News

Friday 2026-05-29

04:00 AM

Two video upgrades [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

It took me thirty years to populate the bookshelf that’s behind me in most of my videos. Most of us don’t have the time or patience to do that.

At the same time, the wonky computer-generated background many people use on Zoom calls undermines the impact and authority you might be seeking. I just discovered these grey backgrounds and using one creates an instant upgrade for many users. $55 well spent. Sample down below.

[All my lighting and setup tips are here.]

As I was writing this, I saw the announcement from ElevenLabs that they are now supporting dubbing in dozens of languages. It’s not perfect, but it’s sort of a miracle.

Here’s what it sounds and looks like:

      

Unpaid labor [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

It’s possible you use social media to grow your business. Or to enhance your career. Or maybe it’s to find delight and joy.

When you add up all the tikking, tokking, tweeting and clicking, what’s the return on that investment? Is your vacation more fun when you spend it taking photos for your Instagram followers? Are you feeding Linkedin or is it feeding you?

Labor is work that we get paid for. It’s work we wouldn’t do for free. And for most people on social media, it’s unpaid labor on behalf of the platforms.

If it’s paying off for you, keep going!

If it’s not, it might be worth reconsidering.

The simple test: when you do it more, do things get better?

      

Trump Points Middle Finger At The American Dream, Tells Green Card Applicants To GTFO [Techdirt]

Poll everyone you can. Even the most MAGA never dreamed up this scenario. There’s no single-issue voter whose kink is “surely the people wanting green cards can get that done in their own countries.”

Nope, this is Trump’s kink. This is a blatant attempt to juice the deportation numbers to soothe the throbbing bald skull of Stephen Miller, who still has yet to see his 3,000 arrests per day bigoted fantasy become reality, no matter how many billions we’re (forced to) throw at ICE.

This is just blatant racism masquerading as slightly-less-blatant racism. The law was never unclear. The system wasn’t being exploited by immigrants. Pretty much everyone has always been fine with the US’s green card program. And yet, this is what America means now, just as it heads into its 250th year.

Foreigners in the U.S. who want a green card will need to leave and apply in their home country, the Trump administration announced Friday, in a surprise change to a longstanding policy that sowed confusion and concern among aid groups, immigration lawyers and immigrants.

The obvious question is “WHY?” The obvious answer is this: this administration hates people who aren’t white. If you think this policy might affect the small percentage of migrants from predominately white nations, you’re living in a self-induced psychosis. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the words falling out of the administration’s collective mouth:

In an emailed statement to the Associated Press the agency said people who provide an “economic benefit” or “national interest” could likely stay in the U.S. while others would have to go abroad to apply.

No need to read between the lines here. This administration is as unsophisticated as a used Croc. Both terms stated here can be read as “white” and “also white.” If you think this means otherwise, be sure to show your whole bigoted ass in the comment section below.

The “agency” mentioned here is the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services), which used to be more concerned with ensuring applicants kept on their path to citizenship. That’s no longer the case. It should rebrand as GTFO, since all it does now is give Trump whatever he wants when it comes to expelling non-white people from this nation.

I’m not even exaggerating. More than 90% of successful asylum seekers are white people from other nations. Any actions taken to limit lawful access to citizenship have targeted non-white people. Pretending that living in the US while seeking a green card is the exploitation of a legal loophole is nothing more than more blatant racism from an administration that has already been pretty fucking blatant about its racism.

The fully-suborned USCIS had this to say about a directive I can’t imagine it saw coming:

USCIS described the change as a return to “the original intent of the law” and closing a “loophole.”

Get thee to a white shoe law firm, he said in a Shakepearian voice. Bro, the “original intent of the law” never resulted in a demand to “close” a “loophole” for over FIVE DECADES. To claim it’s imperative NOW is to pretend you’d rather honor the law, rather than the nation’s foremost golf club groundskeeper.

To sum up: get fucked, Trump. This is nothing more than the administration deciding Lady Liberty is free to assault just because she showed a bit of ankle more than 100 years ago.

Kanji of the Day: 友 [Kanji of the Day]

友

✍4

小2

friend

ユウ

とも

友人   (ゆうじん)   —   friend
友達   (ともだち)   —   friend
親友   (しんゆう)   —   close friend
友だち   (ともだち)   —   friend
友情   (ゆうじょう)   —   friendship
友好   (ゆうこう)   —   friendship
女友達   (おんなともだち)   —   female friend
友愛   (ゆうあい)   —   fraternity
男友達   (おとこともだち)   —   male friend
盟友   (めいゆう)   —   sworn friend

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 屈 [Kanji of the Day]

屈

✍8

中学

yield, bend, flinch, submit

クツ

かが.む　かが.める

屈指   (くっし)   —   leading
理屈   (りくつ)   —   theory
退屈   (たいくつ)   —   tedious
窮屈   (きゅうくつ)   —   narrow
屈辱   (くつじょく)   —   disgrace
卑屈   (ひくつ)   —   servile
屈折   (くっせつ)   —   bending
屈託   (くったく)   —   worry
屈強   (くっきょう)   —   robust
屁理屈   (へりくつ)   —   sophism

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

From Map Data to 3D Buildings in OsmAnd [OsmAnd Blog]

In films like Angels & Demons, Rome never feels flat. The city unfolds through narrow streets, archways, inner courtyards, and massive stone buildings rising above the crowd. You remember not only where the characters go, but the space around them — the height of the facades, the passages through buildings, the way entire streets disappear beneath arches before opening into another square.

But on most digital maps, cities lose that depth. Buildings become flat shapes, reduced to outlines that show where something exists, but not how the city actually feels. For mappers, this is where building data starts to matter.

In OpenStreetMap, buildings can contain far more than a simple outline. Mappers can describe a building's height, the number of floors, where different sections begin, and even passages running through the structure. OsmAnd uses this data to transform flat map geometry into detailed 3D cityscapes. Buildings gain height, complex structures become distinguishable, and streets start to feel closer to the real places they represent.

Castel Sant Angelo

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

How Buildings Become 3D​

Every building on an OpenStreetMap-based map starts as a polygon, a flat outline drawn around the footprint of a structure. That outline tells the map where the building is, but nothing about its shape in space.

The transformation begins with a single tag: building=*. Once a polygon carries this tag, OsmAnd knows it represents a structure and can extrude it vertically. But without height information, every building gets the same default height — a uniform cityscape that feels more like a model kit than a real place.

This is where height tags change everything. When a mapper adds height=* with a value in meters, OsmAnd uses that exact figure to determine how tall to render the building. If the height is not known precisely, building:levels=* works as a practical alternative: OsmAnd treats each level as approximately 3 meters, so a five-story building tagged building:levels=5 renders at around 15 meters. For buildings that don't start at ground level, min_height=* defines where the walls begin, useful for elevated sections, overhangs, or structures built above a passageway.

The result is immediate. Buildings stop being identical flat shapes and start reflecting what actually exists: a two-floor residential house next to a nine-floor apartment block, a low market hall beside a tall church tower. The map begins to carry real spatial information.

For Rome specifically, this matters a great deal. The city mixes centuries of architecture at wildly different scales. A single block might contain a Renaissance palazzo, a medieval tower remnant, and a modern addition — all at different heights, all worth mapping accurately.

Buildings 2D Buildings 3D

More Complex Structures​

Not every building is a simple box. A cathedral might have a nave, a transept, and a tower, each rising to a different height. The Pantheon in Rome combines a cylindrical rotunda with a colonnaded porch, two distinct volumes at different heights within a single structure. A shopping arcade might combine a low glass atrium with a taller surrounding structure. In OpenStreetMap, these buildings can be mapped using building:part=*, which allows a single structure to be broken into sections, each with its own height and shape.

