News

Friday 2026-10-16

05:00 AM

Trump-Appointed Judge Calls Out ICE For Lying [Techdirt]

This is now as common as breathing. ICE does stuff. Arrested people invoke their rights. ICE shows up in court. The court expresses its anger at ICE’s tactics and lies.

Thousands of habeas cases filed by migrants have ended with the courts siding with the arrested migrants. It’s actually more than 10,000 at this point, but the only thing the administration counts is the arrests.

The addition of poorly trained ICE officers to a blend of federal agencies all focused on making chief advisor/ghoul Stephen Miller’s racist fantasies a reality has resulted in the routine violation of rights, as well as the actual murders of American citizens.

So far, we’ve mostly heard angry words from federal judges all over the nation. That may change eventually since the government clearly can’t be deterred by being told it’s in the wrong pretty much all the fucking time. There are only words here too, unfortunately. Hopefully, the anger expressed here will be converted into meaningful sanctions against ICE and the DOJ, but until then we will have to satisfy ourselves with knowing all of this is now part of the public record.

Trump did manage to stack the most important court in the land — something that has paid off more often than not during his second term as president. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that most of his court appointees are more interested in serving the law, rather than serving a guy who thinks he was elected king.

And so it goes here in New York — one of Trump’s favorite targets due to its resistance to his malignant strain of MAGA. The streets have been swarmed by federal officers almost constantly since early last year. That has resulted in the expected jump in arrests and detainments. Not pictured: any respect for long-respected due process rights or even the barest minimum of Fourth Amendment adherence.

That’s what has prompted the latest round of excoriation by a federal court, as the New York Times reports:

A federal judge in New York reprimanded the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on Monday, accusing its officers of lying, lacking proper training and fabricating records to cover up illegal arrests.

[…]

Judge Brown wrote that immigration agents involved in the arrests had given “inconsistent, false and misleading testimony” in court, and said that they had probably perjured themselves. He found that the officers were inexperienced, possessed little understanding of the law and used “false testimony to conceal these failings.”

What’s detailed in the order [PDF] issued by Trump appointee Gary Brown is the sort of corrupt cop shit we always hoped would mostly be relegated to James Ellroy novels and David Simon series. But what’s been exposed by Trump’s anti-migrant animosity is an agency that firmly believes it can arrest whoever it wants and fix it in post — something greatly encouraged by the Supreme Court’s “Kavanaugh stop” non-ruling.

This only deals with one of several plaintiffs making similar arguments about ICE’s arrests. But its telling nonetheless.

Agents allegedly arrested petitioner based on a physical description and photograph of one target. Yet the description disproves the match: the target was five inches shorter and 80 pounds lighter than the petitioner. As to the photograph, the team leader acknowledged upon cross-examination that “it’s very easy to see they’re two different people.” Trying to legitimize petitioner’s arrest, ICE issued a post-hoc sworn administrative warrant containing false information and later issued a Notice to Appear. At the hearing, the officers proffered inconsistent, false and misleading testimony.

The result is troubling: compelling evidence here belies the ICE agents’ reflexive invocation of misidentification as an excuse for erroneous arrests. Particularly problematic in this case, the evidence suggests that ICE attempted to support their unsupported misidentification argument through false or misleading documentation and testimony. The claims of misidentification here prove baseless, the arrests were procedurally deficient and legally invalid, and ICE agents falsified official records trying to conceal their illegal actions, which included significant injury to a U.S. citizen.

Two things should be noted, remembered, and retained as ammunition to use against this administration. First, ICE agents just arrested a guy and then worked backwards to justify the arrest, even though the person they arrested didn’t resemble anything in the narrative ICE hastily erected post-arrest. Second, this whole chain of injustices was inflicted on an actual US citizen — you know, the exact people Trump believes are inherently better than anyone else.

Here’s the rough equivalence a thousand words disputing ICE’s lies and deflection as officers, supervisors, and government lawyers attempted to salvage something from this illegal arrest that was illegal when it involved a purported migrant, but is at least doubly so when it ended with ICE officers tossing a US citizen in jail.

Here’s ICE (and the court notes that some of the officers had almost zero experience [thanks Trump!]) pretending a 5’7″, 110-lb. person is indistinguishable from the purported “target” of the puportedly “targeted” arrest — someone who weighed in at 180 lbs. (at least!) and stood six feet tall.

ICE tried to lie its way out of this. But surveillance video provided by a local business showed ICE officers (with weapons drawn) ambushing Concepcion as he peacefully walked to a barber shop. Conception never saw the officers until they threw him to the ground violently, which immediately disproves the claim that the target of the arrest was trying to avoid apprehension.

It also disproves nearly everything ICE Team Leader John Katepodis stated in court and on his paperwork as he helped his officers work backwards from an unjustified arrest.

First, he states that he “incorrectly testified” regarding what database information was accessible onsite and states that the EARM system “was available to me and my team on our cellphones during the surveillance,” which included the “height, weight and build” of the two targets. Thus, contrary to the testimony he offered at the hearing, Katepodis now claims that the information about “height, weight and build” was available to his team during the operation.

Katepodis further attempts to alter his sworn testimony that he was unaware of whether his supervisor had issued the warrant at the time of the arrest, by now stating that “it was [his] understanding that an I-200 warrant of arrest was issued” prior to the arrest. Again, this contradicts his testimony at the hearing, during which Katepodis testified that his supervisor told him “he was going to issue the I 200,” acknowledged that he “didn’t have the warrant yet” and had been “told that an I 200 was going to be issued.”

Finally, Katepodis tries to explain his apparent falsification of the warrant by certifying it was served by him in the Bronx, when service was made by someone else in Manhattan. Katepodis suggests that it “was my understanding that the certificate of service for the I-200 required the location of the arrest and where Petitioner was locatedat the time the I-200 was issued.” This is largely irrelevant, as it is clear from the testimony that Katepodis had no idea when or whether the administrative arrest warrant was issued.

The ICE Team Leader calls this “incorrect” testimony. Most normal people — including some judges — call this “perjury.” It’s clear from the record that no arrest warrant supporting the arrest of Concepcion existed (and how could it?) before ICE officers arrested him. The document claiming to support this arrest was created after ICE had already arrested the wrong person.

[T]he Court notes that subsequent to petitioner’s detention, ICE agents prepared a substantially false administrative warrant in an attempt to rationalize their actions. The warrant purports to establish “probable cause to believe that [Almonte] is removable from the United States . . . based upon biometric confirmation of the subject’s identity and a records check of federal databases that affirmatively indicate . . . that the subject . . . lacks immigration status.” DE 7-1. The claim that database queries checks could “positively identify” petitioner appears spurious as, without any immigration record, petitioner would not appear in any ICE database from which he could be positively identified.

Unfortunately, there are no sanctions to be had here. Yet. The court is giving ICE one more chance to explain itself before it moves forward with sanctions or any further investigation of its own. I would assume sanctions of some sort will be the end result here, because every time ICE has been given a chance to explain its actions, it just ends up digging a bigger hole.

If this does actually result in ICE officers and DOJ lawyers being bench-slapped, I would absolutely expect Trump to start mouthing off about “activist” judges, even though the one he’s complaining about is one he hand-picked for the job. If nothing else, this should prove Trump isn’t quite the wheeler-dealer he makes himself out to be. He’s a terrible judge of character (so to speak). And you know what they say about that: if you can’t immediately spot the sucker in the room, you’re the sucker.

04:00 AM

Eleventh Circuit Says Cliffhangers Are ‘Features,’ Not Speech, As It Greenlights Florida’s Social Media Age Gate [Techdirt]

Apparently we’re in an era where the courts just decide to ignore precedents they don’t like. And that leads us to ridiculous results like yesterday’s ruling in the Eleventh Circuit allowing Florida’s HB3 social media age verification law to move forward. But to understand how messed up it is, you need to know the history of a few different Supreme Court cases, and how the Supreme Court has started undermining earlier precedents, effectively granting power to the Eleventh Circuit to make up its own rules.

As a quick primer, these are the historical cases you need to understand, to recognize what a clusterfuck this new ruling is.

  • Reno v. ACLU: Effectively establishes that the First Amendment applies to the internet.
  • Ashcroft v. ACLU: Age-gating online speech to shield kids violates the First Amendment when it burdens adults’ access to protected speech and less restrictive alternatives (like filters) exist.
  • Brown v. EMA: State restricting sales of video games to kids violates the First Amendment.
  • Packingham v. North Carolina: State laws can’t ban people from the internet, even if they commit heinous crimes, as the internet involves too much important speech and services.

Then we have some more recent cases that make all this shit trickier:

  • Moody v. NetChoice: Makes clear that internet content moderation is protected editorial decision making under the First Amendment but comes up with a weird rationale to make it nearly impossible to challenge First Amendment-violating internet laws until after they’ve done real harm to companies, by saying it’s nearly impossible to pursue a “facial” challenge (basically saying the law as written is obviously fully unconstitutional) as opposed to an “as applied” challenge, specifically challenging how the law is enforced.
  • TikTok v. Garland: Basically saying that despite the cases above, the government can completely ban a website by just stating “national security” and the Supreme Court will ignore all the First Amendment issues.
  • FSC v. Paxton: Says the Supreme Court will ignore the Ashcroft ruling above, as long as it involves naked people on the internet. Then you can demand age verification and restrict kids because naked people are icky.

So, that brings us to this new ruling in the Eleventh Circuit regarding HB3, which was Florida’s attempt to broadly age verify internet services. The key parts require social media platforms that have “addictive features” (as defined by Florida) to block anyone under the age of 14 from creating an account, and then requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds. In short, it requires age verifying everyone and blocking many users from these services.

The trade groups CCIA & NetChoice challenged the law, and the case went through many twists and turns, including a district court judge pointing out that adults freaking out over whatever new thing kids are into is a moral panic that happens all the time, and we shouldn’t immediately assume that just because politicians are screaming about “protecting the children” that we need to believe them. At one point a judge refused to grant an injunction because (the judge said), the trade association that filed the case (CCIA) couldn’t show that any of its members faced imminent harm.

Soon after that Florida sought to enforce the law against Snap, a member of CCIA. Eventually, the district court issued a preliminary injunction on the law, though the Eleventh Circuit then put a stay on the injunction, with a dissent from Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who makes a ton of important points. As I said, lots of twists and turns.

However, now the Eleventh Circuit has come out with its latest ruling reversing the district court’s preliminary injunction (and vacating it as to the facial challenge), and it’s a fucking mess. Notably, it’s a totally different panel — Judges Newsom, Luck, and Tjoflat — than the earlier ruling, and so this new ruling doesn’t even have the kind of thoughtful dissent Rosenbaum issued last time through this court, and the ruling is worse off for it.

First, the similarities to Brown v. EMA should be obvious, but the panel here says that this law is more like the TikTok case, and thus the ruling in Brown doesn’t really apply:

HB3 more closely resembles the law at issue in TikTok than the one in Brown. HB3 is facially content neutral: It regulates social-media platforms based on their functional capabilities and features, not the content they communicate. The law neither references the substance of the speech on any platform nor draws distinctions based on it. Put differently, HB3 applies to platforms wholly without regard to the topics discussed or the ideas or messages conveyed on them. Truth Social is just as likely as Instagram to be affected by HB3 so long as (1) a proportion of minors under 16 spend an average of at least two hours a day on it; (2) it uses infinite scrolling, push notifications, auto-play, or livestreaming, or displays user-engagement metrics; and (3) it selects content algorithmically for users. Fla. Stat. § 501.1736(1)(e). And tellingly, neither a platform nor a user can “avoid or mitigate” the effects of HB3 by “altering” the substance of any posted expression. TikTok, 604 U.S. at 71 (quoting Turner I, 512 U.S. at 644).

HB3’s justification is also content neutral: to “protect[] children from [social-media] addiction and associated mental-health harms.” Br. of Appellant at 36. That purpose is “unrelated to the content of expression” on any given platform, and it doesn’t “reflect[] disagreement with the message such speech conveys.” TikTok, 604 U.S. at 72.

To put it simply: that is garbage. The reason for Florida’s law is not content neutral at all. It is passing these laws because it doesn’t believe kids should have access to all sorts of constitutionally protected speech. That is important. The claim that it is to “protect children” could equally apply to all sorts of speech, such as books, TV shows, movies, or video games (remember what the Brown case is about?), but we (and the courts) immediately recognize that has clear speech implications, and you can’t wave them off as “content neutral.”

On top of that, the claim that this is just about “capabilities and features” not content ignores that many of those features (as established in cases like Moody) are, in fact, the expressive (First Amendment-protected) speech of the platforms themselves, which the state is effectively banning. To call the law content neutral, even as it calls out specific editorial features, just seems fundamentally incorrect.

Even more incredibly, the Eleventh Circuit literally seems to suggest that states can regulate all sorts of speech that might make people more interested in content as “features” rather than speech. CCIA had pointed out that the law is not at all content neutral because it puts rules on internet speech that doesn’t apply to speech in other mediums, and uses “cliffhangers” in books as an example.

In particular, CCIA emphasizes that HB3 prohibits addictive features only on websites, not on other “services that disseminate speech”—like, for instance, “books that end in cliffhangers.”

The Eleventh Circuit dismisses this in a footnote… suggesting that cliffhangers and other tricks to get people to read more in books can be regulated because they’re “features” not “speech.”

Further, the analogy to literary devices that make books more engaging—like cliffhangers, shorter chapters, or serialization—simply reinforces Florida’s contention that it’s not focused on speech and the accompanying ideas, topics, and messages, but rather on features that in and of themselves are agnostic as to content.

I am… flummoxed by this. Cliffhangers are features, not speech? Have any of these judges ever read a book? Short chapters are features not speech? What? Under the logic of this ruling, a state could issue a ban on short chapters and cliffhangers as being too “addictive” and the Eleventh Circuit says that would pass intermediate scrutiny and be just fine.

And that alone should tell you how preposterous this ruling is.

CCIA pointed out how much protected speech gets stifled under this law, but the judges dismissed it. They claim (incredibly) that the law doesn’t “burden” too much speech:

HB3 doesn’t “burden substantially more speech than necessary” because it (1) calibrates its restrictions by age, (2) regulates minors’ creation of social-media accounts, not necessarily their access to the platforms themselves, (3) covers only those platforms that have been determined to induce heavy use by children, and (4) applies only to platforms that use both algorithms and one of several addictive features.

But that’s simply wrong. It absolutely burdens a ton of protected speech for users under the age of 14. The “calibrates its restrictions by age” ignores that it requires a full block on those under 14, even though there may be plenty of age appropriate speech online for those under 14 (my under 14-year-old middle schooler regularly watches educational videos on YouTube, for example).

Also, it simply ignores that anonymity is protected under the First Amendment, and this law effectively ends anonymous accounts for everyone, since age verification has to cover all users. How did the court address that? It didn’t. Search the ruling for “anonymous” and you get:

At least with the last time through this court in the Rosenbaum dissent, she was able to highlight the issue of anonymous speech. Here, the court just ignores it. Poof. Doesn’t matter.

The court also says all this is fine because it doesn’t restrict access, only account creation:

Second, even among those to whom HB3 does apply, the law restricts only their ability to create their own accounts, not their ability to access social-media platforms per se. The creation of a social-media account is a commercial act—a business transaction. Even a minor—indeed, even a young child—may continue to use the platforms provided he either (1) uses his parents’ (or someone else’s) account or (2) gains access without an account.

But there are plenty of platforms that restrict access to only those with an account. And, again, it also restricts how platforms decide what features to offer, which is its own burden.

