News

Wednesday 2026-04-08

03:00 AM

The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI [Techdirt]

Since the New York Times published its semi-viral big profile of Medvi last week — the “AI-powered” telehealth startup that it breathlessly described as a “$1.8 billion company” supposedly run by just two brothers — I’ve had multiple friends and family members send me the article with some version of the same message: “Can you believe this guy built a billion-dollar company with AI? Why haven’t you done this?” The story is making rounds, and giving people the impression that with a ChatGPT account and a little bit of marketing know-how, you too could be raking in millions every month.

The problem is that most of the story is utter nonsense.

Let’s start with the headline number itself. The NYT admits — buried deep in the piece — that Medvi “has not raised outside funding” and “has no official valuation.” A company’s value is typically established by investors, an acquisition offer, or public market pricing. Medvi has none of those. What it has is a revenue run rate — a projection based on early-2026 sales extrapolated across a full year. Calling that a “$1.8 billion company” is like calling someone who found a twenty on the sidewalk a “future millionaire.” Any business reporter should know the difference. Even the NYT tips its hand:

Medvi is technically not a one-person $1 billion company, since Mr. Gallagher hired his brother and has some contractors. The start-up, which has not raised outside funding, also has no official valuation.

“Technically not” doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there.

But the misleading valuation is almost the least of it. Even if you accept revenue as the relevant metric, how sustainable is that run rate for a company that just got an FDA warning letter, is facing a class action lawsuit for spam, has a key partner being sued over allegations that a major product doesn’t actually work, and is operating in an industry that regulators are actively trying to rein in?

Oh, wait, did the NYT forget to mention all of those things? They sure did! Not to mention the legions of fake, apparently AI generated doctors and patients who keep showing up in Medvi advertisements. Yes, the NYT eventually alludes to some of that, but it claims these were mere “shortcuts” that were fixed last year (they weren’t).

That said, you can feel the pull of the narrative that seduced the NYT: a scrappy founder with a rags-to-riches backstory, two brothers taking on the world, AI tools stitching it all together, Sam Altman himself anointing the achievement as proof that his prediction of a “one man, one billion dollar company, thanks to AI” was correct.

It’s a hell of a story. The problem is that almost none of it holds up to even the most basic scrutiny, and the fact that the New York Times — the New York Times — fell for it (or worse, didn’t care) is an embarrassment. As much as I’ve made fun of the NYT for its bad reporting over the years, this is (by far) the worst I’ve seen. They didn’t just misunderstand something, or try to push a misleading narrative, they got fully played on a bullshit story that any competent reporter or editor should have realized from the jump. This one stinks from top to bottom.

Medvi’s success has very little to do with “AI” and quite a lot to do with fake doctors, deepfaked before-and-after photos, misleading ads, probable snake oil, and the kind of old-fashioned deceptive marketing that has been separating marks from their money for centuries. The only thing AI really “turbocharged” here was the company’s ability to generate bullshit at scale. Oh, and also the NYT somehow missed out on the FDA already investigating the company, as well as the multiple lawsuits accusing the company and its partners of extraordinarily bad behavior.

Let’s start with what the NYT actually published. Reporter Erin Griffith’s piece reads like a press release that the NYT re-formatted as a newspaper article:

Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.

From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.

His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.

Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.

A $1.8 billion company with just two employees? In the age of A.I., it’s increasingly possible.

And then, because no AI hype piece would be complete without the requisite papal blessing from San Francisco:

In an email, Mr. Altman said that it appeared he had won a bet with his tech C.E.O. friends over when such a company would appear, and that he “would like to meet the guy” who had done it.

Altman “would like to meet the guy.” Well of course he would! The NYT hand-delivered him the perfect anecdote for his next AI hype session. The reporter seemingly solicited that quote to validate a pre-existing thesis: “Sam Altman was right about one-person billion-dollar AI companies.” The fact that the company is a dumpster fire of regulatory violations and consumer fraud was, apparently, a secondary concern to the “Great Man and A Great AI” narrative of innovation. This piece was built around a thesis — Sam Altman was right — and then a company was located to prove it.

To its minimal credit, the NYT does kind of acknowledge — eventually, if you make it past the thirtieth paragraph — that things weren’t entirely on the up and up:

Medvi’s initial website featured photos of smiling models who looked AI-generated and before-and-after weight-loss photos from around the web with the faces changed. Some of its ads were AI slop. A scrolling ticker of mainstream media logos made it look as if Medvi had been featured in Bloomberg and The Times when it had merely advertised there.

I mean… shouldn’t that have raised at least one or two red flags within the NYT offices? Medvi’s website featured a scrolling ticker of media logos — including the New York Times logo — to make it look like these outlets had written about the company, when they hadn’t. A year ago, Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré had even called this out directly (along with Medvi’s penchant for bullshit AI slop advertising).

Just underneath these images, MEDVi includes a rotating list of logos belonging to websites and news publishers, ranging from health hubs like Healthline to reputable publications like The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes, among others — suggesting that MEDVi is reputable enough to have been covered by mainstream publications.

…. But… there was no sign of MEDVi coverage in the New York Times, Bloomberg, or the other outlets it mentioned.

And then, despite this, the New York Times went ahead and wrote the glowing profile that Medvi had been falsely claiming existed. The paper of record became the validation that the fake credibility ticker was trying to manufacture.

And the NYT frames all of what most people would consider to be “fraud” as mere “shortcuts” that the founder later “fixed.” Eighteen paragraphs after burying the admission, it reports:

That gave Matthew Gallagher breathing room to fix some shortcuts he had initially taken, like swapping out the before-and-after weight-loss photos for ones from real customers.

“Shortcuts.” Using deepfake technology to steal strangers’ weight-loss photos from across the internet, alter their faces with AI, give them fake names and fabricated health outcomes, and pass them off as your own satisfied customers — that’s a “shortcut.” Ctrl-F is a shortcut. This sounds more like fraud.

And it turns out those “shortcuts” hadn’t actually been fixed at all. As Futurism’s Dupré reported in a follow-up piece published after the NYT article:

As recently as last month, nearly a year after the NYT said that Medvi had cleaned up its act, an archived version of Medvi.org shows that it was again displaying before-and-after transformations of alleged customers. They bore the same names as before — “Melissa C,” “Sandra K,” and “Michael P” — and again listed how many pounds each person had purportedly lost and the related health improvements they apparently enjoyed.

Even though they had the same names, these people that the site now called “Medvi patients” now looked completely different from the original roundup of Melissas, Sandras, and Michaels. Worse, some of the images now bore clear signs of AI-generation: the new Sandra’s fingers, for example, are melted into her smartphone in one of her mirror selfies.

They kept the same fake names and the same fake weight-loss numbers but swapped in entirely different fake people. What the NYT claims was “fixing shortcuts” appears to actually be just “updating the con.”

In a great takedown video by Voidzilla, it’s revealed that at least one set of original images appeared to have been sourced from Reddit forums on weight loss having nothing to do with Medvi, and even with the modified images it used, it massively overstated how much weight the original person claimed to have lost. And while Medvi later switched out the photos with someone totally different, they kept the same name and same false weight loss claims.

And again, all of this was publicly known information that Griffin or her editors could have easily found with some basic journalism skills. We already mentioned that Futurism article from May of 2025, nearly a full year before the NYT piece ran. That investigation traced the deepfaked before-and-after photos back to their real sources, found that a doctor listed on Medvi’s site had no association with the company and demanded to be removed, and documented the AI-slop advertising. That investigation was widely available. A Google search would have found it.

But the fake photos and fraudulent branding are almost quaint compared to what the NYT chose not to mention at all. Six weeks before the NYT piece was published, the FDA sent Medvi a warning letter for misbranding its compounded drugs. The letter admonished Medvi for marketing its products in ways that falsely implied they were FDA-approved and for putting the “MEDVI” name on vial images in a way that suggested the company was the actual drug compounder. The letter warned:

Failure to adequately address any violations may result in legal action without further notice, including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.

The NYT did not mention this letter. And yes, Gallagher now insists that the FDA letter was targeting an affiliate that was using a nearly identical name, and it was that rogue affiliate that was the problem. But the letter is addressed to MEDVi LLC dba MEDVi, which is the name of his company. If he’s allowing affiliates to use his exact name, then that alone seems like a problem. Indeed, it certainly seems to highlight how this is all just, at best, a pyramid scheme of snake oil salesmen, where Gallagher has affiliates willing to deceive to sell more snake oil.

Separately, on March 20, 2026 — thirteen days before the NYT piece ran — a class action lawsuit was filed against Medvi in the Central District of California alleging that the company uses affiliate marketers to blast out deceptive spam emails with spoofed domains and falsified headers. The complaint alleges Medvi is responsible for over 100,000 spam emails per year to class members. The lawsuit seeks $1,000 per violating email.

The NYT did not mention this lawsuit either, even as it was yet another bit of evidence that either Medvi is up to bad shit, or it has a bunch of out of control affiliates potentially breaking laws left and right to increase sales.

And then there are the fake doctors. As Business Insider reported, a review of Meta’s ad library turned up thousands of active ads for Medvi promoted by accounts belonging to doctors who don’t appear to exist. Drug Discovery & Development found over 5,000 active ad campaigns for Medvi on Meta at the time of the NYT piece.

A Drug Discovery & Development review conducted on April 3 of MEDVi’s website, Facebook advertising and public records found a pattern of apparent AI-generated personas, including some presented with medical titles, alongside marketing practices that appeared to go beyond the issues identified so far by regulators. A search of Meta’s Ad Library for “medvi” returned more than 5,000 active ads, many of them running under fabricated physician personas. One Facebook page for “Dr. Robert Whitworth,” which ran sponsored ads for MEDVi’s QUAD erectile dysfunction product, was categorized as an “Entertainment website” and listed an address of “2015 Nutter Street, Cameron, MT, 64429,” a location that does not appear to exist. Other ads ran under names including “Professor Albust Dongledore” and “Dr. Richard Hörzgock,” used AI-generated video testimonials and recycled identical scripts across multiple fabricated personas. In several cases, the page displayed a doctor headshot while the ad itself featured an unrelated person delivering a patient testimonial.

After public scrutiny following the article, those fake doctor accounts started disappearing. In fact, Medvi’s own website fine print acknowledges the practice:

Individuals appearing in advertisements may be actors or AI portraying doctors and are not licensed medical professionals.

Seems like maybe something the NYT should have noticed?

Oh, and that same Drug Discovery and Development article highlights how other snake oil sales sites are using the same named doctors… but with totally different images.

Same names… different people. Drug Discovery and Development has a bit more info about Drs. Carr and Tenbrink:

MEDVi’s current site lists two physicians: Dr. Ana Lisa Carr and Dr. Kelly Tenbrink. Both are licensed doctors who work together at Ringside Health, a concierge practice in Wellington, Florida, that serves the equestrian community. Neither is identified on MEDVi’s site as being affiliated with Ringside Health. On MEDVi’s site, Dr. Tenbrink is listed under “American Board of Emergency Medicine.” Dr. Carr is listed under St. George’s University, School of Medicine, her medical school. The Florida Department of Health practitioner profiles for both physicians state that neither “hold any certifications from specialty boards recognized by the Florida board.” A search of the American Board of Emergency Medicine‘s public directory, which lists 48,863 certified members, returned no current affiliation for Dr. Tenbrink.

Did the NYT do any investigation at all? Serving the equestrian community?

Even the few real doctors Medvi claims to work with turn out to be questionable. From Futurism’s article from last May (again, something the NYT should have maybe checked on?):

We contacted each doctor to ask if they could confirm their involvement with MEDVi and NuHuman. We heard back from one of those medical professionals at the time of publishing, an osteopathic medicine practitioner named Tzvi Doron, who insisted that he had nothing to do with either company and “[needs] to have them remove me from their sites.”

Then there’s what a class action lawsuit filed last November against Medvi’s main partner, OpenLoop Health, alleges about the actual products being sold. The NYT frames OpenLoop as basically making what Gallagher is doing possible, noting that while Gallagher has his AI bots creating marketing copy OpenLoop handles: “doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance.” You know, the actual business.

So it seems kinda notable that way back in November of last year, this lawsuit was filed that claims that the compounded oral tirzepatide tablets — one of Medvi’s key offerings — are essentially pharmacologically inert when delivered as a pill. Tirzepatide (marketed as Zepbound by Eli Lilly) is an FDA approved weight-loss drug as an injectable. But OpenLoop and Medvi have apparently been selling it in pill form. And Eli Lilly says that there are no human studies, let alone clinical trials, involving any tirzepatide pills.

All of that seems like the kind of thing reporters from the NYT should point out.

What we actually have here is a marketing operation that used AI to automate the production of deceptive advertising at a scale and speed that would have been harder to achieve otherwise. Snake oil salesmen have existed forever. What AI gave Matthew Gallagher (and, I guess, his affiliates) was the ability to crank out fake doctors, fabricated testimonials, and deepfaked before-and-after photos faster than any human team could — and to do it cheap enough that a guy with $20,000 and no morals could build it from his house. That’s the actual AI story the Times should have written.

