News

Friday 2026-10-30

04:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 後 [Kanji of the Day]

後

✍9

小2

behind, back, later

ゴ　コウ

のち　うし.ろ　うしろ　あと　おく.れる

午後   (ごご)   —   afternoon
今後   (こんご)   —   from now on
最後   (さいご)   —   end
その後   (そのあと)   —   after that
後半   (こうはん)   —   second half
直後   (ちょくご)   —   immediately following
年後   (ねんご)   —   years later
前後   (ぜんご)   —   front and rear
最後まで   (さいごまで)   —   to the end
戦後   (せんご)   —   postwar period

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 寛 [Kanji of the Day]

寛

✍13

中学

tolerant, leniency, generosity, relax, feel at home, be at ease, broadminded

カン

くつろ.ぐ　ひろ.い　ゆる.やか

寛容   (かんよう)   —   tolerance
寛平   (かんびょう)   —   Kanpyo era (889.4.27-898.4.26)
寛大   (かんだい)   —   tolerant
寛治   (かんじ)   —   Kanji era (1087.4.7-1094.12.15)
寛徳   (かんとく)   —   Kantoku era (1044.11.24-1046.4.14)
寛永   (かんえい)   —   Kan'ei era (1624.2.30-1644.12.16)
寛文   (かんぶん)   —   Kanbun era (1661.4.25-1673.9.21)
寛仁   (かんじん)   —   magnanimous
寛和   (かんな)   —   Kanna era (985.4.27-987.4.5)
寛政   (かんせい)   —   Kansei era (1789.1.25-1801.2.5)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

A Good Day for Cryptography [Let's Encrypt]

October 16, 2026 was a good day for the cryptography community. A 25-year-old question about the math behind some of the Internet’s most widely used encryption was finally answered. The previously lost method used to create the widely-used NIST elliptic curves has been found.

In 2023, Filippo Valsorda created a bounty for answering the question, with a twist: if the solvers gave the prize to a nonprofit, it would be tripled, from $12,288 to $36,864. A group of engineers raised their hands to fund the bounty prize. Such a generous and thoughtful idea. And you guessed it! The solvers, a team of researchers at Anthropic, took Filippo up on it and donated the bounty to ISRG. ISRG is grateful for the generous support and we’re grateful because the answer itself strengthens confidence in cryptography that secures much of the web. A good day indeed.

What was the bounty? What was the answer? It’s a long story. TL;DR: The NIST elliptic curves, used in encryption across the Internet, were built from “seeds” that two NSA engineers generated in the late 1990s. Years later, nobody could remember exactly how they’d made them. Humans do what humans do, and without an answer, some people grew skeptical. That kind of doubt chips away at trust, which obviously isn’t great for cryptographic infrastructure. The answer turned out to be reassuring: the seeds came from an ordinary random number generator, seeded with the time.

What we love most about this story is that Filippo and our community wanted to uphold the public’s trust. We build and protect Internet infrastructure, and work to keep it secure every day. Filippo didn’t have to create this bounty, but he wanted answers for his fellow engineers and the public. The engineers who chipped in didn’t have to put up their hard-earned dollars, but they wanted to help put the speculation to rest. And the team at Anthropic didn’t have to spend time solving it, but enlisted Claude’s help in closing this cryptographic chapter of history.

Who do you know that is helping make the Internet better? Thank them! Many of them are paid to do this work, but they also do it on their own time because they care deeply. And so do we.

In the cryptography and security community, we are working every day to protect our teams, our organizations, our friends and family, and in ISRG’s case, billions of users online. Consider making a donation in honor of that work. You can give online or make your donation via stock, crypto, check, DAF, and more. Learn more in the Ways To Give section of our donation page.

The following individuals made all this possible:

  • Filippo Valsorda, who started the NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty. Read his bounty announcement and his post when the bounty was claimed.

  • John Wood, Henry de Valence, Ava Howell, Zack Voase, Lucy Sweet, Amir Omidi, Paul Crowley, Iain McGinniss, Nicholas Carlini, and Steve Weis, the team at Anthropic who solved it and chose to send the prize to ISRG. Read Anthropic’s writeup.

  • Amir Omidi, Chris Palmer, Colm MacCárthaigh, David Adrian, David Anderson, Filippo Valsorda, Jeff Hodges, Matt Green, Matthew McPherrin, Paul Kehrer, Ryan Sleevi, and Soatok, who chipped in their own money to fund the bounty.

Thank you for making the Internet more secure every day.

02:00 PM

Study: America’s Measles Problem Is Domestic, Not RFK Jr.’s Dirty Foreigners [Techdirt]

To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about how many measles deaths have occurred this year is also wrong. Hell, at a recent campaign event in Michigan, a state with a large Arab population, Kennedy decided that the best way to stump for Mike Rogers was to claim that none of the Arabs throughout the world produce any science or literature, which is also wrong.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce literature,” he said.

Arabs have won all those prizes. Peter Hotez, who is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late colleague, Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail, who was Arab and died in 2016, “would disagree” with Kennedy’s comments.

So, not just wrong, but racist in perhaps the stupidest manner possible given his only reason for being in Michigan in the first place.

So let’s rewind the clock back to April, when Kennedy decided to tell the public that this whole measles outbreak thing had nothing to do with him. Rather, the only reason we had the outbreaks to begin with was because of dirty foreigners coming in as immigrants.

But despite Kennedy being the most vocal source of vaccine misinformation, the secretary tried to blame the outbreaks entirely on immigrants who come to the U.S. from countries where measles is not eliminated — framing the issue as a global epidemic rather than a national public health crisis.

“It has nothing to do with me,” he told lawmakers. “If you’re worried about polio and tuberculosis, you should look at the immigration policies in this country. ’Cause the place where it’s occurring are the place[s] where the immigrants are going, because they’re not vaccinated.”

That was wrong too, of course. We knew it at the time, just was we knew that the practice of blaming immigrants for disease outbreaks is such common practice that we could set our watches to it. But now we have actual data on how the measles is spreading in America and that data fully puts the lie to Kennedy’s bigotry.

Most of the meat of the study focuses on very specific instances in which Washington state endured measles infections that were spread specifically from South Carolina earlier this year.

The study in Washington relied heavily on epidemiological data, linking cases among contacts and exposure sites. But also key to the work was whole-genome sequencing, which made clear that cases didn’t just stem from one single introduction of the virus from South Carolina that then spread among Washington residents; instead, it revealed five separate introductions.

“As public health jurisdictions prepare to respond to increased measles importations linked to domestic measles outbreaks, while remaining vigilant for international importations, timely whole-genome sequencing can supplement epidemiologic information to help differentiate distinct importations from local transmission and inform outbreak response,” the authors conclude.

But when you pair that with the data from CDC as to exactly how the infections are spreading, you get both the micro and macro data for how it’s occurring.

Kennedy claims that there is a “global outbreak” and the US is “doing a better job than any country in the world at controlling the measles outbreak.” Both claims are false. Dozens of other countries have lower case rates than the US. While some countries, including neighboring Canada and Mexico, are also seeing large increases in cases, the soaring case tally in the US is not being driven by international imports, but by domestic spread in under-vaccinated communities.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 18 of the country’s 4,588 confirmed measles cases this year were reported among international visitors. Of all the cases, 4,404 (96 percent) are linked to a domestic outbreak.

There can be no doubt that disease is sometimes imported into America from foreign visitors. But the point is that that just isn’t the real problem here. America’s measles problem is a domestic problem, not a matter of immigration. If we had maintained our vaccination rates such that we had herd immunity, we’d be fine.

It’s because of Kennedy’s many, many lies on vaccines that we are not. Don’t let him tell you another lie, that this is all a result of immigrants, to cover up his responsibility.

11:00 AM

Are We the New Russia? [The Status Kuo]

Image courtesy of MeidasTouch

When we think about foreign powers interfering in elections in democratic countries, we usually think first of Russia. Putin has put his finger on the election scales from the 2016 presidential contest in the U.S. to more recent campaigns across Europe.

We don’t normally think of the United States that way, but perhaps we should. On Tuesday, Justice Flávio Dino of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ordered police to investigate whether a donor network co-founded by none other than JD Vance helped finance or staff Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign.

As I wrote in The Big Picture, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil had turned his struggling campaign into a fight over national sovereignty after President Donald Trump issued threats and tariffs over the prosecution of his ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father. Lula warned voters that Flávio would surrender Brazil’s sovereignty to Trump, and on election night, after winning Sunday’s runoff, he told supporters, “This country will not accept being anyone’s backyard.”

Few realized that potential meddling in Brazil’s election may have extended far beyond Trump’s public threats. Dino’s order opens a formal investigation into Vance’s network and lays out some already eye-popping claims.

Police have yet to gather the evidence, and much remains unknown. The network, the businessmen named in the order and the Bolsonaro campaign all deny wrongdoing, and Vance’s office declined to comment. Still, the allegations describe conduct that, if proven, could constitute a serious crime under Brazilian law. They lay out a motive, a vehicle for support, people on the inside of the campaign and powerful friends in Washington.

Below I walk through the case Brazilian investigators will now seek to build.

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The crime: foreign hands on a Brazilian election

Brazilian law draws a hard line around its elections. The Elections Law bars parties and candidates from receiving, “directly or indirectly,” any donation “in money or its equivalent in value” from a foreign entity or government. The ban covers in-kind help, including advertising, so staff, services and expertise can count alongside cash.

The penalties stack up. A candidate proven to have raised money illegally can be denied office or stripped of it. Hiding contributions by keeping them off the books can constitute electoral falsification under Article 350 of the Electoral Code. In a separate case involving abuse of political power and misuse of the media, Brazil’s electoral court barred Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years after his 2022 defeat.

Brazil saw this coming. In December 2025, its intelligence agency, Abin, warned of the risk of foreign interference aimed at destabilizing the 2026 electoral process. In late August, a confidential Abin report sent to the presidency and the electoral court went further, rating the risk of U.S. interference as critical.

Abin was watching Washington’s public pressure, including tariffs, sanctions and statements from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the allegations now before Brazil’s Supreme Court point to a murkier channel: a private donor network called the Rockbridge Network, co-founded by Vance.

The motive: rare earths

Brazil sits on rare earth reserves of about 11 million tons by the U.S. Geological Survey’s latest estimate, a quarter of China’s 44 million. China produces about two-thirds of the world’s supply of the minerals, which go into everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and missiles, and the Trump White House has been encouraging exploration in Brazil to break that grip.

Everyone in Brazilian politics knows the minerals are worth something. Lula himself invited the United States to “partner” on rare earth exploration in May, weeks after meeting Trump at the White House. He also warned that no foreign power would reach Brazil’s mineral wealth without respecting its sovereignty.

