News

Thursday 2026-11-05

03:00 PM

Post Midterms, Pete Hegseth & RFK Jr. Stare Down Likely Impeachment Efforts [Techdirt]

The impact of the midterm election result is going to be felt for years, to be sure. But some of the effects will be far more swift than that, likely kicking off right after the new Congress is sworn in. We’re mere hours removed from the election, with some votes still being tallied, but already some in the media are handicapping who in the administration will remain in their positions and who will not, either because an angry Trump searching for a scapegoat fires them, or through impeachment efforts. Many people think that a third Trump impeachment will be the focus. I don’t. And I hope that’s not the route the Democrats go, though not every Techdirt writer agrees with me. I guess I’m just not all that excited to watch J.D. Vance walk into a room while Hail to the Chief plays behind him, even temporarily.

I much prefer the government go after the many valid targets for impeachment that currently sit in Trump’s cabinet. And, given that both Trump and Vance are currently blaming the Iran not-a-war for the GOP loss, Pete Hegseth seems like a likely candidate to be the first to go.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth faces impeachment accusations when Congress returns after the midterm elections and others, including President Donald Trump, could be investigated for alleged misconduct as Democrats return to power.

There are all kinds of reasons to impeach Hegseth. His injection of Christian nationalism into the DoD is plainly unconstitutional. He’s currently running a war with Iran that is without Congressional authorization and has resulted in the cavalier bombing of such dastardly targets as Iranian schoolgirls. He is almost certainly personally responsible for the murder of human trafficking victims as part of his campaign to lob bombs at boats off the coast of South America because they might be running drugs. In quick order, the military under Hegseth also managed to double-tap strike its victims in these boats to ensure the victims couldn’t seek justice.

Thomas Massie already has articles of impeachment for Hegseth written. But Hegseth is also an easy target for Trump to fire, which may happen before any impeachment efforts can really get kicked off. It’s not like Trump would lose much in firing Hegseth. He wasn’t qualified for the position to begin with.

And neither is the other likely target of impeachment efforts: RFK Jr. The number of justifications for impeaching Kennedy are legion. He’s completely failed in his role, preferring to run podcasts and host cooking shows instead of doing his job. Measles, screwworms, pertussis are all on the rise under his failed leadership. The medical community is in full revolt over his vaccine policies. He’s hiding data from the public as to the results of his disaster of a tenure at HHS.

Like Hegseth, Kennedy already has impeachment articles filed against him that are ready to go.

Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Michigan, filed impeachment accusations against Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in December. Stevens accused Kennedy of freezing or canceling billions of dollars in research, firing health advisers and spreading conspiracy theories.

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has imperiled the health and safety of the American people, eroded public confidence in the nation’s public health institutions and stalled decades of scientific and medical progress,” Stevens wrote in the resolution.

Kennedy’s ouster from HHS is long, long overdue.

None of this should be misconstrued to suggest that Democrats should take a page from Trump’s playbook and go on a revenge tour. But dismantling the corrupt, inept regime at the Secretary level makes all the sense in the world. Both Hegseth and Kennedy have been absolute disasters for the country on a variety of levels. Allowing them two more years to continue to harm the country is plainly unacceptable. And, importantly, there are Republicans that would be likely allies to impeachment efforts of both of them.

The project of American restoration has to start now. Tearing down the House of MAGA must begin, brick by brick.

Perhaps then, and only then, we can truly be great again.

09:00 AM

DOJ Admits Its ‘Illegal Voter’ Lists Can’t Be Trusted, Leading To Three Court Losses In 24 Hours [Techdirt]

A last minute attempt to throw the midterm election into chaos failed. Leading up to this point, the signs were never good in the Magic 8 Ball way. The Trump administration wants people to believe California was overrun with non-citizen voters. The facts, however, refuse to comply with the narrative.

This particular ship has been sinking for a couple of weeks now. The DOJ delivered an accusation before it even delivered a list. It claimed — absolutely without facts in evidence — that there were at least 20,000 “illegal” voters in California. And by “illegal,” the administration definitely meant “brown people we’d like to expel from the country.”

California pushed back. First, it questioned the claim and received no definite answer. Then the administration reluctantly admitted — as it has in other states — that its first allegation may have been overstated. But rather than pull back and reassess, the DOJ went the other way.

I assure you that I am not making this next part up: it delivered a thumb drive containing a list of the 20,000 “illegal voters,” along with a password written on a Post-It note… you know, the way aging parents handle login info for their cable TV-provided email accounts.

Then the state sued the DOJ, right after the DOJ demanded California investigate each and every one of these 20,000 allegations within 48 hours of being thumb-drived. Other voters sued the DOJ as well, which set it up for the string of extremely speedy failures it recently experienced.

Things already looked bad for the DOJ when its DHS-aided raids in California resulted in the arrests of 28 “illegal” voters — this in a state that has 23 million registered voters. Not content with this failure, the DOJ then claimed California election officials just weren’t doing enough and demanded they do all the heavy lifting while the DOJ pursued its minuscule number of prosecutions.

With the mid-term election just a couple of days away, the courts moved speedily to handle this bullshit. As Chris Geidner reports, the first thing the DOJ did with the clock counting down to “FLIP EVERYTHING” time is shoot itself in the face while attempting to shoot itself in the foot:

A Justice Department lawyer on Monday admitted in court that it was “fair” to say that the Trump administration’s list of “likely noncitizen” voters has a high error rate.

The shocking admission from Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Kao came in a hearing in a lawsuit brought last week by unions representing election workers and civil rights organizations over the Trump administration’s threatened prosecution of those election workers and other related conduct.

Yep, that’s the way the DOJ does business under Trump’s control: You fuck up until you’re forced to admit you’ve fucked up. Firings and forced resignations ensue. New sychophantic rubes are pressed into service. Rinse and repeat.

But what’s really enjoyable about this is how fast the DOJ (and the administration overseeing it) lost at every single level of the federal court system after making this admission. Geidner has reproduced the entire timeline, which is truly a sight to behold.

At 10:10 pm (ET), the federal court handling the lawsuit denied a request for a stay of its order. This led immediately to the administration running its election interference campaign to the next two levels of the court system, hoping against hope that at least one set of judges would give the DOJ permission to fuck with midterm elections in Calfornia. No dice.

[UPDATE, 4:00 p.m. ET November 3: After a flurry of activity in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since Judge Thompson denied DOJ’s motion for a stay of her TRO, a 6-5 limited en banc panel of the appeals court issued an order Tuesday that stays Thompson’s TRO pending the Justice Department’s appeal of it at the Ninth Circuit.]

[UPDATE, 6:15 p.m. ET November 3: The plaintiffs are seeking full court en banc review at the Ninth Circuit, arguing, “Federalism principles of the highest order, embedded in our Constitution, require correction of this erroneous decision by the full Court.”]

Meanwhile, the administration was trying to secure a parallel victory in the highest court in the land, pursuing its appeal of an earlier rejection of the DOJ’s lawsuit against California — one that demanded election officials “segregate” any ballots that might be related to the DOJ’s admittedly highly erroneous list of 20,000 voters.

The Supreme Court couldn’t be bothered. Its rejection failed to state if it was less than impressed with the administration’s lack of subtlety when it came to its own election-rigging efforts:

[Update, 6:05 p.m: The Supreme Court quickly rejected [Solicitor General John] Sauer’s request on Monday evening — before any opposition was even sought or filed… There were no noted dissents.]

So, if you’re following along and can read a clock, you’re seeing something rather remarkable: an administration being shut down by three consecutive levels of the federal court system in less than 24 hours.

And that means California doesn’t have to do any of the bullshit the DOJ demanded and then sued about. It also means the DOJ doesn’t actually have any illegal election dirt on 99.9999% of California’s voters and we wouldn’t be shocked at all if it doesn’t have any dirt on the 28 people it managed to round up during its statewide sweep.

Congress Has Abdicated Its Role Of Holding The President In Check [Techdirt]

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

On the evening of Oct. 11, just weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop airing taxpayer-funded television advertisements praising President Donald Trump.

Yet two of the ads continued running past the court’s deadline, including during broadcasts of “60 Minutes” and “ABC World News Tonight.”

The commercials in question aired in violation of a decades-old congressional prohibition against using federal money for unauthorized publicity and propaganda. Yet Republican congressional leaders did little to stop the president’s ad spending. That left outside organizations and a political candidate to challenge them in federal court.

The episode illustrates a larger development in Trump’s second presidency. Across disputes involving federal spending, government agencies and military operations, the administration has asserted authority that is either restricted by law or that the legislative branch has reserved for itself.

But responsibility for enforcing those limits is increasingly falling to organizations, institutions and individuals outside of the legislative branch.

As a scholar of the American presidency and deliberative democracy, I pay close attention to how the nation’s chief executive exercises power and communicates with the public.

When presidents are allowed to break rules and disregard democratic norms without consequence, I worry that citizens will grow cynical and lose faith in the idea of self-government.

As this happens, citizens may come to see the law as something that applies selectively, depending on who holds power, and lose confidence in the institutions responsible for holding their leaders accountable.

They may also begin to accept the absence of accountability as a normal feature of political life, weakening the public expectations on which democratic government depends.

Practical immunity

Congress is not the only branch of government demurring from holding the president accountable.

In July 2024, the Supreme Court provided presidents sweeping protection from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office under the “core constitutional powers” of the position.

In “Trump v. United States,” the court held that former presidents cannot be criminally prosecuted for actions taken under powers the Constitution gives exclusively to the president. Along with this “absolute immunity,” the justices also granted “at least presumptive immunity” for other official acts.

In their decision, the court’s conservative majority extended the meaning of official conduct to the “outer perimeter” of presidential responsibilities and prohibited courts from examining a president’s motives when determining whether an act was official.

The ruling only addressed criminal liability and did not curtail Congress’ constitutional authority to investigate presidential conduct, control federal spending, enact statutory restrictions and, in serious cases, pursue impeachment.

Yet the Republican majority in Congress has largely declined to exercise these powers against Trump, in areas ranging from declaring war to spending money.

Their acquiescence is helping create a new form of official protection, which I call “practical immunity.” In using this term, I am borrowing from the work of scholars who study abuse in the American penal system.

Those thinkers argue that legal obstacles, institutional hesitation and political incentives sometimes make it difficult to hold public officials accountable, even when the law suggests there has been illegal conduct.

That is what appears to be increasingly happening now with Congress, the courts and the president.