When a building is split into parts, OsmAnd renders each section independently. A part tagged with height=15 sits lower than a neighboring part tagged with height=40, and the result on the map reflects the actual silhouette of the building rather than a single averaged block. For complex structures, this is the difference between a recognizable landmark and a generic shape.

To group parts into a coherent whole, mappers use a type=building relation. The relation connects the outer outline of the building with its individual parts, giving OsmAnd the context it needs to render them together correctly. Without this relation, parts and outlines can conflict, producing rendering errors or overlapping geometry.

Passages Through Buildings​

Archways, vaulted passages, and covered walkways that cut through a structure are a common feature of older European cities. On a flat map, a road that disappears beneath a building and reappears on the other side simply looks broken.

The tag tunnel=building_passage solves this. Applied to the way passing through a building, it tells OsmAnd that the road or pedestrian path runs beneath the structure rather than being blocked by it. The result is a visible opening in the 3D building model, a gap in the wall through which the street continues.

For mappers, the building outline and the road through it are mapped as separate elements. The way carries tunnel=building_passage, the building polygon sits above it, and when both are correctly tagged, the opening is rendered automatically.

Viewing 3D Buildings in OsmAnd​

To enable 3D buildings, go to Menu → Configure map → Topography → 3D buildings. Once the option is on, tilt the map by placing two fingers on the screen and swiping up. Buildings appear only at higher zoom levels, where individual structures are distinguishable, and fade in and out smoothly as you zoom or pan.

One detail worth knowing: if a POI or a navigation point falls inside a building, OsmAnd highlights the corresponding structure automatically. This is particularly useful in dense urban areas where a single address can be hard to locate visually. Instead of scanning the block, you see exactly which building you need.

3D Buildings Highlights

Adjusting 3D Display​

Several settings control how 3D buildings look and perform on the map. Color lets you choose between the default map style or a custom color set separately for day and night mode (custom color is a paid feature). Visibility controls the opacity of buildings using a slider from 10% to 100%, with 50% set by default. Lower values keep roads and labels readable beneath the structures, higher values make buildings more visually dominant.

Both settings open a separate preview screen where you can see the changes on a live map before applying them. If you want to return to the original values, a Reset to default option is available in the app bar.

For performance, two additional options are available. Level of detail switches between Low and High geometry complexity. High detail also enables the fade animation when buildings appear and disappear. View distance controls how far from the camera buildings are rendered, either Near or Far. Using both High and Far improves visual quality but may affect performance and battery usage.

3D Buildings Highlights

3D Cityscapes Challenge​

For a deeper dive into all the settings and technical details, feel free to explore the 3D Buildings documentation. Once you are ready, take this quick interactive quiz to see how well you can navigate urban 3D environments!

Rome, like any city with centuries of layered architecture, rewards the effort of accurate mapping. When the data is there — heights, parts, passages — the map stops being a diagram and starts feeling like the place itself. Tilt the map, walk the streets, and see what careful mapping looks like from the inside.

We appreciate your interest in us and thank you for taking the time to read this article. Join us on social media to keep up to date with the latest news and share your experiences. Your opinion is important to us.

Follow OsmAnd on Facebook, TikTok, X (Twitter), Reddit, and Instagram!

Join us at our groups of Telegram (OsmAnd News channel), (EN), (IT), (FR), (DE), (UA), (ES), (BR-PT), (PL), (AR), (TR).

Pluralistic: Hold on for dear life (28 May 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

  • Hold on for dear life: Not your keys, not your wallet, entirely your problem.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: Who owns "Web 2.0"; EFF saves bloggers' sources; Non-porn porn; Redaction fails; Canadian Tories say markets, not government, will help flood victims; Forced gold-farming; Walkaway cover; Oracle eats shit in Java API case; Captain America was a Nazi spy; Who Broke the Internet? (Pt IV).
  • Upcoming appearances: London, Kansas City, LA, Menlo Park, Toronto, NYC, Edinburgh.
  • 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 shirtless man bound to a chair; his head is bandaged and his torso is covered in wounds. Standing beside him, a hand on his shoulder, is a desperate, suited man brandishing a hot poker. The background is an out-of-focus giant bitcoin logo.

Hold on for dear life (permalink)

From the earliest days of technopolitics, the role of technology in resisting authoritarianism was unclear. On the one hand, there's the indisputable fact that modern cryptography, properly implemented, can deliver a degree of privacy that is proof against all technological attacks.

That is to say, if you pull out your distraction rectangle, fire up the camera, and tap the shutter button, in the ensuing eyeblink instant the image you've captured will be scrambled so thoroughly that it could never be unscrambled without the secret key unlocked by your passphrase or biometrics. Even if every hydrogen atom in the universe were converted into a computer, and even if all those computers spent all the time between now and the end of the universe trying to guess what the key was, we would run out of universe and time long before we ran out of possible keys.

What's more, this extremely robust form of scrambling and descrambling can be combined with other techniques to block tampering with the encrypted data, and to allow parties to reliably identify who scrambled the data and also to restrict who may unscramble it. These remarkable technological facts have inspired many excited debates about what they mean for our politics, most notably among a group of people who called themselves "cypherpunks":

https://web.archive.org/web/20151102012232/https://www.wired.com/1993/02/crypto-rebels/

One cypherpunk faction believed that modern cryptography could enable a kind of technological secession: by allowing ordinary people to communicate, transact and collaborate without the possibility of state interception or control, crypto could make states themselves obsolete.

But another faction pointed out that no amount of mathematics could help you if an agent of the state – or a criminal the state failed to protect you from – tortured you until you revealed the secret passphrase needed to unlock your secrets. This was (ironically) called "rubber hose cryptanalysis" (as in "Tell me your passphrase or I'll hit you with this rubber hose again"). Later, this became known as a "wrench attack" after a famous XKCD comic about $1m worth of security technology being defeated by hitting someone with a $5 wrench until they divulged the password:

https://xkcd.com/538/

Once you stipulate to the problem of wrench attacks and rubber-hose cryptanalysis, it becomes apparent that your cryptography is only as good as your physical defenses. What's more, the most effective physical defenses we have come from a strong rule of law, because even the thickest safe door benefits from the threat of prison for anyone who breaks into the safe, and the most effective tool for preventing a cop from hitting you with a rubber hose is the existence of a judge who can send that cop to prison for abusing your civil rights.

But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?

My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.

Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.

This has many problems. Smart contracts are slow, expensive, and unreliable. The number of people who understand contracts is small, the number of people who understand the software that embodies smart contracts is likewise small, and the Venn intersection of the two is more of a sphincter. What's more, there is irreducible ambiguity in all but the simplest of contracts, which means that even a "self-executing" contract ends up relying on a human adjudicator (an "oracle") who can be bribed or intimidated into cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/14/externalities/#dshr

And when it comes to transactions, crypto proves to be unwieldy, expensive and complex, so that nearly all crypto users end up directing an intermediary (like Coinbase) to hold and move their cryptographic assets for them. The upshot is that cryptocurrency mostly replaces banks – imperfect, but heavily regulated and insured – with unregulated tech platforms with murky ownership and often defective security procedures, who may or may not be insured (or even locatable) in the event of a collapse or a breach. Consequently, cryptocurrency has become a scam magnet of unprecedented and unstoppable power, and hardly a day goes by without people being ripped off in the most ghastly ways imaginable:

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

For bitcoin maxis and other anti-state cypherpunks, this is just a skill issue. Anyone who doesn't understand how to manage their own keys and turns to a platform to hold and move their crypto is getting what they deserve. As the maxim goes, "Not your keys, not your wallet," which is cypherpunkspeak for "caveat emptor."

