News

Tuesday 2026-10-20

04:00 AM

Canadian YouTuber Visited By Cops After Building Mock Flock To Track Cop Cars [Techdirt]

If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn’t be cops. By that I mean that there’s little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don’t have that, this is the sort of thing that happens.

Canadian YouTuber Anthony Sistilli cobbled together a very rudimentary approximation of Flock’s ALPR tech, using off-the-shelf hardware and his personal laptop. A pinch of AI was added to the mix to “train” the camera to focus on probable cop cars, rather than every car that passed by.

He uploaded a couple of shorts to YouTube briefly explaining what he was using and what he was attempting to do. (Here and here.) The recordings honestly explained the limitations of the tech Sistilli was using, while still demonstrating that it did work, albeit in an extremely limited fashion.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the local PD (the Peel Regional Police of Ontario, Canada) decided this simply could not pass without comment. And that would be the sort of “comment” that involved officers arriving at Sistilli’s house in the apparent hopes of intimidating him into abandoning this project.

After Sistilli produced two short-form videos about his project for his 140,000 subscribers, officers from the Peel Regional Police in Ontario showed up at his home on Sept. 20. Sistilli said the visit lasted roughly 30 minutes, with officers focusing on his intentions and whether he planned to build a map tracking police movements.

“Their concern was that mapping police movements could put officers at risk and help people committing crimes,” Sistilli said. “They also made the case that their own cameras and ALPR technology weren’t as concerning as I was suggesting. My impression was that they weren’t familiar with many of the controversies or examples of misuse in the United States.”

This interaction was also posted to Sistilli’s channel. The entire conversation — which should really be considered a professional embarrassment for Peel Regional Police — can be viewed below (albeit interspersed with commentary and interviews):

While it’s true that Canada as a whole hasn’t experienced the perpetual abuse of ALPR cameras by law enforcement officers that we have in the US, that doesn’t excuse the officers’ inability (or refusal) to recognize the irony attendant in claiming persistent surveillance “puts officers at risk” while obtusely refusing to recognize that it creates the same risks for citizens. In fact, the risk posed to citizens is inherently more dangerous than the risk posed to officers due to the imbalance of power.

When a cop misuses cameras, they do so from behind a web of opacity with almost zero accountability. When a single person aims cameras at cop cars — one that can’t handle 24/7 surveillance and operates (very clunkily) only when physically manipulated by the camera operator — there’s nothing approaching the round-the-clock from all over the city surveillance cops insist keep us safer, but somehow would be harmful if the ALPRs decided to focus on cop cars instead.

Sistilli’s experiment (and unwanted interaction with police officers) makes a good point. And because it’s a good point, it was almost entirely lost on the officers who decided this somehow posed a risk to them.

“I never intended to create a giant network mapping every police officer, and I still don’t,” Sistilli told Straight Arrow. “I wanted to see whether it was feasible and use the irony to illustrate a point. Sometimes it’s easier to show people what this kind of surveillance means by turning it around than by simply explaining what companies like Flock are doing.”

Even if the cops are unable (or simply unwilling) to comprehend this point, the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve watched these videos certainly do. Cops need to learn they can’t simply “because we said so” their way through interactions like these — ones they initiate but immediately make clear they’re not actually interested in an honest conversation.

12:00 AM

Two commuting hacks [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

Just about everyone commutes to work, by car or by public transit. And just about everyone carries a smart phone.

All organizations have a communications problem, and it gets worse as they grow. Which issues are we facing today? Who else is on the team? What’s changed in the environment, and what do we need to get in sync on?

Consider starting an internal podcast. Just fifteen or twenty minutes a day. The host interviews team members, informs on important issues or simply helps people see the big picture. When everyone on the team listens to the same podcast each morning, cohesion and focus improve.

A podcast with 25 of the right listeners might be exactly the right size.

The second hack: I’m amazed at how many people on the train are mindlessly swiping through one social media platform or another. Judging by their facial expressions, they’re not enjoying it much.

Instead, we can focus our time and energy on learning. Six months of commuting can easily cover an advanced college course in something that interests us. And using Claude as a Socratic tutor can be a breakthrough. If you’re driving, use voice mode. Ask it to patiently engage you, one conversation at a time, in a journey to learn something difficult. How transistors work. Why the Roman Empire fell. The origin of species.

Day by day, your commute gets better and you get smarter.

      

Whoops: Grok Bot Spills Tech CEO’s Bank Data In Public Slack [Techdirt]

Shane Mac, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, decided to connect Grok Bot to his personal bank account. Like many people who attach undercooked big tech agentic AI agents to their personal accounts without reading the instructions (see: Muse’s rough last few weeks), it didn’t go well.

Mac soon found that Grok not only posted his financial information and bank balances to his company’s Slack channel, the Grok Bot leaked the information while posing as Mac. Mac quickly headed over to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website to share his recent learning experience:

Grok Bot agents are designed to “sign in and work across apps, tools, and websites, including platforms with no clean API or MCP, and come back with the work finished,” according to SpaceXAI.

In Mac’s case, he states the Grok Bot he used to oversee his finances was read-only and didn’t have access to Slack, but another Grok Bot he was using did — so the software “collaborated” to “help.” Mac didn’t understand that other Grok Bots on the same machine have different permissions. Grok Bot didn’t “understand” that it wasn’t being very helpful.

This is, so we’re clear, not software gaining sentence and “going rogue.” This is software that isn’t ready for prime time, hasn’t been fully cooked, and is operating in a country that’s too corrupt to pass meaningful modern privacy laws or to regulate data brokers. Combined with people rushing to integrate the technology into sensitive accounts without really understanding how it works (or the interactions not being made clear by the company itself due to bad instructions or no transparency).

Keep in mind this is a tech CEO and software developer. You can probably imagine how many ordinary people won’t really understand what they’re signing up for — especially in the way that similar products from Meta (Muse) and OpenAI (Dots) are designed to appear harmlessly cute — and in the way that most major tech companies are overstating these chatbots’ level of fit, finish, and “awareness.”

Elon Musk had previously stated that the company would compensate people who suffer financial losses due to Grok Bot, but there’s no real reason to believe that’s actually true:

The dramatic expansion of tech industry access to sensitive systems and accounts in a surveillance-profit-obsessed country without meaningful corporate oversight, privacy standards, or operational consumer protection regulators (thanks in large part to the same companies selling you AI assistants) is going to cause no limit of chaos and headaches in 2027 and beyond.

This particular orchestra of dysfunction is just getting warmed up, and neither the tech industry nor the federal government will be there to help people who can’t afford to make these kinds of mistakes.

Monday 2026-10-19

06:00 PM

Pluralistic: The technopolitics of ad-tech (19 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • The technopolitics of ad-tech: Spying is good for tech, context is good for publishers.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: PNH x Mike Ford; Singapore v Far East Economic Review; Publishing v bestsellers; Architecture v security; Vista v everyone; Free Bieber; Belarus sells the sugar bowls; OCCUPY GEORGE; Grey type sucks; Spinal Tap v studio math; Terry Pratchett x $10t coin; Boy Scouts x copyright maximialism; Canadian Tories x DRM; Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan; ACLu v secret laws; Fined for suing the cops who shot you; Chicago PD steals millions for cop toys; Turing's Law; Copyleft v Vizio; Trump's killswitch.
  • Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, 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 halftoned, yellowing scan of a 1940s page of newspaper ads. Emerging from the ads is a halftoned fist clad in spiked brass kuckles.

The technopolitics of ad-tech (permalink)

"Technopolitics" are the politics embedded in technology. The Ur-text of technopolitics is "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by the rock critic turned scholar Langdon Winner:

https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~beki/cs4001/Winner.pdf

With "Do Artifacts," Winner demands that we move beyond the idea of technologies having "intended consequences" and "unintended consequences" and towards a political economy of tech. In service to this, he divides the politics of artifacts into three categories:

I. Artifacts that have politics embedded in them by their creators, like Robert Moses's infamous bridges over the Long Island parkways. According to Moses biographer Robert Caro, Moses deliberately specified that these bridges must be too low for a city bus to pass under, in a bid to block Black people from traveling from New York City to the beaches he'd developed on Long Island.

Today those bridges are more than a century old, and they are still too low for city buses to pass under them, and this continues to mean that people who don't own private vehicles find it more difficult to get to the beach, and as it's still the case that race is a predictor of low incomes, those are still racist bridges.

II. Artifacts whose politics are accidental but unavoidable. Winner cites a kind of tomato harvester that vastly improved the efficiency of tomato pickers. These harvesters became very popular, which allowed tomato farmers to lay off large numbers of agricultural workers, and also allowed them to price the mechanically harvested tomatoes so cheaply that they crowded out other kinds of tomatoes.

Because these machines created a large pool of unemployed workers, they shifted power from labor to capital, and because these picking machines were too rough for all but the hardest varietals of tomato, they changed the flavor profile of tomatoes in America for the worse, towards a bland, tough tomato.

These picking machines were not designed to make workers poorer, nor were they designed to make tomatoes taste worse, but because of their technical characteristics, this was the unavoidable outcome, the inextricable politics of these machines.

III. Artifacts whose politics are intrinsic to their design. Here, Winner contrasts solar panels with nuclear reactors. Solar panels may require highly centralized industrial systems to produce, but once they are in the field, solar panels are compatible with looser, less coordinated political arrangements. A world of small anarchist communes is fully compatible with solar energy.

Contrast this with nuclear reactors: the prudent ongoing operation of a reactor requires a highly centralized state that is capable of fielding reliable, trustworthy independent inspectors. This state must also be capable of exercising the coercive power to shut down badly maintained or incompetently operated reactors.

The politics of nukes are the politics of a centralized, powerful state; the politics of solar are less determined. Solar is compatible with a wide variety of political systems, including (but not limited to) weak, decentralized states.

