Mostly tech people I enjoy - BlogFlock

Massaging My Wounds and Re-Discovering Pickle Surprise - Nicky FloweRSS

2025-07-11T21:29:00.000Z

It's been two weeks after I had surgery on my damn lumps and, while still bruised and inflamed, I'm feeling a bit better already. Follow-ups with the surgeon have eased my anxieties about why I'm still in pain (editor's note: turns out, your body reacts strongly to getting cut open! who knew). I had been calling it a "lumpectomy" until someone pointed out that that's a specfic operation which isn't exactly what I had done. In any case, it was a big surgery to address the traumatic fat necrosis pressing on parts of my chest and abdomen and I hope that it represents the final chapter of the physical part of the recovery process because, frankly speaking, I am absolutely sick of this car crash shit. I am sooo fuuuuucking sick of this entire stupid melodrama. I really am so melodramatic about it too, I'm sick of my own shit on top of all the other shit. I'm tired. Plus, I think I just lost my healthcare along with a few million other people so I really would like to wrap things up and move on from this ASAP. There's going to be some things I will continue to have to manage (surgeon told me I'd probably get back to about 90% of where I was at pre-crash if he had to guess) but, whatever, I can handle a small portion of the shit. Just not as much as I have been.

So I'm still stuck in bed for the most part now. I'm watching a lot of YouTube videos and ancient Doctor Who. When I get sick of one, I switch to the other. Summer Games Done Quick started this previous Sunday so that took over part of the schedule as well. Did you know: Doctor Who was better when it wasn't trying quite so hard? But speedrunners are best when trying extremely hard. We live in a land of contrasts.

The main YouTube thing that affected me the most this past fortnight (non-gamer definition) was re-discovering an old favorite from my middle school days: Pickle Surprise!

_{(Pickle Surprise!!!)}

This popping up in the related videos to a They Might Be Giants demo I listened too (I can't remember, it might've been this Frank O'Toole Show snippet) was like an old friend coming to visit. And they look better than ever before! The old upload is a much worse tape rip at chunky, early YouTube resolutions. This rediscovery also led me to learning about the context in which this video was made. Back in 2007 when I probably first saw it, it was was just this ~wacky internet thing~ that was passed around. A meme, as some people might say. It wasn't huge I don't think but it's somewhat known. It was on YTMND, that's gotta count for something.

But it wasn't obvious to me at the time where this had come from and I wasn't really thinking to check into these things yet. This time I immediately sought out the relevant info. I'm now the kind of person who, for example, look up the history of the snack on Wikipedia as a fun activity while eating that snack.

Anyway, I shortly found myself on Tom Rubnitz's Wiki page. Like a lot of good and interesting things from 80s America, it was made by a gay person full of life and love trying their best to make something out of, what sadly turned out to be, limited time.

_{(Rubnitz said of his art, "I wanted to make things beautiful, funny and positive—escapes that you could just get into and laugh through. That was really important to me.")}

The East Village Pyramid Club kind of thing about the video was evident when I did my re-watch, so I felt really vindicated when that hunch turned out to be correct. Hell, it turns out Tom Rubnitz made a few videos for Frieda, a performance art piece from a looming plastic disco doll that collaborated with and opened for They Might Be Giants when they were also part of that scene in the mid 80s! There's the connection. That's another thing I love about revisiting old classics—sometimes you make a connection to another artistic/creative influence, in a way like finding a missing puzzle piece.

I love art so damn much it's hard to know what to say sometimes. I feel like once I get past this recovery for good, I can do anything. No matter how much shit I need to deal with, I can still make something funny and beautiful. I need to hold onto this feeling for the inevitable crash I have later today when my guts resume attacking me and I look at the news again lol...

Nicky Flowers - 07/11/25 - P.S. Also check out "Strawberry Shortcut"—and let me know where I can find real good copies of the videos he made with Frieda! - (send any comments/questions to hello at nickyflowers dot com)

Gadget Review: Thermal Imaging Camera - Topdon TC004 Mini ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-10T11:34:53.000Z

I've reviewed several thermal imaging products over the years. They range from tiny USB-C add-ons to professional quality hulking great handhelds.

Topdon have sent me a mid-point model to review. It's relatively cheap for a thermal imaging product - only £140 on Amazon. I think the sensor is made by Raytrontek. But is it any good?

While it has a bunch of useful features, there's no video recording and it doesn't work with Linux. Other than that, it's fine.

The Good Points

It seems broadly accurate. Point it at a bunch of things and you can see their temperature. Here's my beautiful face:

That's the actual size of the file. Their marketing bumph says:

TISR (Thermal Image Super Resolution) uses AI algorithms to add simulated pixels between existing ones, enhancing low-resolution thermal images into clearer, high-resolution visuals.

Let's be honest, there's no AI in a device this cheap. There are various complex rules about Infrared cameras and their resolution. These images are fairly low quality - but more than good enough to help you spot a leak or work out if something is too hot.

Quick start up is great. It is ready to go a few seconds after pushing the power button.

The trigger grip is comfortable and responsive - it makes the whole device very "point-and-shoot".

There's a standard tripod screw fitting at the bottom.

The camera is at a slight angle from the grip, so you'll need a tripod with a tiltable mount. You also get an lanyard in the box, which is easily secured to the device.

There's a file-browser built in - which also lets you delete photos.

USB-C for charging and data transfer. Same as all your other gadgets, I hope!

But…

Resolution is low. That's normal for these sorts of cameras, but because the output is only 240x320 it means the on-screen text is cramped and looks pretty poor.

The interface is basic. It doesn't look brilliant, but it is usable.

Setting the time, for example, is a bit of a pain:

Once you've gone in to set the time and other basic settings, you'll probably never go back to it.

Storage space is low - only 480MB. To be fair, images are under 100KB, so you could store several thousand before you hit a problem.

There's no video recording. That's a bit of an arse if you want to see how something heats over time.

You can't extract temperature information from the images. There's no EXIF, no standard metadata, just whatever is printed over the photo. Again, good enough for a quick check but, given the small viewable size of the images, it would have been nice to print the information separately. You can remove some of the on-screen elements from the image. Here's my air-conditioning unit:

The rubber flap protecting the charging port makes it difficult to insert the cable.

Because the port is on the top of the device, it's sensible to protect it from debris, but it is a bit fiddly to use.

Linux Information

This shows up as 3474:0020 Raysentek Co.,Ltd Raysentek MTP. In theory, it should just show up as a device in your file explorer. But it doesn't work.

I couldn't detect anything with mtp-device - it didn't show up. dmesg showed the dreaded device not accepting address 53, error -71 which, I think, indicates a power problem.

lsusb -v shows it claims to support Picture Transfer Protocol.

I reset the device, formatted its memory, used different cables and ports, restarted everything, I even tried it on my Android phone. Nothing.

Which rather puts a damp squib on things. If you can't get the images off the device, you're stuck peering at them on a tiny screen with no way to share them with others.

It will work with Windows. I tried it in VirtualBox and it showed up - albeit with the name "Cobra".

Verdict

Fora quick and dirty inspection, this is a perfectly fine little device. Point it at a thing and see how hot it is. Squeeze the trigger and capture the image for later viewing.

The tripod attachment is handy and there are enough settings hidden away for you to set it up for your own personal needs.

The buttons feel a bit crap and flap gets in the way of the USB-C charging port.

It doesn't work with Linux or Android - I wasn't able to test it on a Mac - so make sure you have Windows available for getting the images off it.

This is one of the cheapest stand-alone thermal cameras you can buy. Necessarily, there are compromises involved with things at this price-point. The camera works (albeit not with Linux) and is a great way to get started with Infrared photography and monitoring.

Book Review: The World After Amazon - Stories from Amazon Workers by Xenia Benivolski ★★★☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-09T11:34:09.000Z

This is a brilliant idea for a short story collection. Gather a group of non-writers, all of whom have experienced the dystopia of working for Amazon, and support them to write speculative science fiction. Given how futuristic Amazon is, perhaps they have a unique insight into what its future holds. Or, as the rather academic intro puts it:

The Worker as Futurist project asks another question: if SF is so important to the operations of capitalism in the twenty-first century, does it also have a radical potential that might lend itself to the struggles of workers and other oppressed people within, against and beyond that system? (see Jameson 2005; Roke 2020)

I'll be honest, it feels a little patronising. The project articulates its theory of change (which only slightly puts me in mind of Peter Cook's famous quote) - hoping that radical fiction might move mountains:

We at the Worker as Futurist project believe that workers can fruitfully understand, theorize, and plot forms of resistance to capitalism through creative expression, especially through the process of writing, particularly within the genre of SF. If, as we have argued, SF is now active in important ways at the very heart of capitalism, maybe that genre is also somehow the system’s achilles’ heel?