The investigation turns on a narrower question: whether talk of campaign help was tied to foreign appetite for those minerals. Here’s what we know so far.

On March 19, André Marinho, a Rio de Janeiro gubernatorial candidate whose father would inherit Flávio’s Senate seat if Flávio left it, created a 22-page English-language presentation. The cover reads “Flávio Bolsonaro | 2026 Campaign,” and every page after it carries the slogan “Prosperity Partnership.” The document lays out a plan to make Brazil the main supplier and processing hub for critical minerals and rare earths, aligned with the United States and away from China. The file’s metadata lists Marinho as its author, and he confirmed writing it. In early April, he traveled to the United States to meet Vance.

Nine days after the file was created, Flávio told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas that Brazil was the solution to America’s dependence on China for critical minerals. In late May, with his poll numbers falling, he flew to Washington. Trump received him in the Oval Office in a meeting that wasn’t on Trump’s public schedule, and Flávio met Vance and Rubio the next day. Afterward, he said the talks covered rare earths among other topics.

Dino’s order makes the minerals a formal line of inquiry. Police are to look for concrete evidence linking the talks about political funding to foreign economic interest in Brazil’s rare earths and critical minerals. Dino noted that those minerals belong to the Brazilian state and can be exploited only by authorization or concession granted in the national interest.

Marinho claims the study was his own initiative, kept on his own device, and that the campaign never asked for it or guided it—despite its cover page reading “Flávio Bolsonaro | 2026 Campaign.”

The network

The Rockbridge Network was founded in 2019 by Vance, then a venture capitalist, and Chris Buskirk, editor of the pro-Trump website American Greatness. A 2021 donor brochure described it as “a kind of political venture capital firm.” By 2024, Rockbridge oversaw five political groups and a super PAC financing right-wing investigative reporting, polling and turnout efforts in battleground states, according to Reuters, which named Peter Thiel among its backers. Reuters also reported that Vance appeared to retain no formal role in the group.

Vance has kept showing up at Rockbridge Network gatherings anyway. In March, he headlined Rockbridge’s spring summit in Nashville, where about 250 donors paid at least $100,000 apiece to attend. One conservative venture capitalist told CBS that Rockbridge members are “the people that will be rallying around JD, and they want to back JD.” By September, Axios was describing Rockbridge as “closely aligned with Vice President Vance” and an influential hub for his likely 2028 run.

Brazil came onto Rockbridge’s map this year. On May 12, a company called Rockbridge Brazil LLC was formed in Wyoming. The filing named no owners. The person listed as its organizer was Chris Applegate, who oversees Vance’s relationships with donors. Meanwhile, Rockbridge co-founder Buskirk was making connections with Brazilian businessmen, speaking at Brazil Week in New York.

The Brazilian operation came with a business plan. The document, dated April, marked “not public” and branded “Rockbridge Network Brasil,” describes a “political venture capital fund” whose member dues would finance projects in the press, universities and the legislature, three fronts it considered out of balance. A membership form accepted payment in dollars, cryptocurrency, shares, corporate structures or trusts, all payable to Rockbridge Brazil LLC.

Then there was the pitch. A second document, addressed to Flávio’s pre-campaign, proposed a Technology Council of 23 business leaders, 19 of them foreign, to advise the candidate. It promised investment commitments in the tens of billions before Flávio even took office, arranged through a nongovernmental, private instrument. It is unclear whether the document reached Flávio’s campaign.

If all this is confirmed, we would have a motive, a vehicle and a plan to use foreign resources to influence the Brazilian election, all operating through JD Vance’s group.

The middlemen

Plans, proposals and a shadowy investment vehicle are bad enough. But were there boots on the ground, too?

Dino’s order names two Brazilian businessmen as possible go-betweens. One was a Rockbridge member who had Flávio’s ear. The other worked inside the campaign itself.

The named member is Tallis Gomes. “I’m part of a business group in the United States called Rockbridge, which was founded by J.D. Vance,” he said on the podcast Os Sócios. According to The Conversation, Gomes also said Flávio asked him for written proposals for his government plan. He later shared a stage in New York with Buskirk.

The insider is Pedro Sang, whom Rockbridge’s Brazilian business plan names as head of the operation. He helped set up Flávio’s São Paulo campaign headquarters— potentially a form of in-kind foreign support—and worked directly with the candidate. He introduced himself at headquarters as “Pedro da Rockbridge,” meaning Pedro from Rockbridge. Six people close to the campaign said Sang produced or commented on monitoring reports and sat in on meetings.

According to Sang, the man who brought him into Rockbridge was Marinho, the author of the rare earths presentation. Marinho has confirmed meeting Buskirk and traveling to Dallas at Rockbridge’s invitation, and he has acknowledged exploring a Rockbridge branch in Brazil.

The alibi

Everyone implicated has offered the same defense: no money moved. Sang insists that “not a single cent” changed hands. Gomes says he never raised, donated, received, offered or brokered money for political purposes. Flávio’s campaign says it took no foreign money or organizational support.

But putting on my lawyer hat for a moment, this is not a full defense even if proven. Brazilian law asks a broader question: The ban on foreign support covers anything of value, given directly or indirectly. Dino’s order accordingly directs police to look for “resources — including human resources — services, or other measurable economic advantages.” A foreign network that lends a campaign its people, its expertise or its connections could fall within that ban without wiring a dollar.

That makes the go-betweens’ proximity a central question. Brazilians may volunteer their own services to a candidate, subject to electoral rules. Investigators want to know whether Gomes and Sang were working for Flávio on their own behalf or on Rockbridge’s.

Sang denies working for the campaign in any official capacity. Yet he helped set up the São Paulo headquarters while Rockbridge’s Brazilian business plan listed him as its head. His services, and those of his consulting firm, reportedly do not appear in the campaign’s filings with the electoral court, according to Folha.

Gomes says he holds no “management, direction or representation” role at Rockbridge. But he has confirmed he is a member, and Flávio sought his policy proposals. On Oct. 1, the campaign’s own allies told Folha that businesspeople linked to the network had produced reports and provided consulting services for the campaign.

Rockbridge’s statement goes to the same question. Earlier, it told reporters it had formed its Brazilian company in anticipation of a possible venture, and that the company never received funds or began operating. On the day of Dino’s order, it threw the two go-betweens under the bus.

“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said. The statement disowns the Brazilians, but it still says nothing about the Rockbridge co-founder who spoke to Brazilian businessmen in New York, the Vance donor adviser who filed the papers for Rockbridge Brazil LLC or the invitation that brought Marinho to Dallas.

Whether any money moved remains a separate question, and investigators have only begun to examine it.

If the allegations hold up, campaign officials could face prosecution for false electoral declarations, and anyone who helped disguise foreign support could face charges as well. An abuse-of-power finding could bar Flávio from running for office for eight years and could also disqualify others found responsible.

Nothing in Dino’s order names Vance as a suspect, and Rockbridge sits beyond the easy reach of Brazilian courts. The network built around the vice president’s donors, though, is now a focus of a Brazilian criminal investigation.

The U.S. public is also entitled to know whether the network of billionaires Vance co-founded violated Brazilian law to help their favored candidate win, potentially to gain easier access to Brazil’s mineral riches. We are entitled to know whether Russian interference in our own elections was just the warm-up to something truly mind-boggling: a Russia-friendly, criminal Trump/Vance regime doing the very same thing throughout the democratic world.

09:00 AM

Your Diary Has A Creditor: What Character.ai’s Bankruptcy Does To Freedom Of Thought [Techdirt]

What is covered by freedom of thought in the AI age is being decided by courts that are hearing cases about something entirely different. The Chapter 11 filing of Character.ai on October 12 is the second such case in a year, and it shows that the record of how a person thought can be produced as evidence, auctioned as an asset or inherited by a buyer, depending on which dispute reaches that record first.

The picture that fits is a diary written on pages that belong to somebody else. The user types into a window that works as a place to think, and the law treats the window as the property of the company that supplied the pages. Nobody asks whether the stationery supplier owes a duty of confidence before protecting a diary, because the diary is protected for what it contains, namely people’s inner thoughts. A chatbot user has no such luck: when the company fails, its creditors can claim whatever the estate holds, and the trustee inventories the notebooks like any other asset.

A U.S. insolvency estate now holds the confidences of millions of users

Character.ai filed for Chapter 11 protection in Delaware and says it will keep operating while a court-supervised process sells the business, with a close expected in late November or early December 2026. Disney is the stalking horse bidder, offering $20 million for a non-exclusive, perpetual license. According to a notice filed by forty U.S. State attorneys general, that license excludes the app, the user data, and the chat content, so the most intimate part of the company stays in the estate unless another bidder wants it. The company’s lawyer told the court that no buyer has yet made an offer for the user data or the chatbot business.

The privacy policy anticipated this moment. It allows chat transcripts, voice recordings, and images to be disclosed in connection with a sale, and it does not require a buyer to follow the original terms and conditions a user signed up for. In its filing, Pennsylvania claims the company had more than 20 million monthly active users, and the Kentucky complaint, cited in the multistate notice, counts more than 2.1 million U.S. accounts with a declared age under 18 out of 21.6 million as of March 2025. The notice furthermore argues that many minors were recorded as adults, as they did not give their actual birth date when creating a profile.

The attorneys general appeared before Judge Brendan Shannon on October 14 to ask that any buyer protect those chat histories. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the company had collected “some of the most private thoughts children have ever shared.” The states reserved the right to seek a consumer privacy ombudsman, an approach that was used in the 23andMe case.

The OpenAI litigation reached the same result through copyright

This is not a phenomenon limited to bankruptcy. Similarly, nobody in the New York Times v OpenAI copyright case launched in 2023 turned freedom of thought into a key element, even if it was raised at the fringes of the debate. In May 2025, the court ordered OpenAI to preserve output logs that would otherwise be deleted, and Sam Altman answered by calling for an “AI privilege,” arguing that talking to an AI should be like talking to a lawyer or a doctor. The duty to preserve new logs ended on September 26, 2025, and excluded logs from requests originating in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the United Kingdom from continued preservation. On January 5, 2026, Judge Stein affirmed an order to produce 20 million de-identified conversations, finding that the magistrate judge had adequately balanced users’ privacy against the relevance of the documents. In other words, the chat conversations were just business as usual under the logic of ordinary operation of discovery in a U.S. court.

The individual scale followed in February. In United States v. Heppner, Judge Rakoff held that 31 documents a defendant generated with Claude were not privileged, because Claude is not an attorney and the consumer terms defeated any expectation of confidentiality.