(For a further exploration of "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" I highly recommend Ginger Coons' reading guide:)

https://www.not-so-obvious.net/reading-do-artifacts-have-politics/

I really like Winner's framework for exploring technopolitics, but I have my own gloss on it. Winner's framework doesn't explicitly contemplate the idea of technological countermeasures. For example, what if someone were to design a city bus that was low enough to fit under Robert Moses's bridges? At that point, they'd cease to be "racist bridges," and merely become "bridges built by a racist":

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-technopolitics/

Which brings me to the technopolitics of ad-tech. Lots of people think that advertising is "the original sin of the internet," setting in motion the surveillance dystopia that is closing in on us from all sides today:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/mercenary-spyware/#discover-tech

I think this is wrong. I think that finding ways to communicate ideas and pitches to the general public is fine. Without some channel for reaching people with ideas and propositions they may not be familiar with, it would be infinitely harder to reach people for political causes. It would also be harder for new books, movies and music to find new audiences. It would be much harder to get people out to your independent craft fair, your zine show, or your No Kings march.

For me, the internet's original sin isn't advertising, it's surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner's framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:

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

It wasn't the internet's technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws. The last consumer privacy law we got in America was a bill that made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

(As I type these words, the Supreme Court is poised to eliminate even that dried-up old crumb of privacy protection:)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/10/supreme-court-privacy-rights-case-bork-kavanaugh.html

The widespread phenomenon of ad-tech companies spying on us is the result of the decision to allow them to do so. That decision has had innumerable negative downstream effects, such as skyrocketing "surveillance prices":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

And collapsing "surveillance wages":

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

It's created vast surveillance databases that are critical to Trump's racist pogroms, providing dossiers and precise location data on the people ICE kidnaps to Salvadoran slave-labor camps:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/10/ice-tech/#foreseeable-outcomes

Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois

These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability.

Any time we forget this, we let spying tech bosses off the hook. After all, if advertising demands surveillance, then tech bosses are just the avatars of the great forces of history, prisoners of the imperative to spy in order to advertise. By remembering that surveillance advertising is a choice, we put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the guillotineable oligarchs who made that choice, and amassed spectacular fortunes thereby.

Surveillance is political, but surveillance advertising has its own distinct technopolitics, and to understand those technopolitics, we must contrast them with the technopolitics of contextual advertising. Up until a decade or two ago, contextual advertising was simply called "advertising." Contextual advertising is the practice of running refrigerator ads next to articles on cooking and kitchen remodeling; ads for roadside restaurants on highway billboards; ads for Disney vacations in parenting magazines.

Your intuition probably insists that context advertising is less effective than surveillance advertising. After all, surveillance advertising allows a running shoe company to target users who are training for a marathon no matter where they are and no matter what they're doing. Surely this translates into increased "conversions" (clicks and/or purchases, depending on who you're talking to)?

It does, but not by much. Advertisers get about 5% more value from surveillance ads than they do from context ads:

https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/05/WEIS_2019_paper_38.pdf

Partly, that's because surveillance ad companies grossly overrate the efficacy of surveillance advertising:

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

But surveillance advertising's anemic returns to advertisers are down to another aspect of the system: its tendency towards monopolization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2023)

Surveillance is a capital-intensive activity: spying on billions of people as they move through the digital and physical world is incredibly expensive. That is a good part of the reason that online advertising has collapsed into the Meta/Google duopoly, who control about 80% of display advertising.

The harms of surveillance monopolies have a severely distorting effect on policy debates. For example, it's led some anti-monopolists to call for government-issued surveillance identifiers that follow us from birth to death in order to facilitate commercial spying to foster more competition in surveillance:

https://www.thesling.org/what-to-do-about-googles-dominance-of-online-advertising/

Here's the thing about monopolists: they cheat. Google and Meta have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the advertising market, overcharging advertisers and underpaying publishers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

The ad-tech giants have taken in hundreds of billions that they simply can't account for. It's disappeared down a fraud-hole:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/25/lying-spies/#spying-liars

All of this has driven the majority of web users to install a privacy-blocker (like EFF's Privacybadger.org), meaning that surveillance ads are disproportionately likely to not even show up in a reader's browser:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

So while it's possible that, in a state of nature, a surveillance ad would outperform a context ad, delivering more sales for advertisers and more revenue for publishers, the monopolistic tendency of ad-tech means that publishers earn less from surveillance ads (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher commissions), and advertisers see fewer sales from them (because more users block them, and because monopolistic ad-tech platforms extract higher prices).

Context ads, meanwhile, are always going to give power to publishers, because publishers will always understand the materials they publish better than any ad-tech platform could. Commissioning, editing and publishing an article, podcast or video gives a publisher unique and inalienable insight into that material.

Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings is already refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.

It's possible to run "programmatic ads" without surveillance. Rather than building an ad-tech stack through which publishers transmit sensitive information about their audiences ("Who will pay me to advertise to this 18-34 year old man-child from the outer boroughs who owns an Xbox and has recently researched gonorrhea symptoms?"), we can build systems through which publishers transmit information about their own materials ("Who will advertise to a user with a New York IP address who is reading an article comparing running shoe brands?").

Not only is this possible, but it actually generates more revenues for publishers than the surveillance-based ad-tech stack:

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/24/data-from-dutch-public-broadcaster-shows-the-value-of-ditching-creepy-ads/

On top of that, publishers who don't gather personal information about users also don't need to show their users those awful pop-up ads asking their permission to gather their data. Everyone hates those notices, and they are yet another negative aspect of surveillance advertising that disappears with the switch to context ads.

An ad-tech stack for context ads is far less prone to monopolization. Such a stack can be "federated," with multiple "demand-side platforms" (the part of the system that advertisers use to place bids for the right to show their ads) all communicating with the same "supply-side platform" (the part of the system publishers use to transmit opportunities to place ads).

This is also in the technopolitics of context ads: they do not tend toward the "efficiencies of scale" that lead to abusive monopolistic middlemen who steal from publishers and advertisers and sell out the public to fascists who want to arrest them and deport them to Salvadoran slave-labor camps.

When the ad-tech sector is composed of smaller companies that are more competitive with one another, it is much harder for any of them to collude to rig the market. That fierce competition also means it's harder to create a cozy conspiracy to lobby together to block privacy laws, and it leaves the companies with lower margins and less retained earnings to spend on those lobbying efforts.

Surveillance ads also promote all kinds of parasitic businesses. The fact that a publisher can serve ads related to users rather than the subject of their media means that sensationalistic and deceptive websites can sell ads that run against content that's totally unrelated to advertisers' products and services. And because it's cheaper to produce lies and garbage, these publishers can undercut the ad prices demanded by high quality outlets and let advertisers reach the same users. This is the whole reason that "chumboxes" exist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox

Just as nuclear power favors a centralized state, surveillance advertising:

  • favors middlemen over publishers and advertisers;

  • tends toward monopoly;

  • favors low-quality media over high-quality production;

  • impedes the passage of privacy laws;

  • provides authoritarian states with an off-the-books, warrantless source of surveillance data.

And just as solar allows for decentralized, anti-authoritarian societies, context advertising:

  • favors publishers over middlemen and advertisers;

  • tends towards pluralism and diversity of voices;

  • favors high-quality media by reserving the lion's share of the rewards to the producers;

  • does not rely on a weak privacy environment;

  • does not militate for "democratizing spying" by issuing every person with a permanent advertising identifier.

There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with building systems to tell people about things you want them to know. There's nothing (necessarily) wrong with paying for media with ads. It's possible for both of these things to go awry, but they are not in and of themselves bad. They have contingent technopolitics.

But surveillance ads have completely unavoidable, absolutely ghastly technopolitics. Surveillance ads are bad for publishers, for advertisers, and for democracy. We should ban surveillance ads:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

(Image: Jess, CC BY-SA 4.0, modified).

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 Patrick Nielsen Hayden interviews Mike Ford https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=126

#20yrsago Singapore bans Far East Economic Review https://web.archive.org/web/20061010002951/https://www.feer.com/articles1/2006/0610/free/p006.html

#20yrsago Publishing isn’t bestseller-driven https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/conventional_un/

#20yrsago Why architecture and security don’t mix https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/architecture_an.html

#20yrsago Vista licence: Microsoft’s abusive relationship with you https://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/10/19/forbidding_vistas_windows_licensing_disserves_the_user.html

#20yrsago Boy Scouts of America Concerned About Copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20061110065012/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi%3Ffile%3D/news/archive/2006/10/20/entertainment/e110452D84.DTL

#15yrsago Canadian Tories admit that Canadians don’t want DRM rules, push for them anyway https://web.archive.org/web/20111022210131/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6071/125

#15yrsago Visualizing Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20111021103517/http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/9-9-9-in-one-really-long-graph/

#15yrsago Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube https://web.archive.org/web/20111020145336/http://freebieber.org/

#15yrsago Belarusian central bank auctions off its sugar bowls https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/19/belarus-central-bank-sells-office-furniture

#15yrsago Dataviz as defacement: OCCUPY GEORGE https://web.archive.org/web/20111022022046/http://www.occupygeorge.com/

#15yrsago HOWTO avoid a copyright shakedown legal threat: be famous, a politician, a cop, a soldier or a corpse https://torrentfreak.com/undercover-cops-and-politicians-escape-bittorrent-lawsuit-111013/

#10yrsago Popular design guides are responsible for plague of grey type https://web.archive.org/web/20170914051800/https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/

#10yrsago Digital Defenders: a free open-licensed booklet for kids about privacy and cryptography https://edri.org/files/privacy4kids_booklet_web.pdf

#10yrsago Public universities and even the US Navy have sold hundreds of patents to America’s most notorious troll https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/inside-intellectual-ventures-portfolio-nearly-500-university-patents

#10yrsago Airportraits: composite photos of all the daily takeoffs from the world’s airports https://mikekelley.art/?category=airportraits

#10yrsago Rich people can afford to buy more sleep than poor people https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/10/the-rich-can-sleep-in-thanks-to-better-transit/

#10yrsago Harry Shearer sues studio over Spinal Tap, says he’s received $98 in royalties over 30 years https://web.archive.org/web/20161224224142/https://www.yahoo.com/movies/harry-shearer-files-125-million-spinal-tap-fraud-suit-copyright-termination-150031664.html

#10yrsago ACLU asks court to reveal 23 secret surveillance laws https://web.archive.org/web/20161019224447/https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/aclu-wants-secret-surveillance-laws-made-public/

#10yrsago Montana judge unrepentant after sentencing man to 60 days for repeatedly raping his own 12 year old daughter https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/19/us/montana-judge-incest-case-trnd/index.html

#10yrago Turkish court fines bystander/tourist who sued police for shooting out his eye https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/kyrgyz-tourist-wounded-in-gezi-protests-ordered-to-pay-debt-to-turkish-state–104964

#10yrsago By stealing from innocents, Chicago PD amassed tens of millions in a secret black budget for surveillance gear https://web.archive.org/web/20160929143255/https://chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-department-civil-forfeiture-investigation/Content?oid=23728922

#10yrsago Turing’s law: UK to retroactively pardon thousands of men prosecuted for having sex with men https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37711518

#5yrsago The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#capital-as-power

#5yrsago Copyleft lawsuit against Vizio will allow anyone to defend the commons https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/vizio-vs-the-world/#dumbcast

#5yrsago The true, Terry Pratchett-esque origins of the trillion-dollar coin https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/19/moist-von-lipwig/#gimmick-v-gimmick

#1yrago The mad king's digital killswitch https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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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: 574 (7730 total).

