News

Tuesday 2026-11-03

04:00 AM

Sam Altman’s Case Against Your RAM Is Efficient. That’s The Problem [Techdirt]

By now it’s likely you’ve heard of the whole concept of the AI paperclip maximizer problem — a hypothetical first put forth by Nick Bostrom — suggesting that a misaligned AI system that looks to optimize on the wrong single thing (in this case creating paperclips) could lead to the end of humanity. Specifically, the thought experiment is that if you have a sufficiently powerful AI tool that is told to “maximize” the creation of paperclips, it might decide the best way to do that is to seize control of all resources and dedicate them solely to making paperclips. And, naturally, that might include grinding up humans, either as raw material for paperclips or as fuel to power the paperclip factory.

The supposed “lesson” of this is to be cautious about these AI tools, though I think the actual lessons are twofold: (1) thought experiments can only take you so far and (2) never over optimize on a single metric. Indeed, this was part of what our recent series, The Metric is Not the Mission, was all about.

Anyway, everyone in the AI world knows about the whole paperclip thing. I guarantee you Sam Altman knows about it. He has praised the book where Bostrom put forth the hypothetical, claiming that it was “the best thing I’ve seen” on the topic of “will AI kill us all.” And he’s joked about it in a memey way:

A tweet by Sam Altman asks whether an AI would realistically want many little paperclips or one big paperclip, with a poll showing 75.5% chose "many little" and 24.5% chose "one big."

But it’s not clear that he truly has internalized that lesson regarding not optimizing on just a single thing. Last week he went on John Collison’s (co-founder of Stripe) “Cheeky Pint” podcast to talk about the state of AI.

A bunch of the headlines focused on one specific thing that he said, however, that it’s “quite terrible” for people to be wasting RAM in home machines over having them working full steam in a data center somewhere. The context here matters a bit. Collison catches Altman a bit off guard by asking “how’s the compute shortage going?” just as Altman takes a big gulp from his pint of beer, and you see Altman try not to laugh/spit out his beer, before there’s an obvious cut in the video, where he recomposes himself.

They then have a discussion about the increasing demand for compute, Altman talks about how they’re working on having robots build “self-replicating data centers” (what?!?) to which Collison rightly interjects that the problem with data centers right now isn’t the lack of labor available to build them. Collison then shifts the conversation back to the stuff that most people care about: the fact that RAM prices have increased dramatically recently, which is jacking up the price of everything from computers to phones.

Collison notes that people keep saying the market should take care of this: if prices keep going up, shouldn’t Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” motivate more companies to make more RAM and ease the shortage? Altman shows that he’s not a big believer in the invisible hand of the market concept:

Collison: My observation, the compute stuff is they say: “The solution to high prices is high prices.” And it’s like, okay.
Step 1: We have the high prices for memory, and GPUs, and everything. The solutions should be here any moment now. How are we doing on the solutions front?

Altman: Bad.

Collison: And I’m not saying this is OpenAI’s job. I feel this is the invisible hand’s job, right? Memory’s gotten really expensive. So, new memory makers are going to flood the market any moment now.

Altman: I think the invisible hand is failing right now. I mean, the invisible hand… It has like a checkered track record at best. But, I think it’s not quite working here.

He then points out that, for decades, DRAM was a commodity product with razor-thin margins and barely any profits. His argument is that memory makers aren’t willing to expand much because they’re afraid that the bubble might burst and they’d have overbuilt (which… might not be wrong?).

Of course, Altman leaves out of this the fact that OpenAI has basically tried to corner the market on RAM, trying to lock up 40% of the world’s supply without even guaranteeing that it will follow through on the actual purchase orders. I mean, I think that alone would have at least some impact on the current price for RAM, wouldn’t it?

Collison pushes a bit further, and still wants to know why others aren’t getting into the memory market, and even (half jokingly?) suggests Intel could get into the market — a reference to one of the key parts of Intel’s lore and mystique: the Andy Grove decision in 1985 to get completely out of the memory chip business to focus on processors, which got a bunch of recent attention when Intel’s current CEO suggested the (struggling) company might reverse that decision 40 years later.

That brings Altman around to the critical quote regarding local RAM, in which he dismisses the argument that local inference is important, as a way of suggesting that the more efficient use of memory would be in large datacenters where it can be utilized at a much higher rate:

Oh, I think there are all of these ways where the supply chain—it’s just super non-obvious.

An example of this is people…A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now. Because, we are going to have open-source models. We’re going to be able to run them on our computers. And so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And, being used—Mm-hmm. 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment.

And somehow everyone’s… many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.

So he’s correct… in one very, very, very narrow sense of this quote. If you are only interested in dealing with the current “world’s limited supply of DRAM” he’s not wrong that it is more “efficient” to have that RAM be in a data center and then rented out to you. And he’s not exactly wrong that if everyone just paid per token for remote compute, the cost of RAM in your own PC would matter a lot less.

But… he’s kinda missing the larger point: that people are not just focused on optimizing for the most efficient use of memory. They’re not just optimizing for what’s best for “the global supply chain of RAM makers.” They have other concerns — and other uses beyond AI — as well, such as their own sovereignty and control over their own tools and systems. There’s a reason my essay on the need for decentralization (including in AI) went so viral a few months back.

And it’s not because people think they’re single-handedly going to solve the global supply crisis in DRAM by running everything locally. It’s because we’ve seen what happens when a central provider controls key parts of our stack, and the results are very, very, very bad.

Using open weight models on local hardware may not be the most efficient for the exact price of RAM (which, again, Altman tried to corner the market on), but it certainly leads to much more actual user empowerment by people who want to use these tools, but without outsourcing control to someone like Altman.

In a pure “efficiency” model where you are solely optimizing on what’s the most cost efficient way to use memory the answer would be to have it in datacenters where you’d benefit from both economies of scale as well as flexible utilization. But that has consequences. It’s the same logic by which a fascist dictator may seem “more efficient” to those sick of democratic quirks and bureaucratic red tape. It only sounds good if your mental model is completely screwed up and simplistic.

In both cases, you’re talking about a very simplified mental model, optimizing on a suboptimal point. Personal autonomy over our tools and our systems is more important than making your data center more efficient, Sam. The paperclip problem comes from focusing on a narrow metric and over optimizing on it. And in this clip, Sam is paperclipping RAM.

Study Claims Vizio Simply Ignores ‘Smart’ TV Spying Opt Out Requests [Techdirt]

Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly “off.” Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG’s response? To deny everything.

For decades now we’ve documented how while “smart” TV makers are obsessed with making money off of in-home surveillance (which is now more profitable than the actual TV), they do an abysmal job protecting the data they collect. They also routinely don’t respect consumer choice when users say they don’t want to participate in the full scope of hyper-commercialized mass surveillance.

That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial “smart” TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers.

TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn’t work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not:

“We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more
than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios.”

These companies have been awful for a long while now, and U.S. regulation of the sector has varied between soggy and inconsistent. Many smart TV manufacturers fail to encrypt sensitive data, or remove features if you refuse to have your daily viewing habits measured and monetized (by say, disconnecting your TV from the internet).

Vizio was fined $2.2 million by the FTC back in 2017 for failing to tell customers that their televisions were spying on them. The company also wound up facing a $17 million lawsuit that wound up giving consumers somewhere between $13 and $31 (lawyers in the case saw $5.6 million in fees).

The researchers say since they can’t see the precise scope of what’s being collected due to encryption, they’re unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were):

“The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement.”

Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku’s own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung’s opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts.

On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS’ like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs:

“VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can’t be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint.

The app name alone can be revealing. We saw ACR on apps such as VIDAA Kids, which raises concerns under the U.S. children’s privacy law (COPPA), and Christianity and Money. VIDAA’s own HOME OS app sent show and film titles in place of the app name.”

Keep in mind these researchers just focused on ACR — or video, image, or audio snippets taken to track your viewing and build a profile on you. There are numerous other ways smart TVs can track you — and numerous other avenues via which your traffic is being surveilled by everybody along the chain, including your telecom provider.

This persists because companies do not fear U.S. regulators, because U.S. regulators have been largely lobotomized via corruption. The United States also remains too corrupt to base even a baseline privacy law for the internet era or regulate the data brokers that further monetize much of this data. Still the researchers were nice enough to provide regulators a path, should they someday choose to do their jobs.

Monday 2026-11-02

10:00 PM

Pluralistic: Autodoxing (02 Nov 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Autodoxing: The road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Shakespeare programming language; DeCSS is "pure speech"; Blue Coat sold surveillance tools to Syrian secret police; "Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions"; Cable prices rose at double the rate of inflation for 20 years; Supercuts; Antivax x Trump.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, 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.


An engraving of a high-ceilinged Edwardian bathroom; it has been altered so that all the fixtures are leaking, flooding the floor. Peering up from the flooded water are various robot-heads.

Autodoxing (permalink)

After 25 years of fighting for human rights amid the wreckage of bad tech policy, I'm here to tell you that the road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy.