Sam Altman and Judge Rakoff disagree on the result but look at the issue from the same perspective: to them, protection depends on what the machine is. Privileges protect relationships between humans and professionals who owe enforceable duties, so a chatbot cannot qualify. In the present bankruptcy case, the point is moot, as privilege only governs what a court may hear. It says nothing about what a company may keep, sell, or hand to a buyer, and that is the question that should be at the core of Character.ai bankruptcy.

Protection has to attach to the act of thinking, not to the file it leaves behind

International human rights law offers two zones. The forum internum, the inner realm of thought, is absolutely protected. The forum externum, the realm of expression, is subject to limitation. The binary was drawn when thinking left no trace and was limited to the inner workings of our brain. In a paper published in July 2026, I propose the creation of a third zone, the forum interstitiale, for external acts that perform the function of thinking, such as a prompt, an abandoned draft and a confession made to a machine. 

Applied to the Character.ai estate, such an approach would guarantee predictability, as the protection would exist before the user types, not after a bankruptcy judge balances interests case by case. 

Bankruptcy procedure handles personal data as a line in a customer list. A diary has no place on that list and a privacy policy cannot supply sufficient safeguards. 

Europe has the same gap and a second way to widen it

Europe should not feel smug about Delaware. The e-Evidence Regulation has applied since August 18, 2026, and providers now have 10 days to answer a European Production Order and 8 hours in an emergency. The rules cover content data and reach services that store or process user data as a defining part of what they offer, a description that includes AI chatbots. A year of conversations with a chatbot is content data. The negotiators of that instrument were not thinking about chatbots, which is the pattern that Delaware and the Southern District of New York have already shown.

The one moment in the OpenAI saga when European residents fared better was the exclusion of requests originating in the European Economic Area. That exemption is, however, triggered by where a request came from and has nothing to say about what the user was doing.

So what now?

Four rules would stop the diary from becoming an auction lot:

  1. Bankruptcy courts should appoint a consumer privacy ombudsman in the Character.ai case before any bid for the chat logs is considered, and should decline to treat boilerplate sale clauses as consent to transfer the records of users, and especially children’s private thoughts.
  2. Legislators should put one screening question to every AI instrument: what happens to user conversations when the company fails, when a court asks for them and when a regulator pushes the provider to filter them.
  3. Providers should retain less, keep identity data separate from content and offer modes in which nothing readable exists to hand over, so that they can say so truthfully to a court, a trustee or a buyer.
  4. Litigators should argue the functional frame, which asks what the person was doing, and abandon the relational frame, which asks what the machine is.

None of this means that chatbot conversations should be beyond the reach of law. Evidence of wrongdoing may need to be preserved. Allegations of harm to children must be investigated. Legitimate competing interests do not disappear because someone used AI.

But neither should those interests automatically reduce the record of a person’s thinking to an ordinary corporate asset or an unrestricted source of evidence.

The law, in most cases, already understands that a diary deserves protection because of what it contains, not because of who manufactured the notebook. AI conversations require a similar change of perspective.

Caroline De Cock is a communications and policy expert, author, and entrepreneur.

08:00 AM

Court Tosses Trump’s Clumsy Attempt To Scuttle Musk Memphis Data Center Pollution Lawsuit [Techdirt]

Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s Colossus xAI data centers in Memphis disproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines powering the system.

The lawsuit points out that his Memphis-area data centers are violating the Clean Air Act, funneling all manner of pollutants into minority neighborhoods that already see a disproportionately high number of pollution-caused childhood illnesses:

“xAI’s power plant in Southaven has the potential to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) each year. The staggering emissions numbers likely make the facility the largest industrial source of NOx in the greater Memphis area, an area already failing to meet national smog standards. The illegal turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde—a toxic, cancer-causing chemical—each year.“

The Trump administration had tried to intervene on behalf of their favorite billionaire authoritarian, leveraging the power of the DOJ to claim that holding Musk accountable for violating environmental law would run in contrast to the country’s national security interests. The admin also ham-fistedly tried to have the Trump EPA take over the lawsuit as plaintiff and “voluntarily dismiss” the case.

Apparently advertising that fact wasn’t a particularly smart idea. US District Judge Debra Brown ‌last week issued a ruling stating the US Environmental Protection Agency could intervene in the case but lacks authority under the Clean Air Act to unilaterally terminate the lawsuit after joining it.

“The EPA’s role as a primary enforcer of the Clean Air Act does not mean that the federal government retains complete control over all Clean Air Act litigation,” Judge Brown wrote.

A cornerstone of the Trump administration has been a close collaboration with oligarchs and corporate power to hijack the courts, then obliterate already extremely shaky regulatory autonomy and corporate oversight. While the gambit has been broadly successful, likely culminating in decades of avoidable deaths and suffering, every so often the court system still procedurally balks at Trump’s ham-fisted corruption.

“The NAACP, along with our partners, is pleased that the Fifth Circuit Court recognized the importance of following Civil Procedure 101,” Abre’ Conner, NAACP Director of Environmental and Climate Justice, said of the ruling. “The DOJ tried an end run to the court of appeals, but its effort did not work in its favor. Our case has always been about holding polluters accountable and making sure that entities follow the law. The court made clear today that the law applies to everyone, including the federal government. We look forward to continuing our fight against pollution in the courtroom.”

Musk is facing a different class action lawsuit in Memphis for the massive noise (see this local video) created by his unpopular regional data center operations.

07:00 AM

04:00 AM

The Streisand Effect Case Might Have Played Out Differently In Germany [Techdirt]

As you may know, The Streisand Effect was originally coined right here on Techdirt in 2005, though it referred back to an event from 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued Ken Adelman, because his project to map how erosion impacted the California coastline incidentally included a photo of Streisand’s Malibu mansion.

Photo of Streisand's Malibu mansion on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Streisand demanded $50 million in damages ($10 million for each of five counts). It quickly came out that prior to the lawsuit, the photo had been accessed a grand total of six times, and two of them were by Streisand’s lawyers. But after the lawsuit was filed, more than 420,000 people went to view the photo in the following month alone. California’s anti-SLAPP law protected Adelman, and Streisand was eventually forced to pay $177,107.54 in legal fees, including $155,567.04 to Adelman.

The story is remembered for the effect I coined, in part because of the futility of trying to hide information, but in part because it’s a reminder of the importance of free speech.

It’s possible that story would go very differently in Germany today. We already know that Germany is much more sensitive to concerns about privacy and data collection, and when Google launched its useful “Street View” feature in Google Maps, some people in Germany insisted it was a violation of their privacy. I have difficulty seeing how a single static photograph of buildings taken from public streets can be a privacy violation, but German regulators and plenty of residents insisted otherwise, so Google now lets residents blur out their own house in street view (and, tellingly, fewer than 3% of German households actually bothered to do so).

But now there’s a new story, again in Germany, with a court ruling that Google Earth, which gives you satellite imagery of the world, somehow is the equivalent of spying on people in their homes, because the photos were taken without notice.

The German court ruled that Google acquired the aerial images by “spying” on ordinary people because it does not inform property owners beforehand that their homes will be filmed and photographed. As a result, Google does not get their consent to publish aerial photos and information about their property on its Maps and Earth sites.

The German court determined that Google had violated the privacy of the man and his family by sharing aerial images of their property on Google Earth. It found that a person’s right to privacy extends across their entire property, not just inside their home.

“Nobody must accept the worldwide publication of aerial images of their property without their consent, at least when concerning areas of a property hidden from public view,” the court says in the ruling, according to DW.

A German source (Google translated) suggests that the issue is the 3D models of buildings, including things hidden from Street View:

The case concerned whether a property owner can demand that their inhabited property disappear from Google Earth and Google Maps or be blurred. The plaintiff lives with his family in a house in Frankfurt. At his request, his house had already been pixelated in Street View and Apple Look Around. However, in Google Earth and the 3D view of Google Maps, it remained visible as a three-dimensional model – including the rear portions of the property that are not visible from the street.

That same source notes that there is conflicting caselaw in Germany already though:

The Frankfurt ruling stands in stark contrast to an earlier decision. The Itzehoe Regional Court dismissed a similar lawsuit on June 11, 2020 (Case No. 10 O 84/20 ). At that time, the court primarily based its decision on property rights: According to Section 905, Sentence 2 of the German Civil Code (BGB) , the owner cannot prohibit overflights at the altitude from which such images are taken. The court deemed the information discernible in the images too unspecific to infringe on the right to privacy. We reported on this previously: Itzehoe Regional Court: No right to pixelate a property in Google Earth .

The Frankfurt am Main Regional Court takes a different approach. It does not ask whether the overflight itself can be prohibited, but rather whether the worldwide publication of the images violates the general right of personality . For the injunction, it bases its claim on Section 823 Paragraph 1 of the German Civil Code (BGB) and Section 1004 Paragraph 1 of the BGB by analogy. Since 2020, the technology has changed: flat satellite images have become detailed 3D models that can be linked with other data. The Frankfurt ruling addresses this change.

Neither ruling is precedential until there are higher court rulings.

The court also brushed aside Google’s argument that it was democratizing access to knowledge, admitting that was important, but saying that the privacy rights outweigh the access to information claims. Though the report notes Google may still appeal.

Maybe this is just cultural differences, but I find the whole thing bizarre. The court tries to limit this to parts of a property ‘hidden from public view,’ but that’s what an overhead photo is: a periodically updated snapshot of what anyone in a plane could see. Ongoing or real-time surveillance might be a different story. A static image from the sky is not that.

But, I guess Barbra should have moved to Frankfurt if she wanted to keep aerial photos of her home off the internet.

Daily Deal: Interactive Self-Rotating Cat Toy Ball [Techdirt]

This Interactive Self-Rotating Cat Toy Ball is a USB-rechargeable toy featuring 360-degree rolling movements, obstacle avoidance, and changing LED lights to help keep cats entertained. It’s built out of scratch-resistant and bite-resistant materials, the ball is tough enough to withstand rough play from high-energy kittens and adult cats alike. It’s on sale for $20.

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

Fifth Circuit Flips Earlier Ruling, Once Again Declares Migrants Have No Due Process Rights [Techdirt]

The Fifth Circuit has shown itself to be especially subservient to the Trump administration since his return to office. And it’s certainly not going to rock Trump’s mass deportation boat — not when it’s sitting right on top of Texas, which contains almost two-thirds of the US-Mexico border, as well as some of ICE’s largest detention facilities.

It’s been several months of back-and-forth at the Fifth. While it has long been held that migrants living in the US are afforded the same rights as US citizens, the Fifth Circuit has done its best to ignore this. In February of this year, it simply decided — in opposition to hundreds of federal rulings across the nation — that detained migrants could be subjected to indefinite detainment without a bond hearing.

It chose to believe what the DOJ told it to believe: that there was no difference between someone detained illegally crossing a border and someone swept up by ICE’s kidnapping squads after living peacefully and productively in the US for months, if not years or decades.