Being good at deceptive marketing while selling weight-loss and erectile dysfunction drugs online has been a thing since the dawn of email spam. The only novelty here is the tools used to do it. The New York Times just wrapped that up in a neat bow and presented it as the proof of Sam Altman’s big promises for AI.

For what it’s worth, Gallagher has been whining about all this on X, per Futurism’s Dupre:

Though Medvi has yet to respond to our questions, the company’s founder, Gallagher, has spent the last few days on X defending his company. He complained in one post — seemingly in reference to criticism — that “the most low t [testosterone] guys” are “the loudest online” and the “Karens of the internet.” In another post, he wrote that it’s “actually a little crazy the number of people who form a whole opinion from a headline and then publicly wish horrible things will happen.”

Ah yes. The guy complaining about “low t guys” and “karens on the internet” for questioning his “AI business” skills, sure is a trustworthy kind of business person that deserves a NYT puff piece.

The real issue now is what the New York Times plans to do about this. A standard correction noting a few missing details won’t cut it. The entire premise of the article — that this company represents the exciting realization of AI’s business potential — is nonsense. Every element of the narrative is tainted: the growth story is built on deceptive marketing, the product claims are contradicted by the FDA and the manufacturers of the actual drugs, the “$1.8 billion” figure is a projection with no valuation to back it up, and the company is currently facing legal action on multiple fronts. The entire article should be retracted.

The NYT says it “was given access to Medvi’s financials to verify its revenue and profits.” Great. They verified that a company engaged in widespread deceptive practices was, in fact, making money from those deceptive practices. Congrats to the NYT for auditing a snake oil salesman and presenting your findings as if he were an upstanding pharmaceutical salesman.

So to my friends and family members wondering why I haven’t built my own billion-dollar AI company: apparently the missing ingredient wasn’t AI — it was being willing to run a deepfake-powered spam operation selling potentially inert pills to desperate people. The AI just made the lying faster. And the New York Times made one guy appear respectable.

Daily Deal: Costco 1-Year Gold Star Membership + $20 Digital Costco Shop Card [Techdirt]

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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.

Trump’s Office Of Legal Counsel Says Trump Doesn’t Need To Follow The Presidential Records Rules [Techdirt]

Leave it to the president that makes us nostalgic for Nixon-era corruption to claim that a law Nixon made necessary is no longer a law.

The Presidential Records Act was summoned into existence by Nixon’s resignation and his subsequent efforts to destroy records generated by his office as he was fumbling his way towards impeachment. It’s only fitting that the only president to challenge this law is someone who makes Nixon’s corruption look semi-competent.

No one was asking — at least outside of the White House — for the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to weigh in on this law. But weigh in it did, tipping the scale heavily towards “Let Trump do whatever he wants,” despite Supreme Court precedent to the contrary. (h/t Jamal Greene)

The OLC issued this opinion [PDF] last Thursday. It basically says Trump isn’t obligated to turn over records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) following his second term as president. Presumably, the opinion is also retroactive, which would prevent NARA from continuing to demand records from his first presidency — something that has led to a lot of the litigation Trump engaged in following his 2020 loss, much of which is quoted by the DOJ OLC in support of elevating Trump above the law yet again.

I’m sure the Supreme Court — the one “stacked” by Trump himself — has inured itself Trump’s steady stream of verbal abuse at this point. But I’m pretty sure the OLC telling the Supreme Court its own precedent is invalid isn’t going to win the DOJ any friends when it comes time to defend this legal opinion in court.

Nonetheless, that’s what the OLC does here. Repeatedly.

Nixon v. Administrator is not only distinguishable. It was also wrong in concluding that the PRMPA’s “regulation of the disposition of Presidential materials within the Executive Branch” was not “a violation of the principle of separation of powers.”

[…]

Nixon v. Administrator was also mistaken in reasoning that the PRMPA was not “unduly disruptive of the Executive Branch” […]

[…]

Nixon v. Administrator was wrong to suggest that the executive privilege provisions of the PRMPA avoided separation of powers concerns, and those concerns apply even more strongly to the PRA.

That’s the sort of thing that only a true Trump acolyte could write. That acolyte would be T. Elliot Glaser, assistant attorney general, who was previously best know for this:

In 2020, Gaiser worked as legal counsel for Donald Trump‘s 2020 presidential campaign.[14] White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany testified before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack that she considered him an expert on constitutional law. Gaiser worked on election litigation after the 2020 presidential election and produced a speech that rejected the results of the election. According to McEnany, the speech appeared similar to one Trump later delivered, and Gaiser “mentioned in passing” the theory that vice president Mike Pence could refuse to recognize electors from certain states.[4]

It’s great to know that yet another election denier is in a federal position of power, especially with mid-term elections only months away. Prior to this, Gaiser clerked for three federal judges: Edith Jones, Neomi Rao, and (of course) Justice Samuel Alito.

Expecting Gaiser to do anything else but propel forward the administration’s presidents-are-kings-actually theory of executive power is delusional. So is Gaiser’s opinion, which simply says everything prior to this legal memo — including Supreme Court precedent regarding a law that’s nearly 50 years old — is wrong.

Either the administration is certain there will never be another regime change or it’s too stupid to realize Democratic Party presidents will have access to the same theory of power being pushed here, which is going to make them look like idiots when it’s being used against them. Neither option is preferable, and there’s a good chance it’s a 50/50 blend of both.

The silver lining is that this isn’t enforceable in any way. But it will have immediate negative effects. It will make freeing up documents from Trump’s term more difficult. And it will keep NARA from attempting to archive anything its does manage to obtain until the (completely illegitimate) legal questions are settled.

12:00 AM

New Release: Tor Browser 15.0.9 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 15.0.9 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

This version includes important security updates to Firefox.

Send us your feedback

If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, please let us know.

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 15.0.8 is:

  • All Platforms
    • Updated Tor to 0.4.9.6
    • Updated NoScript to 13.6.15.1984
    • Bug tor-browser#44837: Rebase Tor Browser stable onto 140.9.1esr
  • Windows + macOS + Linux
    • Updated Firefox to 140.9.1esr
  • Android
    • Updated GeckoView to 140.9.1esr
  • Build System

America First? Paramount Finalizes $24 Billion In Middle East Backing For Warner Bros Deal [Techdirt]

MAGA Republicans spent year swaddling themselves in phony “America first!” rhetoric (including suffering an embolism over Chinese influence over TikTok), but have suddenly gone mysteriously quiet now that $24 billion in Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign cash is helping to bankroll right wing billionaire Larry Ellison’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers.

The Wall Street Journal (Reuters non-paywalled alternative) indicates that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) has finalized plans to ‌provide ⁠roughly $10 billion to help fund the deal, with another $14 billion split between Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding. China’s Tencent is also expected to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to fund Ellison’s media play.

Because the Trump administration is a corrupt, pay-to-play kakistocracy subservient to the interests of global oligarchs and autocrats, Paramount executives don’t expect any meaningful regulatory review, despite the obvious competition, labor, and foreign influence issues that plague the major deal:

Paramount executives do not expect the funds’ involvement ⁠to trigger ​a review by the Committee ​on Foreign Investment in the U.S. or Federal Communications Commission, the Journal ​said.

The Trump DOJ claims it’s conducting a serious review (and has already sent out some subpoenas), but despite media pretense, there’s absolutely zero reason to assume the DOJ is a credible actor in this arena, especially after the Trump administration purged the handful of even remotely serious antitrust reformers peppered without the ranks of MAGA.

As a result, the only semi-serious obstacle to deal completion is a likely looming lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general, who have ample evidence that the deal will result in mass layoffs and higher prices due to the ridiculous $111 billion price tag and broad competitive erosion.

That’s before you even get to the problems with having Middle East countries back the ongoing Republican plan to dominate consolidated corporate media and destroy what’s left of U.S. journalism. Democrats have performatively urged FCC boss Brendan Carr to investigate, but that’s obviously not happening, despite Carr’s history of phony outrage at foreign government meddling.

This has all been a pretty standard road map for autocracies around the world, including Orban’s Hungary. Party-friendly oligarchs buy up all the media, which then gets to work pummeling the public with right wing propaganda while the government strangles independent journalism just out of frame.

It will continue to accelerate here in the States until the public reaches critical mass and our so-called “opposition party” develops an actual, functional backbone and cultivates more ruthless leadership.

Tuesday 2026-04-07

11:00 PM

All the letters [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages.

But no writer knows all the words.

That’s the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie–between the universal letters and the unlimited words. This is an analogy for arenas as diverse as sports and commerce.

Sometimes, we work on a project where our competitors have access to more letters than we do. It’s unlikely you’ll win that competition.

But if you start out with the same letters as everyone else, don’t spend a lot of time admiring your letters. It’s the words that matter.

      

Kanji of the Day: 帰 [Kanji of the Day]

帰

✍10

小2

homecoming, arrive at, lead to, result in

キ

かえ.る　かえ.す　おく.る　とつ.ぐ

帰国   (きこく)   —   return to one's country
復帰   (ふっき)   —   return
帰り   (かえり)   —   return
帰宅   (きたく)   —   returning home
帰る   (かえる)   —   to return
帰省   (きせい)   —   homecoming
帰れ   (かえれ)   —   go home
里帰り   (さとがえり)   —   returning home to one's parents (of a married person)
帰ってくる   (かえってくる)   —   to return
持ち帰り   (もちかえり)   —   takeout (food)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 醒 [Kanji of the Day]

醒

✍16

中学

awake, be disillusioned, sober up

セイ

さ.ます　さ.める

覚醒   (かくせい)   —   waking up
興醒め   (きょうざめ)   —   spoiled fun
醒める   (さめる)   —   to wake
醒ます   (さます)   —   to awaken
醒め遣らぬ   (さめやらぬ)   —   lingering (usu. feeling, emotion, etc.)
醒めやらぬ   (さめやらぬ)   —   lingering (usu. feeling, emotion, etc.)
酔い醒め   (よいざめ)   —   recovering from intoxication
警醒   (けいせい)   —   warning
興醒める   (きょうざめる)   —   to lose interest
興醒まし   (きょうざまし)   —   kill-joy

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Pluralistic: Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (07 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber: Public provision is a layered question.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: EU appoints henhouse fox (copyright); Emacs x Tron: Legacy; Spammer v dead man's AOL account; Scott Walker's pork fountain; "No toilets, try Amazon"; Iceland falls (x Panama Papers); Rooms in Milanese sewers; China bans Panama Papers; "Parent Hacks"; "The Nameless City"; Phishing the world's top breach expert.
  • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A vintage idyllic picture-postcard view of Lucerne, Switzerland; it features an impressive lakeside building and two elegant span bridges, with snow-capped Alps in the background. The image has been altered: a 'code waterfall' effect (as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies) cascades down over the mountains and streaks across the water of the lake. Three massive fiber optic bundles rear up out of the harbor, their cut tips glowing white. The Swiss flag atop the lakeside building is haloed with radiant glowing streaks.

Switzerland's Goldilocks fiber (permalink)

If you live in Switzerland you can get a 25Gbit fiber link to your home. That's 25Gbit symmetrical – upload and download. On a dedicated connection that's yours and yours alone. From multiple providers. And you can switch providers with the click of a mouse. It's the ne plus ultra, magnifico, wunderschön:

https://www.init7.net/de/internet/fiber7/

In a fascinating blog post, Stefan Schüller unpacks how this came to pass, in Switzerland, a country known for its impassable mountains and its impossible national telco (Swisscom):

https://sschueller.github.io/posts/the-free-market-lie/

Schüller describes the Swiss system as a kind of Goldilocks approach that's midway between two failed systems: the American "free market" system and the German state provision system.

Most people in the US can't get fiber at all, and if you can get it, it's probably 1Gbit, and available from a single provider (that's nearly my situation in Los Angeles, where I can buy 2Gbit symmetrical fiber from AT&T, who run a shared connection on old Worldcom fiber they've lit up). Some (very foolish) people say that Starlink represents a competitive alternative to fiber. This is nonsense – first, because Starlink is another natural monopoly (how many competing satellite constellations can we cram into stable orbits before they start smashing into each other?), and second, because satellite is millions of times slower than fiber:

https://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/starlink-nov-2022-data-caps.html

In Germany, most people also have a single fiber provider, and the connection they get is shared, and caps out at 1-2Gbit.

Meanwhile, the Swiss can get connections that are far faster, and cheaper. How did they do it?

For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks – any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids.

In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice.

You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks. German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit – pipe – laid in a single trench).

This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" – a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes. This is a good idea in theory – but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines.

The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections.

Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity"). The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World."

These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making profits (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting rent (money you get from sweating assets). For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/

This means that US fiber networks tend to be underbuilt (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix.

(Note that there are cities in the US with a better situation; particularly cities served by Ting, which is owned by Hover, the amazing domain registry. Ting operates an excellent mobile carrier and a fiber networks in many cities. If you are lucky enough to have Ting as an option, then you should treasure that option.)

So, that's Germany and America. What did they do in Switzerland?

For starters, they ran a four-strand, dedicated line (an insulated wire with four separate strands of fiber in it) to every house. That wire terminates at your wall with a "neutral, open hub." Any carrier can provide service over those four strands: Swisscom (the incumbent, majority state-owned carrier); Init7 or Salt (national, commercial carriers); or a local ISP.