That's where the wrench attacks come in. Because if you are in possession of keys that can be used to irreversibly and instantaneously steal large sums of money and move it to jurisdictions where the perpetrators are beyond any legal or physical recourse (e.g. North Korea), then there is a massive incentive for your adversaries to kidnap you and hit you with a wrench or a rubber hose.

That's precisely what's going on. People with substantial cryptocurrency holdings face grave personal danger, and the physical attacks on their person grow bolder, more violent, and more sadistic by the day:

https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks/blob/master/README.md

As crypto critic David Rosenthal writes, this problem is even worse than it seems at first blush:

https://blog.dshr.org/2026/05/wrench-attacks.html

For one thing, cryptocurrencies depend on "public ledgers" that indelibly, publicly record every transaction in the network. Cryptocurrency is nothing without these ledgers, and they have to be immutable and public to work. This is very bad news for anyone who relies on anonymity as their defense against physical attacks.

That's because "reidentification attacks" (where an anonymous person in a dataset is positively identified) get easier to perform over time. You might be represented in a database of hospital prescribing activities by a random number, and that number might be hard to associate with your real identity…at first. But with every subsequent release of data – whether in the form of an anonymized data-set or a breach – it gets easier to cross-reference the facts associated with your record with other facts from other records, such that a detailed, identifying picture of you emerges one fact at a time.

For example, if the taxi company you use suffers a breach that reveals journeys associated with every doctor's appointment at the hospital, now an attacker can pick out the home or work address of the single person who visited the hospital just before you received your prescription. The longer an "anonymized" data-set sits around in public view, the easier it gets to de-anonymize it:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3

Combine the fact that permanent ledgers make it progressively easier to identify people whom you can torture into revealing their crypto keys with the irreversible, instantaneous nature of crypto transfers and you get some very juicy targets indeed. "Not your keys, not your wallet" means it's "not anyone else's problem" when you get robbed. You can't ask the bank to interdict or reverse the transaction.

Rosenthal provides a litany of the escalating security measures crypto holders are turning to as this problem goes progressively more dangerous and terrifying. There's the guy who splits his keys up in four physical vaults at four separate locations, whose management is instructed to make him wait a minimum of seven days when he asks to retrieve them. Despite all this, he keeps his identity secret:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/crypto-conferences-up-security-after-attacks-scams

Rosenthal quotes Nicholas Weaver, who asks what kind of "internet of money" bitcoin can be if it can't be safely stored on a computer connected to the actual internet:

https://doi.org/10.1145/3208095

But an equally valid question is, what kind of escape from tyranny is it that requires you to hide your identity at all times lest you be snatched off the street and brutally tortured? What kind of "liberty" requires you to spend $860,000 armoring your two top execs' personal vehicles to protect them from gunfire and light artillery?

https://www.ft.com/content/71d7486d-89b5-48ac-8f94-857578c0a03b

It costs $6.2m/year to protect Coinbase's CEO – "more than the combined amount that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nvidia Corp. spent on their respective CEOs":

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-18/crypto-high-rollers-go-big-on-bodyguards-to-deter-kidnappers

Crypto true believers exhort one another to "HODL" (hold on for dear life). Selling your crypto during downturns is considered a moral failing. But now, crypto holders – especially those who manage their own keys – are literally holding on for dear life, as they are hunted by crime syndicates and state actors alike.

It's a good reminder of how badly crypto has failed on its own terms, delivering its biggest users into an existence of fear and physical peril that rivals the plight of even the most hunted dissidents in the most repressive societies. Worse: as cryptocurrency lobbyists have fused crypto with the world's largest and most corrupt governments (especially the Trump regime), crypto now has all the exposure to state coercion that made banks so unsuitable, but without the (inconstant, insufficient) protections offered by traditional banking.

And that's before we talk about the energy consumption problems, the scams enabled by crypto, and the rampant human trafficking that those scams necessitate:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-human-trafficking-victims-are-forced-to-run-pig-butchering-investment-scams

People in my technopolitical faction have a saying of our own: "'Crypto' means cryptography." Cryptography plays a hugely important role in protecting people from crime and state repression. It is no substitute for the rule of law and democracy, but it remains a key tool for securing and defending both:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/the-best-defense-against-rubber-hose-cryptanalysis/

Cryptocurrency, on the other hand? That's the worst of all worlds.

Hey look at this (permalink)


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

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Can anyone own “Web 2.0?” https://memex.craphound.com/2006/05/26/can-anyone-own-web-2-0/

#20yrsago iRiver gives customers the choice of switching off DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060619150812/http://www.iriver.com/mtp/

#20yrsago EFF scores win against Apple: bloggers’ sources are protected https://web.archive.org/web/20060602020337/http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1489151

#15yrsago Anonymous pre-paid credit-cards and money-laundering https://web.archive.org/web/20110529001021/https://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/05/23/technology-lt-fea-plastic-money-laundering_8481416.html

#15yrsago More incompetence revealed on the part of France’s “three-strikes” copyright enforcer https://web.archive.org/web/20120520073256/https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/french-three-strikes-anti-piracy-software-riddled-with-flaws/

#15yrsago Montage: Non-pornographic scenes from pornographic movies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVBhVDXLpaI

#15yrsago Improper court record redaction: a study https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2011/05/25/studying-frequency-redaction-failures-pacer/

#15yrsago Texas anti-TSA-grope bill killed by threat to shut down all Texas airports https://www.texastribune.org/2011/05/24/fed-threat-shuts-down-tsa-groping-bill-in-texas/?r

#15yrsago Canadian Tories refuse to send soldiers to help flood victims because they’d compete with the private sector https://web.archive.org/web/20110527053822/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec/ottawa-initially-refuses-request-for-more-troops-to-aid-quebec-flood-victims/article2033562/

#15yrsago Gold-farming in a Chinese forced-labor camp https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam

#10yrsago Edward Snowden performs radical surgery on a phone to make it “go black” https://web.archive.org/web/20160527125043/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/snowden-vice-cell-phone-hack/

#10yrsago FBI is investigating copyright trolls Prenda Law for fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20160526005012/https://popehat.com/2016/05/25/fbi-actively-investigating-prenda-law-team-for-fraud/

#10yrsago How a pharma company made billions off mass murder by faking the science on Oxycontin https://web.archive.org/web/20160524112437/http://static.latimes.com/oxycontin-part1/

#10yrsago GOP officials won’t let the FEC stop bosses from forcing employees to give to PACs https://web.archive.org/web/20160526114245/https://prospect.org/blog/checks/fec-deadlocks-over-employer-political-coercion

#10yrsago Undetectable proof-of-concept chip poisoning uses analog circuits to escalate privilege https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a018.pdf

#10yrsago “Pickup artist” douche uses copyright to sue Youtube critics, fans raise $100K defense fund https://www.gofundme.com/f/h3h3defensefund

#10yrsago The best thing you will read about the revelation that Captain America was a Nazi spy https://web.archive.org/web/20160623131614/https://storify.com/rahaeli/captain-america

#10yrsago Revealed: the amazing cover for Walkaway, my first adult novel since 2009 https://reactormag.com/cover-reveal-walkaway-cory-doctorow//

#10yrsago Tor Project is working on a web-wide random number generator https://blog.torproject.org/mission-montreal-building-next-generation-onion-services/

#10yrsago Jury hands Oracle its ass, says Google doesn’t owe it a penny for Java https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/eff-applauds-jury-verdict-favor-fair-use-oracle-v-google

#10yrsago Arcade cabinet enthusiasts discover trove of 50+ games in ship, derelict for 30 years https://arcadeblogger.com/2016/05/06/arcade-raid-the-duke-of-lancaster-ship/

#5yrsago Monopolists are winning the repair wars https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

#1yrago Who Broke the Internet, Part IV https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/26/babyish-radical-extremists/#cancon

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

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


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

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

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

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

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"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

The Paxton Problem [The Status Kuo]

Photos courtesy of KVUE

Some political figures are so thoroughly awash in scandal that writing about them feels redundant, like issuing a weather report during a hurricane. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is one such figure.