Separately, the court claims that this law is fine because it only targets platforms to which kids are “already addicted.”

Third, HB3 targets only the platforms to which many minors are already addicted. As a reminder, a platform comes within HB3’s purview only if at least 10% of daily active users under 16 years old spend an average of two hours or more per day on it. Fla. Stat. § 501.1736(1)(e). Together with its other limitations, HB3’s tailoring efforts fall within the broad range of potential legislative solutions that intermediate scrutiny permits.

Even leaving aside the fact that repeated research suggests claims of social media “addiction” are way overblown, it’s also wrong about the law. Just because people use something an average of two hours or more a day does not, definitionally, mean “addicted.” People spend hours a day reading, playing sports, or watching TV, but we don’t claim those are addictions that need to be regulated. The data here (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) is a bit outdated, but it found that people tend to watch more than two hours of TV a day. Do we claim that everyone is addicted to TV?

Also, nothing about the law is focused just on those who use the platform that much. It bans those who use it for just minutes a day as well if they’re 13-years-old. Arguing that it’s narrowly targeted makes no sense at all.

Bizarrely, the panel then claims that because the platforms can change what features they offer kids, that shows that this doesn’t burden speech. Really.

And fourth, HB3 operates not as an outright prohibition of platform usage but rather as a “conditional ban” of sorts—namely, on platforms’ use of addictive features and algorithms. See TikTok, 604 U.S. at 74, 77. The law applies only to platforms that use a combination of algorithms and addictive features and that succeed in keeping many minors on them for an average of at least two hours a day. See Fla. Stat. § 501.1736(1)(e). Refraining from using either algorithms or addictive features, or remaining below the temporal threshold, exempts a platform from the law’s application.

Right. So, you just admitted that it impacts the editorial decision making of the platforms, the very thing the Supreme Court said in Moody that is protected by the First Amendment.

And while the Packingham case makes it pretty clear that you can’t ban people from websites because there is so much important speech there, again the panel here dismisses that because it’s just banning “a subset of minors” rather than “all sex offenders” as was the case in Packingham.

Unlike HB3, which applies only to a subset of minors, the statute there covered all registered sex offenders. And unlike HB3, which applies only to a subset of social-media platforms, the law there defined the covered sites exceedingly broadly; it included “commonplace social media websites like Facebook and Twitter,” as well as “websites as varied as Amazon.com, Washingtonpost.com, and Webmd.com.” Id. at 101, 106 (majority opinion). And unlike HB3, which restricts account creation but doesn’t limit access to the platforms per se, the statute there forbade any usage of the covered sites. Id. at 101. HB3 is tailored in a way that the law at issue in Packingham was not.

I literally do not understand what they mean when they say HB3 is different because it only applies to a “subset of minors.” It applies to all minors under 14 with a ban on account creation, and also applies to all 14- and 15-year-olds by requiring parental approval for account creation. That’s… way more people than “all sex offenders” (unless Florida has more registered sex offenders than children under 16, which seems like a different kind of problem).

Then we get to the FSC v. Paxton issue. When the Supreme Court ruled in that case last year, we highlighted that the reasoning of the ruling was quite clearly limited to non-First Amendment protected speech, which they claimed included content that would be obscene to minors. But (importantly) we were sure it would open up the floodgates to people claiming it applied much more broadly to all sorts of internet services.

And… that’s exactly what is happening here, and the Eleventh Circuit judges seem to think it’s no big deal to magically expand the FSC ruling to mean you can age restrict First Amendment-protected content too.

CCIA contends that, by contrast, HB3 prohibits certain minors from accessing protected speech. That may be so, but Free Speech Coalition didn’t purport to establish a constitutional outer limit; nothing in the Court’s reasoning there precludes a state from imposing an age-verification requirement that operates to limit minors’ access to some protected speech—provided, of course, that it does so in a content-neutral manner.

That’s literally wrong. The majority decision in FSC quite clearly says it is okay to restrict it because the content is “obscene” to children, and thus not protected. Straight from Clarence Thomas’s decision:

Because H. B. 1181 simply requires proof of age to access content that is obscene to minors, it does not directly regulate the protected speech of adults…. On its face, the statute regulates only speech that is obscene to minors. That speech is unprotected to the extent the State seeks only to verify age. And, the statute can easily “be justified without reference to the [protected] content of the regulated speech,” because its apparent purpose is simply to prevent minors, who have no First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to them, from doing so.

So, I’m honestly baffled that the Eleventh Circuit now claims that SCOTUS’s ruling wasn’t limited to only unprotected speech. It was core to Thomas’ ruling.

The Eleventh Circuit then takes other parts of the FSC ruling out of context, to say that because it mentioned age verification in other contexts (offline) being okay, that means they can extend it to protected speech:

To the contrary, everything the Court said in Free Speech Coalition seems to point in the other direction. The Court emphasized, for instance, that “[r]equiring age verification is common when a law draws lines based on age.” Id. at 479. It noted that many states require proof of age to buy alcohol and tobacco, as well as to obtain licenses to carry a handgun, to drive, and to marry.

Buying alcohol, tobacco, or firearms is, notably, not speech. Neither is driving or marrying. What the fuck are the judges even doing here?

Finally (though, not surprisingly, due to the awkwardness of the Moody ruling), the court rejects CCIA’s “facial” challenge, saying that because some of the platforms covered by this law might host speech that is unprotected under the First Amendment, CCIA hasn’t shown that the law’s unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its constitutional ones. Incredibly, just pages after insisting that FSC v. Paxton isn’t limited to unprotected speech, the court turns around and leans on FSC’s unprotected-for-minors category to argue that some covered platforms host unprotected speech.

Put differently, just because users are “engag[ing] in speech” on a platform doesn’t mean that their expression is fully protected by the First Amendment. Id. There are all kinds of social-media platforms featuring—or even if not featuring, permitting—all kinds of expression. To be sure, much of that expression is fully protected. But some isn’t. The Supreme Court has held, for instance, that certain kinds of speech enjoy no First Amendment protection at all—e.g., incitement, true threats. See Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) (incitement); Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. 66 (2023) (true threats). Other kinds of speech enjoy constitutional protection when exhibited to adults but not when exhibited to children—pornography being the most obvious example. See Free Speech Coal., 606 U.S. at 496.

It may well be true that most expression on most social-media platforms is indeed protected. But not all of it is, at least not with respect to all users. So, for instance, imagine a platform that hosts only unprotected speech—say, Incitement.com or TrueThreats.com. A law restricting children’s (or anyone’s) access to it wouldn’t implicate the First Amendment at all and would trigger only rational-basis review. A law restricting access to a site that hosts speech that is protected for adults but not children—like pornography—would implicate the First Amendment, but a contentneutral restriction—like an age-verification requirement—would be subject only to intermediate scrutiny. See Free Speech Coal., 606 U.S. at 495. Accordingly, even if HB3 “imposes the same onerous restriction” on every platform, Dist. Ct. Order, June 3, 2025, at 43, that restriction could well be subject to different levels of scrutiny, potentially leading to different outcomes.

My response to that is a giant eye roll and “come on.” And, even the judges on the Eleventh Circuit realize “come on, you can’t be serious” is the only logical response here, but insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Moody requires such an outcome:

One might interpose a “come on” objection at this point: Surely, the argument would go, the overwhelming majority of platforms to which HB3 applies overwhelmingly host protected speech. And if, as CCIA insists, the law’s application to those websites would be unconstitutional, then the law’s unconstitutional applications would probably substantially outweigh the constitutional ones. But however intuitive, that sort of impressionistic judgment won’t satisfy Moody’s stringent demands. Whether or not it’s likely that the collective content of the platforms within HB3’s ambit is overwhelmingly protected, CCIA bears the “burden” of demonstrating both (1) the universe of the law’s applications and (2) that the invalid applications substantially outweigh the valid ones.

And, perhaps the ruling in Moody is to blame for this part of it, but when an appeals court has to admit how nonsensical this reasoning is, it seems like a sign that the Supreme Court should reconsider its silly requirements for facial challenges in Moody.

There is a concurrence from Judge Kevin Newsom, who points out that the Supreme Court is effectively all over the map regarding this “as applied” vs. “facial” challenge stuff post-Moody, noting that other recent SCOTUS rulings suggest “as applied” challenges for intermediate scrutiny may not really be allowed either, and then coming around to the obvious conclusion that this might mean that under recent SCOTUS doctrine, the state can pass all sorts of speech suppressing laws with no way for the courts to block them. And, uh, yeah, dude, that’s why these rulings are so damn concerning.

But if the Supreme Court’s point in Moody was to make as-applied challenges the new normal in First Amendment litigation, it seems strange that the same Court—the same nine people—would have then turned around less than two years later and nixed as-applied challenges for the whole range of First Amendment claims that call for intermediate scrutiny. And I don’t think it makes me a result-oriented hack to worry that a combination of Moody’s new (or newly emphasized) limitations on facial First Amendment challenges and a prohibition on as-applied challenges in a host of contexts would lead to, well, a lot less protection for traditionally safeguarded speech.

In the end, I’ll confess that I’m not quite sure what to make of B.P.J.’s statement casting doubt on the viability of as-applied challenges to laws that trigger less than strict scrutiny. But before exporting it to the First Amendment context, I think it’s wise to await a clearer signal from the Supreme Court.

While he doesn’t come out quite that far to say it, by suggesting it doesn’t make him a “result-oriented hack,” he is kinda pointing a finger at “the same nine people” on the Supreme Court who have made these conflicting decisions that make it effectively impossible to stop speech suppressing laws, even with the First Amendment. And they are result-oriented hacks, as some of us have been pointing out (though, realistically, he’s just talking about the “conservative” six who were in the majority of the BPJ case, which effectively puts the kibosh on as applied challenges for anything that qualifies for less than strict scrutiny.

Either way, this ruling makes a mess of free speech online in really damaging ways. Admittedly, some of that is due to the “results oriented hacks” at the Supreme Court, but the Eleventh Circuit’s interpretation of the rulings in Brown, Moody, Packingham, FSC, and a variety of other cases, suggests a do over is absolutely necessary. Hopefully this ruling gets tossed under an en banc hearing or, somehow, by the “results-oriented hacks” at the Supreme Court. With other circuits also having trouble remembering the First Amendment exists online, one hopes that the Supreme Court steps in and reminds them.

Thursday 2026-10-15

10:00 PM

Starlink’s Entry Into Wireless Is Being Wildly Overhyped [Techdirt]

One of the ways Musk fraudulently goosed SpaceX stock value during the IPO was by pretending that the company would very quickly (in just a year or two) grow from just 12 million global Starlink subscribers (just 4 million in the States) to something more akin to 300-500 million.

The way Starlink claims they’ll do this is by getting into traditional wireless phones and challenging incumbents like Verizon, though if you look at the actual details of the plan, it’s not well thought out.

Starlink wants to plunk down thousands of meshed femtocells installed on customer rooftops alongside existing LEO satellite dishes, something one telecom analyst recently stated was “one of the top three dumbest ideas in my four decades of being in this industry.” In part because the femtocells will eat up already dwindling capacity on the increasingly congested network (recall that Starlink customers in some areas already face “congestion fees” as high as $1500).

Musk Corp is also leveraging its cozy relationship with the Trump administration to hoover up as much spectrum as they can get their hands on. You might recall that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr launched an “investigation” into Echostar to specifically help offload their spectrum to Musk. SpaceX also recently bought 14 megahertz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band from investment firm Grain Management, which bought the spectrum from T-Mobile earlier in 2026.

Starlink has even managed to pressure some Republicans into supporting broader cell phone unlocking rules, something the party has spent the last few decades helping entrenched telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon fight tooth and nail against.

The recent purchase was enough to send AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile stocks tumbling:

“Verizon closed down 8.75% on the news, its worst day since July 2002. Shares of T-Mobile dropped 13.27% while AT&T fell 9.81%, each notching their own worst days since 2013 and 2000, respectively.”

In contrast, the white supremacist’s space company’s stock only jumped around 1 percent for the day.

The problem for Musk is multifold. As Dish Network found when it failed utterly to disrupt the sector, it takes a lot more than spectrum hoarding and some greased palms to become a major player in wireless. Actually building a useful network the public wants to use that covers rural and urban markets alike is a massive cash sink investors despise in part because networks take years to finish.

The highway of telecom history is positively filled with the gravestones of companies that tried to cleverly out-maneuver giant incumbent telecoms, which are directly tethered to the heart of the Republican party (remember Starry?).

Space X and its boosters believe that simply having access to Starlink’s network of Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is some kind of magic wand toward competing in wireless (they’re already partnering with T-Mobile for phone calls in out-of-the-way locations). But even normally staid telecom analysts have been shitting all over Musk’s femtocell plan, pointing out it’s not going to scale well:

“Given the laws-of-physics limitations, a Starlink network of small cells would probably have more holes in it than a hiker’s socks. Neither Lum nor Rhodes sees much likelihood of coverage in urban areas that enjoy mainstream and lower-cost alternatives. “It works best in rural because you’ve got fewer choices for fiber and so most customers are there. Where are your customers to repeat it in the city?” said Rhodes. “Well, they don’t exist because they’re not that stupid.”

There’s also the fact that Musk companies don’t really believe in customer service, and fail in most every instance where they’ve been forced to try. Both Starlink and Tesla Solar are routinely inundated with stories where customers can’t even get the companies to respond to phone calls or emails. Starlink also consistently isn’t particularly affordable for the folks most in need of access.

Starlink is (and will probably always be) a good niche broadband solution best suited for people out of reach of better, faster, more affordable options if they can afford it (rural homes, boats, RVs, wars, disasters). But Musk and Republicans have broadly tried to claim that the technology is some sort of magic bullet for connectivity. To the point where they redirected what ultimately will likely be billions of infrastructure bill taxpayer dollars away from faster fiber networks to Starlink.

The actual threat to giants like AT&T and Verizon is limited, though outlets like CBS buried that fact deep in their bullish reporting. Even a best case scenario requires a massive outlay of capital and a half a decade to even get close to begin trying to compete in the space, something SpaceX’s more reality-based investors definitely aren’t going to enjoy.

Pluralistic: Expedia amazoned hotel rooms (15 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Expedia amazoned hotel rooms: Everything more expensive for everyone, monopolies everywhere, and we're all screwed.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Delta v dovening; "Play Money"; Alabama's ethnic cleansing; We trust neuroscience over psychology; Billionaires' anti-homeless pogrom; Game devs v DRM; What security means; Microsoft, tear down that wall! Publisher won't revert rights; SNL's Trump/Clinton debate; Chicago Tribune's murder; AI after AI.
  • Upcoming appearances: Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Oxford, Montreal.
  • 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 faded, scratched postcard advertising the 'Edge of Town Motel.' Next to the motel sign is a vast pink piggybank, out of whose slot rises a motel key on a diamond keychain, emblazoned with a metallic dollar-sign.

Expedia amazoned hotel rooms (permalink)

No matter where you shop, you're getting screwed by Amazon. Amazon has found a way to make everything you buy – at Target, at a mom-and-pop shop, even direct from the manufacturer – more expensive. And they're not the only one: Expedia's done the same thing, but for hotel rooms.

Here's how Amazon broke the economy: first, they locked in a key group of shoppers. The vast majority of affluent shoppers in the USA have Amazon Prime accounts. Having prepaid for a year's shipping in advance, those Prime subscribers start their purchasing journey by searching Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for, that's where it ends.