The most galling thing about this wreckage is that it was both foreseeable and foreseen. Back when Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was telling the world "Privacy is dead, get over it," digital rights advocates were saying, "Not only are digital tools pretty dang good at helping you protect your privacy, but a society-wide abolition of privacy sets us up for infinite harms long into the future":

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

It wasn't just business leaders who hated privacy, it was also our political classes. Bill Clinton tried to put a backdoor into every microchip (no, really):

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

The NSA managed to enact a total prohibition on civilian access to working encryption, on the grounds that we're all safer if our spooks can spy on "bad guys" even if that means that every creep, petty crook, corporate or state-sponsored spy, and mafia can spy on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/09/bernstein-2/#win-some-lose-some

Even after that ban was overturned, governments encouraged the private sector to spy on us without limit, precaution or permission. Those private-sector troves of intimate, compromising data about every person alive constitute a warrantless, off-the-books surveillance system that cops, spies and government agencies can tap at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/13/petards-r-us/#nobus

To protect these surveillance capabilities, private firms and governments colluded to pass "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to reverse engineer our devices and apps to add privacy blockers to them, with the effect that every device we own and every app we use spies on us constantly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

At the same time, states either failed to pass new privacy laws (as in the USA, where federal consumer privacy law was last updated in 1988), or passed privacy laws that went unenforced (as in the EU, where "pretending to be Irish" allows US tech giants to flout EU privacy law):

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

Our surveillance free-for-all world is objectively very bad. Over and over, companies and agencies who have been permitted to nonconsensually harvest and retain our data demonstrate that they are not capable of keeping that data safe, and no matter how badly they fuck up, nothing changes. It's been nearly a decade since Equifax doxed 148 million Americans and not only is the company still in business, they've been permitted to buy up and absorb more commercial surveillance firms.

US regulators let Equifax buy Teletrack in 2021. Canadian regulators let them buy the Food Industry Credit Bureau in 2023. The same year, Brazilian regulators let Equifax buy Boa Vista Serviços. This all despite the fact that Equifax blamed its breach on shitty security practices after a string of mergers that led to it haphazardly combining databases from newly acquired surveillance companies.

Data isn't the new oil. Data is the new oily rag: profitable only if you can warehouse it in vast quantities under unsafe conditions and have society pick up the bill for every conflagration:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Equifax is a serial reoffender, but rather than getting the corporate death-penalty, they've been made to pay coins-down-the-back-of-the-sofa fines that amount to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the costs they imposed on society by amassing these vast, flaming storehouses of oily rags.

Why wouldn't Equifax reoffend? Our policymakers keep demanding less privacy, not more, and their indifference to the consequences is (almost) comical.

Take Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister who uttered what remains, without a doubt, the single stupidest thing anyone anywhere has ever said about tech policy. Like many of his peers before, during, and since his reign, Turnbull had been trying to outlaw working encryption, insisting that every device have a Bill Clinton-esque back-door for the purpose of spying on "bad guys." When told that the laws of mathematics dictated that any measure that let Australia's cops spy on "bad guys" would also let bad guys spy on Australians, Turnbull replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathematics-dont-apply-here-says-australian-pm/

We could laugh Turnbull off…if he was an outlier. But while Turnbull had the world's stupidest rejoinder to the scientifically irrefutable fact that banning encryption will let bad guys hack everything, he was hardly alone in wanting to ban encryption. Banning encryption is current policy in Canada:

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2026/10/08/canadas-bill-c-22-threatens-encryption-users-privacy-and-the-security-of-digital-economies/

It's also current policy in the UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

And in the EU:

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

The difference between Malcolm Turnbull and, say, Canadian PM Mark Carney is that Turnbull was stupid enough to try to defend his ban on encryption, while Carney simply shakes his head at his critics' naivete and continues to press forward with his catastrophic proposal to welcome every cybercriminal in the world to hack every morsel of Canadian data.

When it comes to bad privacy policy, our political classes aren't content to rest on their laurels: hardly a week goes by without news of a new way to encourage (or even require) the private sector to recklessly collect and retain our data, despite the dead certainty that this data will eventually end up breaching and getting plastered all over the internet.

Take "age verification" laws. There's no such thing as "age verification" – there's just spying on everyone, all the time, creating (even more) records of all of our internet activities:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/19/shes-dead-of-course/#consensus-hallucination

Every promise of "privacy preserving" age verification is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

If you think kids are experiencing internet harms today, just wait until we expose them to the harms of having even more of their data harvested, stored, breached, and weaponized against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

If you want to protect kids from algorithmic manipulation and targeting by bad actors, what about banning spying on kids so no one can target them?

https://made-not-found-by-danah-boyd.ghost.io/no-one-paid-me-to-disagree-with-jonathan-haidt-it-was-teenagers-who-taught-me-that-he-was-wrong/

Now, at this point, you might be thinking, "How can we know who the kids are so we know who not to spy on?" You can't. In order to not spy on kids, you'd just have to not spy on anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

"Don't spy on anyone" is the kind of thing that has a reasonable chance of enhancing online privacy. But in the time-honored tradition of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas," governments keep finding ways to make digital privacy worse, for example, by procuring Flock cameras for every lamp-post:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/high-crime-lmao-how-cops-are-treating-mass-surveillance-joke

And then there's UK Labour: after the success of a pilot program for an incredibly effective and safe privacy-preserving way of analyzing the country's health records for research processes, they commissioned the Goldacre Report to evaluate the possibility of making this permanent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

After that report was completed and had a chance to be metabolized by policymakers, Labour acted upon it…by throwing it out and handing all of the country's health data to Palantir, a serial mishandler of data and violator of privacy:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/30/legal-objections-palantir-nhs-platform-handling-data

Here's the scariest thing about bad privacy policy: it has a long fuse. The harms of commercial and private-sector digital surveillance can occur years or even decades after the decision to permit it.

There's a straight line from the post-9/11 decision to encourage public agencies to gather, merge and warehouse data on every person in America, and the ability of ICE ethnic cleansing squads to break down people's doors and drag them off to concentration camps; just as there's a straight line from the decision to do nothing about the breach of every Social Security Number and the later theft of all Social Security data by adolescent DOGE criminals:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-your-ssn-in-the-national-public-data-breach-heres-how-to-find-out

But despite how obvious these connections are, the fact that they're separated by a lot of time and space provides our policymakers with cover for making terrible decisions with foreseeably terrible outcomes. As a society, we lack object permanence, the ability to connect acts in the past with present-day phenomena.

When the press reports on a "Black October" of catastrophic, AI-fueled data breaches and hack attacks, they don't mention a generation of policymakers' indifference and hostility to information security:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake

Policymakers benefit from politics' eternal now, in which disasters simply befall us, without any history or precedent or cause. Remember the One Big Beautiful Bill? Its architects designed it to wreak its worst harms after the midterms, with Medicaid work rules and food aid restrictions starting in December, and cuts to affordable housing and rural hospitals phasing in through the year:

https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/832146932089700352

Black October is going to give way to Black November, Black December, Black 2027, and the Black 2030s – a string of cybersecurity catastrophes that will befall us until policymakers decide that keeping us safe is more important than making it easy for them to attack their chosen "bad guys."

Here's a preview of Black November: there's a new strain of the Volta infostealer malware that uses AI tools to dox you even as it hacks you:

https://www.wired.com/story/kernel-panic-volta-autodoxer-ai-infostealer-malware/

How that works: your computer gets hacked and your data gets stolen, then it gets merged with breach data from Ticketmaster, Disney, AT&T and other companies that have recklessly compiled vast troves of data on all of us, stored it insecurely, and leaked it onto the internet where it will live forever.

Volta's makers prompt their LLM "to act like an intelligence analyst and produce structured citation-backed assessment of the victim." This lets the criminals prioritize their victims based on the expected return from exploiting them. It augments this dossier by combing through your Gmail as well as your Doordash and Uber Eats profiles. This merged data makes it much easier for criminals to call you up or email you (or have a chatbot call you up or email you) and trick you into giving up even more data:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

Volta seems especially interested in younger internet users, targeting "Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions." Of course, once our "age verification" services breach vast, eternally persistent, detailed troves of data on young internet users, this kind of AI-supercharged malware will be able to target kids with much greater fidelity and efficacy.

AI capabilities have made infostealers much worse, but the reason for that new potency lies in how AI capabilities are supercharged by breach data that is the foreseeable and foreseen consequence of generations of hostility to privacy on the part of policymakers and corporations who responded to the incentives policymakers created.

We are living in the age of oily rags. For decades we fucked around with letting the private sector warehouse our data and weaken our security so that public sector agencies could plunder our data and our computers at will. Now, we keep finding out that everything is on fire.

It's going to take a long time to fix this, but we can do it. We can build more secure systems. We can make it much more of a legal ball-ache for companies to gather our data in the first place, and we can legalize and promote the creation of privacy blockers for browsers, phones, computers, cars, thermostats and smart speakers. We can enact corporate death-penalties for breaches to reflect the true societal cost of warehousing our data. We can ban Flock cameras and tear down the post-9/11 "fusion centers" that neatly package up our data for use by DOGE fascists and ICE thugs. We can ban our spy agencies from hoarding defects in widely used software, and instead require them to divulge these bugs so vendors can fix them:

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

And before we do any of that, we can just stop making it worse by ending the campaigns to require companies to spy on us and deliberately introduce security defects into their products.