Each of the strands in your neutral hub operate independently. That means that you can switch from one carrier to another with a click. You can also run two or more carriers' signal through your hub, meaning that you can try out a new carrier before canceling your old one. The carriers compete on price, speed and customer service – but they don't compete on who can actually connect your home to the internet.

The origins of this excellent system are in 2008, when Switzerland's Federal Communications Commission convened a roundtable to determine the future of the country's broadband. Incredibly, it was Swisscom that pushed for the multi-strand, dedicated fiber system, on the grounds that anything less would lead to monopolization.

I say "incredibly," because in all my travels over the past three decades, a single encounter with Swisscom stands out as the most absurd and backwards run-in I ever experienced with a telco.

It was while I was working as EFF's delegate to the United Nations in Geneva, as part of an infinitesimal coalition of digital rights group convened by James Love and Manon Ress of Knowledge Ecology International. Geneva is not a forgiving city for someone working for a cash-strapped NGO: it's a city where everyone (except you) is on a lavish expense account courtesy of a national government, or (better still) an industry body that lobbies the UN.

My usual daggy two-star hotel (which cost as much as a four-star in London) didn't have its own wifi: instead, you signed on through Swisscom, which did not offer its own payment processing. To get onto the Swisscom wifi, you had to buy a scratch-off prepaid card that was good for a certain number of hours or minutes. The hotel was always sold out of these cards.

So my normal ritual upon my arrival in Geneva was to scour the tobacco shops around the train station for scratch-off cards. Normally, this would take four or five tries – the shops would either be completely sold out, or would only have the two-hour cards (needless to say, these were a lot more expensive on a per-hour basis than the one-day and multi-day cards).

On one trip, though, all the shops were sold out of these cards, so I skipped breakfast the next morning to wait outside the doors of the Swisscom offices, which opened five minutes late (the only business in Switzerland that wasn't achingly prompt!). The clerk let me in eventually, but when I approached his counter, he made me trudge to the opposite end of the room to take a number (I was the only person in the shop).

After an ostentatious delay, the clerk called out "Numero un!" and I went up to his counter and asked for a three-day card. No dice, he was sold out. Two-day cards? Nope. One-day? Uh-uh. He only had two-hour cards, too. Literally, the Swiss national telco had run out of integers.

This incident stuck with me so durably that I wrote it into my third novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can hear me read that passage here:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#sctt-slt

So it's frankly amazing to me to learn that Swisscom – who will forever be synonymous in my mind with the most catastrophically stupid internet delivery system imaginable – demanded this anti-monopoly fiber rollout.

But – as Schüller points out – Swisscom's foray into uncharacteristic reasonableness was short-lived. By 2020, the company had regressed to its mean, and was demanding an end to the neutral, four-strand, point-to-point system, petitioning for regulatory permission to switch to a cheaper, slower, shared hub-and-spoke system. This system wouldn't just be slower – it would also require all of Swisscom's rivals to rent access to its fiber, with Swisscom having the final say over who could compete with it and how.

This went all the way to the Swiss federal courts, who ruled that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate "sufficient technological or economic grounds" for the change and fined the company CHF18m for wasting everyone's time with this stupid idea (that is, "violating Swiss competition law"). And so it is that, in 2026, you can get 25Gbit symmetrical fiber throughout Switzerland. Wunderschön!

Schüller closes out his piece with a set of recommendations for countries hoping to replicate Switzerland's broadband miracle: open access to physical infrastructure; point-to-point service; neutral fiber standards; municipal fiber; and strong antitrust enforcement to keep the incumbent carriers in line.

These are great recommendations; they address the contradiction of regulated monopoly telcoms provision. On the one hand, these networks are natural monopolies, and they can only exist with extensive government intervention (at a minimum, to clear the way for poles, trenches and conduit for the physical fiber).

On the other hand, telcoms (especially broadband) play an important role in the political realm, because broadband connections are essential to civic and political engagement. You can't turn people out for a protest, or run an election campaign, a referendum, a ballot initiative, a regulatory notice-and-comment campaign, or even a campaign to get people to a public meeting or listening session without broadband.

This means that state-provided broadband is an incredibly tempting target for political corruption and regulatory capture. Think of all the terrible things that governments are doing with broadband regulation today, like Trump demanding that service providers turn over the identities and locations of his political enemies so that ICE can hunt them down and kidnap or murder them; or "age verification" systems that accumulate mountains of easily raided personal information on adults and children.

Do you want Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr setting content moderation policies for your internet connection? The guy who wants to pull TV and radio stations' broadcast licenses if they criticize Trump and Israel's catastrophic Iran war?

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

Do you want your local ISP being run by your mayor? I mean, sure, there are some reasonable mayors out there, but imagine if your ISP was managed by Eric Adams, Boris Johnson…or Rob Ford:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

Saying that broadband should be run "like a utility," raises more questions than it answers. I, too, want broadband run "like a utility," but that doesn't mean that I want the whole show to be provided solely by my federal or municipal government. A "utility" model for broadband should mean running conduit to every home in town, with point-to-point connections that deliver broadband via a municipally owned network – but not just that.

The municipal network should also offer "essential facilities sharing" in two forms: first, they should allow anyone to set up an ISP by renting shelf-space in the municipal data-center and installing their own switches that can provide internet to anyone in town. This would let large and small companies set up ISPs, as well as co-ops and nonprofits, or even tinkerers wanting to provide access to a group of friends. Beyond that, the city should rent space in the conduit itself, to support point-to-point links beyond those offered by the city – for example, between a university campus and an offsite supercomputing center, or two buildings owned by the same company, or even as a parallel set of fiber connections run by someone who's fed up with getting their internet service from Eric Adams.

This is a "pluralized" utility model: one that involves the city in providing infrastructure at several layers, as well as a "public option" – but which doesn't allow a city that's in thrall to Moms For Liberty to decide what you can say on the internet.

This principle generalizes beyond internet provision, too. Many people have observed that social media, with its strong "network effects" (meaning its value increases as more people use it), could be a "natural monopoly" and want a social media "utility." I can see the reasoning there, but if there's one thing we've learned from zuckermuskian legacy social media, it's that centralized control over speech forums is a moral hazard and an attractive nuisance. It's a political prize beyond measure, and it attracts all sorts of skullduggerous bids to suborn it and harness it to some political faction.

But there's a pluralized utility model for social media, too, thanks to modern, federated social media systems like Mastodon and Bluesky. These are open platforms that can support multiple, interconnected servers that all talk to one another. Unlike, say, Twitter, where you can only talk to other Twitter users, federated social media allows you to talk with anyone on any server, provided they want to talk with you.

As with fiber, a "utility" model for federated social media would feature public intervention at multiple layers of the system. Governments could (should!) run their own servers, providing the canonical source of government information. They can also provide turnkey cloud services for people who want to start their own services – and they can spin out the code that goes into these services into free/open source projects that others can use (and contribute to). Governments could support people who are trying to migrate off of legacy social media (for example, through library workshops and helplines), and pay to label and tag media (for example, media that is compliant with the public education curriculum). Governments could also offer public servers where you could sign up to get online – and because federated social media makes it easy to move your account from one server to another, it would be easy to move from that server to one run by a nonprofit, a co-op or a business:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Think of this pluralized utility model as being something like your city's roads. It's great for your city to provide roads, and great for them to run buses on those roads, and to create bike lanes and bike parking spots and other infrastructure. For roads to be "public," it does not follow that everything on them be licensed and operated by the municipal government: we can still have private bikes, bikeshares, regulated taxis and licensed private motor vehicles. The roads are still "public" but Boris Johnson doesn't get to decide where you can go.

A utility model needn't be all-or-nothing. As the Swiss have demonstrated, public provision of various layers of the system, combined with strong regulation, combined with a public option, can deliver a best-of-all-worlds solution.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Recording industry lobbyist appointed head of copyright for European Commission https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/top-music-industry-lawyer-now-eu-copyright-chief/

#15yrsago How emacs got into Tron: Legacy https://web.archive.org/web/20110407224426/http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

#15yrsago Dead man’s AOL account hijacked by spammer https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/T274c51b2ba843fb0-Mb6bf8853b1ed34a26b07ce44/deceasesd-father-in-law-spamming-friends-and-family-two-years-on

#15yrsago Scarring Party: megaphone songs, sea chanteys and dark vaudeville tunes https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044523/http://www.avclub.com/milwaukee/articles/the-scarring-party-losing-teeth%2C43871/

#15yrsago Snaggly table made out of computer junk https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044521/http://brcdesigns.com/furniture/binary-low-table

#15yrsago Scott Walker gives cushy $85.5K/year government job to major donor’s young, underqualified son https://web.archive.org/web/20110406040138/https://thinkprogress.org/2011/04/04/scott-walker-hires-dropout/

#15yrsago Closing down Borders sign: “No toilets, try Amazon” https://web.archive.org/web/20110406044522/https://consumerist.com/2011/04/sign-at-borders-store-closing-in-chicago-tells-customers-where-to-find-a-restroom.html

#15yrsago What is legitimate “newsgathering” and what is “piracy”? https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/why-arianna-huffington-is-bill-kellers-somali-pirate/

#10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister asks to dissolve Parliament https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35966412

#10yrsago Artist installs rooms beneath Milan’s sewer entrances https://web.archive.org/web/20160406132425/https://www.biancoshock.com/borderlife.html

#10yrsago Banned on China’s Internet: all discussion of the Panama Papers https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-35957235

#10yrsago Google reaches into customers’ homes and bricks their gadgets https://arlogilbert.com/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.srp9ym34a

#10yrsago Middle class housing projects are the Bay Area’s future https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/welcome-to-the-future-middle-class-housing-projects

#10yrsago Pollster explains how Chamber of Commerce can steamroller empathetic execs into opposing progressive policies https://web.archive.org/web/20160406190524/https://gawker.com/business-execs-support-progressive-policies-but-the-ch-1768898477

#10yrsago How to write about scientists who are women https://www.doublexscience.org/the-finkbeiner-test/

#10yrsago Garden: XKCD’s latest maddening, relaxing webtoy https://xkcd.com/1663/#3978da67-1ead-45e1-a293-9c8e4918a147

#10yrsago Parent Hacks: illustrated guide is the best kind of parenting book https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/parent-hacks-illustrated-guide-is-the-best-kind-of-parenting-book/

#10yrsago The Nameless City: YA graphic novel about diplomacy, hard and soft power, colonialism, bravery, and parkour https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/05/the-nameless-city-ya-graphic-novel-about-diplomacy-hard-and-soft-power-colonialism-bravery-and-parkour/

#5yrsago How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach

#1yrago How the world's leading breach expert got phished https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

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06:00 PM

Supreme Court Wipes Piracy Liability Verdict Against Grande Communications [TorrentFreak]

cassette tape pirate musicIn late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music prevailed in their lawsuit against Internet provider Grande Communications.

The record labels accused the Astound-owned ISP of not doing enough to stop pirating subscribers. Specifically, they alleged that the company failed to terminate repeat infringers.

The trial lasted more than two weeks and ended in a resounding victory for the labels. A Texas federal jury found Grande liable for willful contributory copyright infringement, and the ISP was ordered to pay $47 million in damages to the record labels. The copyright infringement verdict was confirmed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, though the Fifth Circuit ordered a new trial on damages.

The verdict was not the final word yet, as Grande petitioned the Supreme Court last year, urging the justices to take up the case and review the Fifth Circuit’s decision.

Grande’s petition centered on the crucial question of ISP liability in cases of contributory copyright infringement. Grande framed the issue as an “exceptionally important question under the Copyright Act,” highlighting a “nationwide litigation campaign by the U.S. recording industry” to hold ISPs liable for copyright violations carried out by their customers.

The central question is as follows:  

“Whether an ISP is liable for contributory copyright infringement by (i) providing content-neutral internet access to the general public and (ii) failing to terminate that access after receiving two third-party notices alleging someone at a customer’s IP address has infringed.”

Knowledge is Not Intent

The case and the questions are similar to the Cox v. Sony case, which the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Internet provider last month. In a 7-2 decision, it concluded that an ISP cannot be held contributorily liable for copyright infringement merely because it kept providing service to subscribers that were flagged for piracy.

In Cox, the Supreme Court stated that contributory liability requires proof that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can only be shown in one of two ways. Either the provider actively induced infringement, or the service is one that has no substantial non-infringing uses.

“Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights. Accordingly, we reverse,” Justice Thomas wrote in the opinion last month.

The Court also directly countered the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning, which held that supplying a product with “knowledge” of future infringement was enough to establish liability.

Supreme Court Sends Grande v. UMG Back to Fifth Circuit

With Cox v. Sony now settled, the Supreme Court turned its attention to Grande’s pending petition. Rather than taking up the case on the merits, the Court issued a GVR order, granting the petition, vacating the Fifth Circuit’s judgment, and remanding the case for reconsideration under the Cox standard.

The order effectively removes the case from the Supreme Court docket, urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision in light of the new ruling.

