Eleven months ago, I wrote about what I thought was a truly fascinating find: that some kids appeared to be using some random old NPR podcasts on Spotify as a personal chat room to get around various restrictions. It was mentioned, somewhat in passing, on the “How to do Everything” podcast last October, where someone who did social media monitoring for NPR described noticing odd comments like these showing up on podcasts like NPR’s TED Radio Hour:
But then, a week and a half ago or so, This American Life, a much bigger podcast, also associated with public radio (though not actually part of NPR), reported that they had discovered basically the same thing (and clearly seemed unaware that anyone else had reported on it earlier, even other public radio podcasts). This American Life used it as an example of “intergenerational” confusion, because Dave Blanchard, the millennial who first spotted those comments on the (again, public radio) podcast “Wild Card,” assumed they were bots, only to be told by a Gen Z colleague that they were kids, not bots:
Ira Glass
So OK, bots, he thought, some newfangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted the posts.
Dave Blanchard
And I went back to the Spotify comments again. And there was a new comment that said, uh, so it deleted my com. And that felt not botty. That felt very strange that a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it, letting people know that it had been deleted.
Ira Glass
And then there were other responses to that.
Dave Blanchard
So someone says, username cotton/amity, parentheses, I’m back, bitches, commented, “Weird.” Aubrey commented, “That’s weirdss,” two S’s.
Ira Glass
This is really not looking like any bot behavior he’d ever seen. So he goes to NPR’s Slack channels, post some screenshots, describes what these comments are. And one of the higher-ups, Matilde, suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does. And then somebody younger at NPR reads the thread. They’re 10 years younger than Dave– Gen Z, not millennial, named Hannah Chinn.
Hannah Chinn
And I click into the screenshots, and almost immediately I’m like, oh. My conclusion is really, really different than Dave’s and Matilde’s, because I’m like, these are kids. And I think that part of that is because I was a middle schooler on the internet, posting on forums and stuff.
And so I look at their display names. Their display names are, like, Ella with five emojis. And they’re the special character emojis. They’re the ones that you have to go onto the internet and type your name into a special text generator, and then it comes out as a special character, and then you have to special paste it into your profile.
Ira Glass
Their profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah’s never seen before. And then there’s the way that they’re commenting back and forth with each other, short little phrases. I’m sorry. That’s weird. Lots of hi’s, lots of extra exclamation points. Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.
Hannah Chinn
And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
I also find it kinda hilarious that Hannah mentions how they would talk with their friends via Google Docs, because in my post from last year, that was the other example I used to demonstrate how kids will turn anything into their own personal social space.
One thing that This American Life was able to do though, was track down one of the kids, a 14-year-old girl, named Ella, whom Ira Glass speaks to. You can hear a bit of their conversation in this Bluesky post from Glass:
Some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code. Hear the story: link.podtrac.com/78g1b584
Or listen to the whole thing on the full podcast (which doesn’t go that much deeper into this conversation). While some of the earlier discussion was speculative, it appears that the speculation was exactly right regarding what’s happening, including the idea that if adults caught them on the Spotify page of a public radio podcast, they wouldn’t be too concerned:
Ira Glass
Ella says this all started with a video podcast that played TikTok videos. Ella thinks a kid started it. The video seemed to be chosen specifically for kids who weren’t allowed on TikTok, but were allowed on Spotify. That was Ella. She was allowed on Spotify, but on no social media. And she and the other kids would watch this girl’s podcast on Spotify and then chat in the comments of the podcast.
Ella
And her podcast ended up getting banned. And we wanted to keep talking to each other, so people would make playlists.
Ira Glass
She described exactly the system that Hannah figured out. Kids would name their playlist “chat here” or something like that, and then there’d be some podcast, and everybody would go to that podcast and talk in the comments. She says it was maybe 20 kids in the core group– lots of theater kids, she says, mostly girls, most of them with strict parents who didn’t let them on regular social media.
And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?
Ella
I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.
Ira Glass
I see. So you picked NPR because it didn’t seem very popular.
Ella
Yeah, so that we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s comments.
Ira Glass
I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.
Ella
[CHUCKLES]
Sorry.
Ira Glass
That’s OK. Are your parents NPR listeners?
Ella
Yeah, my mom is. She listens to podcasts all the time.
Ira Glass
Was any of this that your parents were NPR listeners, and this felt like this is the perfect cover? Like, if they catch you doing this, you can be like, look, I’m just doing this for an NPR show.
Ella
Yeah.
Ira Glass
Is that true? Did you think about that?
Ella
Yeah, a little bit.
While this feels like a silly little story, it’s actually pretty important at a time when adults keep rushing to ban social media for kids. Those bans miss the point: kids still want to socialize, to gather, and to chat. And we’ve effectively been closing down the real world places where they can do that outside of school.
Professor Kate Klonick, who studies online speech and platform governance, summed it up nicely: “All networked technology comes down to chat.” That’s a crazy important point to make, which is often lost in the wider discussions about “regulating social media.” If you are connecting people via technology, they are going to use the tools to communicate. Pretending that we can magically stop this or regulate “chat” is going to end badly.
But the attempts continue no matter how much the kids today may think “that’s weirdss” with two s’s.
The Microsoft Access Complete Course combines four different courses in one. Jump in, and you’ll walk through everything from the absolute Access basics to more advanced concepts, like building dynamic user data forms and effective reports. By the end of the course, you’ll have the know-how required to create effective database tables, automate tasks, and more. It’s on sale for $13.
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.
The Supreme Court just keeps giving Trump a free pass to engage in what Mike Masnick correctly called “human trafficking.” It’s stuff this nation has never done before because it’s never been run by someone quite like Trump before. To maximize the cruelty inflicted on immigrants, the Trump administration (steered directly by its chief ghoul, Stephen Miller) has repeatedly ejected migrants into anywhere but their native lands, putting most of them in countries even our own State Department recommends everyone steer clear of.
Any country with a history of human rights abuse or is considered to be “war-torn” is a favored destination for people this administration wants erased from the US population count, if not from the world itself.
And despite this being a particularly novel and particularly cruel abuse of immigration enforcement powers, the Supreme Court has refused to block this on multiple occasions. Any time an appellate court says the government can’t do this, the government immediately runs to its SCOTUS enablers to get injunctions stayed pending its appeal.
SCOTUS did this June 2025 over the lengthy dissent of justices who rarely have anything to do these days but express their disagreement with the conservative far-right majority that runs the court. And now it has done it again — targeting the same appellate court (First Circuit) that ruled only a few days earlier that it would not be allowing the injunction against vanishing migrants into war-torn hellholes to be stayed pending the administration’s constant stream of appeals.
This ruling runs only a paragraph as well. And the three justices dissenting from the majority’s decision to reimpose the stay on the injunction are the ones you expect. There’s nothing new to write here, so they don’t. However, the majority does at least suggest it might actually consider the case on its merits in the near future, rather than just keep hitting the reset button without explanation every time a court sides with the victims of the administration’s abject cruelty.
From the one-paragraph preamble to the SCOTUS order list [PDF]:
The application for stay presented to Justice Jackson and by her referred to the Court is granted. The February 25, 2026 order and judgment of the United States District Court for theDistrict of Massachusetts, case No. 1:25-cv-10676, are stayed. The application is also treated as a petition for a writ of certiorari, and the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following questions: (1) Whether the district court had jurisdiction over Respondents’ claims. (2) Whether the district court had authority to enter classwide declaratory relief and APA vacatur under 8 U. S. C. §1252(f)(1). (3) Whether the Government’s Guidance on third-country removals is unlawful under 8 U. S. C. §1231(b), the Due Process Clause, or FARRA/CAT and its implementing regulations. (4) Such other questions that the Government determines are appropriate for the proper disposition of the case. The Clerk is directed to establish a briefing schedule that will allow the case to be argued in the December 2026 argument session.
The upside is that the government will have to present an argument in favor of its actions and try to support it with existing precedent. The bad news is that SCOTUS is cutting corners on behalf of the administration by treating an application for a stay as a writ of certiorari. They’re not the same thing and doing this just means the right-wing majority is going to pretend the government has already filed a brief containing its arguments for lifting the stay to the court, which it absolutely hasn’t done. On top of that, the government gets to choose what “other questions” are pertinent to this case — a courtesy that’s not being extended to the plaintiffs who just got shit on by SCOTUS undercutting their injunction without saying anything more than “we’ll discuss this at a later date and the administration will get to lead the discussion.”
On the other hand, there’s always a chance the administration will talk itself out the good graces of the ultra-conservative majority by making arguments so bad or blatantly bigoted everyone but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will be forced to reject them.
But, as it stands now, the government is free to kidnap people off the streets, deprive them of their due process rights, and ship them to whatever country they think might make these migrants the most miserable.
When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son David) hired blog-troll Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” they claimed were “traditionally ignored by mainstream media.”
As we noted at the time, that was all bullshit code for turning CBS into yet another outlet that panders to global autocrats, normalizes far right wing extremism, coddles corporate power, and generally shits all over the kind of popular progressive societal reforms (like an equitable tax code) that terrify rich people.
Obviously none of this has gone well, with Weiss “new” CBS seeing some of the worst ratings in a quarter century. Apparently, people don’t have much of an appetite for authoritarian-coddling, “anti-woke,” low-effort agitprop crafted by unqualified people with little actual journalism experience.
Thanks to feckless California Democrats, Ellison is close to also acquiring CNN and doing the same thing courtesy of Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. While initially there was some thought that Weiss would see her management role extended to include “modernizing” CNN, there are growing rumblings that Paramount may ultimately jettison Weiss entirely:
“Everyone is wondering how soon it will take the Ellisons to pull the plug once the merger goes through,” one industry insider told Radar. “CBS is desperately trying to spin these abysmal launch numbers as a win when the entire industry is laughing at yet the third failure on Bari’s record.”
Radar’s sourcing is pretty thin, and doesn’t extend much beyond insider gossip. But the same growing Ellison dissatisfaction is bounding around right wing media outlets like the New York Post (for whatever that’s worth) suggesting that at least — it’s unlikely that Weiss’ shaky authority extends to CNN. A lot seems to be hinging on just how bad the ratings are for the looming new season of 60 Minutes.