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 NY Post blames pagans from Indianapolis for spam malware https://web.archive.org/web/20011103073038/http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/33077.htm

#25yrsago The Shakespeare Programming Language https://web.archive.org/web/20011207071324/http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/

#25yrsago Appeals court: DeCSS is "pure speech" https://web.archive.org/web/20011102003502/https://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48075,00.html

#20yrsago Apple drops Trusted Computing https://web.archive.org/web/20070106150844/https://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/

#20yrsago Microsoft threatens China pull-out over jailed bloggers http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6102180.stm

#15yrsago Righthaven copyright troll’s victims send in US marshals to seize its assets https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/us-marshals-turned-loose-to-collect-6372080-from-righthaven/

#15yrsago Supercuts: rapid-cut videos that collect repetition https://web.archive.org/web/20111103190737/http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/supercut/

#15yrsago Study: why parents help their underage kids pretend to be 13 in order to use Internet sites https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3850/3075

#15yrsago Blue Coat “deep packet inspection” tools used by Syrian secret police and other repressive regimes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/blue-coat-acknowledges-syrian-government-use-its-products

#15yrsago Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions: awesomely dangerous pranks from the age of fraternal lodges https://memex.craphound.com/2011/11/01/extraordinary-catalog-of-peculiar-inventions-awesomely-dangerous-pranks-from-the-age-of-fraternal-lodges/

#10yrsago Cable prices have risen at more than double the rate of inflation for 20 years https://cordcutting.com/news/cable-prices-have-risen-faster-than-inflation-for-each-of-the-past-20-years/

#10yrsago Typical English village mystified by its cult status among Chinese tourists https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-37820663

#10yrsago Nebraska’s billionaire governor couldn’t preserve the death penalty through the law, so now he’s buying a ballot initiative https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/ricketts-nebraska-death-penalty/

#10yrsago Anti-vaxx conspiracy leaders back Donald Trump, claim it’s mutual https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2016/11/02/donald-trump-and-disgraced-antivaccine-scientist-andrew-wakefield-best-buds-forever

#10yrsago New, fast-spreading IoT botnet hybridizes two less-effective strains to achieve quick dominance https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/new-iot-botnet-that-borrows-from-notorious-mirai-infects-3500-devices/

#1yrago There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/01/redistribution-vs-predistribution/#elbows-up-eurostack

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: 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.

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.

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Dutch Court Orders ISP to Block Z-Library and OceanofPDF [TorrentFreak]

stopIn March 2024, the Rotterdam court added Anna’s Archive and Library Genesis to the Dutch pirate site blocklist.

The order was a win for anti-piracy group BREIN, but one prominent shadow library was missing. Z-Library wasn’t covered, even though BREIN warned in 2022 that it could seek blocking measures if the site recovered from the U.S. crackdown.

When we asked about the omission, BREIN explained that it focused on Anna’s Archive and LibGen because these were seen as more popular. The anti-piracy group added that it planned to request a Z-Library blockade in the future, if the site stayed online. More than two years later, BREIN has kept its word.

KPN Must Block Z-Library and OceanofPDF

Last Friday, the Rotterdam court ruled in BREIN’s favor in its case against Internet provider KPN. The court ordered the ISP to block Z-Library and OceanofPDF, which BREIN describes as the two largest and most popular book piracy sites that weren’t blocked yet.

The order lists one domain for OceanofPDF, oceanofpdf.com, and five Z-Library domains: z-library.sk, z-library.la, 1lib.sk, z-lib.gd and articles.sk.

OceanofPDF

OceanofPDF

According to BREIN, the shadow library sites offer tens of thousands of titles from Dutch rightsholders. These include books, magazines, (academic) journals, sheet music and newspapers.

BREIN adds that, when it served the summons, OceanofPDF had more than 200,000 monthly visits from the Netherlands, while Z-Library had over 300,000 Dutch visits per month.

BREIN sued KPN under the terms of the site blocking covenant, which it signed with several Dutch Internet providers in October 2021. This agreement requires BREIN to sue the providers in alphabetical order, and this time it was KPN’s turn.

While KPN was the only targeted ISP, other major Dutch Internet providers have agreed to follow suit under the covenant. These blocking actions are meant to make the shadow libraries much harder to reach in the Netherlands, at least without workarounds.

The covenant also required BREIN to try to take the sites offline at the source, before going to court. In July, BREIN asked the site owners, registrars, registries and hosting providers to take action, without result. According to the court, BREIN couldn’t be expected to do more.

Dynamic Order Covers Future Mirrors

The order has a dynamic provision, which allows for blocking actions against future domains, subdomains, proxies and mirrors. This means that if Z-Library or OceanofPDF switch to new domains to evade the blocking measures, BREIN can add these domains without going back to court.

KPN previously pushed back against a dynamic order. In 2023, the provider argued that a similar order targeting Lookmovie and Flixtor was too broad, but the court disagreed. This time, KPN didn’t put up a defense and left the decision to the judge.

Interestingly, Z-Library itself encourages people to run mirrors. Since 2025, users can operate mirror sites on their own domains and, since June, these mirrors can carry custom branding and be password protected.

Z-Library’s mirror page

Z-Library's mirror page

Password-protected mirrors without any Z-Library branding are not easily detected by rightsholders, which makes them harder to block, also dynamically.

BREIN Points to Libraries

BREIN stresses that readers do not need these shadow libraries as there are plenty of legal options to get books.

“There are fantastic legal, user-friendly apps on the market that let consumers read and listen to countless ebooks and audiobooks. You can also borrow ebooks and audiobooks through the library at little cost,” BREIN writes.

“So there’s no reason at all to get books from illegal sources. Illegal services put all the revenue in their own pockets. Nothing reaches the authors and publishers.”

Whether the dynamic order can keep up with Z-Library’s network of user-run mirrors has yet to be seen, but it should make the sites harder to reach for casual visitors.

—

TorrentFreak has seen a copy of the latest blocking ruling issued by the Rotterdam court, but it has not been published publicly yet. BREIN’s announcement can be found here.

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

07:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 算 [Kanji of the Day]

算

✍14

小2

calculate, divining, number, abacus, probability

サン

そろ

予算   (よさん)   —   estimate (of costs)
計算   (けいさん)   —   calculation
通算   (つうさん)   —   total
決算   (けっさん)   —   settlement of accounts
予算案   (よさんあん)   —   draft budget
補正予算   (ほせいよさん)   —   revised budget
試算   (しさん)   —   trial calculation
加算   (かさん)   —   addition
予算編成   (よさんへんせい)   —   budget compilation (by the Cabinet)
換算   (かんさん)   —   conversion (e.g., yen to dollars)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 舗 [Kanji of the Day]

舗

✍15

中学

shop, store, pave

ホ

店舗   (てんぽ)   —   shop
老舗   (しにせ)   —   long-established shop
舗装   (ほそう)   —   paving (a road)
本舗   (ほんぽ)   —   head office
舗装路   (ほそうろ)   —   paved road
舗装道路   (ほそうどうろ)   —   paved road
貸店舗   (かしてんぽ)   —   store for rent
茶舗   (ちゃほ)   —   tea store
舗道   (ほどう)   —   paved road
新聞舗   (しんぶんほ)   —   newspaper distributor

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Open Source Conference 2026 Fukuoka に出展・登壇します [OpenStreetMap Japan]

OpenStreetMap Japan は、2026年12月12日（土）に福岡大学で開催される「Open Source Conference 2026 Fukuoka（OSC2026 Fukuoka）」に出展します。ブース展示に加え、IoTとOpenStreetMapを活用したバリアフリー情報の共創をテーマにしたセミナーも行います。 OpenStreetMap（OSM）は、誰でも自由に編集し、誰でも自由に利用できるオープンな地理情報データベースです。 ## 開催概要 - 日時：2026年12月12日（土）10:00〜18:00（展示は16:00まで） - 会場：[福岡大学 A棟](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/278117659) 7階 - 参加費：無料 - 参加登録：[OSC2026 Fukuoka 参加登録ページ（connpass）](htt

03:00 PM

07:00 AM

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

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is the first of several comments about Trump’s voting fraud squad proudly announcing the arrest of… 28 people in California. It’s an anonymous comment summing up their attitude:

Republicans just want election fraud. That’s it.

In second place, it’s a double-winning comment that also took second place over on the funny side. Once again it’s an anonymous comment, this time about Ofcom ramping up the Online Safety Act after all the evidence that it isn’t working:

In other words, the Online Safety Act has one, and only one, genuinely good provision: it requires Ofcom to report the data showing that it doesn’t work.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Stephen T. Stone and one more comment about Ofcom, this time answering the question about why they’re doing all this:

Simplest answer is often the best: They want to use this as a pretext for an Internet censorship endeavour in the vein of China’s Great Firewall.

Next, it’s Rocky with another comment about the 28 voter fraud arrests:

Which also means if they can only find 28 erroneously registered people out 23 million it is proof that the system works because no system is perfect and a error rate of 1.22e-6 is so incredibly low it is statistically insignificant. I expected it to be much much higher, because as you say, voters screw up and voters are people and people screw up daily.

I’m just waiting for the idiots to show up ranting about “see, I told you!” which means they think they are perfect and have never ever in their life made a mistake which is utter bullshit. But that’s they way of the fools, confidently ignorant of their own shortcomings.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is David with a reply to another comment aptly describing the rate of voter fraud as “one percent of one percent of one percent”:

That’s already three percent, enough to swing an election.