The order

the order

Given the similarities between the two cases, it is no surprise that the Supreme Court came to this conclusion.

It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to revisit whether Grande’s conduct meets the intent threshold that was established in Cox. That is a significantly higher bar than the one applied in the original verdict, which found that continuing to provide service to known infringers was enough to establish material contribution.

The music companies previously said they sent over a million copyright infringement notices, but that Grande failed to terminate even a single subscriber account in response. However, without proof of active inducement, these absolute numbers carry less weight now.

Whether this translates into a win for Grande on remand remains to be seen. For now, however, the original $47 million verdict is further away than ever.

This week’s GVR order is just one of the many ripple effects of the Sony ruling on other contributory infringement cases. Last week, we reported how X already asked the court to dismiss its liability battle with several music publishers. Meanwhile, the ruling will also directly impact Verizon’s repeat infringer battle with the music industry.

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

02:00 PM

Congress Wants To Put The Law Behind A Paywall. Again. [Techdirt]

Every relevant court that has looked at this question — including the Supreme Court — has agreed: no one can own the law. When private standards get incorporated into binding legal requirements, the public has a right to access them freely. The Fifth Circuit, the DC Circuit, and the First Circuit have all reached the same conclusion through different cases over the past two decades.

So naturally, a bipartisan group of senators has reintroduced a bill to override all of that.

Senators Coons, Cornyn, Hirono, and Tillis have brought back the Pro Codes Act, a bill that would grant copyright protection to standards that have been incorporated by reference into law. That means building codes, fire safety codes, electrical codes, accessibility guidelines — the kind of stuff that governs whether your house is up to code and violations of which can carry civil or criminal penalties — would remain the copyrighted property of the private standards development organizations (SDOs) that wrote them.

That would be really, really bad — and also, according to multiple federal courts, unconstitutional.

The press release from these senators is really something. Tillis says the bill “protects a commonsense system that keeps Americans safe without costing taxpayers a dime.” Coons worries about “a penalty for the non-profit organizations that developed them and stand to lose their intellectual property.” The Copyright Alliance (a copyright maximalist org funded by the usual suspects in Hollywood) CEO calls it “a clear win for public safety, transparency, and economic growth.”

You’d think we were talking about some beleaguered group of nonprofits on the verge of financial collapse, valiantly producing safety standards out of the goodness of their hearts, about to be crushed by pernicious freeloaders daring to read the laws for free. The reality, as Katherine Klosek and Garrett Reynolds detailed here on Techdirt, is rather different. The main SDOs pushing this bill — the International Code Council and the National Fire Protection Association — are making more money than ever, with CEO salaries upward of $1,000,000, compared to a median nonprofit CEO salary of around $115,682. Their revenues have grown even as organizations like Public.Resource.Org and UpCodes have been providing free, unfettered access to these incorporated standards for years.

As the Fifth Circuit noted way back in 2002:

“It is difficult to imagine an area of creative endeavor in which the copyright incentive is needed less. Trade organizations have powerful reasons stemming from industry standardization, quality control, and self regulation to produce these model codes; it is unlikely that, without copyright, they will cease producing them.”

Twenty-four years later, the prediction holds up perfectly. The SDOs kept producing standards. They kept growing their revenue. They just also want Congress to hand them a monopoly over public law, because the courts wouldn’t.

And the bill is sneaky about it: it includes a provision requiring that incorporated standards be made “publicly accessible online,” which the bill’s supporters point to as proof of their commitment to transparency. But the bill explicitly says this access must be provided “in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.” That’s Congress writing profit protection directly into the definition of “public access to the law.” In practice, as Klosek explained last year, this means read-only access where you can’t download, copy, print, or link to the standards. That’s not access to the law. That’s a peek at the law through a keyhole, on terms set by a private corporation.

Meanwhile, the organizations actually providing genuinely useful, free public access to these laws — Public.Resource.Org, UpCodes, and others — would be exposed to copyright liability under this bill. So the Pro Codes Act doesn’t just fail to improve public access to the law. It actively threatens the entities that are already doing a better job of providing that access than the SDOs ever have.

So when the senators pushing this bill talk up the need for “non-profits” to make money, what they’re really doing is choosing which nonprofits deserve to survive — the (already extremely well-resourced) ones that write the standards, rather than ones like Public.Resource.Org that actually make those standards available to the public.

This bill has never received a committee hearing. Not in this Congress. Not in any previous Congress. The last time around, it was brought to the House floor under suspension of the rules — a process reserved for non-controversial legislation — and still couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to pass. A growing coalition of libraries, journalists, civil society organizations, disability rights groups, and the NAACP has lined up against it.

They’ve lined up against this law because it’s bad. It locks up the law behind copyright.

The Supreme Court. Multiple circuit courts. A broad coalition of public interest groups. All saying the same thing: the law belongs to the public. But as long as the SDOs keep spending millions on lobbying, Congress will apparently keep trying to give it away.

11:00 AM

Hegseth’s War On His Own Army [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of NBC News

“Here is a four-star general who is actively working to get equipment and people into theater — to protect U.S. forces — and you fire him? In the middle of a war?” That was an unnamed U.S. defense official reacting to the news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had just fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.

A second official, also speaking anonymously, was even more succinct: “It’s insane.”

George, the Army’s highest-ranking uniformed officer and a decorated combat veteran of the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan, was informed by phone during a meeting that he had been fired. He had been confirmed by the Senate 96 to 1, and still had more than a year left in his term. No reason was given.

On that same day, Hegseth also fired Gen. David Hodne, who commanded the Army’s new battlefield modernization unit, and Maj. Gen. William Green Jr., the Army’s chief of chaplains.

Three generals. One day. Zero explanations. With a war raging, the U.S. public is entitled to understand what drove this decision, particularly whether Hegseth is prioritizing politics over mission.

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So what actually happened?

Following Gen. George’s firing, the Pentagon offered little beyond platitudes for his “decades of service.” But reporting from the New York Times, NBC News and CNN has helped fill in the picture.

Weeks before his firing, Hegseth had moved to block four Army officers from a promotion list of roughly 29 candidates selected to advance to brigadier general. The four officers Hegseth singled out for removal were—surprise, surprise—two Black men and two women. Nearly everyone else on the list was a white man.

Gen. George pushed back on the move to block these racial minorities and women from advancement. He and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll—a Trump appointee, not a Biden holdover—refused to go along, citing the officers’ exemplary service records.

The general then did what any reasonable person would do: request a meeting to discuss Hegseth’s refusal to promote these four officers. Hegseth declined to meet.

Two weeks later, George was out.

Beyond the controversy over the promotions, other factors may have been at work. Axios reported that the dismissal was also driven by “clashing personalities,” and NBC and the Times both noted Hegseth’s troubled relationship with Driscoll, with whom Gen. George was closely allied. CNN pointed out Gen. George’s prior service as a military aide to Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, a role that Hegseth and his circle reportedly held against him.

Not one of these explanations has anything to do with George’s competence or fitness for his position, which has never been questioned. They appear tied instead to his perceived loyalties and willingness to stand up for racial minorities and women in the military.

Hegseth’s blocking of these qualified women and Black men was not an isolated incident. Nine U.S. officials confirmed that he had blocked or delayed promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers across all four military branches. Hegseth’s own chief of staff, Ricky Buria, objected to the appointment of Maj. Gen. Antoinette Gant to lead the Military District of Washington on the remarkable grounds that Trump wouldn’t want to be seen publicly with a Black woman officer at events.

Why bother modernizing anyway?

Gen. David Hodne’s dismissal got less coverage than Gen. George’s but may prove equally consequential, according to military analysts.

Hodne ran the Army’s Transformation and Training Command, known as T2COM. The unit, stood up just last October, was tasked with accelerating how the Army develops and deploys new battlefield technology. It was the Army’s most forward-looking institutional investment, championed by Gen. George.

With both George and Hodne fired, T2COM’s future is now unclear. The unit’s website still displayed Hodne’s headshot the morning after his firing. But the man stepping in as acting Army chief, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, a former Hegseth aide installed as vice chief just months ago, has reportedly questioned whether the Army’s modernization push was moving “too fast and too far,” according to U.S. officials.

In short, the Army’s top officer is gone, the command meant to modernize its battlefield capabilities is leaderless, and his replacement is on record as skeptical of the whole enterprise.

So which general would Jesus fire?

Then there’s Maj. Gen. William Green Jr.— a Baptist minister, Iraq veteran and the Army’s chief of chaplains since 2023. His dismissal is, by one measure, unprecedented: In the more than 100 years since Congress created the position under the National Defense Act of 1920, no Army chief of chaplains has ever been fired.

Green became the first. And Hegseth did it the Holy Days leading up to Easter Sunday.

As with Generals George and Hodne, no reason was given for Green’s firing, but the context isn’t hard to see. Hegseth has been on a determined campaign to remake the Chaplain Corps in his own ideological image. In the weeks before the firing, he had already scrapped the Army’s 2025 Spiritual Fitness Guide. He also shrunk the military’s faith coding system from more than 200 categories to just 31 and announced that chaplains would no longer display their rank insignia but show instead only their religious symbols, because they are “first and foremost called and ordained by God.”

He also invited his pastor, Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist, to preach at the Pentagon. Wilson has argued that women should be denied the right to vote and that Christian slaveholders were “on firm scriptural ground.”

Experts on religion in the military have raised alarms. “The ideological consolidation of the military is something that we have historically not wanted,” Georgetown visiting scholar Matthew Taylor told The Hill. “We want the military to be diverse. We want the military representative of the American people.”

The Chaplain Corps historically has been built on principles of on pluralism, meaning spiritual care for service members of every faith, or even no faith at all. That’s the kind of institution Green was running, and what Hegseth is trying to dismantle. He is doing so while waging war against, and fiercely condemning, an Islamic theocracy—while insisting to U.S. troops that God’s providence is on their side.

A purge without precedent

April 2 was not an aberration. It was another chapter in a story that began on day one of the Trump regime.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen senior military leaders. The roster includes Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr.; Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti; Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan; Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin; NSA and Cyber Command chief Gen. Tim Haugh; Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse; Naval Special Warfare Command chief Rear Adm. Milton Sands; NATO military committee representative Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield; and Navy chief of staff Jon Harrison, just to name a few.

As Axios noted last year,

Decades of experience have been wiped from the highest levels of the U.S. military.

MIT political scientist Caitlin Talmadge, who specializes in military operations and foreign policy, laid out the stakes plainly. “Firing senior officers for cause is one thing. Firing them repeatedly on this scale and with no explanation is unprecedented in our nation’s history.”

Last year, shortly after the firings began, five former defense secretaries, including Trump’s own first SecDef, retired Gen. Jim Mattis, sent a joint letter to Congress calling the purge “reckless” and demanding immediate hearings on the national security implications. Republican leaders on the Hill have scheduled none.

With respect to the recent firings, some Republicans on the Armed Services Committee broke with Hegseth. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) praised George’s modernization work, and Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) called him a “principled leader.”

But none of the GOP elected officials has actually done anything about the firings.

The war within the war

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offered the sharpest theory for why all of this is happening now. In his view, the purge isn’t happening in spite of the Iran war. It’s happening because of it. Sen. Murphy argues that experienced generals are pushing back on war plans they consider unworkable, and that Hegseth is removing those who do.

If true, it explains a lot. As I’ve written about the Iran war’s deteriorating trajectory, Trump and Hegseth both predicted the conflict would wrap up quickly. It hasn’t. Casualties are mounting. U.S. fighter craft are being shot down. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed and contested. And now the 82nd Airborne is heading to the region, raising new questions about what comes next.

Into this moment, Hegseth fired the general actively managing Army logistics and installed a loyalist who has questioned the pace of modernization. He also gutted the command designed to give U.S. forces a technological edge on the battlefield.

“This doesn’t feel like a very strong, self-assured decision,” one defense official told Axios.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine veteran on the Armed Services Committee, called the broader pattern what it is: “That’s a recipe not just for a politicized military, but an authoritarian military. That’s the way militaries work in Russia and China and North Korea.”

When it was time to choose between the hot war in the Persian Gulf and the culture war at home, Hegseth chose the latter. And none of us, least of all the troops heading into theater, is safer or better for it.

09:00 AM

Trump Fires Attorney General Pam Bondi For Not Making His Vindictive Fantasies A Reality [Techdirt]

You’re never safe when you’re working for Trump. That much was obvious in Trump’s first term, when he fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and FBI Director James Comey. They were all fired for the same reason: failing to be completely loyal to Trump.

This time around even die-hard MAGA loyalists are being fired. DHS head Kristi Noem was dismissed from her position, despite being the enthusiastic figurehead of anti-migrant cruelty Trump definitely wanted in that position. Now, she’s cooling her heels and watching the dust settle on her political hopes as the doesn’t-sound-made-up-at-all “Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.”

Less than a month later, another head has rolled. This time it’s Pam Bondi, who’s getting fired for failing to do the impossible while still remaining fiercely loyal to the Trump’s lost causes.

In recent weeks, Ms. Bondi tried to shore up her position by moving more aggressively against investigative targets singled out by Mr. Trump, including the former Obama official John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to officials briefed on the effort.