It’s not surprising that Bari Weiss can’t do journalism — because she was never a journalist. She was a right wing substack troll focused on editorially punching left against “woke” concepts like empathy, diversity, democratic norms, popular progressive reforms, and broad public opposition to genocide.
But apparently Weiss isn’t good at propaganda either. Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and countless other right wing agitprop mainstays have mastered the art of trolling about homelessness, drug use, crime, and immigration in a way that captures the interest of the frightened, racist, and elderly. But, thankfully for the public interest, Weiss doesn’t really actually seem to know how to modernize broadcast TV agitprop for this new era.
Of course the Ellisons don’t really know what they’re doing — so it’s very possible they just keep doubling down on the same mistakes. The problem is that the CNN deal saddles them with significantly more debt, which always results in more layoffs, higher prices, and corner cutting, all of which are only likely to expedite the “tiffany network’s” precipitous collapse in the marketplace of ideas.
I often hear Bari Weiss was a “success” and “is doing what she was hired for” because the Ellisons hate journalism and want to see CBS destroyed. And while I doubt they’d lose much sleep if CBS journalism did die; I genuinely do think they thought they could “modernize” CBS as an effective propaganda tool, and it’s abundantly clear Weiss isn’t capable of it.
Which suggests it’s very likely she’s replaced by somebody more competent, at least as so far as rank propaganda is concerned. One thing will be sure: whatever happens to Weiss she’ll absolutely continue to fail upward.
If you buy a coal mine, the business model is simple: dig out as much coal as you can economically justify, then walk away.
On the other hand, the model for a brand or a community or a movement is to relentlessly generate value, connection and possibility. Growth can be sustainable and occasionally exponential.
Too often, we slip into the lazy mindset of extraction. Take a great brand and milk it as it fades from neglect. Stop reinvesting in assets because it’s cheaper in the short run to simply take profits. Coast on a hard-won reputation because it feels safer.
When we wring our hands about private equity ruining organizations, it’s mostly because they often follow the lazy and fearful path of extraction instead of committing to generating something new.
Sometimes, extraction is our best option. But it probably pays to call it that to eliminate frustration and confusion.
Tuesday was supposed to be Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) day to shine. At 5:40 that morning, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei reported that the first-term senator had grown close to Vice President JD Vance and was drawing buzz as a possible 2028 running mate. The piece claimed Vance views Schmitt as “trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator.”
“Deft political operator” is now the most ironic of these fawning assessments. Only a few hours later, Schmitt became the laughingstock of Capitol Hill after he attempted an elaborate gotcha while questioning former special counsel Jack Smith before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The crash and burn was so spectacular that it will likely define Schmitt—and prompt Vance to quietly cross his name off the short list.
So how did “Schmitt earns the VP inside track” become “Wile E. Coyote has everything blow up in his face, holding mere wisps of his trusty detonator while Jack Smith toots a ‘beep beep!’ as he road-runs by?”
It’s not even Schadenfriday, but pull up a chair and gather round, as I tell the tale of the day the Schmitt hit the Fani.
The twisted logic and bold, unsupported leaps in Schmitt’s brain trace back to early 2024. On Feb. 2, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, best known for prosecuting Trump in Georgia over the 2020 election, acknowledged in a court filing what she is sadly next best known for: a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the lawyer she had appointed to lead the case.
Defendant Trump pounced, claiming Willis had brought on Wade “in consultation with the White House and DOJ.” There’s zero evidence of this, of course. But Schmitt understood that the spoils would go to whoever brought Trump Jack Smith’s head on a gold-plated platter.
And why not a former top state prosecutor from the great state of Missouri? It’s not called the “Show-Me State” for nothin’!
The notion of Dark Brandon forces in Washington secretly steering the Georgia RICO case and protecting Willis is the stuff of right-wing conspiracy podcasts. But it’s also the tangled thread Schmitt pulled on during Tuesday’s hearing. He suggested that the former special counsel had flown to Atlanta for an NBA game and used the visit to meet with Willis.
The gotcha goes off the rails
Like any senator looking for a memeable moment, Schmitt arrived armed with a poster board and what he and likely his brilliant staffers believed was a perjury trap. Pointing to text messages from Smith’s team, Schmitt accused Smith of lying under oath about attending an Atlanta Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024.
“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024?” Schmitt asks Smith.
“I’m sorry, can you say that again?” Smith responds.
Schmitt then repeats his question.
“What city would that be in?” Smith asks.
“Atlanta,” Schmitt replies.
“No,” Smith says emphatically.
“Okay,” Schmitt says, growing excited. “Your testimony today is that you did not go to Hawks game on February 3, 2024. Is that correct?”
Smith looks perplexed. “I have no recollection of that.”
“Let me just give you a little context,” Schmitt says, pressing. “The day before Fani Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor—you know, the Atlanta prosecutor that was also trying to get Trump—the next day, were you in Atlanta?”
[Smith] says slowly, “I do not believe so.”
Schmitt then asks whether Smith had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel. Smith searches his memory but comes up empty. “It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport … but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta,” he says. “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game.”
Then came the coup de grâce from a triumphant Schmitt, fancying himself a modern-day Matlock.
“What would you say if I had a series of messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta, at a Warrior Hawks game, on Feb. 3 2024?” Schmitt says, as his team pulls out the poster board. Sen. John Foghorn Leghorn Kennedy (R-LA) helps hold up the board, which purportedly bears snippets of a text thread.
The board features photos of Willis and Wade, a shot of Atlanta’s State Farm Arena and text messages among members of Smith’s team, including one asking whether “109 Row 1” was reserved for Jack.
Smith tries to get a better look, but the poster comes down too quickly.
“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” Schmitt says smugly. “So I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”
“You just took it down really quick, if I could look at that again?” Smith says, his voice cool but cutting.
“I think you’ve already sufficiently answered, I want to run through—we’ll, we’ll put it in a file,” Schmitt says when the chair recommends that Smith receive a copy. “You can respond, I think you’ve already perjured yourself.”
But here’s the thing. Smith did go to a basketball game that day. But it was at the University of Maryland, where he watched Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes play the Terrapins. That put him roughly 650 miles from the Atlanta arena where Schmitt’s wild theory placed him.
Schmitt had mixed up the Hawks and the Hawkeyes.
If you’re going to come for Jack Smith, you’d better not miss. Here’s the moment Smith realized the error Schmitt had made on live national television.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that man smile so broadly. Here for it.
And here is the moment Schmitt’s staffers realized they should start updating their resumes.
“I just want to say—in the famous words of the chief of the secret police under Stalin—show me the man, I’ll show you the crime. You may think you’re a hero in this story. But let me tell you something: You’re the villain. … You will go down as a total dirtbag.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) spoke next, and she wasn’t ready to move on from the poster. “Allow the witness to see this vast posterboard that we saw,” she said. “I’m a former prosecutor too and I have never seen anyone just say, ‘What do you think of this?’ and put it down.”
Once Smith finally got to read the texts, he solved the mystery in short order. He said,
“If this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time. And the [Marshals] Service was there with me. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”
Klobuchar connected the dots while the jur—I mean, the audience, and really the whole nation—leaned forward. “Could it then be that the University of Iowa was the Hawkeyes?” she asked. She then turned to Schmitt and his staff and delivered a withering rebuke. “The confusion over the names of the team—perhaps they should’ve looked at it more carefully.”
Schmitt objected to the interruption. “Are we just having, like, an open session here? I’m glad you’re trying to rehabilitate the witness but it’s not your time,” he said.
Klobuchar replied, “I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong.” In case Schmitt was trying to get up off the mat, she made sure he stayed down. “You had the teams wrong, sir,” she told him.
By the end of her questioning, Senate staff had confirmed that Iowa played Maryland on Feb. 3, 2024. Clark scored 38 points with 12 assists in a 93–85 win, giving the Hawkeyes their first victory in College Park in 31 years. Klobuchar’s amused verdict: “It must have been a pretty good game.” She noted that Schmitt owed Smith an apology for the “dirtbag” remark. After the hearing, she put it more bluntly to reporters: “He owes the witness an apology.”
Hey Senator Eric Schmitt—I love Caitlin Clark but never saw her or Jack Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game.
Even Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) appeared to recognize the train wreck unfolding on her side of the aisle.
Here’s the full exchange with Schmitt, Smith and Klobuchar for your viewing pleasure.
Wrong game, wrong league
Schmitt’s team could have used a lesson in investigative technique and basic deduction. The texts themselves pointed away from Atlanta all along. Talking Points Memo checked the seating charts. Section 109 at State Farm Arena uses lettered rows, so there is no “109 Row 1” in the building where Schmitt placed Smith. Section 109 at Maryland’s Xfinity Center uses numbered rows. Before you accuse a man like Jack Smith of lying, you had better do your due diligence.
St. Louis television station KSDK went a step further and found a shot of Smith in the seat itself. In footage from the broadcast of the Iowa-Maryland game, the station spotted him in section 109, row 1, a seat that, as its report noted, “doesn’t even exist in Atlanta.”
MeidasTouch slowed the game footage so viewers could pick out Smith for themselves:
Cool under fire
Smith met every escalation with a request for specifics. Asked about an NBA game, he asked which city. Accused of perjury, he asked to see the evidence. Once he finally had the damn poster in front of him, he explained it in minutes. He named the U.S. Marshals Service as a witness to where he had been and invited the senator to check the date himself.
Across the table, Schmitt had called him a villain and a “total dirtbag” and invoked Stalin’s secret police chief. In Schmitt v. Smith, the former came off looking more like that police chief.
CNN’s rundown of the hearing described Smith as “a very careful witness” who was nonetheless “a little more animated and open” than at his House appearance in January. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others,” Smith told the committee. When Republicans named former members of his team, he defended them without hesitation. “The fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.”