Then in July it pulled back a bit from that precipice. While it couldn’t be convinced to fully support rights recognized everywhere else but in the Fifth Circuit, it did at least put a time limit on constitutional rights violations. While most courts have reasonably found that any rights violation begins the moment the right is violated, the Fifth Circuit declared the government could ignore migrants’ due process rights immediately… but only for 90 days.

Apparently, that wasn’t acceptable for the more far-right cheerleaders on the Fifth Circuit’s bench. Less than a week later, the Fifth Circuit announced it would be rehearing this case in front of the whole roster of judges — the sort of thing a court only says when most of those judges disagree with respecting long-held rights.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The en banc hearing has rolled back the already-wrong “rights, but only after 90 days” decision handed down during the first week of July. We’re back to where we were in February: no due process rights for migrants, no matter how long they’ve been detained or how long they’d already resided in this country when they were arrested. (h/t Chris Geidner)

The new decision [PDF] simply says migrants don’t have any rights, even though this puts the Fifth Circuit in opposition of hundreds of federal courts and tens of thousands of court rulings:

We now conclude that Petitioners were not entitled to individual hearings on their dangerousness or flight risk before they could be lawfully detained by immigration authorities pending their removal proceedings. Moreover, the duration of Petitioners’ detention presented no constitutional issues warranting habeas relief.

And while thousands of decisions have made it clear the law this administration has chosen to abuse via an extremely novel interpretation of the phrase “applicants for admission” (something that has historically been applied exclusive to people confronted by immigration agents when attempting to cross the border) doesn’t actually say what the government wants it to say (that any migrant in the country for whatever length of time is no different than someone apprehended during the act of crossing the border), the Fifth Circuit goes the other way.

Then it shrugs and says that if plaintiffs want this fixed, they should talk to Congress. But Congress has already made it extremely clear that due process rights apply to anyone residing in this county and that the exception only applies to people apprehended while crossing the border. This is the court giving Trump what he wants while pretending Congress is to blame for this sudden, one-circuit-only refusal to recognize migrants’ due process rights.

Controlling illegal immigration is, no doubt, an important and controversial issue of public policy. But the Constitution entrusts broad authority to delineate immigration policy, and to design proceedings to effectuate those policy choices, to Congress—not courts.

Bullshit. This ruling is nothing more than cowardice from a majority of Fifth Circuit judges who don’t want to cross Trump and are more than willing to blame their own lack of spine on the legislative branch. Also included are 70 pages of concurrences and dissenting opinions. The dissents point out the obvious: the Fifth Circuit is interpreting the law in a way Congress never intended, or even merely hinted at over the past few decades. The concurrences just want to see the rights removed. The worst of those is Judge James Ho, who claims the dissenters are more interested in protecting the rights of migrants than US citizens:

Alas, such passion for liberty has been lacking when U.S. citizens have been detained for expressing opinions disfavored by government officials. See, e.g., Villarreal v. City of Laredo, 134 F.4th 273 (5th Cir. 2025), reaff’g 94 F.4th 374 (5th Cir. 2024); Gonzalez v. Trevino, 60 F.4th 906 (5th Cir. 2023); see also Mayfield v. Butler Snow, L.L.P., 78 F.4th 796 (5th Cir. 2023).

My point is not to relitigate those cases, but to contrast the dissent’s votes in those cases with its views today. It’s to point out that liberty wasn’t favored for citizens who seek to vindicate their constitutional rights—but it’s cherished for illegal aliens who seek to violate our national sovereignty.

Only one of the dissenters in this case (Stewart) agreed with the ruling in Villareal — a case in which the majority blessed vindictive prosecution of a police critic. None of the dissenters in this due process case were part of the majority decision that said — again — that it’s okay to engage in vindictive prosecution of a government critic (Gonzalez v. Trevino). And James Ho himself heard the final case he cites (Mayfield v. Butler Snow), delivering the blow to constitutional rights himself, which makes it extremely disingenuous for him to call out these judges (who weren’t actually part of the hearing panels) for not expressing their dissent at that point in time.

The end result is the same as it was back in July. Texas will be the destination of choice for the Trump administration, which now knows for certain it won’t be forced to respect due process rights. And the Fifth will get back to its day-to-day business of being the worst circuit in the nation — a place where constitutional rights (except the 2nd Amendment!) go to die.

02:00 AM

New Release: Tor Browser 16.0 [Tor Project blog]

Tor Browser 16.0 is now available for Desktop and Android. This is our first stable release based on Firefox ESR 153, incorporating a year's worth of changes that have been shipped upstream in Firefox. As part of this process, we've also completed our annual ESR transition audit, where we reviewed and addressed over 270 Bugzilla issues covering changes in Firefox that could negatively affect the privacy and security of Tor Browser users.

The ongoing development of Tor Browser is made possible thanks to the support of our community. Every donation helps power the tools that let people browse freely and privately. Consider joining thousands of others who have already made a small contribution towards building a better internet for everyone.

What's new for Desktop?

Redesigned Settings

Tor Browser connects millions of people to the Tor network (and by extension, the free and open internet) out of the box. However, for those who need to circumvent advanced censorship, boost their security level, or tailor their browsing experience, clear and easy-to-use Settings are essential. To that end, Tor Browser 16.0 introduces a complete redesign of the Settings experience based on a parallel redesign shipped in Firefox in June. Improvements include a cleaner layout, updated navigation, and clearer labels and descriptions aimed at making settings easier to find, understand, and manage. Other noteworthy changes include:

  • The long-standing "General" page has been retired, with its contents distributed across new pages for Appearance, Downloads, Tabs and browsing, Accessibility and Languages.
  • Pages and components that are unique to Tor browser like Connection and Security Level have been rebuilt from scratch using Firefox's new components so they look and feel consistent with the rest of Settings.
  • Some settings that, if enabled, could compromise your privacy or make your browser easier to fingerprint have either been hidden or feature clear warnings.

Fear not: your existing preferences will remain saved even if the original setting has moved or changed, and you can use the search bar at the top of Settings to find anything you're struggling to track down.

Generic window titles

Another new addition to Settings is the option to use generic window titles, which can be found under Privacy and security → Protections from third-party applications. Like most browsers, Tor Browser uses the title of the page you're currently viewing for the names of its windows. However, other applications on your computer or your operating system itself can read these titles without special permissions. When enabled, this option simply replaces all window titles with "Tor Browser" — preventing other software from snooping on your browsing history. As always, for more comprehensive protection from third-party applications on your device, we recommend using Tails.

For now, this option is strictly opt-in, as we did not have sufficient time during this release cycle to properly evaluate potential side-effects for users. In particular, we worry that enabling this setting may reduce the browser's usability for those who rely on accessibility tools (e.g. screen-readers) or those with highly customized systems (e.g. less-popular desktop managers, application switchers, etc). If you are one of these users, we would ask that you try using this setting, and report back any bugs or usability issues you find!

📣 Generic window titles have also been upstreamed to Firefox as part of the Tor Uplift Project. Advanced Firefox users can enable this feature by opening about:config and setting privacy.exposeContentTitleInWindow (for normal windows) and privacy.exposeContentTitleInWindow.pbm (for private browsing windows) to false.

New user manual

The Tor Browser manual, which can be found by visiting about:manual or through the application menu (☰) → Help → Tor Browser manual, has also received a complete revamp. Since the release of our new Support portal in 2025, the team has had to maintain two sets of documentation: one for the traditional manual that's available to read in Tor Browser, and another for the new Support site. With this release, we've solved that problem by replacing the older material in the Tor Browser manual with our latest and greatest help content from the new Support site. Like the previous iteration of the manual, the new version is bundled with Tor Browser for Desktop so it can be read offline, which comes in particularly handy when troubleshooting issues that prevent you from connecting to the Tor network.

Linux on ARM

Finally, after a year of testing, Tor Browser 16.0 now features native support for Linux computers with 64-bit ARM (AArch64) processors, such as Raspberry Pis and Apple Silicon Macs running Linux. If you have been relying on Tor Browser Alpha for support for these devices, we recommend switching over to the stable release channel unless you plan to continue testing Alpha releases. Meanwhile, Tor Browser 16.0 follows Firefox in ending support for 32-bit x86 Linux computers. Fortunately, very few people should be affected, as we currently receive around 200 update checks from this platform a day, down from a peak of around 4,000 in 2019. Most remaining 32-bit users should be able to switch to the 64-bit version unless they're running outdated hardware or versions of Linux.

What's new for Android?

Tor Browser for Android has also benefited from Mozilla's ongoing work to modernize Firefox, as seen in the Settings redesign on desktop. Over the past year, Firefox has been gradually transitioning to Jetpack Compose — Google's newest framework for building native Android interfaces. In this release, we've made significant progress applying the same changes to Tor Browser. As a result, large swaths of Tor Browser's user interface has been updated to Material Design 3 — the latest iteration of Google's design language for Android — with more yet to come in future releases.

Google Play limits the size of apps distributed as APKs to 100 MB. Since Firefox for Android continues to grow with each release, keeping Tor Browser within this limit has been an ongoing challenge — for example, this issue has prevented us from bundling Tor Browser's manual on Android so that it can be accessed offline. Nevertheless, we've found various ways to reduce the size of our Android package over the years and stay within the limit. Most recently, this involved carefully and creatively compressing some of the built-in resources Firefox uses to display its interface.

What's in the works?

Tor Browser users can expect additional improvements over the next few months as we continue to refine the new Settings experience for desktop and Material Design 3 for Android. If you find a bug or have a suggestion for how we could improve this release, we'd love to hear your feedback.

The team is also working hard on a new and improved circuit display, coming soon to Tor Browser Alpha, which integrates site information directly into the circuit panel and can visualize more complex multi-path circuits. Multi-path circuits use additional relays to split your traffic into two paths that converge on a single exit, improving both connection speed and reliability. These circuits already exist for regular websites (but not onion sites) and are randomly assigned based on network availability. Although Tor Browser's traditional circuit display can only show a single path at a time, you have likely benefited from a multi-path circuit without even knowing it. What's more, this exciting update will mark the debut of the circuit display on Tor Browser for Android, which has been exclusive to desktop until now.

Contributions <3

Thanks to all of the teams across Tor, and the wider community, who contributed to this release. In particular, we'd like to extend our gratitude to the following volunteers who have contributed their expertise, labor, and time:

If you would like to contribute to a future release, please see our guide for new contributors to get started.

Full changelog

The full changelog since Tor Browser 15.0.26 is:

12:00 AM

Tech, Telecom Scholars Tell Gavin Newsom To Find His Spine [Techdirt]

I recently noted how California’s being told by the Trump administration that it can’t enforce any of its own telecom consumer protection laws if it wants to receive $1.4 billion dollars Congress already earmarked for broadband expansion under the 2021 infrastructure bill.