And don’t tell me that isn’t how percentages work, or you won’t get to enjoy 2000% percent reductions in drug prices.

We’ve already had the second-place double-winner above, so we’ll move on to editor’s choice, starting out with one more anonymous comment about the fraud arrests. This time, it’s about the government’s little trick of lumping together “illegal registration or voting” as a single stat:

Hundreds of millions of Americans have committed murder or drank water.

Finally, we’ve got an anonymous comment about RFK Jr. personally stepping in to approve peptide use over the FDA’s objections:

My peptides bring all the Übermenschen to the yard,
And they’re like “OH MY GOD WHERE DID ALL THESE TUMORS COME FROM?”

That’s all for this week, folks!

04:00 AM

“Not yet” [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The reason we train is to get better.

Every successful product goes from version 1.0 to 2.0, eventually.

Very few people still drive a Model T.

It’s not perfect, not yet. But we ship the work because it’s on the way to the next step.

Perfect isn’t possible. Better always is.

      

A Wonderland Halloween! (and other recent joyful moments) [The Status Kuo]

It’s been a bit since I shared family photos, and what better time to spread some joy and happiness, as we are all thinking about how much brighter the future could be in just a couple of days?

This year’s Halloween theme was Alice in Wonderland! Ronan’s white rabbit ears weren’t on for this photo (and he frequently lost them throughout the day) but you get the gist!

My best friend from high school Kinnari arrived this month to help with the family. She’s a recent empty nester, and now she’s got a full nest again! The Alice in Wonderland theme was her idea, and she made a great Queen of Hearts!

My fur babies were, appropriately, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

We’ve discovered that the kids both have a knack for music. This is their evil crazed musical genius moment lol

The Hudson Valley has a wonderful amount of fall activities for the whole family, and we took full advantage!

The kids played in leaf piles for half an hour, shrieking and laughing with delight!

Their aunt (whom they call Mimi gugu—father’s sister) visited, too! She taught Riley some mindful Buddhist practices, practiced in a Tex-Mex restaurant!

Speaking of Tex-Mex, here are my two little burritos after a bath. It’s a wrap!

And this is them sharing a toy bike together. The tandem ride was their idea!

Some folks wonder why they get up and get going every morning, but I never do, even though it’s usually before dawn! The democracy I’m fighting for is the one my kids deserve, along with millions of children like them.

While our family may not be traditional, we should have the same rights as any other. We should live free from fear and discrimination, especially from our own government. And that goes for our immigrant neighbors, too.

Thanks to all of you who help support my family and my work. It’s truly an honor to lead this community of readers and activists. We’ve made a real difference in key races this election. And when we take back Congress, we will hold our own leaders to the task of restoring the rule of law and ensuring accountability from this criminal regime.

From my family to yours, let’s go out and win this on Tuesday. For all of our futures.

Yours in resistance,

Jay (baba)

with Riley (jiejie) and Ronan (didi)

If you’d like to add your name to the list of my family’s supporters, you can upgrade a free subscription to a paid one using the button below. Thanks to all who already are paying subscribers!

Subscribe now

Sunday 2026-11-01

08:00 PM

06:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 乳 [Kanji of the Day]

乳

✍8

小6

milk, breasts

ニュウ

ちち　ち

牛乳   (ぎゅうにゅう)   —   milk
授乳   (じゅにゅう)   —   breastfeeding
母乳   (ぼにゅう)   —   mother's milk
乳児   (にゅうじ)   —   infant (below 1 year old)
乳幼児   (にゅうようじ)   —   infants
離乳食   (りにゅうしょく)   —   baby food
豆乳   (とうにゅう)   —   soy milk
乳製品   (にゅうせいひん)   —   dairy products
乳液   (にゅうえき)   —   latex (milky fluid found in plants)
哺乳瓶   (ほにゅうびん)   —   baby bottle

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 冗 [Kanji of the Day]

冗

✍4

中学

superfluous, uselessness

ジョウ

冗談   (じょうだん)   —   joke
冗談じゃない   (じょうだんじゃない)   —   it's no joke
冗長   (じょうちょう)   —   tedious
冗談半分   (じょうだんはんぶん)   —   half joking
冗談めかして   (じょうだんめかして)   —   jokingly
冗舌   (じょうぜつ)   —   talkativeness
冗長性   (じょうちょうせい)   —   redundancy
冗費   (じょうひ)   —   unnecessary expense
冗漫   (じょうまん)   —   verbosity
冗長化   (じょうちょうか)   —   duplication

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

07:00 AM

06:00 AM

Pluralistic: Formalities (31 Oct 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Formalities: When it comes to AI, the Copyright Office is restoring copyright to its proper status, as something you have to work to get.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: GWB x martial law; Li'l Sparky; Dueling Starbuckses; Microsoft buys Skype (does fuckery); Bieber v SOPA; SOPA is the worst; Snowden x rule of law; "Laserwriter II"; Russia v DST; Class war funnies; Minnesota's miracle; Icelandic women v sexism; Image analogies; Aussie DMCA ratfucked; "Authorised Domain"; Sales tax is regressive; Prince Charles's secret veto; Wells Fargo blackballed workers for refusing to crime; Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone; Put it back!; The internet was made for privacy.
  • Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, 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 humanoid robot with blue skin pocked with transparent patches that show circuit boards beneath. Its eyes are yellow copyright symbols. It is admiring its reflection in a mirror supported by a gold robot. The reflection of the robot has red x's in its eyes instead of copyright symbols.

Formalities (permalink)

It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.

The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression, which means that only works of human authorship are eligible for copyright.

This isn't a controversial position within legal circles. But for media executives, this is shocking; absurd, even. This gap between the industrial and the legal understanding of copyright comes from a fundamental difference over the evocatively named legal doctrine of "sweat of the brow."

"Sweat of the brow" is fundamental to a correct legal understanding of copyright. Copyright rewards and protects creativity but it does not protect hard work. You can labor for ten years over a phone book listing the numbers of every person in a town and (as a collection of uncopyrightable facts) it will receive no protection at all. Zero. Zilch. Anyone can copy and sell that phone book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.

Copyright law doesn't care if you slaved over that collection of facts, if you missed sleep and your kids' little league games to realize your grand vision. Copyright law doesn't care if you plowed every cent into it, remortgaging your home and cashing in your (already resentful) kids' college funds.

But: if you dash off a haiku in ten seconds while sitting on the toilet, shove it into your pocket and forget about it, and then your (still resentful) kids discover that crumpled haiku after your (highly suspicious) death, your kids will be able to claim a full 70 years' worth of copyright over that forgotten triviality (the term of copyright for works of human authorship is life plus 70 years).

This is the uncontroversial and universally accepted legal understanding of copyright: all the copyright in the world for creative acts, no copyright at all for mere acts of labor. The "sweat of the brow" has nothing to do with a work's eligibility for copyright.

But no media boss believes this. For media bosses, copyright is a pseudo-property† right, designed and operated to protect their bottom line. The point of copyright isn't to incentivize creativity, but rather investment.

† Or not-so-pseudo

There's obviously a relationship between creative acts and acts of investment, but it's possible to create without investment (see: your haiku) and it's possible to invest without creativity (see: your phone book).

And once again, the creativity that copyright protects is human creativity. This is a lesson that David Slater learned the hard way. Slater is a professional wildlife photographer and amateur monkey-trainer who combined his interests by teaching Celebes crested macaque monkeys to take selfies. But when Slater published a monkey's selfie others copied and distributed the image without his permission, on the (entirely legally correct) basis that monkeys are not humans, and that means that works created by monkeys don't get a copyright. This was also the Copyright Office's position, and the position of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals:

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

This is the basis for the US Copyright Office's repeated decision to refuse to extend copyright to AI-generated works. An algorithm is even less human than a monkey, so if you can't get copyright over a monkey selfie, you definitely can't copyright your chatbot's slop. The US Copyright Office has successfully defended this position in multiple courts, triumphing over plaintiffs who were so persistent that they even got the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue (the Supremes decided the case didn't warrant their attention):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away.

There are other ways that copyright can find its way into AI-generated material. You can make creative edits to it: if you output a slop novel and rewrite various sentences (providing those rewrites involve some creativity and not just mechanical corrections or word substitutions), then the edited sentences become copyrighted works, even though all the rest of the text remains uncopyrightable.

You can also get a "thin" copyright through selection. If you get your chatbot to output many images based on your prompt and choose your favorite, your selection can confer a tiny bit of copyright over that creative act of selection, but it will be harder to defend than even the other (attenuated and highly specific) forms of copyright.

Now, perhaps you've spotted an administrative problem lurking in this turn of events. How can someone else know what part of a work is AI-generated (and thus in the public domain) and which parts are human-edited/contributed (and thus copyrighted)? Just as importantly, how can you prove which parts of your work are not AI-generated and thus eligible for copyright protection.

This gets especially gnarly when you're dealing with complex media. In an animation, an AI might do the rigging and movement for a human-created sprite. The sprite is copyrightable, but its movements aren't. That would mean that I could remap your sprite's movements onto a different sprite without infringing your copyright. Or say the sprite and its movements are human created (and thus copyrighted), but the backgrounds are procedurally generated? I could take those backgrounds and put new animations overtop of them.