Doubling down
Schmitt did not apologize for getting basic, easily discoverable facts wrong or for his baseless ad hominem attacks on Smith. Speaking to reporters after the hearing, he tried to keep the insinuation alive: “I asked him if he was in Atlanta. He said he’s in Maryland. Maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe he’s not. He’s lied before.”
Schmitt then went on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” where host Andrew Kolvet treated the exchange as a win and Schmitt defended his “research”:
“You had text messages from his team confirming that he was going to a Hawks game and he sat there acting dumbfounded and completely clueless,” Kolvet said.
“It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta. He claimed later that he was at another game,” Schmitt said.
Schmitt gave HuffPost a slightly longer version after the hearing. “I don’t know if Jack Smith’s lying or not. It was the only game―Atlanta was the only NBA game or men’s college basketball game that night at 7:30.”
But pay close attention. By his own account, Schmitt had checked only the NBA and men’s college schedules. The game Smith attended that night was a women’s game. Apparently, it never occurred to Schmitt and his staff that Jack Smith would watch a women’s basketball game in person.
By Tuesday night, Schmitt had moved on to jokes. “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” he posted on X. He was promptly Community Noted.
Ass clownery
Parts of the MAGA media world had already declared victory before the facts caught up with them. Benny Johnson posted, “Senator Eric Schmidt Just CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself on the stand in his testimony,” misspelling the senator’s name. His post appeared to have come down by late afternoon. Sean Hannity also posted about the moment and later deleted it.
Veteran Capitol Hill reporters struggled to find a precedent. “An absolutely brutal mistake by Sen Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and his staff,” wrote Scott MacFarlane. “24 years of covering Congressional hearings … I’ve never seen anything like this.”
ABC’s Jonathan Karl zeroed in on the prop poster: “This was bizarre. I have never seen ‘evidence’ introduced so quickly and then hidden.”
MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian observed,
Semafor’s Dave Weigel drew a scathing comparison to a different courtroom. “Christopher Darden level work from Schmitt here,” he remarked, for those who remember the lawyer who had O.J. Simpson try on the glove.
The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger drew attention to the senator’s satisfied face as the exchange unfolded. “He really, really thought he had him! He thought today would go down as Eric Schmitt Day!”
Criticism of Schmitt crossed the aisle and likely hit harder. The National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy wrote that Schmitt had shown himself “both boorish and incompetent.” Conservative pundit Ben Domenech needed just three words: “Big Hawkeyes fan.”
Then there was the matter of the vice presidency. In an opinion for the conservative Washington Examiner, Tiana Lowe Doescher wrote that Schmitt’s “unsubtle bid for the 2028 vice presidency lasted less than six hours.” She added that she had it “on good authority that Vance’s team is not happy with Schmitt’s shadowjockeying to become his running mate.”
If you enjoyed this piece and would like to support the writer behind it, please consider upgrading your subscription if you haven’t yet! I hope I’ve earned your trust and brought you both clear information and a bit of levity through these challenging times.
These submissions traditionally focus on torrent sites, cyberlockers and pirate IPTV services. In recent editions, however, intermediaries such as hosting companies and Cloudflare have been added to the mix.
LaLiga takes this expanding reach a step further. In its submission for the 2027 edition, the Spanish football league asks for NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark to be listed.
The 14-page submission targets a wide range of sites and services, including traditional piracy threats, but the VPN section is new. The league notes that it doesn’t take offense with the technology itself, but with how these providers are marketed by others through their affiliate programs.
“The conduct that takes these services beyond neutral technical provision is the deliberate marketing of circumvention, conducted at arm’s length through affiliate programmes,” LaLiga writes.
Geo-Unblocking Free Football Broadcasts
LaLiga explains that publishers and influencers with affiliate deals publish guides, updated for the 2026/27 season, on how to watch its football matches for free using these VPNs. Those pages rank the providers and link to discounted subscriptions, while earning a commission on resulting sales.
Some of these guides point out that football fans can use the VPNs to circumvent geoblocking, allowing them to watch free or cheap broadcasts in other countries. This isn’t linked to pirate streams, but LaLiga notes that it harms the territorial exclusivity of its licensing deals.
“the loss of neutrality”
Guides of this type are not hard to find. We came across several Spanish-language pages, updated for the new season, that recommend connecting to a foreign VPN server to watch matches on free broadcasts abroad.
These recommendations are published by affiliates, not by the VPN providers themselves. LaLiga’s submission doesn’t claim that the providers write the guides themselves, but it argues that the providers profit from them.
Circumventing Pirate Site Blockades
In addition to bypassing geo-blocking, the submission also flags guides that it sees as a more serious concern. These are affiliate pages that name pirate streaming sites and services, explaining that a VPN can bypass court-ordered site blocking measures.
LaLiga says that anyone can verify this affiliate marketing activity, but the submission doesn’t name or link to a single guide or influencer that’s crossing a line.
According to LaLiga, the publishers behind the guides are not always independent, linking the vpnMentor review site to Kape Technologies, which owns several VPN services.
“Publishers of the guidance are in some cases not independent. Within one of the corporate groups identified above, VPN review and ranking publications are under the same ownership as the products they rank, a relationship those publications disclose,” the submission reads.
Which of these publications include the guides LaLiga describes isn’t mentioned.
Independence
The submission also argues that some VPN providers have released marketing material timed around its match calendar. This is not backed up with examples, but in February a Spanish court in Córdoba reached a similar conclusion when it issued an ex parte site blocking order against ProtonVPN and NordVPN.
Without hearing the VPN providers, the court reportedly concluded that both NordVPN and ProtonVPN actively advertise their ability to bypass geo-restrictions, citing match schedules in their marketing materials, while describing the VPNs as active participants in the piracy chain.
The matter is not settled yet. In May, the same court refused to fine NordVPN for not complying, accepting that the targeted IP addresses of pirate streams changed frequently. The main proceedings are still ongoing.
VPN Technology is Fine
LaLiga asks the Commission to list the four providers because they allegedly facilitate access to blocked pirate sites and services. The league stresses that it’s not targeting the technology itself.
“This request is based not on the provision of VPN services as such, but on the commercial exploitation and active promotion of their ability to circumvent court-ordered blocking measures,” LaLiga writes.
The submission also opens with a disclaimer. “This submission does not assert any finding of legal liability against the entities named,” it reads.
The main allegation hinges on the affiliate promotion angle, without naming any specific guides. Whether that will be sufficient for the European Commission has yet to be seen, especially since it is still contested in courts and among lawmakers whether VPN providers should be required to implement blocking orders.
AFTVnews Downloader Short Codes
VPNs are not the only general-purpose tools in LaLiga’s submission. The league also targets Downloader by AFTVnews, a popular app for Fire TV and Android TV devices that lets users download files by entering a URL or a numeric short code.
LaLiga says it catalogued 341 of these codes, 262 of which lead to pirate apps. The league describes the codes as a curated catalogue, under the operator’s “exclusive editorial control.”
“The ease and simplicity with which applications can be discovered and installed through this catalogue is itself demonstrative of its nature as an editorially-curated platform, distinct from the underlying distribution infrastructure,” LaLiga writes.
AFTVnews, which boasts more than 100 million users, describes the codes as being “generated by the AFTVnews URL Shortener,” which suggests that they are created from links submitted by users.
Downloader
Downloader has been targeted before. In 2023, Google removed the app from its Play Store following complaints from Israeli TV companies, and again after a DMCA notice from Markscan. The app was later reinstated.
Whether the Commission will mention Downloader or any of the four VPN providers in its 2027 piracy watchlist has yet to be seen. The latest Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, released in 2025, did not include any VPN services, but did mention various hosting providers, IPFS, and domain name privacy service Njalla.
—
A copy of LaLiga’s submission to the European Commission is available here (pdf).
We reached out to ProtonVPN, the VPN Trust Initiative and AFTVnews for comment, but they did not respond before publication.
Disclosure: TorrentFreak uses VPN affiliate links, but not in a circumvention context.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
While the game-playing that RFK Jr.’s CDC has conducted is ongoing, they can only keep up the charade for so long. The nation is undergoing the worst outbreak of measles in over three decades, with Pennsylvania currently the hardest hit of all the states. As we’ve discussed, there have now been four measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania and, presumably, nation-wide to date in 2026. For a month, the CDC played games with the data, refusing to report on any of those deaths, a direct slap in the face of the families of the dead. Instead, Kennedy reportedly intervened directly to stop the publication of those fatalities, with the CDC claiming that this was due to a new verification process for confirmation that the dead did in fact die from complications of measles.
Why Kennedy and his cadre of minions did so is not a complicated question to answer. The government’s response to the measles outbreak is an unmitigated failure and Kennedy exhibits all the hallmarks of an ego-driven sociopath. But this game-playing always had a short shelf life and now the public CDC website for the outbreak at least is acknowledging half of the deaths from measles this year.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday confirmed that there have been two measles-related deaths in the country this year, up from one reported last week. The confirmation, on the agency’s website, comes as measles cases continue to rise across the United States, with 3,659 infections as of September 24.
The CDC, however, did not specify in which states the deaths occurred.
That in and of itself is an interesting omission. If one were to want to be of a conspiratorial mind, the question that would immediately leap to mind is whether there are measles-related deaths in other states besides Pennsylvania that have occurred. Perhaps in a state with a state government more friendly, or at least obedient, with this particular administration.
I want to be clear: I have no data or reporting that would indicate other deaths have occurred. But this is what happens when you have a CDC that is playing games with reporting and data, or otherwise obfuscating the truth about what is happening with a medical crisis like this. You get a vacuum in which speculation is allowed to fester.
And, of course, the semantic argument the CDC is trying to make here is still in play.
The federal agency has said is working with state epidemiologists on a standard definition for measles-related deaths to ensure consistent reporting across jurisdictions, adding that the number of deaths is subject to change as additional information becomes available and reviews are completed.
This is what we call a solution in search of a problem. I have not heard of a single concrete issue with how measles data was reported in 2025, yet here we have a change in definitions and reporting process. Why?