He was under felony indictment for nearly a decade, investigated for bribery by the FBI at the urging of his own employees, sued by his own whistleblowing deputies, and impeached by his own party. Even his own wife fied for divorce on what she called “biblical grounds.”

Unfortunately, after Paxton defeated four-term incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s Texas GOP Senate primary runoff, by a staggering 28 points, we need to talk about him again. Everything decidedly awful about Paxton is back in center stage in one of the most-watched Senate races of 2026. And that has the GOP spinning, wincing and even shooting at each other, even as a formidable Democratic challenger, James Talarico, rises in the polls.

Hold on to your ten-gallon hats. This ride is about to get bumpy.

Subscribe now

From “Crooked Ken” to “Our Nominee”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is scrubbing the internet furiously. For months, it ran aggressive attacks on Paxton—calling him “Crooked Ken,” accusing him of corruption, and even blasting him for giving the “kid-glove treatment” to an alleged child sex trafficker. One NRSC press release charged that “More Texans are now victims of an alleged child sex trafficker because Crooked Ken Paxton gave this dirtbag the kid-gloves treatment.” The Cornyn-NRSC joint fund ran scorched-earth ads accusing Paxton of cheating on his wife, “sleeping around with a married mother of seven,” and growing his net worth by 7,000 percent while in office.

Paxton won anyway, which tells you a lot about the MAGA base in Texas. Within hours, the NRSC quietly deleted at least two dozen press releases, digital ads and social media posts attacking Paxton. Every trace of “Crooked Ken” vanished from its website. The committee’s election-night statement conspicuously failed to mention either Paxton or Cornyn by name, pivoting instead to attacks on Democratic nominee James Talarico.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) at least had the candor to name the problem. Speaking with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday, Thune urged Republicans to “pivot” to win Texas in November, adding: “Ken Paxton is our nominee, and we’ve got to do everything we can … to make sure that we win this race, because losing is not an option.” Meanwhile, however, the Senate Leadership Fund’s fall ad reservations, comprising nearly $350 million in airtime across eight states, still do not include Texas.

Some senators who aren’t up for election, and therefore have less to fear from Trump’s base, are even more direct. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said Paxton “could reasonably be indicted for a felony.” And Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is retiring and has dispensed with what he cheerfully called his “extra filter,” delivered a colorful if grim comparison: “To call Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.”

Republicans are in disarray over Paxton, and that could present an opening for Talarico.

A Rap Sheet in Three Acts

Before getting to the Senate race now in full swing, it’s helpful to review Paxton’s record. There is no charitable way to do this, so let’s present it in three tragic acts.

Act One: Securities fraud. In 2015, just months after taking office as attorney general, Paxton was indicted on two counts of first-degree felony securities fraud and a lesser charge of failing to register with state securities regulators. The charges stemmed from his efforts to solicit investors in a tech startup called Servergy without disclosing that the company was paying him commissions to recruit backers. Each first-degree count carried a potential sentence of up to 99 years in prison. The case dragged on for nearly a decade of pretrial maneuvering before being resolved in 2024 through a pretrial diversion agreement: Paxton paid roughly $271,000 in restitution, completed community service and what the agreement called “legal ethics education,” and entered no plea. The charges were formally dismissed in 2025. He has insisted, throughout, that he did nothing wrong.

Act Two: FBI investigation. In October 2020, eight senior attorneys in Paxton’s own office reported him to the FBI, accusing him of bribery and abuse of office. Paxton, they claimed, had repeatedly misused the power of his office to benefit Nate Paul, a wealthy Austin real estate developer and political donor, in exchange for personal favors. In a deposition, Paul also revealed that Paxton had recommended he hire a woman with whom Paxton was having an extramarital affair. The Department of Justice eventually closed its investigation, once again without charges. But the whistleblowers who brought those allegations and were forced out of Paxton’s office won a $6.6 million civil judgment against Paxton. Texas taxpayers footed the bill.

Act Three: Impeachment. In May 2023, the Texas House, controlled by Republicans, unveiled articles of impeachment against Paxton, charging him with bribery, abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and abuse of the public trust, among other counts. The House voted 121 to 23 to impeach him. It was the first Texas impeachment of a sitting official since 1975. The subsequent two-week trial in the Texas Senate produced additional revelations about Paxton’s alleged affair with an aide. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, sat through the trial but was barred from voting or participating in deliberations. This being Texas, the state Senate acquitted Paxton on all 16 articles.

Trump’s Blessing and the MAGA Math

So how does a man a record this shady win a Senate primary by 28 points against a four-term incumbent? The answer has two parts: Donald Trump and the MAGA base’s willingness to treat criminal allegations as evidence of political persecution.

After initially hinting he would back Cornyn for re-election after the first round of voting, Trump ultimately endorsed Paxton just one week before the runoff, calling him a “true MAGA warrior.” Many observers noted that Trump does not like to back the losing side and likely withheld his support until it was clear which candidate would prevail.

Trump’s endorsement helped carry Paxton to victory. But he was already the darling of the MAGA base in Texas, which was more motivated to turn out to vote. Paxton had cultivated the same political identity as Trump: a fighter (and somewhat paradoxically a victim) wrongly persecuted by a corrupt system. He had built a devoted following among voters who saw, as they had with Trump, his impeachment not as evidence of wrongdoing but as a sign he was the enemy of the establishment. As Paxton himself told a radio audience when pressed about his negatives, “This is the same argument they made against Donald Trump.”

The national Republican Party had poured nearly $100 million into the Cornyn re-election effort. But it was not enough. In a statement after the results came in, Lauren French, spokesperson for the Senate Majority PAC, summed up the wreckage. “Washington Republicans burned nearly $100 million trying to stop Ken Paxton—and still lost. Even members of his own party call Paxton too corrupt and too damaged for Texas. Now he’s the GOP standard-bearer. Good luck with that.”

Enter James Talarico

The man standing between Paxton and the U.S. Senate is James Talarico, a 37-year-old Austin state representative, former public school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian who won the hard-fought Democratic primary in March. Within minutes of Paxton’s projected win Tuesday night, Talarico posted a video to social media framing the race in terms his campaign has been building toward all year. “The Most Corrupt Politician in America just became the Republican nominee for the United States Senate. That kind of corruption is the rot at the core of this broken system.” His campaign slogan: The People vs. Ken Paxton.

There is a stark contrast between the candidates, not just in character but in resources. Talarico raised more than $27 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone, reportedly the largest first quarter haul for any Senate candidate in any state in history, even surpassing Jon Ossoff, Sherrod Brown and Colin Allred. His total fundraising since entering the race last September has exceeded $49 million from over 540,000 individual donors, spanning 246 of Texas’s 254 counties. Paxton, by contrast, raised $7.6 million total and entered the general election with roughly $2.3 million cash on hand. He will almost certainly need to be rescued by national Republican money, the same apparatus that just spent $100 million trying to defeat him.

The Polls and the Path

A Texas Public Opinion Research poll from late April found Talarico leading Paxton by five points, 46 to 41, among likely general election voters. That’s within the margin of error but slightly wider margin than Talarico’s three-point edge over Cornyn in the same survey.

The picture sharpens further among key demographic groups. Talarico leads Paxton by 56 points among Black voters, 27 points among Latino voters, and a decisive 53-to-28 among independents. Among moderate voters, his advantage balloons to 49 points.