America's affluent top decile – the 10% of richest Americans – do the majority of America's shopping, a phenomenon that has only been accelerated by America's precipitous slide into oligarchy, which has exhausted the savings and the credit-card limits and the home equity of the majority of Americans, who increasingly can't afford to buy anything:

https://dreamagainusa.org/

If you want to sell things in America, you must sell them in the place where the top decile shops, and that's Amazon. For merchants, that is an incredibly expensive proposition: 51-60% of every dollar you spend with an independent merchant on Amazon is claimed by Amazon through junk fees, listing fees, commissions, processing fees and other scams:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/04/cheating-at-fraud/#absentee-rentier

Merchants don't have 51-60% margins they can afford to turn over to Amazon. To remain viable while selling on Amazon, they have to raise prices. Amazon doesn't mind if prices go up, so long as Amazon's price remains competitive. So Amazon imposes a requirement on its suppliers called "most favored nation," which requires sellers to offer their best price on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/25/most-favored-nation/#price-fixing

Practically speaking, that means that when you raise your price on Amazon, you must raise your prices everywhere by the same amount, which means that no matter where you shop (Target, Walmart, the corner store or direct from the factory), you pay the Amazon Tax.

The Amazon Tax is a prime (you should forgive the expression) example of enshittification, in which an intermediary (a business that sits between buyers and sellers, AKA, "a platform") screws both customers and sellers to benefit itself.

But Amazon isn't the only example of a powerful digital intermediary that has used its market power to impose an economy-wide tax. Wherever you look online, you find digital giants who grew the way Amazon grew (buying all of their competitors) and then did what Amazon did (squeezing buyers and sellers, making prices higher everywhere).

That's what happened with Expedia. Almost every travel site you can find online has been purchased by Expedia (Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz), and the ones that aren't Expedia subsidiaries were acquired by its main rival, Priceline (Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda and even Opentable). Nearly all the hotel rooms are booked by a tiny minority of travelers – largely that same top decile that Amazon has so thoroughly captured and locked in – and hoteliers can't live without their business, and they're almost all Expedia and/or Priceline customers. Expedia accounts for 80% of all hotel bookings by dollar value.

Expedia's position, in other words, is basically Amazon's position, so Expedia is doing exactly what Amazon is doing: they charge huge fees to hotels, and then force the hotels to raise their prices everywhere through a "most favored nation" deal:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.369601/gov.uscourts.wawd.369601.1.0.pdf

But – as Lee Hepner writes for the BIG newsletter – Expedia has figured out ways to out-Amazon Amazon. They've copied one of Amazon's sleaziest businesses, and made it worse:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-expedia-rigs-travel-markets-and

Here's Amazon's sleaziest commercial practice: when you search Amazon, the top results for your search aren't the best matches for your queries; they're products sold by the companies willing to pay the most for search placement, in a "real-time auction" that runs every time you search. The cost of winning that auction comes out of your pocket through higher prices: the first result for an Amazon query is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match. The top row is 25% more expensive. On average, the best match for your query is 17 positions down the screen, on the second page, where almost no one ever bothers to scroll:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

This rip-off is Amazon's most profitable line of business, more profitable than AWS or Prime. It makes the company more than $80b/year. And – incredibly – Expedia's found a way to make it even worse.

Like Amazon, Expedia auctions off its search results. They call this their "VIP listing" program. Practically speaking, hotels have to pay for this, because it boosts booking rates by 42% (the first ten results on an Expedia search-results page get 62% of the clicks). VIP listing is expensive for the merchant – but it's even more expensive for you and me.

That's because Expedia requires hotels in its VIP listings programs to raise their prices on non-Expedia sites by 10-25%…INDEFINITELY.

Let me repeat that: to stay in business, hotels need to be on Expedia. To stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to raise their prices to pay Expedia's junk fees, but they have to raise their prices everywhere else. But to really stay in business on Expedia, hotels have to use the VIP program, which is even more expensive. And – one more time – hotels in the VIP program have to jack up their prices everywhere else, INDEFINITELY. This means that, throughout the economy, hotel prices are rising at a superinflationary rate, because Expedia – who command 80% of the market – are pushing those prices up.

This goes a long way to explaining why US hotel rates rose 58% from a 2020 average of $103/night to a 2025 average of $162/night. It explains why hotel prices rose by 5% last year, which is double the rate of inflation. And this is why Expedia stock is up 65% since the start of the Iran war, a fact that Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin attributes to "higher margins" from "higher prices":

https://s202.q4cdn.com/757635260/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/Q2-2026-Earnings-Presentation-Final.pdf

In his coverage of the Expedia lawsuit – which brought many of these details to light – Hepner notes that hotels themselves have undergone near-total cartelization, with Hilton, Marriott, and Choice International owning the majority of all hotels after a string of acquisitions that went largely unchallenged by slumbering antitrust regulators around the world. These consolidated chains have also jacked up prices and enshittified their service, slashing housekeeping and check-in staff and allowing their facilities to slip into disrepair.

This, too, is characteristic of monopolization: whenever a monopoly takes over part of its supply chain, the rest of the supply chain consolidates to prevent itself from being ripped off by the new giant. This is the story of publishers consolidating to defend themselves from Borders/B&N, Walmart and Costco, then Amazon; and it's the story of literary agencies consolidating to resist the power of those overgrown publishers.

And it's the story of health-care, which saw consolidation in pharmaceuticals leading to mergers among hospitals, who screwed the insurers, who also consolidated.

In every case, it's the workers and the people who rely on them that get the shitty end of the stick. Hotel guests, readers and patients pay more for inferior products. Writers, editors, doctors, nurses, hotel staff and housekeepers get lower pay and worse working-conditions:

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

There is nothing wrong with the idea of an intermediary. Most writers can't publish and sell their own books, and few travelers can navigate finding hotels in strange cities without help. The problem of intermediaries is that when intermediaries gain monopoly power – by buying their rivals and capturing buyers and sellers – they are able to squeeze both. As Tim Wu says, this is the moment when a company that's supposed to be helping becomes a predator, acquires "main character syndrome" and makes every transaction all about the middleman, at the expense of the people buying and selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/05/absentee-landlord/

There are so many reasons for inflation and the cost of living crisis: wage stagnation, wars of choice in Iran, environmental cataclysm after environmental cataclysm. But under cover of these real factors is a cohort of what Matt Stoller calls "economic termites," parasites that have infested the walls of our economy and are devouring it from within.

You can't solve this by shopping. Calling the hotel direct won't fix it: they have to be on Expedia to survive, and to be on Expedia, they have to sign up for VIP service, and to keep VIP service, they have to make their prices higher everywhere. To fix this, we need systemic action: the corporate death penalty for the companies that are consuming the structural members of our society.

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)

#25yrsago Delta diverts flight after passenger reports praying Hassids as suicidal jihadis https://web.archive.org/web/20011016000622/http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011015/od/delta_dc_1.html

#20yrsago Play Money: memoir of a year selling game-gold https://memex.craphound.com/2006/10/15/play-money-memoir-of-a-year-selling-game-gold/

#15yrsago Cereal Monsters: Frankenberry and friends as Universal classic monsters https://www.deviantart.com/jasonedmiston/art/Cereal-Monsters-106139367

#15yrsago Alabama’s racist “immigration” law creates misery and fear for brown people https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-families-trapped

#15yrsago Neuroscience explanations are more believable than mere psychological ones https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2778755/

#15yrsago Writer: “my publisher said I could only get the rights to my out-of-print book back if I bought their leftover copies from them” https://writerbeware.blog/2011/10/18/guest-blog-post-fitzhenry-and-whiteside-writer-beware/

#10yrsago SNL’s Trump/Clinton debate sketch makes Saturday Night great again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVMW_1aZXRk

#10yrsago The pathogens of Wells Fargo’s corruption fester in every large corporation https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/three-things-to-know-to-hold-wells-fargo-accountable

#10yrago Billionaire tech investors back ballot initiative to purge homeless people from San Francisco https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/10/14/silicon-valleys-acute-homeless-problem-ballot/91082346/

#10yrsago Game developers say no to DRM: “hurts our customers” https://web.archive.org/web/20161013180206/https://kotaku.com/pc-game-developers-say-anti-piracy-tech-would-make-thei-1787747680

#10yrsago After being outed for massive hack and installing an NSA “rootkit,” Yahoo cancels earnings call https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/yahoo-hacking-verizon_n_5800eef7e4b0e8c198a78b14

#5yrsago ROT 8000 and what "security" means https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/15/fargo-north-decoder/#on-trusting-trust

#5yrsago The Chicago Tribune is being murdered before our eyes https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

#1yrago The AI that we'll have after AI https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue

#1yrago Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/#data-dieselgate

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 508 (25536 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

\

RIAA Flags Anna’s Archive and AI Voice Cloner to U.S. Government [TorrentFreak]

riaaEvery year, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) invites rightsholders and other stakeholders to suggest foreign sites and services for its list of “notorious markets.”

The annual review doesn’t make any legal findings. Instead, it aims to encourage the listed services, and the countries they operate from, to take proper action against piracy and counterfeiting.

Last week, the RIAA responded with a submission that mostly mentions familiar targets. It lists torrent sites, stream-rippers and cyberlockers, many of which were flagged in previous years. There are some notable newcomers too, including Anna’s Archive.

Anna’s Archive and the Spotify Scrape

In December last year, the shadow library announced that it had downloaded 86 million music files from Spotify, plus metadata for 256 million tracks. This prompted an aggressive legal response.

A few days later, the RIAA coordinated an emergency court action on behalf of its members and Spotify, which resulted in a temporary restraining order against the site. Following this order, domain registry PIR suspended the site’s .org domain, and RIAA says Cloudflare also stopped providing services to the shadow library.

Following this crackdown, Anna’s Archive initially reported that its Spotify metadata torrent was “unavailable until further notice.” In February, however, the site quietly released roughly 3 million music files.

While the torrents for those releases were delisted shortly after, the lawsuit continued, with the labels and Spotify on the winning end.

“On April 14, 2026, RIAA and Spotify obtained a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive,” the RIAA writes in its USTR submission.

From RIAA’s submission

riaa anna's submission

Despite the legal victory, the music group stresses that Anna’s Archive remains available through its .gl, .pk and .gd domains.

The RIAA isn’t the only rightsholder group that flagged the shadow library to the USTR. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) also lists Anna’s Archive as a “notorious” online site (pdf). According to the publishers, traffic to Anna’s Archive’s domains grew 28% despite their enforcement efforts, to an average of 41 million visitors a month.

The AAP also highlights that Anna’s Archive offers AI developers high-speed access to its collection, in exchange for what the site describes as an “enterprise-level donation.”

Voice Clones and Leaks

The AI angle also applies to newcomer Lalals, a service operated by a company based in the United Arab Emirates. This AI platform allows users to change a vocal recording to sound like popular artists such as Taylor Swift and Drake, without their permission.

According to the RIAA, that infringes the artists’ rights of publicity and likely also infringes its members’ rights in the sound recordings that were used to train the voice models.

“The sound recording artists whose voices are being exploited include Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, Chris Martin, and Rihanna, among many others,” RIAA writes.

Lalals

lalals website

In the cyberlocker category, meanwhile, Mega is a familiar target. The European Commission added the file-hosting service to its own piracy watch list in 2022, and the RIAA now lists it among the notorious markets it wants the USTR to include.

“While Mega removes content that is specifically reported by rights holders, it does not implement effective measures to prevent the re-upload of infringing material or deter repeat infringement,” the RIAA writes.

RIAA stresses that users of the platform continue to share pre-release music and AI-related content, such as vocal models and cloned recordings. On what grounds Mega is required to prevent reuploads is not mentioned by the music group.

Several new cyberlockers are flagged for their role in pre-release piracy as well. These include Gofile, Sendgb and Imgur.gg.

Links to these services are reportedly shared on music leak forums, and the RIAA mentions Leaked.cx by name in the entries for Sendgb, Imgur.gg and Pixeldrain, which was already included in last year’s submission.

This Imgur.gg hosting platform doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the popular image host Imgur. When we checked, the site didn’t list any company details, but it did promote a music streaming app “Built by the imgur.gg team.”

Imgur.gg

imgur.gg website screenshot

RIAA goes on to mention that Telegram and Discord remain the primary mechanisms through which pre-release music is distributed. That accusation isn’t new, as the passage is nearly identical to last year’s submission.

Familiar Names, Familiar Words

Many other entries are familiar as well. The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RuTracker are listed in the torrent category, Rapidgator and Krakenfiles are flagged as cyberlockers, and Y2mate and Savefrom remain in the stream-ripping section.

Krakenfiles is still listed, even though the RIAA notes that it removed its upload functionality this year.

Whether any of the newly nominated sites will make it onto the USTR’s final list has yet to be seen. Last year, the USTR included several of the RIAA’s picks, including Y2mate, Savefrom and Krakenfiles.

Before the USTR makes its decision, the sites and services mentioned in the submissions can respond with rebuttals of their own, which Mega plans to do.

Responding to our request for comment, the company says that it removes reported content and permanently closes the accounts of repeat infringers, as is required under U.S. law.

According to Mega, infringing activity represents a small fraction of the overall use of the service. Last year, it processed close to 3.9 million copyright takedown requests and removed links represented around 0.002% of the more than 208 billion files stored by its 338 million registered users.

In the same period, 5,627 accounts were suspended under its “three strikes in six months” repeat infringer policy.

“Mega respectfully disagrees with the RIAA’s characterization, which fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature of the service, and will be filing its own submission with USTR setting out why its inclusion on the Notorious Markets List would be unwarranted,” Mega’s Legal and Compliance Manager Csaba Szabó informs TorrentFreak.

—

The RIAA’s full 2026 list of “notorious” sites and services can be found below, and the full report is available here (pdf). The cursive listings marked (new) are newcomers and those that were removed are crossed out. The RIAA stresses that this list is a non-exhaustive overview.

Stream-Ripping Sites

– Y2mate.gs (formerly y2mate.nu)
– Savefrom.net
– Ssyoutube.com
– Notube.net
– Y2mate.is (new)
– Snaptube app and related domains

Music Download/Streaming Sites

– Mp3.pm (new)
– Tubidy.cool (previously listed as a stream-ripper)
– Scnlog.me
– newalbumreleases.net
– waploaded.com
– hiphopkit.com

BitTorrent Indexing Sites

– ThePirateBay.org
– 1337x.to
– Rutracker.org

Cyberlockers

– Rapidgator.net
– Krakenfiles.com
– Chomikuj.pl
– Pixeldrain.com
– Pillows.su
– Mega.nz (new)
– Gofile.io (new)
– Sendgb.com (new)
– Imgur.gg (new)
– Ddownload.com (new)

Additional Issues

– Anna’s Archive (annas-archive.gl, .pk, .gd) (new)
– Lalals.com (new)
– Other intermediaries: Telegram and Discord
– Bulletproof ISPs: PRQ, Frantech Solutions/BuyVM/PONYNET, DDoS Guard
– Domain Name Registrars: NameCheap, Tucows and others

Physical Markets

– Counterfeit CDs and vinyl from China and Russia, sold through Amazon, eBay, Vinted, Marktplaats, Leboncoin and Wallapop (new)

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

09:00 PM

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

Don’t bring a spreadsheet to a fear fight.

Change causes fear. And change is all around us.

The fear of the unknown. The fear of failure. The fear of uncertainty.

Mostly, we’d like safety. And when the world changes, safety feels like it’s in short supply.

One reason we have security theatre is that the performance of security often creates more of the feeling we seek than actual safety.

Taking your shoes off before you enter the airport. Installing a giant, clunky, loud, armored garage door. Viewing strangers with suspicion. Using false proxies and useless shortcuts to insulate ourselves (or seek to do so) from the changes and the unknowns we fear.