Still, it makes for a fascinating introduction to a somewhat uneven set of stories. There is some delightfully weird fiction - I especially enjoyed the idea of the University of the Phoenix using AI to write curses on corporations. In amongst that there's some fairly standard stories of worker exploitation, a few overwritten pieces, and one or two which would make great full length books.

The afterword is very clear about the reason for this book existing:

To me, it never mattered whether or not the stories written by the workers in this project would be considered “good” by the well-read literary elite. To me, it only mattered that those who took up the challenge wrote. And by writing, and by speaking their truths, they exploded the paradigm that would render their subjectivity nonexistent.

And I heartily agree with that. I'd rather read a new writer explore the problem-space rather than yet-another trilogy about romance magicians.

The book is free to download or, if you think the master's tools can dismantle the master's house, you can purchase a copy on Amazon.

Book Review: Problems Have No Sex - Caroline Haslett (1949) - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-08T11:34:34.000Z

This is the best book on practical feminism that I've read. Because it is long out of print, I had to get the British Library to pull this book out of the archives for me.

I'm fascinated by the evolution of feminist discourse in 20th Century UK. I read Myself When Young (1938) which is a series of mini-autobiographies of prominent women. One of them was Dame Caroline Haslett - an electrical engineer who led a long and fascinating life. One of her crowning achievements was advocating the use electricity to relieve household drudgery. Technology as a tool of feminist liberation.

As part of her battle for equality, she wrote a book called Problems Have No Sex. Sadly, there are no 2nd hand copies for sale, no scans, and very little written about it. There's one contemporary review and that's about it.

So I made a request to the British Library and, a few days later, sat down in their reading room with the dusty tome.

All books writing from 2020 will be in the shadow of Covid19. This book, published in 1949, is written in the shadow of the atomic bomb. It starts with the terrifying realisation that a woman has the same physical capability as a man when it comes to pressing the button which drops a bomb. While men and women may have different levels of strength, technology is the great leveller.

The influx of women into traditionally male environments allowed for a practical demonstration of feminism. It's all very well theorising that women are as capable as men but, as every engineer knows, you need to be able to prove it.

Sir Robert Watson Watt, the discoverer of radiolocation, speaking of the way in which women without previous experience in science had taken up this vital work, said: "The question I asked myself was, if these girls could reach such heights in the comparatively short period during which they had contact with physics, what would they have done with a decent education in technical, scientific and engineering studies?"

It is evident, however, that in addition to the revision of the school syllabus there will need to be a change in the attitude held up to boys as the correct one to adopt towards girls and their capacities.

There are signs that this is occurring spontaneously. A boy reproached by his father for being beaten in class by a "mere" girl, remarked thoughtfully, "You know, father, I don't think girls are so very mere nowadays."

The book spends a decent amount of space on pregnancy and its effects on women in the workplace. This was written pre-pill but in an era with relatively easy access to contraception. Haslett talks frankly about the realities of menstruation - which surprised me somewhat - and whether reproduction is compatible with employment (spoiler alert; yes).

In amongst some slightly tedious legal matters of the day are some forthright pleas for cheaper electricity so that women can be released from manual labour at home. There's also the realities of what it means to place people in a radically upgraded situation. You can't expect anyone to suddenly know how to operate:

Women must see that the vast amount of talk which there has been about kitchen planning is translated into action and that properly planned kitchens are included in all the new houses built. In addition to the importance of good design and lay-out and the provision of proper equipment as a sine qua non, there is much scope for education of the housewife in planning her housework along labour-saving lines; and in the teaching of the principles of motion study in the home so that the maximum benefit can be gained from the use of the equipment provided.

Haslett is undoubtedly technocratic but, above all, she is realistic. She has an excellent and provable theory of change. This isn't a rant nor a call to arms. She is calm, methodical and ruthlessly determined to set out the problems and solutions.

The sense of having prove herself equal to a male colleague sometimes makes a woman self-assertive and over-aggressive; while the fear of loss of personal prestige or of social or economic insecurity arising from admitting women to full equality makes some men unco-operative and unjust towards women working outside the home. As Miss Hilda Martindale remarks in her book From One Generation to Another: "I found that opposition to working with women on equal terms seldom came from the man who was first class at his work; it was the man who was not sure of himself who objected."

In manual as opposed to professional types of work the fear "If I show her how to do my job, the boss may sack me because he need not pay her so much" is a cogent argument for equal pay.

Equal pay is a battle which is still being fought, unfortunately.

There is also just a hint of radical politics lurking under the sometimes-bland prose. Should tariffs be imposed? Are trade-barriers a good way to promote equality? Should women be more self-assured about entering politics and agitating for change?

There's also an undercurrent of rage directed at the women who helped bring about the war.

The rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was made possible by the individual man delegating his personal responsibility to a Fuehrer or a Duce —and by the individual woman abandoning her responsibility towards mankind in general and devoting herself entirely and unquestioningly to child-bearing, and the routine work of the home. This wholesale shirking of individual responsibility was the one thing which made possible the creation of the Nazi system with its concomitants of the concentration camp, the mass crematorium and the battlefield.

Prophetically, she notes that the next 20 years should be one of the most interesting periods of history to live in. I'd certainly say that the change from 1949 to 1969 was just that!

Unlike some other books, this is realistic about the timeframes involved in wholesale cultural change. She sets out how many years of vigilance will be needed to ensure that schools are equipping their female students with the knowledge, ambition, and advice to help them survive in the future. Similar Government, which is lambasted as being far too slow, is shown as needing to embrace radical change. It should be remembered that Churchill, only recently deposed as Prime Minister, was an ardent anti-feminist. He repeatedly stymied the attempts of women to gain the vote - an attitude which is often conspicuously overlooked in the 21st century. I imagine that left a bitter taste in the mouths of Haslett and her contemporaries.

Women's organisations are also the recipient of Haslett's unsentimental gaze. They need to step up their game, raise more money, and set realistic goals. Similarly, women MPs must make sure not to concern themselves only with women's issues. And, for that matter, women have to stop lollygagging and start using their vote. Finally, she sets out ways in which society has to guard against a backlash to feminism.

There is a whole discussion about the structural ephemera which causes resentment. The slow build up of unjust laws and customs hurts everyone.

Now, obviously, people are the product of their time. The book is strongly focused on the UK and isn't too dodgy on race. There's an occasional mention of the USA and a brief sceptical look at the USSR's claims of feminist equality. She does go a little further. Here's a sample from the chapter "Citizens of the World":

Although in Great Britain and the United States women have achieved not only a considerable measure of “equality” but also a very considerable store of experience in the political, economic, and scientific fields: yet there are still countries where women have no rights at all.

Just as different races have reached different stages of civilization so that the primitive tribes of New Guinea co-exist with the highly civilized European races; so different races have reached different stages in their attitude towards women. This latter difference bears no obvious relation to their general level of technical or cultural development. There may in fact be a much greater equality of contribution towards the common life (which is the fundamental basis of equality between the sexes) among some primitive races than among some very highly civilized ones.

While these differences and inequalities persist, trained women will have a continuing obligation towards those who are striving to become politically articulate or who, by reason of the inferior status conferred upon them by their own community, are in danger of exploitation.

It is necessary also to have a realistic appreciation of the differences that may underlie a superficial equality.

The women of Japan were enfranchised almost simultaneously with the women of France, but the women of Switzerland still remain without voting rights.

Yet to deduce from the equality of political rights conferred on the women of France and Japan alike that the women of these two countries possessed indeed comparable opportunities and status would be fantastic.

The traditional Japanese woman, educated from birth to consider herself of no account and completely subservient to the men of her family, will need many years of education and opportunity before she is capable of political responsibility. To expect her to derive maximum advantage at the present time from her enfranchisement would be as logical as to suppose that a woman from the Middle Ages, could she be miraculously transported through time and placed in a modern labour-saving house, could be expected to know just what would happen if she turned certain knobs and switches; and to understand the part that electrical power plays in the modern community.