It is not entirely clear if any specific action or event finally tipped the balance for Mr. Trump, who had been reluctant to fire senior officials to avoid reprising the chaotic turnstile personnel turnover of his first administration.

But with the dismissal of Ms. Noem and now Ms. Bondi, that might be changing. His calculus appears to have shifted after the quick confirmation of Markwayne Mullin as Ms. Noem’s replacement.

Bondi’s head may have been destined for the chopping block months ago, when Trump (in what appeared to be a personal message accidentally posted on main) berated Bondi for not doing all the impossible stuff he wanted done right now, like engaging in vindictive prosecutions that were (1) obviously vindictive, and (2) didn’t have enough evidence to support the hallucinatory charges dreamed up by Trump and his DOJ enablers.

Nothing has improved since then. Lots of prosecutors have left the DOJ, refusing to engage in Trump’s overt politicization of the department. Others have been dismissed for the same reason. A handful of handpicked prosecutors have been sidelined by judges because they were never formally appointed. And grand juries are frequently refusing to buy what the government’s selling, terminating prosecutions before they can even get off the ground.

Not that we should expect anything better (or more ethical) from her replacement. Todd Blanche is a true Trump loyalist. But he’s taking over a DOJ that’s short on experience, long on MAGA loyalty, and whose reputation has been completely destroyed by this administration and its actions.

The stuff Bondi failed to get done will continue to not happen. Anyone stepping into this position should know it’s only going to be temporary. The president who thinks he’s a king will continue to see courts stifle his worst impulses. Changing the name on the letterhead isn’t suddenly going to make vindictive, politically motivated prosecutions any more legal or feasible.

But I don’t have any sympathy for anyone being shit-canned for failing to satisfy the whims of a megalomaniac who thinks he’s a king, rather than a temporarily elevated politician. They’re far more than merely complicit. They’re fully supportive of destroying America and its institutions to usher in a new age of white Christian nationalism. So, fuck ’em. They got what they deserved.

07:00 AM

UK Politicians Continue To Miss The Point In Latest Social Media Ban Proposal [Techdirt]

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means.

What was the last vote about? 

On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed amendments tabled by the House of Lords in the government’s flagship legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. 

The House of Lords previously tabled an amendment to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures,” which effectively banned under-16s from social media. When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated it by 307 votes to 173. 

Instead, the Commons proposed its own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide. 

Who does this give powers to?

The Commons proposal redirects power from the UK Parliament and the UK’s independent telecom regulator Ofcom to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, currently Liz Kendall, who will be able to restrict internet access for young people and determine what content is considered harmful…just because she can. The amendment also empowers the Secretary of State to limit VPN use for under 18s, as well as restrict access to addictive features and change the age of digital consent in the country; for example, preventing under-18s from playing games online after a certain time.  

Why is this a problem? 

This process is devoid of checks or accountability mechanisms as ministers will not be required to demonstrate specific harms to young people, which essentially unravels years-long efforts by Ofcom to assess online services according to their risks. And given the moment the UK is currently in, such as refusing to protect trans and LGBTQ+ communities and flaming hostile and racist discourses, it is not unlikely that we’ll see ministers start restricting content that they ideologically or morally feel opposed to, rather than because the content is harmful based, as established by evidence and assessed pursuant to established human rights principles. 

We know from other jurisdictions like the United States that legislation seeking to protect young people typically sweeps up a slew of broadly-defined topics. Some block access to websites that contain some “sexual material harmful to minors,” which has historically meant explicit sexual content. But some states are now defining the term more broadly so that “sexual material harmful to minors” could encompass anything like sex education; others simply list a variety of vaguely-defined harms. In either instance, this bill would enable ministers to target LGBTQ+ content online by pushing this behind an under-18s age gate, and this risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies. 

How will this impact young people? 

The internet is an essential resource for young people (and adults) to access information, explore community, and find themselves. Beyond being spaces where people can share funny videos and engage with enjoyable content, social media enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their in-person realm, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse or their sexuality. In severing this connection to people and information by banning social media, politicians are forcing millions of young people into a dark and censored world. 

How did each party vote? 

The initial push to ban under-16s from social media came from the Conservative Party, who have since accused the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “dither and delay” for not committing to the ban. The Liberal Democrats have also called this “not good enough.” The Labour Party itself is split, with 107 Labour Party MPs abstaining in the vote on the House of Lords amendment. 

But we know that the issue of young people’s online safety is a polarizing topic that politicians have—and will continue to—weaponize for public support, regardless of their actual intentions. This is why we will continue to urge policymakers and regulators to protect people’s rights and freedoms online at all moments, and not just take the easy route for a quick boost in the polls.

How does this bill connect to the Online Safety Act?

The draft Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that came from the Lords provided that any regulation pertaining to the well-being of young people on social media “must be treated as an enforceable requirement” with the Online Safety Act. The Commons amendment, however, starts out by inserting a new clause that amends the Online Safety Act. 

For more than six years, we’ve been calling on the UK government to pass better legislation around regulating the internet, and when the Online Safety Act passed we continued to advocate for the rights of people on the internet—including young people—as Ofcom implemented the legislation. This has been a protracted effort by civil society groups, technologists, tech companies, and others participating in Ofcom’s consultation process and urging the regulator to protect internet users in the UK.

The MPs amendment essentially rips this up. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall recently said that ministers intended to go further than the existing Online Safety Act because it was “never meant to be the end point, and we know parents still have serious concerns. That is why I am prepared to take further action.” But when this further action is empowering herself to make arbitrary decisions on content and access, and banning under-18s from social media, this causes much more harm than it solves. 

Is the UK alone in pushing legislation like this? 

Sadly, no. Calls to ban social media access for young people have gained traction since Australia became the first country in the world to enforce one back in December. On 5 March, Indonesia announced a ban on social media and other “high-risk” online platforms for users under 16. A few days later, new measures came into effect in Brazil that restricts social media access for under-16s, who must now have their accounts linked to a legal guardian. Other countries like Spain and the Philippines have this year announced plans to ban social media for under-16s, with legislation currently pending to implement this.

What are the next steps?

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returns to the House of Lords on 25 March for consideration of the new Commons amendments. The bill will only become law if both Houses agree to the final draft. 

We will continue to stand up against these proposals—not only to young people’ free expression rights, but also to safeguard the free flow of information that is vital to a democratic society. The issue of online safety is not solved through technology alone, especially not through a ban, and young people deserve a more intentional approach to protecting their safety and privacy online, not this lazy strategy that causes more harm than it solves. 

We encourage politicians in the UK to look into what is best, not what is easy, and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms. 

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

05:00 AM

Trump Celebrates Easter By Dropping An F-Bomb, Threatening More War Crimes [Techdirt]

Before we get into this, let’s set the scene a little:

The latest Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 20-26, 2026, finds that most White evangelicals (69%) approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president. And a majority (58%) say they support all or most of his plans and policies.

Let that sink in for a bit. The operative term here is probably “white,” but Trump has been embraced by the evangelical community, despite his being about as far removed from the ideals of Christianity as their arch-nemesis, trans people the Devil. (And let’s not forget I’m talking about the ideals, which are often preached but rarely practiced.)

Here’s how Trump handled Easter morning, one of the holiest (no pun intended) holidays observed by the people most likely to support him no matter what:

President Trump: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-05T12:26:44.944Z

In Trump’s own words, at 5:03 am on Easter Sunday:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Now, I have to admit that when I first read this, I thought Trump was announcing some new celebration of US infrastructure before derailing his own train of thought. But it’s definitely not that.

It’s the other thing… which turns out to be Trump announcing planned war crimes. Again.

Both sides have threatened and hit civilian targets like oil fields and desalination plants critical for drinking water. Iran’s U.N. mission on social media called Trump’s threat “clear evidence of intent to commit war crime.”

Iran’s military joint command warned of stepped-up retaliatory attacks on regional oil and civilian infrastructure if the U.S. and Israel attack such targets there, according to state television.

The laws of armed conflict allow attacks on civilian infrastructure only if the military advantage outweighs the civilian harm, legal scholars say. It’s considered a high bar to clear, and causing excessive suffering to civilians can constitute a war crime.

While it looks like both sides in this war are willing to strike civilian infrastructure, the United States should be trying to take the high road (the one without war crimes). And if it can’t be bothered to do that, the administration should — at the very least — try to keep the president from publicly saying we’re going to commit war crimes.

But, alas, there’s no one willing to stop him. Pete Hegseth is definitely relishing his unearned role as the Secretary of Defense (“Back to the Stone Age.”) And he appears to be firing anyone who disagrees with things like drone-killing people in international waters and, you know, engaging in war crimes.

Both Trump and Hegseth have publicly claimed they’re doing God’s work by going to war with Iran, something that has been echoed by the same demographic detailed in the Pew Research survey.

Shamefully, they won’t see a drop in support despite Trump threatening war crimes, dropping an F-bomb, and promising to send people halfway around the world to hell, as if he were a god himself. And that’s a damning indictment of an entire segment of Americans who choose to treat their religion as a weapon and want the world to be remade in their own image — something they often accuse Muslims of doing. The irony is lost on them, along with the man they’ve chosen to treat as God’s appointed leader.

We’ve had a lot of low points as a nation, but usually we’ve at least tried to improve. That’s no longer the case. We’re under the rule of people who debase and abuse the nation they claim to love. Happy Fuckin’ Easter, you crazy bastards. Welcome to Hell.

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03:00 AM

Jacob Siegel’s Error-Filled Book On ‘Censorship’ Got Fact-Checked. He’s Calling It Censorship. [Techdirt]

Fact-checking is not censorship. Asking a publication to correct factual errors is not censorship. Pointing out that someone’s book contains demonstrably false claims is not censorship. None of this should require explanation. And yet here we are, because author Jacob Siegel has decided that Renee DiResta requesting corrections to false statements he made about her — in his book and in reviews of his book — constitutes some kind of sinister suppression campaign. He’s gone as far as writing an article at The Free Press (which I have no intention of linking to and giving more traffic) publicly accusing her of plotting to censor a review of his book published in The Baffler. He spent a morning on Twitter calling her “a figure connected to the US government” (she’s not) who “pressure[d] a publication to remove its review of my book” (she didn’t).

This is all, to put it plainly, absolute nonsense. But it’s a specific strain of “free speech absolutist” nonsense that we keep seeing over and over again. And I say that as someone who has spent decades fighting for free speech, but is pretty damn sick of these free speech tourists, pretending to support free speech when they’re really just trying to protect themselves and their friends from social consequences for saying something stupid, or just something blatantly false.

We’ve seen this playbook before. Six years ago, a group of prominent intellectuals published what became known as the “Harper’s Letter,” ostensibly warning of a rising tide of censorship and illiberalism supposedly threatening free expression. But when you actually looked at the cases they cited, what you mostly found was… people criticizing them (or their friends). Sometimes sharply. Sometimes even unfairly. But the “intolerance” they described was just other people exercising their own free speech to push back on ideas they disagreed with. As we noted at the time, the whole thing amounted to famous people with massive platforms, and little self-awareness, using those very platforms to complain about being silenced.

But the Harper’s Letter crowd, for all their hand-wringing, were at least mostly operating in the realm of opinion and social consequences. They didn’t like that people disagreed with them loudly. Fair enough. It was thin-skinned and cringey, but mostly harmless. Siegel is doing something worse, because he made demonstrable factual errors in his book. Rather than owning them, he’s accusing the person he published false information about of censorship for having the temerity to ask for corrections.

If asking for a correction to a false factual claim counts as censorship, the word has been stretched so far that it no longer means anything. Which is probably the point. The more the term gets diluted, the easier it is to weaponize against anyone who challenges you on the facts.

Some background: Siegel published a book called The Information State, which is basically a book-length expansion of his 2023 Tablet essay about what he and a small group of MAGA-leaning grifters call the “censorship industrial complex.” One of his main arguments centers on the Election Integrity Partnership, an academic research project DiResta worked on during the 2020 election. Siegel’s book says the EIP “classified 21,897,364 tweets” as “misinformation incidents,” and he places this number in a context carefully designed to make readers believe the project flagged 22 million tweets to platforms for removal. As DiResta explains:

A couple of pages before the number appears, Siegel spends a some time on a character sketch establishing me as dishonest. Then he describes me as leading “the Election Integrity Partnership, at the time perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence.” He then writes that “over a hundred employees in the EIP network maintained nearly round-the-clock coverage of social media” and sent “alerts and takedown requests” that platforms responded to in under an hour. Immediately after that operational framing — the censorious leader, round-the-clock monitoring, the takedown requests, the rapid platform response — he drops the 22 million number: the EIP “reported collecting more than 859 million tweets for analysis and classifying 21,897,364 tweets on ‘tickets’ as unique ‘misinformation incidents’ just between August 15 and December 12, 2020.”

Read in sequence, the clear implication is that this was the scale of the “censorship operation”: a hundred people working around the clock flagged 22 million tweets to platforms, which obediently took them down within the hour. That is how people on Twitter are reading it, too.

That is not what happened.