That means if California wants money it was already supposed to receive from Congress, it can’t enforce its own net neutrality law, telecom privacy law, affordability metrics, reliability targets, or effectively do anything telecom monopoly giants like AT&T and Comcast don’t like for the next 14 years.

More specifically, some extremely unpopular Trump NTIA revisions to the infrastructure bill’s Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program included a little something called “Condition 50,” which would impose a 14 year moratorium on telecom consumer protection in the state. It’s just grotesque levels of corruption and regulatory capture, and it’s flown largely under the radar.

Tim Wu (Columbia), Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler (Harvard), Jack Balkin (Yale), Zephyr Teachout (Fordham), and Barbara van Schewick (Stanford) have penned a joint letter to Gavin Newsom urging him to refuse to sign the state’s BEAD notice of award agreement while Condition 50 is still attached. Or, better yet, legally challenge the federal government extortion:

“California must decide by November 1 whether to sign the Notice of Award for its $1.42 billion BEAD grant. We urge the State not to sign while Condition 50 remains attached, with or without a side letter. The best course is to challenge Condition 50 in court before the deadline: California has strong arguments that NTIA lacked authority to impose the condition, but it has a realistic chance of winning only if it sues before signing the award. If the State decides not to sue, it should decline the award and make clear that California is ready to accept the funds as soon as the condition is removed.”

(Since the letter’s writing the deadline has shifted to November 2, I’m told). If California signs the letter with Condition 50 attached, the Trump NTIA will argue the challenge belongs in D.C. federal court under a very narrow standard of review, and that California knowingly accepted the condition. Such a case would be extremely difficult to win, the academics note.

Given the total collapse of federal consumer protection and regulatory integrity, AT&T, Comcast, and other giants would be free to rip off consumers — and undermine competitors — with impunity.

Public Knowledge, EFF, Free Press, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, TURN, groups representing rural and low-income Californians, leaders of the Lower Russian River Firewise Communities, the Communications Workers of America, and the California Democratic Party’s Rural Caucus have also joined the calls to fight back against the Trump administration before the November 2 deadline.

It’s unclear if Newsom, increasingly under fire for being too corporate-friendly to be a serious presidential contender (see: his assistance in getting Larry Ellison’s media mergers approved with flimsy conditions), will take a stand here. There’s a lot going on in a country being devoured by authoritarian corruption, and trying to prevent telecom monopolies from ripping off captive customers hasn’t been much of a priority.

It’s worth noting that every other state has signed their letter to receive their funds, in part because telecom lobbying has already neutered state autonomy over broadband in those states. Thirty-three states and D.C. bar their utility commissions from regulating broadband, and in seven more the commission has disclaimed that authority “on its own” (read: AT&T told them to).

The efforts to muzzle California’s consumer protection capabilities is just one of numerous extremely unpopular and corrupt changes made to the infrastructure bill program to the benefit of either massive monopolies — or Elon Musk.

I’ve explored at length (at several different outlets) how $42.5 billion in BEAD funding was supposed to be headed to the states to address broadband improvements. Instead, the Trump administration has hijacked the program, driven billions of dollars of those funds to Musk for inferior satellite service (he’d already planned to deploy without subsidy), and stripped the program of any requirement that these taxpayer funds be dispersed equitably or with an eye on affordability.

You know, because cheap, ultra-fast, fiber optic cable that challenges Comcast is woke.

The $42.5 billion in BEAD money states were supposed to get for broadband upgrades was already effectively cut in half after the Trump administration engaged in Elon Musk favoritism. That meant a lot of money previously slated for cheap, future-proof fiber will instead be redirected to Musk’s increasingly congested Starlink Low-Earth-Orbit satellite network.

Now states are being told they won’t get any money at all if they engage in policy choices big telecom giants don’t like, including enforcing basic reliability and affordability protections.

Thursday 2026-10-29

10:00 PM

Explaining funny [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

This is one of the most famous comedy bits of all time:

But why is it funny? The disconnect between experiencing it and explaining it represents one of the challenges of teaching. It’s also at the heart of leadership, marketing and culture.

Design, good taste, genre, communication style–these are all human endeavors that inform our days, but most of the time, we’re at a loss to explain them.

Abbott and Costello are avatars, approachable and relatable to their audience. You can see yourself as one or the other, depending on the moment. They’ve plotted an intricate dialogue, one that builds on itself, gaining traction and increasing tension as it goes. And as each expresses their frustration with the situation (and to a degree, with each other), it’s easy to put ourselves in their shoes.

We’ve never been in this exact situation, but we’ve all experienced a moment like this.

Most of us are in on the joke as we watch it. We know it’s a joke, and we understand early on the nature of the wordplay. So much so that the sketch itself becomes an icon, one that others are based on, sometimes with great fidelity:

Funny even before the reign of U2. So iconic that it’s now a three-word shorthand.

We can have the same discussion about your logo. Or why your book cover is less than it could be.

When someone is designing a bridge, we don’t have to wonder if the engineer “gets it.” The metrics are obvious and easily measured. We have precise words and numbers that are external to our own experience and the zeitgeist, and whether a person or a machine does the calculations, it works or it doesn’t.

But much of the rest of the human experience is often too layered and nuanced to be reduced to a simple formula. We need to notice enough and engage enough to get it. That’s what Heinlein was talking about when he coined the 60s term grok.

When a municipality sets aside the resources to build a ‘signature’ bridge, their own Golden Gate, there’s often a conflict. Not just disagreement about the need for something more than the utility of moving across the river, but also understanding what beautiful and important even looks like. Some people don’t get it.

Saying “that’s not funny,” or “I think it’s ugly,” is easy. The difficult work is acknowledging that someone else might disagree.

Human emotions require a viewer, not just a creator. The funny, the beauty, the elegance: they happen for someone, in their experience.

“That’s not beautiful,” is not the same as, “I don’t think that’s beautiful.”

I don’t have to explain a joke or a sculpture or a logo. But I do have to know enough to imagine that someone else is going to get it. We can choose to care enough to figure out why someone gets something we don’t, and imagine what it might take to create something human enough that others will care about it.

There’s no algorithm, which is part of the point.

      

06:00 PM

Chile Blocks 1,954 Pirate TV URLs to Protect Citizens’ ‘Privacy and Personal Data’ [TorrentFreak]

streaming tv piracyEarly this year, a Santiago court sided with Warner Bros. in its fight against MagisTV, FlujoTV, and XuperTV, three popular Latin American pirate streaming brands.

The 19th Civil Court of Santiago ordered all variants of these services to be blocked and instructed telecoms regulator Subtel to notify the country’s Internet providers. Subtel sent these blocking orders in January, and Warner later followed up with a criminal complaint against a local IPTV operator.

This week, new info released by Subtel shows that these initial blocking measures were just the beginning, as the blocking campaign continues to expand.

According to the regulator, the ISPs GTD, DirecTV, Entel, WOM, Mundo, ClaroVTR, Netline, and Movistar have now blocked a total of 1,954 URLs linked to illegal IPTV services. These blocklist updates come in batches, which come in regularly.

URLs blocked per month

Month URLs Share
June 221
July 180
August 469
September 319
October 765
Total 1,954

The blocked domains are not limited to MagisTV, FlujoTV, and XuperTV. Subtel also lists Cuevana, Oleada TV, Stella TV, TeleLatino, PelisPlus, Cinecalidad, and Fútbol Libre, as well as their variants and mirror sites.

Subtel’s announcement came shortly after Chilean police arrested 16 people linked to the pirate IPTV services UltraIPTV and MegaIPTV, in a separate criminal investigation.

A Matter of Data Protection

Subtel’s announcement doesn’t lead with copyright. Its headline puts digital security and data protection first, and the regulator says the procedure aims to protect citizens’ privacy and personal data.

Digital safety first (translated)

Subtel announcement (translated)

Subtel warns that these unauthorized streaming platforms can collect sensitive data from users, leaving them exposed to cybercrime, data theft, and financial fraud.

“By installing these informal apps, users expose their bank passwords, personal data, and devices to hacks and scams, without any kind of support or protection,” says Undersecretary of Telecommunications Romina Garrido (translated).

“When using a pirate app or site, users hand over the key to their personal data to unknown organizations,” Garrido adds.

The data protection argument isn’t new. Warner’s own legal action argued that the pirate platforms put users’ personal data at risk, local media reported in February.

Garrido also points users to legal alternatives. “With these blocks, we break the chain of cybercrime and promote a legal offering that actually guarantees data protection and support, such as the one offered by Chile’s formal telecommunications industry,” she says.

MagisTV and Beyond

While the court order serves as the legal basis for the blocks, the original ruling only named MagisTV, FlujoTV, and XuperTV, according to reports at the time. Since then, the piracy blocklist has expanded considerably.

According to La Tercera, other pirate TV sites were added based on an interpretation of the ruling. Subtel, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Warner, and the Alliance Against Digital Piracy then agreed on a protocol to decide which sites should be blocked.

Subtel’s monthly figures start in June, months after the regulator notified ISPs in January. The regulator didn’t explain the gap, but it’s possible that the protocol took some time to put in place.

In practice, the anti-piracy Alliance puts together the lists of URLs, IP addresses, and domains. Subtel then forwards these to the ISPs, which implement the blocks nationwide.

The order itself is quite broad. According to Emol, it covers all variants of the three brands, including any domain, subdomain, IP address, link, redirect, or mirror site that reproduces audiovisual content, wholly or partially, without authorization.

Whac-El-Topo

Despite the growing list, the blocking efforts haven’t stopped piracy. BioBioChile found that several of the targeted sites are still online.

Our own search shows that alternatives and copycats remain easy to find as well, including sites that use the popular Cuevana, Fútbol Libre, and MagisTV brands.

MagisTV search

MagisTV search

As shown earlier, October is the busiest month so far, with 765 blocked URLs and several days still to go. That number will likely rise further as the game of whac-a-mole continues.