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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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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ISSN: 3066-764X

Court Approves ‘voices38’ Subpoenas After Denuvo Drops Payment and Login Data Requests [TorrentFreak]

voices38Earlier this month, Denuvo asked a California federal court for help to unmask the person or group behind the popular game cracking handle ‘voices38’.

The request is part of the DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit that the Irdeto-owned company filed in September. That complaint identified the cracker only by a Discord user ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles.

Denuvo wanted to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit, and its request wasn’t limited to just names and email addresses. The proposed subpoenas also requested payment details, login logs and post/comment histories, which turned out to be a step too far for the court.

‘Voluminous Data’

On October 8, Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. ordered Denuvo to explain why it needs “the voluminous data contained in its requests for production” to identify and serve the defendant.

“Plaintiff’s requests for production go well beyond what is needed for the limited purpose of identifying the defendant and could pose substantial privacy concerns,” Judge Gilliam wrote.

Privacy concerns

Privacy concerns

The proposed subpoena to Valve was the broadest with 35 requests for the seven Steam profiles. These covered payment methods and transaction histories, IP addresses with timestamps, device identifiers, and any linked accounts.

Discord was asked to list the account’s server memberships and role assignments. Reddit, meanwhile, was asked for the posts and comments by ‘voices38’, as well as the account’s subreddit memberships.

From 46 Requests to Nine

The judge gave Denuvo the option to revise the subpoenas, using a narrow subpoena model from another case, or justify each data request in detail.

Denuvo chose the revise option. A few days ago, it filed new subpoenas that ask the platforms for targeted information.

Each request now covers documents relating to the identity or contact information of the account holder. That includes names, identification documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and business or residential addresses. Instead of the 46 original requests, there are now nine.

Info requested from Reddit

reddit

The new requests no longer list payment data, transaction histories, login logs, comments or posts. They do ask for IP addresses and phone numbers, which go beyond the model subpoena the judge pointed to. Denuvo argues that the platforms collect little information at sign up, and that what they collect is self reported.

The IP addresses may therefore be the only reliable path to the defendant, Denuvo writes. It also wants any name or identification document these companies have on file.

“Denuvo has only a pseudonym,” the company notes.

The nine requests

# Platform Target Account / Identifier Information Demanded
1 Discord User ‘voices38’ (ID: 1427416652684984397) Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
2 Reddit User ‘voices38’ Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
3 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561199431115733 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
4 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561198779407957 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
5 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561199886659362 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
6 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561199875355070 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
7 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561199872834766 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
8 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561198730942620 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses
9 Valve (Steam) Profile 76561198735927271 Names, ID documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses

The crypto platform FixedFloat isn’t on the list of subpoena targets. Denuvo previously said that it found cryptocurrency transactions by the cracker on the crypto exchange, but it hasn’t asked the court for permission to subpoena the platform.

Subpoenas Granted

After reviewing the new request, Judge Gilliam granted the motion. This means that Denuvo can now serve Discord, Valve and Reddit with the revised subpoenas, to identify the defendant and serve the lawsuit.

The subpoenas set November 3 as the deadline for the platforms to produce the requested information. Whether that will be enough to put a name to ‘voices38’ has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of Judge Gilliam’s order to show cause is available here (pdf). Denuvo’s response, with the revised subpoenas, can be found here (pdf), and the order granting the motion is available here (pdf).

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

05:00 PM

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 12 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day
Gotland Grand National 2023. Gotland Grand National has long been considered the world’s largest Enduro competition and was first run in 1984.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 13 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day
Desert elephant (Loxodonta africana) spraying sand on herself while guarding her sleeping baby. She has covered the baby with a branch. In Damaraland, Namibia

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 15 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day
White teatfish (Holothuria fuscogilva), Ras Muhammad National Park, Red Sea, Egypt. This species of sea cucumber, also known as white teeth, is found in shallow waters near islands and around coral reefs in the tropical waters of the Indo-Pacific ocean. Juvenile cucumbers live in shallower waters (such as inter-tidal zones) and then migrate to deeper waters as they mature. Adult cucumbers weigh between 2.4 and 4 kilograms. They are oval in shape and have a firm texture. This species cucumber has lateral papillae (teats) which are often buried in the sand. As it's consumed as a food and is part of a large commercial fishery across its range, it was listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List in 2010 due to overfishing.

10:00 AM

Steady pace [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 16 Oct 2026, Week 42

F-Droid core

Wow, almost a month since our last weekly. A lot has happened, and most stayed the same. We were busy with apps inclusions, apps updates, client fixes and summits. The PR team is also the maintainer team, the testing team and the support team. Priorities take hold.

Now, polishing the Client is a top priority, so we’ll talk about apps way below.

F-Droid and F-Droid Basic were updated to 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 adding:

  • Show Calculator icon when app hiding is enabled (Full only)
  • Show panic app hiding explanation dialog (Full only)
  • Fix notifications quirks (Thanks proletarius!)
  • Add icon shortcuts for My Apps and Search
  • Sort new apps by added date
  • Fix Huawei/Honor crash when drawing adaptive app icons
  • Fix app installation on old Xiaomi/Redmi devices
  • Disable SessionInstaller on newer Chinese MIUI devices
  • Translation updates

While we had more than a dozen test versions, we still did not convince enough users to update and hit these fixed bugs early in the development process. An understandable problem given the Android ecosystem size and diversity.

F-Droid Basic has been suggested for a while, so everyone already got the update. F-Droid’s extra features took a bit more time, but we are getting close to a release for everybody. If you’ve opted into betas you already got the updates, if not, you can do it now or manually expand Versions and update.

Community News

XDA covers (their) preferred short list of of must-have FLOSS apps, that made them “ditch their mainstream rivals”. Were you even using “mainstream” apps anyway?

While we acknowledge that mobile computing is the widest available form of computing, by users numbers, we know some also use the bigger “older” kind too, and use them together with their mobile devices to enhance operations. One such tool is fdroidcl, a command-line F-Droid desktop client that allows you to get the same apps controls, but from the comfort of your physical keyboard. Matthias Kirschner, of FSFE and former F-Droid Board member, tells us how he uses it for phone setups and upgrades. Get up to speed in this 10 minutes read.

Conversations was updated to 2.20.4+free with minor UI fixes. The developer penned a post that made the rounds in the FLOSS and Android communities, as the app is now also free on the centralized app store. Why now? See the 5 minute read that might make you mad that developers are treated this way by faceless corporations and happy that you chose F-Droid.

Jami launched their Jami Web client, no phone needed.

OsmAnd~ was updated to 5.4.10 with a plethora of fixes polishing the 5.4 release. One important fix that the F-Droid contributors have pushed is OpenGL1 integration crashes as our first release was misbehaving on lower-end devices that can’t use the modern OpenGL2 rendered due to hardware constrains.

Poker Payout was updated to 1.4.22 but with a new signing key. You’ve installed it last month? Tough luck, you need to uninstall then reinstall.

SMSecure was updated to 1.4.0 adding search, better delivery reports, hiding phone numbers in the UI, updated translations and many more fixes. One important feature that might get Silence users up from the couch has been added, Import encrypted backups from a SilenceExport folder. While we kept Silence on a life line since its last 2019 version, by fixing arm64 compatibility, time will soon come for it to be archived as the app won’t be installable on future Android versions and the current notification issues are a pain for the users. Get testing!

@CodeDoctor’s Dreamy Duskywing is here

Butterfly was updated to 2.6.0:

One of the biggest Butterfly updates yet brings:

📓 OneNote & Xournal++ support
🔄 Canvas rotation
💾 Persistent document states
🧰 Paints and presets for tools
📁 WebDAV remote encryption and backups
🎚️ UX improvements
📊 Tables
🗃️ Smarter file names for templates
🤝 Better collaboration & embeds
⌨️ More inputs & keybinds
🚀 Performance improvements

Read more here

@shuvashish76 makes it modern:

NewsBlur - News reader was updated to 15.0.5 adding better tablet support, faster scrolling, images controls, enhanced Add site and more.

Rethink: DNS + Firewall + VPN, updated to v0.5.7, gets a new redesigned UI, stats, universal allow rules, smart DNS filters and more.

@theimpulson peels onion layers:

First thing, I have been working with people at Weblate to have a small plugin and library to allow updating translations without rebuilding and redistributing the Android apps. As the work is still alpha, feedback is appreciated. Join us at github.com/WeblateOrg/kotlin-sdk.

The Tor Project muses back on how Tor VPN came to be, with Rust, per app tunnels, circumvention and more. Take an 8 minute break, read here.

@TobiGr checks a resume:

NewPipe is looking for two paid contractors: One Android developer with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose experience to help with the development of our new player library NewPlayer and the modernization of our codebase. There is also an open job an UI / UX expert to improve NewPipe’s user experience by doing an UX audit of the app. More information can be found on the website of NewPipe e.V., the non-profit organisation supporting NewPipe financially.