The simplest, most reliable way to ensure the works you invest in are fully and entirely eligible for copyright is to just use humans for the whole project. Declare a "no-AI policy," and hire human artists to produce the works you hope to sell. Monitor their activity to ensure they're not using AI. Keep good records.

Now, as much as I like the idea that we've arrived at a copyright law that insists that a company can only get exclusive rights to its products by paying human artists to make them from end-to-end, I don't think that's likely to be the way it shakes out, but that doesn't mean that this is a wash for artists.

The reality is that copyright claims are always "fact-intensive inquiries" that are expensive to litigate and difficult to adjudicate. It's completely normal for copyright lawsuits to turn on documentary evidence gleaned from fragmentary records. This is simply intrinsic to copyright, because copyright is a doctrine that requires judges to assess whether things are "creative" and "original" as though these were freestanding categories that everyone could agree upon.

Of course, the rules of copyright can make this harder or easier. One way in which the rules make deciding copyright cases much, much harder is copyright's broad prohibition on "formalities" ("formalities" is how copyright wonks refer to "red tape" or "paperwork"). For nearly all of American history, copyright ran on a key formality: deposit, registration and notice.

To secure a copyright for a new work, an artist (or their employer) had to send a copy of that work to the Library of Congress (deposit), along with paperwork detailing the claim of authorship (who made this, what parts of it did they make) (registration) and they had to display a copyright notice that told you who held the copyright to every work that was registered (notice). Both the filing and the notice required careful attention and precision, and screwing either one up could result in your losing your copyright. It's an open secret among copyright scholars that Walt Disney screwed this up with the first Mickey cartoons, meaning they've been in the public domain since their release:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725055415/http:/homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/publicdomain/HedenkampFreeMickeyMouseVaSp&E(2003).htm

This system of copyright formalities meant that you could always tell whether a work was copyrighted, you could always find out who claimed the copyright over it, and which parts of the work were claimed under copyright and under what basis. What's more, formalities created the Library of Congress, since the LoC acted as America's "copyright deposit" library, holding deposit copies of every work that had ever been issued a US copyright.

The US system of formalities was descended from the English system, in which the Stationers' Guild used a copyright registry to establish who had the rights to which books. But there were competing copyright systems, notably the "continental" system that was codified through the Berne Convention, a copyright treaty drafted by Victor Hugo (yes, that Victor Hugo).

Among other things, the Berne Convention abolished formalities. Much of the world adopted Berne, but the US held out until 1976. With the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress brought the US into compliance with Berne, abolishing formalities in the USA. As a compromise, the 1976 Act requires US authors to register their copyrights in order to obtain "statutory damages" (up to $150,000 per work). That's a pretty good incentive, but even with that incentive, the vast majority – far in excess of 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999% – of all copyrighted works are not registered with the Copyright Office. They are born copyrighted from the moment they are "fixed in a tangible medium" until 70 years after their authors die. But without registration, you can't know when that copyright clock started ticking because you have no way to verify who the author of the work is. This not only makes it incredibly difficult to establish the copyright status of nearly every copyrighted work, but it also means that in nearly every case, you can't readily determine who you should approach if you want to pay them for a copyright license.

Abolishing formalities has created a universe of orphan works: everything from napkin doodles to kindergartners' finger paintings to message board posts. Within that universe is a kind of gaseous cloud that, if condensed, would come out to an infinitesimal planetoid, representing the entirety of commercial works whose authors give a damn about their copyright status. It's a bad, bad system.

This system doesn't do away with the need to keep careful records: like I said, copyright disputes usually require the close examination of documentary evidence. What formality abolition accomplished was the destruction of the regular system of record-keeping: rather than having a standard, universally agreed-upon way to determine the status and resolve disputes about a copyrighted work, now we have the scattershot, incoherent system that makes copyright disputes far more likely (because no one knows who to approach for copyright licenses) and far more difficult to resolve (because there's no registry of copyrighted works).

Which brings me back to the question of AI and copyright. If a firm uses some AI in its work, it's going to need to document that very carefully. Firms that don't keep very close track of the elements of their products that come from AI will have a far harder time defending their commercial interests.

Basically, we're about to recreate formalities, but managed by the private sector. To the extent that companies use AI in their work, they are going to have to track every pixel and every word and every note that is output by an AI system, and which parts were added or edited by humans after creation.

That means that companies that want to protect their commercial interests aren't just going to get more protection based on how much work they get humans to do; they're also going to have to treat copyright's government-enforceable monopoly over expressive speech with the gravitas it deserves: not something you get automatically, but something you have to do real administrative work for.

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 Slushpiles v anthrax https://memex.craphound.com/2001/10/29/some-publishers-have-instituted-new/

#25yrsago Image analogies https://mrl.cs.nyu.edu/projects/image-analogies/

#25yrsago Cleaning the Fucking Kitchen for Dummies https://web.archive.org/web/20011007082222/https://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/kitchen.html

#20yrsago Last minute changes snuck into Aussie DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20061104133320/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004975.php

#20yrsago Creative Commons 3.0 license drafts published https://creativecommons.org/2006/10/30/version30revisedlicensedrafts/

#20yrsago Bush legalizes martial law https://politics.slashdot.org/story/06/10/28/1934208/bush-signs-bill-enabling-martial-law

#20yrsago No blogging allowed at “consumer generated media” conference https://web.archive.org/web/20061108055635/http://gregverdino.typepad.com/greg_verdinos_blog/2006/10/social_media_fi.html

#20yrsago Li'l Sparky: miniature 9V electric chair https://www.flickr.com/photos/84221353@N00/281833134/in/pool-make/

#20yrsago New Starbucks stores to open across the street from each other https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2006/oct/29/starbucks-buzzes-along-with-expansion/

#15yrsago HOWTO defend yourself against tear-gas https://web.archive.org/web/20111030230740/http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/5Fe8Ye/motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/ows-flier-defending-against-tear-gas

#15yrsago How to make a computer that doesn’t lock out GNU/Linux https://web.archive.org/web/20120113141447/https://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/lf_uefi_secure_boot_open_platforms.pdf

#15yrsago Microsoft buys Skype, attacks reverse engineer with bogus takedown notices and florid language https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTAwNzI

#15yrsago Justin Bieber: senator who sponsored anti-streaming bill should be “locked up — put away in cuffs” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/10/justin-bieber-streaming-bill-author-should-be-locked-up/

#15yrsago SOPA in depth: the worst-ever copyright proposal in US legislative history? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet

#15yrsago Fresh German police-malware uncovered; everything the police said in defense to date revealed as lies https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2011/analysiert-aktueller-staatstrojaner

#15yrsago Russia dumps daylight savings https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15512177

#15yrsago Class War funnies: 1935 Daily Worker comics https://philnel.com/2011/02/02/hoff_teeth/

#15yrsago Christian groups: we will bodily protect Occupy London from St Paul’s https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/29/christians-defend-occupy-london-protest

#15yrsago Dean of St Paul’s resigns over plan to evict OccupyLondon https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/31/dean-st-pauls-resigns-occupy

#15yrsago The future of the living room: Authorised Domain https://dn711102.ca.archive.org/0/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_215_Authorised_Domain.mp3

#15yrsago Sales tax is still regressive, gravity still sucks, and George Osborne is still a delusional ideologue https://www.bbc.com/news/business-15519727

#15yrsago Prince Charles exercises a secret veto over a wide swath of UK legislation https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/prince-charles-offered-veto-legislation

#15yrsago London cops recording movements & association with mobile tracking device: “blanket & indiscriminate” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance

#10yrsago The Shadow Brokers dump more intel from the NSA’s elite Equation Group https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/message-5-trick-or-treat-e43f946f93e6#.x2c36nsfq

#10yrsago Wells Fargo blackballed employees who refused to commit fraud, forcing them out of the industry forever https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episode-732-bad-form-wells-fargo

#10yrsago Listen: free recordings of Edgar Allen Poe stories, read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone https://open.spotify.com/album/6xDmRcD6sgsGbDvBRpyH5H?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open

#10yrsago How Minnesota’s governor performed an economic miracle by raising tax on the rich and increasing minimum wage https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-dayton-minnesota-economy_b_6737786

#10yrsago Icelandic women walk off the job 14% early to protest 14% pay-gap https://www.teenvogue.com/story/women-iceland-protest-gender-wage-gap

#10yrsago Snowden to journalists: your best defense is legal limits on spying, not cryptography https://medium.com/global-editors-network/e-snowden-against-surveillance-journalists-engagement-more-efficient-than-encryption-dbfbacdf9463#.jd6u431fo

#10yrsago After North Carolina Republicans banned cities selling internet, a town decided to give it away instead https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/city-isp-makes-broadband-free-because-state-law-prohibits-selling-access/

#5yrsago LaserWriter II https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

#5yrsago Now, Put It Back! https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/31/now-put-it-back/

#1yrago The internet was made for privacy https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

#1yrago When AI prophecy fails https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

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)


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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: 504 (31359 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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

02:00 AM

The Hallmark dilemma [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

The slogan is “when you care enough to send the very best.”

But more accurately, it’s “when you don’t care enough to be on the hook.”

For a low-stakes social interaction, the Hallmark card is a convenient and safe solution. Low-risk, it gets the job done. People don’t blame you for letting someone from Kansas say a nice thing on your behalf.