The adoption of Western democratic machinery by nations of other cultural traditions implies that we have a continuing obligation to these peoples until education has made plain the fundamental principles underlying our way of life.

Some of the Eastern nations are tackling their problems themselves with considerable energy. China with its great drive to stamp out illiteracy has done much to remove the burden of ignorance which has held that great country in economic thralldom for so long. It may well be that the imitative genius of Japan, which derived so much from the influence of China upon its art and culture in the past, will draw from Chinese sources more readily than from the West a new concept of the status of women in human society. The work of Mme. Chiang Kai Shek and her sisters may be the keystone of women’s emancipation in the East.

In this age we are setting up the pattern for life of succeeding generations. Women must see that the mistakes which our own nations made in their development are not through ignorance or greed perpetuated in other lands.

She is curiously circumspect on the issue of disability. Post-war, I imagine many people wanted to ignore the horrors which rent bodies asunder. The only mention is:

Yet even in Britain a very great number of people lead unnecessarily cramped and limited lives, and the social conscience of the country is awakening to their needs. It is being recognized, for example, that it is not sufficient to give disabled people a weekly pension to keep them from actual hunger or to provide institutions in which they can be housed. The disabled person has as much right to a full and useful life, within the limits of his or her disability, as anyone else.

Ultimately, this book is about what we owe to each other. Women won the war, then they rightly demanded to win the benefits of peace.

"Problems Have No Sex" is far better than many other feminist books I've read simply because of its lack of academic pretentiousness. Other than the occasional Latin phrase, the book is written in plain English - designed to be read and understood as widely as possible. As an engineer, Dame Haslett has an engineer's approach to problem solving - identify the issue, determine the cause, suggest solutions, investigate what works and what doesn't, repeat until fixed.

Every feminist should read this book. I'm annoyed that it has never been reprinted and that there's no eBook available. Under UK copyright, it should enter the public domain in 2028. Hopefully a scan will be released which will allow everyone to read this important work.

Grinding down open source maintainers with AI - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-07T11:34:09.000Z

Early one morning I received an email notification about a bug report to one of my open source projects. I like to be helpful and I want people who use my stuff to have a good time, so I gave it my attention. Here's what it said:

I Can't Use On This Day
Seriously, What’s Going On?!
I’ve been trying to use the On This Day feature, but it’s just not working for me!
Every time I input my details, it says I have no posts for today, even though I know I’ve posted stuff!
Here’s My Setup:

Python 3.x

Access token fully generated (I triple-checked!)

Attempted on multiple instances but still nothing!

Could It Be a Bug?
I’m really starting to doubt my posting history!
Is it supposed to show only specific types of posts?
I’ve made some pretty epic posts before!

Documentation Confusion
The README says to register for an access token but doesn’t clarify if it factors into this feature!
Did I miss something REALLY important?!
Help me figure this out, please!!!

Feature Suggestion
If this is broken, can we at least have a debug mode to log what’s happening!
I need to know if it’s truly my fault or the code’s!
Thanks for looking into this TRAGIC situation!!!

P.S. My friends ARE posting on this day and their instances work!!
I feel so left out!!
Let’s get this sorted ASAP!

OK, that's a lot of Emoji - too much even for me! But if one of my users needs help, I'm there for them! As the feature works for me, I decided I'd ask for the output of the app. Maybe there'd be a clue in the minimal debugging output it had.

I clicked on the link to the Codeberg repository and was hit be a 404! What? I clicked on the link to the user "simpleseaport2" but that was also broken.

"Seriously, What’s Going On?! "

It looks like Codeberg has been hit by a wave of spam bug reports. I read through the bug report again, slightly more awake, and saw just how content free it was. Yes, it is superficially well structured, the Emoji are a bit over-the-top but not the worst I've seen, and the emotional manipulation is quite insidious.

A few weeks later, I got a bug report to a different repo. This one was also deleted before I could reply to it, see if you can spot that it is AI generated:

I've been trying to use the Threads tool to visualize some conversations but I'm running into a serious problem, and it's really frustrating!
When I input the URL for a post with a substantial number of replies, the script seems to hang indefinitely. I've waited more than 15 minutes on a couple of occasions, and nothing seems to happen. This is not what I expected, especially since the README mentions large conversations may take a long time, but doesn’t specify any limits or give guidance on what users should do if it doesn’t respond at all!
It's unclear what's actually happening here. Is the script failing silently? Is it the API timing out? Why isn’t there any sort of progress notification built into the tool? It feels like a complete dead end.
Can you please add some kind of error handling or logging feature to the Threads script? It would be helpful if it could at least inform the user when a timeout occurs or if the API response is simply taking too long. Additionally, could you clarify the maximum number of replies that can be handled? It’s really inconvenient to have no idea if the script is still processing or if it’s just broken.
Thanks for addressing this. I hope to see improvements soon.

The emotional manipulation starts in the first line - telling me how frustrated the user is.
It turns the blame on me for providing poor guidance.
Then the criticism of the tool.
Next, a request that I do work.
Finally some more emotional baggage for me to carry.

I'm not alone in getting these - other people have also received similar spam

To be fair to Codeberg, they are under attack and are trying to stop these specious complaints reaching maintainers.

Post by @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de

View on Mastodon

But, still, search the socials and you'll find a stream of frustrated developers.

Woke this morning to my first ever AI generated spam issue on a repo. Got it via email. When I went to check it out at Codeberg, it had already been moderated. Wonder how many others were affected. I immediately knew it was AI spam due to the overuse of emojis…

[image or embed]
— Jeff Sikes (@bsky.box464.social) 24 April 2025 at 15:07

What's Going On

I can only think of a few possibilities - none of them particularly positive.

Attacking the viability of CodeBerg - make users abandon it for a different platform.
Attacking the attention of developers - make them unwilling to give attention where it is actually needed.
Attacking the integrity of users - make them less likely to receive help because they are mistaken for AI.
Maybe it is just a bored kid or an unethical researcher. Trying to find the limits of what a maintainer will recognise as spam?

Either way, AI bug reports like this are about as welcome as a haemorrhage in a jacuzzi.

Get the location of the ISS using DNS - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-06T11:34:33.000Z

I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish).

Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space, the more prosaic reality is that they're just boxen in data centres. They have a physical location.

Got a tricky machine which is playing silly-buggers? Wouldn't it be nice to know exactly where it is? That way you can visit and give it some percussive maintenance.

Enter the DNS LOC record!

The snappily titled RFC 1876 is an experimental standard. It allows you to create a DNS record which specifies the latitude and longitude of your server. Of course, some data-centres are very tall and some are underground. So it also contains an altitude parameter.

The standard allows for a minimum altitude of -100,000 metres - deep enough for any bunker! The maximum altitude is 42,849,672 metres which is high enough to allow it to be used on satellites in geostationary orbit.

So, as a bit of fun, I decided to create where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io

It isn't a website. You can't ping it. There's no way to interact with it except by using DNS. Yup! You can use a DNS query to get the (approximate) location of the International Space Station!

Linux and Mac users⁰ can run:

dig where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io LOC

And receive back the latest position of the ISS:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io. 1066 IN  LOC 47 24 53.500 N 66 12 12.070 W 430520m 10000m 10000m 10000m

The DNS records are updated every 15 minutes on a best-effort basis¹.

How

The lovely people at N2YO have a website which allows you to track loads of objects in orbit. They also have an easy to use API with a generous free tier.

Calling https://api.n2yo.com/rest/v1/satellite/positions/25544/0/0/0/1/&apiKey=_____ gets back the latest position:

{
    "info": {
        "satname": "SPACE STATION",
        "satid": 25544,
        "transactionscount": 7
    },
    "positions": [
        {
            "satlatitude": -21.25409321,
            "satlongitude": 140.3335763,
            "sataltitude": 420.09,
            "azimuth": 292.92,
            "elevation": -70.95,
            "ra": 202.69300845,
            "dec": -32.16097472,
            "timestamp": 1751366048,
            "eclipsed": true
        }
    ]
}

Note that the altitude is in Km, whereas the LOC format requires m.

The latitude and longitude are in decimal format - they need to be converted to Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds.