Statistics rarely overcome stories.

So what does?

Familiarity. And conversation.

“What would make you feel safe?” is a different approach than “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Until we get familiar enough with the new status quo, what performance would be a helpful way to create the feeling of safety?

What if we could create even more of that feeling with a different approach?

And while we’re at it, what if we spent time becoming familiar with the thing you’re afraid of?

The most useful spreadsheets and facts are the ones that fearful people create to help them see their world differently.

      

01:00 PM

Epic Games Somehow Gets Even Worse On AI Than Tim Sweeney’s Anti-Disclosure Take [Techdirt]

There have certainly been some bad takes on both sides of the AI in video games argument. In one corner, we have the never-AI-ers who reflexively claim that any use of any type of AI in any game is a total disqualifier. No quarter is given to nuance. No daylight is offered for discussion. It might as well be religion to those folks. Then, on the other side, you have people like Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, who has not only directed his company to go all in on the use of generative AI in gaming, but actually had the chutzpah to suggest that his rival Steam’s inclusion of AI-use disclosures on its storefront are “irresponsible.”

But Epic has somehow gotten even worse on AI use than that. Rather than suggesting that generative AI is a potential tool for use in gaming, which can often mean its use is employed on the perimeter of game-creation, Epic has decided to make the use of AI compulsory.

According to a new report by Bloomberg, developers on the game were told to implement an “AI-first” production model using Anthropic’s Claude AI models. The team is not to use any more “hand-written code,” and even artists are being pushed to use the technology that has become a punching bag among actual players. The director of the unannounced game reportedly told developers that all art should be “generated with full AI workflows.”

“We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” Jake Jones, communications director at Epic Games, said in a statement.

It’s hard to overstate just how stupid this is. This isn’t handing artists new and interesting paintbrushes to use. It’s taking their paintbrush away entirely and telling the artists to simply tell a machine what to make. That is a terrible idea. It’s also completely antithetical to how other game makers have employed the use of AI. This is going to turn off both the public, which generally hates the idea of artistic interruption through the use of AI tools, and the pool of artists Epic does and could in the future employ.

AI models are getting better at coding, certainly. But what Epic is clearly doing is anti-artist for the sake of speed-running development after cutting human employment.

The upcoming shooter, which Bloomberg reports was supposed to release in March 2027, has now been delayed due to slow progress and understaffed teams. Despite a $1.5 billion investment by Disney in 2024 for collaborations that include this project, the Fortnite maker laid off 1,000 people earlier this year amid the battle royale’s struggles and the costs of ongoing antitrust litigation.

For the group that is dogmatically opposed to the use of AI in gaming, this is their boogeyman come to life. It’s the starkest example of bad corporate behavior enabled by AI that they could want. And it’s very hard to argue against them when there are bad CEOs and bad companies out here pulling this kind of garbage.

I won’t even try. I’ll repeat that I think there is a place for this technology as a tool to enable artists and enable more art. But if the gaming industry is too poisoned at this point to allow for that possibility to be employed responsibly, then so be it.

10:00 AM

Will Universities Respond To The AI Moment? [Techdirt]

A key role universities play in society is providing knowledge that can guide public action. Moreover, public universities have a legal duty to serve the public. We expect researchers in universities to  produce and disseminate knowledge that can ultimately advance human flourishing and meet the informational needs of lawmakers, civil society, and the public generally. Yet too many schools are currently failing to meet this expectation in key domains. Nearly four years after the launch of ChatGPT sparked humanity’s most pressing technological moment, many public stakeholders are left with more questions than answers about how to navigate this AI moment. 

Universities have only just begun to enable scholars and students to contribute to the massive task of providing adequate knowledge to guide societal action with respect to AI. This delay–perhaps forgivable for a brief period of time given that universities will never move at the speed of startups–is eroding the capacity and, as a result, legitimacy of these critical institutions. The longer that universities operate as if society were not undergoing fundamental change, the faster that faculty members will depart for other opportunities (e.g., in industry), potential and current students will opt for alternative paths to education, and stakeholders will decrease or even withhold ongoing financial support. 

Other individuals and more nimble organizations have rushed to fill the informational vacuum. AI labs, research institutes, and partisan entities now play a heavy role in shaping how the public and elected officials think about this moment. However, these parties–no matter how well-intentioned–have biases that may skew public discourse and lack the legitimacy of institutions like universities, which are built to shield researchers from major conflicts of interest. 

The exodus of talent from many universities is partially outside of their hands. Federal and state lawmakers often control the resources available to public institutions. They have yet to equip universities with the resources and tools required to assist with navigating this AI transition. In some cases, lawmakers have actively diminished support for higher education. The foreseeable result is that many professors cannot access leading AI models and many students lack AI training and literacy. These decisions have produced an academic community that is technically challenged in its ability to guide society through the myriad questions posed by AI. 

Public officials–to varying degrees and levels of specificity–flag for universities what studies, projects, and events would help meet public informational needs, but universities may not prioritize that work. For example, agencies sometimes issue requests for information–invitations for the public, especially individuals with relevant expertise–that do not result in meaningful engagement. At the federal level, agencies often receive fewer than ten comments on critical regulatory questions. More targeted outreach programs to scholars could provide agencies with more information as well as give academics a chance to share their perspectives. Relatedly, when legislative committees at the state level hold hearings on topics closely studied by a nearby university, they often opt to invite politically connected witnesses rather than professors. This preference may make for good politics but it leaves academics on the sidelines. A small amount of effort by these state actors could go a long way toward helping academics shift their research priorities. 

In this way, external actors may be partly to blame for the increasing irrelevance of higher education in AI governance conversations. But universities should also take some responsibility. Even if professors were equipped with the latest AI, some would likely fail to use it–preferring to stick to the syllabus they’ve taught from for decades and investigate the topics that they find most interesting, regardless of societal relevance. If professors persist in the belief that AI is something they can ignore and act as though they have no responsibility to monitor and contribute to the public knowledge, there’s little reason for such public funds to go toward AI tools at universities nor to improve outreach to academics to assist with AI-related questions.

Academics are not passive players in decisions to cut funds and reduce support. Across disciplines, academics have maintained incentive structures that permit many scholars to act as though it’s still 2022. In response, some academics who  appreciate the scale, speed, and societal significance of AI have left the Ivory Tower for the Silicon Tower, where the pay is higher, the tools are more sophisticated, and the culture rewards those who dive into the most important inquiries. 

Given these challenges, what can be done? This essay provides an initial call for reform, to which we hope others will also contribute. Questions of how to resolve the compensation gulf between industry and academia are left for another time. Universities–including faculty, staff, administrators, and related organizations and networks–can still make progress on establishing the conditions for increased and expedited AI research by those who opt to stay in academia. These reforms should satisfy several foundational principles, such as protecting academic freedom, creating meaningful opportunities for student participation, and addressing issues with particular importance to the university’s surrounding community. 

Again, this is a starting point. We invite academics and others to share this call for reform, add to it, and amend it; what we should not do is carry on as normal. Instead, we call for the vast majority of scholars to substantially re-orient their research, writing, teaching and service around AI. 

We think that our legislators, civil society organizations, and neighbors would be better off with  too much analysis of AI, rather than too little. We’re currently living in a world with too little analysis and it’s far from satisfactory. Not every scholar should pivot to addressing AI directly, but the majority of departments should be able to point to how their collective expertise contributes to a better societal response to this moment. A surge in focus and expenditure on AI need not last forever but is highly needed at the moment.

Recommendation #1: Identify and Prioritize Societally Important Research Questions

Professional organizations like the Association of American Law Schools (“AALS”), which represents law schools and law professors, should establish and support shared services that collect consequential questions about AI from lawmakers and AI stakeholders, such as frontier AI labs and research entities, and connect them with relevant academic communities. Staff at these organizations have extensive knowledge of the communities that exist within the discipline as well as how best to share research, advice, and engagement opportunities (as explored below). 

Additionally, participating universities can and should set up means to receive AI-related requests to provide yet another avenue for scholars to learn about how they can contribute. Imagine, for example, if universities designated a “legislative research liaison” who had the sole purpose of working with the legislature to specify their knowledge gaps. (It is worth noting that some universities already have government affairs teams that commonly interact with legislators, albeit not necessarily for this purpose.)

Of course, individuals, organizations, and governing bodies can also share their informational needs with the Ivory Tower. This need not be a costly endeavor. For instance, state legislative committees could start their next legislative session with a hearing that culminates in a research agenda that is published and sent directly to all universities. 

Recommendation #2: Enable The Necessary Resources for Timely and Thorough Research on AI

State and federal officials, as well as AI stakeholders seeking expedited expert analysis of complex questions, should ensure that participating scholars have the resources to offer valuable insights. As it stands, universities have far too few tokens, limited access to frontier models (sometimes because of their own outdated procurement standards and IT policies), and, in some cases, minimal understanding of the latest developments in AI (such as the existing and near-future capabilities of AI). 

Government officials counting on scholars to help them in their work ought to invest in their capacity to do so. AI research is not cheap. Universities are struggling to provide meaningful access to faculty, staff, and students given the high costs of many AI systems and the variability of usage-based expenses. Rather than wait for universities to procure such access, some professors are trading university roles for the lab gigs–joining labs where they know that they will be able to use the latest and greatest AI. Legislatures have yet to make the sort of sizable investments in universities required to meet the demand for AI access among experts nor to compensate experts enough to keep them on campus. In fiscal year 2025, the average state appropriation for higher education amounted to just a 2 percent increase when adjusted for inflation. 

AI labs likewise counting on scholars to assist with readying society for their transformative technology ought to lower barriers to academic investigation. While labs have offered some universities financial breaks on their tools and permitted some degree of support to researchers, there’s substantial room for improvement. Labs, including Google and Anthropic, are sitting on vast troves of user data that can inform everything from how AI may impact the labor market to the extent to which individuals are becoming reliant on AI tools for sensitive tasks. Universities could unleash their extensive interdisciplinary experts on such data if labs facilitated access. Labs may have justifiable reasons for holding that information close to the chest. In the wrong hands, data related to user habits, interests, and goals could lead to problematic outcomes. That said, Anthropic, OpenAI, and others cannot at once stress their concern about society’s readiness for transformative AI while keeping the information necessary to assist with that effort locked away. 

Recommendation #3: Reward Contributions to Societally Relevant Work on AI

Academics may be hesitant to alter their research agenda and planned publication goals if doing so is likely to block professional progress. Tenure requirements are often tied to adherence to the existing, protracted processes. What’s more, even those requirements are completed on paper–i.e. publication of a certain number of articles, tenure decisions are commonly shaped by norms and biases that further obligate applicants to invest in the status quo. For example, in the discipline of economics, tenure may be especially likely to be awarded if the applicant has published in one of five journals. 

Alternative contributions to the discipline, especially those done in response to demand for input on AI questions, should clearly and meaningfully inform tenure, compensation, professional recognition, and perhaps university obligations, such as committee assignments. In addition to rewarding traditional research, universities eager to meet this AI moment should formalize recognition of the following: 

  • public engagement research (albeit likely in a truncated form and via more accessible outlets),
  • advice (testifying before legislative bodies, responding directly to government requests for information and the equivalent from labs), and 
  • engagement (meeting with legislators, regulators, and AI company policy staff, teaching community courses, serving as an expert at community forums).

Accounting for these contributions to a moment of informational demand would return universities to their historical focus on knowledge creation and dissemination. Rep. Jordan Morrill, author of the eponymous act that created the nation’s land grant universities, introduced the legislation with the following vision: “Let us have such colleges as may rightfully claim the authority of teachers to announce facts, fix laws, and scatter broadcast that knowledge which will provide useful in building up a great nation.” That guiding principle informed subsequent legislation. The Hatch Act, enacted in 1887, set up “agricultural experimentation systems” at universities in each state for the purpose of:

acquiring and diffusing among the people of the United States useful and practical information on subjects connected with agriculture, and to promote scientific investigation and experiment respecting the principles and application of agricultural science.

These academic entities were expected to “conduct original research or verify experiments” related to timely agricultural questions and to produce “reports of progress . . . at least once in three months, one copy of which shall be sent to each newspaper in the states in which they are respectively located, and to such individuals actually engaged in farming as may request the same.” Notably, these reports were to be sent via the “mails of the United States” at no charge to the recipient.

Realization of Morrill’s vision and replication (with some adaptation) of the Hatch Act’s provisions in modern times would transform modern universities, many of which have serially drifted from their respective missions. 

Recommendation #4: Accelerate Publication and Delivery to Stakeholders

Academic research tends to move at the speed of their respective research journals, which are rarely known for their haste. As of 2013, the publication cycle–from submission to public distribution–in business and economic journals often took 18 months; physics, comparatively moving at hyper-speed, averaged 9 months for that cycle. While some degree of delay is unquestionably necessary to probe and refine research, many scholars would conclude that the time between paper submission and publication could be shortened with minimal or, given the speed of AI, perhaps even justifiable losses to quality. 

Rather than tolerate continued reliance on those processes, domains should identify suitable alternatives that may allow for sufficient review while not unnecessarily delaying release. While many pre-print avenues exist, such as ArXiv and SSRN, it may nevertheless still be the case that the existing norms around length and formatting standards still slow a scholar’s dissemination of information that may be especially valuable to AI stakeholders. For example, it may be the case that in certain scenarios the most valuable thing to state or federal officials is a wide-range of white papers or even two-page memos from a range of practitioners. Such memos would substantially depart from the traditional research paper in just about every domain yet have an incredible impact on a pressing policy matter. 

Minimally, disciplines should commit to making their research outputs open source when possible. Academic research that lives behind a paywall will inevitably fall short of its potential to contribute to public discourse. Yet, in many disciplines only a fraction of articles are open source. Theoretically, authors of paywalled pieces may share shorter, more accessible versions through alternative means. Still, it’s antithetical to the mission of universities–especially public universities–to impose gates on knowledge. The need for open knowledge is all the greater with respect to research that addresses timely matters, such as AI. Furthermore, the materials, data, and analysis code underlying empirical research (when relevant) should be made publicly available and be as transparent as possible. By adhering to this principle of open science, empirical fields can move faster, providing opportunities to ascertain which findings are reproducible and replicable more quickly.

Conclusion 

Universities have obligations to help support the societies in which they are embedded. Novel problems and possibilities presented by this AI moment undoubtedly call for substantial assistance from our educational institutions. The call has not been answered. In fact, many of the individuals best suited to assist universities at this time of public need are leaving. The public ought to demand more–from universities, from state and federal government officials, and from AI labs. 

Universities can and should change their priorities and practices to better serve their external stakeholders. Different universities will adopt different approaches. Some will be more successful than others. This letter is meant to spark conversations that lead to tangible reforms,, not to advance a single best approach. Each discipline and institution may have varied answers but we think they all ought to center on a contemporary version of what Walter Murray, first president of the University of Saskatchewan, wrote in 1908: 

What is the sphere of the university? Its watchword is service—service of the state in the things that make for happiness and virtue as well as the things that make for wealth. No form of that service is too mean or too exalted for the university. It is as fitting for the university, through correspondence classes, extension courses, supervision of farmers’ clubs, traveling libraries, women’s institutes or musical tests to place within the reach of the solitary student, the distant townsman, the farmer in his hours of leisure or the mothers and daughters in the home the opportunities for adding to their stores of knowledge and enjoyment, as it is that the university should foster researches into the properties of radium or the causes and cure of swamp fever.

It is an obligation for universities to serve the public. The need is especially high in this time of drastic technological change, with AI adoption happening faster than the adoption of any other technology in human history. We hope universities will embrace the recommendations in this essay, responding more effectively to the AI moment. 