Archived Apps

7 apps were archived
  • APatch: The patching of Android kernel and Android system
  • CaptureCap: Record and Stream Audio and/or Screen
  • DobbyVPN: VPN client-side toolset.
  • F-Droid Privileged Extension OTA: Services to allow F-Droid to securely install and update apps
  • Human Benchmark: Test and compare your cognitive abilities with fun challenges
  • T CrB Detector: T CrB Detector notifies the user when the star T CrB has exploded.
  • TLSFragment: TLS fragmentation to bypass China’s Great Firewall. (Do try Lumine!)

Newly Added Apps

299 apps were added
(expand for the full list)

Just three hundred? Included during these 4 weeks, and many more are waiting. Some already got updates too, but we’re listing new apps only once here. The review process is long, not only by the length of our backlog, but also to get a chance to work with the developers, to get things in perfect shape at inclusion time and for the long road ahead. NOTE: We are also tightening the rules for apps inclusion, review the docs here.

More contributors raised to this challenge, offering their hands, eyes or tokens, each with their own abilities. Developers were guided to fix the recipes, add metadata (pics, icons, description), fix reproducibility issues, fix crashes and possible issues raised by testing in emulators and on real devices.

  • 0x56erify: Local, offline SHA-256/SHA-512 checksum verification.
  • 5G Proxy Client: Routes device traffic through a remote SOCKS5 proxy via TUN. No root, TCP/UDP.
  • AA-AuralListen Podcatcher: Private, ad-free podcast app – audio only, no account, all data on your phone
  • AdaptKey: Privacy-first Android keyboard that learns your typing style. Fully offline.
  • ADB Captain: Run ADB commands on your phone. No root, no PC — via Shizuku.
  • AeroPayout: Become a pilot in 7 days — buy tickets, advance seats, earn real rewards
  • Aftergleam - academic papers: A private reader for new research papers, ranked on your phone.
  • Agenda Tech: Private offline calendar: encrypted, zero network, encrypted backups.
  • Agendula: Tasks: A Material 3 Expressive task app with CalDAV sync.
  • Airplane Scheduler: Turn airplane mode on and off on a schedule
  • AlarmClock Deluxe (Wecker, Uhr, Timer, Stoppuhr): Alarm, clock, timer and stopwatch with advanced alarm tools
  • AMARadio: Ad-Free - No Paywall - Just Radio
  • Anchor Chain: Safe anchoring with phisycs
  • Andropolis: Classic city building: an open-source Android port of Micropolis (SimCity).
  • Animation Maker: A tool to convert image sequences into video files
  • Anonomi Postbox: Self-hosted relay that holds Anonomi messages until you are back online
  • API Flow: A focused mobile workspace for testing HTTP APIs
  • APODroid: Sets NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day as your wallpaper, every day
  • AppShelf: List of installed apps with sources — save, sync and restore on a new phone
  • AppStow: Organize and launch apps, websites, web apps and deep links
  • Aradia: LibriVox listener: Find, stream, and download free public-domain audiobooks.
  • ARK-launcher: A modern, customizable home-screen launcher built with Jetpack Compose
  • Auvae — growing close: 257 questions that bring people genuinely close. No account, no ads.
  • AWAGAM TLD and Domain Blocker: Block TLDs and domains at the DNS level using your own blocklists
  • AwayDoomscrollin’: Beta shield that blocks Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts scrolling
  • Aya: Quran, Hadith & Prayer Times: Offline Quran with 10 Qira’at, Hadith, prayer times, adhan, azkar & qibla.
  • Baby Monito: Track your baby’s feedings, diapers and weight, privately and offline
  • Baby Touch Lock: Block accidental touches, gestures and buttons while your kid watches videos
  • Battleship: Offline naval combat against an AI opponent, with no ads and no account
  • Bematist: Matches your local music’s BPM to your running cadence in real time
  • Binary Puzzle: A minimalist binary placement logic puzzle game.
  • Bitcoin Ticker (+Widget): Ad-free Bitcoin home-screen widget: EUR/USD price, 24h change and charts
  • BLACKBOX: File Encryption & Vault
  • Block Night: Offline falling blocks: 600 certified floors, daily challenge, Marathon and Zen
  • Bona vortaro: Esperanto dictionary, with the whole Reta Vortaro, offline
  • Box Breathing: Lightweight 50 KB box breathing timer that ticks the seconds out loud
  • boxorg: Declutter meditatively — photograph, frame, pack, find it again.
  • BreakThrough: Offline side-scrolling glass-breaking game
  • Brevier: A reading browser: the web without JavaScript, set in your own type
  • Bubble Night: Offline bubble shooter: 600 certified levels, daily challenge, Endless and Zen
  • CairnGPS: Hike tracking, live GNSS satellite view, achievements. Works fully offline
  • Captain’s Log: Your Personal Log for Navigating the Inner Cosmos
  • Cat Hunt: A game for cats: mice, bugs, a fish, a butterfly and a laser dot to catch
  • Chess Puzzles: Offline chess tactics from real Lichess puzzles. No account, ads, or tracking
  • Chroma Launcher: Your home screen, sorted by color. Find any app at a glance.
  • CimBar Scanner: Send and receive files and text as animated color barcodes — offline
  • ClashFest: Rule-based proxy client on the mihomo core: import, connect, protected
  • Clio Audiobook Player: Clean, modern audiobook player for Android focused on privacy and simplicity.
  • ClipRecorder: A privacy-friendly video recorder with clip management, effects, and merging
  • ClipVault: ClipBoard Manager with history, selection and management. Needs LSPosed / Root
  • Cobalt: Universal offline-first note capture and personal knowledge archive
  • Coffee Log: Log your coffee recipes so you can dial in and repeat the perfect cup
  • Colorgram: A free, open-source color logic puzzle game with no ads or tracking
  • ConnectFour Studio: Connect Four with 15 levels, 20 boards, match mode and perfect analysis
  • Constanza - Good habits: Habit reminders you answer without opening the app. No cloud, no ads.
  • Cookie Extractor: Extract your own session cookies after a manual login
  • Count for me: An interval timer you write, not one you just set.
  • CountAway: Count days to or from dates with local home-screen widgets
  • CPR Beat: Offline CPR metronome: 100–120 bpm, 30:2 mode, rescuer-switch timer
  • Cryo: Personal finance by voice: forecast, cards, debts, budgets and goals
  • CubeTimer: Offline 3×3 speedcubing timer with TNoodle scrambles
  • Cyclic Alarms: Alarm app for shift schedules — repeats every N days, not just weekly
  • Cycluna: Your cycle and the moon, tracked privately on your phone.
  • Daybook: Daily Logic Puzzles: New logic puzzles every day. No ads, no subscription, works offline.
  • DayCalcy: Simple ofline date calculator with reminder.
  • DeepWave: Binaural Beats: Binaural beats & isochronic tones for sleep, focus and relaxation
  • Desktop Mascot: A customizable animated mascot for your Android screen
  • DevSwitch: Toggle developer options, USB and wireless debugging, with Quick Settings tiles
  • DNS Resolver: Local DNS resolver, ad/tracker sinkhole, and traffic monitor
  • DoNotNotify: Block unwanted notifications with customizable rules
  • DragTree: NHRA Pro Tree reaction timer — accelerometer launch detection, no internet
  • Drausible: Read your Plausible Analytics stats, from plausible.io or a self-hosted server
  • Drift: Local-first RSS and Atom reader with optional cross-device sync
  • Drink Water!: Track water intake and get timely reminders. No accounts or ads.
  • Droynis: Read-only security and privacy audit for your phone
  • DumberKit: Calculator: Calculator and unit converter for keypad phones, typed on the keypad
  • Ebb: A period tracker that keeps your cycle on your phone. No account, no internet.
  • Echo Tiles - Play Your Music: Play piano tiles to your own music. Open-source, offline, and completely ad-free
  • EhViewer NekoInverter: An E-Hentai Application for Android with censorship circumvention
  • Encarté: Offline loyalty card wallet made for French shops. Scan, store, show.
  • Encly: Encrypted Offline Notes: Private notes & tasks with a PIN lock. No account, no internet, no ads.
  • ErmChat: A feature-packed Twitch chat client for mobile
  • Ethic Compass: An accessible, offline magnetic compass.
  • Ethic Keyboard: An app for those who only need a keyboard and nothing more
  • Ethic Notes: Private, offline, zero-permission notes application.
  • Ethic One Call: Lend your phone for one call while keeping the rest private.
  • Ethic QR Scanner: An offline QR and barcode scanner that never opens links automatically.
  • Ezhuthola: Malayalam Keyboard: Type Malayalam in Manglish. No ads, no tracking, no internet.
  • Feedora: A modern and elegant RSS reader with Material You design
  • FeelS: Local-first feelings wheel for private emotion check-ins.
  • Fencing Scores: Pool and tournament management for fencing competitions
  • Finan+: Offline, encrypted personal finance manager (Brazilian Portuguese)
  • Find Words: Word Search Puzzle: Solve fun word search puzzles! Connect letters & challenge your brain
  • Flare Enough: Calm, private, offline tracking for medication, symptoms and stillness.
  • Focus Launcher: A text-only, black and white launcher with app timers and a weekly review
  • Fogwave: Minimal ad-free internet radio for Lithuanian stations
  • Folder Camera: Take photos straight into folders, with optional secure transfer to your PC
  • Folio: Doc Maker: Scan & turn photos into clean PDFs. Fits size limits. Offline, no ads.
  • Fossy Protokoll: Document rental defects and build protocols — offline, no tracking.
  • FPS Meter: Lightweight real-time FPS overlay and game performance monitor
  • FreeFTP: Free FTP, FTPS and SFTP client. No ads, no paid tier, no tracking.
  • FreshMate: Keep your food fresh — track expiry dates for everything in your fridge
  • FTPS Server: Run a secure FTP server and share files on your local network, with no ads.
  • Ganxet: Board game timer for the whole table, with a clock facing each player
  • Garage: A modern, privacy-focused, comprehensive vehicle management app.
  • Gecko: Time-travelling audio recorder — save what just happened
  • Ghest: Track loans and fixed payments: where you are and when they end, fully offline
  • gloomy: A dim, night-vision-friendly screen light with swipe controls
  • Gluco Glance: Read your CGM sensor over Bluetooth. Offline, no accounts, no tracking.
  • Gotweb: Game of Trees Web Authenticator App
  • GPG Key Manager: GPG Tool for Android
  • GPS Car Tracking: GPS tracks with live OBD-II metrics; offline queue to your own server
  • Grace Launcher: A simple launcher with an app list, calendar agenda and music controls
  • Graycie: Apply grayscale automatically based on the app in the foreground
  • GrayPause: Keep your phone in grayscale, take short color breaks that end by themselves
  • Gridlink Mail: A fast, private JMAP and IMAP email client. No ads, no tracking, no Google.
  • Grove: A native Org-mode notes app for Android. Your notes stay plain .org files.
  • Gymbro: Private workout tracking with clear progress stats.
  • GymLog: Simple offline workout tracker. No accounts, no cloud, no tracking
  • Horus: Run Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode in a real Linux terminal on your phone
  • how many? - Count from Photo: Count Objects in Photos
  • Hydro Homie: Simple, private drink tracker with a filling glass, streaks and reminders
  • Ironvellum: Strength training with a ledger that remembers everything.
  • Jalali Persian Calendar: Gregorian and Persian (Jalali) calendar with a two-way date converter
  • JelloDog Chat: Chat for servers friends DMs and voice
  • Jigsaw Solitaire: A beautifully tactile, relaxing jigsaw puzzle game
  • JPortal: Unofficial app for the JIIT webportal: attendance, marks, grades and exams
  • KabelWacht: A simple, free WireGuard VPN client: scan, import, and manage tunnels.
  • Kairos: Your tasks in the right order, fitted into your day. No account, no network.
  • Kakuro: Solve Kakuro puzzles! The addictive blend of Sudoku and crossword sums.
  • Kalimory: Calm, offline bodyweight training with guided workouts and progressions
  • KeepADB: Keep Wireless Debugging active and toggle it from a tile or widget
  • keepIT: Notes, checklists and voice notes. Offline-first, synced on your own server.
  • KeliBoard: Customizable open-source keyboard
  • Keryx: One reader. Every device. Local-first RSS reader with optional cloud sync.
  • Keyholm: Single-device passkeys on secure hardware
  • Kompanion: Remote control companion for KOReader e-readers
  • Kryfo: private messages over tor. no phone number, no account, no metadata trail.
  • L9: Home screen launcher for D-pad and T9 keypad phones
  • Lantern Sudoku: Calm, readable sudoku with hints that teach. No ads, no game over, offline.
  • LatentJam: Local music player with an on-device recommender. No account, no network.
  • LensCast: Turn your phone into a networked camera: web, MJPEG and RTSP streaming