What actually happened, as we’ve covered in detail before, is that the 22 million figure comes from a post-election academic analysis of how viral election narratives spread across social media — a research dataset, not a list of items flagged for removal. During the actual election, EIP flagged roughly 4,800 URLs total, including 2,890 tweets, to platforms for possible policy violations like impersonating poll workers. As DiResta notes:

Of those, approximately 65 percent received no platform action whatsoever, about 25 percent were labeled, and ~10 percent were removed — by the platforms, under their own policies. No government agency directed or funded any of it. Those are the real numbers. A few hundred tweets came down. This is in the public record, in our publications, in amicus briefs, in legal filings, and in congressional testimony. Every flagging ‘ticket’ we sent to a platform was turned over to Jim Jordan’s Weaponization Subcommittee under subpoena. Even Jordan’s deeply partisan report does not attempt to substantiate the “22 million” framing — because it can’t be substantiated, because it isn’t true.

Because this point apparently can’t be stated enough: the EIP flagged fewer than 3,000 total tweets, essentially asking Twitter: “hey, does this violate your rules?” Many of those reports actually came from local election officials worried about disinformation — things like false information about where and when to vote — who figured that a coordinated flag from a research partnership might get more attention than a single complaint.

But what EIP did was really no different than what ANYONE could do by seeing a piece of content on social media and clicking the ever-available “report” button. I’ll note (because I just checked) even X (the supposed, but not really, free speech platform) still lets anyone report any content, and among the categories you can report content for is… “civic integrity.”

In the case of EIP, it submitted fewer than 5,000 such URLs across multiple platforms and the platforms DID NOTHING in response to the majority of them, finding that they did not, in fact, violate any policies. While they took action on 35%, most of those were “labeling” (i.e., providing more speech) and only 10% involved removals (and most of the ones that were removed involved blatant election disinformation, such as telling people to vote in places that had no polling place).

That’s just a few hundred tweets removed, decided by the private companies based on their own decisions.

The 22 million number, which Matt Taibbi and others pushed for many months was what EIP wrote about months later, when they wrote a report about how misinformation spread. It was not content they asked to be removed. It was not content they alerted platforms to. It was just what their (months later) after report reviewed on the platform, trying to show how misinformation spread.

Siegel, apparently, knows all of this. DiResta claims she told him in person before he published. He published the misleading framing anyway. That’s on him. If that leads others to repeat that false information and later being asked for a correction, that is 100% on Siegel for failing to do his own homework and choosing to publish information he was told, point blank, was false.

So when reviews of his book repeated the 22 million number as if it described the scale of active censorship — because Siegel’s book is designed to make readers draw exactly that conclusion — DiResta contacted three separate publications and asked for corrections. This is the most normal thing a person can do when they’ve been written about inaccurately. It happens every day across every type of journalism. It is, in the most basic sense, counterspeech. “Hey, you published this thing, it got some important facts wrong, here’s what they are, and why they’re wrong. Can you issue a correction?”

In no definition of “censorship” is that censorship.

Of the three publications DiResta alerted that they were repeating false statements, there were three very different responses: The Brownstone Institute did nothing. The Free Beacon issued a correction. The Baffler pulled their review entirely. As DiResta makes clear:

To be unambiguously clear, I did not ask The Baffler to pull their review. I asked for a correction. The fact that they pulled it, though, made Siegel lose his mind.

That last part is key. DiResta asked for a correction. The Baffler, after reviewing the evidence, independently decided to pull the review — presumably because the errors were significant enough that a simple correction wouldn’t suffice. That was the publication’s editorial decision. But Siegel treated it as proof that DiResta was running a censorship operation against him. He falsely accused her of pressuring a publication to remove its review in his Free Press article. On X, he went even further and dropped the “pressuring” qualifier and just flatly accused her of being behind the decision.

Siegel was wrong about the supposed “censorship operation” DiResta supposedly ran during the 2020 election. And now he’s wrong about the “censorship operation” he thinks she’s running against his book now.

Is he ever right about anything?

And the Free Press ran this without anything resembling proper fact-checking. When DiResta asked Bari Weiss’s (and now CBS’s) the Free Press how Siegel’s blatantly false claims made it through editorial review, the answer was remarkable:

When I asked The Free Press how Siegel’s theory made it through fact-checking, they told me that Siegel emailing me to demand my correspondence with The Baffler, The Free Beacon, and The Brownstone Institute was the factcheck.

So to be clear: the “fact-check” on an article accusing someone of orchestrating censorship consisted of the accuser sending his target a hostile email demanding she turn over her correspondence. I know that fact checking is a dead art, but that’s not how fact checking works. For a publication that built its brand on being a corrective to mainstream media sloppiness, it’s embarrassing.

DiResta describes the trap Siegel has constructed:

Siegel’s article is designed so that every possible response feeds his narrative. If I stay quiet, the lies ossify. If I ask for corrections, that’s “suppression.” As I push back publicly here, watch, I’ll become an ‘unhinged woman.’ If a publication independently decides his claims don’t hold up, that’s my fault too.

This is the core of the problem, and it extends well beyond Siegel. This specific rhetorical move has been gaining traction for years: the redefinition of “censorship” to include any form of factual challenge, correction, or even disagreement. We saw it when the NY Post declared that fact-checking was censorship. We’ve seen it when people accused social media of “censorship” for merely adding more speech to a discussion.

And the accusation does double duty as marketing. Every correction request becomes a news hook. Every pushback becomes evidence of the conspiracy described in the book. The victimhood is the product. It drives sales, generates sympathetic coverage in friendly outlets, and turns the factual question — was the book accurate? — into a secondary concern.

DiResta puts it well:

The allegations that I’m debunking here are load-bearing walls in Siegel’s book. If 22 million tweets weren’t flagged — and they weren’t — then “perhaps the largest public-private social media monitoring and censorship initiative in existence” shrinks to an academic project in which researchers tagged a few thousand URLs to private platforms, most of which they ignored. That’s why Siegel is so angry. It’s not that I’m “censoring” him. It’s that I was never a government-puppet “censor” at all.

Pull out the load-bearing claims and the whole structure collapses. When the structure is a sweeping conspiracy theory about a “censorship industrial complex,” the author has every incentive to make sure nobody pulls those claims out. Reframing factual corrections as censorship is how you protect a weak foundation — it turns your biggest vulnerability into your biggest rhetorical asset.

Free speech means Siegel can publish his book. He did! It’s out there, for sale, being reviewed, being discussed. Free speech means DiResta can point out that the book contains factually false claims about her. She did that too. Free speech means publications can decide whether to correct, retract, or stand by reviews based on their own editorial judgment. The Baffler made its call. The Free Beacon made a different one.

None of this is censorship. It is the system working as intended. The proverbial “marketplace of ideas” that free speech advocates claim to champion depends on people being able to challenge false claims without being accused of suppression. If “censorship” means “someone publicly disagreed with me and a publication decided my claims didn’t hold up,” then the concept has been gutted.

Siegel published a book making grand claims about a censorship machine. The subject of those claims had the receipts proving those claims false. She asked for corrections through entirely normal channels. One publication issued a correction, one did nothing, and one pulled its review entirely. Siegel’s response was to accuse her of censorship — from his perch at a well-funded publication, with a book on the market and an audience on X hanging on his every word.

Rather than being gagged, he’s simply being corrected. The fact that he can’t tell the difference — or, more likely, that he can tell the difference and has decided that pretending otherwise is more profitable — tells you everything you need to know about how seriously to take his claims.

12:00 AM

Supreme Court Shrugs Off Opportunity To Save The First Amendment From The Fifth Circuit’s Antipathy [Techdirt]

The Supreme Court’s latest recap of its relative inactivity (Trump administration “emergency” appeals aside) has delivered yet more evidence of this court’s indifference to rights violations committed by the government. Other cases involving alleged rights violations that should have — at the very least — been handed over to jury for further consideration were tacitly blessed by the top court in the land by its refusal to grant certori.

This one — involving the retaliatory arrest of an independent journalists by cops who didn’t like her reporting — is yet another miscarriage of justice by a Supreme Court whose majority simply won’t take cases that might force it to hold the government accountable for its actions.

This case has bounced up and down the judicial ladder for more than a half-decade. Laredo, Texas native/independent journalist Priscilla Villarreal has been live streaming and reporting via Facebook under the name “Lagordiloca” for several years. Laredo PD officers don’t like her because she asks them questions they don’t like answering and films them when they’re performing traffic stops and arrests.

After Villarreal published information about a Border Patrol officer who had committed suicide, the Laredo PD worked with local prosecutors to have her arrested. All Villarreal had done was ask a PD employee to confirm information she’d already obtained. The PD responded by opening an internal investigation to oust the employee that had responded to Villarreal’s queries. Then it decided the only way for justice to be done was to arrest the person who had merely received confirmation (via a law enforcement employee) she already had in her possession.

Prosecutors claimed Villarreal’s acquisition and publication of this information violated a state law forbidding people from profiting from “misuse of official information.” To support this claim, the prosecutors claimed Facebook clicks were a form of “profit.” To date, no other citizen has ever been prosecuted under this law that was clearly written to prevent government employees from profiting from information only government employees might have access to.

The local judge immediately tossed the bullshit charges immediately after they were presented to her in court. Somehow, the district court managed to look past the obvious First Amendment violations to give the officers immunity. The Fifth Circuit’s first pass reversed this, with Judge Ho making it clear there’s no way any reasonable officer would have thought arresting a journalist simply for asking questions didn’t violate the Constitution.

This is not just an obvious constitutional infringement—it’s hard to imagine a more textbook violation of the First Amendment.

Then things got weird. A couple of judges in the minority thought this shouldn’t stand and started making noise. The Fifth Circuit agreed to an en banc hearing and reissued this opinion with a new dissent written by Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, along with some additional commentary by Judge Ho about how far removed from sanity Richman’s dissent was.

Two years later, it handed down its second take. And the majority somehow came to the conclusion that it’s okay to engage in retaliatory arrests as long as you can find any criminal statute at all to support the arrest. According to Judge Jones, Villarreal should have either limited herself to official channels or challenged the law itself in court, rather than ask a government employee to verify information Villarreal already possessed.

This was appealed. Eight months later, the Supreme Court sent it back down to the Fifth Circuit for yet another pass, instructing it to apply the Trevino standard. That standard is fairly simple: if a law is rarely, if ever, enforced but somehow shows up conveniently to do the cops’ dirty work when they want to retaliate against a person they don’t like, there’s a good chance this selective application is an established violation of rights. In this case, prosecutors had never used this law to charge anyone ever.

The Fifth Circuit’s third pass — again written by Judge Edith Jones — said the Trevino factor just didn’t matter. If the law was on the books (even if it had never been enforced), it was justification enough for the arrest. And even if that arrest violated the Constitution, the officers should still be given qualified immunity because how could they have known that arresting the only person ever charged with this crime in its 23 years of existence might somehow be unconstitutionally retaliatory?

Now that we’re caught up, this is how it ends for Priscilla Villarreal:

The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

There’s a dissent written by Justice Sotomayor that’s even lengthier than my preamble. It’s worth reading, though, and it starts with this admonishment of the majority’s refusal to write this obvious wrong:

It should be obvious that this arrest violated the First Amendment. Yet the Fifth Circuit held that the officials were entitled to qualified immunity, and now Villarreal is left without a remedy. The Court today makes a grave error by declining to hear this case.

The nation’s top court has decided the Laredo PD and local prosecutors can walk away cleanly from a series of extremely obvious rights violations. And in doing so, it emboldens them (and others) to engage in future retaliatory arrests of journalists they don’t like.

The Supreme Court majority is apparently willing to pretend rights don’t exist when it’s convenient to do so, just like the officers whose actions it tacitly blesses with this particular inaction. Sotomayor drills down on this, rubbing the majority’s nose in its deliberate dismissal of constitutional rights:

[T]he Fifth Circuit found that the officials reasonably believed that they had probable cause to arrest Villarreal for violating §39.06(c). Id., at 385–390. Not so. Just like an individual cannot be convicted of a crime for engaging in First Amendment activity, it is axiomatic that a probable cause determination cannot be based on such protected activity either.

[…]

It necessarily follows that when an arrest is based on protected First Amendment activity, that activity cannot constitute probable cause and support adverse police action. All reasonable officers know this.

[…]

Here, it is hard to conceive of a more obvious constitutional violation than arresting a journalist who, in searching for corroboration, simply asks a government source for information. That is the essence of many journalists’ jobs. The arrest does not somehow become reasonable, and constitutional, merely because an unconstitutional application of a statute authorizes it.

All we have is the dissent. All Villarreal has is knowledge Laredo PD officers and local prosecutors will be digging through the state statutes to find something else to charge her with the next time her reporting pisses them off. The Supreme Court issued a short, clear instruction to the Fifth Circuit, telling it to apply a specific legal standard. Instead, the Fifth Circuit — led by the consistently awful Judge Edith Jones – sidestepped this instruction on its way towards granting the officers qualified immunity. And that deliberate refusal to engage with the Supreme Court’s specific instructions has now been ignored by the same court that strongly hinted the Fifth Circuit got this wrong. It’s a shrug that lets the general public know exactly where it stands: at the bottom of the national organization chart with no layers of protection between them and government officials who seek to do them harm.