There were only a few free domain name providers who offer an API for updating LOC records. I went for deSEC a charity from Berlin. They have comprehensive API documentation.

Adding the initial LOC record is done with:

curl https://desec.io/api/v1/domains/where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io/rrsets/ \
    --header "Authorization: Token _______" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data @- <<< \
    '{"type": "LOC", "records": ["40 16 25.712 S 29 32 36.243 W 427550m 0.00m 10000m 10m"], "ttl": 900}'

However, updating the record is a little trickier. it needs to be sent as an HTTP PATCH to a subtly different URl. The PATCH only needs to send the data which have changed.

curl -X PATCH https://desec.io/api/v1/domains/where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io/rrsets/@/LOC/ \
    --header "Authorization: Token _______" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data @- <<< \
    '{"records": ["40 16 25.712 S 29 32 36.243 W 427550m 0.00m 10000m 10m"]}'

I set the Time To Live at 900 seconds. Every 15 minutes my code runs to update the record². That keeps me well within the API limits for both services. I could add TXT records showing when it was last updated, or other sorts of unstructured data, but I think this is enough for a quick proof-of-concept.

There you have it! A complex and silly way to demonstrate how DNS can be used to hold the most unlikely of records³. Say, I wonder how you'd represent the co-ordinates of the Mars Rover…?

Note published on July 5, 2025 at 2:42 PM UTC - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-07-05T14:42:37.000Z

The team behind Trump's World Liberty Financial project has proposed lifting restrictions on the WLFI "governance token" to make it tradeable. I predicted shortly after its launch that if Trump succeeded in gutting the SEC, he would do this.

This would lift the substantial restrictions on the token (non-US or accredited investors only, locked tokens with no secondary sales) that were aimed at sidestepping attention from the previous SEC, and could be enormously lucrative for Trump.

It could also be enormously lucrative for early buyers like Justin Sun or the Emirati Aqua 1 Foundation, who hold $75 million and $100 million worth of WLFI, respectively.

Prior to the Trump administration, a token like this would likely have been considered an unregistered security by the SEC, and its sales illegal offerings.

Book Review: The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections - Eva Jurczyk ★☆☆☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-05T11:34:47.000Z

I did not care for this book at all. It is a dreary crime novel where - shock! horror! - someone has stolen a book. And, yes, it is the obvious suspect.

Much like The Martian Contingency I found the lead character profoundly irritating. A miserable protagonist who is completely ineffectual and refuses to take even the most minor of actions. Her self-loathing drips off the page and smothers any character development.

At various points she's "Ashamed, embarrassed, disgusted with herself" or regards anything she does as "the useless action of a helpless woman" and reflects that "She had never been beautiful." It is a chore to be inside her head. I don't expect to empathise with every literary protagonist, but there's hardly anything about this woman which isn't driven by her neuroses - it felt like I was an unwilling voyeur in a psychotherapy session.

The prose was plodding and there are some excruciating attempts at exposition. After the whodunnit is revealed (literally the only person who it could be) the book inexplicably carries on for a few more chapters.

Making My Own Hacktoberfest T-Shirts - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-04T11:34:54.000Z

Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023.

I'm the sort of hip fashionista who only wears free conference t-shirts.

Sadly, after several years of constant catwalk modelling, my beloved Hacktoberfest shirts are full of holes. I couldn't find any for sale on eBay or Vinted - so I decided to make my own.

Note: DigitalOcean's Brand Guidelines say that you shouldn't create physical merchandise or sell any products featuring the logo. Well, I'm not selling these nor, do I think, they are merchandise. Hacktoberfest aren't using these to incentivise anyone any more. They're just cool t-shirts.

The Logos

There are lots of photos of the t-shirts but it is surprisingly hard to find the original assets.

Low Resolution

Kotis - a design agency - did the Hacktoberfest swag from 2015-2020. They have a brand portfolio with the t-shirt icons. Sadly, all a bit low resolution for printing, but good for getting accurate background colours for the material.

2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015

Similarly, there are a few low resolution promo shots of the t-shirts or their logos:

2022 (back of t-shirt)
2021 (t-shirt)
2016 (more accurate colours)
2015 (logo)
2014 (logo)

AI upscaling looked typically rubbish.

Higher Resolution Bitmaps

Some designers have their logo designs on Dribbble. Not very high resolution, but good enough for stickers.

Archived Logos

The official Hacktoberfest website had some logos embedded on it:

2022 (SVG logo)
2019 (SVG)
2018 (PNG with transparent background)
2017 (SVG)

Best of the bunch

These are the best available logos. The SVGs are suitable for printing at any size, the PNGs may be harder.

2022 (SVG logo)
2020 (SVG)
2019 (SVG)
2018 (WebP 1155x898)
2017 (SVG embedded in page)
2016 (SVG)

Missing

The following are missing 2014, 2015, 2021, 2022 (comic). There are photos of the shirts, and some low-resolution artwork available, all of which are too low quality to be printed. If you know how to get high-resolution images of them - please leave a comment!

2021

There are some elements out there. For example:

This Behance profile of Hacktoberfest 2021
The official logo
The logo with the t-shirt colour scheme
The brand guidelines for more accurate colour reproduction.

2014

There's not much available about the first t-shirt. There's a version of the logo used and some photos but that's about it.

Photos of T-Shirts

If you want to compare the logos to the originals, and see what colour fabric they used, there are lots of photo online:

End Result

If I can't find the missing logos, I'll create my own design for my own personal use. Something like this:

If you have a source for vectors of the missing logos, please drop me a comment.

Reviewing the 14 books I read in June - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-07-03T18:35:35.000Z

Reviewing the 14 books I read in June

So many good books this month, with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and Martha Wells’ Artificial Condition leading the pack for fiction.

@molly0xfff June reading wrap-up, reviewing the 14 books I read this month (no spoilers) #readingwrapup #junereadingwrapup #booktok #bookrecommendations #parableofthetalents #murderbot #spaceopera #litrpg #newtanddemon ♬ original sound - Molly White

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Process Vs Prejudice - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-03T11:34:05.000Z

I recently read an interesting article about Accountability Sinks. In it, the author argues that part of the reason for having business processes is that they diffuse accountability.

Every one of us has tried to have an argument with an employee of a big company, and it always goes like this:

the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to.

So should we give people more discretion in which processes they follow?

In some cases, yes! The article contains some compelling examples of when "breaking the rules" is the preferable outcome.

But there are some unacknowledged downsides to letting people decide which rules are applicable - and that's people's personal prejudices.

The article say some of the discontent with the modern world can be blamed on over-adherence to rules. For example:

The skepticism toward judges? It fits. They often seem more devoted to procedure than to justice.

Imagine a world without sentencing guidelines. Perhaps the judge is from a different tribe to the accused and punishes them much more harshly than a clan-member. Would that seem fair?

The customer service agent just doesn't like people of your gender, and refuses to process your refund.

You give the bank manager a firm handshake and he approves your loan - even though you don't technically qualify you look like a decent sort of chap.

And on it goes.

Look, there's no doubt plenty of bias encoded within processes. All processes should be regularly reviewed and updated. Breaking a process in extremis can be a good idea. When confronted with an inflexible policy, you may feel like a mere cog in a machine - but at least the machine is prevented from discriminating against your type of cogs.

A well-defined process dehumanises both sides.

Pluralistic: Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor (03 Jul 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-07-03T09:29:30.000Z

Today's links

Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor: But states hate noncompete "agreements."
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Non-Singularity futures, CBP corruption, Sun Ra's syllabus, Snowden on Little Brother, EU interop, bossware.
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor (permalink)

As fascism burns across America, it's important to remember that Trump and his policies are not popular. Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is extremely unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.

Keeping this fact in mind is essential if we are to nurture hope's embers, and fan them into the flames of change. Trumpism is a coalition of people who hate each other, who agree on almost nothing, whose fracture lines are one deft tap away from shattering:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

The vast unpopularity of Trumpism presents endless opportunities for breaking off parts of his coalition. Take noncompete "agreements": contractual clauses that ban workers from taking a job with any of their employers' competitors for years. One in 18 Americans has been captured by a noncompete, and the median noncompete victim is a minimum-wage fast-food worker whose small business tyrant boss wants to be sure that she doesn't quit working the register at Wendy's and start making $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at McDonald's.