09:00 AM

08:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 味 [Kanji of the Day]

味

✍8

小3

flavor, taste

ミ

あじ　あじ.わう

意味   (いみ)   —   meaning
興味   (きょうみ)   —   interest (in something)
趣味   (しゅみ)   —   hobby
味方   (みかた)   —   friend
味わい   (あじわい)   —   flavour
気味   (きあじ)   —   market sentiment (stock market)
風味   (ふうみ)   —   taste
美味しい   (おいしい)   —   good(-tasting)
持ち味   (もちあじ)   —   inherent flavor
地味   (じみ)   —   plain

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 喉 [Kanji of the Day]

喉

✍12

中学

throat, voice

コウ

のど

耳鼻咽喉科   (じびいんこうか)   —   otorhinolaryngology
喉頭   (こうとう)   —   larynx
耳鼻咽喉   (じびいんこう)   —   ear, nose, and throat
喉元   (のどもと)   —   throat
喉の痛み   (のどのいたみ)   —   sore throat
咽喉   (いんこう)   —   throat
喉が渇く   (のどがかわく)   —   to be thirsty
喉頭蓋   (こうとうがい)   —   epiglottis
喉越し   (のどごし)   —   feeling of food or drink going down one's throat
喉仏   (のどぼとけ)   —   Adam's apple

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Visible Minorities: Cornell University and Rape Culture [SNA Japan]

An under-investigated rape case at Cornell recently resurfaced due to a lawsuit. It might seem odd for an Ivy League school to face such severe allegations, but not to me. I was an undergraduate at Cornell 40 years ago, and what’s happening now is all within character.

SNA (Tokyo) — A media storm in recent weeks has been over an alleged rape case at Cornell University, where a lawsuit by “Jane Doe” claims that two years ago her intoxicated group sex at a frat house turned into a drug-incapacitated assault by seven men, including an invitation to more assaulters through a group chat.

The allegations become more horrifying the more one reads, but I’ll stop there. I hope an investigation by New York state authorities (not just Cornell or Tompkins County, who clearly botched things) provides justice, closure, and remedies — not to mention a revision to a vague New York state law on intoxication and sexual consent.

But this column is not to litigate the case. It is to provide some insights as to why it happened at Cornell.

I attended Cornell as an undergraduate from 1983, graduating in 1987. And the Jane Doe Case is not surprising to me. Granted, sexualized violence is a problem across American universities, but I will argue that Cornell is particularly susceptible to it. Not only is it cold, cruel, and cutthroat, but also you feel like you can get away with anything because nobody cares.

Cornell’s Remoteness and Cabin Fever

First, consider this apocryphal story about founder Ezra Cornell: When he announced in 1868 that Cornell’s motto would be, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study,” people apparently said, “You can’t say that. We won’t have the capacity for everyone.” Ezra is said to have replied, “But wait and see where I’m going to put it.”

Compared to the other mostly-coastal Ivy League institutions, Cornell is located far inland in Upstate New York in the small town of Ithaca, four hours in good weather from the nearest major metropolitan city, New York. (The only other Ivy as far inland, Dartmouth, is two hours from Boston.)

For some, remoteness is a boon: Fewer distractions mean more focused research. But for bright, restless, and randy undergraduates getting their first taste of unsupervised freedom, Ithaca becomes a small town with quite a few bored big-city trust-fund kids from Downstate.

Now add in the climate. Upstate New York between November and April has oppressively grey skies, bone-chilling temperatures, and lake-effect snow howling in. Cabin fever is a thing. So much so that the university offers a daily bus service (17 round-trip routes per week, with waiting lists) to and from Manhattan. Want an image of life on campus? Listen to Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock,” an ode to angsty English majors. To many it was an anthem.

Fortunately, I was a “townie,” galvanized by winters in high school at another small town fifty miles north. It was poorer, less cosmopolitan, and the weather worse. Cornell was a step up, and I wanted to find other people who were quirky, intellectually curious, and believed in the value of an education as an end in itself. I did, but even with all that Upstate experience, my first two semesters were simply awful. This was because Cornell students and faculty are pretty cruel to each other.

Cornell is Not a Nice Place

Start with the chip on the shoulder. Cornell is considered a lower-tier Ivy — a place where people grit their teeth about not getting into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, and spend the rest of their lives proving that they are just as good. (For the record, they are.) I’ve attended many Cornell functions and even a summer class reunion since graduation, and even as we approach retirement, people from my Reagan-Era class spend most conversations preening about how successful they are. At the University of Hawai’i I’ve even heard them called “the Cornell Mafia” for reasons unclear.

Cornellians’ insecurity and hypercompetitiveness start in undergrad. Cornell as an institution prioritizes research over teaching, churning out world-class grad students, publications, and professors. But basically undergraduates are treated as an afterthought, a moneymaker. I only realized, after working at teaching-focused colleges and universities, just how unsupported as students we had been.

For example, let’s start with the roller-coaster of first-year introductory classes, where you find yourself adrift in an impersonal sea of hundreds of people. Psych 101, the biggest, famously had 1,600 students each semester. And they pile on the work. In the social sciences, professors routinely assigned a hundred pages or more of reading per week, times four or five classes. One week in and you felt like you were a month behind.

Big impersonal classes might be par for the course for big universities, but Cornell classroom environments went the extra mile to be cutthroat. Professors themselves sometimes encouraged sink-or-swim, survival-of-the-fittest mentalities. I heard about a professor announcing that his intro class was being curved to a C — despite the major requiring a B average. Then he added, “Look to your left. Now look to your right. Those people will probably not be in this class by the end of the semester.”

That assumes the professor actually taught the class. For example, a Nobel Laureate my classmate had made it clear that teaching students was beneath his personal schedule; students were to call his secretary to confirm if he would lecture next class. Even famed astronomer Carl Sagan was infamous for not bothering with undergraduates, sometimes so busy that students sat in a lecture hall and watched him on video. Well worth Cornell’s high tuition.

Then, if you were brave enough to ask a question, classmates made you feel stupid for holding up the lecture by scoffing, or even hissing! (The collective “Cornell Hiss” is a defining experience.) You quickly learned that questions and discussion were reserved for biweekly sections fobbed off on grad-student Teaching Assistants (TAs), who weren’t teachers either. Some were there to scoff at your questions too. Others had difficulty speaking English!

That meant that for the first two years of required foundational courses, at best you were getting detached lectures from a world-famous researcher, at worst winding up with a low grade at the end of the semester because you got a bad TA.

Students soon became sociopathic. I heard about a TA having students submit their weekly problem sets in a box outside their office. That soon stopped because students were taking submissions out of the box and putting in wrong answers. Why? To lower the curve for the class.

Other students turned self-destructive. Security was beefed up around the campus gorges at “prelim” (midterm) time, because class brainiacs effortlessly getting As in high school were suddenly coping with Cs, Ds, and Fs and thinking their lives were ruined. And suicide is more tempting when you see the “easy-out” solution every day walking to and from class.

To be sure, weathering shocks is part of the college experience and growing up. But there are better ways to do it than in the Cornell Crucible. At the teaching universities I work at we tell students about the “hidden curriculum” of college. For example, reading your syllabus in advance to assess how organized or maniacal the professor is. Or knowing what office hours are for. (I only started going to them in Sophomore year, but even then at Cornell you might get five minutes, timed, with a world-class professor bored with intro-level content. Or, again, just get the TA.)

Or going to the writing center for help on getting your papers up to an academic standard. Or asking a librarian how to find books or use a card catalog. (We had no Internet yet.) Or availing ourselves of mental health counseling on campus (although back then psychiatric help was a bit stigmatized, ridiculed as Woody-Allen hypochondria). Or knowing that there is someone called an Ombudsman to mediate any grade disputes with TAs. And of course, knowing where to go or what to do if you are sexually assaulted.

At Cornell the attitude was more, “These are all things you have to live and learn through.”

For example, one of our first Cornell lectures was from legendary Professor L. Pierce Williams, who offered his “Notorious Note-Taking Lecture” every Orientation. It humorously had nothing to do with note-taking. After dwelling on how Cornellians develop quirky research passions (like bombardier beetles), the upshot was that Cornell was an ordeal to attend; it would break you down and hopefully build you back up again.

Still, in all Williams’ humorous asides, students were still not told about the tools to empower themselves. Such as how to take notes. (I didn’t even know there was something called the “Cornell Note Taking System” until I was in my forties!) And, aside from Psych 101’s mid-semester module on the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation, insufficient heed was paid to students’ physical and mental health. Cornell was toughening you up for the real world where you grab what you want.

Sing it with me: “I am a rock. I am an island.”

No Rest from the Ordeal

But the ordeal went beyond the classroom. I got unlucky my first semester, crammed between four walls with a bad roommate in a room meant to be a single, and not in the worn-out lower-campus “U-Halls” that Freshmen got thrown into and spent the year trying to get out of. I was “lucky” enough in the campus lottery to get a dorm in the Collegetown bar district, filled with upperclassmen because they were still legal to drink.

Cornell upperclassmen take a certain delight at watching Freshmen flail. That’s how they were treated, now it’s somebody else’s turn. To ingratiate ourselves we were constantly apologizing for our learning curve. And then the cycle perpetuates next year when we can haze downward.

That’s what happens when Cornell lacks the undergraduate residential colleges at places like Princeton or Harvard, designed to foster tight-knit mini-communities and support each other’s same-age experiences. (Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones were famously roommates at Harvard for all four years.) At Cornell, people are cold by living space design.

And then comes the winter hunker-down, where your pastimes turn hedonistic. Once Upstate’s amazing fall colors blow away around Halloween, the darkness sets in for six months. You find pastimes, but soon realize that there’s not much else to do in winter but eat (Cornell Dining is excellent), go to the library, find friends (or have superficial “Face Time” events), or find a comfortable place to rest your head (not guaranteed; Ithaca has slumlords so predatory we knew them by name).

That’s what makes Cornell fraternities and sororities attractive to some. They are housed in beautiful multistory mansions just off campus, built by actors and producers when Ithaca was the silent-film-era “Hollywood of the East.” Largely left to their own devices, young, isolated, minimally supervised, and often rich and entitled males find themselves steeped in National Lampoon’s “frat-boy humor” and destructive Animal House culture (one tagline of the 1978 movie: “We can do anything we want. We’re college students!”). At many universities they are generally excused for their campus japes and pranks, if not encouraged by a forgiving “boys-will-be-boys” environment. (It’s called “himpathy” by scholars.) At Cornell, stir-crazy students party and pork. It’s been nicknamed “Carnal University” for a reason.

Cornell frats have a long history of excess and violations of the Student Code of Conduct. Delta Kappa Epsilon (a motto I once saw outside one of their parties: “DKE till you drop”) has gotten itself in trouble multiple times for excessive drinking. Phi Kappa Psi, Phi Sigma Kappa, Delta Phi, Theta Tau, and Zeta Psi have dangerous and deadly hazing. According to Cornell’s official website on this, most semesters listed since 2004 have reported multiple violators.

I personally rushed two frats, but soon stopped because the atmosphere felt off. One evening during my first semester, my Freshman neighbor from my Collegetown dorm got carried in after a frat party. Despite being underage, he had blacked out, which the brothers thought was raucous. They dumped him in our dorm’s communal bathroom and left him for dead. Our RA asked us to turn him on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit. By morning, he had covered the entire bathroom floor with so much puke that it was seeping into the carpet next to my room. I soon moved to a different dorm.

Now let’s situate this timeline in the “rape culture” of 1980s mass media. For example, frathouse movie Animal House was so successful that it was one of the biggest box-office hits of the 1970s, listed in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Even Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars, and it spawned a TV spin-off and a chart song. Great. But remember that within all the movie’s hijinks, one of the goals was to get women drunk enough to bypass consent.

This percolated downward. For the high-school set, even “teenager flick” director John Hughes (famous for The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) provided a scene in Sixteen Candles (1984), where the heartthrob character offers Anthony Michael Hall his drunk and semiconscious girlfriend and tells him to “have fun.” Hughes plays it for laughs.

There’s plenty more. Just watch more ‘80s movies. The downside is that if you laugh at or even celebrate this stuff, you create a permission structure for it. When Christine Blasey Ford accused future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape, I fully believe her. Kavanaugh graduated high school the same year I did, and was steeped in the same culture.

There were counteractions to sexualized violence, then as now. “Take Back the Night” rallies raised awareness about sexual assaults on Cornell’s expansive campus grounds. They were taken seriously enough for the university to start a service where campus security officers (always in pairs, and with uniforms and identification) could be called up to walk people home. Good.

But I also heard the broskis dismissing the women protesters as “Cornell dogs” (a play on words for the local canines allowed to roam freely on campus during the 1970s), saying they were too ugly to worry about needing the service. Hilarious, guys. And indicative.

Have the Fundamentals Changed?

That’s what I saw at Cornell 40 years ago. Have things changed? It doesn’t seem so.

Let me excerpt from Cornell philosophy Professor Dr. Kate Manne’s article, “What it feels like at Cornell right now” (New York Magazine, September 29):

On Wednesday night, Cornell will bring the distinguished sociologist Cynthia Miller-Idriss to campus for a prestigious university lecture. The topic? The links between misogyny and violent extremism. But what good is this discussion if we don’t address the problems in our own backyard? What use was it to bring the writer and activist Chanel Miller to campus in the spring just for fraternity brothers to scroll, bored, on their phones as she movingly shared her experience as Emily Doe, the victim of Brock Turner?

“As I wrote at the time, I was floored and dismayed as I sat in the audience with one of my brilliant undergraduates; we heard Miller’s shattering account of being sexually assaulted by Turner behind a dumpster at Stanford University after a fraternity party. Her talk was riveting, and there was so much to learn from it. And yet many of the male students who hailed predominantly from fraternities — 15 percent of each chapter was required to be in attendance — were so tuned out that Miller commented ruefully: ‘You know, this has been my hardest gig, because they didn’t turn down the house lights. I’m not sure how you professors do it, because it’s so hard looking out at this sea of mildly disgruntled faces. I mean, I’m sure you’re all very moved, but …,’ Miller smiled. The implication being, it didn’t seem like it, from her angle.

I usually end my columns with suggestions for improvement. I can’t this time. This field isn’t my expertise.

But I do have my experience at Cornell to offer. I realized that I am capable of powering through hard times to accomplish my goals. It served me well in Japan, where adversity is seen as an inevitable, if not fortifying, part of life.

But also I see how Cornell is not (or should not be seen as) a healthy or even normal college experience. If anything, Cornell taught me how NOT to teach or treat students.

Another world is possible. Other institutions get their students through with less self-generated adversity and asshollery.

But Cornell is simply not that kind of place. It is institutionally hard-wired to be so cold and impersonal that people assume nobody’s really watching, so they can get away with being predatory. And, as usual, this works against women.

It will take experts with degrees to fix this situation. Cornell has no shortage of them. But will admin listen? Or will the next winter just swoop in and make everyone sing “I am a rock, I am an island,” all over again?

Given that 40 years have passed and I’m still not surprised by this lawsuit, I suspect the latter.

Unless there are both big changes to the law and even bigger changes to the cruel Cornell campus culture, there will be more Jane Does.

Trump’s New Press Secretary Is A Hot Mess [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of CNN

Katie Zacharia’s first White House briefing Tuesday, her second day as press secretary, lasted 14 minutes. “I have wanted to work for him for a very long time,” a plainly nervous Zacharia told reporters, then spent most of the appearance reading from a thick briefing book.