When Congress stops defending its laws

The television ads case illustrates the conundrum of practical immunity.

In opposing the temporary restraining order, the Trump administration’s attorneys did not contest the argument asserted by the plaintiffs – Common Cause and two unions – that the expenditures violated federal appropriations law. Instead, they said the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. They also argued that the case was moot because the advertising campaign was ending.

Those arguments failed in court. Yet the administration’s defense demonstrated how elusive enforcing a law can be when Congress fails to assert its constitutionally granted role, even when the underlying legal restriction is clear. To win, a plaintiff must establish a concrete injury and persuade a judge to intervene. While this happens, the disputed conduct often continues.

In this case, the president went on spending public money in violation of the law. The GOP-led Congress, meanwhile, remained silent, even though its own role was being usurped.

Another boundary that Trump has repeatedly tested is the so-called “power of the purse”, which is among the legislative branch’s most important constitutional responsibilities. Presidents may spend federal money only for purposes Congress has authorized. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 protects lawmakers’ decisions against presidential efforts to ignore congressional appropriations.

In September 2026, Trump’s administration canceled more than US$800 million in congressionally approved spending for immigrant services, climate change and civil rights for minority groups. The cancellation was done through a maneuver known as a pocket rescission. The administration timed its action to make it difficult for Congress to consider or stop the rescission. The Government Accountability Office – an independent agency that examines how taxpayer dollars are spent – said tactics like these violate federal law.

When this happened, a few members of Congress tried to intervene and stop the rescission, but the Republican majority blocked their efforts.

The collapse of institutional rivalry

The separation of powers divides authority among the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government to prevent too much power from becoming concentrated in any one place.

The architects of the Constitution anticipated that officials in different branches would compete to preserve their authority. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison argued that maintaining the balance established by the separation of powers depended on the ambitions of public officials coming into conflict. Members of Congress could be expected to resist presidential encroachments because those encroachments diminished their own power.

Fierce partisanship has complicated this arrangement.

Legal scholars Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes have shown how political competition mostly now happens inside and between parties, rather than among branches of government. When one party controls Congress and the presidency, legislators may become more invested in advancing their party’s agenda than they are in defending their institution’s constitutional authority.

Trump’s influence over Republican voters intensifies these incentives. Lawmakers who oppose him risk public ridicule, primary challenges and diminished political support. Defending congressional authority may therefore carry greater immediate – and personal – political costs than allowing presidential power to expand.

The result is a political system in which a president can act in ways that may violate federal law, undermine democratic norms and encroach on Congress’ constitutional authority.

Madison’s constitutional design assumed that public officials would defend the powers entrusted to them. The danger to the American constitutional system emerging in Trump’s second term is that congressional leaders have begun to regard those powers as expendable, allowing the president to exercise authority under conditions of practical immunity. He faces little fear of meaningful institutional consequences.

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin is the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University

A Special Post-Election Edition [The Status Kuo]

I’m traveling today, so I don’t have a regular column for you. Instead, I put together a collection of reactions, moments and commentary that capture the historic victory voters delivered yesterday, at long last putting a real check on Trump’s power.

I’ve never enjoyed pulling something together quite so much. Enjoy! — Jay

Before you scroll, consider saying a celebratory thanks with a supporting subscription to The Status Kuo. I’ve seen two straight months of declining numbers, and I sure could use some votes of confidence!

Subscribe now

Now there’s a NYT front page I approve of!

The rout was so bad, even Trump had no tricks left to play.

It was so bad they lost SOUTH CAROLINA. Think about that.

For many, the biggest moment of the night came when the Lone Star State got called for the Democrats.

As Kelly Clarkson might say, “Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this.”

Talarico enjoyed a victory lap. Er, bite.

The scene in Austin looked as if the people of some Eastern European nation had finally overthrown their dictator.

Then came the icing on the cake.

Democrats won bigly, thanks in large part to young voters who turned out for their democracy. Here’s the moment this group heard the race was called.

Let history recall that when Texas went blue, it went BIG blue.

It wasn’t just every statewide office. Every county in Texas shifted blue.

And who do we have to thank for all this? Well, people have theories, backed by evidence.

But you wouldn’t know it from his attitude.

Trust us, Donald. You were on the ballot.

Even Fox wasn’t buying his crap.

Nor were his followers fully on board.

MAGA tears are, in fact, delicious.

Your PARTY is the disaster, TBH.

More fun headlines from the right:

Meanwhile, at the Paxton watch party:

I’m so sorry you lost all that money betting stupidly.

Elon spent hundreds of millions and got walloped anyway. Think he’ll learn?

(Musk and Starlink have no power to penetrate election machines, because they aren’t connected to the internet. Just to be clear.)

Speaking of hateful would-be oligarchs:

This was a foolish, shortsighted play.

We should also be clear about which policies voters rejected, especially in places like the Rio Grande Valley.

Some fun facts:

Other trifectas burst into life like new stars.

I love this win so much.

Boe Boe could go bye-bye…

The election’s impact on state legislatures is just sinking in and bringing some very big smiles.

I mean…

Virginia voters finally took on and took down a hateful part of their history.

And Missouri voters are unrigging their democracy in real time.

A few more gems:

This lady. Sheesh. Bye!

The incoming Oversight chair has two words for Trump cronies:

6c95ee51-5483-4853-9763-7a8a4cc678bd.jpg.jpeg

We need more of this energy until all the wrongdoers are held to account.

Sen. Ron Wyden is on board.

And can we talk about some amazing historic firsts?

This one got my tear ducts working overtime.

The South is changing! Fingers crossed for this unexpectedly close race. Don’t ever say your vote doesn’t count.

Wow, this bit of history hits hard.

Out West, more history in the making!

805b374d-36e0-48ae-af74-7fd77292e101.jpg.jpeg

Progress isn’t always apparent. Then you look around and realize how far we’ve come.

They made history in the Wolverine State, too.

This victory speech. Right in the feels.

And a message to AIPAC and its outsized influence on our elections:

In Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan made history as the first Indigenous woman elected to the U.S. Senate. She is also an unapologetic ally of my own LGBTQ+ community.

And speaking of that community, New Hampshire’s Chris Pappas became the first openly gay man elected to the U.S. Senate. Thanks to all who donated through the Human Rights Campaign to help elect him!

His victory speech made history, too! Darn these lucky people with their amazing husbands by their sides! (Complains the single gay dad, lol.)

Our trans brothers and sisters are making history, too!

My friend and colleague at the Human Rights Campaign, Bentley Hudgins, also made history in Georgia! Thanks to all of you who donated through HRC to their campaign!

Here’s a recap of other amazing firsts:

Many people have suffered and sacrificed these past two years. We took our country back in their names.

We made sure their deaths were not in vain.

We have so much to be grateful for. I am joyful and tired in the best of ways. Tomorrow, the work begins to renew the American experiment and its great, still unfulfilled promise. But yesterday, we took bold steps in the right direction and set a new course for our country.

One day I’ll tell my children what happened in these dark years in America, and they will hardly believe me.

“Was Donald Trump really as bad as Claude says?” Riley asks, glancing up from her AI tutor.

“Yes, he was, I’m afraid,” I respond. “But together we were better and stronger than him, and we saved our democracy. That was, let’s see, the midterm election of 2026. It was the last chance we had to keep from going off the cliff, and we pulled the country back.”

My heart fills with the memory.

“Sure, Ba. Whatever you say,” Ronan says with an eye roll. “Can you put the holodeck on? I wanna 3D the WNBA finals.”

House Majority [xkcd.com]

06:00 AM

ICE Is Now Arresting People Who’ve Been Released From ICE Detention By Court Orders [Techdirt]

US federal court have overwhelmingly ruled (10,000 orders and counting) that migrants are — just like natural-born citizens — entitled to constitutional rights. Among them is the right to due process. This means that detained migrants have a right to a hearing to see whether they can be held in custody until a hearing on the issue. And that issue is whether or not they can be held indefinitely.

The courts have said migrants have rights, far more often than not. The Trump administration has sought to counter this with an extremely novel interpretation of immigration laws that have been on the books for decades, claiming there’s ultimately no difference between someone caught crossing the border illegally (who can be detained and deported without worrying about the Constitution) and someone who has been in this country for months or years and poses no actual flight risk, much less a threat to public safety.

Since it’s not on the right side of the law, the party of “law and order” has encouraged ICE to thwart the law and/or flat-out ignore court orders. ICE has made it a habit to immediately move detainees from detention center to detention center in hopes of preventing their cases from being heard. Not only does it distance migrants from their legal representation, it keeps the venue in permanent flux, which means habeas petitions are doomed to fail because they were filed in place other than where the rights violation took place (the location of the arrest).

ICE also tends to route most detainees to large concentration camps in Texas and Louisiana because they’re ultimately overseen by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, which has (now) repeatedly decided migrants don’t have rights.

Apparently, the usual ICE bullshit isn’t working well enough or often enough. Now, the administration is straight up mocking the 10,000+ decisions in favor of due process rights by deliberately targeting migrants who have been freed from detention by federal court orders.

Immigrants who have been granted release from detention after winning habeas corpus petitions in court are being re-arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Guardian has identified at least 20 cases nationwide relating to people who were detained after being released on habeas corpus petition in the last year, according to court records, attorneys and media reports.

Twenty cases may seem like an immeasurable drop in the bucket compared to the nearly 100,000 habeas petitions that have been filed since Trump’s assault on migrants began early last year. But it’s also an obvious undercount. This determination relies on what can be gleaned from court records, which means there are likely hundreds of “re-detainees” who haven’t been able to file a motion due to ICE’s deliberate attempts to separate migrants from their rights and representation.

And this effort is amazingly brutal. No normal human being would consider this to be acceptable US government behavior. But this is something the psychopaths and sociopaths running the GOP are willing to do to indulge the whims of their preferred demagogue.

And in Minnesota, seven immigrants were re-detained before even exiting the Whipple federal building detention facility on the outskirts of Minneapolis, as first reported by MPR.

“I don’t think being taken out of a building and directly into the arms of four or more officers complies with the court’s order,” Daniel Suitor, attorney to two of the men, said in a phone interview .

In Louisiana (Fifth Circuit, yo!), immigration officials were held in contempt after re-arresting a single migrant three times after he’d been granted release by federal judges. More of the same is going on in Minnesota (see above) and Pennsylvania.