  • LibreCrate: Private offline vault for your documents and notes
  • LifeMeter: Your birthdate turned into a live dashboard of numbers about your life
  • liftmath: Gym calculator: 1RM, plates, warm-ups, strength scores, records, rest timer
  • LinkLift: Private media extractor and downloader for video, audio, and images.
  • LiveTempo: Manage song playlists with BPM references for live performances
  • Logic Labs: A pocket digital-logic lab — breadboard, 74xx TTL chips, offline coursework.
  • Lomo Camera: A tiny camera that shoots vivid, cross-processed Lomo-style photos
  • London Transport: Shows transport (Tube, Bus, Cycle) in London
  • Luncher: A lightweight home screen for Android TV: hide and reorder your apps
  • Macrion: Screen-aware Android automation, independently developed from Klick’r
  • Mahjong Solitaire: A performance-oriented classic Mahjong Solitaire game.
  • MapFlip - Apple to Google: Redirect Apple Maps links to Google Maps. Fast Apple map redirect & converter.
  • Mars Live Wallpaper: Mars, Earth, the Moon and Pluto turning in front of the Milky Way
  • Matewave: Offline chess: AI, puzzles, opening training and play with friends nearby
  • Mathe-Trainer: Mental arithmetic practice for primary school. German interface.
  • MegaProxy: Private VPN client for HTTPS, MASQUE α and SSH servers you control
  • MeshCore Signal Tester: Real-time mesh signal monitor for MeshCore companion radios & repeaters
  • MeshNavarra Utility: Administer Meshtastic nodes and NavaTastic repeaters over USB and Bluetooth
  • MeteoCompare: Compare 21 weather models, 10-day forecasts, local alerts and detailed charts.
  • MinLauncher: A minimal, ad-free Android launcher with no internet access and no tracking.
  • Mobile Harness: AI coding, Linux terminal, files, diffs, and previews on Android
  • Mobile Maia: Offline chess against Maia-3 with local Stockfish analysis
  • Mock Location that actually works: A reliable mock location provider that actually works to replay GPX tracks.
  • Modern T9: Predictive T9 keyboard with no network access and no telemetry
  • MoveAPiece: Offline Chess: Offline chess vs Stockfish or Maia, opening trainer, Pegasus & Chessnut boards
  • MTS Dialer (cz.mts.phone): Phone app (calling, blocking, contacts) that you’ll love !
  • Mushroom Compass: A compass that show you the way to your stored mushroom spots
  • MyLexicon: Offline-first personal dictionary and vocabulary companion.
  • Nature’s Music: Mix nature sounds—ocean, rain, forest, storm, city—and set a sleep alarm
  • Nearby Glasses: Smart Glasses are often hard to spot. This app scans for their Bluetooth ID.
  • NeionLauncher: <25KB size Android Launcher
  • Nexpill: Medication reminders that arrive on time. No account, no internet.
  • Nightblast: Send urgent alerts to your contacts using encrypted SMS messages
  • Nocean: Offline rich-text notes with fonts, media and no cloud
  • Notenkladde: Photograph and import sheet music, read it while you play, write notes on it
  • Numbers & Letters: Mental arithmetic and vocabulary game, no ads, no trackers
  • Numio Calculator: A clean, open-source calculator with live results and unit conversion
  • OctoLab: GitLab client for Android: gitlab.com and self-hosted instances
  • Okanzo: Private, offline-first net worth tracker with on-device encryption
  • OmniBeat: Internet radio player built to support all modern online stations.
  • OnionDrop: Private file sharing directly over Tor
  • Open Eats Journal: Open Eats Journal is a free nutrition, calories and weight tracking app
  • Open Open Radio: Browse and play thousands of web radios, with Android Auto support
  • Open Patience: Free, open-source Klondike & FreeCell solitaire — no ads, no tracking
  • Open Recorder: Open-source screen recorder with internal audio and no internet access
  • OpenChordBook: Read, write and organize chord charts offline
  • OpenOdo: Private offline vehicle logs, reminders, fuel and expense history
  • OpenPlants: Open-source & privacy-friendly companion app for your plants
  • Operator: List and kill processes that consume a lot of resources
  • Oubliettes: Dungeon logic puzzle: find the walls from the row and column counts
  • Outdoor Food Calculator: Plan food weight and nutrition for outdoor trips
  • PaperCript: Encrypted passwords on printable QR cards. No network, stores nothing.
  • Paperless Native: Mobile client for your self-hosted Paperless-ngx document server
  • PaperPhoneLite: Encrypted messaging through self-hosted Tor onion services
  • Pass: Deterministic passwords from site, login, and one master password.
  • PassPony: Git Password Manager: Password manager for pass and passage stores, synced with git
  • Patch Pilot: Manage presets on your hardware synth over USB, straight from your phone
  • PebbleNTN: Turn-by-turn directions from your phone’s nav apps on your Pebble watch
  • PebbleRecorder: Turn a Pebble watch button into a remote start/stop trigger for audio recording.
  • Phosphor Cam: Turn your camera into live ASCII and dither art
  • Pixel Tag Drawer: Organize and launch Android apps with tags and usage-based sorting.
  • PlaneTxt: Todo, agenda, journal and notes in plain Markdown files
  • Plunge Tracker: Offline cold plunge timer and log. No accounts, no network, no tracking.
  • PlusPlay: A minimal, lightweight Android video player app written in Kotlin
  • PocketClaw: A private AI agent that runs on your Android phone, with real on-device tools
  • Poop Log: Private, offline Bristol stool diary with CSV export.
  • Presencia: Simple offline attendance tracker for students
  • Prism Gallery: A private, offline photo gallery with four beautiful, animated design styles
  • Puzzle Press: Seven daily word and logic puzzles. Offline, no ads, no account.
  • QR Code Displayer: Reconstruct damaged or blurry QR codes entirely on-device for easy scanning.
  • QRieux - QR Scanner: QR scanner & creator. No ads, no tracking, works offline.
  • QuorumPony: Split a secret into printable cards. Any K of N recover it. Fully offline.
  • Ramblr: Tap, ramble, tap. Clean dictated text lands wherever your cursor is.
  • Ratafuel: Find the cheapest fuel in France near you.
  • Read Later: Bookmark. Read. Listen. The simple way to manage your reading list.
  • Rechenzwerge: Counting and math practice for preschool and elementary school.
  • Regex Crossword: Offline regex-crossword puzzles in hexagon and rectangle grids.
  • Relagent: Trustworthy AI assistant that runs 100% on your hardware
  • Renamite: Motion / vector animation editor
  • RepForge: Workout logger with AI coaching, analytics & Health Connect integration
  • ResticDroid: Scheduled, encrypted backups with restic
  • Rouse Context: Turn your phone into a secure, on-demand MCP server for AI clients
  • Rune: Private, on-device encrypted notes. No network, no telemetry, no trackers.
  • Sameura Dam Monitor: Storage rates and related data for 125 dams in Japan including Sameura Dam
  • ScaleLauncher: Use Xiaomi S400 locally via Bluetooth with openScale and Health Connect
  • Scratchpad Launcher: A minimal launcher with an always-visible scratchpad. Zero ads.
  • ScrubPony: Strip GPS and metadata from JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC photos, on your device.
  • Sepia: Share images without oversharing. X-ray, redact, and prove the file is clean.
  • Shelf: Offline book catalogue: search, track streaks, read your own files.
  • Shellwave: An SSH client that doesn’t make you choose between convenient and trustworthy
  • ShizuStore: App store for Shizuku apps that installs APKs from their upstream sources.
  • SilentSuite - Secure Data Sync: End-to-end encrypted sync for calendar, contacts, and tasks
  • Simple Nextcloud: A small Nextcloud file browser without a duplicate upload cache
  • Since Us: Count your days together. Private, ad-free and made for every kind of love.
  • SkyPulse: Decode and monitor 1090 MHz ADS-B aircraft with an RTL-SDR
  • Sleep Noise: Noise to sleep, or to cover the room around you. Plays when you open it.
  • Slitherlink: Logic Loop Puzzle: Connect the dots to form a single continuous loop. Pure, relaxing logic puzzle.
  • SnowRaven: Birding tools and data explorer for your eBird and Macaulay Library exports
  • Social Deduction Game: Offline game-master assistant for Werewolf, Mafia and social deduction games
  • solyto: Free, private, all-in-one personal organizer. Self-hostable.
  • Sopa de Letras: Offline word search with a 300-level campaign, daily challenge and time attack
  • SparkleDNS: Encrypted DNS over HTTPS and HTTP/3 with blocklists and per-app rules
  • SplitSmart: Offline expense splitting with fair shares and fewest-transfer settlements
  • Splitz: Launch paired apps in split screen with Accessibility Service automation.
  • Spool Maker: Read and create NFC spool tags for UltiMaker 3D printers
  • SportWetter: When does the weather suit outdoor sport? Heat, cold, wind, rain, air.
  • SPRAWL//RUN: A running tracker wrapped in a cyberpunk story that chases you. Fully offline.
  • Square Chess: Chess built for square screens, compact devices, e-ink and physical keyboards.
  • Sshd4a: An ‘sshd’ server with shell access, rsync and scp/sftp services.
  • Stanza: Pomodoro Timer: Frosted glass Pomodoro timer with zero-battery chronometer countdown.
  • Starling: End to end encrypted location sharing. No accounts, no tracking.
  • Sun Piano: Piano and synthesizer with 8 instruments, recording, metronome and MIDI input
  • Sweep: Plain-language stalkerware checkup. On-device, nothing stored or sent
  • TabGreater: Crypto watchlist with live prices, charts and home-screen widgets
  • TABI: Learn Japanese from zero in about five minutes a day.
  • Tally: One tap per expense. Every account, every currency. Private, offline, no ads.
  • Tapbar: Launch apps or quick actions from the status bar or anywhere on your screen
  • TaskDav: Tasks, notes and calendar over CalDAV — or local-only on your phone.
  • Temperance Companion: Offline habit tracker and Health Connect bridge for Obsidian Temperans
  • Tennis Score Manager: ITF tennis scoring with umpire voice calls, BLE wristbands and a TV scoreboard
  • Tern: Follow app releases where they are published and check them before they install
  • TeXslate: On-device LaTeX/XeTeX editor: compile & PDF preview offline, no cloud
  • TG WS Proxy: Telegram MTProto WebSocket Bridge Proxy
  • TreasureHunt: Be active, go treasure hunting!
  • TrovePass: Offline password generator — one master password for every site
  • TU Expense Tracker: Private, offline-first expense tracking directly from bank SMS alerts.
  • Turn the Page: Read FB2, EPUB and PDF with paper page turns and a spread on foldables
  • Tutor Language: Offline Spanish learning with reading, listening, and dialogue practice.
  • TV Viewer - IPTV Streaming: Free open-source IPTV player with community channels and opt-in analytics.
  • TyphoonEye: Typhoon tracks, forecasts and alerts for the Northwest Pacific
  • VaultPony: Encrypted vaults you control, compatible with VeraCrypt.
  • VaultX - Secure Password Manager: Secure offline password and identity wallet manager
  • Vectorint: See how much you can safely spend right now
  • Veil: Private, local-first encrypted notes
  • Vento VNC/RDP Client: Fast, fluid VNC/RDP remote desktop client
  • Verdetto: QR & Barcode Scanner: QR & barcode scanner. See the link before it opens.
  • Visual Routines: Create and follow calm visual routines one step at a time
  • VocaPhone: Voice dictation keyboard that transcribes on hardware you control
  • Voice Keyboard: Speech-to-text keyboard that uses your own Whisper API key
  • Voice Memos: A voice recorder with an inline player and a trim editor, no ads, no network
  • Waqfah - Quran before apps: Read a Quranic ayah before the apps you choose to open
  • Waste Works: A casual recycling clicker: take trash apart, find valuables, equip your worker
  • Webby Images Downloader: Pick images from a web page and download them all at once
  • WebStack: Visual bookmark stack and website manager for Android with offline snapshots.
  • Where: End-to-end encrypted realtime location sharing
  • Whisper: RSS Reader: Calm, private news from the sites you choose. No account, works offline.
  • Why? – mindful unlocks: Asks why you unlock your phone. See your habits. No internet. No tracking.
  • Wocheneinkauf: Shared shopping list for family and flatmates, synced live - no account
  • Wol Panel: Wake your machines over the LAN with a magic packet
  • WolLight: Wake-on-LAN app with device list, LAN scan and stale-IP recovery. LAN-only.
  • Zabb: Mobile client for Zabbix monitoring
  • Zanshin Calendar: Tibetan and Japanese calendars with almanac readings, and a meditation timer
  • Zazen: A minimal, offline meditation timer with interval bells.
  • zinna-IME: Offline Japanese keyboard with mozc conversion, flick and qwerty
  • ¡Aquí hay tomate! - Pomodoro: Pomodoro timer with a one-cell home screen widget. Dark, fast and quiet.
  • Ğ1nkgo: Ğ1 Wallet: simple, quick, modern and versatile
  • 是语输入法: A fast offline Chinese Pinyin input method