The story of noncompetes is bullshit from top to bottom. The argument goes, "Your boss invests heavily in training you, and lets you in on all his valuable trade-secrets. When you walk out the door and go to work for a competitor, you're stealing all that training and knowledge. Without noncompetes, no boss will invest in the knowledge-intensive industries that are the future of our economy."

Now, like I said, the vast majority of people under noncompetes are working low-waged, menial jobs with little to no training, and no proprietary trade secrets to speak of. Which makes sense: workers with less bargaining power end up signing worse contracts. That's half the case against noncompetes.

Here's the other half: the most IP-intensive, profitable, knowledge-based industries in America operate without any noncompetes. California's state constitution bans noncompetes, which means that every worker in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is free to quit their job and walk across the street and join a rival.

If Hollywood and tech are examples of industries that "can't attract investment," then we should be shooting for every sector of the American economy to be so starved for capital. Silicon Valley's origin story is based on the ability of key workers at knowledge-intensive firms to quit their jobs and go to work for a direct competitor: the first Silicon Valley company was Shockley Semiconductors, founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing silicon transistors.

Shockley literally put the "silicon" in Silicon Valley, but he never shipped a working chip, because he was a deranged, paranoid eugenicist who ran such a dysfunctional company that eight of his top engineers quit to found a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Then two of the "Traitorous Eight" quit the Fairchild to start Intel, and the year after, another Fairchild employee quit to start AMD:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/

This never stopped. Woz quit HP and Jobs quit Atari to start Apple and the tradition of extremely well-capitalized companies being founded by key employees who quit market-leading firms to compete with their old bosses continues to this day. There are many things we can say about AI, but no one will claim that AI companies – especially not those in California, where noncompetes are banned – have trouble attracting investment. Half of the leading AI companies were founded by people who couldn't stand working for Sam Altman at Openai and quit to found a competitor. Just last week, Altman flipped out because Mark Zuckerberg poached his key scientists to work on competing products at Meta:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/28/meta-four-openai-researchers-superintelligence-team-ai-talent-competition/

Knowledge-intensive industries are provably compatible with a system of free labor where workers can work for anyone they want. You know who understands this? The lawyers who draw up employment contracts with noncompete clauses in them: the American Bar Association bans noncompetes for lawyers! Every law firm in America operates without noncompetes!

Everyone hates noncompetes. They are bullshit, and only get worse with time, as the largest companies in America metastasize into sprawling conglomerates, they compete with everyone. Who isn't a competitor of Amazon's?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

Biden's antitrust enforcers hated noncompetes, too. Former FTC chair Lina Khan held listening tours and solicited comments to hear workers stories about noncompetes, developing a record that she used to create a rule that banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

America's oligarchs weren't happy. They sued to overturn the rule, and got a nationwide injunction (you know, those things that Trump's illegitimate Supreme Court claims are unenforceable) that suspended the FTC rule pending a full hearing.

It's clear that Trump's FTC is going to walk away from this fight and let the rule die. Trumpism is wildly unpopular, and this is no exception. Americans overwhelmingly support banning noncompetes, but Trump's richest donors are terrified of another Great Resignation and want to keep us indentured to their shitty companies, so Trump's FTC will sell us all out.

But that's not the end of things. As David Dayen writes for The American Prospect, states and local governments can pass their own noncompete bans, and they are:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-07-02-ftc-noncompete-state-regulation-workers-wages/

Take NYC mayor-in-waiting Zoran Mamdani: unlike Trump (and the Democratic Party's billionaire wing), Mamdani campaigned by offering to create policies that are popular, including a ban on noncompetes. New York City has two distinct groups of workers who are screwed over by noncompetes. One of those groups is Wall Street finance bros, who work for some of the most legendarily toxic assholes to ever draw breath, and are overwhelming bound by noncompetes that will all become null and void the day Mamdani dons his sash.

The other group of workers Mamdani will liberate are those at the very bottom of the income distribution, from fast food workers to gig workers to doormen, who are victims of some of the dirtiest noncompete clauses in America, including "bondage fees":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/21/bondage-fees/#doorman-building

Big cities are filled with workers who are getting screwed by noncompetes and every city government has it in their power to liberate every one of those workers (who are also voters).

States can do even better. There are already four states that ban noncompetes, two of them blood red: California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. Other states place significant restrictions on noncompetes, including Washington, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. Nevada bans noncompetes for hourly workers, Idaho only allows them for "key employees"; Louisiana limits noncompetes to two years, and NJ bans noncompetes for domestic workers.

Up and down the country, in states blue and red, noncompetes are unpopular, and banning noncompetes is popular:

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/majority-americans-support-ftc-ruling-would-ban-non-compete-agreements

Oregon just banned noncompetes for doctors and other health workers, as part of a sweeping, bipartisan law that banned the "corporate practice of medicine":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/20/the-doctor-will-gouge-you-now/#states-rights

Oregon's in good company: noncompetes are banned in the health sector in 32 states, including Arkansas, Indiana and Colorado.

Lina Khan's FTC developed an irrefutable evidentiary record about the abusive nature of noncompetes, proving that industries can attract capital and field successful companies without them. States have it in their power to step in where Trump has betrayed American workers. This isn't the most efficient way to protect workers – that would be a federal ban on noncompetes – but it will still get the job done, and it will weaken the Trump coalition, which is barely holding together as it is.

Hey look at this (permalink)

What's Going on Online https://www.ninetiesinternet.com/
State Department Wants to Know Student Visa Applicants’ Myspace Accounts https://theintercept.com/2025/07/01/trump-student-visa-social-media/
The bug in the letter, part 2 https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/bug-in-the-letter-2/
Turns Out Appeasing Trump Only Emboldened Him https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-trump-prosecution-law-felonies-fascism/

Object permanence (permalink)

#15yrsago Futures for SF writers that aren’t the Singularity https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2008/08/25/fresh-sf-futures/

#10yrsago Secret court will let NSA do mass surveillance for another six months https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/secret-us-court-allows-resumption-of-bulk-phone-metadata-spying/

#10yrsago Bigoted officials: First Amendment means we don’t have to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples https://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/30/us/same-sex-marriage-supreme-court-ruling-holdouts/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+(RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories)

#10yrsago McKinney, TX wants $79K to retreive emails of the cop who tackled bikini-clad teen https://www.techdirt.com/2015/06/30/city-claims-it-will-take-9000-hours-79000-to-fulfill-gawkers-request-emails-related-to-abusive-police-officer/

#10yrsago We’ve evolved to disbelieve evolution https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/06/29/418289762/don-t-believe-in-evolution-try-thinking-harder

#10yrsago US Customs and Border Protection: America’s largest, most corrupt police force https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-border-patrol-20150630-story.html#page=1

#5yrsago Snowden on Little Brother https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#omnibus

#5yrsago Sun Ra's syllabus https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#sun-ra

#5yrsago Invigilation CEO doxes student https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

#5yrsago Big Cop's corporate armorers https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#charitable-laundering

#5yrsago Bossware https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#bossware

#5yrsago EFF on EU interoperability policy https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#eu-interop

#1yrago Austin Grossman's 'Fight Me' https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/01/the-big-genx-chill/#im-super-thanks-for-asking

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
Forward Kentucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs
Democrats Abroad
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

- 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 (the-bezzle.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)

Uncanny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
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/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Note published on July 3, 2025 at 2:44 AM UTC - Molly White's microblog feed

2025-07-03T02:44:05.000Z

NYC, 1919: Perched on a towering pile of donated books, a librarian calls from a megaphone to request more book donations for American troops stationed in France. The American Library Association’s campaign sent up to 55,000 books each month to military camp libraries.

(via Library of Congress)

Book Review: The World According to Cunk - An Illustrated History of All World Events Ever, Space Permitting by Philomena Cunk ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-02T11:34:17.000Z

There are some characters whose tone of voice is inimitable. You cannot fail to read this without Diane Morgan's languid cadence echoing in your big empty head.

The book has been written with a very specific pace - one chuckle per paragraph, a big laugh every page, and a set number of uncontrollable giggles per chapter. Somewhat formulaic, but highly effective.

I kept highlighting bits of it and showing them to my wife. After the 8th or 9th time she grabbed her own copy and started showing me the bits she found funny.