Not only are migrants being re-arrested immediately after securing their release via court orders, but they are increasingly being deported to countries with which they have no ties. Cruelty on top of cruelty on top of hideous displays of inhumanity. That’s just the day-to-day operations of our current administration, one completely consumed by hatred and capable of little more than inflicting whatever pain it can until it runs out of time… or victims.

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Ofcom Admits ‘Highly Effective’ Age Checks At 16 Really Mean ‘ID Scans For Teens’ [Techdirt]

Last week, Ofcom, the UK regulator in charge of all this stuff, released its “rapid assessment of highly effective age assurance at 16.” That came right on the heels of its quietly released (only because the law required it) report showing that the Online Safety Act’s duty of care wasn’t actually having any noticeable impact on kids’ access to “harmful content.”

Even as the Online Safety Act was being rolled out after years of debate, UK politicians started whining and screaming that they had to follow other countries towards banning kids from social media entirely. Ofcom is supposed to help put together a plan for such a social media ban by the end of the year, with implementation set for next spring. As part of this, Ofcom was tasked with reviewing the state of technology that can determine whether someone is under or over 16, and in doing so basically confirmed what many activists have been pointing out all along: if you’re putting an explicit age limit on social media, you are requiring kids to hand over private information and put themselves at risk.

The report includes this handy chart, which basically notes that if you’re trying to determine if someone is between the age of 16 and 18, you’re really talking about having them hand over private information:

That first column on the left is the telling one. That’s the one that says there are only four(ish) “highly effective” means of doing age assurance… and basically all of them are actually “send private info to a company.” The first two are obvious: uploading a photo ID or banking info, both of which are incredibly risky, especially since you’ll be uploading them to companies which are clear targets for hackers. The third one is really the same thing, because even as “digital identity services” are coming online with the goal of doing the ID part as a third party and then issuing some sort of “old enough” / “too young” token, those services are still getting that information via the uploading of private info.

But it’s the last one that’s the funniest. For years, age verification providers have insisted that no one would have to upload private info, because they could estimate your age just based on scanning your face. But we’ve always called bullshit on that. Such scanning may be able to tell the difference between a 50-year-old and a 15-year-old but it’s effectively useless for determining the difference between a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old.

And Ofcom kinda admits that. It still lists facial age estimation as “highly effective,” but only with that parenthetical caveat. And the full paper concedes that the technology falls apart for exactly the kids closest to the age line:

The margin of error for facial age estimation becomes more significant for the ages closest to the target age gate (16 in this case). For example, if the facial age estimation algorithm is accurate within two years for children aged 15, it could estimate them as aged 17. This could result in significant numbers of children under 16 gaining access to services or functionalities that are restricted. It could also result in a 17-year-old being denied access if they are estimated to be 15, unless they use another method. However, this is only likely to affect users who are close to the target age, as most adults offered this method would be estimated to be clearly above 16.

So, yes, if you’re much older, perhaps a facial scan gets you onto a website without uploading your ID. But if you’re anywhere near 16, you’re basically out of luck, because Ofcom’s fix for the margin of error is to kick anyone who looks young-ish over to a different method… and a different method is always going to be “upload an ID.”

In order to account for the margin of error in a facial age estimation algorithm, services should implement a ‘challenge age’ (sometimes known as a ‘buffer age’). A challenge age approach is widely used in an offline context when selling age-restricted products like alcohol in retail environments, for instance, through the retailing strategy ‘Challenge 25.’ In this approach, anyone who appears to the provider of restricted products to be under the age of 25 should be challenged to provide acceptable ID proving that they are over the age of 18 if they wish to buy alcohol.

Of course, requiring kids to upload their photo IDs or banking info is going to be difficult given that many kids… don’t actually have photo IDs or banking info at age 16. Ofcom argues that 89% of 16-year-olds have a passport while 19% have a provisional driving license. But passports also aren’t the kind of ID that kids regularly have at the ready any time they’re reaching an internet service. Perhaps I’m out of touch with the youth of the UK, but I’d be surprised to find many of them regularly have passports at arms length most of the time.

The likely result is forcing more kids to get IDs at younger ages than they would otherwise need them, again creating privacy questions for those kids. Either way, teenagers are in for a lot of “your papers please!” and Ofcom says so pretty directly:

Our preliminary assessment suggests that 16- and 17-year-olds are more likely than users of other ages to need access to a photo ID document. Of the methods listed as capable of being highly effective at 16, a photo ID will likely be needed at some point in the process. This is either because the method itself requires a photo ID, because ownership of a photo ID is part of the underlying process for accessing another method (such as opening a bank account or using a digital identity service), or because a 16- or 17-year-old will most likely fall within the challenge or buffer age for facial estimation methods and be asked to prove their age with a secondary method.

In other words, what UK politicians (and plenty of “child safety activists”) are demanding here is that a bunch of kids have to give up their privacy and hand over documents that can put them at risk. For their safety. At a time when there remains little to no evidence that barring kids from internet services will actually improve their safety.

03:00 AM

Musk’s Starlink Eyes Buying Boost Mobile In Doomed Bid To Dominate Smartphones [Techdirt]

One cornerstone of Elon Musk’s fraud-packed SpaceX IPO prospectus includes the claim that they’ll extremely quickly (as in a year or two) boost Starlink subscriber totals from 13 million to something closer to 300 million. Given the network’s congestion problems and physics constraints, that’s simply not realistic. Also: more users means even greater capacity problems and weird network restrictions.

To try and goose growth, Starlink has recently been making it clear they’d like to try and get into the cellular and smartphone business. But the actual plan is, as with all things Musk, a misleading, hot mess.

A key part of Starlink’s plan includes plunking down thousands of meshed femtocells installed on customer rooftops alongside existing LEO satellite dishes, something one telecom analyst recently stated was “one of the top three dumbest ideas in my four decades of being in this industry.”

In part because the femtocell installations are just logistically annoying and complicated, and will further will eat up capacity on the increasingly congested network (recall that Starlink customers in some areas already face “congestion fees” as high as $1500).

To goose growth Starlink and SpaceX have been gobbling up valuable wireless spectrum (with the help of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr). They are also apparently in conversations to buy Echostar’s Boost Mobile prepaid brand:

“SpaceX has held talks with telecom firm EchoStar in recent months about launching its own signature wireless service through a deal with the company, the report said, citing people familiar with the negotiations. The move would support the Elon Musk-led company’s plans to build a hybrid satellite-terrestrial mobile network through Starlink ⁠Mobile, combining its satellite constellation with ground-based infrastructure to challenge US wireless giants AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.”

One problem? Boost mobile is just a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). It’s primarily just customer-facing retail artifice that runs on the back of existing AT&T and T-Mobile networks; neither of which is keen to have their cozy regional telecom dominance disrupted. To actually compete, Musk and Starlink would still need to invest hundreds of billions of additional dollars in a high-powered 5G network over the next decade. And even then there’s no guarantee of success.

You might recall that Boost Mobile was offloaded to Echostar as part of that doomed first-term Trump administration effort to approve the Sprint-T-Mobile merger, then hide its labor and competition impact by pretending that Dish Network would build a successful replacement 5G network. That of course never happened; the real impact was mass layoffs, higher prices and worse service for everybody.

I should note that the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr not only launched a fake “investigation” into Dish to try and force it to offload much of its spectrum to AT&T and Musk, but recent reporting suggests the Trump administration threatened Charlie Ergen with additional scrutiny if he didn’t ramp up his donations to Trump’s ballroom. So there’s entire layers of grift going on here.

Regardless: U.S. telecom is just generally a shitty market to try and disrupt. It’s extremely expensive and time consuming, and at every turn you’re likely to get creatively ratfucked by giants like AT&T and Verizon, whose political influence over Republicans historically rivals Musk’s. Again, even traditionally staid and bullish telecom trade mags have expressed concerns that Starlink’s smartphone push is doomed.

I think this mostly all exists as a way for Starlink to hoard valuable spectrum and goose stock valuations. There may be some people at Starlink who have convinced themselves this will actually work (the fact SpaceX has been lobbying for phone unlocking rules suggests some potential earnestness), but U.S. telecom history is littered with these sorts of half-assed disruption efforts that routinely go nowhere.

I’m not prone to believe things that come out of the mouths of Verizon executives, but in this case I think Verizon CEO Dan Schulman is correct when he states it would cost SpaceX something akin to $300-$500 billion and five years build a network capable of really competing with cellular giants.

And that’s just network infrastructure; you still need to convince users to sign up, provide a quality experience, and provide useful customer support (something Musk companies historically aren’t interested in). While fending off the political machinations of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, who all but own the legislature in most states after a generation of lobbying and campaign contribution.

The Musk cult and our shitty corporate press will spend the next few years enamored with the fiction that “Musk is disrupting smartphones,” but this mostly just reads as further stock-fluffing performance by a man with more money than sense.

02:00 AM

Arti 2.8.0 released [Tor Project blog]

Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in Rust. We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 2.8.0.

This release continues our ongoing development towards using Arti as a relay and as a directory authority, with much of the work focusing on computing the consensus from votes, bootstrapping router descriptors and microdescriptors, as well as relay bandwidth rate-limiting, descriptor encoding, and the relay DNS cache implementation. Additionally, we have made a number of cleanups and clarifications to the Tor specification.

This release contains security fixes for a number of low-severity security issues. We encourage arti and arti-client users, especially those running onion services, to upgrade as soon as possible.

As usual, there also are many under-the-hood improvements to our infrastructure, testing, and documentation, along with multiple bug fixes and internal cleanups.

For full details on what we've done, including API changes, security fixes, and for information about many more minor and less-visible changes, please see the CHANGELOG.

For more information on using Arti, see our top-level README, and the documentation for the arti binary.

Thanks to everybody who's contributed to this release, including 5225225, Gaith Hallak, and manthan-lab.

Also, our deep thanks to our sponsors for funding the development of Arti!

Wednesday 2026-11-04

09:00 PM

Pluralistic: The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (04 Nov 2026) [Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow]

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

Today's links

The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app: Every heretofore useful button now summons a useless AI genie.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Army Times v Rumsfeld; RIAA v soccer mom; Skateboard truck table; Internet scare-story prof won't show her workings; IoT botnet v Liberia; BLM v TPP.
Upcoming appearances: Kilkenny, Courtenay, Vancouver, Folkestone, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal.
Recent appearances: Where I've been.
Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
Colophon: All the rest.