Updated Apps

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

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Kanji of the Day: 採 [Kanji of the Day]

採

✍11

小5

pick, take, fetch, take up

サイ

と.る

採用   (さいよう)   —   use
採択   (さいたく)   —   adoption
採点   (さいてん)   —   marking
採取   (さいしゅ)   —   picking
採決   (さいけつ)   —   vote
伐採   (ばっさい)   —   felling timber
採用試験   (さいようしけん)   —   employment examination
採算   (さいさん)   —   profit
不採用   (ふさいよう)   —   rejection (of an application)
採掘   (さいくつ)   —   mining

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 嘱 [Kanji of the Day]

嘱

✍15

中学

entrust, request, send a message

ショク

しょく.する　たの.む

嘱託   (しょくたく)   —   commission
委嘱   (いしょく)   —   commissioning
嘱望   (しょくぼう)   —   having great hopes for (someone's future)
委嘱状   (いしょくじょう)   —   letter of appointment (to a position)
嘱する   (しょくする)   —   to entrust (someone) with
嘱託殺人   (しょくたくさつじん)   —   murder at the victim's request
嘱目   (しょくもく)   —   paying attention to
受嘱   (じゅしょく)   —   being entrusted with
依嘱   (いしょく)   —   commissioning
付嘱   (ふしょく)   —   conferment

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

06:00 AM

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

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about Florida’s age-gating law and its esoteric definition of addiction:

Is anyone else bothered by this incredibly strange definition of “addiction”? Is YMCA soccer addicting if 10% of a youth soccer team (one player) plays soccer for more than two hours a day?

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a reply to a comment celebrating MAGA’s electoral victories:

Congratulations, you got record-high inflation, higher prices on gas and diesel, a militarized police force working on the president’s order to commit human trafficking with a side of murder, the kind of war your diaper-wearing piss-stain of a president said he wouldn’t start, and a massive reduction in the reputation of the United States amongst longtime allies. Are ya winnin’ hard enough to get sick of it, Trumpist?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a response from MrWilson expanding on the first place winning comment about addiction:

It’s all arbitrary bullshit and has to be because it’s impossible to create definitions that would actually work for every scenario. A kid using Facebook messenger to get math tutoring help from his friend for two hours could count as “addiction” here.

It’s all substituting broadbrush generalizations in lieu of parents paying attention to what their kids are doing online, or even better, having honest relationships that mean their kids actually talk to them about what they’re encountering online.

Addiction should only be determined by a trained psychiatrist in individual cases after direct observation, not by politicians grand-standing and virtue-signaling their “think of the children” schtick that supports the “re-elect me so I can continue to get campaign donations from wealthy donors and insider trading stock tips” schtick.

Next, it’s Thad with a comment about the observation that ICE is inflicting injustices on the US citizens that Trump believes are inherently superior to everyone else:

Let’s not pretend we don’t know who he really means when he says “citizens”.

Over on the funny side, things are awfully slow: not a single comment even got enough votes to earn a funny badge, and in fact nothing even really came close. So in lieu of the normal section, we’ll just wrap things up with one single editor’s choice. It’s another comment about the “two hours a day” addiction definition, this time from an anonymous commenter:

no no I think they’re cooking here. We just need to extend this to its only logical conclusion: the 14 hour work week.

That’s all for this week, folks!

05:00 AM

Sunday 2026-10-18

11:00 PM

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

I know that you know that taking this exit will get us to Sheridan Drive, but the person who’s likely to be driving down this road in a few minutes has no idea.

Let’s agree that most street signs are for folks who know where they’re going. We would label things differently if we were instructing those that don’t.

I know that you know that ERASE isn’t the same thing as DELETE, but the next person interacting with your command-line interface might not know.

Of course this is obvious when we say it so clearly. And yet, there are many kinds of USB cables, poorly named and labeled. The instructions that come with just about anything we buy were written by lawyers for juries, not by a product manager who actually wanted to inform and delight.

Design to be understood. And design so that the inevitable confusion of the newbie doesn’t get worse. Because without your active intervention, it will.

      

Chinese Court Jails Aiyifan Operator, U.S. Judge Won’t Transfer Pirate Site’s Domains [TorrentFreak]

aiyifanLast month, Chinese streaming giant Tencent won the first round of its legal battle against the pirate site Olevod, when a Florida judge ruled that the case can proceed in the United States.

Tencent is not the only Chinese platform to try its luck there. Last year, rival streaming service iQIYI used the same court and the same legal team to sue Aiyifan, a pirate streaming service for Chinese speakers outside China.