She opened by lavishing praise on Trump, noting that we are “in the middle of the midterm blitz” and insisting there is “energy and excitement never seen before in the history of midterms, thanks to President Trump.”

Huh. You have to see it for yourself to really appreciate how stilted she sounded and how awkwardly this landed.

Her script included a boast about a “historic one-day war” against Venezuela, while the war Trump started with Iran nears its ninth month. On the campaign trail, “Attendance is at record highs as enthusiastic, hardworking Americans are lining up and packing arenas,” she declared, though scores of seats at Trump’s recent rallies sat empty.

Sean Spicer would be proud.

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Off script

After her prepared remarks, Zacharia took questions from just three outlets she had picked ahead of time: Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail. But even with this friendly crowd, she stumbled. Fox’s Peter Doocy asked whether the U.S. had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Zacharia told him she’d “have to get back to [him] on that.”

Then the Daily Mail lobbed a softball: how a mother of four would manage a job her predecessor left to spend more time with her two children. She whiffed even more memorably. “The idea of not spending evenings with my kid is, kids are, is completely unacceptable. So my president, excuse me, my husband — that’s a good one — my husband is out here,” Zacharia said.

After the laughter, she ended the briefing, saying Trump was “heading out to Marine One for our historic trip to Alaska, and we can ask him all of the questions out there.” A convenient exit, perhaps, before she did more damage. Trump didn’t exit the White House for nearly an hour and a half.

On the South Lawn, Trump offered his verdict: “I thought she was very good.” But reporters had questions about her credentials. New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh asked Trump where Zacharia, whom he had called an attorney, had passed the bar exam. Trump turned to look at her as she stood behind him: “Which state?” Her answer: “When I moved to China.”

Wait, so… she passed the bar in China? Reporters have been digging into her claim that she’s an attorney, and so far it’s not looking like Zacharia’s background was actually vetted.

Such is the Trump kakistocracy.

The most qualified, bar none?

When Trump announced her appointment on Friday, he called Zacharia “an attorney.” She has presented herself as a lawyer for years. “I’m a lawyer,” she said on Greg Kelly’s show on Oct. 5. Fox News identified her on screen as a lawyer during at least 18 appearances since March 2025.

Popular Information searched bar records in all 50 states and D.C. and found no evidence she has ever been admitted to practice law. The State Bar of California confirmed to CNN it had no licensing record for her: “The State Bar of California has no record of Kate Sharon Zacharia … having been licensed to practice law in California.” When Popular Information asked the White House directly, the press office replied, “Refer you to the President’s TRUTH on Katie.” (Apparently, Trump’s assertion is its own evidence.)

HuffPost asked the same question and received a statement from White House communications director Steven Cheung calling her “uniquely qualified and whip smart.”

Bzzzz, sorry. Didn’t answer the question.

Some practitioners use “lawyer” for anyone with a law degree and reserve “attorney” for those licensed to practice. “All attorneys are lawyers, but not all lawyers are attorneys,” Hannah Brefeld, an associate at Reavis Page Jump, told HuffPost. But that hair-splitting distinction doesn’t resolve the licensing question. Trump called her “an attorney,” and the legal issue goes beyond which label she uses. California law makes it a misdemeanor for anyone without an active license to “[hold] himself or herself out as practicing or entitled to practice law.”

Zacharia’s LinkedIn lists her as full-time “General Counsel” to Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Trump ally Ric Grenell, from January 2024 to March 2025. But Popular Information found that the group’s IRS filings show she never drew a salary; in 2024 she was paid $27,367 in fundraising commissions.

Her China credentials have shifted too. After law school, she worked from 2011 to 2013 as an associate at Zhong Lun, a Beijing firm. On Buck Sexton’s show in 2025, she said, “I was the outside counsel to the IFC and the World Bank.” A June 2026 press release announcing her appointment to a mining company’s advisory board described her work far more narrowly, as “matters involving organizations associated with” the World Bank Group and the IFC.

As for passing the bar in China, only Chinese nationals may sign up for the country’s national legal qualification exam. Sitting for a U.S. bar exam from Beijing was also off the table during her 2011-13 stint: those exams were given only in person in the admitting jurisdiction and California did not introduce remote bar exams until 2020. Foreign lawyers can work at Beijing firms as “foreign legal consultants,” but rules adopted after her stint require at least two years of practice as a lawyer outside China first. Zacharia joined Zhong Lun straight out of law school.

Georgetown Law professor Mark Jia told Popular Information he knew of no one like Zacharia hired as a foreign legal consultant before formal rules arrived in 2017, and said she was likely a paralegal or in a similar role. “It is not accurate for her to call herself a lawyer,” Jia said.

Asked to clarify, Zacharia told Politico’s Dasha Burns, “I practiced international transactional law, with all the appropriate credentials.” She did not say where she passed a bar exam. A White House official offered CNN another explanation: “Katie moved to China with her husband after graduating because of his job at an American private equity firm while she worked on international transaction law.” The official did not respond when asked whether she passed the bar exam.

Pizzagate holocaust on Mars

Zacharia is also a prolific Truth Social poster, with a reported total of 2,696 posts and reposts since March 2022.

And hoo, boy.

On Sept. 4, 2022, shortly after John Podesta was appointed to the Biden White House as a climate adviser, Zacharia posted “Pedo Podesta. #pedoPodesta.” Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a central target of Pizzagate, the baseless conspiracy theory that Democratic elites ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria. (Every accusation is a confession; the rule still holds.)

The Podesta post was part of a pattern. That same day, according to Popular Information, responding to a Variety story about a film in which Timothée Chalamet plays a cannibal, Zacharia wrote, “The radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals. Change my mind.” Three days later she tagged Trump and Sean Hannity, asking why Fox News didn’t do a “feature” on “what a pedophile Podesta is.” On Oct. 17 she pressed Hannity again: “[W]here’s the feature on John Podesta?”

Conspiracy theorist Robert David Steele, who died of COVID-19 in August 2021, was a regular on Alex Jones’s show and had claimed NASA was (checks notes) hiding a colony on Mars populated by kidnapped children. In November 2022, Zacharia mourned him: “He was exposing the pedo rings of the elite cabal. May he Rest In Peace and the work of his hands not have been in vain.”

For all that conspiratorial garbage, I can find nothing from her about Trump repeatedly appearing in the Epstein files.

Zacharia’s conspiracies also extend to medicine. In a 2025 podcast interview, she said, “The abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the extermination camps in Nazi Germany.” In November 2025 she doubled down, tweeting that mifepristone “is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”

Let’s be clear: Mifepristone is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone; Zyklon B was a pesticide comprising pellets infused with hydrogen cyanide. The pill’s only Nazi-era tie is corporate, not chemistry: the French company that developed it in 1980 (35 years after the end of World War II) was majority-owned by German drug giant Hoechst, one of several firms that had merged to form the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, whose subsidiary supplied Zyklon B.

For a self-described corporate attorney, Zacharia doesn’t seem to understand how ownership structures work.

Her views on executive power are equally extreme. In June 2025, after Trump federalized California’s National Guard and sent troops into Los Angeles, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged protesters to remain peaceful. Zacharia replied in a now-deleted tweet,

“The federal government under @realDonaldTrump should take over all of California because clearly you can’t be trusted to do a single thing.”

That same month, responding to Stephen Miller’s claim that sanctuary cities were a criminal conspiracy, she called for suspending habeas corpus in another since-deleted tweet. Habeas corpus allows people to challenge the legality of their detention in court, providing constitutional protection against unlawful detention.

Asked by CNN about her posting history, Zacharia offered this: “I am grateful to serve President Trump as Press Secretary, and I will diligently and effectively amplify his successful agenda.”

Again, bzzzzz, sorry. Didn’t answer the question.

She lured Trump in

Zacharia’s résumé is remarkably thin for such an important job. She spent about six weeks as a Homeland Security spokeswoman before announcing her departure on March 31. She joined Trump Media as a communications adviser in June.

A person familiar with the search told CNN that as of last week, Zacharia was not being considered. The White House had struggled with higher-profile candidates, several of whom had previously criticized Trump.

Then Trump made the call without consulting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles; senior staff, Wiles included, learned of it the night before the announcement.

According to a person familiar with her strategy for landing the job, she checked Trump’s public schedule daily, monitored his Truth Social activity and timed her TV appearances for when she thought he’d be watching. Some days she logged as many as seven hits, rising at 1 a.m. in California for Fox & Friends. Top aide Natalie Harp, known as “the human printer” for the news clippings she feeds the president, made sure clips of Zacharia reached him.

It worked. Trump “had grown somewhat infatuated” with her Fox appearances, sources told CNN. “I’ve known Katie a little bit, but I’ve watched her a lot on television and she does a very good job and she believes in us,” Trump told reporters Saturday. His announcement of her appointment praised her “unblemished record of support” and called her “a devoted fan and member of MAGA!” Two days later he added that Katie “has been with me, in spirit, from the very beginning.”

Legally blunder

Other White House aides were less impressed.

“She should have been doing murder boards for two weeks before going up there,” a Trump adviser told CNN. Those are mock briefings designed to prepare officials for tough questions. “No question we’re all missing Karoline,” another said.

“Literally zero reason to put her out on her second day, unprepared,” one White House official told CNN. Another told MS NOW’s Jake Traylor she needed to “get much better, fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record.” Ouch.

Anthony Scaramucci lasted just 11 days as Trump’s communications director in 2017. About Zacharia, Scaramucci himself tweeted, “the clock is running. Thus far 1/11th of a Scaramucci.”

Time to put up a head of lettuce?

07:00 AM

ICE’s Lies About A Man Officer Ran Over Undone By Footage Captured By Nearby CCTV Camera [Techdirt]

Here’s something ICE pretends has happened:

ICE alleged in a statement that “Parra-Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.”

ABC13 reached out to an ICE spokesperson, who said agents were attempting to arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who was their intended target.

ICE alleges Mendoza-Cervantes entered the United States illegally from Mexico five times and had a final order of removal issued by a judge. The agency also alleges Parra-Hernandez is in the country illegally.

Now, if you’re an absolute prick (or an ICE officer, but I repeat myself), you may think this lie is technically correct. After all, Miguel Parra-Hernandez was struck by the front of an ICE vehicle while running through a parking lot. So, he was running in front of an ICE vehicle when things happened that ICE attributes to nobody (“was struck”).

But the verbal tense means everything here. If all you saw or heard was the ICE statement, you would assume the man carelessly crossed a street or inadvertently stepped out into the path of an already-moving ICE vehicle.

But the proper tense here is “running” and he wasn’t initially running “in front” of an ICE vehicle. The ICE vehicle (and its unnamed driver) had to cross a street and cut through a parking lot to… um… “was struck” Parra-Hernandez.

The rest of the statement is the usual ICE bullshit meant to fool idiots into believing whatever happens to migrants is their own fault, as though being in the country illegally should be met with something that looks a lot like attempted vehicular manslaughter. That the person ICE officers ran over wasn’t even the (purported) target of this arrest attempt makes this statement even stupider than it already is.

If you choose to believe ICE rather than me, feel free to watch the recording yourself. And then smack yourself around a bit for being exactly the rube this administration assumes everyone — even its voting base — to be.

What you’ll see here is Parra-Hernandez exiting a truck stopped on the street and running through a parking lot. Shortly thereafter, you’ll see the ICE vehicle accelerate from across the street and aim the accelerating vehicle directly at the running person as it enters the parking lot. While you won’t actually see the impact (due to another vehicle in the lot that seems to be part of the ICE posse), the end result was an ICE officer running over a fleeing person.

And how it happens looks very deliberate. Even if you give ICE a benefit of doubt it certainly hasn’t earned, the best case scenario is that the driver thought he could safely do some sort of pedestrian PIT maneuver or realized far too late that they wouldn’t be able to slow down in time.

But don’t bounce out the video quite yet. There’s more! An ICE officer enters the abandoned truck and parks it in the parking lot in a spot where it could easily be believed that a fleeing person would have “inadvertently” crossed paths with an ICE pursuit vehicle.

While some might speculate that ICE needed to remove the abandoned vehicle from the nearby street for public safety or whatever, the fact that it was conspicuously parked where it could shore up ICE’s narrative undercuts any assumptions of innocence on ICE’s part.

Furthermore, the vehicle was now part of an active crime scene, which meant ICE should never have moved it at all. Running someone over with a car is a crime, even if it’s accidental. An investigation needed to happen, but ICE compromised the crime scene when it absolutely didn’t need to, even if its intentions (allow traffic to flow) were pure. There were plenty of ICE officers on the scene that could have directed traffic until the locals showed up.

Given all of that, it’s 100% safe to assume the only reason the vehicle was moved was to put the truck in the path of the ICE vehicle after the fact, thus making its “ran out in front of our vehicle” narrative a bit more believable.

While there is now an independent investigation underway, it’s unlikely ICE will cooperate in any way. And it’s probably only a matter of time before the feds step in and sweep this under a rug that cannot possibly have any more room for additional cover-ups. At least the local prosecutor and sheriff’s office seem interested in digging into this, rather than just run interference for Trump’s anti-migrant efforts.

On Saturday, Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin issued a statement regarding the incident, stating in part:

“Time is of the essence in getting the facts, and the public deserves clear, accurate answers.

ICE must cooperate fully with the local investigation. My office supports Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and District Attorney Sean Teare in their ongoing independent investigation, and the Harris County Attorney’s Office stands ready to assist and support these critical efforts. We will continue to monitor developments closely as the facts become clear.

Let’s raise a glass to the undertrained, overly aggressive officers of ICE. They can’t get away with much because they’re too stupid and aggro to realize there are cameras everywhere these days. And even if they can’t be bothered to wear/activate the mandated body cams ICE has been dragging its feet about since late last year, someone or something else is bound to catch them in the act. But until we get a few convictions nailed down, the entire administration will remain the embodiment of Trump’s “I could shoot someone on Fifth Ave. and get away with it” (lightly paraphrased, you MAGA pedants) boast.

05:00 AM

MAGA Built The Censorship Machine It Spent Years Falsely Accusing Democrats Of Building [Techdirt]

This is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in charge. We’ve certainly spent plenty of time talking about Donald Trump’s myriad and non-stop attacks on free speech, and just recently I wrote about how Trump has turned his FCC into the very “ministry of truth” that Fox News falsely claimed Biden had created. But two recent articles show how MAGA has gone all in on doing the two things it most loudly (and falsely) accused the other side of: suppressing free speech on campus, and running a “censorship industrial complex” to coerce private companies into silencing speech it doesn’t like.

On the “free speech on campus” thing, we already know that the Trump admin has disappeared students for their speech. But Adam Serwer, over at The Atlantic, has an incredible story on how MAGA officials in Texas have effectively silenced all kinds of speech across universities in Texas.

At Texas Tech, medical students no longer learn about racial disparities in medical care. Faculty at the university’s medical center in Lubbock were advised to “refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present,” according to a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors. (When asked for comment, a spokesperson said that the university’s “written guidance is publicly available and expressly protects instruction necessary for licensure and patient care.”) According to the same lawsuit, the censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus because “it references Plato’s beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality.”

Professors in the Texas A&M system have had to strip their syllabi too. According to an ACLU lawsuit, last January, Aaron George, a professor at Tarleton State University, was told by administrators to remove A Gay Manifesto, a Stonewall-era LGBTQ-rights pamphlet, and White Flight, a history of urban segregation, from his American-political-history course. After a student complained that a different class the professor taught violated university policy, George was informed by administrators that it would be canceled if he did not make “necessary” (but unspecified) changes. He cut a reference in the course description to the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class was allowed to proceed.