The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app (permalink)

"AI is being shoved down our throats" can mean any of several things. It can mean that our bosses are demanding that we use AI in reckless or nonsensical ways on the job:

https://www.404media.co/manifestos-fear-and-loser-thinking-inside-protons-ai-reckoning/

It can mean that Elon Musk and the NASDAQ have colluded to force ordinary retirement savers to bail out his emirati and tech oligarch buddies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/technology/spacex-indexes-401k.html

These are arguably the most important ways in which AI is shoved down our throats, but the most visible form of conscription into the number-go-up AI project is happening at the user interface level. This UI fuckery predates AI. For more than a decade, tech companies and their executives have colluded to trick, coerce and force you into using new features that they wanted to sell to their investors as the future of their companies.

Remember Google Plus, the Facebook-killing social layer that was going to give Google access to a new, multi-trillion-dollar market? Bradley Horowitz, then a VP at Google, charged every product team with cramming G+ into their offerings, tying their bonuses to G+ usage (at companies like Google, your bonus can dwarf your base salary).

Now, googlers are bright and resourceful people, and if you tell them that they can double their earnings by getting users to click on Google Plus buttons, they'll come up with all kinds of ways to get you to do this. Some of those gambits will be the kind of thing that Horowitz doubtless hoped for: innovative and creative ways to add value to Google's core offerings with G+ features.

But when the stakes are that high, Goodhart's Law inevitably comes into play: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The easiest way to get a user to click on a G+ button is to replace whatever button that user hits most often with a G+ version. Rather than introducing users to Google Plus in a way that turns them into G+ fans, you just frustrate them by tricking them into clicking on a useless button.

From a product manager's perspective, it's worth making whatever changes as are needed to ensure that your salary is doubled because you hit your "key performance indicator" (KPI), even if it's at the expense of your users' loyalty to your product. Preserving user loyalty at the expense of half your wages is a bad trade.

When a machine learning system does this, we call it "reward hacking." AI programmers create an "objective function" for their system, a single number that the system will try every tactic to increase; then, more often than not, the AI program finds perverse shortcuts to make the number go up whether or not it achieves the programmer's goal:

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

For example, if you charge an AI with coming up with the shortest run through a video game, it might well discover a bug that makes it impervious to enemy attacks or just lets it teleport to the end of the game. To avoid these perverse outcomes, programmers have to add more and more specificity to their objective functions: "speed run the game without teleporting or discovering an immortality hack."

Not for nothing, many science fiction writers (including me) have noted that tech bosses' fear of their own AI systems is a kind of emotional spillover from their frustrations with the corporations they run, where underlings engage in the same kinds of reward hacking that we see from chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/14/timmy-share/#a-superior-moral-justification-for-selfishness

Despite the ease with which metrics can be gamed, tech bosses remained committed to the use of KPIs to shift the priorities of their organizations, and they use the same objective function refinement technique that programmers use for reward-hacking AIs in a bid to prevent cheating by employees who hit their KPIs any way they can.

This explains a lot about the experience of watching a video on your phone. Any time you tune into a show on a streaming platform, you are forced to handle your phone with the delicacy of a photonegative. If any part of your hand brushes any part of the screen, you will immediately be whisked away from the video you're watching to an entirely different one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Worse, after your program has been replaced with this new one, there's no obvious way to get back to the show you were just watching. This is very weird, considering that the "back button" has been a part of computer interfaces since 1981:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/back%20button

The reason you don't get a back button is reward hacking. Streaming video platforms are under enormous pressure to successfully recommend their back-catalog to their users, because the alternative (commissioning or purchasing a steady stream of popular new shows) is very expensive. Investors put a lot of stock in streaming services' "successful recommendation" rate.

So streaming service bosses charge their product teams with making "successful recommendations." The easiest way to "recommend a show" is to booby-trap the streaming service's UI so that touching any part of the screen takes you to a video you never asked to see.

This is obvious reward hacking, so streaming bosses refined their objective function: they made their teams' bonuses contingent on getting you to watch a new video for a minimum time-frame. This in turn triggered the next volley in the reward-hacking wars, in which product teams took away the back button. This gives users any number of greased slides that whisk them away to a new video. To get back to the old video, users are forced to climb a greased pole.

This is the fatfinger economy: created in the 2010s by teams at large tech companies with KPI-obsessed bosses; refined in the 2020s by teams at bottom-line obsessed streaming media companies; and now perfected by teams being charged with cramming AI into every corner of our lives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

The fatfinger economy is an extraordinary beneficiary of the drive to add "telemetry" to all of our apps. Today, an app vendor can call up a dashboard and find out which buttons and fields and sliders see the most use, and they can use that ranked list to figure out which buttons to replace with AI-demon-summoning lookalikes that help product teams "prove" to their bosses that they've "successfully integrated AI" and lets their bosses prove to their investors that "users value AI features."

I recently switched from Android to Graphene, a de-googled phone operating system. Graphene's maintainers are blissfully free from the imperative to show that "users value AI features," and that's why I have never accidentally summoned up an undismissable AI by tapping a Graphene UI element.

It's a different story when it comes to apps. Graphene has many different ways to install apps, including via Google Play (Google's default Android store). That's useful because it lets you install your old Android apps after switching to Graphene, but it does leave you exposed to the fatfinger economy.

Last week, I got a painful reminder of the progress of the fatfinger economy outside of Graphene's utopian pocket-universe. I make extensive use of an app called "Genius Scanner," which lets me scan receipts and email them to myself (I do this a lot because, as a freelancer, I have to track a lot of different expenses). I bought a lifetime subscription to Genius Scanner in 2023, after getting burned by Camscanner (my previous, now enshittified scanning app), and I've been perfectly happy with it…until now.

Genius Scanner is obviously under pressure to drive AI adoption. I can tell because they've taken away the most important UI element and swapped it for a worse-than-useless AI button.

Here's how I use Genius Scanner: I press the "make new scan" button and line up the receipt on the screen. Then I press the "retitle" button, which brings up a field that is populated with the current date and time (16 characters in all). This text used to be selected so that hitting the little "x" next to it deleted it, making it easy to title a new scan. After that, I'd just email it to myself.

As of last week, though, there is no button that deletes the date and time so you can enter a useful title. That little "x" has been replaced with a button that brings up an ad for the company's new AI tools, which cost $40/year. There's no way to tell the system that you're not interested in buying a new subscription for the tool that you've already bought a lifetime sub for, and there's no way to get that little "x" back.

To be clear: that little "x" represents one quarter of my receipt scanning workflow. They have swapped it out for an ad for a new subscription AI feature, and gave me 16 new keypresses on the backspace button to replace that single tap on the "x." I have seen that ad about 100 times at this point, because I keep tapping the spot where the "x" used to be.

I'm certain that the company knew that its paying customers relied on the "x" to accomplish a vital function in any scanning app (giving good, descriptive titles to scans). They need the AI number to go up, so they replaced the "x" with the AI ad, which will let them tell their investors that they've got "strong consumer interest in their AI features."

Meanwhile, they already have my money, so there's no way I can punish them for their decision to screw me over to juke a meaningless stat. It's as neat (and depressing) an example of the principle that "even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product" that you could ask for.

It's also a perfect little object-lesson in the ways that companies can report increasing AI interest and usage without generating any interest or usage. In the fatfinger economy, every metric is a target, and is thereby rendered meaningless.

Hey look at this (permalink)

Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/google-search-schools-restrict-ai.html
Private Credit's State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7152239

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Army Times: Rumsfeld must go! https://web.archive.org/web/20061107220242/http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110406Z.shtml

#20yrsago UK is a surveillance society http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm

#20yrsago Record companies sue soccer mom’s kids https://web.archive.org/web/20061104145550/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110200114.html

#15yrsago HOWTO make your own skateboard truck lazy-susan table https://www.instructables.com/Skateboard-Table/

#15yrsago Home Secretary to OccupyLondon: you’re scaring the tourists https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15588987

#15yrsago Judge whose daughter released video of him beating her suspended from bench during judicial investigation https://web.archive.org/web/20111105234141/http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_VIDEOTAPED_BEATING_TEXAS

#15yrsago Prof who keeps announcing links between the Internet, childhood dementia and autism should publish theories in a scientific journal https://www.badscience.net/2011/11/why-wont-professor-greenfield-publish-this-theory-in-a-scientific-journal/

#10yrsago Internet of Things botnet threatens to knock the entire country of Liberia offline https://doublepulsar.com/shadows-kill-mirai-ddos-botnet-testing-large-scale-attacks-sending-threatening-messages-about-6a61553d1c7#.zg4448j8w

#10yrsago Black Lives Matter declares its opposition to TPP https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/gauis-publius-tpp-has-picked-up-a-powerful-enemy-black-lives-matter.html

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Folkestone Writers Festival, Nov 16
https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/whats-on/cory-doctorow-the-internet-is-broken-now-what/
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en

Recent appearances (permalink)

Clint Eastwood (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/NoGodsNoMayors/posts/clint-eastwood-173008088
Life After AI (Brain Bar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/

Latest books (permalink)

"The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 544 (32413 total).

"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Vietnam Jails Pirate Football Streamers for Up to a Year, Three Escape Prison [TorrentFreak]

In May, the U.S. Trade Representative opened a Section 301 investigation into Vietnam, arguing that the country’s piracy prosecutions lacked a deterrent effect.

USTR pointed to recent cases in which defendants received suspended sentences and relatively low fines. A few weeks earlier, Vietnam’s Prime Minister had ordered a nationwide crackdown on copyright infringement. Several criminal cases have since moved forward, including those against the alleged operators of HiAnime and the Xoi Lac TV sports streaming network.

Another site in the crosshairs was Bún Chả TV, which offered Premier League and Champions League streams with Vietnamese commentary. According to police, the site drew hundreds of thousands of visits a day.

Investigators described the site as an underground company, with separate teams for programming, commentary, SEO and accounting. The main revenue came from ads and from redirecting viewers to illegal gambling sites.

On May 15, police from several provinces moved in. They summoned suspects, searched homes and workplaces, and seized 38 computers and 42 phones. Less than two weeks later, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced that Bac Ninh police had charged ten people.

Up to a Year in Prison

That case has now reached a verdict. In a first-instance ruling reported last week, a court in Bac Ninh convicted 14 defendants of infringing copyright and related rights under Article 225 of Vietnam’s Penal Code, VTC News reports.