But this is Texas, and Cook Political Report still rates the seat “likely Republican.” We shouldn’t overlook that Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024.

And yet, the underlying demographic math has shifted considerably. The New York Times Upshot noted this week that Democratic gains among white Texas voters during the Trump era have been roughly equivalent to those Democrats made in Georgia, which resulted in a flip in that state.

The bigger story, as I’ve written earlier, is Latino voters. Trump made significant gains with them in 2024, neutralizing Democratic progress elsewhere. But those gains have now reversed. The latest Times/Siena poll shows Democrats ahead by 30 points among Hispanic registered voters nationally, better than Biden’s 2020 margin and approaching Clinton’s 2016 numbers. The Times ran the hypothetical: if Harris had matched Clinton’s Hispanic margins in 2016, Texas in 2024 would have been essentially tied. Indeed, in the current national environment. Texas would be expected to tilt Democratic.

Since January, Paxton has yet to lead a single general election poll against Talarico. Even Karl Rove acknowledged on Fox News that Democrats have a genuine opening that simply would not have existed against Cornyn.

Talarico’s Strategy: Coalition Over Confrontation

Talarico’s path to a historic upset runs through a coalition the Texas Democratic Party has rarely managed to assemble. It includes disenchanted moderate Republicans, independents, younger Black and Latino voters and a wave of small-dollar national donors energized by the idea of flipping Texas. Talarico held a press conference outside Paxton’s office in January to launch an anti-corruption agenda, signaling from the start that Paxton’s record would be a pillar of the campaign. His messaging on the stump has emphasized bipartisan legislative wins on property taxes, teacher pay, child care and prescription drug costs. These are ground-level pocketbook issues aimed at voters who may not share his party affiliation but recognize their own interests in his messaging.

Talarico is also positioning himself pointedly to the right of the Democratic establishment on border security and the oil and gas industry. It’s a calculated overture to right-leaning voters who may be unenthusiastic about Paxton but who would never describe themselves as Democrats. The morning after Paxton’s win, Talarico tweeted directly at such voters: “To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: you have a place in our campaign.”

Paxton’s counterstrategy is predictably Trumpian: drown Talarico in culture-war attacks and hope the red-state math does the rest. At a rally days before the primary, Paxton passed a microphone around the crowd and invited supporters to help him workshop nicknames for his opponent. The results he adopted for his victory speech included “Tofu Talarico,” “Six-Gender Jimmy,” “James Tala-freak-o,” and “Low-T Talarico.” Trump, for his part, posted that Talarico was “a weird — a weird — candidate” who “can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas” (Talarico is not a vegan). The NRSC called him “the most radical, woke Democrat Texas voters have ever seen.” Club for Growth labeled him “a crazy person.”

The attacks seize on a 2021 legislative statement in which Talarico argued that modern science recognizes more than two biological sexes, and on his remark, as a seminarian, that “God is nonbinary” — comments he has defended but acknowledged were awkwardly phrased. Talarico’s response to the vegan charge was tone perfect: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”

Addressing the “freak” charge, Talarico told CBS News, “If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles.” He was referring to the case of Adam Hoffman, a former Waco attorney who had pleaded guilty to indecent assault of a child in the third grade. Paxton’s office took over prosecution after the local DA recused himself and the first trial ended in a hung jury, with the victim unwilling to testify again. Paxton’s prosecutors then offered Hoffman a deal that would have reduced a first-degree felony charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child to two misdemeanors and only a single day in jail.

Republican state Reps. Pat Curry and Jeff Leach held a press conference calling the deal “incomprehensible.” Leach, as House Judiciary chair, invited Paxton to testify before his committee. Paxton has not responded.

The Bottom Line

In March I discussed a perfect storm that could help a rising young candidate like Talarico: a damaged candidate like Paxton winning the GOP primary, who is tied tightly to Trump, all while Latino voters abandon their rightward shift in historic numbers.

Beto O’Rourke came closer than any Democrat in a generation to winning statewide in 2018, raising $80 million and losing by 2.6 points. Colin Allred ran a credible race in 2024 but still lost to Ted Cruz by nine points. All the while, Hispanic voters kept moving toward Republicans, erasing Democratic gains elsewhere. The question for 2026 is whether that trend has reversed enough. The Times’s analysis and recent special elections in Texas suggest it has, and substantially.

Republicans have never before asked Texas voters to send to Washington a man who was indicted on felony charges, investigated by the FBI at the request of his own deputies and impeached by his own party. The NRSC knows this could spell catastrophe, or it wouldn’t have spent $100 million trying to prevent this outcome.

Talarico is currently outraising Paxton by more than 20 to 1. He leads in head-to-head polling and has the most thoroughly documented opposition research file of any Senate candidate, most of it written by Republicans. But he still faces a structural Republican advantage in a state Trump carried by 14 points, and a MAGA base energized by the idea that their guy is a victim/fighter.

None of that is insurmountable, especially in a Blue Tsunami election. But it still requires a shift of nine points from just two years ago. You almost have to try to lose to see numbers like that.

If a U.S. Senate seat in Texas does finally fall to the Democrats this November, the GOP will largely have its leaders and its own radical base to blame.

12:00 AM

‘Trump Mobile’ Has Struggled To Ship Any Phones, But Has Already Leaked Subscriber Data [Techdirt]

The Trump Organization still hasn’t shipped their promised Trump phone to most customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But rubes patriots who signed up did get something else instead: their private data leaked to the public. According to Techcrunch, the Trump Mobile website openly shared customer emails, addresses, phone numbers, and other sensitive data.

Trump Mobile has subsequently confirmed the leak, which they’re blaming on somebody else:

“Phone provider Trump Mobile has confirmed that it was exposing customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, cell numbers, and order identifiers to the open internet…[a spokesperson] said that the exposure was linked to a third-party platform provider that supports “certain Trump Mobile operations.” He did not name the provider.”

Whoops.

Even calling Trump Mobile an actual company is generous. As we noted when it was “launched” last year, the company is really just a lazy rebrand of an existing MAGA-friendly MVNO provider, Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.

A cornerstone of the venture was a “made in America” gold “Trump phone” named the T1 that was supposed to launch last August. Though shortly after launch the Trump Organization eliminated all the “made in America” claims. And the actual phone still hasn’t arrived in the hands of most customers, despite people paying $100 as early as June last year to reserve one. So very on brand, really.

Some of the Chinese-made phones have started showing up with reviewers, and it’s not going great. The screen is smaller than promised, the gold is more of a sickly yellow, the American flag is missing two stripes, and the phone, despite promises that it was “made with American values in mind,” appears to just be a lazy rebrand of an existing two-year-old Chinese-made Android phone (the 2024 HTC U24 Pro).

So it’s a dated Chinese phone, slathered with Trump’s name, gold paint, and an incorrect depiction of the U.S. flag — that’s a year late, not particularly secure, and pre-loaded with propaganda (Truth Social). Again, very on brand. Though curiously in stark contrast to all of the Trump bravado about how he’d personally ensure most smartphones would now be made in the States.

Still, Trump Mobile execs are trying to put on a brave face and pretend this is going well:

“The technology business is more difficult than some may realize, as parts must be tested for quality assurances,” Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien said in a statement to CNET earlier this month. “We have experienced delays during a variety of steps in getting the T1 to completion, but those delays were worth it in our minds as we are delivering an amazing product.”

Except there’s no real indication that last bit is true. Like most Trump efforts to make money off his name, it’s clear this entire thing was aggressively half-assed.