Music Publishers Ask Court to Dismiss X’s ‘Weaponized DMCA’ Antitrust Suit [TorrentFreak]

x twitterLast week, X asked a federal court in Tennessee to dismiss a music piracy lawsuit, arguing that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony, rendered the music companies’ contributory infringement theory futile.

The music publishers, meanwhile, were busy in a different court, asking a Texas judge to throw out X’s antitrust complaint against them with similar finality.

The motion to dismiss, filed in the Northern District of Texas, argues that X’s lawsuit doesn’t hold up and the music companies want all eight counts dismissed with prejudice.

A Conspiracy Built on One Word

X filed its antitrust complaint in January, accusing the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and a coalition of major music publishers, including Sony, Universal, and Warner Chappell, of coordinating a “weaponized” DMCA takedown campaign to coerce X into industry-wide licensing deals.

The conspiracy claim rested heavily on a pre-litigation email sent by NMPA President David Israelite to Twitter in October 2021. X alleged that Israelite threatened a “massive program” of DMCA notices on a scale “larger than any previous effort in DMCA history” if X did not agree to a partnership.

From X’s January complaint

massive

However, the publishers have now submitted the full email chain to the court, arguing that X’s complaint “selectively crops, paraphrases, and misconstrues” it. They note that the complete exchange tells a more nuanced story.

In his October 6 email, Israelite warned Twitter that the NMPA was preparing a “massive program” of DMCA notices, adding that his “preference is not to go down that road, but instead to develop a partnership.” He closed by writing (emphasis added): “If you are interested in engaging in such a conversation, please let me know. If you choose not to do so, then please know we are open to starting a conversation at any point during the future process.”

The first email

email

The publishers argue that X’s conspiracy theory rests almost entirely on that final word.

“X argues that by using the word ‘we,’ NMPA meant that X could only deal with the Music Publishers collectively for a license and that no individual Music Publisher would negotiate separately. That inference is not only implausible, it is completely devoid of factual basis or allegation. An antitrust claim cannot rest on such a tenuous thread.”

Same Judge, Same Problem

One of the key reasons for a dismissal is the argument that there can be no antitrust injury, as X and the music publishers do not compete. The music companies argue that antitrust law requires a competitor to be involved in a refusal-to-deal claim.

The argument has already succeeded once against X, in the same courthouse, before the same judge. In February, District Judge Jane Boyle dismissed X’s antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers with prejudice, finding that X had failed to allege antitrust injury because no competitor was involved in the alleged boycott.

The publishers quote that ruling extensively and argue the present case is largely similar.

“Specifically, X does not allege that any participant in the alleged conspiracy is its competitor, a necessary requirement for antitrust injury to flow from an alleged refusal to deal,” the motion states.

The proposed order submitted alongside the motion has Judge Boyle’s name pre-filled.

Retaliation, Not Antitrust

The music publishers take their motion to dismiss beyond simply refuting X’s claims. They also suggest that X filed the antitrust suit as leverage in the copyright infringement case the music companies filed in the Tennessee federal court.

“The paucity of factual allegations supporting an antitrust claim is no accident. X’s motivation in filing suit was different: retaliation and leverage for the copyright suit the Music Publishers filed against it, which is currently pending in Tennessee federal court,” the motion notes.

X argues that the music companies sent a flood of “baseless” DMCA notices, targeting over 200,000 posts and suspending 50,000 users. However, the music publishers motion counters that none of the takedown notices was objectively baseless.

The Sham Exception

The music companies argue that their takedown campaign was a First Amendment-protected pre-litigation activity. They invoke the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which shields things such as pre-litigation notices and cease-and-desist letters from antitrust liability.

DMCA takedown notices, they argue, fall in the same category, especially since these were used as key evidence in the the copyright lawsuit currently pending in Tennessee.

This type of protection does not apply if the notices themselves are “baseless” or a “sham,” which X argued is the case here. The original complaint pointed to several examples, including a takedown notice targeting a video where the non-commercial use of background music was flagged as copyright infringement.

The music companies, however, counter that X does and cannot claim that any notices were baseless. This includes the background music example: this may qualify for fair use defense, but the publishers add that “infringing use of incidental background music is still infringing.”

All in all, the motion to dismiss concludes that the music companies used the DMCA as Congress intended, and that it is not an antitrust violation. The complaint should therefore be dismissed with prejudice on all counts.

It is now up to Judge Boyle to decide whether the antitrust case can continue or whether it should be dismissed outright. The same is true for the Nashville case, where X asked the court to completely dismiss the music companies’ copyright infringement lawsuit.

—

A copy of the motion to dismiss, filed April 2, 2026 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, is available here (pdf). The supporting memorandum can be found here (pdf).

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

Monday 2026-04-06

10:00 PM

Kinder than necessary [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness.

If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than necessary, the expectations for what’s necessary will ratchet forward, making everything more pleasant.

And… being kind is a lovely way to spend your day.

[Compare this to an alternative: “be as selfish as you can get away with.” Hardly worth going down that path.]

      

Kanji of the Day: 暮 [Kanji of the Day]

暮

✍14

小6

evening, twilight, season's end, livelihood, make a living, spend time

ボ

く.れる　く.らす

暮らし   (くらし)   —   life
暮らす   (くらす)   —   to live
一人暮らし   (ひとりぐらし)   —   living by oneself
暮れ   (くれ)   —   sunset
年暮れ   (ねんくれ)   —   year end
夕暮れ   (ゆうぐれ)   —   evening
お歳暮   (おせいぼ)   —   year-end gift
暮らしぶり   (くらしぶり)   —   lifestyle
独り暮らし   (ひとりぐらし)   —   living by oneself
明け暮れ   (あけくれ)   —   morning and evening

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 羅 [Kanji of the Day]

羅

✍19

中学

gauze, thin silk, Rome, arrange, spread out

ラ

うすもの

網羅   (もうら)   —   encompassing
修羅場   (しゅらじょう)   —   fighting scene
甲羅   (こうら)   —   shell (of crab, tortoise, etc.)
羅列   (られつ)   —   enumeration
沙羅   (さら)   —   sal (tree) (Shorea robusta)
阿修羅   (あしゅら)   —   Asura
修羅   (しゅら)   —   Asura
羅針盤   (らしんばん)   —   compass
網羅的   (もうらてき)   —   comprehensive
森羅万象   (しんらばんしょう)   —   all things in nature

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Pluralistic: Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages (06 Apr 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A robot in an old fashioned frock coat. In one hand, he holds a giant magnifying glass. On the other stands a child laborer - a coal miner from the 1910s, squinting at the camera. Terrifying energy beams streak out of the robot's eyes into the glass and at the child. The background is an extremely dark, very roughed-up US $100 bill.

Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages (permalink)

What industry calls "personalized pricing" is really surveillance pricing: using digital tools' flexibility to change the price for each user, and using surveillance data to guess the worst price you'll accept:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/

At root, surveillance pricing allows companies to revalue both your savings and your labor. If you get charged $2 for something I only pay $1 for, the seller is essentially reaching into your bank account and revaluing the dollars in it at 50 cents apiece. If you get paid $1 for a job that I make $2 for, then the boss is valuing your labor at 50% of my labor:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#

Surveillance pricing is a key part of enshittification, relying on three of the key enshittificatory factors that have transformed this era into the enshittocene:

I. Monopoly: Surveillance pricing is undesirable to both workers and buyers, so in a competitive market, surveillance pricing would drive labor and consumption to non-surveilling rivals:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

II. Regulatory capture: Surveillance pricing only exists because of weak regulation and weak enforcement of existing regulations. To engage in surveillance pricing, a company must first put you under surveillance, something that is only possible in the absence of effective privacy law.

In the USA, privacy law hasn't been updated since Congress passed a law in 1988 that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

In the EU, the strong privacy provisions in the GDPR have been neutralized by US tech giants who fly an Irish flag of convenience. Ireland attracts these companies by allowing them to evade their taxes, but it can only keep these companies by allowing them to break any law that gets in their way, because if Meta can pretend to be Irish this week, it could pretend to be Maltese (or Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, or Dutch) next week:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

What's more, competition laws in the EU and the USA ban surveillance pricing, but a half-century of lax competition law enforcement has allowed companies to routinely engage in the "unfair and deceptive methods of competition" banned in both territories.

III. Twiddling: "Twiddling" is my word for the way that digitized businesses can use computers' flexibility to alter their prices, offers, and other fundamentals on a per-user, per-session basis. It's not enough to spy on users: to engage in surveillance pricing, you have to be able to mobilize that surveillance data from instant to instant, changing the prices for every user. This can only be done once a business has been digitized:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Combine monopoly, weak privacy law, weak competition law, and digitization, and you don't just make surveillance pricing possible – at that point, it's practically inevitable. This is what it means to create an enshittogenic policy environment: by arranging policy so that the most awful schemes of the worst people are the most profitable, you guarantee that those people will end up organizing commercial and labor markets.

When surveillance pricing is applied to labor, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination," a term coined by Veena Dubal based on her research with Uber drivers:

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

Uber uses historic data on drivers to make inferences about how economically precarious they are, and then extracts a "desperation premium" from their wages. Drivers who are pickier about which rides they accept ("pickers") are offered higher wages than drivers who take any ride ("ants"):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

On the back-end, Uber is inferring that the reason an ant will accept a worse job is that they have fewer choices – they are more strapped for cash and/or have fewer options for earning a higher wage.

This is a straightforward form of algorithmic wage discrimination, using the blunt signal of how discriminating a driver is when signing onto a job to titer the subsequent wage offered to that driver. More sophisticated forms of algorithmic wage discrimination draw on external sources of data to set the price of your labor.

That's the situation for contract nurses, whose traditional brick-and-mortar staffing agencies have been replaced by nationwide apps that market themselves as "Uber for nursing." These apps use commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker sector to check on how much credit card debt a nurse is carrying and whether that debt is delinquent to set a wage: the more debt you have and the more dire your indebtedness is, the lower the wage you are offered (and therefore the more debt you accumulate – lather, rinse, repeat):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

Surveillance wages are now proliferating to other parts of the economy, as "consultancies" offer software to employers that let them set all parts of your compensation – base wage, annual raises, and bonuses – based on your perceived desperation, as derived from commercial surveillance data that has been collected about you:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/employers-are-using-your-personal-data-to-figure-out-the-lowest-salary-youll-accept-c2b968fb

Genna Contino's Marketwatch article on the phenomenon offers a concise definition of "surveillance wages":

a system in which wages are based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge.

This means that carrying a credit-card balance, taking out a payday loan, or even discussing your indebtedness on social media can all lead to lower wages in the future. Contino references a recent report released by Dubal and tech strategist Wilneida Negrón, surveying 500 large firms, which concluded that surveillance wages are now being offered in sectors as diverse as "healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail." Customers for surveillance wage tools include "Intuit, Salesforce, Colgate-Palmolive, Amwell and Healthcare Services Group":

https://equitablegrowth.org/how-artificial-intelligence-uncouples-hard-work-from-fair-wages-through-surveillance-pay-practices-and-how-to-fix-it/

After a brief crackdown under Biden, the Trump regime has been extraordinarily welcoming to surveillance pricing companies, dropping investigations and cases against firms that engaged in the practice. A few states are stepping in to fill the gap, with New York state passing a rule requiring disclosure of surveillance pricing – a modest step that was nevertheless fought tooth-and-nail by the state's businesses.

In Colorado, a new House bill called the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" would prohibit the use of personal information in wage-setting:

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb25-1264

This bill hasn't passed yet, but it's already doing useful work. Companies universally deny using surveillance data to set wages, insisting that they merely pay for consulting services that give them advice on how they could do surveillance wages – but don't actually take that advice. However, these same companies – including Uber and Lyft – are ferociously lobbying against the bill, raising an obvious question, articulated by the bill's co-sponsor Rep Javier Mabrey (D-1): if these companies don't pay surveillance wages, then "what is the problem of codifying in law that you’re not allowed to?"

Surveillance wages are a rare profitable use-case for AI, in part because surveillance wages don't need to be "correct" in order to be effective. An employee who is offered a wage that's slightly higher than the lowest sum they'd accept still represents a savings to the company's wage-bill. As ever, AI is great for fully automating tasks if you don't care whether they're done well:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/22/nobodys-home/#squeeze-that-hog

The fact that surveillance wages are calculated by external contractors enables employers to engage in otherwise illegal price-fixing. If all the garages in town set mechanics' wages using the same surveillance pricing tool, then a mechanic looking for a job will get the same lowball offer from all nearby employers. If those bosses were to gather around a table and fix the wage for any (or all) mechanics, that would be wildly illegal, but the fact that this is done via a software package lets the bosses claim they're not actually colluding.

This is a common practice in other forms of price-fixing. We see it in meat, potato products, and, of course, rental accommodations (hey there, Realpage!). It's a genuinely stupid ruse based on the absurd idea that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/#carbo-loading

Speaking of crimes that are implausibly deniable when undertaken with an app: surveillance wages also allow employers to offer lower wages to women and brown and Black people while maintaining the pretense that they're in compliance with laws banning gender and racial discrimination.