Four defendants, including the heads of the content, programming and operations teams, were sentenced to 12 months in prison. Five others received ten months, and two were sentenced to eight months.

Notably, three of the site’s commentators were not sent to prison. Their ten-month sentences were suspended.

Sentences per defendant, according to the verdict reports

Defendant	Role	Sentence
Đặng Thế Anh	Content lead	12 months
Nguyễn Thế Anh	Programming lead	12 months
Bùi Tiến Dũng	Operations lead	12 months
Đinh Thọ Bình	Commentator	12 months
Nguyễn Anh Đoàn	Operations	10 months
Mai Nguyễn Nhật Minh	Operations	10 months
Trương Đình Lộc	Operations	10 months
Lê Xuân Sơn	Commentator	10 months
Vi Quang Thiện	Commentator	10 months
Vũ Ngọc Phát	Operations	8 months
Hoàng Thụy Thúy Hằng	Operations	8 months
Nguyễn Hoàng Nam	Commentator	10 months, suspended
Lê Văn Tuyên	Commentator	10 months, suspended
Khiếu Hoàng Anh	Commentator	10 months, suspended

All 14 defendants reportedly admitted the charges and cooperated with the authorities. According to investigators, Bún Chả TV streamed more than 150,000 sports matches and it allegedly made more than 20 billion dong, roughly $760,000, in illegal profits from betting and gambling ads.

The defendants in court (photo: Công an Bắc Ninh)

The verdict reports don’t mention a total. Instead, they list illegal gains per person or team. The leader of the content team allegedly gained more than 430 million dong, while commentators made from more than 31 million to more than 480 million dong each.

‘Strong’ Penalties

The verdict was picked up by Rouse, the law firm that represents the Motion Picture Association in Vietnam. In an article headlined “Strong Vietnam criminal penalties,” published on Lexology on November 3, the firm calls the ruling another victory for Vietnam’s IP landscape.

“The defendants were all sentenced to terms of 8-12 months in prison,” Rouse writes.

From Rouse’s article

While Rouse is correct on the length of the terms, it doesn’t mention that three of the sentences were suspended. Instead, Rouse stresses that the ruling is part of a tougher enforcement trend.

“This ruling reflects a shift in enforcement strategy by Vietnamese authorities, who are increasingly moving past preliminary domain blocking to deliver criminal convictions against the operators of commercial-scale piracy rings,” the firm notes.

“This perhaps reflects the strength of the national crackdown following the USTR pressure in May,” the firm adds.

Organizer Not on Trial?

The 14 defendants worked on the site, but according to the indictment reported by VTC News, the operation was directed by Bùi Bá Hiến, who manages and runs a company called S24. Hiến allegedly instructed employees and hired collaborators to build and run Bún Chả TV.

Hiến is not among the 14 defendants named in the reports, as far as we can see. The reports don’t name any of the impacted rightsholders either.

Interestingly, in September, Bac Ninh police issued a wanted notice for a man of the same name, Bùi Bá Hiến, CEO of esports company Box Vietnam. This person is also charged under the same copyright statute.

Police said this man fled on May 13, two days before the Bún Chả TV raids, but none of the reports we’ve seen confirm that this esports executive is the same person that’s named in the Bún Chả TV indictment.

The USTR has until November 29 to make its Section 301 determination, although it can extend the investigation by three months if needed. On paper, Vietnamese law allows for sentences up to three years for copyright infringement. Whether the 8-12 month sentences are what Washington had in mind when it called for more deterrent punishments has yet to be seen.

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

08:00 PM

9-Point Book Sales Checklist for the Holidays [The Business of Printing Books]

Wondering how to get more sales of your book this holiday? Now (before people start shopping) is the time to start thinking about how you can take advantage of this unique shopping season.

Like all entrepreneurs, you’re likely selling the majority of your books online. That’s a trend that is going to continue to grow. Reports from last year show that more than half of consumers are doing the majority of their shopping online.

Your book marketing strategy needs to kick into high gear for the holiday season. With an extra emphasis on your target audience and seasonal book sales, this 9-point plan will help you focus and prepare.

Understanding Seasonal Buying as an Author or Entrepreneur

The holiday retail season begins in late October, crescendos in November, and burns bright up to the end of December. But that trend is shifting, with some retailers already starting to promote holiday sales. A longer holiday season and the likely uptick in online sales mean lots of opportunities for you to sell your books to more readers!

Since you’re selling directly to your audience, you’ve likely got a very good idea about what kinds of people buy your books. This is the core of your author sales strategy—to understand how to increase book sales during holidays, you have to understand your audience.

Luckily, you’ve already earned some online book sales and started to learn who these buyers are. Seasonal buying for authors like you will focus on two major efforts:

Reaching more readers
Offering unique products

The first is more straightforward—people will be shopping anyway, so you’ll just reiterate whatever book promotion and marketing efforts you’ve already started. The second is a little more difficult. But your existing fans and followers want something new from you; items that make great gifts are ideal. Think about how you can give your best customers more of what they love to make sure you’ve got something they want to buy this year.

Preparing for Seasonal Holiday Book Sales

This 9-point guide to holiday book marketing strategies for authors focuses on the many technical aspects of publishing and selling books.

1. Test Your Site for Increased Traffic

Before the holidays kick off, take some time to review the technical aspects of your website. What that means is testing the site to be sure it runs fast with substantially more traffic. As you promote your books to fans through social media, paid advertising, and search, you’ll be increasing your organic reach. New customers will be discovering you, leading to an increased traffic load on your website.

The bottom line is that your site has to be working if you want readers to buy your books. Take the time to test every aspect of your site, including signing up for emails, clicking various pages, and completing a purchase.

2. Update Your Website

Your brand’s website is the most important hub for you and your holiday sales. Take some time to review your site and make sure it’s up-to-date and working well!

If you’ve got a relatively small site (less than 500 total URLs), I recommend Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. Not only does Screaming Frog have a cool name, but their tool will also analyze your site and provide a lot of valuable information.

Use that information to clean up your pages. That includes fixing broken links, updating your page Headings with the most relevant copy, adding holiday-related Calls to Action, improving site speed, and much more.

Beyond improvements, you should plan how to promote your books during the holidays. That might mean a new homepage featuring your newest or most popular books. Place a button to make buying easy and prominent.

3. Focus On Your Best Sales Channels

Where do you think most of your book sales online come from? Yes, you can easily count how many sales you’ve made through your site, but do you know how those shoppers found you? The most common channels for entrepreneurs tend to be:

Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok)
Search (Organic SEO-focused content)
Email (for your true fans and followers)
Paid Advertising (Search Ads, Print, Video, etc.)

Social media offers a lot of low-cost ways to connect with readers. Search is key if you’re a blogger and create SEO-friendly content. And of course, email is going to be huge if you have even a moderately sized subscriber list.

Paid advertising is mostly a strategy to boost sales on Amazon. We won’t get into it here, but you can learn more about paid advertising from Written Word Media.

Unless you’ve got a team to help you out, you’ll likely need to focus most of your energy on just one of these channels. So pick the one you’re already seeing the best results from and amplify it!

4. Stock Up And Plan For Delays

There’s no doubt about it; there will be shipping delays. And since your book is print-on-demand, there could be production delays as well. Plan ahead.

You should absolutely get a box of books to have on hand. With a stock of books ready to be shipped by you, you can offer faster shipping for shoppers who wait until the last minute.

For authors who use Lulu’s Bookstore or our Global Distribution service, you should consider adding some information from retailers to your marketing plan. The majority of retailers are already getting ahead of likely delays by sharing information and updates regularly. Use that to help you plan and give your own readers the information they need to shop this season and get their books promptly.

Holiday Production And Shipping Guide

Stay ahead of delays and production times by following our quick guide to holiday shipping readiness.

9-Point Book Sales Checklist for the Holidays

5. Special Holiday Products

Print-on-demand makes it simple to update and re-publish your work. For example, you could create a special holiday edition of your book (or books), including a unique message for readers or maybe a bonus short story. Or maybe flex some graphic design skills and offer a special cover for holiday shoppers.

You could create a holiday edition of your book, then include a custom bookmark, a card, or a thumb drive with audio or ebook access, or any other product that might interest your readers. Does the protagonist in your fictional series wear flamboyant scarves? Maybe you offer a bundle that includes one of that character’s scarves!

There really isn’t anything you can’t have custom-made right now, so thinking in terms of bundles or gift packages, particularly if you have dedicated fans, is a great idea.

6. Plan Around Discounts

Here’s the deal—if you sell on the Lulu Bookstore, you can offer your readers our best discount of the year during Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Subscribe to Lulu emails to stay up to date on our current discounts.

Or, if you’re selling from your own site, you can set up your own sales. The Black Friday/Cyber Monday period is still the best time to offer deep discounts, but any point in November is a good time for a sale. Just be sure to share the discount early and often so your readers know about the sale!

7. Create Holiday Assets

You need some eye-catching graphics. You’ll also need clear and direct holiday copy. These two elements make up your holiday marketing assets.

Work on consistent designs for your holiday email and social graphics. Draft blog posts and emails early so they can be revised and updated as needed. Your holiday social posts and emails should look a little different than a normal piece of content you might create, but your followers should still be able to tell it’s yours!

Don’t know where to get started with building your graphics? I recommend trying Canva or Adobe Express. Both platforms let you do basic graphic design with loads of free templates.

8. Take Advantage of Your Resources

I spend a ton of time reading, watching, and listening to content about publishing. There is so much information out there; you need to take advantage of it. If you’re working this season to sell your book, you have to know a little about a lot of things.

But you’ve also never had access to more (mostly free) resources than at any other time in history. Right? You can learn how to write, publish, market, and sell, all right from your computer. Check out our Free Resources for Creators and our Partners Page for pros ready to help you with all aspects of publishing.

9. Post-Holiday Retention

Not to disappoint you, but even if the sales rush dies down after Black Friday/Cyber Monday, your work continues. Okay, maybe take a few days off.

But you don’t want to let all these new customers you just earned slip away! They’ve already contributed to your holiday book sales numbers and, in the process, gave you their valuable contact information. Even if only a few of your holiday customers become regular customers, it all adds up.

A good strategy is to start sending emails to your new subscribers shortly after the new year begins. Plan to recycle or update your best social posts and blog content to entice these new followers to become fans.

That’s the big and final takeaway from your holiday sales efforts. Those sales today are great, but the customers who keep coming back for more are the ones who sustain your business.