Aiyifan also operates under the names YFSP and IYF, with domains including aiyifan.tv, yfsp.tv and iyf.tv. According to Similarweb, yfsp.tv alone drew roughly 14 million visits last month.

Unlike Olevod, Aiyifan never appeared in court, and none of its operators were named as defendants. However, the U.S. case isn’t the only legal trouble the pirate site is up against. In China, one of the site’s operators has been sentenced to prison recently.

Operator Jailed in China

In August, iQIYI informed the Florida court that the Shanghai Third Intermediate People’s Court had upheld the criminal conviction of Wang Jianyang, describing him as one of Aiyifan’s principals.

According to the ruling, Wang ran a company in Chongqing that provided the technical support for Aiyifan’s website and app. He also handled advertising and promotion, working on the pirate platform since 2022.

The Chinese police detained Wang in March 2024, which was more than a year before iQIYI filed its lawsuit in Florida.

Wang had been convicted before. In 2021, a court in Jiangsu gave him a suspended prison sentence of three years and a 6 million yuan fine for setting up another pirate site.

Aiyifan launched while he was still on probation. In March of this year, a Shanghai district court revoked the suspension and added a new sentence of three and a half years, plus a 1 million yuan fine. Combined, Wang faces four and a half years in prison and a 7 million yuan fine.

From the translated Shanghai ruling

aiyifan sentence

Wang appealed the verdict, arguing that the evidence was insufficient and that, at most, he merely provided technical support. The appeals court disagreed, however, concluding that he played a major role in the operation. That ruling is final.

Florida: $1.96 Million Instead of $196 Million

In Florida, iQIYI’s civil case was launched in hopes to shut down the site. Aiyifan didn’t respond to the complaint in the U.S. federal court, after which a default was entered in July 2025.

iQIYI asked for a massive $196.55 million in damages. Most of that came from applying the $150,000 statutory maximum to 776 registered works, while thousands of unregistered works added another $78.55 million in proposed damages.

In January, Judge Melissa Damian ruled that Aiyifan is indeed liable. However, she rejected the damages award because it lacked support. iQIYI responded with a revised request for $54.4 million, but that was still too much for the court.

In an order issued last week, Judge Damian awarded $1,000 per registered work, doubled for willfulness, for a total of $1.8 million. The award covers a total of 901 works as more copyright registrations had been processed as the case moved on.

The trademark claims added $160,000, but there were no damages awarded for the roughly 5,000 unregistered works. This brings the total to $1.96 million, about 1% of the original request.

From the final default judgment

iqiyi damages

The reduces damages is not the only setback for the Chinese streaming company either, as its requested injunction is also limited.

Judge Won’t Transfer Domains

iQIYI specifically targeted the pirate site’s domain names, asking the court to hand them over and redirect them to iQIYI’s own site. It also wanted ISPs, hosting companies, CDNs, payment processors and WeChat to stop serving Aiyifan.

The amended motion for a default judgment dropped most of these third parties, but it still requested the domain takeovers, to effectively take these offline.

Judge Damian was not convinced that this would be appropriate. iQIYI admitted that it couldn’t say how much of the content on the sites was infringing, or whether any of the other content is licensed.

Aiyifan streams plenty of content that is not owned by iQIYI. Taking over the domains entirely would therefore go too far, the judge concluded.

The order acknowledges that “some other judges in this District have a more liberal approach to the dispensation of injunctive relief.” However, Judge Damian sided with the Eleventh Circuit’s requirement that injunctions must be narrowly tailored.

yfsp.tv’s homepage this week, with Toy Story 5 in the top slot

yfsp homepage

Partial Domain Registrar Suspensions?

Instead of transferring the domains, the judgment orders domain registrars to cancel the pages and subdomains that feature iQIYI’s shows or trademarks, once iQIYI provides a list.

If a registrar fails to comply, the registry must move the domain to a registrar of iQIYI’s choosing. That changes the registrar but would not transfer the ownership.

The registrar provisions in the judgment

registrar

Whether registrars can comply is questionable. A registrar controls the domain registration, not the pages on a website, so the only tools at its disposal are suspending or redirecting a domain as a whole.

That is exactly the broad outcome the court is trying to avoid.

Even the subdomains are a stretch. Two of the listed sites, m.yfsp.tv and www.yfsp.tv, share a single domain, and a registrar can only switch one of them off if it also runs the domain’s DNS.

For now, the Aiyifan sites remain online. Without a response from the operators, it’s also unclear whether iQIYI will be able to collect any of the damages.

—

A copy of the final default judgment, issued at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf). The accompanying order can be found here (pdf), and the translated Shanghai ruling, as filed by iQIYI, here (pdf).

The seven (sub)domains listed in the judgment: m.yfsp.tv, www.yfsp.tv, www.yfsp.lv, www.iyf.tv, www.iyf.lv, www.aiyifan.tv and www.ayysp.com.

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

10:00 AM

Kanji of the Day: 無 [Kanji of the Day]

無

✍12

小4

nothingness, none, ain't, nothing, nil, not

ム　ブ

な.い

無理   (むり)   —   unreasonable
無料   (むりょう)   —   free (of charge)
無い   (ない)   —   nonexistent
無いと   (ないと)   —   have to (verb)
無駄   (むだ)   —   futility
無視   (むし)   —   disregarding
無職   (むしょく)   —   without an occupation
無所属   (むしょぞく)   —   independent (esp. in politics)
無党派層   (むとうはそう)   —   unaffiliated voters
無償   (むしょう)   —   without compensation

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 撤 [Kanji of the Day]

撤

✍15

中学

remove, withdraw, disarm, dismantle, reject, exclude

テツ

撤退   (てったい)   —   evacuation
撤去   (てっきょ)   —   removal
撤回   (てっかい)   —   withdrawal
撤収   (てっしゅう)   —   removal (of a building, equipment, etc.)
撤廃   (てっぱい)   —   annulment
白紙撤回   (はくしてっかい)   —   complete revocation
全面撤退   (ぜんめんてったい)   —   total (full-scale) withdrawal
撤兵   (てっぺい)   —   withdrawal of troops
部隊撤退   (ぶたいてったい)   —   troop withdrawal
市場撤退   (しじょうてったい)   —   pulling out of a market

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

07:00 AM

Saturday 2026-10-17

11:00 PM

The race to the bottom feels inevitable… [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

but it isn’t.

A company wants web traffic, so it dumbs down content, builds listicles and grows. But then others become even dumber or more convenient, so it has to race to keep up with them. Eventually, with nothing but junk, it fades away.

A company builds a reputation for delivering useful permission-based email newsletters. But it needs to grow, so it eases its rules on spam, facilitates list swaps and grabs for attention. This attracts new users, but eventually the spam filters catch on and the site (and its users) sink into the muck.

A celebrity finds their notability fading, so they appear on C and then D list reality shows until everyone is in on the joke except them…

We can justify most moves to the bottom while they’re happening, but the problem with this race is that you might win.

With effort, you might not get to the top, but without resolve, you’ll certainly find yourself at the bottom.

The alternative is to resist the temptation for fast growth and settle for trust and authority instead. The race to the top is possible, but it’s more like a patient, persistent climb.

It’s difficult, lonely and only for long-term players. That’s precisely why it’s so valuable.

If you’re not proud of it, don’t serve it.

      

Just for Skeets and Giggles (10.17.26) [The Status Kuo]

The midterms are just over two weeks away.

44d6d78c-3430-4540-bc48-f79a849af85d.jpeg

Rather than addressing soaring fuel prices, the wars in Iran and Ukraine and rampant corruption, the president and his cronies seem intent on a smash-and-grab.

Image.heic

Trump is whining again about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Image.heic

If you’re on Russia’s side, it’s hard to pass as a peacemaker.

Image.heic

The oligarchs are particularly worried about the latest turn in the Russia-Ukraine war.

IMG_3059.jpeg

Widespread reports say that the online right’s yammering has died down lately. Coincidence?

6860f7ec-91e2-4757-aee3-2c4b508ea097.jpeg

I misread this at first, too. Truly gallows humor!

Image.heic

Dems now appear to hold the upper hand in deep-red Texas.

Image.heic

But his faithful are sticking by him, even if they can’t explain why.

Image.heic

This is a far cry from the Republicans of a generation ago.

SNL had thoughts on a widely shared image of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Image.heic

But there are still Hegseth defenders, right?

Image.heic

Whiskey Pete is all about the T.

Image.heic

Some top-shelf political commentary from this stand-up.

Image.heic

The big news this week: Trump’s handpicked new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, lasted just five days (or four depending on how you count it). Why? Well, let’s just say her first press briefing was less than stellar.

Image.heic

Here’s Jimmy Kimmel, trying to get canceled again by the Trump White House.

Image.heic

Takes on her performance soared like the price of diesel.

Image.heic

Here’s the Devil himself in her earpiece.

Image.heic

One of my favorites here:

Image.heic

The bit works even without the full look.

Image.heic

She was giving strong Miss Teen South Carolina vibes.

Image.heic

For you SNL fans:

Image.heic

Every actor will appreciate this.

Image.heic

There were also her claims of being an “attorney,” despite never having passed the bar exam. Her explanation involved (checks notes) China.

Image.heic

Halloween costume idea just dropped.

913198d9-5659-4b72-897c-abdcf2c5fffd.jpeg

With the false claims piling up for Katie Sack-a-lies, could she last much longer?

Image.heic

Did anyone else catch this?

Image.heic

Trump was photographed on Marine One with his travel companion Natalie and his new press secretary, and well…

Image.heic

The verdict: The lettuce outlasted Katie. Here’s a… tribute for you Hunger Games fans.

The Daily Show also offered a moving in memoriam.

Image.heic

It reminded my friend Corey Craig of something…

Image.heic

Sorry, not sorry.

Image.png

Mrs. Frazzled had some gentle parenting to do.

Image.heic

She went back to the Devil to re-bargain for her pasty soul (which he apparently consumed?), but no dice.

Image.heic

The Onion previews a future headline.

Image.heic

For those who need it in handy chart form, four days works out to just over a third of a Scaramucci.