Thursday 2026-05-28

10:00 PM

Debito’s Shingetsu News Agency Visible Minorities column 75: “Japan’s Foreigners and the Four Worst Words”, on how Japan’s recent public policies making NJ Resident lives more miserable is what happens when NJ continuously self-disenfranchise (May 28, 2026) [debito.org]

I recently received this question from a reporter: "Sanseito, which has promised to put 'Japanese First,' made a strong showing in the 2025 Upper House election.  Some wonder why those who voted for the party were not aware that the slogan could promote discrimination and anti-foreigner sentiment.  I would very much appreciate it if you give us your take on this." My answer was:   "After several decades of economic stagnation, and now a shrinking economy and falling wages, people are ever hungrier for change, any change.  Sanseito profited from that like nationalist/populist movements and parties have done worldwide.  It’s a cresting wave of anti-globalism and identity politics.  I’m sure voters were perfectly well aware that 'Japanese first' would stoke discrimination.  Now playing dumb about rising xenophobia is just, if I'm being gracious, a form of 'buyer’s remorse.'   "But I actually doubt all that many voters in Japan are all that regretful beyond the 'tatemae' (pretense) of expressing a simple 'kawaisou' (what a pity).  People have had decades to make anti-discrimination policies to prevent this sort of thing, but never really have.  Because after all, the discrimination won't affect most of them.  Again, foreigners aren’t really seen as residents and neighbors in the 'monoethnic' Japan national narrative, so all this to me is within character.  I’m more surprised a Sanseito-type party wasn’t as successful sooner." This brings us to me saying the four worst words in the English language...

Building trust through software rather than giving it [F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository]

Security and privacy come from trust

The experience we have with our devices usually feels private and secure. If no one else is looking at our screen, it seems like no one is watching. Unfortunately, this feeling is misplaced. Apps come bundled with trackers, websites seek to profile users to target them with ads and many apps and systems providers have full access to how users interact with their product. And that’s before even talking about the malicious actors who want access to your credit card details.

Even if we are aware of this, we don’t want to think about the privacy and security of our devices. What we want is to be able to trust that the systems we interact with protect us and our information. Just as we trust that the public bridges we walk on to support the weight of traffic, we should be able to trust the devices and software we use. Yet reality is different. Where public infrastructure relies on strict rules and regulations, technology is a patchwork of unequally adopted standards, connected blocks and proprietary solutions. This usually leaves us trusting those who build apps and devices. When Apple informs iPhone users that they might have been targeted by a spyware, users trust that the company is telling the truth and sharing real information. When Google tells us that our account is secure and only we can access it, we trust them. How those companies actually implement privacy and security is unknown, we trust them to be doing it correctly.

But trust can be built through a lot more than a relation with a company. It can be cultivated with open source code, with the adoption of secure and well-known protocols, through reproducible build and deployment process, and through the infrastructure and hardware it runs on.

Trusted protocols for example can participate in building trust. TLS, OAuth, The Signal protocol: those are all standards and protocols that have been adopted across industries and that allow us to shop online safely, connect to our banks securely or message people privately and security. Fundamentally, they provide security in a way that doesn’t require trusting intermediaries: an encrypted Signal message could go through a dozen servers, yet only the sender and the recipient can read it.

But protocols aren’t sufficient, and the trust they provide can be weakened when implemented in a non-transparent manner. WhatsApp implementing the Signal Protocols means we still have to trust the company building the product when its history provides limited reasons to do so.

To illustrate this: A range of recent, and relatively questionable, lawsuits against Meta alleged that WhatsApp did not, in fact, implement E2EE encryption and could access user messages. While there are strong reasons to think those are part of a smear campaign, with WhatsApp code being proprietary, there is no means to ensure that the Signal Protocol is indeed properly implemented, and has remained so with every update of the app since the work done between the Meta and Signal.

Protocols are not silver bullets that, when deployed, simply create security and cannot be broken. In the same way that a spyware installed on a smartphone can access and siphon plain-text messages from any encrypted app like Signal, it is possible for an app developer to insert code to exfiltrate messages, or private keys for later decryption. Some of this can be audited by monitoring app traffic but there are limitations.

What we need to build infrastructure trust

Completely avoiding the need to trust those who create and deployed software is hard, but reducing this trust to the bare minimum is feasible and desirable. It will always feel safer to trust a company saying “You don’t have to trust us, you can trust our security and test it yourself” than one saying “Just trust us”.

Whether in the context of discussion around digital sovereignty or pushing back against digital monopolies, creating systems that offer built-in trust rather than requiring trust in companies offers security and autonomy guarantees that are hard to overstate. For mobile app for example, this translates into:

  • Open and trusted protocols: building on secure foundations that are battle tested, benefit from multiple implementations and supported by a community
  • Free and open source software: providing transparency that allows code auditing
  • Reproducible builds: providing certainty that what you are running is what the developer released and hasn’t been altered
  • Control over the infrastructure: access to the physical machine in charge of the actual computation is crucial in preventing manipulation and intrusion

F-Droid implements many of those things. Reproducible builds have been a core part of making releases of Android apps in a fully automated way since 2015. We have full control over the server used to build and publish apps, along with a strict security model. Most of those things run on open source software, rely on open and trusted protocols and benefit from the active communities that develop and maintain them.

At a time where pressure is mounting with regards to who owns our infrastructure and systems, building and using tools that create trust enables us to limit our dependency on unreliable actors who can put entire ecosystem in jeopardy on a whim.

Yet seeking autonomy does not need to mean isolation. Those steps might reduce our dependency on private actors, but they require a strong and healthy open source ecosystem to thrive. It switches our reliance from companies with private interests that might change to communities of actors that collaboratively build open tools. If this is something that resonates with you and you want to support F-Droid to continue in these efforts, consider making a donation.

04:00 PM

Visible Minorities: The Four Worst Words [SNA Japan]

Because what Japan is doing to its foreign residents is all within character, and everyone should have seen it coming long ago.

SNA (Tokyo) — Frankly, given the state of the world, I’ve dreaded writing another column. Where to start anymore?

But a recent question from a reporter put my mind back in focus:

Sanseito, which has promised to put ‘Japanese First,’ made a strong showing in the 2025 Upper House election. Some wonder why those who voted for the party were not aware that the slogan could promote discrimination and anti-foreigner sentiment. I would very much appreciate it if you give us your take on this.

My answer was:

After several decades of economic stagnation, and now a shrinking economy and falling wages, people are ever hungrier for change, any change. Sanseito profited from that like nationalist/populist movements and parties have done worldwide. It’s a cresting wave of anti-globalism and identity politics.

I’m sure voters were perfectly well aware that ‘Japanese first’ would stoke discrimination. Now playing dumb about rising xenophobia is just, if I’m being gracious, a form of ‘buyer’s remorse.’

But I actually doubt all that many voters in Japan are all that regretful beyond the ‘tatemae’ (pretense) of expressing a simple ‘kawaiso’ (what a pity).

People have had decades to make anti-discrimination policies to prevent this sort of thing, but never really have. Because after all, the discrimination won’t affect most of them.

Again, foreigners aren’t really seen as residents and neighbors in the ‘monoethnic’ Japan national narrative, so all this to me is within character. I’m more surprised a Sanseito-type party wasn’t as successful sooner.

This brings us to me saying the four worst words in the English language:

I. Told. You. So.

There Should Be No Surprises Here

The rise of Sanseito, and the competing downward spiral of policies to make foreign residents ever more miserable, are all part of a pattern.

Since the 1990s, pundits like me have warned that Japanese society has public policies with racism baked in. It’s so embedded that people reflexively accept a basic premise: That some people are entitled to power (e.g., Japanese in Japan), and those who “don’t belong here” will just have to settle for second-class status (e.g., you foreign residents). Some opinion polls have even said a large proportion of Japanese don’t believe foreigners deserve the same human rights in Japan.