Get the Most From Your Book Sales

The fourth quarter is always a big one for every business and individual creator trying to sell a product. Seasonal sales are going to be upon us soon, and you’ve got to be ready if you want to capture some of those readers looking for books.

The best advice is to start now. Stay ahead of potential delays and make sure your customers get their gifts in time for the holidays.

The power of sync [Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect]

There’s an overlooked power tool right in front of us. Every individual and organization can use it well, but rarely does. I could write a book on this, but here’s the post instead:

Synchronized work happens together, on a shared schedule, in real time.

Asynchronized work (my spellchecker says this isn’t a real word) happens on our schedule.

Phone calls are sync. Texts are async.

Network TV was sync. Youtube and Netflix are async.

Writing a screenplay is async. Making a movie from that screenplay is sync. Going to opening night is sync, watching it two months later online is async.

Writing a book is async. Publishing a book is sync. Reading it is async.

A staff meeting is sync. A memo is async.

Commercial air travel is sync. A private jet is async.

Each offers costs and advantages.

When I go to a live concert, it’s happening. For me, for the audience, for the act. If any of us is having a bad day, it detracts from the experience. But when it’s right and it’s real, magic ensues. It’s largely unrelated from the experience of listening to the same song streamed (async) or on the radio (a blend of the two).

I imagine that your energy levels and mood fluctuate during the day. When working on async projects, the smart path is to match your internal energy with the work to be done. Write blog posts when you’re on a post-swim high, pay bills when all you can manage is clerical work.

Organizations that don’t account for the cost of sync-meetings waste not just billions of dollars but the insight and energy of the people who might be able to contribute if the timing and approach were different.

Sync has three advantages:

Energy multiplies. When someone is contributing, others seek to catch up. When someone has a good idea, others might work to top it. We have the chance to create an environment that multiplies the effort of all those involved.
It can be more efficient. The donut shop can’t have the frosting person frost whenever it’s convenient. They have to frost right after the donuts come out of the fryer. Many processes depend on the right people being in the right place at the right time.

One form of this efficiency is that the contributor can see, in real time, how the recipient responds and act accordingly.
It offers command, control and (one kind of) inspection.

But it has costs and risks:

Energy also spirals down. When a team member is emotionally disconnected or physically absent, the entire interaction can suffer.
It can be less efficient. There’s less room for slack and resilience, and assembling the right people at the right time comes at a premium. There’s a lot of sitting around on a movie set.
It doesn’t usually match the needs of the worker or the market.
It makes it difficult to be intentional and clear about the details of the work or the arc of the project.

The implications are everywhere we look, and the status quo works to maintain its sync or async status.

Media companies that are in love with whatever sync/async built their organization often flounder when the media consumption axis flips. The only reason Amazon and Netflix exist is that their sync predecessors couldn’t figure out how to deal with an async relationship with the customer. And now that Netflix has a huge advantage, they’re timid about shifting some of the content to a sync model that would create more buzz… and Amazon has failed to capture the real-time shopping experience that’s so common online in China.

When we were forced to work from home six years ago, offices freaked out. Some embraced the async magic it offered, while many bosses were at a loss on how to manage people they couldn’t see in real time.

One reason is that employees had been indoctrinated in the idea that work was what you did when someone was watching. If you were ‘working’ from home, it was okay to also do errands and a workout, because without a hall monitor, you were off the clock.

On the other hand, some used the freedom the way a productive writer does. Without the distractions of real-time sync, there was plenty of time to get some actual work done.

Once you see it, all sorts of new insights come to mind:

The handoffs. Much of the leverage and the friction in our modern world lives at the points where work switches modes. A deadline, for example, is a sync point imposed on async work.

Who owns the clock? Sync is more than a scheduling choice, it’s also a display of power. The person who calls the meeting has already decided to spend everyone else’s time. Bosses call meetings; the employee sends a memo.

Async moves power from the coordinator to the creator.

Flips are opportunities. Why are college applications async, while job interviews are sync? Kickstarter turned product launches async, and Ted Turner turned news into something that broke.

Fake async. Over time, async creeps toward sync. It’s ironic that Slack messages, texts and email which succeeded because they were async, now create an expectation of real-time response. These are async tools used with sync expectations, so you get the interruptions of sync without its energy.

Name it. Protect your work style and the expectations for what you deliver. Organizations can be more mindful of the cost of sync, and creators can properly price their effort for each kind of work. There’s a reason it costs a million dollars to have Bob Dylan sing at your birthday party.

Sync creates cultural side effects. When everyone at the watercooler is talking about the same thing, cultural cohesion follows. When Netflix moved to binge viewing, they used their capital advantage to make it very hard for others to keep up by producing enough shows. But by sticking with this moat, they’ve diminished word of mouth. Far more people talked about Nathan Fielder’s movie during launch week than ever talked about his streaming show.

AI is currently async. An agent never needs a meeting and works at 3 a.m., so humans become the sync bottleneck. But as its power increases, expect AI to be a partner in most sync events.

Trust is built in sync and spent in async. Async works better between people who already know each other. New teams, new hires, and new customer relationships may need sync at first. The alternative is to build systems that are async by nature, enabling new participants to earn trust in powerful new ways. Online reputation systems and thoughtful online communities are getting better at this.

Here are three simple axioms to start the process with:

Don’t make something synchronized unless it delivers valuable advantages over work done asynchronously. Show your work and defend your choice.
When you’re doing async work, match it to your internal chemistry. Get more done, but in a different order than it’s assigned.
Pay attention to the shifts from one to another. That’s where opportunities and pitfalls lie.

Kanji of the Day: 重 [Kanji of the Day]

重

✍9

小3

heavy, important, esteem, respect, heap up, pile up, nest of boxes, -fold

ジュウ　チョウ

え　おも.い　おも.り　おも.なう　かさ.ねる　かさ.なる　おも

重要 (じゅうよう) — important
三重 (さんじゅう) — triple
体重 (たいじゅう) — weight
重視 (じゅうし) — regarding as important
重い (おもい) — heavy
貴重 (きちょう) — precious
慎重 (しんちょう) — careful
重ね着 (かさねぎ) — layering (clothing)
重ね (かさね) — pile
重さ (おもさ) — weight

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

Kanji of the Day: 擦 [Kanji of the Day]

擦

✍17

中学

grate, rub, scratch, scrape, chafe, scour

サツ

す.る　す.れる　-ず.れ　こす.る　こす.れる

摩擦 (まさつ) — friction
擦り (かすり) — grazing
擦り傷 (かすりきず) — scratch
貿易摩擦 (ぼうえきまさつ) — trade friction
擦る (かする) — to graze (e.g., bullet)
擦れる (かすれる) — to get blurred
日米貿易摩擦 (にちべいぼうえきまさつ) — Japan-US trade friction
擦れ違う (すれちがう) — to pass (by) each other
摩擦熱 (まさつねつ) — frictional heat
頬擦り (ほおずり) — rubbing cheeks together (as a display of affection)

Generated with kanjioftheday by Douglas Perkins.

StepBy で集める街の点字ブロック情報〜 Code for Okayama Meetup #1 〜 [OpenStreetMap Japan]

視覚障がい者向け地図情報投稿アプリ「StepBy」を使った、まち歩き・情報収集ワークショップを岡山駅周辺で開催します。 StepByは、点字ブロックのある道を実際に歩いてその位置を記録したり、音響信号機や歩道橋の入口など、視覚障がい者の移動に役立つ情報を写真や説明とともに投稿したりできるWebアプリです。当日は、StepBy開発者からアプリの開発背景や使い方を紹介した後、グループに分かれて岡山駅周辺を歩き、点字ブロックをはじめとする歩行支援情報を収集します。その後、会場に戻って集めた情報を確認・整理し、OpenStreetMapへの情報の反映にも取り組みます。単に地図データを増やすだけでなく、普段とは少し違った視点でまちを歩き、視覚障がいのある方の移動という観点から地域を見直すことも、このイベントの目的です。 StepByやOpenStreetMapを使ったことがない方にも、最

GIMP 3.2.8 Released [GIMP]

We’re glad to announce the release of GIMP 3.2.8! This new stable release contains a number of bugfixes and security updates from new and long-time contributors.

This news posts provides an overview of the changes since GIMP 3.2.6. For a more detailed review, check out the NEWS changelog.

Wilber-o'-Lantern — *Wilber-o’-Lantern, CC BY-SA 4.0, October 31st, 2026*

General Updates and UX Improvements⁠

The Add Border filter now allows you to create semi-transparent borders based on the color you choose in the filter.

Jehan fixed a bug introduced in GIMP 3.2.6 when we added better support for cutting/copying from layer groups. Non-rectangular selections on layers within a layer group will now be copied over correctly.

Bruno Lopes corrected an issue where the cursor coordinates did not always update in the status bar when changing between different applications.

denzjos helped us identify a bug with the Levels tool where picking input levels with the Color Picker tool would report incorrect values when working with non-destructive filters. Jehan then developed a fix for it.

Harsh Verma has implemented a new GUI testing suite in GIMP so we can better check for regressions in the GUI during development. He is preparing a news post that will go over this in more detail, which we will share soon!

Jehan improved our font-loading code so that it can be cancelled early (for instance, when quitting GIMP while the fonts are still loading). This should speed up our shut-down times.

Bruno Lopes made improvements to some dialogs so they appear on the correct screen for users with multiple monitors. In addition, the Dot to Dot setting now works again. It was reporting wrong pixel density since GIMP 3.0.

Jacob Boerema backported some fixes for the Metadata Editor and Viewer feature, as part of his larger work in the development branch.

Alx Sa and Bruno Lopes added more definitions to our theme file so that GIMP looks the same on each platform.

Highlighting New Contributor’s Work⁠

All contributions to GIMP from the community are valued! We want to highlight work from some of the newer contributors here.

Infinity made several improvements to our text tool for this release! In particular, they improved text cursor movement when editing Right-to-Left languages and mitigated issues when editing text with negative kerning.
As a side effect of this bug fix, we actually get much better support of RTL text as well as of mix of LTR and RTL texts. The on-canvas dialog now has two new icons for text directions, and the tool automatically detects your base text direction, as defined by rule P2 of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, unless you manually override by clicking one of the buttons.

Showcasing improved support for RTL text - GIMP 3.2.8

Aruius improved our color picking display GUIs, so you see more minor changes in colors when editing.