The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship school of the UT system, announced last month that it was eliminating majors in Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies. More than 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily ones relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Consolidating majors isn’t necessarily nefarious, nor is rethinking a core curriculum (a central group of courses from which students must take a certain number to graduate). But these changes are happening, Lauren Gutterman, an American studies professor at UT, told me, “entirely because of the political context.”

Where are all the folks who spent years screaming about “academic freedom” and insisting that colleges were censoring conservative speech? Remember how Bari Weiss and Joe Lonsdale created their “University of Austin” because (they falsely claimed) there were no universities where people could speak freely — and then they fired someone for suggesting that there might be some value in thinking about the importance of diversity.

Hilariously, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill back in 2019 guaranteeing “free speech on campus.” But as Serwer’s piece details, these days there are all sorts of banned topics on Texas college campuses, and basically none of free speech grifters who spent years crying crocodile tears over supposed attacks on “campus speech” seem to have anything to say about it.

Even more ridiculous, Serwer details how Texas Tech is using AI to scan syllabi for wrongthink, with predictably stupid results:

Alan Barenberg, a history professor who specializes in the Soviet Union, was told to remove readings by the Princeton historian Joan Scott and the French philosopher Michel Foucault from his Ph.D.-level historiography class, after they were flagged by the AI—whose assessments he described to me as “completely inaccurate.” It also seemed to have mixed his course up with a different one. The texts were part of a unit of the class related to how treatment of gender in historical research has changed over time. “These things have been taught in classes for a long time,” Barenberg told me. The material is controversial, he said, only “in the eyes of a few people who aren’t even actually on campus.”

“The fact that the system AI doesn’t work, that it makes inaccurate pronouncements—that’s a feature, not a bug. They don’t care if it’s accurate or not. They just want to be able to say, Look, we’re making sure that your children are not being exposed to these horrible ideas from these radical professors,” Barenberg said. “A key part of how authoritarian systems often work is that, through the vagueness and sending up signals and vibes, they’re essentially saying, You know what not to do, but being deliberately vague about it.”

Although the AI is now reviewing only some courses, the university could extend the process to more.  For now, professors are the ones responsible for volunteering whether their own materials may be considered controversial. Many, unsure of what might trigger the bot, told me that they had private conversations with administrators who told them to simply self-censor and remove materials from their courses in advance, so as not to draw the wrath of leadership or lawmakers.

So the “free speech on campus” crowd is now actively censoring speech on campus because a computer program told them it was woke. What could go wrong?

Now, the other story: Anthony Fisher, at MS Now, is pointing out how Donald Trump has absolutely created the “censorship industrial complex” that a bunch of factually challenged “free speech” grifters insisted the Biden admin had built.

MAGA-adjacent journalists, one of whom now runs CBS News, have claimed there was a vast “censorship industrial complex” — run exclusively by Democrats, of course. In 2022, they peddled Elon Musk’s nothingburger “Twitter Files” as the free speech scandal of the century. It was, in fact, a fake controversy driven by politically motivated reasoning and faux-journalistic laziness, and none of them ever had the integrity to admit they were led by the nose by the world’s richest man or that they got the story completely wrong.

But the Trump Censorship Industrial Complex is very real. It is chilling speech in the media, academia and everyday life.

“Over the last two years, there’s been escalating threats against ABC,” Wilkinson said in court Tuesday. She added that the president “has control over vast regulatory powers that he’s willing to use against those he does not like” and “has put in place a chairman at the FCC who understands his marching orders and is not shy about saying so. These are blatant violations of the U.S. Constitution.”

You can follow the links there to get more details, but the most important detail is that when some individuals and two MAGA-run states sued the Biden admin over the supposed “censorship industrial complex,” it was two Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who pointed out how wrong they were.

During oral arguments Kavanaugh practically laughed at the lawyer making these claims, pointing out that government officials merely pressing their side of the story with no associated threats or coercion happens every damn day in the government, and is not even remotely close to censorship. Then Coney Barrett wrote the decision of the court, noting the complete lack of evidence tying any government outreach to actual moderation decisions, and called the lower court judge’s factual findings “clearly erroneous.” That resulted in the case being sent back for lack of standing due to the fact that there was zero evidence presented of any coercive behavior.

So there was no Biden “censorship industrial complex,” but there absolutely is a Trump one. As Fisher notes:

The Trump administration’s juvenile bullying has already restricted The Associated Press’ White House access for more than a year over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And those efforts have now bled over into MAGA Republican-dominated states, like Alabama, where a new law requires “all state and local entities and their employees” to refer to the body of water as the Gulf of America. That means public schools, colleges and even the state’s NPR affiliate have to abide by Trump’s embarrassing attempt at patriotic virtue signaling.

Carr has threatened broadcasters’ licenses for reporting accurately on Trump’s asinine and failing war on Iran. The administration is still in a legal battle with MS NOW, CNN and Politico, as it preposterously claims its ban on the three news organizations is a national security issue. And the administration has been siccing its secret police force on private citizens who’ve written social media posts criticizing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s brutal crackdown on immigrants — and U.S. citizens caught in their lawless dragnets.

And not a peep from those who falsely argued that it existed under Biden. How strange.

Once again, those complaints were all lies and projection. Richard Hanania, the far right commentator who spent years spreading hate and white supremacy online and now pretends to have turned against the very MAGA Trumpism he long supported, at least admitted clearly, back before Elon Musk took over Twitter, that right wingers like himself only scream about “censorship” because they want to do it themselves. This was in response to him getting banned from (again, pre-Elon) Twitter for violating its rules against hateful conduct. At the time, he said:

I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.

But that kind of honesty about how much MAGA authoritarians want to censor people while screaming about non-existent “censorship” from the other side is rare.

Still, it would be nice if everyone stopped pretending that Greg Abbott, Donald Trump, or Elon Musk ever stood for free speech at all. They all whined about free speech solely as a means to make sure that they were in charge of censoring those they disliked.

Daily Deal: The Academy of Game Art Bundle [Techdirt]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You’ll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for $25.

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

Court Filings Show DHS Is Collecting Info On Protesters, Feeding It To Palantir [Techdirt]

More evidence is piling up that contradicts the almost-but-not-quite denials given by administration officials in response to allegations about the DHS compiling a database to keep tabs on protesters.

Just a few months ago, “Immigration Czar” Todd Lyons was trying to turn credible accusations into a nothingburger by deploying a few vague and trite statements that didn’t actually add up to real denial. Protesters were reporting that immigration officers were taking photos of protesters, trying to gather other identifying info from them when accosting them, and then doing truly nasty stuff plainly meant to deter them from engaging in further protests or simply trying to document what ICE officers were doing out in the field.

Protesters and observers who have encountered ICE officers have reported multiple drive-bys by ICE officers at their personal homes, calls from unidentified officers containing veiled threats of punishment, and other forms of intimidation that are reliant on having enough collected data to locate people’s homes, phone numbers, places of business, etc.

If this database of protesters and other ICE opponents doesn’t actually exist, it would seem unlikely that any immigration officer would refer to it. But that has happened and that’s what drew the questions from congressional reps that Lyons then attempted to dance around.

Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.” 

“I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.”

Lyons doubled down on his denials about the database’s existence during a Senate hearing Thursday. When asked if ICE is giving protester information to any other agency, Lyons said: “We do not.” 

In his official response to congressional oversight, Lyons went a bit further… which only made things worse.

If individuals who interact with ICE officers are not arrested or detained, any information collected during those encounters is maintained consistent with applicable law and DHS and ICE policies and is treated as an official government record.

That’s the information-gathering side of things, which clearly states that ICE is collecting information on more than just the people it arrests. And since it’s collecting this information on non-arrestees in the normal course of business, the compilation is undeniably happening. Whether or not this information is segregated from the rest of the stuff ICE gathers is hardly consequential, which makes this statement from Lyons especially meaningless.

DHS is not creating or maintaining a separate, standalone database for individuals encountered that haven’t been arrested or detained.

You don’t have to create a new database. You don’t even have to silo it off. You can just dump this info in with the rest of the stuff and let those with access use this info to track down protesters in order to intimidate them.

A recent court filing in a lawsuit against the DHS brought by anti-ICE protesters in Maine (one that alleges a lot of truly troubling behavior by ICE officers) says ICE is shoving this info into Palantir’s gaping data maw, presumably to expedite future threats, intimidation, and retaliation against First Amendment-protected activity.

An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.

[…]

Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers’ homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027.

The allegations are only going to get more serious the further this case proceeds. The plaintiffs are still operating with limited information, but what little they have already suggests ICE officers routinely engage in retaliatory acts against protesters and observers. From the filing [PDF]:

While the case is still in its preliminary stage, with only limited discovery, the record demonstrates that agents routinely collect images of observers’ faces and license plates, and have created retaliatory investigative records about their protected activity. Agents also threatened multiple observers with being placed on watchlists, and have continued their practice of intimidating drive-bys: in June of this year, an agent led Plaintiff Hilton to the address on her driver’s license and conspicuously stopped in front of the house. Other Mainers have experienced the same. All Plaintiffs have experienced concrete harm and have been chilled in the exercise of their First Amendment rights: Williams and Pantos have stopped all observation activity entirely, and Hilton and Fagan have reduced their protected activity or taken other precautions while doing so.

Whatever guidelines ICE may have in place (if any) to prevent ICE officers from gathering info on protesters and observers clearly isn’t working. The filing mentions multiple times where ICE officers have directly told the people they’re accosting that they would be adding them to the ICM (ICE’s case management system) or, worse, a “domestic terrorism watchlist.”

These are credible allegations, especially since some of these threats from officers have been recorded. The plaintiff who’s allegedly now facing mandatory secondary inspection at all border crossings for the next six months lends a lot of credence to claims about being added to terrorism watchlists.

DHS’s denial is hardly worth noting.

A spokesperson for DHS calls the case “meritless” and says that “the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

All this says is that the DHS doesn’t “run” the “domestic terrorists” database. While that is true (the Terrorist Screening Dataset is overseen by the DOJ and “run” by the FBI), the Terrorist Screening Center is a multi-agency operation (including the DHS and its components) that “manages” (direct quote here) its operations. Furthermore, the DHS and its components are designated “nominators,” which means exactly what’s being denied by DHS spokespeople: officers do have the power to put people on “terrorist watchlists.”

Whether or not this lawsuit leads to more discovery, there’s no reason to give the DHS the benefit of a doubt while waiting for more information to roll in. It has already shown it’s willing to violate rights, ignore court orders, and pretend existing immigration laws don’t actually say what they say. The mass deportation machinery deployed by the Trump administration is in a state of constant acceleration. Anything that might reduce a bit of the friction — even if it’s clearly unconstitutional acts of intimidation — will be deployed until a court tells it to stop… and then for awhile after that, if recent history is any indication. And it’s all being aided by a company that’s collecting tens of millions of dollars to, basically, help ICE agents connect these dots faster.

04:00 AM

My SNA VM column 79: “Cornell University and Rape Culture” (Oct 14, 2026), on why the recent lawsuit alleging an under-investigated gang rape is completely within Cornell’s history and character. I know because I graduated from there. [debito.org]

Intro: A media storm in recent weeks has been an alleged rape case at Cornell University, where a lawsuit by “Jane Doe” claims that two years ago her intoxicated group sex at a frat house turned into a drug-incapacitated assault by seven men, including an invitation to more assaulters through a group chat. The allegations become more horrifying the more one reads, but I’ll stop there.  I hope an investigation by New York State authorities (not just Cornell or Tompkins County, who clearly botched things) provides justice, closure, and remedies — not to mention a revision to a vague New York State law on intoxication and sexual consent. But this column is not to litigate the case.  It is to provide some insights as to why it happened at Cornell. I attended Cornell as an undergraduate from 1983, graduating in 1987.  And the Jane Doe Case is not surprising to me.  Granted, sexualized violence is a problem across American universities, but I will argue that Cornell is particularly susceptible to it.  Not only is it cold, cruel, and cutthroat, but also you feel like you can get away with anything because nobody cares...

02:00 AM

Publishers Seek $19.5m From Pirate Library WeLib, Recycle Anna’s Archive Claims [TorrentFreak]

welib logoLast year, Anna’s Archive warned its users about WeLib, a “new entrant” in the shadow library ecosystem.

The site appeared to have mirrored most of Anna’s collection and used a fork of its codebase. Since WeLib wasn’t sharing new collections or code improvements in return, Anna’s Archive cautioned prospective users.

“We recommend not using them,” the team wrote at the time.

In June, major book publishers came to a similar conclusion, but for different reasons. They filed a lawsuit against WeLib in New York federal court, alleging that the site “was created after its operators copied the source code and most of the contents of” Anna’s Archive.

WeLib

welib website

Despite these and other copyright infringement allegations, WeLib’s anonymous operators never responded to the lawsuit. This prompted the publishers to move forward and the court clerk entered a default in August, opening the door to a final judgment request.

$19.5 Million, Again

On Monday, the publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, asked U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero to issue a default judgment against WeLib and its unnamed operators.

“Defendant WeLib is a pirate site whose sole business is the distribution of protected content in violation of the rights of Plaintiffs and other copyright owners,” their brief reads.

The publishers request the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 130 works listed in the complaint, ten per publisher. That adds up to $19.5 million, the same amount Judge Jed Rakoff awarded in the Anna’s Archive case.

Damages calculation

Plaintiff Amount
Apress Media, LLC $1,500,000
Cengage Learning, Inc. $1,500,000
Elsevier Inc. $1,500,000
Hachette Book Group, Inc. $1,500,000
HarperCollins Publishers LLC $1,500,000
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. $1,500,000
Macmillan Learning $1,500,000
Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC $1,500,000
McGraw Hill LLC $1,500,000
Pearson Education, Inc. $1,500,000
Penguin Random House LLC $1,500,000
Simon and Schuster, LLC $1,500,000
Taylor & Francis Group LLC $1,500,000
Total: $19,500,000

The brief also puts a spotlight on WeLib’s revenue model. The site can be used for free, but it asks users for “donations” of up to $90 a month. According to the publishers, these are simply payments for faster downloads.

In addition to the damages, the publishers want a permanent injunction. This would require domain registries and registrars to disable welib.org, welib.st, and welib-public.org, and to block their transfer to anyone other than the publishers. Hosting providers would have to stop serving the sites.

Named intermediaries

intermediaries

The injunction would apply to all applicable intermediaries, but the proposed order names five specifically: Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Tucows, and two Njalla entities. That’s a much shorter list than the Anna’s Archive judgment, which named more than twenty.

Borrowed From Anna’s Archive

It is not unusual that arguments from a similar case are reused and that also applies here. Large parts of the WeLib brief mirror the one that law firm Oppenheim + Zebrak filed against Anna’s Archive in May, on behalf of the same publishers.

However, not everything fits. According to the brief, WeLib diverts revenue from the publishers “at a scale made worse by their use of the viral BitTorrent protocol.”

We haven’t seen any evidence that WeLib uses BitTorrent, and the WeLib complaint doesn’t mention it either. Instead, the cited paragraphs discuss various harms including lost sales and harm to the market for AI training data.

The same sentence appears, word for word, in the brief against Anna’s Archive. There, it was backed up by the complaint, which described how Anna’s Archive offers torrent files for bulk downloads on a dedicated “Torrents” page.

Same sentence, different site

welib vs anna

WeLib’s own complaint mentions another download mechanism. It describes how the site serves files directly from its servers, through “slow” and paid “fast” downloads.

The brief also mentions that WeLib’s infringement continued “despite this and several other cases against them.” That entire paragraph comes straight from the Anna’s Archive brief. While Anna’s Archive was sued before, we are not aware of any other lawsuits against WeLib’s operators.

