for ourselves. We have a lot of problems in the cities here, and I like the idea of book, to let kids dream about the city because we want that dream to come true.

Aryeom: What about Gunga’s future?

Nara: Ehh, I expect in the future that we have more people working with us. And we have more companies work with us with free software, you know. I’d like to get larger but not too larger. Because I want my life too!

Aryeom: Wise!

Nara: But I’m happy now because last year two new people joined the studio, and it’s a lot more fun to work with more people. We exchange experiences, and I think I want to grow in that way, to get a little bigger and get more partners. And work with more cinemas! It’s more difficult because it’s expensive to work with cinemas, working with animations. We like to do more for ourselves. We make a lot of productions, videos for other companies, for the government, so we’d like to do more for ourselves – like our stories, less for them, more for us.

Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025
Estudio Gunga Projects and Film Fests, by Nara Oliveira, CC-BY-SA - 2025

Jehan: Okay, maybe the last question unless someone has something. Do you have any requests for GIMP developers? Other than on-canvas preview because we already have it!

Nara: I will see the new version you talked about after this.

No, I’m okay. I think I’ve used it for such a long time that I’m so adjusted to it. In the beginning I had a lot of issues – if you gave me a paper then I would fill it with “I want this, I want that! Why do I have this? I can’t believe it!”

But today it is so natural to me that I had to think about it before coming here, because I’ll be meeting people that I want to talk about it with. And I think well, there are little things I want to change in the software. But I think that I have this because I’ve been using it for so long. People are always comparing it with propriety software, and I don’t compare it anymore because it’s been such a long time since I’ve opened something like Photoshop.

So, I’ll think about it.

Jehan: But in the end it just works!_

Nara: Yeah. I’ve written some*, but not for GIMP, for Inkscape, Scribus…

[Editor’s note: Jehan misheard the word “some” here as “song”]

Jehan: Ah! A song for everyone but us?

Nara: I used an earlier version of Inkscape which had a lot of bugs. They just changed it and so I have just bugs for Inkscape. Bugs are bugs.

Jehan: Ah, it’s bugs, not a song!

Nara: Yes, for Inkscape. For Scribus, I have some issues with development.

Aryeom: So you have bugs for them, but you have requests for us. So it’s good!

Jehan: Ah, okay. I thought you’d wrote a song.

Nara: No no – I know my letters are beautiful but it’s not a song.

And I’m happy to meet you! Very happy. I don’t go to a lot of events like here in Brazil. I don’t have a lot of time to do that. And it’s like an investment to travel here because it’s very expensive and the country is too big, haha. So my involvement with free software is like in my community. On our street where we work, a lot of people use Linux because of us. It’s like a center, you know? Time to time, someone goes there, “Oh, I bought a new notebook, I want to install Linux, let’s do it together”.

I think my part in this is more local than global – in the community. I feel better like this. Real connection, offline. I’m not so close to the development here and the other artists. And most of them, they’re just show artists. They don’t really work with design, they don’t really live from this, you know? I tend to know people who live from free software. Most of them are professionals, who are really good at one software, but they don’t put food on the table with it. It’s a little different. I learn from them, but I want to know people who have real issues.

Because when you don’t work with it, you just experiment, you make your own goals. Like “I’m going to make this girl have make-up on her face”, and then you do that. When you work, another person puts a goal on you. Like, “Make this girl have a guitar”, and you have to find a way to do that. And the process when you make a goal versus when another person makes a goal you have to achieve, it’s very different when you’re working with the software. Because you have to go somewhere you’ve never went before. And it makes you use the software in a different way.

You understand what I’m saying? Because when I see the workshops, people are very good at doing something they always do. I want to see people doing very good things they’ve never done before. These things show the real potential of the software.

Jehan: And the potential of the artist.

Nara: Yes, and the potential of the artist. Because you can show me, Inkscape or GIMP is doing this new thing. But maybe I’m not going to use it just because it’s in the software. I’m only will use it if I need it. So, there are a lot of people who are experts in the tools and what the tools can do – to make it, you have to use all the tools combined. It’s different, it’s another level.

Jehan: Well, I think that’s a good interview. Thank you Nara!

Nara: Thank you!


Estudio Gunga

12:00 AM

FTC Strikes Settlement With John Deere On ‘Right To Repair’ [Techdirt]

To be clear, the FTC under Donald Trump and new boss Andrew Ferguson has been a dangerous embarrassment. Whether it’s the firing of both Democratic Commissioners, the politically motivated investigations, the extremist attacks on trans people, the agency’s useless attacks on porn, or its efforts to undermine free speech, the Trump FTC has largely been a hot and painful mess that looks nothing like the “extension of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy” promised by Republicans last election season.

That said: stopped clocks and all that.

The agency appears to have actually done something useful in striking a new settlement with agricultural giant John Deere to address the company’s longstanding “right to repair” abuses. According to an FTC announcement, the settlement to the joint lawsuit brought by the FTC and five states requires that the FTC spend at least ten years trying to make repairing its tractors easier:

“The FTC’s settlement requires Deere—for the next 10 years and under the supervision of the FTC and plaintiff states—to provide farmers and independent repair providers with the same equipment repair resources, including applicable software capabilities, that it currently provides to authorized Deere dealers.”

As is often the case, whether this actually sees any meaningful enforcement will remain an open question. But right to repair advocates like U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor say the settlement is a meaningful one, and a step up to the agreement John Deere made when recently settling a different right to repair class action lawsuit for $99 million.

“The agreement between Deere and the FTC is much better than the deal secured in a similar class action lawsuit,” Proctor said. “For example, it protects independent mechanics from anti-competitive practices in the repair marketplace.”

As we’ve covered for years, John Deere went out of its way to acquire smaller, independent repair centers to force users to use more expensive John Deere dealership repairs. Then it went out of its way to make tools, manuals, and parts as difficult as possible to get. In short they worked tirelessly, for years, to create a monopoly on repair — dramatically driving up costs for consumers.

John Deere’s behaviors had one positive net benefit: they directly sparked a nationwide and bipartisan right to repair reform movement that sparked Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington to pass state level right to repair laws. All 50 states have considered such laws, and several (like Maine and Ohio) have gotten close in recent years.

More recently, John Deere had been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agreed to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s original complaint noted.

It’s worth reiterating that since passage not a single state has actually enforced the laws despise no shortage of offenders, so a lot of work needs to be done on the enforcement front. And again, a settlement with the FTC is also only as good as enforcement; not exactly the Trump administration or U.S. government’s strong suit when it comes to standing up to consolidated corporate power.

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