Chiem Whua Ma helped resolve an issue on Windows where the UI would appear to freeze when moving the canvas after opening multiple images at once. They also fixed a bug where vector layers would be offset incorrect after the canvas was resized.

Manu Cornet has focused on several performance fixes for GIMP. For this release, they improved caching when drawing gradients larger than 6000 x 6000 pixels. They also made the “marching ants” display for selections run more efficiently. Additionally, they improved how channels are displayed in the Channel dock when a dark theme is set. Finally they sped up the display time for the Preferences dialog.

balooii made several fixes as well. For instance, they updated our external copy and paste code to also pass along the DPI settings for the image; this means that other software can properly rescale what you paste if they have a different setting that what you used in GIMP. They also made our Debug dialog themeable and translatable (though we hope you don’t get the opportunity to see their work in this area!)

MrYoranimo fixed an oversight in our raw data import plug-in, where images were not loaded as binary data on Windows. This is a bit technical, but it meant that some raw data might not be interpreted correctly. Their fix ensures that the data is loaded consistently on Windows as it has been on other platforms.

Dimitriy Ryazantcev has continued their work on Windows icon and animated cursors. In this release, they have updated our loading code to match how Windows orders and groups icons in the file.

abderraouf updated our HEIF loading code to allow for loading larger images.

Chomu updated our menu code to allow plug-in and script developers to add submenus in named menu sections. For instance the following code will add a submenu Custom/ below other Paste as actions and your new plug-in action in it:

gimp_procedure_add_menu_path (procedure, "<Image>/File/[Paste as]/Custom");

Also gimp_plug_in_add_menu_branch() has been deprecated (though it was already not working properly anyway so we expect nobody was using it).

System-specific Updates⁠

Bruno Lopes continues their work to improve GIMP’s integration on different platforms. To name a few updates:

On macOS 27+, title bars are displayed with background colors again. Icons on the menu bar should also appear accordingly. Since the release of Golden Gate, these were being rendered transparently due to breaking changes on the macOS side.
On macOS 14+, we now use the ScreenCaptureKit API for taking screenshots.
On Intel-based macOS, GIMP should run without warnings from GateKeeper thanks to us now consistently notarizing Python.
We now display a 1/0 value for switches on macOS based on the “Differentiate without color” setting.
Transparency is retained when copying an image from certain apps to GIMP, instead of it showing as black.
The longstanding “Blank UI” bug that happened on startup for certain macOS computers should be finally fixed!
Print Preview (aka Image Settings tab) should now work with the Windows 11 Unified Print Dialog on that platform. In addition, Page Setup should now use the correct printer, not just the default one on Windows.
On Windows, “Merged title bar” settings now play nicer with system features such as minimizing from the task bar and title bar shadowing effets.
The Screenshot feature now works better on HDR displays on Windows.
AppImage compatibility was improved to support installing Python Wheels from pip like Flatpak and Snap. Note, however, that our minimum version for 3.2 continues to be a distro released after Debian 13 (Trixie).

Security Updates⁠

As many free and open source software projects can attest, we have continued to receive a large quantity of security reports due to recent advances in software scanning and testing programs. Jacob Boerema and Alx Sa along with new contributors Mike Gorse, Dirk Müller, and Alynx Zhou have proactively responded to and patched these reported issues when applicable.

We take security seriously, but this is not quite as scary as it first sounds. There are no personal accounts or banking information to exploit since we of course don’t access or store that information! The most common report that we get is our older image plug-ins and legacy filters are too trusting of the image size information provided by the image file, and if you intentionally alter this information, you could cause the plug-in (not GIMP itself) to crash.

Around GIMP⁠

Documentation for resource makers⁠

Bruno Lopes wrote two new tutorials on developer.gimp.org:

These articles should help plug-in and script developers who want to make their plug-ins translatable, either by themselves or by members of the community. This will be especially helpful as we make progress on creating an built-in Extension repo for easily downloading and installing plug-ins, filters, and more. (More information on that coming soon!)

New Mirrors⁠

Randhost, in Portugal, and ZEROLAG, in Romania, have graciously offered to serve mirrors for GIMP downloads.

Mirrors help GIMP be available for download at high speeds wherever you are in the world.

Does your organization wish to be one of our official mirror sponsors? Create a request to become an official mirror!

Release Stats⁠

Since GIMP 3.2.6, in the main GIMP repository:

82 reports were closed as FIXED.
46 merge requests were merged.
300 commits were pushed.
11 translations were updated: Chinese (China), Dutch, Georgian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

27 people contributed changes or fixes to GIMP 3.2.8 codebase (order is determined by number of commits; some people are in several groups):

10 developers to core code: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa, Harsh Verma, Manu Cornet, Chiem Whua Ma, balooii balooii, infinity, Chomu, aruius.
11 developers to plug-ins or modules: Alx Sa, Bruno Lopes, Jacob Boerema, Dimitriy Ryazantcev, Alynx Zhou, Dirk Müller, Harsh Verma, Jehan, Mike Gorse, MrYoranimo, phoinix.
11 translators: Anders Jonsson, Dick Groskamp, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Martin, luming zh, Aurimas Aurimas Černius, Baurzhan Muftakhidinov, Ekaterine Papava, Kjartan Maraas, Yuri Chornoivan, Emin Tufan Çetin.
1 theme designers: Alx Sa.
4 build, packaging or CI contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Harsh Verma, Alx Sa.
2 contributors on other types of resources: Jehan, Bruno Lopes.

Contributions on other repositories in the GIMPverse (order is determined by number of commits):

The gimp-test-images (unit testing repository) repository had 2 commits by 1 contributors: Jacob Boerema.
The flatpak release had 12 commits by 2 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan.
Our main website (what you are reading right now) had 65 commits by 3 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Alx Sa.
Our developer website had 56 commits by 5 contributors: Bruno Lopes, Jehan, Harsh Verma, Alx Sa, Denis Rangelov.
Our 3.0 documentation had 197 commits by 8 contributors: Jacob Boerema, Dick Groskamp, Kolbjørn Stuestøl, Anders Jonsson, Marco Ciampa, Jehan, Balázs Úr, Yuri Chornoivan.

Let’s not forget to thank all the people who help us triaging in Gitlab, report bugs and discuss possible improvements with us. Our community is deeply thankful as well to the internet warriors who manage our various discussion channels or social network accounts such as Ville Pätsi, Liam Quin, Michael Schumacher and Sevenix!

Note: considering the number of parts in GIMP and around, and how we get statistics through git scripting, errors may slip inside these stats. Feel free to tell us if we missed or mis-categorized some contributors or contributions.

Downloading GIMP 3.2.8⁠

You will find all our official builds on GIMP official website (gimp.org):

Linux AppImages for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
Linux Flatpaks for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
Linux Snaps for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
Universal Windows installer for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
Microsoft Store for x86 and ARM (64-bit)
macOS DMG packages for Intel/x86 and Apple/ARM hardware (64-bit)

Other packages made by third-parties are obviously expected to follow (Linux or *BSD distributions’ packages, etc).

What’s Next⁠

While we’ve been making periodic updates to the stable GIMP 3.2 branch, we’ve also been hard at work on developing the next version of GIMP. There’s a lot of cool things in progress, and we look forward to sharing more about that with you all soon!

Don’t forget you can donate and personally fund GIMP developers, as a way to give back and accelerate the development of GIMP. Community commitment helps the project to grow stronger!

07:00 PM

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 28 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

71-931M "Vityaz" tram at Tverskaya Zastava Square in Moscow, Russia

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 29 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Vineyards (AOC Languedoc-Cabrières) in autumn at the foot of the Pic de Vissou. Commune of Cabrières, Hérault, France.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 30 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Sunrays shining through trees and weak fog near Walchwil, Switzerland

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for October 31 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

MACS 2129-1 Galactic Graveyard: "This chillingly haunted galaxy mysteriously stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang! It became a cosmic cemetery, illuminated by the red glow of decaying stars. Dare to enter, and you might encounter the frightening corpses of exoplanets or the final death throes of once-mighty stars." NASA Exoplanet Exploration Halloween poster 2020.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 1 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

The twelve stained-glass windows of the Església Santa Margalida (Santa Margalida, Majorca, Spain) depicting twelve saints. Today is All Saints' Day.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 2 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Saint-Charles Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Quebec City. Today is All Souls' Day.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 3 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Orange-lined triggerfish (Balistapus undulatus), Red Sea, Egypt. This demersal triggerfish has a maximum body size of about 30 centimetres (12 in) and is found across the Indo-western Pacific East Africa, Red Sea and Japan, typically in coral reefs ecosystems, coral lagoons, and external reef slopes within this area. Within coral reefs, the orange-lined triggerfish are more versatile than other triggerfish species and can be found at depths up to 50 metres (160 ft), although studies have found that they prefer depths of 2 to 8 metres (6 ft 7 in to 26 ft 3 in). It's an omnivorous feeder that can, because of its strong and heavy teeth, tackle a variety of benthic prey like cnidarians, molluscs, ctenophores, crustaceans, other fish, algae, and echinoderms. This species in particular, given its broad diet and distribution, is a crucial component in coral reef ecosystems through top-down control and especially through consumption of sea-urchin.

Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 4 [Wikimedia Commons picture of the day feed]

Picture of the day

Swing into books. Book week, November 1-7, 1964.

05:00 PM

7th Measles Death Of The Year Recorded In New York State [Techdirt]

It’s very gross for this to be any sort of “I told you so” opening to this post, but the measles outbreak in America continues to get worse, as predicted. While last years case counts and deaths from the disease, which had been vaccinated to the point of eradication back in 2000, were a record-breaking shitshow, 2026’s case and death counts have already outpaced it significantly. There are more than double the total cases of measles already compared with last year, and triple as many deaths. Through it all, RFK Jr. and his HHS agency have battled the outbreak through inaction and obfuscation of data.

The worst of the outbreaks has been in Pennsylvania this year. Unfortunately, highly infectious diseases don’t respect state borders. Measles is already spilling out into neighboring states. Weeks ago, New York State declared a state of emergency due to measles infections. And, now, the state has sadly reported its first fatality from measles.

It’s the first known measles-associated death in the state in over 30 years, health officials said.

“We are deeply saddened by the death of a child in Lewis County associated with the ongoing measles outbreak,” the New York State Department of Health and Lewis County Public Health said in a joint statement on Monday. “We extend our heartfelt condolences to the child’s family and loved ones and ask that their privacy be respected during this difficult time.”