Now, it’s happening at scale. If you want to be left off the hook, AI is a convenient excuse. Do what it says. Ask it what to dress up as for this Halloween, or what to write in your marketing copy. Let it design your website or write your resume. Perhaps you could have it write your wedding vows as well.

Our culture prizes convenience ahead of just about everything else, and AI slop is convenient. It saves us time but it also saves us emotional labor.

The dilemma is obvious. Unlike a Hallmark card, AI is available to do just about everything. And when we’ve streamlined our life to a convenient nub of its former self, then what?

There’s a different path. Insist that AI ask you questions. Challenge it to challenge you.

Then choose. Sign your work.

AI isn’t the cause of slop, and it’s not a good excuse for slop either.

      

Just for Skeets and Giggles (10.31.26) [The Status Kuo]

Happy Halloween!

And what could be scarier than an election under Trump just three days away? Many of us have been losing sleep, but let’s be honest:

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Still, there is good cause to believe a blue wave approacheth to washeth out the orange stain. Out, out, damn rot!

Seen yesterday outside Trump International Hotel in NYC:

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Donald himself has had a tough week on the trail, haunted as he is by President Obama.

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That line about Saddam Hussein opening a Cheesecake Factory at the White House is stuck on repeat in that tiny brain.

The legacy media tried to put a serious spin on Obama’s quip—which wound up highlighting how ridiculous the coverage was.

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If we fail to check his power, it could all soon look like this:

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Or this:

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Be ready for The Cheesecake Factory to put up signs in its stores.

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At least Marco Rubio is prepared for his new role.

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Meanwhile, we’ve moved from “sharks and batteries” to whatever this is.

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Who still supports this guy?! Comedian Dan Docimo on that subject:

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In honor of the brave heckler who shouted this during Trump’s speech:

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If medals are handed out when the Empire’s Death Star is destroyed, this man should be in line for one.

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We have much political rehab ahead of us when that day finally comes.

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Were Trump to kick the bucket early, we’d still be left with JD Vance.

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He should be treated with the seriousness he deserves.

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This guy nails it.

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Trump talked admiringly about Nicki Minaj’s ass while rumors swirled that he might even make her the new Katie Zacharia.

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All 435 House seats and one-third of the Senate seats are up for grabs, and many Senate races are unexpectedly in play, even in the South. American voters be like:

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The GOP’s main argument is against socialism, which no one on our side is actually proposing.

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I just want MAGA to fix its spelling. Sound up for this.

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Now boarding: Active military, families with small children, Democrats and anyone who knows how to spell “borders.”

Also, with many of the Epstein files still unreleased or heavily redacted, can we talk about all the pedophiles in the GOP? It’s almost like Pizzagate was a projection. On that subject, give this guy a medal, too:

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The White House, with an assist from the New York Times, is trying to make much hay out of the Double Dan situation on Alaska’s ballot.

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Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign has denied any involvement, and what was alleged isn’t necessarily illegal, just dirty political chicanery of the sort we routinely see from the other side (usually to a shrug from the media). The Onion’s headline is so good.

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Even the new-ish “Jeopardy!” host landed some chuckles.

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We need a Spartacus moment for all the Dans to declare, “I am Dan Sullivan!”

Voters just want their government to address the affordability crisis without shaming them, and to stop catering to wealthy, corrupt mega-donors.

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In international news, democracy was on the march this week! Brazilian voters said “No thank you!” to more Bolsonaros.

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The internet is undefeated.

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Flávio Bolsonaro fled to the U.S. right after the election (not shady at all, right?). Borowitz for the kneecapping:

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Send your trusty writer a Halloween treat! My newsletter needs volunteer support to keep going strong and remain free for those on fixed income or disability. Everyone else should consider donating a bit of candy! Upgrade to be a paid supporter today:

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It’s not about whether you ever catch the ball. It’s how hard you tried.

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This is also me with my dog trying to do my morning stretches.

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Wax on, wax off, Master Calvin!

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Stella waits for this magical moment each day.

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If there were such a thing as a grass puppy, she would be it.

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Here is a series of animals getting into the pumpkin spirit.

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This pumpkin literally did nothing but sit there through all this.

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Pumpkin dunks!

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Today I learned that cute little hummingbirds are quite territorial about their feeders.

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Drew Lynch has a unique perspective on this.

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Took me longer than it should have…

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I did this the other day on an app, and it was shocking.

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Now for the spirit-of-the-season section!

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The Dark Gourd is watching.

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I don’t know why anyone would do this… but hahahaha!

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This Venom costume is simple yet so effective.

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This moment emotionally scarred many a child of the ’80s.

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This get-up was no loose canon.

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This went in a wholly unexpected direction.

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Talk about some jarring arts and crafts!

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Ah, the wisdom of children.

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This is also one of my regular complaints.

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We end this special Halloween edition with a bawdy dad joke from some ETs. The lawyer in me deeply appreciates this one!

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Have a great weekend! And let’s manifest the blue wave!

Jay

Saturday 2026-10-31

11:00 PM

Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books Dataset, Deleted It ‘Due to All This Litigation’ [TorrentFreak]

meta-logoIn a series of lawsuits in California federal court, Meta is being sued over the use of pirated books to train its Llama AI models.

The lawsuits are separate, but Judge Vince Chhabria handles them together. The plaintiffs include authors such as Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and publishers such as Entrepreneur Media and Chicken Soup for the Soul.

In August, Meta told Entrepreneur that it did not believe it had obtained the pirated Books3 dataset through BitTorrent. Books3 is a collection of nearly 200,000 books, taken from the library of the private torrent tracker Bibliotik.

However, recent deposition testimony from a former Meta researcher tells a different story, according to the rightsholders.

Books3 Torrenting Testimony

In a joint status report filed with Meta on Tuesday, the rightsholders say that Stephen Roller admitted during a deposition last week that he torrented Books3 and knowingly distributed it. Roller worked at Meta between 2017 and 2023, and the download took place during that period, they say.

Roller didn’t recall exactly when he acquired the dataset, the plaintiffs note. He did acknowledge that Books3 was created in 2020, and that he didn’t work for any other company while at Meta.

This is relevant, as the court ruled last year that training Llama on books was fair use, leaving Meta’s BitTorrent downloads as the main open issue in the authors’ case. Earlier this month, a judge ordered Meta to name the employees who approved torrenting from shadow libraries.

Meta has acknowledged using Books3 before. In early 2024, it admitted that it used portions of the dataset to train its Llama 1 and Llama 2 models. That admission didn’t say how Meta obtained the dataset.

Roller also testified that Meta had copies of Books3 by the time he left its AI research group FAIR, the plaintiffs write. He also named two research scientists who, they say, likely acquired their own copies.

Roller no longer has his own copy. According to the plaintiffs, he deleted it about a year ago, possibly after he was subpoenaed for the second time. He did so “[d]ue to all this litigation,” as “it seem[ed] contentious to have copies of The Pile [which includes Books3].”

Books3 testimony

Books3 testimony

The claim that Meta had multiple copies, at least one of them torrented, was news to the plaintiffs, they write. They plan to ask Meta how many copies of Books3 it acquired and how, and will ask the court to step in if that fails.

Meta: Could Have Been for Himself

Meta sees things differently. The company notes that the status report is the first time the rightsholders raised these concerns, and the tech giant argues that Roller’s deposition doesn’t support them.

“Mr. Roller testified that he did not know when he downloaded a copy of the ‘The Pile’ via torrent, and did not testify that his download of the ‘The Pile’ was for Meta or at Meta, noting it could have been for himself or for another employer,” Meta writes.

Meta’s response

Meta's response

According to Meta, Roller also said that he didn’t know whether more than one copy was downloaded, or whether the two researchers he mentioned acquired Books3. He left Meta in January 2023 and has since worked for three other companies working on AI.

The deleted copy was stored on Roller’s personal computer, Meta adds. He removed it more than two years after leaving the company because he “didn’t need it, so [he’d] rather not have it.”

A (Pirated) Book Club

Books3 is not the only pirated material that comes up in the status report. The plaintiffs also suggest that pirated books may have been used at Meta for things other than AI training.

They want Meta to produce the contents of an internal Google Drive folder titled “ML Books”. In addition, they want records of a Meta book club that may have used books from shadow libraries.

In one of the documents Meta produced, an employee shared a “pirated book” with a colleague. “i know for vellum sake this is prob very ironic,” the employee wrote. When asked whether the book was pirated, the employee replied with a link to the “ML Books” folder.

The recipient told another colleague, “bro she tryna get me fired.” He added that he “may need her to delete those messages.”

ML Books

ML Books

The plaintiffs see this as relevant. If Meta employees used shadow library books for a book club, that would impact Meta’s fair use defense.

However, Meta argues that this request comes too late. The plaintiffs first asked for the linked files on October 9, which was more than a month after the discovery period had closed.

As for the folder itself, Meta says it is investigating and will discuss it with the plaintiffs when it knows more.

Missing Server Logs

Roller’s copy of Books3 is not the only material the plaintiffs say is missing. Meta still hasn’t handed over all command history files from its torrenting, they note, despite court orders to do so. According to the plaintiffs, these logs show how Meta configured its torrent software and which torrent files it targeted, and thus which works.