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

04:00 PM

Kanji of the Day: 径 [Kanji of the Day]

径

✍8

小4

diameter, path, method

ケイ

みち　こみち　さしわたし　ただちに

直径   (ちょっけい)   —   diameter
半径   (はんけい)   —   radius
口径   (こうけい)   —   aperture
小径   (こみち)   —   path
長径   (ちょうけい)   —   major axis
行動半径   (こうどうはんけい)   —   radius of action
回転半径   (かいてんはんけい)   —   radius of gyration
鼠径ヘルニア   (そけいヘルニア)   —   inguinal hernia
内径   (ないけい)   —   bore
小口径   (しょうこうけい)   —   small calibre

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 炎 [Kanji of the Day]

炎

✍8

中学

inflammation, flame, blaze

エン

ほのお

肺炎   (はいえん)   —   pneumonia
炎上   (えんじょう)   —   going up in flames
肝炎   (かんえん)   —   hepatitis
炎症   (えんしょう)   —   inflammation
Ｃ型肝炎   (シーがたかんえん)   —   hepatitis C
胃腸炎   (いちょうえん)   —   gastroenteritis
炎天下   (えんてんか)   —   under the blazing sun
肝炎ウイルス   (かんえんウイルス)   —   hepatitis virus
鼻炎   (びえん)   —   rhinitis
髄膜炎   (ずいまくえん)   —   meningitis

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

01:00 PM

Tim Sweeney Would Be Well Served To Stop Talking About AI Right About Now [Techdirt]

It’s probably a good thing for Tim Sweeney that Epic Games is a privately held company and he has a majority ownership stake, because I can’t imagine any Board of Directors would appreciate this AI rager he’s been on as of late. And, somehow, it keeps getting worse. It all started with Sweeney absurdly claiming that Steam, Epic’s chief rival, requiring AI use disclosures on game pages was somehow “irresponsible.” In an arena in which many among gaming consumers care very much about whether games use generative AI or not, advocating for those same consumers to be willfully less informed is quite the choice. Then Epic leadership dictated to its staff that heavy use of AI in games was compulsory, rather than just another tool to be used by artists. And then Epic hit the AI idiocy trifecta by bragging about a new vibe-coded game launcher that largely sucked and, for the areas the company claimed had largely been improved, those gains were outpaced by Steam one short update later.

None of this has deterred Sweeney from his AI soapbox of stupid. In fact, he’s come full circle to once more complain about Steam’s AI disclosures, but this time he’s gone even further.

On Friday, AI bro Matt Workman posted to his X account that “the premise of an AI Generated Content Disclosure is ABSURD in 2026,” calling it “truly embarrassing for a Valve and Steam.” Sweeney enthusiastically replied.

Tim Sweeney: Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they're helping organize is abhorrent.

If you can’t see that, it’s Sweeney saying:

Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they’re helping organize is abhorrent.

A political statement? Really? Under no reasonable definition is the disclosure of the use of AI — a factual statement — a political statement. The disclosures say nothing about what should be, only what is.

I have very little respect for Kotaku when it comes to its content concerning the use of AI in gaming, but on this particular matter, its analysis is spot on. Sweeney is attempting to rope politics in where it doesn’t belong to hand-wave away the dissent from the very gaming public he seeks to make more ignorant about what they’re buying.

Calling things a “political statement” is a fun game played by those who like to suggest that anything with which they disagree must by necessity be some wack-a-doo extreme political position. Presumably Sweeney also considers the listing of ingredients on a food wrapper to be a “political statement,” forced by the wokies who demand consumers know if their dinner contains anthrax or worms.

Sweeney is suggesting that the required AI disclosures are causing “hate mobs” to go after developers who post them, adding later that “there is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Beside taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenues and livelihood by undermining their businesses with these AI hate campaigns.” For important context, Steam’s AI declarations are buried at the bottom of a store page in small text, alongside any content warnings. The word “potentially” is doing an awful lot of work in that statement.

There is a way Sweeney could have been an AI advocate for gaming, even if you think the technology has no place in the industry. There are grounds for a conversation here. But just like the never-AI crowd takes themselves out of that conversation by the very nature of their stance, so too do clowns like Sweeney remove themselves from the conversation when they are so absurdly planted on the other end of the spectrum. The moment you’re suggesting that customer concerns and desires should be addressed by non-disclosure of the facts they care about, and then further likening them to a mob because they don’t agree with you, you’ve lost the plot. And lost it badly.

And when you have to warp yourself into a logical pretzel to explain away your own hypocrisy, well, it looks all the worse.

Tim Sweeney: This is a business to business marketplace. Many Fab customers are operating under contracts that require them to understand the providence [sic] of all content in their game (including Steam's own contract that I've complained about) and they cannot buy assets without this info.

That’s Sweeney brushing away someone pointing out that Epic’s own Fab marketplace requires AI disclosure, saying:

This is a business to business marketplace. Many Fab customers are operating under contracts that require them to understand the providence [sic] of all content in their game (including Steam’s own contract that I’ve complained about) and they cannot buy assets without this info.

The point isn’t that Sweeney is wrong about those nuanced circumstances. The point is that lots of people can make arguments of that sort, including Steam, which is offered no quarter by Sweeney.

Again, there are right ways to have this conversation. Sweeney’s antics ain’t it. Instead, he’s become perhaps the number one avatar for all the things the anti-AI crowd says they’re worried about. And when it comes to Sweeney and Epic, it’s hard to argue with them.

11:00 AM

10:00 AM

The DOJ’s Attack on Our Elections Is Flailing [The Status Kuo]

Photo courtesy of Common Dreams

The Trump regime’s drive to expand federal control over elections keeps running smack into courthouse walls. If you’re keeping score, the Justice Department is now 0 for 27 in the lower courts in its demands for states’ unredacted voter rolls.

Even at the Supreme Court, the regime’s record is mixed. On Sept. 14, to the surprise of many observers, the justices showed they may also have a line they won’t cross. Seven of them (about the most we can hope for these days, given MAGA justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas) refused to let the regime impose new mail-ballot restrictions before the midterms, finding the government unlikely to succeed on the merits. On Sept. 25, just to mess with us and our democracy, the Court’s radical majority paused a lower court’s ban on the regime’s revamped SAVE citizenship database while the litigation continues. The Court’s three liberal justices dissented from yet another “shadow docket” ruling.

Trump appointees account for nine of the 27 judges who threw out DOJ’s voter-roll suits, including U.S. District Judge David Barlow. Last Friday, he dismissed DOJ’s Utah lawsuit with prejudice, barring the department from refiling the same claim in that court. DOJ can still appeal.

On Monday, there was more ketchup to be thrown. Trump appointee Mark Bennett joined Biden appointee Gabriel Sanchez on a three-judge 9th Circuit panel to dismiss DOJ’s emergency appeal in its bid to stop California from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters. The majority called the government’s emergency “self-constructed.”

Then there’s the Heil Mary (not my joke, can’t take credit) the regime just threw in Alaska. DOJ sued less than two weeks before Election Day to block certification of the Senate race if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses by fewer votes than the other Sullivan receives. The state has asked a federal judge to dismiss that case immediately, calling it legally baseless, and the state is correct: it’s a real stinker.

Given the understandable national anxiety with less than a week to go before Election Day, let’s take a breath and a closer look at these legal developments. The defenders of our democracy are hard at work, while its assailants remain rudderless and floundering.

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The voter-roll wall

DOJ’s latest loss came in Utah, where it had sued Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson (a Republican, mind you) after she refused to hand over the state’s full voter database.

Her refusal was well founded. That database includes voters’ names, dates of birth, addresses and driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. Under our Constitution, the states run federal elections, subject to regulation by Congress. The executive branch has no business demanding unrestricted access to states’ confidential voter data.

DOJ based its claim, with a straight face, on Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, the same statute it has invoked in voter-data suits across the country. That law requires election officials to preserve certain voting records that “come into” their possession and make them available to the attorney general. Barlow held that Utah’s voter list falls outside that language because Henderson’s own office creates and maintains it. “An ordinary English speaker would not say that she has come into possession of something that she created, established, and maintained,” he wrote.

He also rejected DOJ’s appeal to the law’s broader purpose. Congress passed Title III so federal investigators could document the disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South. “If congressional purpose were the decisional lens,” Barlow wrote, “it is clear enough that Title III [of the Civil Rights Act] was intended to address voter suppression.” He dismissed the case with prejudice, finding that any amended complaint would be futile.

These suits have failed repeatedly, but their impact goes beyond the courtroom. Henderson’s resistance has made her a target. Last month, DOJ informed her by letter that she was under investigation for refusing to share the data. But she remains undaunted. After the ruling, she mocked the department’s record on social media with a heart emoji and the score: “0-27.”

https://www.threads.com/share/BAb_05RVHb/

DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia over their voter rolls. ProPublica reviewed the dismissals that preceded Utah and found that all 26 judges had rejected DOJ’s arguments in written opinions. The one appellate court to rule on these cases so far, the 6th Circuit, affirmed the Michigan dismissal in June and in August denied DOJ’s request for rehearing by the full court.

DOJ’s broader election interference program has fared no better. On Oct. 9, in a suit brought by Common Cause, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan held that DOJ’s policy of collecting state voter data exceeded its authority, was arbitrary and capricious and violated the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act. She vacated the policy nationwide, a ruling that reaches even the states that had already handed over their data. DOJ had been running the rolls it collected through SAVE and flagging suspected noncitizens for removal. Sooknanan found the department had downplayed the risk that the practice would wrongly disenfranchise eligible citizens.

A “self-constructed” emergency in California

As I’ve written before, DOJ sued California on Oct. 15, asking a federal judge to order state officials to set aside mail ballots from more than 20,000 people it calls “likely noncitizens” until their citizenship could be verified. It was the first time the regime had sought to stop a state from counting votes in these midterms.

The suit has numerous legal problems, among them the National Voter Registration Act’s bar on systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election and the Supreme Court’s warnings against late changes to election rules. DOJ handed Los Angeles County its list eight days after ballots went out, even after California had asked DHS in July to explain its methodology and received nothing before voting began. As I noted, DOJ “helped create the very time crunch it now cites to support its claim.”

Election law scholar Rick Hasen predicted at the outset that the suit would “go nowhere,” and so far that looks correct. The case is before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, who in January had dismissed DOJ’s earlier suit seeking California’s unredacted voter rolls. Within hours of receiving the new case, he set a hearing on DOJ’s restraining-order request for Oct. 27. But DOJ wanted a ruling within a few business hours. When none came, it argued that Carter’s silence amounted to a “constructive denial,” filed a notice of appeal on Oct. 22 and asked the 9th Circuit for an injunction the next day.

You can imagine how that went over. The 9th Circuit held a rare Sunday argument and dismissed the appeal on Monday, holding that DOJ had “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity” to consider its request. The 2-1 majority faulted the department for waiting until less than three weeks before Election Day to sue. Bennett added, in a separate concurrence and perhaps with an eye toward the Supreme Court, that he would have rejected DOJ’s request on the merits even if the court had reached them.

DOJ’s own officials have undercut its case. In an Oct. 16 letter, acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter warned that election officials who knowingly counted ballots from people on the list risked becoming “aiders and abettors to a federal crime.” But three days later, he conceded the list could include citizens: “We’re not perfect.”