In the wider economy, women and racialized people are already offered lower wages and – thanks to the legacy of racial discrimination in employment and housing – are more likely to be indebted:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

By tapping into data brokers' dossiers that reveal the economic precarity of jobseekers, surveillance pricing allows employers to systematically lower the wages of women and Black and brown people, who have the highest incidence of indebtedness, while still claiming to offer race- and gender-blind wages. This is a phenomenon that Patrick Ball calls "empiricism washing": first, move the illegal racist discrimination into an algorithm, then insist that "numbers can't be racist."

But this isn't just about lowering wages at the bottom of the employment market. In recent history, the employers most eager to illegally lower their workers' wages are tech bosses, who had to pay massive fines for illegally colluding on "no poach" agreements to suppress the earning power of high-paid computer programmers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

(This is why the tech industry is so horny for AI – tech bosses can't wait to fire a ton of programmers and use the resulting terror to force down the wages of the remaining tech workers:)

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

Which means that the very programmers who write and maintain the surveillance wage software used on the rest of us are especially likely to have the tools they created turned on them.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Arthur C Clarke fights Buddhist monks over Daylight Savings Time http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4865972.stm

#20yrsago What parts of the .COM space are registered? https://web.archive.org/web/20060411133458/https://www.yafla.com/dforbes/2006/03/29.html

#20yrsago Bomb squad called out to “defuse” life-size Super Mario power-ups https://web.archive.org/web/20060405034455/http://www.recordpub.com/article.php?pathToFile=archive/04012006/news/&file=_news1.txt&article=1&tD=04012006

#20yrsago Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling https://web.archive.org/web/20060405223008/https://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php

#20yrsago Isaac Newton’s alchemical “chymistry” notebook scans https://web.archive.org/web/20060612203137/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp

#20yrsago Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling https://web.archive.org/web/20060405223008/https://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/poems.php

#20yrsago Isaac Newton’s alchemical “chymistry” notebook scans https://web.archive.org/web/20060612203137/http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/index.jsp

#15yrsago Misleading government stats and the innumerate media who repeat them https://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/

#15yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program blocks free speech, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed https://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/

#15yrsago Misleading government stats and the innumerate media who repeat them https://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/

#15yrsago US Customs’ domain-seizure program blocks free speech, leaves alleged pirates largely unscathed https://torrentfreak.com/us-governments-pirate-domain-seizures-failed-miserably-110403/

#10yrsago Panama Papers: Largest leak in history reveals political and business elite hiding trillions in offshore havens https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/the-panama-papers-how-the-worlds-rich-and-famous-hide-their-money-offshore

#10yrsago America’s teachers are being trained in a harsh interrogation technique that produces false confessions https://web.archive.org/web/20160404143447/https://www.alternet.org/education/why-are-k-12-school-leaders-being-trained-coercive-interrogation-techniques

#10yrsago LA’s new rule: homeless people are only allowed to own one trashcan’s worth of things https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-apartments-demolished-20160402-story.html
#10yrsago Save Netflix! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-netflix

#10yrsago The TSA spent $1.4M on an app to tell it who gets a random search https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/tsa-randomizer-app-cost-336000/

#10yrsago Iceland’s Prime Minister says he won’t resign, mass demonstrations gain momentum https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016/03/31/anti_government_demo_planned_for_monday/

#10yrsago Panama Papers reveal the tax-avoidance strategies of David Cameron’s father https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/04/panama-papers-david-cameron-father-tax-bahamas

#10yrsago Studio sculpts giant coin, photographs it alongside normal objects to make them look tiny https://skrekkogle.com/projects/50c/

#5yrsago China's antitrust surge https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#sectoral-balances

#5yrsago Consumerism won't defeat Georgia's Jim Crow https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#christmas-voting-turkeys

#1yrago End-stage capitalism https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/04/anything-that-cant-go-on/#forever-eventually-stops

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. First draft complete. Second draft underway.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • 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.

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ISSN: 3066-764X

08:00 PM

It's metadata all the way down [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 03 Apr 2026, Week 14

F-Droid core

F-Droid Basic was updated to 2.0-alpha6, and we’ve announced it already in a, we hoped, humorous toot back on April first. That ending flew over some heads or maybe people want to hear more good news than “coping jokes”.

Full changelog:

  • Faster DB queries (thanks Peter!)
  • Support for new categories
  • Auto repair corrupted search index
  • Make app installs more robust
  • Improve Chinese search queries
  • Fix name and summary localization in app details
  • Fix CJK language search in app lists and My Apps
  • Fix RTL presentation of updates
  • Fix crash when removing screenshots from disk cache
  • Fix crash when deleting repos
  • Fix overlay issues in landscape mode on small screens
  • Fix themed app icon
  • …many unit tests

We’re in the phase of polishing, catching edge-case bugs and waiting for your feedback. Compact bottom-bar for smaller devices? Search button on bottom-bar for that one hand reach-ability? Download speeds display? All considered, mocked, tested on devices, improved. And more to come.

The latest batch of updated strings were pushed to our translation portal so make sure you not only translate but use the app in hand as reference for meaning and context. If you thought your locale was up to date last week, get ready for over 110 new strings!

Want to help, not only to read text? Install F-Droid Basic, if you don’t have it already, navigate to the app details and check “Allow beta updates” in top right three dot menu.

Community News

ArcaneChat and Delta Chat were updated to 2.48.0. Their last week changelog and Fediverse posts were interesting, their latest blog is even nicer. What’s new? Less metadata in certain places, testing native calls via peer-to-peer WebRTC on Android, iOS and Ubuntu Touch, descriptions for groups and channels, audio messages that play in the background, rewritten downloads, multi-path delivery and more.

If you’ve been holding off updating Syncthing-Fork we have two pieces of news for you. First, the original dev continues to collaborate still, we know this was a pain point back then. Second, we’ve just added BasicSync, A simple app for running Syncthing, which just controls Syncthing’s running behaviour as hands off as possible, while the original service hums in the background.

Ente Auth - 2FA Authenticator was updated to 4.4.19 with bug fixes and improvements but Ente Photos - Encrypted photo storage to 1.3.28 got more niceties. Back in February: likes and comments, admin and people management, ZIP downloads, QoL tweaks and more. And now in March: offline galleries, nicer layouts, social feeds, better ML, hidden photos tricks plus lots of fixes.

In more Ente news, the new Ente Locker, An end-to-end encrypted document storage app, was just included, bringing the same polish from photos to documents and beyond. Get a quick look in the introductory post.

EphemeralWorkProfile, Profile owner Android privacy app and ProtectedWorkProfile, Profile owner Android security app, are two new apps from the same developer, that use the Android profile feature to secure isolated spaces on your device, either temporary or more permanent.

Kodi was updated to 21.3 after a three month delay, as its recipe needs a bit of finesse. You can read the changelog here.

Lichess, The one open-source chess game, was just added as a new app, but it’s actually a full rewrite in Flutter that replaces the older lichess. The feature list is impressive and it has UnifiedPush support on top, gg.

Threema Libre was updated to 6.4.0l overhauling the chat overview, protecting the master key with the Android Keystore system and more fixes. Since DeltaChat lobs the metadata topic, looks like Threema has something to say too, talking about paid services vs anonymity, hijacked accounts and more, in their 10 minute post.

@shuvashish76 reads acronyms:

Episteme Reader was updated to 1.0.40-oss adding OPDS catalogue support, DOCX file support and many improvements.

Thore Göbel rotates the USB and tries again:

FMD devs are now publishing developer-signed APKs in their custom repository. The packages on F-Droid are not yet migrated to reproducible builds, but things are shaping up to be soon. Notably, FMD has published detailed documentation and scripts about their experience of using a Nitrokey HSM. Hopefully, this helps other Android developers to sign their apps with hardware keys! For more details, see the announcement blog post.

Newly Added Apps

33 more apps were newly added
  • Brogue CE Android: A classic dungeon crawling roguelike
  • Chip Defense Copper: A tower defense game with a microprocessor theme
  • Collect the Cookies!: Collect cookies in this fun idle-ish game
  • CSV Editor: View and edit CSV files on your device
  • De Fide: Offline Catholic app for prayer, Scripture, novenas, and the Rosary
  • deutsia radio: Privacy-focused radio player supporting clearnet, Tor, and I2P networks
  • DroidStress: Simple CPU Stress test tool for Android
  • FastTimes: Simple, private, open-source intermittent fasting tracker
  • FirTube: FirTube — browser based on Android WebView for watching YouTube
  • FloFla Cards: FloFla Cards – Passive learning with your phone! 🎓📱
  • GAMA: A specialized utility to manage and switch GPU rendering APIs via Shizuku
  • GlyphPort: Port Nothing® Glyph Compositions between phones
  • Impostor MX: Classic multiplayer party game, now digital and open source
  • Jyutping - Cantonese Keyboard: Easy-to-use Cantonese input method with pronunciation lookup and dictionary
  • Kefir Control: Track milk kefir fermentation times
  • KeinPlan: Alternative client for static DSB resources
  • LibreFit: Workout tracker with a rich dataset and images
  • Miniter: Video editor built for simple tasks
  • Music: A basic M3Y music player app
  • NightDream: Clock, screensaver & radio with dynamic brightness & custom layouts
  • Notes: A basic note-taking app
  • PaperKnife+: Privacy-first PDF utility: merge, split, rotate, and protect
  • Pokébase: Browse Pokémon and TCG cards with search, filtering, and offline caching
  • RowMate: Track your workouts on your FTMS rowing machine with real-time data
  • Sidestep: Intercept URLs, remove tracking, and redirect to privacy-friendly frontends
  • SilentShare: Share personal information with others visually in-person
  • Smart Edge: Sidebar & Gestures: A highly customizable side panel inspired by OriginOS
  • SoundPod: A minimalist music streaming app
  • SpaceBeam: Kaleidoscope Camera Fun with Shaders for live visual performances
  • Study Tracker: Simple and clean study progress tracker
  • USB Descriptor Explorer: Inspect USB devices with full descriptor and HID details
  • VolumeScroll: Scroll anywhere using your volume buttons
  • Word Tracer: A crossword-like puzzle game

Updated Apps

233 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

New language: Croatian / Hrvatski [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]

The F-Droid website is now also available in the Croatian language.

Thanks for everyone that contributed! While the website is translated, there are still some other components that are currently in progress. Those interested in contributing to F-Droid’s contribution efforts, are encouraged to contribute via Hosted Weblate.

10:00 AM

06:00 AM

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

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering an additional resource on our post about the White House’s new app:

The other half of the story

The analysis by “thereallo” covers the Android version; there’s a dissection of the iOS version at Security Analysis of the Official White House iOS App

It’s just as bad and sheds additional light on why this is a security and privacy disaster.

In second place, it’s a reply from Rocky to a commenter who was angrily getting everything wrong about the Murthy ruling:

What’s pathetic clownboy, is that you think you understand legal matters.

You blather on about merit while totally missing the point why they ruled they way they did and it is just mindboggling that you are unable to connect the dots here. It is very simple, it was concluded the plaintiffs suit had no merit, substance or proof of injury (you know, the part you are desperately ignoring) that would trigger Article III standing.

But keep screaming about lies while we point out your stupid clownishness.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from martin1961 deploying an aphorism in response to Virginia’s legally misguided attempts to compel CSAM scanning:

When you come across a man made obstacle, do you
A) dismantle it and carry on, or
B) find out why it was placed there in the first place ?

Next, it’s Drew Wilson pushing back against a commenter who disputed the comparison of the social media moral panic to previous moral panics:

That would be because the comparisons are justified. Video games were supposedly going to corrupt the youth by turning them into murdering psychopaths who would be deadly effective because they train all day on their “murder simulators”. That never played out no matter how many times the media blamed video games for anything violent.

The same is being done with social media. Social media is corrupting the youth because the youth will become distracted or have no sense of morality because they are seeing easily accessible pornography on platforms like YouTube (something that doesn’t even pass the laugh test in my books).

If there are any fundamental differences between the two, I’m not seeing it. There was never really any evidence that video games were going to turn the youth into murder machines and there was never any evidence to say that social media will inherently destroy the youths moral compass, attentiveness, or whatever else the heck that is being fabricated by politicians and the media.

The irony here is that by making your argument, you proved Masnick’s point about someone always insisting that “this time it’s different”.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Pixelation with a comment about RFK Jr.’s struggle to fill the CDC Director position:

Job ad

Needed: Whipping boy. Experience required:Conspiracy theorist.

In second place, it’s Arianity with a quip (plus a nice note) on last week’s comment post regarding the considerable length of one of the winning comments:

Congrats to Azuaron for getting their first article published on TD!

In all seriousness though, that article’s comment section was one of the best I’ve ever seen in terms of people actually productively trying to work through issues and explain their positions, even if I didn’t agree with everything.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Thad on our post about Pete Hegseth’s war on truth:

It’s not a war, it’s a military operation on truth.

Finally, it’s MrWilson with a good reply to anyone making confidently wrong statements about the law:

Another thorough legal analysis from Trust, Me, Bro, & Associates, all graduates of the Gut Feeling School of Law, magna cum dumbass.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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