Specifically, Meta has yet to hand over command history files from any of the servers it used during its torrenting periods, the plaintiffs say. They now ask the court to order Meta to say whether any of these files were deleted, and when.

Meta, in turn, counters that it has produced substantial quantities of logs from those servers and is still searching backups, handing over new files on a rolling basis. According to Meta, there is no reason to believe any command history files were deleted.

Entrepreneur’s case is scheduled to go to trial in the spring of 2027, with the other publishers lined up behind it, should it settle before then. Meanwhile, the list of related cases keeps growing. This month, publishers including Elsevier, Hachette and Macmillan, as well as more authors, joined the queue.

—

A copy of the joint case management statement, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf).

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

05:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 納 [Kanji of the Day]

納

✍10

小6

settlement, obtain, reap, pay, supply, store

ノウ　ナッ　ナ　ナン　トウ

おさ.める　-おさ.める　おさ.まる

納得   (なっとく)   —   consent
納豆   (なっとう)   —   natto (fermented soybeans)
収納   (しゅうのう)   —   storage
納め   (おさめ)   —   the end (of)
納付   (のうふ)   —   payment
奉納   (ほうのう)   —   dedication
納税   (のうぜい)   —   payment of taxes
滞納   (たいのう)   —   falling behind (with a payment)
納入   (のうにゅう)   —   payment (of taxes, fees, etc.)
納税者   (のうぜいしゃ)   —   taxpayer

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 疫 [Kanji of the Day]

疫

✍9

中学

epidemic

エキ　ヤク

免疫   (めんえき)   —   immunity
検疫   (けんえき)   —   quarantine
検疫所   (けんえきしょ)   —   quarantine station
疫学   (えきがく)   —   epidemiology
検疫官   (けんえきかん)   —   quarantine inspector
疫病   (えきびょう)   —   epidemic
疫病神   (えきびょうがみ)   —   god of pestilence
免疫細胞   (めんえきさいぼう)   —   immune cell
免疫系   (めんえきけい)   —   immune system
自己免疫   (じこめんえき)   —   autoimmunity

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

出来たての森を記録！うめきたデータソン [OpenStreetMap Japan]

## OpenStreetMapとWikimediaで新しい森を記録しよう 2026年11月20日、大阪駅前のグラングリーン大阪に新しい都市の森「うめきたの森」が開園します。 その翌日、出来たての森をみんなで歩いて、地図や写真に記録してみませんか？ 今回は、開園したばかりの「うめきたの森」を実際に歩き、園路や施設、案内表示、見どころなどを調査します。 集めた情報は、自由な地図 OpenStreetMap や、写真を共有する Wikimedia Commons に記録・公開します。 現地調査後は、十三の「みんなの図書館さいくる」へ移動して、地図の編集や写真の整理・公開、成果発表をします。 OpenStreetMapやWikimediaの編集経験がない方も歓迎します。 ## 開催概要 - 日時：2026年11月21日（土）13:00～17:30 - 集合場所：[うめきた広場（グランフ

03:00 PM

RFK Jr. Steps In To Personally Approve Peptide Use In America Over FDA’s Objections [Techdirt]

If you go through all of the bloviations from RFK Jr. when it comes to his stance on vaccines, one of his chief refrains is that vaccines that have been in wide use for many years haven’t been tested properly for safety, or that data about their safety has been hidden or ignored. He’s generally wrong about all of that, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from saying it over and over again. The end result, if you didn’t bother looking any further into what Kennedy has said and written on the topic, is that you might believe that what Kennedy really cares about is a cautious approach with stringent testing before allowing something to be put into American bodies.

But that isn’t what Kennedy believes. It’s not what he demonstrates through actions, either. And if you want proof of that, you need only read about how Kennedy has unilaterally adjusted rules at HHS to allow pharmacies to sell you peptides over the objections of the FDA.

Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has unilaterally passed a rule that will allow specialty pharmacies to sell six specific peptide drugs, overruling scientists at the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy’s new rule sidesteps the need to formally undo that FDA action. The rule is titled “Enforcement Discretion Policy Regarding 503A Compounding Using Certain Peptide Bulk Drug Substances” and was made available Wednesday on the Federal Register, with the final publication date set for October 30. The rule does not change the regulatory status of the peptide; instead, it states the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will no longer take enforcement action against compounding pharmacies for making the peptides, essentially giving them a green light to freely produce and sell them.

So what qualifications does Kennedy possess that is informing his decision to overrule actual FDA scientists on the topic of peptides? None, of course. Kennedy is not a scientist. He’s not a healthcare professional. What he is, instead, is both a user of peptides personally and someone who has many friends in the peptide business. It’s just another grift, though it is being wrapped in pretend backing from the panels that Kennedy personally stocked with sycophants.

One reason cited for all the peptides was that an FDA advisory panel voted in July to add these six peptides back to the list of drugs compound pharmacies can make. However, prior to the vote, Kennedy stacked that 12-member committee with eight new members. At least six of Kennedy’s additions have ties to peptide-related businesses and clinics, raising serious conflict-of-interest concerns.

Another explanation for allowing the peptides is that the safety concerns are mainly hypothetical or “inferential” and not based on observed harm in humans. But this is mainly because there are few to no studies involving humans that show either benefits or harms from the peptides.

And here we put the lie to Kennedy’s concerns about vaccines. If he wants to claim that vaccines haven’t been tested enough to be in wide public use, he cannot create a non-enforcement policy over peptides that have had far less, if any, such testing. We are living under health policies that are purely Kennedy’s personal whims. That’s nothing like the gold standard science that he has been promising to follow throughout his tenure at HHS.

The peptide pushers are celebrating and it’s not hard to understand why. Many Kennedy allies are among them. He gave them a gift, almost perfectly circumventing his previous fears about testing to do so.

01:00 PM

Fume and Doom [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of ABC News

With just four days to go before the midterms, Trump is unraveling. Yesterday, a Reuters reporter asked him whether his decision to skip a planned weekend rally in Kansas had anything to do with being sick of traveling. Trump shot back that the reporter was “way out of shape” and looked “like hell” while insisting he himself felt fine. HuffPost described the president as visibly drenched in sweat during the exchange.

By Thursday evening, Trump had also scrapped a Sunday rally in Dubuque, Iowa, leaving a Friday stop in Florida as his only remaining in-person event before Election Day. By Friday, perhaps due to the negative perception those cancellations left, Trump had reversed himself and put both rallies back on the schedule for Sunday.

These final chaotic days in the campaign cap a month of red state Trump rallies that have done little to move the political needle. If anything, they may have made things even worse for the GOP.

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No safe spaces left

Two of Trump’s first October stops were Durant, Oklahoma and Mobile, Alabama—odd choices. Trump carried Durant’s congressional district by more than 50 points in 2024, and as redrawn, Mobile’s district favored him by around 40 points. Nebraska, another reliably red state, came next.

In an analysis of the GOP’s midterm panic, CNN’s Aaron Blake tallied Trump’s 2024 margins in the three states at 31 points in Alabama, 34 in Oklahoma and 20 in Nebraska. Asked why he was spending the home stretch in places like these, Trump explained, “Well, I won all of them by a lot. I’m going there just to make sure.”

Republican strategist Ryan Mahoney offered a less reassuring explanation. “There’s no shortage of states, solid-red districts, solid-red states [that] are starting to suffer with Republican base voters who lack enthusiasm and motivation to get out and vote.”

In Durant, Trump’s message to the home-field crowd was telling.

“I feel a little foolish, you know what I’m saying, ‘Go out and vote, go out and vote.’ You’re gonna, they’re gonna win in the last half, but still go out and vote. We’re worried about Michigan. We’re worried about Texas. We’re worried about a few states.”

By Trump’s count, there were as many as 40 races worth worrying about.

“This looks both necessary and risky,” one GOP strategist said of Trump’s unusual strategy. “We’re playing defense in some red states here.” He likened the swing through GOP strongholds to a farewell tour and warned that battleground stops could backfire.

Trump’s aides heard that warning, too. The New York Times reported that political advisers and outside Republican groups cautioned them that rallies in battleground races could do more harm than good. But the president’s team largely discounted the concern. In his advisers’ view, the strategy was simple: “Focus on red states and juice turnout.”

But turnout where, exactly?

Perhaps the White House understood that it was going to lose but didn’t want to lose quite so badly.

Eight days before the election, the Trump tour reached Mississippi, where recent polling suggested GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s race had grown more competitive. Her Democratic opponent, Scott Colom, posted, “Cindy High Prices is scared and that’s why she’s sending Donald Trump down here.”

Paid protesters, all

Trump is used to hecklers, but probably not quite this many or with messages this pointed. At San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum on Oct. 7, at least 18 hecklers were either removed by security or walked out after disrupting his speech.

Kansas was rowdy too. At Trump’s Oct. 19 rally in Park City for Sen. Roger Marshall, there was one interruption after another, including a protester who shouted a memorable expletive:

At times, the MAGA crowd grew hostile. In San Antonio, a man in a red hat grabbed a departing protester by the hair before other rallygoers pulled the two apart. Five days later, at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio, a woman in a “Release the Epstein files” T-shirt was swarmed by at least three men, one of whom appeared to punch her in the head and pull her hair. From the stage, Trump narrated, referring to her throughout as a man:

“They’re all paid. They get paid by the lefties in order to destroy our country. They’re scum. But he’s going back home to Mom. He’s going back home to Mom. Look at him. Look at him. Terrible. Don’t we love law enforcement? Oh, he’s gotta go on a diet! He’s a fat guy. Wow. Wow. Gotta go on a diet fast. We all do.”