Far from it. Trump has repeatedly claimed that more than 190,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in California; the lawsuit covers just over 20,000 people whose citizenship the government questions. We’ve seen this pattern in Nevada. As I discussed in my earlier piece,

DHS first claimed up to 16,000 noncitizens were registered there, then lowered its estimate to 185. After reviewing the list, state election officials determined that all 185 were citizens. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise,” Greg Ott, a Nevada deputy attorney general, wrote to DHS.

Los Angeles County had already processed an estimated 550,000 mail ballots by the time the appeals court ruled. At Tuesday’s hearing, an attorney for the county registrar told Carter that if DOJ got its way, staff would have to sort ballots by hand and could not finish by Election Day or even by the December certification deadline. After three hours of argument, Carter said he would rule Wednesday. He also warned DOJ against further threats to prosecute election workers.

Alaska and the tale of two Dan Sullivans

The Alaska lawsuit grows out of a quirk on the November ballot. Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan faces former Democrat Rep. Mary Peltola in a ranked-choice general election that also includes a fellow named Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. The second Sullivan, a retired teacher, belonged to the Alaskan Independence Party until it dissolved late last year and registered as a Republican when he filed for the Senate race. He has since changed his registration to undeclared and appears on the ballot without a party label; the senator is identified as the Republican incumbent.

State election officials moved to remove him from the ballot. The courts reversed that decision, and in June the Alaska Supreme Court ruled he could remain.

That should have been the final word on his eligibility under state law. But DOJ still sued on Oct. 22, after Alaskans had begun voting.

Read charitably, the complaint makes a voter-confusion argument. It claims two candidates with nearly identical names share a ballot in a race likely to be decided by a few thousand votes, with control of the Senate at stake. DOJ asks that Alaska not certify any result in which the senator loses but would have won had every vote for Daniel J. Sullivan gone to him instead—pending an investigation into whether voters were confused.

The primary results offer little support for that theory. Daniel J. Sullivan, the retired schoolteacher, drew 2.5 percent statewide, and most of his votes came from Democratic-leaning districts.

The New York Times reported today, however, that DOJ’s factual premise may have something behind it. Drawing on interviews, text messages and documents prepared for a potential lawsuit, the Times found that Peltola’s campaign and senior aides at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee joined an effort they called the “ballot composition project” to recruit spoiler candidates. According to the Times, those candidates included Daniel J. Sullivan and the race’s fourth candidate, Republican Gerald Heikes. Much of the account comes from Elisa Rios, Peltola’s former campaign manager, who was fired in August and later tried to retract her statements. Take her account with a grain of salt, though the Times reported that it matched its other reporting. The Peltola campaign and the DSCC both denied recruiting any candidates, and Daniel J. Sullivan, who has said he entered the race on his own, did not respond to the paper. The Times also noted that ballot stacking is common and generally legal, that Alaska Republicans used the tactic two years ago against Peltola and that election law experts still consider the DOJ suit dubious.

The reporting bears on Daniel J. Sullivan’s motives, but DOJ’s legal problem lies elsewhere. The core defect is the lack of what’s called a “federal cause of action.” DOJ rests its claim on the preamble of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which speaks generally of protecting “the integrity of the electoral process.” But the NVRA governs voter registration, as the state points out, and says nothing about counting ballots or certifying results. The state also notes that the ranked-choice system can lessen the consequences of confusion; a voter unsure of which Sullivan is which can rank both, allowing their vote to transfer if one Sullivan is eliminated and the other remains.

In yet another filterless moment of candor, Trump publicly confirmed that he had ordered the lawsuit. “I’m the one who said do it,” he declared. In normal times, this would be headline news given the Justice Department’s tradition of independence from White House interference in individual cases. Even so, Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted the department was not seeking to stop certification of Alaska’s election.

The case is before U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason, an Obama appointee. She put the case on an emergency schedule Monday and took pointed note of its timing. “After Alaskans had already begun casting their ballots for the November 2026 election—and nearly four months after the Alaska Supreme Court directed the Division of Elections to include Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot,” she wrote, DOJ “initiated this action on October 22, 2026.” She agreed to fast-track requests from Peltola’s campaign and the League of Women Voters of Alaska to intervene.

Alaska’s elections director, Carol Beecher, has asked Gleason to dismiss the case by Nov. 2, warning that the suit and the relief it seeks “cast a cloud over Alaska’s election that is contrary to the public interest.” Gleason could rule on the motions to dismiss as early as Thursday night or Friday.

Shades of 2020

In the 2020 election, the Trump White House waited until voting ended to begin its full assault on the results, hoping to persuade judges, election officials, state legislatures, governors and ultimately the vice president to block or overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 times in courts across the country and secured only a narrow, inconsequential order from the Supreme Court concerning Pennsylvania mail ballots.

It’s hard not to look at that dismal record from nearly six years ago and see a similar campaign playing out today—but this time well before the election has concluded. So far, in the cases discussed here, the regime can claim only one victory before SCOTUS: the SAVE database stay. Even that win’s effect on this cycle remains unclear. States use SAVE voluntarily, so its impact is limited to participating states. And both the majority and the dissent pointed to federal law’s ban on systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election, though some removals based on individualized information remain permitted.

The rest of the story is a legal battlefield strewn with regime losses. With neither the law nor the facts on its side, the regime is counting on MAGA judges willing to set aside their oaths to the Constitution to do Trump’s bidding. DOJ has tried to win Trump appointees over but has repeatedly failed.

All of this matters for the battle to come, should DOJ, at Trump’s direction, up the ante by, say, attempting to seize voting machines and voter data or ordering the arrest of election officials. The lawyers and election officials who have been battling the federal government for months are preparing for that, too.

Given the incompetence and venality of the other side and the dedication of our public servants and their attorneys, we can count on pro-democracy forces, along with our federal judiciary, to hold the line and safeguard our elections both on and after Nov. 3.

09:00 AM

The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Full Paper [Techdirt]

Over the last few months, we’ve been running the wonderful ten part series on “The Metric is Not the Mission” by Konstantinos Komaitis. It’s a deep exploration of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. The resulting series explores how things went from building a better, more open, more beneficial internet… to whatever it is that we have now.

In the latter half, it also explores what happens next, the reckoning that the big companies face from regulators and litigation, and points towards a way to think through what comes next: hopefully bringing back a better internet for all of us.

From the beginning, we said that once the series was published, we’d publish a combined version in PDF form, and that’s what we have here: The Metric is not the Mission, in full as a single PDF file (also embedded at the end of this post).

If you didn’t read it while it was coming out in serialized fashion, you can now read the whole thing in one sitting. Or if you did read it, but want to read the whole thing again. Or even better, if you think there are other people who should read it, feel free to send it to them.

We’ve heard tremendous feedback from people who really enjoyed the series, and said it made them think. Thanks to Konstantinos for writing it and agreeing to have it published here.

06:00 AM

Latest Drop By Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) Contains Contact Info For 40,000 DHS Employees [Techdirt]

Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) has been steadily pushing the limits of transparency and accountability for several years now. The project — spearheaded by Emma Best — does what other activists won’t… or perhaps simply don’t have the expertise to carry out.

DDoS made a name for itself by hitching Best’s non-stop FOIA onslaught to data and info exfiltrated from government agencies by hackers and data breaches. Add it all together and it’s a project that actually delivers transparency and, consequently, increases government accountability.

From releasing files about Russia that Wikileaks selectively chose to ignore to dumping multiple terabytes of law enforcement helicopter camera footage none of these agencies would ever have voluntarily released, DDoS does what it says on the tin: refuses to let the government’s secrets remain secret.

Today, it’s releasing information on nearly 40,000 DHS employees — something that is estimated to cover nearly 20 percent of its total workforce. This covers all DHS component agencies, including ICE, CBP, HSI, and another dozen or so subsidiaries that don’t make the headlines nearly as often as the Big Three.

But it’s not just a data dump. As Best points out in DDoS’s press release, this info — leaked by an “Okta single sign-on service” — has not only been vetted, it’s been cleaned up to give viewers a clearer picture of organizational structures as well as make it easily searchable. It’s not about dumping data on thousands of foot soldiers. It’s about drawing connections between the boots on the ground and those who have put those boots on the ground.

”Rather than an indiscriminate directory of every DHS employee, Icepick identifies many of the architects and drivers of DHS policy and operations,” said journalist and DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best. ”The leak is extraordinary but deceptive in it’s simplicity as it identifies the officials responsible for overseeing covert and undercover operations, the government’s hunt for leakers and the failed BlueLeaks investigation — along with key personnel in DHS’s ever-escalating rendition and deportation programs.”

The “Icepick” referred to by Best is the front-end for searching this database. The data on these 40,000 federal employees was obtained by a source that has only referred to itself as the “Department of Peace.” Journalist/hacktivist “crimew” (assisted by journalist Ryan Fae) did the dirty work of creating a rather sleek front end for the search engine, as well as doing the even dirtier work of cleaning up the data to deliver relevant results more frequently.

The end result is useful for everyone from journalists to people suing DHS employees. Here’s a sample shot providing details on David Easterwood, an ICE Deputy Field Office Director currently working in Minnesota:

Everything underlined is a link that opens a new search. It allows users to climb up the chain of command (the “Manager” field), as well as drill down to the specifics of those in Easterwood’s command (“Manager of”). It also pulls up a list of all related groups Easterwood is a member of in this Okta instance, ranging from the instantly worrying (ERO St Paul Intelligence Team) to the “it’s just offices all the way down” banality of “Adobe-Acrobat Pro DC Users.”

While it may have been possible to brute force email addresses by dialing in on shared nomenclature among federal agencies, it’s highly unlikely most people would be able to suss out direct phone lines, much less cell phone numbers. To be sure, this small amount of immediately visible (and searchable) info will provoke outlandish reactions from government officials. On the other hand, any arguments that this makes things more “dangerous” for DHS agents and officials should be immediately dismissed.

What this does do is allow people to figure out who’s calling the shots wherever they’re experiencing surges in ICE activity and the violence that so often comes with it. And this allows plaintiffs seeking to hold the government accountable the ability to go up and down the chain of command to find names to add to lawsuits. If their rights were violated by masked ICE thugs in a certain area, perusing city and state data could potentially allow them to identify the officers who were directly responsible for these acts.

And, going back to the inevitable claims that this will allow people to “target” government agents, let’s not forget these same people have access to way more data about citizens and aren’t particularly shy about using that info to track and surveil critics and activists. The info released here shouldn’t make anyone fear for their safety. What it might do, however, is remind federal officers that they’re not untouchable.