But Japan’s foreign residents should have seen it coming. There’s a long history to cite:

More than a century ago, a generation of colonized foreigners in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere became subjects of the Japanese Empire. Many ethnicities collaborated, fought, and died for the Emperor in Japan’s wars. Then, after World War II, they were summarily denaturalized and disenfranchised, losing their right to vote and participate in Japanese society, many becoming the card-carrying Zainichi generational foreigners.

That set the template. As Japan prospered in its postwar boom, “newcomer” foreigners invited into Japan’s burgeoning labor market fared no better, finding themselves on revolving-door labor visas and exploited under government-sponsored human trafficking systems. Even the “good foreigners” (the racially bona fide “Nikkei Japanese” laborers from South America, given instant de facto Permanent Residency) were summarily booted in the 2009 economic crisis.

Today, under late-stage cultural capitalism, the ruse is now to get quick money from foreigners who are even more temporary—tourists. But that plan has soured under its own success, with crowds of foreigners being blamed for all manner of social ills. This has provided political leverage to the xenophobes who no longer have to hide their intentions anymore. In comes Sanseito, encouraging a Liberal Democratic Party to compete with policies making life for foreigners as miserable as possible.

That means all you foreign residents who devoted your lives to Japan by marrying, paying taxes, investing in homes, becoming gainfully employed and starting companies, having kids, taking out Permanent Residency, and contributing to Japanese society like everyone else: Your status is now tenuous.

You face new “Permanent” Residency statuses that require twice the time, with application fees that have risen tenfold—conveniently too expensive for many lower-wage long-term residents. And it’s no longer “permanent”—it can be revoked in an instant if you miss a tax payment.

You also face ever-higher hurdles both in terms of arduous visa ladders (3-year visas are difficult enough to get, but 5-year visas will now be required for PR), “upper-intermediate level” N2 language tests, higher entry fees all around, and likely an extra “gaijin tax” as dual-pricing schemes and racial profiling wind up on your restaurant bills, as an automatic “seating charge for tourists.” After all, Japan’s policymakers make almost no distinction between foreign tourist and resident, so why should anyone else?

So where’s the outrage from those affected? It’s muted, because making life difficult for foreign residents has been so normalized that some of the biggest advocates are the long-term foreigners themselves. As I’ve written many times in the past, many promote “guestist” arguments, i.e., foreigners are the “guests” to the Japanese “hosts,” so don’t rock the boat. Or they depict the “bad foreigners” (as opposed to the “good ones”) as despoiling their Japan due to their illiteracy, deliberate misbehaving, or cultural-klutziness. Or they argue that Japan can run its society as it pleases and foreigners should have no say—anything else is tantamount to cultural imperialism. Or that shimaguni (island-country) Japan just doesn’t know any better. Yada yada.

Nothing quite like denying your own right to exist in a society as an equal.

You Brought This on Yourselves

Activists like me have tried to warn you that things won’t get better unless you stood up for yourselves. I, for one, have written books and hundreds of columns on how Japan systemically excludes all sorts of people (not just foreigners), pointed out where the pressure points are for fixing these situations, and offered advice for how you can assimilate better. You can still read them at Debito.org.

But the reactions towards us immigrants trying to help Japan’s foreign communities have been counterproductive. Again, just speaking for myself, a solid number of readers generally concluded that people like me were just angry malcontents trying to self-aggrandize (if not capitalize) on human rights, or just decided to shoot the messenger for popping their bubble with uncomfortable truths.

So let’s pop another: It might be a relief to some that you don’t have to care about Japan’s political outcomes, or have any input into public policies that affect you. But now look what that got you—blame and public sanctions for things you didn’t do.

So after 30 years of cautionary tales culminating in the public policies we predicted, I think I’ve earned the right to say those four words:

I. Told. You. So.

You Could Have Been Contenders

Another future was possible. There was arguably a window in the late 1980s when Japan was bringing in Non-Japanese as longer-term residents, and policymakers were thinking about how Japan could best assimilate itself into a globalizing economy by “internationalizing” its labor force. Companies were hiring foreign workers like us at the ground floor. We were learning Japanese and figuring out how power flowed for ourselves. Many of us assimilated into Japan on our own terms.

And we did good. Our generation of Japan specialists between 1985-1995 eventually paved the way for today’s widespread acceptance of “soft-power” Japanese (and Asian) cool cultural exports—including Anime, Manga, arguably even K-Pop bands. Not to mention more than a generation of JETs. Thankfully, the era of the “inscrutable Japanese” has gone the way of Reischauer.

Sadly, that time frame of expertise slammed shut, as Japanese society eventually realized that the “Bubble Era” of prosperity for all was a phase that would never return. Instead, people took their anxieties out on the easiest targets—foreigners—as most societies feeling real economic pain do.

This could have been ameliorated significantly if policymakers had taken our suggestions decades ago:

1) Create a national narrative where anyone could be a “Japanese” based on legal status, not physical appearance.

2) Create laws against racial discrimination, as both the Japanese Constitution and United Nations treaty require.

As you know, that didn’t happen. Now foreign residents have a generation of their children saddled with the same racial profiling that targeted them as parents.

What can you do about it now? You can rebel, settle into quiet second-class-citizen suffering, or leave. All options are such a waste of Japan’s talent and energy.

Or worse, you can become enough of a “self-hating gaijin” to have to constantly prove yourself to be a “real Japanese,” as Diet Member Kimi Onoda, Cabinet “Minister in Charge of a Society of Well-Ordered and Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals,” does when she aims to make herself look good by making you look bad.

That’s how we got here. These monstrous situations could have been avoided if Japan had taken the reasonable advice of treating people like human beings regardless of nationality and physical appearance. But no…

The Comeuppance Is Coming

Instead, Karma’s a bitch. Japan’s countryside is depopulating. Its economy keeps falling down the international GDP rankings, shrinking from senescence due to a lack of replacement birthrates or immigration. Its pension systems, as forecast, are going bankrupt. Its old people are living lives of penury as real wages drop for everyone and inflation does its damage. The slide in the international exchange value of the yen means foreign tourists get the bargains, while people living in Japan get trapped in a domestic spiral of decreasing buying power.

And it was all for naught. Unless Japan engages in ethnic cleansing (not impossible, given Sanseito), its foreign population will rise anyway as a percentage regardless just from natural attrition.

Again, everyone, Japanese and Non-Japanese, was told this was coming. As far back as the year 2000, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi and the United Nations both said that Japan would need to import 600,000 foreign residents per year to maintain the current standard of living. Then two decades ago, prominent thinkers, such as Hidenori Sakanaka, warned that we were at a crossroads to becoming either a “Big Japan” (a regional if not a world power) or a “Small Japan” (an irrelevant geopolitical backwater), depending on whether Japan chose to treat its foreigners as guest workers or future Japanese citizens.

More than a quarter century later, it’s clear the “Small Japan” scenario is nigh.

We. Told. You. So.

Yet most of you acquiesced to this. If you also stood up for your rights as citizens, residents, and taxpayers, things might have turned out differently. But you didn’t.

Instead, most of you chose to ignore, marginalize, if not outright attack people like us. (I for one still get regular death threats.) Oh well. Ye shall reap.

So enjoy your sunset years within a sunsetting society. I too will enjoy Japan, like many other Japanese abroad, as a citizen but not as a resident. Because I did everything I could to become Japanese and it wasn’t enough. Given Sanseito-ism, it’s even less likely to be enough now.

Maybe now you’ll listen. But I doubt it. Like any community you bought into but can’t leave (the MAGA personality cult comes to mind), it’s nearly impossible to admit you were wrong.

But I will still say it: I. Told. You. So.

Become a Shingetsu News supporter on Patreon.