Because of Kennedy’s ego, that’s why. If you want to know what it looks like when Kennedy fails at his job, you need only look at this from the CDC measles site.
More cases. More hospitalizations. More deaths, no matter what roadblocks to reporting them Kennedy wants to put in place. Kennedy’s first year saw the worst outbreak of measles in decades. His second year is already worse and we still have a full quarter of a year to go, including November and December, which were the worst months of last year for case counts.
Failure across the board. A sophomore slump, of a sort, but one in which real Americans get really sick and sometimes really die.
I’m writing today for The Big Picture about a single week of headlines that, taken together, show a Republican Party in real trouble with 35 days to go before the midterms.
Trump’s disapproval rating topped 60 percent this week, the worst of either term. One GOP strategist told Axios it “looks worse than 2018 now.” Diesel is at record highs in the middle of harvest time, mortgage rates just touched 7.5 percent and the war in Iran has no end date. Sounds like a great time for a top White House aide to post an AI video of himself spraying champagne down a White House corridor.
No really, he did.
In today’s piece, I walk through the week story by story. Each one shows the same pattern: The GOP made choices that are now costing voters real money, and when those voters ask for relief, the answer is contempt.
Look for my piece this afternoon if you’re a subscriber to The Big Picture. If you’re not, you can sign up for free or become a valued paid supporter of our work here:
I’m sure whoever thought this might be a good idea — that would be the Dallas city council members who approved this contract — thought no one would ever find out about it.
But nothing stays secret for long, not even furtive movements like this one, which added AI-addled cameras to garbage trucks with the apparent hope of providing the city with another revenue stream.
AI-powered cameras mounted on Dallas trash collection trucks have photographed and rated roughly 21,000 properties since April with a “blight score,” according to city records obtained by NBC 5 Investigates, raising concerns about privacy and whether the technology could lead to more code enforcement fines in lower-income neighborhoods.
That’s right, Dallas homes were being judged by cameras and algorithms, assigning “blight” scores to homes the garbage trucks serviced. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the highest concentration of cameras (and, consequently, the highest amount of “blight” determinations) targeted the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas.
Using the city’s data, NBC 5 Investigates mapped the locations of the roughly 21,000 properties where the cameras detected potential violations. The largest numbers were in Southern Dallas — including many in some of the city’s most economically challenged ZIP codes.
Having been apprised of this information by journalists, rather than the government reps whose paychecks rely on their tax dollars, residents began to express their opposition. Some saw it for what it was: yet another way to punish people for the “crime” of being poor. Others speculated it was just another tool in the gentrification toolbox, meant to encourage poorer people to move out of neighborhoods developers want to whiten and brighten on the cheap.
According to City Detect, the company that operates the cameras and manages the database, this isn’t a threat to people’s privacy. CEO Gavin Baum-Blake claims it’s up to the city how the system is used, but he firmly believes any use will be “fair.” He notes the system blurs license plates and faces, which does make it more difficult for law enforcement officers to abuse the images captured by the cameras.
But on the other hand, Baum-Blake’s claims the system is “not a tax on the poor” doesn’t really jibe with the actions of the same city City Detect’s CEO believes will only use the technology for good.
The city told NBC 5 Investigates that it has already sent 1,800 notices, which it calls “courtesy notices,” to owners of properties where cameras detected possible violations. The notices ask residents to make repairs voluntarily. If the problems are not addressed, the warning can eventually lead to additional enforcement and fines.
Well, that very much looks like a “tax on the poor.” The city told NBC 5 that the “goal” is to issue around 5,200 notices a year, which means issuing 14 notices a day if the city is operating this program 24/7/365. But it isn’t, so the daily rate will be much higher. Not only that, but the focus on poorer neighborhoods is bound to generate a higher than average “blight” rate, which means the 5,200 annual notices will never be evenly spread across Dallas, but rather concentrated in the areas where people are naturally more fearful of government interaction and less financially equipped to fight back when the system says something is “blight” when it (legally speaking) isn’t.
And when the poorest residents are unable to fight back, they’ll be hit with fines and fees they can’t afford, which will give the city leverage to place liens on property if not seize them outright for the supposed greater good of the city.
The good news for locals is that the cameras might not be around for much longer. Dallas City Councilmember Chad West has proposed an amendment to the budget to stop funding the three-year, $2.5 million camera contract.
On the flip side, there are a bunch of caveats. The council member has already tabled the amendment to await further input from stakeholders. That might have been a good thing, but it sounds like the only stakeholders that will be involved in this are Dallas council members. A “hearing” is scheduled for December, but nothing in either article quoted suggests this will be a hearing that’s open to the public.
One wonders what sort of positive things the city might have been able to do with the $2.5 million it has spent so far on garbage truck AI blight cameras. I’m sure the city thought it made sense to spend a sum this small to collect on some blight payments. It wouldn’t take long to collect enough fines and fees to offset this expense, especially if the city decided to expand the surveillance range and reduce the tolerances applied to blight determinations. And while $2.5 million over three years wouldn’t do much to lift people out of poverty, the city could have just as easily decided not to do this and figure out a more positive way to beautify and restore some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users.
The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated with social media, video games, and AI systems by introducing age-based access rules, safety requirements, and stronger enforcement and oversight measures. It presents itself as building on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and puts into “hard law” some of the safety-by-design measures specified in the non-binding DSA guidelines on minors’ protection.
The proposal is built around the following elements: social media age “delay”, safety by design, age assurance and parental responsibility, and strong enforcement. Each of these measures are concerning.
Mandatory Age Gates for Social Media and Video-Sharing Platforms
Following the advice of an expert panel, the proposal would create a phased access to social media and video-sharing platforms deemed risky—a threshold met simply by relying on personalized recommender systems or offering “uninterrupted content consumption”: no service accounts for children under 13; restricted accounts under tight parental supervision from 13 to 15; and autonomous accounts in a safe-by-design environment from 15 to 18. Full online access is therefore reserved for adults.
If this sounds complex and like a compliance nightmare, that’s because it is. The access delay comes with privacy-intrusive age verification across the board, relying on the EU age verification scheme. For teenagers, this law means significant control in the hands of their parents, who must set up accounts and prove that they are, in fact, parents, adding yet another problematic layer of verification.
In fairness, the Kids Act’s gradual approach at least appears to be designed with some proportionality considerations, rather than imposing a blanket social media ban. Just last month a French court declared such undifferentiated bans unconstitutional. The EU Kids Act distinguishes between age groups and certain services and follows a risk-based approach. This means, for example, that age verification is not required for existing accounts if the provider can tell with a “high degree of confidence” that the user is above the age threshold—a vaguely specified standard.
Yet, the law still indiscriminately covers social media and video-sharing, with virtually all mainstream services being covered by the proposal. The broad scope also sits uneasy with the use of age thresholds, which remain a blunt proxy for maturity. What is more, by focusing heavily on safety and harms, the EU Kids Act pays little attention to the privacy and freedom of expression rights of users, as well as the right of children themselves to access information and to participate online. However they’re designed, age gates undermine civil liberties, reduce safety, and create barriers to internet entry, often at the expense of marginalized groups. They also create a powerful infrastructure for control and further entrench the power of big tech.
The proposal exempts not-for-profit encyclopedias, scientific repositories and educational services, as well as open-source software-developing and-sharing platforms. However, no exceptions are foreseen for small and medium-sized enterprises, which will only foster the dominance of resource-laden tech companies that were already investing in similar measures. And we know that most companies are well-advised to play it safe and use privacy-unfriendly age checks across their platforms.
Safety by Design Across Covered Services
The proposal’s second pillar, “safety by design”, casts a wider net. It applies across social media, video-sharing, online games, AI companions, chatbots and even app stores—with varying requirements. Providers must generally make child-safe design the default and can relax from the requirements only if they use age assurance to establish that the user is an adult.
For example, rules on addictive features such as infinite scrolling, safe account settings, and more choice over recommender systems are to provide a safe internet experience to young people. As regards AI companions and chatbots, the proposal requires companies to design their services to reduce minors’ exposure to emotional dependencies and harmful interactions. Online games are covered as well: they must come with contact protections. The law also makes app stores the gate keeper for age-appropriate access, based on an age-rating system.
The devil of these measures lies in the details, but all of them raise fundamental rights concerns and some of them seem poorly suited, if at all, to the decentralized architecture of the Fediverse. The requirement for very large online platforms to set up compliance plans before rolling out new services raises additional questions about the risks of transplanting product-safety doctrines of conformity and risk control into speech regulation. Deciding what is “safe” can easily become a question of what content people can access or share.
Next Steps
By choosing to regulate all these aspects through the Kids Act, the Commission not only but creates a privacy minefield, it also intermingles the digital fairness agenda with the more fundamental-rights heavy questions of age assurance and access to information. An unfortunate policy choice that will politicize well-intentioned efforts to curb manipulative and addictive design practices (read our position on the DFA).
It speaks volume that the Kids Act has not gone through a full impact assessment process, which would typically require a systemic check of alternative policy options and stakeholder consultations. Looking forward, we call on the EU lawmakers to pull the teeth of the most harmful suggestions and to make sure that the new measures don’t erode the fundamental rights of all users.
Last week, “Reckless” Ben Schneider did Wired’s “Autocomplete Interview” which is always fun. At one point, one of the questions is “Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?” and his answer is amusing (for anyone who isn’t one of Reckless Ben’s current lawyers):
Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?
My whole thing with when it comes to the law is it’s so boring. And so, how do you create entertaining content about something that’s so boring?You do the exact opposite!
I basically just think like, what would a lawyer tell me to do? And then I’m like, I just, okay, let’s scrap that idea. Let’s do the exact opposite.
You know,I want to make a lawyer like cringein his chair, you know, cuz that’s what’s fun.
And so, no, I don’t have a law degree because if I did, I’d probably be more careful and then being more careful would result in me being more boring.
Still, he does seem to have taken at least some of the “get a lawyer” talk to heart in the case that Bricks & Minifigs (“BAM Franchising”) filed against him (the same case in which BAM settled with the Mansells and dropped its claims against Bryan Mansell, while still pressing ahead against Schneider and some of his colleagues — though Mansell is now claiming that BAM did not, in fact return all the Lego sets he’s owed, and some of the sets it gave him were not from his collection).