It's just endlessly quotable. "The emperor eventually died and was buried with a load of clay figures – like Nick Park will be." and "a sort of naughty typewriter called the Enigma machine" still keep me guffawing.

The long-running callbacks are perfect, as are the inclusion of a few fan favourite jokes.

Even the fucking index of this book is hilarious.

Pluralistic: Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (2 Jul 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-07-02T08:13:06.000Z

Today's links

Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts": A phantasmagorical memoir of intergenerational trauma and reconciliation.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Toronto G20 police riot, why I'm leaving London, BBC's Right to Be Forgotten pages, breaking up Google, Female Furies
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" (permalink)

Tessa Hulls's debut graphic novel is Feeding Ghosts, a stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of her Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601652/feedingghosts/

Feeding Ghosts is about Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police. Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, wrote a bestselling memoir about her experiences in post-revolutionary Shanghai that made her both famous and notorious, in part because of the salacious details of Sun Yi's affair with the Swiss diplomat who fathered Rose, Hulls's mother.

In Hong Kong, Sun Yi's mental health declines precipitously. Some combination of mental illness and trauma – both from the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War and the her torture at the hands of the Chinese police – sends her into a spiral of paranoid delusions. But Sun Yi has a community of people who feel an obligation to support her in Hong Kong, including one of her rich "boyfriends" – and Rose is sent away to a fancy, British-run girl's school dominated by expats where she acquires a cut-glass accent and learns to mix upper-class, colonial English gentry.

Hulls is born to Rose many years later, after Rose has emigrated to the USA, attended university, married twice – the second time to Rose's father, an Englishman – and moved her mother in with her. For Hulls, growing up in Rose's household as the only Asian kid in a small American town, is a series of torments. Her mentally ill grandmother lives in one bedroom, gripped by delusions, compulsively writing, fretting, begging with her few English words for Rose to come back. Rose, meanwhile, is a duty-stricken domestic saint who does all the cooking and cleaning, cares for her children and her husband, and looks after her totally isolated, profoundly disturbed mother.

Hulls grows up in the shadow of the intergenerational trauma – genocide, war crimes, colonialist discrimination, untreated mental illness, and everyday American racism – that haunts her family. Rose veers from doting to shouting, terrified that Hulls is sliding into the family's madness, unable to understand or grapple with Hulls's identity as a self-proclaimed "mixed-race" Eurasian person, born in America, unable to speak Chinese or to understand her Chinese identity.

All of this biography is interspersed through several time-hopping sections that recount the history of the Chinese revolution and the lives of Sun Yi and Rose, along with scenes from the decade that Hulls spent writing and drawing Feeding Ghosts, during which she and her mother travel to see their family in China, on a literal and figurative journey of reconciliation.

It sounds complex and confusing, but it's anything but. Each of intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space.

In the final third of this long, large book, we get to the meat of Hulls's own story: her tempestuous relationship with her mother, her mother's immersion in a psychoanalytic cult, the sad demise of Sun Yi, and the wild flight of Hulls herself, in which she breaks off her stultifying engagement and teaches herself to be a bicycle mechanic and begins cycling all over the world, living on pennies and consummating her love of wild and empty spaces. At college, she becomes a cook through a weekly women's drunken pie-baking night, and somehow parlays that into a long session as a cook in Antarctica on McMurdo Station.

This final third acts as a kind of keystone to the many interwoven tales, as well as to the complex relationship between Hulls, her mother, and her own sense of self. Up until this point, the different threads of Hulls's family's story are subtle echoes of one another, motifs that repeat and vary. But in this final third, the reader – and Hulls – experience a profound psychological realization about how the three stories of these three generation of women, along with China's tumultuous history and the experience of an American immigrant all produced the person whose bold illustrations and sharp prose we've been immersed in for hundreds of pages. It's a wild moment.

Hulls's art style runs to dark, stylized inks, with horrors and ghosts puncturing individual panels' frames and wending through the page. It's a phantasmagorical experience.

Feeding Ghosts came out in March, and has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience).

The prize is a big deal, obviously, and it's no coincidence that this kind of difficult illustrated memoir has won both graphic novel Pulitzers. Hulls joins the annals of world-altering comic-book memoirists, from Lynda Barry to Emil Ferris (My Favorite Thing is Monsters) to Art Spiegelman and Chester Brown. She has pulled of a magnificent feat, one that illuminates history, contemporary racial and gender politics, the immigrant experience, and the impossible problems of parents and children in the aftermath of unspeakable trauma.

Hey look at this (permalink)

FCC will allow prison phone gougers another two years of ripoffs https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2024/07/18/fcc-vote/
Mitch Kapor finally completes MIT master's degree after 45-year detour https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/30/mitch_kapor_mba/
Ted Chiang on Superintelligence and Its Discontents in J.D. Beresford’s Innovative Work of Early 20th-Century Science Fiction https://lithub.com/ted-chiang-on-superintelligence-and-its-discontents-in-j-d-beresfords-innovative-work-of-early-20th-century-science-fiction/
AI warnings are the hip new way for CEOs to keep their workers afraid of losing their jobs https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/18/business/ai-warnings-ceos
Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/AI catchphrases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup/AI_catchphrases

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Toronto cops justify extreme G20 measures with display of LARPing props, weapons from unrelated busts https://web.archive.org/web/20100702002151/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/weapons-seized-in-g20-arrests-put-on-display/article1622761/

#15yrsago Copyright best practices for communications scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20100628005458/http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use/related-materials/codes/code-best-practices-fair-use-scholarly-research-communication

#15yrsago G20 police used imaginary law to jail harass demonstrators and jailed protestors in dangerous and abusive “detention center” https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/29/g20-police-used-imaginary-law-to-jail-harass-demonstrators-and-jailed-protestors-in-dangerous-and-abusive-detention-center/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#10yrsago BBC’s list of pages de-indexed through Europe’s “right to be forgotten” https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Finternet%2Fentries%2F1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059
Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
Forward Kentucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs
Democrats Abroad
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

- 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 (the-bezzle.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)

Uncanny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025
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/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Are Brother's Insecure Printers Illegal in the UK? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-07-01T11:34:15.000Z

Another day, another security disaster! This time, multiple printers from Brother have an unfixable security flaw. That's bad, obviously, but is it illegally bad⁰?

Let's take a look at details of the vulnerability:

An unauthenticated attacker who knows the target device's serial number, can generate the default administrator password for the device.

Recently, the UK brought in some laws aimed at strengthening consumer protection - the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure act (PSTI). There's a readable summary on the National Cyber Security Centre's website.

There are three interesting points to note in that blog post. The first is about passwords:

The law means manufacturers must ensure that all their smart devices meet basic cyber security requirements. Specifically:

The manufacturer must not supply devices that use default passwords, which can be easily discovered online, and shared.

Secondly, is a question of jurisdiction:

Most smart devices are manufactured outside the UK, but the PSTI act also applies to all organisations importing or retailing products for the UK market. Failure to comply with the act is a criminal offence

Thirdly, what is actually covered:

The law applies to any ‘consumer smart device’ that connects either to the internet, or to a home network (for example by wifi).

Is a WiFi enabled printer a "consumer smart device"? One of the things that techies find confusing is that the law is not code. It usually doesn't enumerate a definitive list of what is and what isn't in scope. It gives a general outline and then allows case-law to develop. This means laws don't need to be updated when someone invents, say, an Internet connected tinfoil dispenser.

Let's move beyond the consumer-friendly summary and go to the actual law. The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure (Security Requirements for Relevant Connectable Products) Regulations 2023

Passwords must be—

a. unique per product; or

b. defined by the user of the product.

Passwords which are unique per product must not be—

a. based on incremental counters;

b. based on or derived from publicly available information;

c. based on or derived from unique product identifiers, such as serial numbers, unless this is done using an encryption method, or keyed hashing algorithm, that is accepted as part of good industry practice;

d. otherwise guessable in a manner unacceptable as part of good industry practice.

How does this apply to the printers? Rapid7, who discovered the vulnerability, have this to say about how it works:

[The vulnerability] allows an attacker to leak a serial number via the target's HTTP, HTTPS, and IPP services. However, should an attacker not be able to leverage [the vulnerability], a remote unauthenticated attacker can still discover a target device's serial number via either a PJL or SNMP query

So, yes. The default password is unique but it can be automatically derived from the serial number. That serial number is available to anyone with a network connection to the printer.