02:00 PM

Out Of Control RFK Jr. Fires Leaders Of Preventative Services Task Force [Techdirt]

Alright, this is getting dire. In addition to all of the anti-vaxxer bullshit that has infected HHS thanks to RFK Jr.’s appointment to run the department, we have also made the point recently that an equally big problem is the talent drain occurring at HHS as well. Between the voluntary exits by smart people who don’t want to be part of something this stupid and the scores of smart people who have been fired by Kennedy and his hand-picked goon squad, HHS and its child agencies have significantly less talent within them today than they did a year and a half ago. And I haven’t even mentioned yet that we don’t currently have Senate-confirmed heads of the FDA, the CDC, or a Surgeon General. What’s the point of these positions if they mean so little that the Trump administration isn’t going to bother to fill them?

But Kennedy isn’t done, yet. Just recently, he fired the leadership of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a volunteer group that works with government to mandate what preventative care procedures are approved such that insurance services have to cover them without copay.

In letters dated May 11, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. notified the two doctors who chaired the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that he was terminating their appointments immediately, before the end of their multiyear terms.

The Department of Health and Human Services already had largely sidelined the task force, indefinitely postponing scheduled public meetings over the past year and thus leaving some long-expected updates on cervical cancer screenings and other topics in limbo.

Kennedy didn’t inform Drs. John Wong and Esa Davis as to why their positions were being terminated in his letter. But he did go before Congress recently and talked about wanting to reform the task force because he considered their approach and work lazy and not transparent enough. We’ve heard Kennedy make these noises about transparency in the past and we know that they are bullshit. He is almost certainly instead looking merely to install sycophants that will do whatever his bidding happens to be. Particularly as it appears that the task force was prevented from publishing some of its work.

Some health advocates had worried that Kennedy was preparing to replace the expert panel with less experienced political appointees, like he had done with a critical vaccine advisory committee. Over the past year, the task force wasn’t allowed to publish its final update to the cervical cancer screening guideline or take steps to update recommendations about maternal depression, said former task force chairman Dr. Michael Silverstein, a pediatrician.

“This is a level of government intrusion into scientific processes that I’ve not experienced in my 10 years on the task force,” he said.

What chaos comes out of this move remains to be seen, though there can be no doubt that chaos is on the menu. There are treatments out there that could benefit from approval from the task force, but insurance won’t cover them without that approval. We’re talking about screenings for cancer and other dangerous afflictions. Kennedy could also install people who will approve whatever crazy whim he comes up with next. Perhaps insurance will have to cover snorting cocaine off of toilets while supervised by a doctor.

You may laugh at that, but look around you. Does it really sound that crazy with all that has gone on at HHS the past 18 months?

09:00 AM

Australian Teens Impacted By The Social Media Ban Are Getting Less News [Techdirt]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the months leading up to the implementation of Australia’s social media ban in December 2025, there was much discussion about the possible negative consequences.

Among these were concerns that teenagers would consume less news. As most young adults use social media for news and many rely on it, this was a real risk.

So months on, has this come to pass? In our newly-published research, we found the more young people are impacted by the ban, the more likely they are to report they are getting less news and having less opportunity to discuss news and the issues that matter to them.

Our research

In February we surveyed 1,027 young people aged 10 to 17, just two months after the legislation took effect.

As part of a longitudinal survey that has examined young Australians’ news engagement since 2017, we asked young people questions about the ban’s impact on their social media use and their news engagement.

First, we investigated if the ban had affected young people’s social media use by asking them if their engagement with each banned platform had changed at all, and if so, whether the change was a complete stop or if they just used it less.

We found 61% of under-16s who had previously been using banned platforms reported little or no change in their social media use. For the majority of young people surveyed, the ban was ineffectual.

In fact, only one in four (26%) reported their social media use had been affected.

Next, we asked young people if the ban had affected their engagement with news.

For those whose social media use was significantly disrupted, the result was stark: 51% reported getting less news as a direct result of the ban.

This finding is a significant concern because it suggests that as the ban becomes more “successful”, with a greater number of young people being removed from platforms, their news engagement will fall in parallel.

The impact on civic involvement

A 2025 report from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, based on testing of year 6 and year 10 students, finds school students’ civics knowledge is the lowest it has been since testing began 20 years ago. This is despite most young people believing it’s important to take action in the community on issues that matter to them.

Our findings show that when young people are impacted by the social media ban they lose access to news about issues they care about. They are also talking less about news and finding fewer opportunities to share their views or take other forms of action.

Our previous research shows news engagement makes young people feel knowledgeable and more capable of responding to issues.

A large body of research also shows news interest and engagement is closely associated with civic engagement. The more engaged people are with news, the more likely they are to become involved in community and social issues.

Social news or no news

It’s unlikely that being cut off from news on social media will lead young people back to traditional news sources.

Most young Australians say they don’t feel represented or heard by traditional news organisations. They also feel the news mainstream outlets create isn’t accessible to young people and doesn’t focus on the issues that matter most to them.

In our survey, 75% said news organisations have no idea what their lives are actually like, and 71% said they find it difficult to find news relevant to people their age.

Our earlier research also shows Australian news organisations rarely include young people in news stories. When they are included, they are seen but not heard.

For instance, young people are shown in news stories in photographs and video footage ten times more than their voices are heard or they are quoted in stories.

In addition, another study of news has shown that when young people are included in breaking news events, they are often stereotyped as being lazy, dangerous and entitled.

These findings demonstrate some of the reasons young people have likely turned to social media for news in recent years.

So what should we do?

It’s likely that over time, more young people will be cut off from social media as loopholes in the ban are ironed out. This emphasises the need to find ways to encourage young people to engage with other news sources in productive and meaningful ways.

A key concern is trust. We need to educate young people about the importance of news to democratic process, providing them with insights into how high quality journalism is produced and supporting them to make informed decisions about who and what to trust online.

This can happen as part of media literacy education but this requires investments in high quality curriculum resources and teacher training.

In Australia, we are in the fortunate position that we already recognise the need for media literacy in the Australian curriculum. High quality news literacy resources are being produced by the ABC through programs such as BTN (Behind The News), and other organisations such as Squiz Kids.

At the same time, to develop trust, mainstream news organisations need to do a much better job of representing young people in fair and inclusive ways so they feel seen and heard.

Finally, it’s important to recognise that amid all of these changes to young people’s technology access, our research shows family is the first and most trusted source of news for young people. We need to help parents understand the important role they play in helping their kids navigate the news.

Michael Dezuanni is Professor, Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology; Simon Chambers is a Postdoctoral research fellow at Western Sydney University, and Tanya Notley is Professor in Digital Media at Western Sydney University

08:00 AM

07:00 AM

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for May 22 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day
The NASA/German Research Centre for Geosciences GRACE Follow-On spacecraft launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Tuesday, May 22, 2018, from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
RSSSiteUpdated
XML About Tagaini Jisho on Tagaini Jisho 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Arch Linux: Releases 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Carlson Calamities 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Debian News 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Debian Security 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML debito.org 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML dperkins 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository 2026-05-28 10:00 PM
XML GIMP 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Japan Bash 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Japan English Teacher Feed 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Kanji of the Day 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Kanji of the Day 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Let's Encrypt 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Marc Jones 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Marjorie's Blog 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML OpenStreetMap Japan 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML OsmAnd Blog 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Popehat 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Ramen Adventures 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Release notes from server 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML SNA Japan 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Tatoeba Project Blog 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Techdirt 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML The Business of Printing Books 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML The Luddite 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML The Popehat Report 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML The Status Kuo 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML The Stranger 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Tor Project blog 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML TorrentFreak 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML what if? 2026-05-29 04:00 AM
XML Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed 2026-05-28 07:00 AM
XML xkcd.com 2026-05-29 04:00 AM