Specifically, Schneider and his colleague Victor Nguyen have filed an anti-SLAPP motion against BAM. Utah only got its current, much stronger anti-SLAPP law in the middle of 2023, becoming just the fourth state to adopt a standardized anti-SLAPP law known as the UPEPA, for Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. Since then, a bunch more states have followed (the Uniform Law Commission tracks the enactments, currently at 17), which is great to see.
Schneider’s lawyers, from the firm of Spencer Fane, make it clear that BAM’s lawsuit is an obvious SLAPP:
Plaintiffs do not like that Reckless Ben highlighted the Mansells’ predicament, the methods used, and the publicity generated by the videos. But Plaintiffs cannot weaponize the courts to suppress Reckless Ben’s work or his First Amendment rights, particularly where Plaintiffs have now “recognize[d] that the Mansell family experienced a genuine loss,” as reported by Reckless Ben….
Utah’s Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), Utah Code section 78B-25- 101 et seq., is meant to prevent precisely this type of effort. UPEPA is “an ‘anti-SLAPP’ act” or a statute protecting parties faced with a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” UHS of Provo Canyon, Inc. v. Bliss, 2024 WL 4279243, at *3 (D. Utah Sept. 24, 2024). Although “SLAPPs are often cloaked as otherwise standard claims of defamation, civil conspiracy, tortious interference, nuisance, and invasion of privacy, just to name a few,” UPEPA combats the misuse of such claims to avoid the “unifying features” of SLAPPs, which “make them a dangerous force” by “ensnar[ing] their targets in costly litigation that chills society from engaging in constitutionally protected activity.” …
The same dangerous features exist here, but Plaintiffs took additional steps to chill protected speech. Faced with negative exposure, Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit and immediately sought an overreaching temporary restraining order (TRO) based on assertions of fact in a Verified Complaint. Reckless Ben had no opportunity to object to the TRO but was immediately prohibited from speaking about the evolving story, violating his First Amendment rights and impairing his livelihood. At the same time, Plaintiffs freely spoke about the situation, attempting (unsuccessfully) to convince the world they had done nothing wrong. In doing so, however, Plaintiffs directly contradicted key allegations they made in filing this suit and obtaining the TRO. While this unfolded, Reckless Ben was silenced by a TRO that operated as a gag order.
Although the TRO has since been amended by stipulation, Plaintiffs have not abandoned their suit. Despite admissions undermining their case and despite multiple significant flaws with the claims, Plaintiffs persist with thirteen causes of action, most of which fail as a matter of law but will inevitably require substantial costs to defend.
The Court should stop this quintessential SLAPP effort by applying UPEPA and dismissing most of Plaintiffs’ claims.
The filing walks through the basics of the dispute, including the fact that BAM never actually identifies any specific statements that were defamatory.
BAM now admits “the Mansells experienced a genuine loss and a great deal of uncertainty and frustration” and has agreed to dismiss all claims against Mr. Mansell and to pay for the LEGO collection at issue…. In public statements, including a joint statement with the Mansells, BAM confirmed it paid a settlement amount and “issued an unqualified apology to the Mansell family for the losses and pain suffered from the events surrounding this dispute.”… With payments for the property at issue and unequivocal apologies, Reckless Ben correctly reported that BAM “stole” the LEGOs, to the extent such statements can be deemed defamatory at all. As such, BAM’s claims based on defamation must fail.
There’s a lot more in the filing about how both the defamation and RICO claims are ridiculous and should fail, but the key part is that under the UPEPA anti-SLAPP law, if Schneider prevails here, the fee award is mandatory, and BAM would be on the hook for his attorneys’ fees and costs, which would be quite a satisfactory conclusion to this particular story.
So yeah, sometimes what the lawyers do is boring. But it might also get you out of a massive, censorial lawsuit that seeks to bankrupt you… and get the other side to pay for it all.
But speaking of people in this dispute who should speak to lawyers, well, Joshua Johnson (one of the guys who took over the shop that had the consignment deal) might want to get on the phone with one quickly. Because he apparently took a phone call from “some random guy” with a YouTube channel, spoke to him for about an hour, and appears to have said a bunch of things that undermine this very case in which Johnson is one of the named plaintiffs. Oops.
We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it’s hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you’ll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start to see the results straight away. It helps you overcome the language barrier challenge by helping you learn real, practical vocabulary in a wide variety of languages from any device that you choose. uTalk’s language programs let you listen to native speakers who are recorded in uTalk’s recording studio and feature independently verified translations so you’ll be able to navigate through your next vacation like a real local. Get 2 languages for $30, 6 languages for $50, or all 100+ languages for $69.97.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Let’s start this off by clearing the air: Stephen Miller looks exactlylike the sort of person who wants to elevate white people above everyone else. Sure, he doesn’t have the Hitler ‘stache or a blond pompadour, but he’s the same bit of unspectacular “whiteness” Hitler was. Miller is bald, mostly chinless, and looks like someone who’s been banned from both Venmo and Uber for being way too violently creepy. Bro looks like he’d ask Pat Sajak if he could buy a jowl.
But we’re not here to insult Stephen Miller’s looks. I mean, we did do a bit of that but that’s not the larger, more salient point. Miller’s proximity to the president — and more importantly, to Trump’s vague goals of making the country more “white” and more less-white people dead/disappeared/hunted — has generated the onslaught that similarly generated the kind of things no MAGA shitheel would utter publicly: violence against white citizens who have chosen to defend migrants against ICE’s kidnapping squads.
Whatever killing the government can’t get done in the streets, it can (non-verbally) ask other countries to do on their behalf. After shuttling arrestees from detention center to detention center ahead of court filings, these migrants are then violently ejected from the country. That’s not a phrase I’m using lightly. This administration has made a concerted effort to secure agreements with various hellholes around the world in order to inflict as much misery as possible to people it doesn’t even consider to be human beings.
And that’s where Stephen Miller has been so instrumental. DHS and ICE encourage voluntary “deportation,” promising migrants tens or hundreds of dollars for leaving the country of their own free will and volition. (This is also a lie, but what else did you expect?) For those swept up in ICE purges that most frequently target areas bereft of Trump voters, the alternative is much worse. If you don’t end up in El Salvador’s worst prison, you’ll likely be dumped in whatever war-torn, human-rights-violating country that will have you, especially in exchange for federal payments they’d be otherwise banned from receiving.
Relying on a series of leaked documents, the Post reports that at Stephen Miller’s direction, the agency is effectively paying out huge sums of taxpayer money to some really nasty governments in exchange for their acceptance of third-country deportees who, for various reasons, cannot be returned to their countries of origin.
It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff. The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt “human rights safeguards” that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad.
Any normal administration that just wanted to toughen up migration law enforcement would round up migrants and ship them back to the countries they came from. That’s simply not painful enough for this administration, especially when it’s allowing Stephen “Please, My Father Is Mr. Ghoul” Miller to be the brass knuckles he wished to see in the (anti-migrant) world.
Instead, the White House is actively seeking agreements with some of the worst countries in the world to engage in some perverse form of “revenge” against migrants. In many cases, the migrants being subjected to this Trump-specific cruelty aren’t criminals. They’re just people who’ve recently seen their protected status unilaterally revoked, their still-valid visas stripped, or their attempts to abide by the legal naturalization process preemptively terminated by a government that just wants to see as many non-white people ejected/destroyed as possible.
To reiterate: this administration, under the “advisement” of Stephen Miller, is seeking to inflict maximum pain on people who desired nothing more than to live a life free of violence and persecution. The message being sent now is the opposite: “Get fucked for trying, non-whites. Smooches, the US Government.”
The truly vile kicker here? Also at Miller’s direction, this agency is turning the original purpose of the State Department’s refugee architecture on its head. The Office of Remigration is a part of the department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which has historically been devoted to resettling people fleeing horrors abroad in the United States.
But now, civil servants who previously carried out that mission are leaking to the Post their dismay at being ordered to do the opposite. They’re now working to get other countries to agree to accept deportees who have no ties whatsoever to their new destinations, even as we pay these countries foreign assistance money to do so.
Are you happy with your representation? I direct that question to the MAGA faithful as well — people who seem to believe the USA is the best country ever, but only if no one desiring access to our level of freedoms ever dares to seek asylum here. And by “no one,” we’re not counting white South Africans, who are, of course, free to take our jobs and leech off of our social services and fuck with the purity of our fluids.
Miller and the people who listen to him are exactly who we think they are: Nazis who don’t have the strength of character to actually own it.
So “remigrations” are understood as part of a civilizational rescue mission of sorts: Masses of human civilizational contaminants are rounded up, expelled from the West, and dumped outside our charmed hemisphere, into that geographic mass that Trump calls “shithole countries,” which is of course where they belong. If this is terrifying, so much the better. It’s all rooted in a series of delusions, not least delusions of world-historical grandeur.
The DHS and its agencies continue to make transparently false claims about ridding this nation of the “worst of the worst.” Trump continues to just be casually racist on the regular. Stephen Miller lurks behind the curtain, touching himself furtively as all of his white nationalist dreams become reality. Being exposed won’t change his Nazi tendencies, though. All it’s likely to do is provoke him to double-down on his blatant hatred.
Object permanence: Doonesbury on 9/11; Suspicious Looking Device; Elephant-shit paper; The Onion x TSA liquid rules; Borders goodbye letter; Voting machines suck; EFF v DRM; Matt Furie on the hijacking of Pepe; Austerity v last steam-loom; Facebook x "disinformation" criticism.
Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, who have done some of the most important work on surveillance pricing (using computers to spy on you to rip you off) and algorithmic wage discrimination (using computers to spy on you and steal your wages). Today, she publishes Gouged, a comprehensive, accessible guide to this modern scourge:
Owens and Groundwork have done as much as anyone to publicize and fight against the use of corporate power, computers and vast troves of commercial surveillance data to pick your pocket, shrink your paycheck and make the worst people on earth far richer. It was Katie Wells, a Groundwork fellow, who co-authored the report describing how the apps nurses use to get shiftwork collude with data-brokers to find out how much money nurses owe on their credit cards, so they can pay the most desperate nurses lower wages:
Owens helped coin the term "the age of recoupment," to describe this current moment in which companies that chased all their competitors out of the market with predatory pricing are now jacking up prices, knowing they're the only game in town:
And Owens helped lead a study that showed that Instacart was using surveillance data to jack up prices by 20% or more based on inferences about your willingness and ability to pay (after the study was published, Instacart promised they'd stop doing it):
Owens and Groundwork have a keen eye for the structural conditions that allow companies to screw their workers and customers, especially the role that competition plays in keeping companies' greed in check. Take their proposal for "street pricing" in sports stadiums: like everyone, they understand that sports stadium owners know that you can't easily step outside for a snack, so they've raised prices to the sky:
They have a simple solution: just force vendors to charge the same prices as the shopkeepers in the neighborhood – the ones whose customers can take their business elsewhere. This proposal polls high (Groundwork does a lot of polling), both with Democrats and Republicans (despite the latter group's allergy to "price controls"). It's a good example of the kind of policy work Groundwork does: diagnosing a problem and coming up with a solution that's easy to administer and easy to explain, in terms that are popular with people from all walks of life.
This is the spirit of Gouged: laying out the baroque, data-driven scams that underpin an ever-increasing part of your life in plain language and tracing those scams back to specific policy choices.
Owens does important work here: sector by sector and scam by scam, she lays out how companies collude – often with the assistance of a captured and tame state – to reduce competition in order to raise prices, from groceries to rents to airline tickets. She describes how online sellers exploit their information asymmetry, their ability to both directly observe you and millions of other consumers, and to augment those observations with sensitive information purchased from the wild west of data brokers, to steer you into paying more and getting less. These schemes run the gamut from subscriptions you sign up for with a single click but can't get shut off without canceling your credit card, to lengthy check-out processes that end with a long set of junk prices that tack another 10 or 20% onto the cost you thought you were about to pay.
All of this raises a deceptively simple-sounding question: what is a fair price? Owens takes us through the history of pricing, and the American tradition – begun by Quakers – of replacing haggling with price-tags, and setting those prices at "cost plus a reasonable percentage." She describes an ideological project, a cousin to the neoliberal revolution of Carter and Reagan, to replace this "fair price" with a "market price" that was calculated to be whatever the market would bear. She introduces us to the men who spent a generation dreaming of the technology to change every price for every customer, every time that customer entered the marketplace, and she shows us how, when they got their wish, they shifted billions away from workers and shoppers to owners.
Remember: a wage is also a price: it's the price you get for your labor and the precious, irreplaceable hours of your life. The same men who committed to making prices you pay as high as possible were every bit as committed to ensuring that the price you charged for those unrecoverable moments of the only life you will ever live as low as possible. Every scam to make you pay more has a mirror-image scam that ensures you are paid less. This is the logical trajectory of the gig economy – a way to bring that same exploitable information asymmetry to labor markets, where the boss can observe everyone on the payroll and how much (how little) they've accepted from job to job, but workers don't even know who the other workers are, much less what they're getting paid.
All of this is laid out with admirable clarity and detail. By the time you get to the last chapter, you'll know exactly how you're getting scammed, who is scamming you, and why they're getting away with it. The final chapter is meant to be the "What do we do about it?" chapter, and regrettably, it's weaker than other parts of the book. Owens urges you to have conversations with your friends about these things, she urges you to take basic measures to defend your privacy, and lists some businesses that have steered clear of the scams she describes in the book, with the implication that you could bring your business to these companies and ones like them.
There is nothing wrong with this advice. Every word of it is sound, and your life – and the world – will be better off if you follow it. But this wasn't what I hoped for from someone with such an excellent track record of devising shovel-ready, highly leveraged, popular policy proposals. I would much rather have been presented with a half-dozen well-thought-through, well-explained rules or laws that could really strike at the root of these problems.
The pathologies Owens presents in this book can be traced to the Chicago School, a group of radical economists who won favor with Carter, Reagan, Thatcher, and other architects of neoliberalism. The Chicago School's chief strategist was Milton Friedman, who spent decades advocating for the policies that went on to destroy the world as we knew it. Before Friedman was ascendant, his colleagues would ask him how in the world he expected his plans – totally alien to the political consensus of the day – to ever turn into action.
Friedman had a stock answer for this question: "In times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center. Our job is to 'keep ideas lying around' so that when the crisis strikes, we will be able to seize the moment."
Friedman was a monster, but he was right. There's always a crisis, eventually – the world is big and complicated and subject to all kinds of shocks. Friedman didn't need a crystal ball to predict a crisis – the next crisis was eminently foreseeable. Today, crises are coming thicker and faster than ever, as Friedman's program of autocratic rule and extraction reaches a boiling point.
Each of the scams that Owens lays out in her book is a crisis in waiting. When those crises arrive, I would love to go into it knowing which policies could have prevented it, so that I can blame our policymakers for failing to prevent it, and, after they've been defenestrated, I can demand that anyone who seeks to replace them promise to take meaningful steps to end the crisis and prevent it from happening again.
Throughout this excellent book, Owens makes an indisputable case that the problems she describes have a systemic root. They're not caused by wickedness or greed – they're caused by a system designed to reward wickedness and greed. There's nothing wrong with giving people some simple measures they can take to protect themselves from such a system, but those protections will only ever be partial and temporary. I would have been far more energized if those personal measures had been a prelude to a chapter designed to equip me with a list of bold, muscular policy demands.
Long ago, Owens convinced me that the system is rigged and we all deserve better. This book made that case even clearer. I want to know how we get beyond modest personal protections and make our way to a better world for all.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 574 (7730 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
We avoid this question all the time, and it costs us.
Don’t put kerosene in an electric car. It won’t work. Don’t give your dog dark chocolate, it’ll make him sick.
And yet, we often hesitate to be honest about what gets us moving.
What puts something at the top of your priority list, or pushes you to put in extra effort? What challenges or rewards do you keep coming back to, gig after gig, job after job?
Here are few to get you started:
Extinguishing emergencies
Going a little faster than the person next to you
Pleasing the boss
Undermining the boss (class clown)
Establishing a web of safety
Running away from safety
Earning trust
Getting your way
Feeling safe
Feeling alive
Feeling vindicated
Showing the skeptics that we’re right
Staying out of the spotlight
Someone who is free climbing at Yosemite probably has different fuel than the person on the treadmill at the gym. The emergency room doctor is not the same as someone working in public health.
The structure, shared measurements and near universal recognition of a quest for an Olympic medal can capture an athlete’s life for ten years–but then, once they retire from this special condition, it’s possible that they’ll never again find this sort of motivation.
“How are you?” is a benign question, but the honest answer might reveal which fuel we’re focusing on, helping us see what we’re drawn to–and it’s rarely universal. That’s part of the hiding. We’d like to believe that anyone else facing the same choices we have would use the same fuel and demand the same priorities we do. Look around. Fuel isn’t universal.
If the fuel you’ve chosen is helping you get to where you want to go, that’s fabulous. For most of us, though, it might be worth a pause to consider whether it’s what we really need to fill our days or create the change we seek.
The DigiCert EV code-signing certificate we use to sign Windows installation packages is expired since September 1st and we are currently in the process to renew it. Unfortunately, this process is delayed and not yet complete.
This has caused Windows users trying to install Tor Browser 15.0.21 and 15.0.22 from scratch to receive "bad signature" warnings.
As a temporary work-around, for Windows only we're keeping Tor Browser 15.0.20 (the latest correctly signed version) listed on our download page, relying on automatic updates (which are signed with a different key, not involving this expired certificate) to bring Windows users to the current version.
This release is signed using a new subkey. If you previously used gpg to verify Tor Browser downloads, you may need to refresh the Tor Browser signing key (0xEF6E286DDA85EA2A4BA7DE684E2C6E8793298290) in your local keyring. For more details you can read our page about signature verification, specifically the section "Refreshing the PGP key".
Send us your feedback
If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.
In the piece Dave Willner and I published last week about why “the apocalypse won’t be sexy,” we discussed how the real threat wasn’t “rogue” out of control AI tools, but rather humans doing stupid shit, sometimes because they stop thinking in the presence of these AI machines. A deeply reported Bloomberg article by Ben Bartenstein and Krishna Karra details how the now infamous bombing of an Iranian girls elementary school was due to Pentagon officials deep over-reliance on Palantir’s Maven system.
Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.
In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.
To understand how we got here, you need a timeline that stretches back the better part of a decade. Project Maven was, somewhat famously, a project to use AI in the Pentagon, that Google was originally tapped to build. However, in 2018, due in large part to employee protests, Google announced it would drop the contract. Days later, Google announced that it would not allow its AI to be used for “weaponized systems.”
Around that time, I was asked to be on a panel debating whether or not it was good for employees to protest contracts like this with one of Palantir’s founders. Little did I know that the reason that founder was so vehement in his contempt for the Google employees protesting was because, right at that moment, Palantir was swooping in to grab the contract that Google was dropping.
Secretive data analytics company Palantir is working on Project Maven, the US Department of Defense program that Google dropped in March following protests inside of the company, according to people familiar with the project.
That takes us to earlier this year, when Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth kicked off their disastrous, stupid, and short-sighted war in Iran with an initial bombing campaign that (among other things) blew up a girls elementary school, killing at least 100 girls (later reports put the toll at more than 165, most of them children). While Hegseth and Trump tried to pretend it wasn’t them or that it wasn’t a school, the evidencepiled uppretty quickly.
At almost the exact same time, the Pentagon got into its (now deemed unconstitutional) petty spat with Anthropic, which included some debate about whether or not the Defense Department could get around Anthropic’s guardrails against using its AI for autonomous weaponry. Not surprisingly, this resulted in plenty of speculation about whether or not the bombing of the Shajare Tayyiba Elementary School was due to an AI failure. Reports noted that the site used to be a military compound, but satellite imagery by 2017 had showed the outdoor play area, and intelligence analysts should have removed it from any target list. Hell, the school was apparently clearly labeled… on Google Maps.