Even a typo and a garbled sentence with a double negative were copied. Both briefs mention what happens if the court “is satified” that the default standards are met, and both argue that the defendants “cannot establish that they have not presented any meritorious defenses.”

A Paper Victory?

It’s now up to Judge Marrero to decide on the request. Whatever the outcome, the publishers are unlikely to collect much, if anything, as WeLib’s operators remain anonymous.

Anna’s Archive lost several domains to an earlier injunction obtained by music companies. However, it remains online through .gl, .pk, and .gd domains, which are tied to registries and registrars outside the United States.

If Anna’s Archive is any indication, the injunction may cost WeLib some of its domains. However, that is no guarantee that the site will shut down permanently.

—

A copy of the publishers’ memorandum in support of the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf). The proposed default judgment and the statement of damages can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). The publishers’ earlier brief against Anna’s Archive is available here (pdf).

We reached out to Oppenheim + Zebrak for comment on the BitTorrent claim, but they did not respond before publication.

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

Wednesday 2026-10-14

11:00 PM

China Still Has Easy Access To TikTok Despite Trump ‘Fixes’ [Techdirt]

Remember how the Trump administration — and folks like Brendan Carr — spent four straight years fear-mongering about China’s purported control over TikTok and its owner, ByteDance? And remember how the Trump administration (with incompetent Democratic lawmaker help) “fixed” the problem by offloading Tiktok to Trump’s billionaire buddies while still maintaining co-ownership with the Chinese?

It was basically a five-year xenophobic fear campaign designed to steal the revenues of a top short-form video company that U.S. giants like Meta were struggling to compete with. And it was propped up by endless empty lip service to propaganda, consumer privacy, and national security; in turn propped up by a tech press that struggled to explain how silly and corruption-fueled it all was.

After the Trump deal, U.S. operations of TikTok now had three “managing investors” that collectively owned 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation (Larry Ellison), Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent is owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent is “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 20 percent was retained by ByteDance.

The Trump administration offloaded most of TikTok’s infrastructure to Oracle — a company with a long list of privacy violations — so they could pretend they “fixed privacy issues” with the app. They also set up a bunch of “safeguards” designed to pretend they’d cut off Chinese influence, without actually doing so.

Unsurprisingly, a deep dive by Politico found that little has actually changed in terms of Chinese access to some of the core components of the app and user data. And there’s little to no indication the Trump administration is doing anything to ensure adherence to the deal. Employees are still using AI and internal chat systems built by ByteDance, which would likely make Chinese data collection trivial:

“Employees at the new company, officially named TikTok USDS Joint Venture, still work regularly with the global TikTok organization, according to current and former employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, and internal communications reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. That includes coordinating over new features, sharing information about dangerous trends on the app and collaborating over policies. U.S. employees also still use an internal chat system called Lark, which was built by TikTok’s former Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to communicate and share information with both their U.S. and global counterparts.”

Great stuff. There are other instances of largely performative attempts to keep Chinese and U.S. TikTok employees separated, but there’s no real indication this is working or being overseen by anybody competent in the U.S. government:

“At TikTok office buildings, U.S. employees can go to TikTok global offices on different floors but are required to get a chaperone, an employee said, and are prohibited from bringing laptops. Prior to the deal, U.S. employees could mostly move freely between the U.S. and global offices.”

It’s equally murky as to whether “the algorithm” (a subject of endless debate during the fearmongering campaign) is still maintained and updated by ByteDance engineers.

Again, there’s no real indication that this was ever about anything but Trump and his allies hijacking the revenues of a profitable short-form video company under the pretense of national security. You could also easily argue that under Byetance ownership the company was at least incentivized to behave to remain in the U.S.; guys like Larry Ellison — with a long history of ethical and privacy “lapses” — really has no worries that the government will ever hold him accountable for much of anything.

As we noted early on, the Chinese really don’t need TikTok to spy on Americans or funnel propaganda to the electorate. Because we’re too corrupt to regulate data brokers or pass a privacy law, most U.S. consumer data is openly accessible via the public market to anybody — including Chinese intelligence.

The Trump administration is still facing a lawsuit alleging the deal is illegal. And Democrats continue to look positively feckless and ignorant for helping the Trump administration hijack an app (popular with young voters) during a presidential election season where the youth vote mattered more than ever.

07:00 PM

New Release: Tails 7.15 [Tor Project blog]

Changes and updates

  • Update Tor Browser to 15.0.25.

  • Update the Tor client to 0.4.9.14.

  • Update some firmware packages. This improves support for newer hardware: graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on.

Get Tails 7.15

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your Persistent Storage

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 7.0 or later to 7.15.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails 7.15 on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions.

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 7.15 directly:

Support and feedback

For support and feedback, visit the Support section on the Tails website.

Things people don’t say [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Marketers and politicians too.

We don’t say them because it’s assumed. And because we’re afraid.

“I might be wrong.”

“I’m just guessing”

“This might be selfishly motivated.”

“It could be that I’m hallucinating.”

“I heard this somewhere but I don’t know firsthand that it’s true.”

“I know I sound certain, but I’m not.”

When an AI doesn’t say these things, we’re frustrated when they turn out to be the case. Because our default in interactions with machines is that they don’t dissemble, confuse or mislead.

Perhaps we should print these caveats out and read them before we read an ad, believe a scammy text or interact with an LLM.

Trust is the building block of cultures that matter. We have long manipulated trust for commercial and political ends, and now machines are following our lead.

      

04:00 PM

In 1991, Federal Panel Blasts Vaccine Unavailability That Led To A Measles Epidemic [Techdirt]

The apocryphal quote supposedly from Mark Twain is one of my favorites: “History does not repeat, but it does often rhyme.” Now, there is no evidence that Twain ever actually authored these words, but it’s incredible how true they tend to be regardless. And when it comes to the current measles outbreak that is ravaging the country, and the Northeast in particular, they seem incredibly apropos.

We’re suffering this outbreak for many reasons: the anti-vaxxer agenda being rendered directly into the federal government, the distrust in medical professionals and science that has been purposefully fostered by bad actors, and a general apathy for vaccinations. But if you want to know why it’s gotten worse and not better, the answer to that is singular: inaction by the federal government.

And if you go back to 1991, the last time the country suffered a measles epidemic this significant, you can read news stories that don’t exactly mirror our current situation, but they do rhyme.

A breakdown in the vaccination system caused the nation’s worst measles epidemic in decades, and more epidemics may occur unless the system is changed, a Federal advisory panel said today.

The panel, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, said in a report, “The principal cause for the epidemic is failure to deliver vaccine to vulnerable preschool children on schedule.” It said the health care system created “barriers to obtaining immunization and fails to take advantage of many opportunities to provide vaccines to children.”

It’s a similar story today, of course. Though, unlike today, I don’t have any reason to believe that governmental failures in 1991 that led to the measles epidemic at the time were purposeful. In fact, federal officials at the time responded to this report not by lambasting state officials with conspiracy theories and political attacks, but by acknowledging the report’s accuracy and promising to do better. There’s no indication that the federal government at the time attempted to hide cases and deaths from measles, unlike the current administration under RFK Jr.

No, this was federal advisors and federal officials working off the same set of facts and combining their efforts to make things better. And better things actually got. This was, by the way, a time when the Executive Branch was also Republican.

Dr. Bart, director of the National Vaccine Program Office of the Department of Health and Human Services, said the Bush Administration had been waiting for the report and would quickly plan to follow as many of the panel’s recommendations as possible.

“We have a huge increases and deaths due to measles for the first time in two decades,” he said. “We also think there is some acute deterioration of the health care system, and we fear that this may be a warning flag for other problems to come.”

Dr. Henderson said that immunization “is the simplest procedure in the entire medical armamentarium, and is by far the most cost effective of all the medical interventions we have.” If we cannot provide the simplest and most cost effective thing we have, he said, “what does that say about our health system? It is clear that we have a problem.”

Well, then at present we have a problem. A bigger one, actually. The story at present isn’t one of government bureaucracy failing simply because big governmental systems are slow and lethargic generally. In this case, the causes of vaccine hesitancy and under-vaccination is the plan. It’s what the leadership of our health agencies are striving for.

There is no argument otherwise. Kennedy has said the government is doing a great job on the measles question, even as thousands are infected and people are dying. We’ll get into this more separately, but Kennedy also has, in the middle of this outbreak, created a federal program to financially incentivize the reporting of vaccine injuries.

If disease is the enemy of Americans, then Kennedy is a traitor. He’s giving aid and comfort to that enemy, plain and simple. It’s why the measles outbreak is getting worse, not better. It’s why other health conditions are on the rise, such as pertussis and mumps.

What is happening right now is insane. What makes it more insane is that the lessons we learned from the last time we engaged with this enemy are barely 35 years old. Universe willing, November will pave the way for Congress to actually do something about it all.

10:00 AM

The Metric Is Not The Mission: The End Of The Universal Internet [Techdirt]

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.

The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.

Part VII: The End of the Universal Internet
Part VI examined the limits of what platforms can know about us. This part widens the lens again, looking at what happens when the supposedly universal internet collides with geopolitics, national interests and the return of sovereignty.

Every age constructs its own myths. The Industrial Revolution gave us the myth of endless progress: the conviction that scientific discovery and economic growth would move steadily, almost mechanically, towards a more prosperous future. The twentieth century inherited the myth of globalization, imagining that the increasing movement of goods, capital, and people would gradually soften political boundaries and render old rivalries economically irrational. The internet age produced its own variation on the same theme. Technology, we were told, would become the first truly global language. Networks would succeed where diplomacy often failed. Code would travel more easily than ideology. Connectivity would create constituencies for cooperation that governments could neither manufacture nor easily disrupt.

Silicon Valley became the principal narrator of that story. Its ambitions were never presented as merely commercial. They were civilizational. Google did not simply index websites; it sought to organize the world’s information. Facebook did not describe itself as a social network so much as an instrument for making the world “more open and connected.” The rhetoric mattered because it invited users to think of these companies not as corporations competing for market share but as custodians of a new global infrastructure. They increasingly resembled institutions whose legitimacy derived from serving humanity rather than shareholders alone. And, for a remarkably long time, much of the world accepted that proposition.

The claim was not entirely unreasonable. The internet had always been unusual in the way it blurred geography. An email ignored borders. A website became available almost everywhere simultaneously. Engineers from countries with profoundly different political systems collaborated through common technical standards. Open-source software demonstrated that voluntary cooperation across cultures could produce systems of astonishing sophistication. The internet did not abolish the nation-state, but it often operated according to a logic that transcended it.

Many of the major technology companies genuinely believed they were extending that tradition. Their work forces became international and they acquired global user communities. Product launches were increasingly discussed as worldwide events rather than national ones. Executives frequently spoke in the language of humanity rather than citizenship, presenting their platforms as shared spaces that belonged, in some broader cultural sense, to everyone who used them. The distinction between an American company and a global institution became deliberately blurred. History, however, has a way of reintroducing distinctions that periods of optimism encourage us to overlook.

The return of geopolitics over the past decade has been one of the defining developments of the twenty-first century. Strategic competition between major powers has expanded far beyond military capability to encompass semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, undersea cables, quantum research and digital infrastructure. Technologies that were once understood primarily as commercial products have become matters of national security. Supply chains are scrutinized through strategic rather than economic lenses. Investment decisions increasingly reflect geopolitical calculations. Even the language has changed. Governments now speak of technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and digital resilience with a confidence that would have seemed unusual only a decade ago.

The internet did not escape this transformation. For the technology companies themselves, this represented an unusually difficult moment. They had spent decades cultivating identities that rested upon universality. Their products connected families, businesses, and communities across political boundaries. Their legitimacy depended, at least in part, upon the perception that they served users rather than governments. Yet the world around them increasingly demanded choices that universal institutions rarely have the luxury of making.

Those choices did not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes they appeared in export controls on advanced semiconductors. Sometimes in legal obligations to remove applications from national app stores. Sometimes in debates over encryption, data localization, or cloud infrastructure. Sometimes in public appearances alongside political leaders announcing industrial strategies designed explicitly to strengthen national technological advantage. Each individual decision could be justified on pragmatic grounds. Taken together, however, they revealed that the age of the post-national technology company had come to an end.

This is not a moral criticism. No corporation exists outside the legal and political framework of the state in which it is incorporated. Governments possess legitimate security interests. Companies have legal obligations. In periods of geopolitical stability, these realities often remain comfortably in the background; during periods of strategic competition though, they become impossible to ignore. What changed was not simply the relationship between governments and technology companies. It was the relationship between technology companies and the stories they had long told about themselves.

The promise of universality became increasingly difficult to sustain once digital infrastructure itself became a strategic asset. A platform cannot simultaneously present itself as belonging equally to everyone while operating within a world that increasingly expects technological capability to serve national interests. The contradiction is not necessarily the fault of the companies involved; it is a consequence of history changing around them.

There is a revealing parallel with another great infrastructure of modernity. For much of the twentieth century, commercial aviation cultivated an image of cosmopolitanism. Air travel compressed distance, encouraged cultural exchange, and embodied the optimism of an increasingly interconnected world. Yet no one seriously imagined that airlines existed independently of states. Routes reflected diplomacy. Airspace reflected sovereignty. Aircraft manufacturing reflected industrial strategy. The industry remained deeply international while never ceasing to be profoundly geopolitical.

Digital platforms are discovering a similar reality. The internet encouraged us to believe that information could flow independently of power. For a time, perhaps it did. Today, information infrastructure has become power. Artificial intelligence depends upon computational capacity. Computational capacity depends upon semiconductor supply chains. Cloud services depend upon data centers, energy grids and legal jurisdictions. Networks remain global, but they are no longer politically weightless.

This shift has consequences that extend well beyond geopolitics. For users around the world, one of the most striking aspects of the early internet was the feeling that participation itself conferred a kind of equality. A student in Addis Ababa, an entrepreneur in Mexico City, and a researcher in Helsinki entered the same digital spaces and, at least in principle, encountered the same opportunities to create, publish, and collaborate. The internet’s openness did not eliminate global inequalities, but it fostered the belief that the network itself belonged to no single political center.

That belief has become harder to sustain. Increasingly, the largest digital platforms appear not simply as global companies headquartered in the United States, but as organizations whose strategic interests inevitably intersect with those of their home state. Again, this is not unusual in historical terms. It is precisely how most industries have always functioned. The novelty lies elsewhere. For perhaps the first time since the commercial internet emerged, the mythology of technological universalism has given way to the more familiar realities of geography, sovereignty, and power.

The consequences are likely to endure long after today’s geopolitical tensions have evolved into new forms. Once users begin to see platforms not as neutral environments but as actors embedded within particular political and economic systems, trust acquires a different character. Questions that once appeared purely technical become constitutional. Who governs digital space? Whose values shape its rules? Whose interests ultimately prevail when cooperation gives way to strategic competition?

These are not questions that engineers alone can answer. Nor, for that matter, are they questions that any platform can resolve through better product design. They belong to a different historical moment altogether.

The great irony is that the internet has arrived at precisely the moment when the world is rediscovering the enduring importance of political boundaries. The dream that networks might quietly dissolve geopolitics has not survived contact with the twenty-first century. It is not the internet that failed but the assumption that technology could ever remain separate from history.

Konstantinos Komaitis, PhD, is a veteran of developing and analysing Internet policy to ensure an open and global Internet.

08:00 AM

Daily Deal: The Complete CompTIA And IT Exam Training Bundle [Techdirt]

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