Image.png

Bye, gurl.

Weekend Update had a special guest on.

Image.heic

It’s often said we’re blessed that today’s fascists are also embarrassingly incompetent. Exhibit 4,879:

IMG_3060.jpeg

Since Elon Musk is back in the news in the worst way, let’s review what we already know about him.

Image.heic

Shout out to the DSA folks in Los Angeles for this seasonally appropriate commercial.

Image.heic

I had no idea Kacey Musgraves was an internet sniper.

IMG_3047.jpeg

If you’re like most readers, you’ve seen this ask each week and scrolled past. I get it. This is free, and money is tight. But I’m hoping a few of you will take a moment today to support this newsletter, which depends wholly on voluntary contributions. The tip jar has been very low on new subscriptions lately, and it would make my day if a few folks would pledge $6 a month or $60 a year to support my daily efforts! Thanks for listening and considering!

Subscribe now

My heart melted watching this determined doggo.

Image.heic

Speaking of skills, this balancing act is impressive.

Image.heic

I loved this comment. Very of the moment.

IMG_3099.jpeg

This three-Doberman family is so fun to follow.

Image.heic

You don’t need three Dobermans to have great security.

Image.heic

On to the kitties. Talk about flower power!

Image.heic

I didn’t know cats sometimes jump like bunnies in a field.

Image.heic

I also had no idea mountain goats acted this way. Dude, you’re gonna get canceled.

Image.heic

It’s spooky season, so I present to you a terrifying yet cute rabbit.

Image.heic

The response to this post is amazing.

Image.heic
Image.heic

I watched just one of these clips and now I’m hooked.

IMG_3052.jpeg

Here’s another. Aaaaaaah!

Image.heic

More British humor! This guy is so good on the fly.

Image.heic

One more classic from Michael McIntyre. Don’t skip this one!

Image.heic

Another tribute to our lost legends, Whitney and Dolly.

Image.heic

And one for just Dolly:

Image.heic

DJs hear the world differently.

Image.heic

To close things out, a dad-joke gag of sorts. I love the cross-accent humor!

Image.heic

Have a great weekend!

Jay

10:00 PM

Pluralistic: Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (17 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links


A lonely country road with a large roadside billboard. Thrusting out of the billboard is a punching fist with bloody, spiked brass knuckles; it is surrounded by scabrous craters. The sky is a psychedelic roil of red-brown clouds, from behind which loom indistinct, vast tropical flowers.

Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (permalink)

More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history. As large as that boycott is, everyone – yes, everyone – should block every "programmatic" ad, because the entire system is so insecure that failing to do so could result in the total compromise of any or all of your digital devices.

That's the inescapable conclusion of Citizen Lab's latest blockbuster investigative report, "Exposing AdFection," which reveals how the largest ad-tech companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, allowed themselves to be hijacked by a "mercenary spyware" company that used the ad system to locate targeted individuals and serve "zero-click malware" that took over their computers and phones without them having to take any action:

https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/

These tech giants amassed detailed surveillance dossiers on virtually every internet user, and they've assigned each of us unique, persistent identifiers, like a Social Security Number for spying. These companies also allow advertisers – or anyone pretending to be an advertiser – to serve blobs of code (which is all an ad is) to anyone based on those identifiers.

This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve "malicious ads" (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained "no-click, zero-day" attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without any user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning.

Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself "Integrity Labs" because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps.

Discover-Tech was "certified" as a safe supplier by Google, Yandex, Microsoft, Beeswax (a division of Comcast) and IAB, the ad-tech industry's leading professional association. Ironically, Discover-Tech even attacked users by serving them malicious GDPR notices that appeared to let users opt out of commercial surveillance.

Because Discover-Tech was certified by all these industry bodies and firms, it had access to more than four billion ad-auctions, meaning that on billions of occasions, it was able to collect the identities of users loading apps and visiting websites, check them against the list of targets, and attack any victims it discovered through this dragnet.

Discover-Tech is an Israeli company with ties to other Israeli spyware and hacking companies, including through its board, whose members included Eric Banoun ("One of the pioneers of offensive cyber in Israel" –Haaretz). They have overlaps, relationships and affiliations with a rogue's gallery of Israeli companies, including the notorious NSO Group, who routinely sell cyber-weapons to the world's worst governments and whose products have been used to attack journalists, embassy workers, and activists.

The whole incident highlights the monumental insecurity of the ad-tech industry, whose indiscriminate and voracious surveillance and manifestly insufficient vetting and security auditing now expose every internet user in the world to terrifying targeted attacks. These companies – including Google, a thrice-convicted monopolist whose surveillance tendrils are wrapped around the whole world – claim that they operate their networks with prudence and oversight. But the proof is in the pudding: for years, they've played host to a murderer's row of cyber-mercenaries who used their infrastructure to attack journalists and others.

The only way to avoid this is to block ads. This is easy enough to do in a browser (which is why the majority of internet users have installed an ad-blocker in their browsers), but it's illegal to reverse-engineer and modify an app so you can block the ads in it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element

Many websites run anti-ad-block scripts that push out nagging, guilt-tripping notices that call you a thief and a cheapskate for blocking ads. Ignore those notices: if a website is running "programmatic" ads that allow arbitrary third parties to spy on billions of people and target individuals for malicious device takeovers, they are charging too high a price to see their content.

Some sites go further: their notices demand that you either turn off your ad-blocker or pay for a subscription. This "pay or okay" scheme is illegal in Europe, California and other territories with strong privacy laws, and they are morally bankrupt besides. Privacy shouldn't be a luxury item and everyone deserves to be secure from cyber-attacks:

https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-make-you-pay-privacy

This report also provides the most comprehensive rebuttal to a dangerous idea that refuses to die: that we should improve competition in the ad-tech sector by assigning every internet user a mandatory, government-issued advertising ID to "democratize" ad-targeting and followup (which the sector calls "attribution"):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve

Despite all this, none of it is an indictment of ads per se. The problem here isn't advertising, it's surveillance. The ad-tech sector has convinced advertisers that targeting ads to users rather than content will massively improve ad performance. The evidence for this is very poor: targeted ads improve clickthrough rates by less than 5% (relative to content-based ads that relate to the substance of the page you're looking at), and they're incredibly expensive (and very dangerous!) to serve.

On top of all that, surveillance-based ads shift power away from publishers (who know more about the materials they publish than any ad-tech company ever will) to spying ad-tech companies (who can spy on users in ways that no publisher could ever match). Whatever minor additional revenues surveillance advertising can wring out of the market are totally swamped by the cost of the ad-tech sector's own operations, which the ad-tech sector makes up for by grossly underinvesting in security and by colluding to cheat publishers and advertisers, charging more for ads and paying less to the websites that run them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

If we want to improve competition in advertising services, the answer isn't to facilitate spying (which also allows the world's scummiest cyber-mercenaries to stage and serve targeted attacks). We should ban surveillance advertising altogether, restoring context-based ads to their role as the way that publishers make an honest living without selling out their audiences:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation

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 Linux on a Big Mouth Billy Bass https://web.archive.org/web/20010927153043/http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/

#20yrsago No-Fly lists even stupider than suspected https://web.archive.org/web/20061019002553/http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fstories%2F2006%2F10%2F05%2F60minutes%2Fmain2066624.shtml

#20yrsago Canadian MP booted for his blog https://web.archive.org/web/20061026153747/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/10/18/turner-caucus.html

#20yrsago Recording industry shuts out Brazilian legal scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20061103225020/http://www.a2kbrasil.org.br/ENG/SIGN-A-PETITION-FOR-AMENDING-THE

#20yrsago How pickpockets work https://web.archive.org/web/20070110023812/http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2006/11/mystory.html

#15yrsago Why are more people opting for legal name-changes than ever before? https://web.archive.org/web/20111020163908/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15333140

#15yrsago Advice to the 1% from Lemony Snicket https://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket/

#15yrsago Proposed Australian law makes it an offense to insult Gaming Minister Michael O’Brien https://web.archive.org/web/20120507161803/http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/surely-this-is-a-joke/story-fn7x8me2-1226167552466

#15yrsago Aloha From Hell: Sandman Slim goes back to Hell and kicks more ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/18/aloha-from-hell-sandman-slim-goes-back-to-hell-and-kicks-more-ass/

#10yrsago California DMV thinks “INFOS3C” is a dirty word https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/17/california-dmv-rejects-1nfos3c-vanity-plate-because-sexual-connotation/

#10yrsago Howard Stern won’t release Trump tapes https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/howard-stern-on-replaying-his-donald-trump-interviews-it-would-be-a-betrayal-7542079/

#10yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson says Elon Musk’s Mars plan is a “1920s science-fiction cliché” https://web.archive.org/web/20161018043554/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/why-elon-musk-s-mars-vision-needs-some-real-imagination

#10yrsago UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal says GHCQ illegally spied for 17 years https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13305270/uk-illegal-surveillance-gchq-investigatory-powers-tribunal

#10yrsago Project Include cuts off Y Combinator because Peter Thiel is a part-time investor there https://web.archive.org/web/20161019043240/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/horrified-by-trump-silicon-valley-leaders-debate-cutting-ties-to-peter-thiel

#10yrsago Islamophobic terrorist cell planned a “bloodbath” in Kansas, wanted to kill Muslim babies https://web.archive.org/web/20161018144035/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/15/it-will-be-a-bloodbath-inside-the-kansas-militia-plot-to-ignite-a-religious-war/?utm_term=.a9d769256cf6

#10yrsago Everything Belongs to the Future: a tale of pharmadystopian, immortal gerontocrats https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/18/everything-belongs-to-the-future-a-tale-of-pharmadystopian-immortal-gerontocrats/

#10yrsago UK government proposes issuing Britons with unique porn-viewing ID numbers https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/a-database-of-the-uks-porn-habits-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/

#10yrsago Donald Trump’s mail-servers are running Windows 2003 https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#core

#5yrsago Copyfraudster censors investigation of implausible covid gadget https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud

#5yrsago Corporatism made John Deere ripe for a strike https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#deere-dash

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: 563 (26602 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.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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.

How to get Pluralistic:

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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.

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