The error was one that AI would not be likely to make: US officials failed to recognize subtle changes in satellite imagery, while human intelligence analysts missed publicly available information about a school located inside the Revolutionary Guard compound (or failed to add it to the database used for targeting). AI has its notorious failings, from hallucinations to sycophancy, but it’s also able to take in far more information than current, human-led systems — and a deeper look at satellite imagery or, simply, an internet search could have forestalled the disaster. Even a scan of Iranian business listings turned up the school, according to Reuters.
That article discusses Palantir’s Maven — calling it “a kind of DoorDash for deadly missile strikes” — but then suggests it wasn’t really involved in this process:
The tragedy at the Shajareh Tayyebeh school led to an immediate rush to blame AI for the fatal missile attack. And while the initial speculation turned out to be wrong, it does suggest that civilian deaths stemming from automation will be viewed differently than those caused by humans, even if autonomous weapons prove safer in the aggregate.
Except, the Bloomberg report suggests, Palantir’s Maven was definitely involved in the process, even if human stupidity (naturally) made the final calls.
Basically, the Bloomberg report details that people at the Pentagon assumed (incorrectly, obviously) that Palantir’s Maven would magically alert them “hey, this might be a school.” But that’s not how it works. Then again, why would anyone expect a system sold as “intelligent” to apply any actual intelligence to vetting potential targets?
Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.
Yeah, okay, maybe “it’s not clear why” people expected it, but really? It kinda is, isn’t it? Palantir and all the AI companies play up the “smarts” of their systems and it leads people into a false reliance on them as all-knowing, all-seeing beings, rather than just automation machines that can handle fuzzy inputs and outputs better than old deterministic systems.
Of course, the fact that it was humans who over-relied on Maven lets Palantir wash its hands of the whole thing and yell “not our fault” as loudly as it can:
A Palantir spokesperson said that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies” and that there’s no evidence that its software was at fault in the Minab strike.
Yes, the human is responsible. But people over-relying on the tech because you oversold it is kinda part of the issue, just as Elon Musk overselling the safety of his “full self driving” feature needs to fall partly on Tesla.
And here, even though there were “humans in the loop,” it seems clear that in their rush to find places to bomb, they were perfectly happy to let Palantir’s Maven do the actual work:
High on Centcom’s list: the naval division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most powerful force across the country’s military, economy and politics. It’s tasked with defending — and at times, disrupting — the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz. The Minab school site — with its uncorrected classification as an IRGC facility — was fed into Maven along with other potential targets. It ultimately emerged as one of the recommended day-one targets, people involved in the investigation said.
As all targets do, the Minab site moved through a multi-stage assessment process known by the military as the “kill chain.” Steps in that process have traditionally involved intelligence analysts, imagery specialists, targeteers, lawyers, operational commanders and launch crews, according to US military doctrine and interviews with current and former defense officials. Today, Maven sits at the heart of those operations — between the initial intelligence inputs and the latter review stages, officials said.
Part of that “kill chain” process was supposed to include the “civilian harm mitigation” (CHM) team to carefully review the target to see if there were risks of civilian harm and (you guessed it), how to mitigate that. But, you know, Hegseth finds “CHM” to be way too woke, and got rid of most of them in his quest to make sure he seemed as manly and bloodthirsty as possible. And, besides, they had Palantir’s Maven AI to do the hard work? Who needs a CHM team when Maven can do it…
In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets — work that includes assessing how they align with an operation’s objectives — had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via Maven, people involved in the Pentagon’s internal review said.
Officials involved in the investigation pointed to gaps that they said were left after Hegseth dismantled most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation, or CHM, units — cutting headcount across a number of teams by roughly 90% to fewer than 20 staff members, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Centcom’s team was reduced from 10 to 1.
No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said.
So, no, Palantir’s AI didn’t make the decision… but it sure did make Hegseth and Centcom feel pretty confident that they could rush the kill chain process and skip the CHM part which, you know, might have caught the pastel painted walls around the school, the soccer pitch, and the playground markings.
There’s a lot more in the article detailing how the bombing came about, how Hegseth’s obsession with killing off programs he deemed to be too woke, and prioritizing speed and “lethality” all contributed to what is pretty clearly a war crime. But in the end, the point that Dave and I made in our piece earlier this week stands. The apocalypse won’t be sexy. It’ll look like overconfident people skipping the boring checks because they assumed the fancy AI system had already done them for them.
In October 2020, the RIAA used a DMCA notice to remove the popular YouTube download tool youtube-dl from GitHub.
The RIAA argued that the software circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technology. A few weeks later, GitHub reinstated the repository and set up a $1 million defense fund for developers facing similar claims.
The music industry had more success in Germany, where labels won a lawsuit against Uberspace, the hosting provider of youtube-dl’s official website. In November 2024, the Hamburg Court of Appeal rejected the host’s appeal.
While youtube-dl was never formally shut down, active development has been largely taken over by the open source fork yt-dlp. In fact, people who visit the original .org domain of youtube-dl’s former website are redirected to yt-dlp.
The yt-dlp project launched in 2021 and has more than 16,000 forks and more than 190,000 stars on GitHub, making it the 32nd most-starred project on the site.
IFPI Flags yt-dlp as “Major Problem”
The music business is well aware of these developments and continues to see this type of software as a problem. In a new policy submission, music industry group IFPI highlights yt-dlp as a major problem, naming four developers by their online handles.
The callout is part of IFPI’s submission to the consultation for the 2027 EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. Among other things, it asks for yt-dlp to be added to the list of stream ripping services, alongside Savefrom.net and two Y2mate sites.
“YT-DLP is a major problem for the music industry as it provides freely available open-source software that enables users to download and permanently store music and audiovisual content from licensed streaming platforms, including YouTube, without authorisation,” IFPI writes.
A Major Problem
IFPI’s overview describes the project’s history, its stream ripping capabilities, and the copyright-critical Unlicense it’s released under. The group also explains why the software is hard to stop.
“Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove, while continuing to facilitate stream ripping at scale and depriving right holders, artists and licensed services from legitimate streaming and downloads.”
Four GitHub Handles
The submission identifies the project’s founder as GitHub user pukkandan, who it says was lead maintainer from 2021 to 2024. It also lists three current core maintainers: coletdjnz, bashonly and Grub4K. These handles are publicly listed on GitHub.
From yt-dlp’s GitHub
This is the first time we’ve seen yt-dlp, or the original youtube-dl, named as a target in a Watch List or Notorious Markets submission.
Besides the listing, the yt-dlp callout doesn’t ask for anything concrete. There is no takedown request, call for blocking measures, or any action against the developers. The submission also doesn’t mention that the software can be used for lawful purposes.
Circumvention?
The yt-dlp description does not mention the word ‘circumvention’ either, but the general stream-ripper intro does. IFPI argues that YouTube uses technical protection measures to prevent downloads.
“Stream ripping sites are circumventing these measures that enjoy legal protections under the international treaties and EU law,” the submission reads.
Legal protections
The music group also cites the German youtube-dl ruling, where the court held the website’s host liable for aiding and abetting the circumvention of these measures.
However, the submission itself describes the tool as “parsing webpage and player data, and interacting with platform-specific playback endpoints.” How circumvention potentially fits in there is not mentioned.
Officially Hosted in the United States
The European Commission’s Watch List highlights marketplaces and services outside the EU that reportedly engage in or facilitate piracy and counterfeiting. While the location of the developers isn’t discussed, GitHub is called out as the hosting platform.
“Github is YT-DLP’s official source; it serves as the main platform for accessing the scripts latest updates, source code, pre-compiled binaries and installation instructions,” IFPI writes, while adding that forks and copies are also available elsewhere.
GitHub is a Microsoft-owned company, based in the United States, which would make the yt-dlp repository US-hosted.
AI ‘Ripping’ Threats
IFPI’s submission is not limited to traditional threats. It also flags a newer type of ripping tool. AI music apps Rythmix and MusiQ AI allow users to paste a YouTube link and turn the recording into an AI cover song with a cloned artist voice.
Rythmix
Both these tools are available in Apple’s App Store, and Rythmix is also on Google Play, where it was already downloaded more than five million times.
In the months to come, the European Commission will go over all submissions and decide which of the proposed targets make it into the 2027 edition of the list. Whether that includes yt-dlp or the AI apps has yet to be seen.
—
IFPI’s submission to the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, which includes a variety of additional targets, is available here (pdf).
We reached out to the yt-dlp maintainers and GitHub for a comment on IFPI’s submission, but they did not respond before publication.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
I’m starting to think we have unknowingly entered the age of great American civic nihilism. The impetus for that belief most recently has been RFK Jr. and the wider government’s complete acquiescence to his bald-faced lies and betrayals. If nobody can be bothered to lift a finger over that man, then they obviously don’t think any of this whole civics thing matters at all.
But it is not, nor has been, all about Kennedy. I’m not naive enough to believe there was ever a time when everyone on both sides of the government and private interests coin was completely honest with one another all the time, but the modern era is so full of blatantly cynical lying on both sides that it’s disheartening. And if you want to see an example of this in action that isn’t on the government side, you need only look at what Microsoft has done after its acquisition blitz.
While battling the government to acquire Activision Blizzard, Microsoft stated to the FTC and to the courts that this acquisition would result in more consumer options and would not result in consolidation-based layoffs. Shortly after the purchase was allowed to go through, Microsoft laid off 2,000 staff. Then it laid off more staff. Then it warned it would lay off even more staff, which was a promise it actually followed through on. Then, over this past summer, Xbox cut 20% of its staff.
This time, not only are people losing their jobs, but the various studios that employed them are being shuffled around, amalgamated together, or shut down entirely, while foundational Xbox IPs are changing hands. Across social media, the gaming community is reacting to the news with a mixture of frustration and resignation.