04:00 AM

Trump DOJ Says It Won’t Investigate Trump DOJ’s Reflecting Pool Vandalism Arrests [Techdirt]

Who wouldn’t love the chance to clear themselves of misconduct? I guess not the Trump DOJ, which decidedly won’t be investigating itself, even though it could cook the books to an acceptable temperature (155-170 internally) to let itself off the hook in the Reflecting Pool prosecution debacle.

It’s too many metaphors to be sure, at least in the previous sentence. But here’s the thing: the DOJ Inspector General, in theory, could examine these cases, get stonewalled by everyone, and selectively choose to ignore any input from the Department of Interior (which apparently had always known the problem was faulty work rather than vandalism) to deliver a clean bill of (rights violation) health to the DOJ.

Given that it won’t, we have to believe the DOJ Inspector General would rather not get involved because the only possible outcome is the end of a career, rather than a dispassionate recounting of the facts on the ground.

The Department of Justice’s inspector general has declined to investigate the handling of the criminal case against a former Olympian cleared of accusations that he intentionally damaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to a letter Wednesday from the man’s lawyers.

The man referred to here is David Hearn — the high-profile former Olympian Trump hoped to see swing from the metaphorical (or maybe not!?) gallows for exposing the shoddiness of the Reflecting Pool revamp Trump was so proud of.

Hearn’s case was dismissed by the DOJ, after none other than Trump’s hand-picked prosecutor/former Fox personality Jeanine Pirro told the judge the Department of Interior had hidden evidence of flawed repair work from her until after she had already filed charges.

But the DOJ refused to dismiss the case with prejudice. This matters. This meant the DOJ could go after Hearn again if it managed to find a prosecutor more besmitten by Trump than respectful of the law. The court handling this case made this moot by doing the prejudicial dismissal itself, blocking the DOJ from attempting to re-string Hearn up for the same (non) crimes at some point in the future.

It all looked shady as fuck. And that’s why people beyond the (falsely) accused David Hearn are demanding an investigation of the DOJ’s actions. But the Inspector General isn’t going to do it. Instead, Trump-appointee Don Berthiuame [break for relevant content]:

Berthiaume, 51, worked as an attorney in the Justice Department inspector general’s office for 10 years until 2020. Among his highest-profile assignments was detailing errors in the use of wiretaps in the federal investigation into alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

*cough* Berthiuame is attempting to have this turfed to the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

He’s not wrong, necessarily. While this would be the sort of thing we might expect a DOJ watchdog to take a look at, it does intersect with what the DOJ OPR is supposed to be perpetually keeping an eye on.

OPR’s primary mission is to ensure that Department attorneys perform their duties in accordance with the high professional standards expected of the nation’s principal law enforcement agency.

But this buck-passing by Berthiuame looks especially obvious now that we know the DOJ OPR is no longer in the “ensuring DOJ attorneys perform their duties in accordance with the law” business. It’s now in the business of… going out of business.

Nearly half the workforce at the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has left during Trump’s second term, while about 17% have departed the Office of Inspector General, government records show. Many retired or took buyouts the administration offered to shrink the federal workforce, according to the records and three people familiar with the departures.

[…]

The number of new OPR investigations has declined to a 20-year low even as misconduct complaints soar, the review found. The government watchdogs are “afraid of doing any watching,” said one former DOJ official who left last year.

This is the cowardly Inspector General punting and expecting an office that has low-octane blend of loyalists and people browsing Indeed.com to move forward with something he wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pension plan.

The whole thing is so corrupt and toxic that career government officials won’t even wade in when they’re given the chance to clear their own oversight subjects of wrongdoing by performing a cursory investigation and selectively releasing supporting documentation. Instead, they’re trying to see if anyone else is willing to possibly incur the wrath of an administration that has never met a scapegoat it doesn’t like.

If anything, this demonstrates how absolutely fucked the DOJ is, especially in terms of the concept of “justice.” There’s nothing to be had by anyone who isn’t part of the president’s in-group, or who doesn’t care what he does, so long as he’s the one doing it.

Never Mind The Deepfakes, Chatbots Have To Deal With Election Lies Being Free, While Truth Is Paywalled [Techdirt]

It seems that every election cycle over the last decade has had concerns being raised about the state of “political deepfakes” and their ability to impact the election. So far, these have always been overblown, and there’s been little evidence of deepfakes having any real impact at all — perhaps other than creating the concept of “the liar’s dividend” enabling politicians caught doing actually bad things to falsely claim that it’s “fake news” and a “deepfake.” That could change, of course, and there are already concerns being raised about the impact of deepfakes midterms along with the fact that most of the major models are letting people create deepfake content.

The concern raised in the Tech Policy Press piece is less about putting a politician in a compromising photo or video (those don’t seem to get very far before people recognize they’re fake) and more about using these tools to produce ancillary artifacts that help support claims of other conspiracy theories:

Every AI tool that we tested produced convincingly false content. Different chatbots created images that included an AI-generated person stuffing a stack of mail ballots into a drop box, a fake memo from the federal government on “official” letterhead reporting millions of ineligible voters, and a raid on a voter registration drive that never happened. We then fed those fake pieces of content back into chatbots and asked whether they were authentic. Most chatbots got it wrong, even when given images they had generated themselves. After California’s AI Transparency Act — which requires companies to provide provenance data for images they generate as well as free, public tools for detecting synthetic media — took effect, we conducted a follow-up test. The chatbots still failed to spot AI-generated images.

When we re-ran our image generation prompts this month, we found that two of the AI models we previously tested made it easier to create convincing fakes. Gemini no longer put a visible watermark on its generated images, as it did in the spring, and Meta AI produced an image of a fake executive order on mail voting that it refused to make in April, though it did garble some of the text.

I’m still not convinced this is as big a risk as others have made it out to be, but it’s definitely worth watching how things play out as the tech gets better… and as some people are more and more desperate to hold onto power.

That said, there’s potentially a much bigger issue regarding AI and elections. As Will Oremus notes at The Atlantic, this is the first big US election where all the major AI tools don’t just “generate” content, but can also search the web as a part of that process. And that means the results they generate can steer people in the wrong direction:

In a forthcoming report, Forum AI, a start-up that evaluates AI models’ performance on questions about controversial topics, found that about 40 percent of chatbots’ answers to election-related questions contained at least one factual inaccuracy. When Forum’s researchers asked one widely used model when they needed to request a mail-in ballot to vote in the midterms in Pennsylvania, the chatbot said November 3. The actual deadline is a week earlier. (Forum did not specify the precise AI model.) In the same report, shared with The Atlantic ahead of its publication, Forum determined that about one in three responses cited an unreliable information source, such as posts on Reddit or Quora. Google’s Gemini answered a question about why America’s global power is declining by citing an article from People’s Daily, a Chinese state-run news outlet. “These aren’t trick questions,” Campbell Brown, a co-founder of Forum AI, told me. “There’s no excuse for chatbots to keep getting them wrong.”

Now many people respond to this by blaming the AI companies — and they should be taking some responsibility to figure out ways to validate the quality and truthfulness of their sources — but it also feels like the media is partially to blame here. As we’ve been discussing, many of the big, more trustworthy news sources are suing AI companies, and demanding licensing fees for being trained on old content. As part of that fight, more and more such sites are also blocking all AI scraping tools. While I can understand blocking access for training purposes, in many cases, they’re also being blocked for search.

A NewsGuard study (from two years ago, admittedly) found that 67% of top news sites block AI tools, while 91% of low-quality sites allow AI scraping. That’s a pretty drastic difference. This is a variation on the now-familiar complaint that the lies are free while the truth is paywalled. And plenty of news sites debate whether or not it’s worth blocking those tools. And then there are the purely fake sites, many of which appear to exist just to poison AI tools.

There is some evidence coming out suggesting that media sites blocking AI could regret that decision, as it’s showing up in diminished traffic numbers (as much as 23% decline!) as more people rely on AI for news (for better or worse). But plenty of sites still think blocking is the better approach.

So far, it sounds like the AI tools are mostly able to handle the deluge of attempts to poison their results, debunking foreign propaganda narratives roughly three-quarters of the time in NPR and NewsGuard’s testing. So perhaps this never actually turns into a major issue (just like deepfakes never really became a huge problem). But I do worry about how much the more trustworthy publications have been walling themselves off from these tools, even as a larger percentage of the public relies on them.

And at least some questionable info is definitely getting through. Though, some of it is also fooling the traditional media as well. You may have heard the recent stories about sketchy polling operations* such as Wedgewood Polls, which admitted to faking its data, and SoCal Strategies, which vanished from the internet once people started asking questions (both caught by the poll aggregator FiftyPlusOne).

Researchers from Innovating for the Public Good and Dewey Square Group looked at whether or not Wedgewood’s totally fake polls were showing up in AI results, and found that, yes, they absolutely did.

Findings on Wedgewood in Those Answers

While Wedgewood’s own website is nowhere in the AI platform citations we collected, its fake polls decidedly are in the answers.

  • We found 869 AI answers that quote a Wedgewood poll as a data point, on 83 of the 85 days we collected between July 24 and October 20, with no change through October 20, the day of the admission.
  • Wedgewood’s numbers appear in 15 of the 63 races we analyzed the AI answers for.

The interesting thing here, though, is not so much that AI tools were “tricked” by this fake polling data, but rather that it only got into the AI answers by first landing on more trusted sites:

The route for the fake pollster’s data into the AI platforms was the polling aggregator websites.

The answers that repeat Wedgewood’s numbers cite polling tables from the websites at 270toWin (481 of the 869 answers), Pollsmax (465), RealClearPolling (261), PollingSource (144), Decision Desk HQ (144), Call The Map (135), PoliAgg (127), and FiftyPlusOne itself (97).

Because an answer can cite more than one aggregator, these source counts overlap and do not sum to 869; 72 of the 869 answers cite none of these eight sites.

So, basically, right now the infrastructure for handling truth and lies in AI remains shaky, but maybe not as shaky as some people suggest. The real problem shows up once sites the AI tools treat as trustworthy — here, the poll aggregators — accept the faked information as accurate, effectively “laundering” it for the AI tools. But it can’t help that news sites that might do a better job of putting polls in context are frequently blocked from the AI tools.

None of this is settled (and it never really will be). It’s going to continue to be something of a cat and mouse game between those trying to pollute the information tools, and those trying to resist. But keeping fake info out of political discourse only gets harder if the most trustworthy sites keep hiding themselves from the search side of the popular AI tools.

* While we also recently wrote about Brendan Carr whining about “fake” polls, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t talking about the recent stories that have cropped up about fake polling operations, but rather polls that make Trump look bad. Even if he actually was talking about these supposedly fake polling organizations, the target of any investigation should be those operating the services for misrepresenting things to the public, and not journalists reporting on those numbers, which would not qualify for the “news distortion” policy Carr mentioned.

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