By Wednesday, the hecklers had broken into song. In Chillicothe, Ohio, a man interrupted Trump’s remarks to sing that Trump had flown on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.

Trump claimed, without evidence, that he was a paid protester who had been given $250.

Thursday brought Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Trump sold out the 6,000-plus-seat Winthrop Coliseum in 2016. This time, he spoke at the Rock Hill Sports and Event Center, which has just 1,200 stadium seats.

Crowd size remains a point of pride and a sore spot for Trump. He has reportedly grown agitated over coverage of empty chairs and early departures at his rallies. At a rally in Perry, Georgia, last Saturday, Trump told the crowd that Barack Obama had been in Michigan “and the place was empty,” adding, “I had 40,000, he’d have like 90.” (Obama’s Detroit crowd was reported at more than 4,300, and video from inside showed the gym packed.) The next day in Port Huron, Michigan, Trump opened by calling Obama “my competitor” and argued that he had drawn the bigger crowd. On Thursday, he falsely declared on Truth Social that he was drawing “the BIGGEST CROWDS at Trump Rallies in the history of Midterm Elections, by a factor of five times.” Sad!

Per the Times, Trump has also been complaining that JD Vance hasn’t drawn large crowds to his own events. White House aides came to the vice president’s defense, after a fashion. “Donald Trump is the hardest working person in the country, followed by JD Vance,” spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said.

Amusing fact: Trump opened his Rock Hill remarks by talking about the North Carolina Senate race, where polls show Democrat Roy Cooper leading Trump’s handpicked candidate, Michael Whatley. “Whatley should win because he’s phenomenal,” Trump said. “But what are you going to do?”

Maybe remember which Carolina you are in, for starters.

Sick of traveling

The now-viral Trump exchange with Reuters correspondent Jacob Bogage came Thursday at Joint Base Andrews, as the president stepped off Air Force One. When the reporter raised travel fatigue, Trump called him sick, demanded to know who he worked for and pronounced Reuters terrible. Mediaite suggested Trump may have misheard the question as asking whether he was sick. When the reporter replied that he only wanted to make sure the president was doing well, Trump went on:

“Look at this guy. He’s way out of shape. … I’m not going to Kansas because he’s doing very well. … You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell!”

(Trump gripes, privately and publicly, about how hard he is working, apparently hoping to guilt his supporters into voting. “I’m working my ass off,” he told a Tennessee crowd earlier this month. “You better get out there and vote.”)

Nine days earlier, Trump had a similar back-and-forth with a reporter in the Oval Office. On Oct. 20, he warned Andrew Feinberg, White House correspondent for The Independent, that he had “better be careful.” Later, as Feinberg began a question about the golf courses Trump owns, the president cut him off:

“What’s wrong with you? Are you a sick person?”

“Not that I know of, sir,” Feinberg replied.

“I actually think there’s something wrong with you,” Trump said.

Even comedians he’s courted get the same treatment. After Bill Maher, who recently dined with Trump at the White House, used a monologue to bring up Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the president dictated a 1,300-word Truth Social post to aide Natalie Harp aboard Air Force One. “You’re not transformative, you’re a Loser!” Trump wrote. “I never watched your show much, but I will never watch it again.”

Trump insists he feels perfect. But C-SPAN footage of his rallies captures verbal stumbles and unfiltered behavior that have fueled questions about mental decline.

Phoning it in, literally

The Kansas rally had originally been set for Saturday in Salina in support of Sen. Roger Marshall. A YouGov poll conducted from late September into early October showed his Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, leading 48 percent to 45 percent. Trump nevertheless claimed he was skipping Kansas because Marshall was doing very well.

The plan, at first, was for the unpopular president to hold tele-rallies instead. “President Trump will continue connecting directly with Americans nationwide through more than 20 tele-rallies before Election Day,” an official said. A GOP source claimed that requests for tele-rallies were pouring in. A tele-rally, as HuffPost explained, is basically a conference call that Trump places to activists gathered around a speakerphone.

The Republican National Committee extended Trump’s stated reasoning to Iowa. “With Republicans in a strong position in Kansas and Iowa, previously planned in-person rallies in those states will no longer take place as scheduled.”

The Iowa event, a Sunday rally at the Five Flags Center in Dubuque, was reportedly still on the schedule during Trump’s exchange with reporters at Joint Base Andrews. Public polls show Democratic challengers still within striking distance in Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Alaska and Kansas—all traditional GOP strongholds.

The vice president scrapped a trip of his own. On Thursday, the White House announced that JD Vance would appear Friday in St. Cloud, Minnesota, for a fraud-focused press conference in the state that has become the White House’s favorite fraud punching bag.. By Thursday evening, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota had confirmed that “Vice President JD Vance will no longer be coming to St. Cloud on Friday.” St. Cloud Mayor Jake Anderson said no reason was given; the vice president’s office cited a scheduling change.

Trump, meanwhile, heads to Daytona Beach, Florida, on Friday, ahead of Sunday’s now restored stops in Kansas and Iowa—though the jury is still out on whether he will actually show up Sunday. He plans to be at the White House as the results come in.

Aides have removed all bottles of ketchup from the premises as a precaution.

11:00 AM

Wherein The Copia Institute Tells SDNY That AI May Have Problems But So Is Using Copyright Law To Try To Fix Them [Techdirt]

There’s a lot wrong with AI. But bad things happen when we try to use copyright law to fix it. Which is what we just told the Southern District of New York, where OpenAI and Microsoft are defending themselves in several cases alleging that their training violated the copyrights of the works the AI models were trained on. We made a few points.

One overarching point is that what the plaintiffs are trying to do is not what copyright law is for. Copyright gives the holder the ability to control how the embodiment of the work is used (ex: you can’t copy a book without permission, or, as the example we used in the brief, perform a play) but not the ability to control the public from benefiting from its contents. Copyright can control such activities as copying, distributing, or performing a work but NOT reading, watching, listening to, or learning from a work. What OpenAI does with its training is the latter set of activities, not the former. But if OpenAI is somehow not able to engage in these activities because of copyright, then no one can. Which would lead to a direct harm to the public, a loss of an important benefit copyright law is actually supposed to give it.

In fact, it is a benefit copyright law must provide the public. The whole point of copyright law is to promote “the progress of sciences and the useful arts,” or, in other words, help ensure we get more innovation and expression. But the plaintiffs in these cases want the opposite: they want copyright to stop these things. They want copyright law to prevent AI from being further developed (indeed, in its complaint the New York Times Company even asked for OpenAI’s models to be destroyed!) by denying it the ability to do the learning that is needed for it to be useful. And they want to prevent any of the further expression that AI helps facilitate, even though fostering new expression is exactly what copyright law is supposed to do.

In fact, it is what copyright law is constitutionally required to do. Moreover, if, rather than fostering innovation and expression, copyright law instead obstructs it, then copyright law is not constitutional. Congress only gets its authority to make copyright law through the Progress Clause (“to promote the progress of science and the useful arts…”) so if it turns out that the law it has passed instead does the opposite of promoting progress, then that law is unconstitutional, as being beyond its authority.

The First Amendment also limits Congress’s authority to pass laws that inhibit free expression. So Congress also would not have had the authority to pass a law that let copyright holders of existing works prevent either the development of AI or any of the downstream, lawful expression AI helps facilitate. If the copyright statute Congress passed were to have that effect, then it would be unconstitutional.

It also would violate the Constitution in another way we’ve discussed before: by violating the First Amendment-protected “right to read,” which is sometimes also referred to as the right to receive information. All those learning activities (reading, watching, listening to, etc.), which the current statute does not actually restrict, are activities that the First Amendment entitles the public to do, and copyright law not only does not prevent, but constitutionally could not prevent.

Meanwhile, we also made an overarching point: even to the extent that AI as we know it may be terrible, and we are looking for a law that can stop it, copyright law is still not the right law to do it. First of all, it’s not tailored to the actual problems we’d want to address (for instance, if using AI in hiring decisions produces discriminatory results because of bias incorporated into the AI model, then the solution to that problem is making sure that AI can train on even more material, not less, because it is the training limits that tend to create that bias). Secondly, the worse we think today’s AI is, the more important it is that something better is developed, but if law can stand in the way of further development, then none will be. None can be, and we’ll be stuck with the technology we have, if not an even worse version of it if we have to degrade the models in response to copyright claims. As well as stuck with an imbalanced, super-powered copyright law that could stand in the way of lots of other non-AI innovation and expression.

And, again, if we have to freeze the technology because of copyright law, then copyright law is definitely running afoul of the Constitution, which allows Congress to pass a copyright law that only does the opposite.

In sum, the worse you think AI is—and we make no quibble with that assessment, although we did point out that it also has some distinct upsides, particularly when it comes to enabling more expression—the more important it is that these copyright claims be dismissed. Because however bad the state of play may be today, a copyright law that would let these claims prevail will only make everything worse.

10:00 AM

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