No additional information on the case was released.

We don’t have any more information on the specific case or victim beyond that. But we do know that it was another child that died. Children have represented the overwhelming percentage of case counts and fatalities thus far. We also know that this death needn’t have happened. Until RFK Jr. got into government, America had not had a measles fatality recorded in decades. Through vaccination programs and the resulting herd immunity, even those medically unable to get vaccinated against measles were protected. The anti-vaxxer movement undid all of that, of course, and the avatar for that movement is Kennedy.

A major concern among health professionals right now is measles cases occurring during pregnancy, given how dangerous it can be for both the person pregnant and the fetus upon birth. The CDC reportedly wanted to issue an informational alert to health professionals about the dangers of such cases and how to handle them. Unfortunately, it seems the powers running those government health agencies would prefer to hide that information from the public.

Days before the seventh preventable measles death, The Washington Post reported on Kennedy’s latest push to thwart public health efforts: Career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which is under Kennedy’s control—were blocked from publishing an urgent health alert to clinicians regarding the risk and management of measles cases during pregnancy.

Given the previous success of vaccines and vaccination campaigns, many clinicians have never seen such cases in their careers. But measles infections during pregnancy pose severe, life-threatening risks to both pregnant people and fetuses. As such, CDC scientists wanted to issue an informational advisory through the CDC’s Health Alert Network.

But the CDC Director’s Office declined to provide the required approval for the alert, sources told the Post. The scientists have since moved to trying to publish the information in the CDC’s publication, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). But the peer-review process for the publication is longer than that of an advisory. Further, vaccine-related studies already approved for publication in MMWR have been suspiciously delayed, the Post reported.

Here again we see sociopathic behavior from Kennedy and its detrimental impact on the health of Americans. Kennedy doesn’t want government studies on vaccine related information because, obviously, those studies don’t align with Kennedy’s preferred conspiracy theories about vaccines. Likewise, he doesn’t want alerts going out to medical professionals about measles during pregnancy because either they put the lie to Kennedy’s claim that he has this whole measles thing under control, because the advice given in those alerts would be to encourage more vaccination, or both.

There is no explanation for why informational alerts about an ongoing health crisis that were otherwise approved for publication should be blocked by someone with no medical degrees or background. This is hiding information from the public, and from doctors. It’s evil.

People are getting sick and dying, most of them children. That Kennedy is prioritizing his own ego and pet projects over those lives isn’t surprising, but it is horrifying. And it must be stopped.

02:00 PM

The U.S. Midterms Were Once Again Flooded By Fake ‘Pink Slime’ Local Newspaper Propaganda [Techdirt]

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either “news deserts,” or local news that’s mostly just low-quality infotainment and agitprop.

Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” doing quality local journalism just wasn’t profitable enough for the dipsy brunchlords that fail upward into positions of prominence at most media companies, so the internet… didn’t. As a result, all sorts of terrible stuff has rushed to fill the vacuum where quality local journalism once existed.

That includes not just your usual collection of propaganda like Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc., but also so-called “pink slime” fake local newspapers that try to look like a real local paper, but are basically just partisan agitprop.

Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University did the definitive study on the subject in 2022, and found that there were 1,200 bogus local news outlets around the country, all feeding gullible readers a steady diet of misleading bullshit. In the years since, such fake newspapers have outnumbered real ones. They’re often even better funded.

This partisan ratfuckery historically was heavily dominated by Republicans. But in recent years Democrats have gotten in on the action. And increasingly as voters turn to AI to inform them about upcoming elections, AI chatbots are leaning on these fake pink slime newspapers as reliable sources of local information:

“As a citation, ChatGPT linked to a website called the Kalamazoo Beacon. The Beacon labels its articles as “news articles” in the website’s source code. The outlet also describes itself in the site’s source code as “Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities.”

But the Kalamazoo Beacon has only published 16 stories, all about [Michigan Democrat Democrat Sean McCann], his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR’s review shows.”

When the “both sides” press covers this pink slime phenomenon, they sometimes try to imply that this kind of stuff is happening perfectly symmetrically among both major parties (as this Financial Times story does). But NPR’s own previous reporting (which this newer piece curiously fails to mention) indicates that Republican pink slime efforts outnumber Democrats by around ten to one.

In this newer case, nobody can actually seem to track this new smattering of pink slime newspapers to an actual source:

“It’s unclear who operates the websites. NPR was unable to find or reach the site operators. One of the Democrats promoted by the network, JoAnna Mendoza of Arizona, said she wasn’t behind the websites and doesn’t know who is. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the House Democrats, denied involvement in a phone call with NPR. Other candidates the websites promoted, including McCann, as well as other Democratic super PACs that support the candidates, including American Bridge 21st Century, Tomorrow Together and House Majority PAC, did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.”

Regardless of the party of origin, the tactic represents a very ugly problem in a country increasingly being devoured by artifice and disinformation. There’s an active extraction class effort to not only undermine sources of expertise (journalism and academia), but to “flood the zone with shit” to disorient Americans (or their AI chatbots) that go hunting for reliable information.

The death of local news divides the public, can actively shift electoral outcomes, reduces electoral participation, makes a populace more susceptible to propaganda, and can even increase municipal borrowing costs (less local truth-to-power journalism means less oversight of waste, which results in more waste, which results in higher interest rates for municipal bond lenders).

Journalism ideally is the glue that contributes to a healthy civic nervous system. We’ve lost that tether, and therefore (quite intentionally) our sense of a collective, shared reality. You may have noticed a few… repercussions here and there.

There are ample paths out from inside the problem (better media literacy training, enforcing antitrust law, funding public media, restoring media consolidation and media diversity ownership requirements, creating better funding models for real journalism). And while there are organizations spending a lot of time working on the problem (see: the creation of state “civic information consortiums“) they’re consistently out-financed and in desperate need of additional support.

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Rewriting Copyright Law For Generative AI Would Hurt Everyone [Techdirt]

In courts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It’s easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people who aren’t represented in the case at all, including researchers, artists, activists, journalists, people with disabilities, and anyone who accesses and shares content online.

That’s why EFF is stepping in to defend the public’s rights in these cases. Last week, EFF filed an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, explaining how the court’s ruling on fair use could impact people worldwide. If fair use gets narrowed, it will impede work that benefits the public, like medical research and investigative journalism, and even limit access to privacy protection tools.

Let’s be clear: creators and workers deserve support as AI changes their fields, and Big Tech companies must be held accountable for the harms they cause. But giving copyright holders more control over the web won’t accomplish either of these goals. If the plaintiffs prevail in these cases, courts would have to rewrite copyright law in ways that hurt everyone except powerful media and tech companies.

Rewriting Fair Use Makes Everyone Worse Off

Copyright exists for one reason: to stimulate creativity and innovation in service of the greater public good. Unfortunately, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are arguing to limit everyone’s fair use rights, in ways that would thwart the basic purpose of copyright. The harms of shrinking fair use will go far beyond generative AI, impacting everyone.

Initial speculation that AI models would be infringement machines, churning out works highly similar to those on which they were trained, has proven unfounded. And courts have already found fair use in cases where copyrighted works were used to train generative AI models, recognizing that training uses those works for a fundamentally different purpose.

Plaintiffs in these cases argue that, even if the use is transformative, using their works to train AI is still unfair, because the AI models could generate new, non-infringing works that might compete with plaintiffs’ own works. They also argue that scraping or downloading the data without permission—or in some cases, from websites containing infringing copies—was independently infringing and/or rendered any subsequent uses of that data unfair.

These arguments would put beneficial research and reporting at risk. First, if copying without permission rules out fair use, the law will never protect transformative uses that benefit us all. Researchers, journalists, and other watchdog groups gather information the same way AI companies do—but they do it to serve the public interest, and often to hold Big Tech itself accountable. For example, journalists and nonprofit researchers have used “crawling” or “scraping” to investigate potentially anticompetitive practices by tech companies, and research misinformation and hateful content posted on X. Their data acquisition techniques are virtually identical to those used by AI giants—but they lack those companies’ deep pockets.

Requiring users to show that copyrighted material was lawfully obtained would also threaten everyday internet use. As EFF’s brief explained, that requirement would “cast legal doubt on the billions of copies we collectively make every day through routine online activities like opening emails, clicking on an embedded link, visiting websites, sharing pictures, streaming music, and watching videos. All of this activity requires intermediate copying.”

Fair use is what lets us all use the internet without being compelled to track the source of every image, video, and article that we click on, and make sure the rights are all cleared.

Additionally, while rightsholders are understandably concerned about competition from AI generated works, copyright law exists to promote new creation, not protect authors who published first. Under the plaintiffs’ theory, no one could stand upon the shoulders of giants. Copyright could prevent people from writing new books inspired by themes in a favorite novel or genre, or prevent academic researchers from publishing literature reviews that distill insights from prior research—simply because readers might prefer those new publications over those that came first.

Finally, general-purpose AI models are neither designed nor usually used to create works targeted at any particular market. These models have been used to generate new insights and tools for medicine, science, journalism, art, and accessibility. For instance, an AI-powered tool called Be My AI uses Open AI’s GPT models to provide visual descriptions for people who are blind or have low vision. Generative tools have also accelerated scientific research, and researchers have used these tools to develop new medical treatments and medications for conditions previously thought to be incurable.

Mandatory Licensing Would Entrench Big Tech

Some creators and publishers argue that AI developers should just get a license. But requiring permission for every work used would give the largest companies massive advantages over small competitors and impede academic research. As Professor Lawrence Lessig recently noted:

If all training requires a license, then none but a handful of tech giants will be able to afford the costs of training. That’s not because authors are greedy but because the copyright system is the least efficient property system known to man.

Moreover, creators are unlikely to benefit from these licensing arrangements in many cases. Media and entertainment giants have exploited the imbalance between themselves and underpaid working artists for decades. Trying to help creators by giving them more rights under copyright is, as Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take. Artists aren’t getting good deals from record labels or publishers now; there’s no reason to think these companies, which already own the copyrights, will treat artists more fairly once they control the data that powers AI.

The Future of AI Is Too Important to Leave to Big Content or Big Tech

AI technologies will affect all of us, and copyright law is ill-equipped to address many of these consequences. The rules governing these technologies should be rules that serve the public—not just the small number of companies that can afford to litigate copyright battles for decades, or settle for billions.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

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