But, do printers fall under the scope of this act?

The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 says:

4 Relevant connectable products

In this Part “relevant connectable product” means a product that meets conditions A and B.

Condition A is that the product is—

A. an internet-connectable product, or

B. a network-connectable product.

Condition B is that the product is not an excepted product (see section 6).

It goes on to define what Internet-connectable means, along with some other clarifying details. But is there a get-out clause here? Are printers an "excepted product"?

In this Part “excepted product” means a product of a description specified in regulations made by the Secretary of State.

OK, let's look at the regulations. I've expanded out the relevant bit:

Schedule 3 Excepted connectable products

Computers

Products are excepted under this paragraph if they are computers which are—

a. desktop computers;

b. laptop computers;

c. tablet computers which do not have the capability to connect to cellular networks.

Nope! The Brother printers don't appear to be exempt¹. What's the maximum penalty Brother could be subject to?

The greater of £10 million or 4% of worldwide revenue.

Ouch!

Of course, much like GDPR fines, these are headline grabbing numbers. The prosaic reality is that the enforcement policy is much more likely to suggest remedial steps. Only the most flagrant transgressors are likely to be punished harshly².

So, to recap. The law says an Internet-connected device (including printers) must have a password which is not "based on or derived from publicly available information". As I understand it, having a serial-number based password is OK as long as you don't publicise the serial number. I expect that if it were printed on a sticker that would be fine. But because the serial can be discovered remotely, it fails at this point.

In Brother's (slight) defence, unless the user has specifically connected the printer to the Internet this is only a local vulnerability. Someone on the same network would be able to monkey around with the printer but, similarly, they could plug in a USB cable for some illicit printing or break it with a hammer. Any damage is confined to the LAN.

Should users change default passwords? Yes. But manufacturers have a legal duty to ensure that people who don't are still protected.

I'm not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is just my interpretation of what's going on. If in doubt, consult someone qualified. ︎
With thanks to m'learned colleague Neil Brown who came to much the same conclusion ︎
You can see the actions they've previously taken. Because PSTI is so new, there aren't any actions against insecure IoT devices - so we'll have to wait and see how they choose to proceed. ︎

Pluralistic: How much (little) are the AI companies making? (30 Jun 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-07-01T05:41:30.000Z

Today's links

How much (little) are the AI companies making?: Ed Zitron does the math.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Wil Wheaton on /., G20 Toronto; London's war on photograhy, debating C-11 on Twitter with James Moore, breaking up Google, Female Furies…
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).

Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.

The all-time world champeen of this kind of finance fraud is Masayoshi Son, the founder of Softbank, who acts as the bagman for the Saudi royals' personal investments. Remember last decade when the tech press was all abuzz about "unicorns" – startups that were worth $1b? That was Son: he would take a startup like Wework, declare its brand to be worth $1b, invest an infinitesimal fraction of $1b in the company based on that valuation (sometimes with a rube co-investor) and declare the valuation to be "market-based." A whole string of garbage companies achieved unicornhood by means of this unbelievably stupid trick:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

Of course, every finance bro is familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Sure, the Saudi royals could be tapped to piss away $31b on Uber, losing $0.41 on every dollar for 13 years, but eventually they're going to turn off the money spigot and attempt to flog their shares to retail and institutional suckers. To make that work, they have to invent new accounting tricks, like when Uber "sold" its failing overseas ride-hailing businesses to international rivals in exchange for stock, then declared that these companies' illiquid stock had skyrocketed in value, tipping Uber into the black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

Take Google: once the company attained a 90% global search market-share, there were no more immediate prospects for growth. I mean, sure, they could raise a billion new humans to maturity and train them to be Google customers (e.g., the business plan for Google Classroom), but that takes more than a decade, and Google needed growth right away. So the company hatched a plan to make search worse, so that its existing users would have to search multiple times to get the information they sought, and each additional search would give Google another chance to show you an ad:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars, could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless growth is the ideology of a tumor," right?

But spinning an endless growth story isn't merely ideological. It's a firmly materialistic undertaking. Companies that appear to be growing have market caps that are an order of magnitude larger than companies that are consisdered "mature" and at the end of their growth phase. For every dollar that Ford brings in, the market is willing to spend $8.60 on its stock. For every dollar Tesla brings in, the market is willing to spend $118 on its stock.

That means that when Tesla and Ford compete to buy something – like another company, or the labor of highly sought after technical specialists – Tesla has a nearly unbeatable advantage. Rather than raiding its precious cash reserves to fund its offer, Tesla can offer stock. Tesla can only spend as many dollars as it brings in through sales, but Tesla can make more stock, on demand, simply by typing numbers into a spreadsheet.

So when Tesla bids against Ford, Ford has to use dollars, and Tesla can use shares. And even if the acquisition target – a key employee or a startup that's on the acquisitions market – wants dollars instead of shares, Tesla can stake its shares as collateral for loans at a rate that's 1,463% better than the rate Ford gets when it collateralizes a loan based on its own equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the world have spent the past decade – the decade after they monopolized their sectors and conquered the world – pumping a series of progressively stupider bubbles: metaverse, cryptocurrency, and now, AI.

Tech companies don't need these ventures to be successful – they just need them to seem to be plausibly successful for long enough to keep the share price high until the next growth story heaves over the horizon. So long as Mister Market thinks tech is a "growth" sector and not a "mature" sector, tech bosses will be able to continue to pay for things with stock rather than cash, and their own stockholdings will continue to be valued at sky-high rates.

That's why AI is being crammed into absofuckingloutely everything. it's why the button you used to tap to start a new chat summons up an AI that takes seven taps to banish again – it's so tech companies can tell Wall Street that people are "using AI" which means that their companies are still part of a growth industry and thus entitled to gigantic price-to-earnings ratios:

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

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

People – who have had an infinitude of AI crammed into down their throats – are already sick of AI. Policymakers and financiers – credulous dolts who fall for tech marketing hype every! fucking! time – are convinced that AI Is The Future. This presents a dilemma for tech companies, who research the hell out of how people actually use their products and thus must be extremely aware of how hated AI is, but whose leadership is desperate to show investors that they are about to experience explosive growth through the miracle of AI.

The reality is that AI is a very bad business. It has dogshit unit economics. Unlike all the successful tech of the 21st century, each generation of AI is more expensive to make, not cheaper. And unlike the most profitable tech services of this century, AI gets more costly to operate the more users it has.

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

Now, what about Openai? Well, they're one of Masoyoshi Son's special children, of a piece with Wework and Uber. Openai is projecting $12.7b in revenue this year, with losses of $14b. Add in a bunch of also-rans like Perplexity and Surge, and the revenue rises to $32.3b. But…if you chuck them in, you also get total exenditure of $370.8b.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

These are terrible numbers, but also, these are some genuinely impressive accounting gimmicks. They are certain to keep the bubble pumping for months or perhaps years, convincing gullible bosses to fire talented employees and replace them with bumbling chatbots that will linger for years or decades, the asbestos in the walls of our high-tech civilization.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

How Bezos and Sánchez’s Venetian Bacchanal Delivered a Pitch-Perfect Ad for Socialism https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-jeff-bezos-and-lauren-sanchezs-venetian-bacchanal-delivered-a-pitch-perfect-ad-for-socialism/
Facebook’s Enshittification Continues Apace by Penalizing Link Posts https://opus.ing/posts/facebooks-enshittification-continues-apace-penalizing-link-posts
Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach https://global.oup.com/academic/product/law-and-technology-9780197526149
Stop Destroying Videogames https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
Fall 2025 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview: Politics & Current Events https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/98114-fall-2025-fiction-nonfiction-preview-politics-current-events.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago London cops enforce imaginary law against brave, principled teenaged photographer https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/officers-claim-they-don-t-need-law-to-stop-photographer-taking-pictures-2012827.html

#15yrsago Globe and Mail journalist arrested and kettled at G20 Toronto https://web.archive.org/web/20100630110103/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/caught-in-the-storm-penned-in-at-queen-street/article1621255/

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/
Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059
Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
Forward Kentucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs
Democrats Abroad
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

- 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 (the-bezzle.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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links

How much (little) are the AI companies making?: Ed Zitron does the math.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: Wil Wheaton on /., G20 Toronto; London's war on photograhy, debating C-11 on Twitter with James Moore, breaking up Google, Female Furies…
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

How much (little) are the AI companies making? (permalink)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

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

The reality, of course, is that people hate AI. Telling people that your product is "AI enabled" makes less likely to use it:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2368040#d1e1096

You can be forgiven for not knowing this, though. As Ed Zitron points out in a long, excellent article about the credulity and impuissance of the tech press, the actual numbers suuuuuck:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/make-fun-of-them/

Microsoft

Spending: $80b in 2025

Projecting: $13b in 2025

Actually: $10b comes from Openai giving back compute credits Microsoft gave to Openai, bringing the true total to $3b.