All of this was predicted by game journalists, industry insiders, and the FTC. Microsoft said this wouldn’t happen, but it is. And it was always the plan. And what will the consequences of all that lying be?
Nothing. Regulatory capture is the rule, not the exception. Government inaction is often the best we can hope for, but here it’s debilitating. People lost jobs because of a combination of regulatory apathy and what can barely be called a corporate con-job, so transparent was the con.
During Fox’s broadcast of the Washington Commanders–Seattle Seahawks game on Sunday, a fairly creepy ad aired. There was Donald Trump, looking dour and striding down a hallway as his own voice intoned, “We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists!” If that wasn’t WTF enough, the ad closed with an on-screen disclosure that it was “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
The spot, “Final Battle,” also aired during the Carolina Panthers–Cleveland Browns game, on “Saturday Night Live” and during “Fox News Sunday.” It promised, without a trace of irony, to “expel warmongers” from the government. The ad is nearly identical to one from Trump's 2024 campaign, before he himself became chief warmonger in his second term.
It is at least the third government-funded Trump ad to air since Wednesday. Others include one set to a song titled (checks notes) “Love Me” and one filmed at Mount Rushmore, which doesn’t bear Trump’s face, at least not yet (spits, throws salt).
The White House insists the ads are “public service announcements.” They are “about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders and abroad,” a spokesperson said.
The ads return repeatedly to a single enemy: communism. That’s hardly a PSA. Earlier this month, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump repeatedly branded Democrats as communists, warning, “It’s going to be a communist country if they win.” The same week the first ad debuted, Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping, who leads China’s Communist Party, for a state visit.
The White House’s claim that these are PSAs rather than political ads is laughable. Consider the evidence.
The “Love Me” spot, which debuted Wednesday night during Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” opens with Trump declaring, “Together we will defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America. America will never be a communist country.” Photos of the president flash by, showing him at rallies, pardoning turkeys, standing with the FIFA trophy, flanked by military brass and posing outside the Taj Mahal, all set to JMSN’s song “Love Me.” On-screen text promises the “Largest Tax Cuts in History,” “Reigniting American Manufacturing” and “Defend Law and Order and Police.”
As is usual with this regime, nobody asked the artist. JMSN said he never licensed the song. “To anybody who has followed my career and knows what I stand for and built my career on, it should go without saying that I would never authorize my music to be used for ANY political agenda or campaign,” he wrote.
The spot also features UFC CEO Dana White’s voice from the 2024 Republican National Convention. “He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was gonna stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves.”
Here’s the full ad if you can stand it on a Monday morning:
On Sept. 13, the White House posted a nearly identical video to its YouTube channel without the “government paid for this” language. The ad also resembles commercials the nonprofit wing of Trump’s political organization released earlier. One spot from Securing American Greatness titled “Toughest Guy” was built around the same Dana White tribute.
The “Final Battle” spot is basically a recycled campaign ad. Along with vowing to cast out communists, warmongers and Marxists, Trump pledges to demolish the deep state. It nearly duplicates a campaign video Trump posted to Truth Social in 2024, which ran six seconds longer and carried his campaign logo and a number supporters could text. That version closed by urging viewers to “Join President Trump’s Fight for America.”
Another ad, which aired on CBS stations Thursday evening, recounts the U.S. capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and features Trump alongside top Cabinet officials.
The Mount Rushmore spot runs a full minute. Trump’s voice, lifted from an address he delivered at the monument over the July Fourth weekend for the country’s 250th birthday, plays over nighttime shots of the carved presidents. “This is only the beginning of the Golden Age of America,” Trump says.
Some Golden Age, huh?
Why they’re running the ads
In August, Trump began pressing supporters to treat the midterms as a referendum on him. “So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote,” he told a rally in Myrtle Beach, S.C., adding, “It’s so important.”
Days later, The Atlantic reported that the president had adopted a new game plan.
The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”
You could hear GOP candidates groan across the country.
Zeteo reported that the taxpayer-funded campaign addresses an even more personal grievance. Several advisers and officials told the outlet that Trump has repeatedly complained that too many Republican candidates and lawmakers are leaving him out of their TV ads. One adviser said they had shown the president GOP campaign sites that had downplayed or deleted mentions of him, and a source said Trump phoned one allied candidate to demand why they weren’t campaigning harder on his second-term accomplishments.
Trump hates disloyalty more than anything, and he needs everything to be about him, so these betrayals stung doubly. Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, explained that GOP candidates have concluded Trump now hurts them more than he helps and are keeping their distance. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen that,” Madrid said.
Two sources told Zeteo that Trump’s team made sure the “Love Me” ad ran on Fox and in the Washington, D.C., media market, where he is widely despised and where the ad was unlikely to sway many voters, all so the president would see it on TV at the White House. Zeteo notes that his team ran a similar play in the summer of 2020, buying campaign ads in Washington, where Trump has little voter support, to ease his worries that Republicans weren’t backing him enough.
Voters want solutions, not hype
The ads’ on-screen promises center on tax cuts, manufacturing and policing, all framed by the fight against “communism.” Voters heading into November, however, have other priorities. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Aug. 28–31, 47 percent of registered voters named the cost of living as the top factor in their midterm vote. That cost has only gone up since then. A whopping 71 percent of adults disapproved of Trump’s handling of the issue.
The Iran war has added to those cost pressures. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that higher energy prices from the conflict added 2.3 percentage points to annualized inflation in the second quarter of 2026. In that quarter, inflation in the personal consumption expenditures price index, a broad measure of the prices Americans pay for goods and services, reached 5.3 percent.
Some Republican Senate candidates have begun campaigning against the war on pocketbook grounds. In a new ad filmed in a grocery store, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says, “The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that after campaigning in battleground states, he has found parents lying awake at night over one issue. “They’re worried about the cost of living,” he said.
There’s a law against this
Congress has included a ban on government propaganda in its annual spending bills since the 1950s, including the funding package Trump signed in February. The current version, Section 718 of division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, reads:
No part of any appropriation contained in the act or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has held that the prohibition reaches communications that are “purely partisan” or designed to aid a party or candidates.
GAO has also recognized that administrations may spend public money to explain and defend their policies. Kevin Kosar, who wrote the Congressional Research Service’s 2014 report on government advertising and is now a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was blunt about the “Love Me” spot: “This advertisement looks like puffery.”
The White House’s defense rests on Trump’s absence from the ballot. “The President is not on the ballot and the ads don’t have a call to action,” an official said. (Recall that a month earlier, Trump had asked his supporters to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.”)
The White House also points to public service campaigns under earlier presidents, including George W. Bush’s ads about a Medicare law and the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccination drive. Those campaigns, the White House claims, promoted specific policies. “When prior Administrations utilized the airwaves, it was called ‘public education,’” the White House said. “When this Administration promotes pride in our country, many of those same voices call it ‘propaganda.’”
[Narrator, interrupting: “It is propaganda.”]
In March 2004, GAO cleared a Bush administration Medicare television ad, finding it was neither self-aggrandizing nor “so partisan in nature” as to violate the ban, and noting the health department’s explicit legal authority to inform beneficiaries about program changes. Two months later, however, GAO ruled that prepackaged Medicare news segments, presented by people posing as reporters, were illegal covert propaganda because viewers were never told the government produced them.
In 2015, GAO found an EPA social media campaign on water regulations illegal on the same ground.
On Sunday, White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X, “Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv.”
The disclaimer on Trump’s ads blunts one line of attack. GAO has treated concealment of the government’s role as central to findings of covert propaganda, and these spots identify their sponsor. Columbia law professor Richard Briffault said the ads likely don’t violate election law because they don’t endorse a candidate, though he agreed they raise questions under the propaganda ban.
Democrats aren’t splitting these hairs. Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Jack Reed (D-RI) (both powerful Democratic appropriators) and senior Democrats including Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) demanded after the first ad aired that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles pull it immediately and discipline the federal employees who worked on it.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” they wrote. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) separately asked Wiles to disclose the contractors involved, the source of the funding and whether money had been diverted from federal agencies.
But nearly a week after the first ad aired, it remains unclear which government agency made the ads or paid to air them.
Criticism also came from inside the GOP. “[U]sing taxpayer dollars, it feels like Viktor Orbán,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). Substack writer Heather Delaney Reese drew the same comparison, pointing to the taxpayer-funded billboards Orbán’s government put up across Hungary. She argued, “This may actually be where Trump and his enablers got the idea in the first place, as Trump had considered Orban a friend and carefully followed his rise and fall from power.” (Fun fact: Earlier this year, Hungarian voters ousted Orbán’s party after 16 years in power, electing Péter Magyar in a landslide.)
Kennedy also noted, “I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money [on] private ads for themselves,” adding that a rule against spending public money on self-promotion probably already exists.
Yeah, so what now?
It's a question this regime keeps raising: If they broke the law, what can we do about it?
The staffers who made or bought time for the ads could potentially face Hatch Act scrutiny. The Hatch Act bars federal employees from using official resources for political activity. Public Citizen noted in its complaint to GAO and the Office of Special Counsel, “Though the Hatch Act does not apply to the president, it does apply to White House staff.” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) went further. “This may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes.”
But enforcement, as always with this lawless White House, is another matter. According to the Congressional Research Service, no single agency oversees department advertising budgets. Public Citizen says it has filed a dozen Hatch Act complaints with the Office of Special Counsel over the past year and that, to its knowledge, the agency has ignored all of them.
Going the normal route—writing letters, filing complaints, even filing suit—hasn’t reliably stopped this White House from acting illegally and misusing funds. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly lifted lower-court injunctions restricting administration actions while litigation proceeds.
The silver lining, if one exists, is that the ads really aren’t going to help the GOP. If anything, they are a disaster. They drill home the very idea that most Republican candidates want to run from: that the GOP is tied to the terrible Trump policies driving up fuel, food and health care costs and does nothing to rein in its president.
So Trump wants us to pretend he’s on the ballot and vote accordingly? Challenge accepted.
Every few years, rightsholders get the opportunity to 
In October 2020, the RIAA used a 