Meta

Spending: $72b in 2025

Receiving: At most $600m in gross revenue from selling "smart" Raybans, which might not actually be loss-leaders, meaning it's possible that they're making less than $0.00.

Amazon

Spending: $100b in 2025

Projecting: $5b in revenue in 2025

Google

Spending: $75b in 2025

Projecting: They won't say, possibly zero.

As Zitron points out: this industry is projecting $327b in spending this year, with $18b in revenue and zero profits. For comparison: smart watches are a $32b/year industry.

These are by no means the only funny numbers in the AI industry. Take "Stargate," a data-center initiative with a price tag of $500b. Actual funds committed? $40b.

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

How Bezos and Sánchez’s Venetian Bacchanal Delivered a Pitch-Perfect Ad for Socialism https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-jeff-bezos-and-lauren-sanchezs-venetian-bacchanal-delivered-a-pitch-perfect-ad-for-socialism/
Facebook’s Enshittification Continues Apace by Penalizing Link Posts https://opus.ing/posts/facebooks-enshittification-continues-apace-penalizing-link-posts
Law and Technology: A Methodical Approach https://global.oup.com/academic/product/law-and-technology-9780197526149
Stop Destroying Videogames https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
Fall 2025 Fiction & Nonfiction Preview: Politics & Current Events https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/98114-fall-2025-fiction-nonfiction-preview-politics-current-events.html

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Wil Wheaton’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/05/06/27/0926218/wil-wheaton-strikes-back

#20yrsago Anti-DRM badges https://web.archive.org/web/20050701004506/http://nootropic.blogspot.com/2005/06/gallery-of-drm-related-antipixel.html

#15yrsago ACLU: America is riddled with politically motivated surveillance https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Spyfiles_2_0.pdf

#15yrsago Canada repeating Britain’s dirty copyright legislation process https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/29/canada-copyright-digital-economy

#15yrsago UK government hushed up internal analysis of anti-drug strategy to avoid ridicule https://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2010/06/home-office-internal-document-reveals.html

#15yrsago My Twitter debate with Minister who introduced Canada’s DMCA https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/28/my-twitter-debate-with-minister-who-introduced-canadas-dmca/

#10yrsago Why I’m leaving London https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london/

#10yrsago Neal Stephenson on the story behind Seveneves http://www.bookotron.com/agony/audio/2015/2015-interviews/neal_stephenson-2015.mp3

#10yrsago Brian Wood’s Starve: get to your comic shop now! https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/29/brian-woods-starve-get-to-your-comic-shop-now/

#5yrsago NYC housing lottery favors the least-needy https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#market-failure

#5yrsago Facebook and Trump collaborate on rule-rigging https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#fb-hearts-dt

#5yrsago How to break up Google https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#braygoog

#5yrsago Female Furies https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/29/female-furies/#apokolips-now

#5yrsago Bailouts should come with strings attached https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/28/kings-shilling/#tanstaafl

#1yrago The reason you can't buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/
Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059
Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
Forward Kentucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs
Democrats Abroad
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

- 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 (the-bezzle.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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

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

Pluralistic.net

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

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Book Review: The Left Hand of Dog - Si Clarke ★★☆☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-06-30T11:34:37.000Z

I have to say, I did not get on with this book. The central conceit is that a sci-fi fan is abducted by aliens and their universal translator converts everything into understandable slang. So we get lots of warp factors, ansibles, dilithium crystals, and Hitchiker’s references. It makes the whole thing feel a bit cheap. OK, maybe it is a little silly when an author comes up with some technobabble instead of saying "make the jump to light-speed" - but readers appreciate the effort.

It's a daft enough story but the chuckles are few and far between.

Much like the Wayfarers books, it wears its heart on its sleeve. I found that a delightful and refreshing aspect which is rarely seen in sci-fi.

But, in the end, I found the plot a bit too derivative to enjoy, and the shoe-horned references quickly became tiresome.

Contactless Payments with GrapheneOS - Terence Eden’s Blog

2025-06-29T11:34:57.000Z

Google's monopolistic stranglehold on Android results in poor experience for power-users, and artificially restricts choice for those who have older phones. For example, Google Wallet is the de facto way to use NFC payments on Android. There's one problem though - it only works with Google's Android. If you have the temerity to install a 3rd party Android OS - like the hyper-secure GrapheneOS - you'll be locked out of it.

First of all, Google is lying. It does meet security standards and it is not rooted. I get that I have no right to run someone else's software in an environment they don't like, but this is just misinformation. 3rd party OSes are often more secure that a stock OS which has been left to rot by an unresponsive manufacturer.

Anyway, here's how you can use contactless payments on Graphene.

Prerequisites

I'm going to tell you what I did. If you found another way, leave a comment or write your own blog post.

I'm using the latest version of Graphene (2025062000) with Play Services installed. The app is running in my main profile. None of the advanced app protection has been toggled for the app. NFC is on.

You will have to agree to Curve's privacy policy. And the privacy policy of your credit card. Look, if you're using Graphene, you're probably overly privacy sensitive. If you're concerned about The Man knowing that you used your card to buy a breakfast beer and then sharing that with 958 trusted partners, just use cash instead.

Install Curve

Here's a referral link to install Curve - join and you get £10. Or, you can install directly from the Play Store.

You'll need to create an account and pass KYC / AML checks. Curve are regulated by the FCA so you should feel safe giving your details to them.

Add a card

Curve is a virtual card provider. So add your existing Visa or MasterCard to the app (no Amex). When you spend on Curve, you're actually spending on the underlying card you've added. Curve promise cheaper foreign exchange fees and a few other perks. But what we're really interested in is NFC payments.

Set up Curve Pay

On your app's dashboard, you should see a banner saying "Curve Pay is good to go!". If not, head into your account and set it up there.

If it has all set up, you should see a welcome tutorial explaining how contactless works.

Set your default wallet

On your phone, go to Settings → Connected devices → Connection Preferences → NFC → Contactless Payments.

Or, search your settings for Pay.

Select your default wallet app - in this case, Curve.

Pay for something

You need to make sure NFC is turned on before you can use NFC payments. I know that sounds obvious, but I forgot to do it the first time and got very confused.

Go to a local shop, pick up something, hand it to the merchant, wave your phone over the payment terminal like you are a technowizard from the future.

Enjoy eating whatever you paid for!

That's it!

Once you're done, you can turn of NFC if you're paranoid.

Apparently, Curve also works with Garmin Smart Watches - but I don't have one to test out.

If you've found this blog post useful, I'd be grateful if you signed up with my referral link for Curve.

Pluralistic: Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (28 Jun 2025) - Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

2025-06-28T13:17:15.000Z

Today's links

Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity: Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2020, 2024
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
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.

Antitrust defies politics' law of gravity (permalink)

In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in Perspectives on Politics:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues, analyzing the effect that the preferences of different groups of people had on the outcome. They wanted to find out what drove policy: money, or popularity?

It's money. It's totally, utterly money. When billionaires want something, it literally doesn't matter how much the rest of us hate it, they're gonna get their way. When billionaires hate something, it doesn't matter how popular it is with the rest of us, we're not gonna get it. As Gilens and Page put it:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

I know the cynics out there are hollering "no duh" at their computers right now, but bear with me here. Gilens and Page's research shows that you and I have no voice in policy outcomes. Based on these findings, the only way we can change society is to try and woo oligarchs so they champion our cause. This reduces democracy to a competition to see who can pour the most honey into a plutocrat's ear. Mass mobilizations – millions of people in the streets – only matter to the extent that they bring a tear to a billionaire's eye.

This just shattered me. I've been haunted by it ever since. I've tried some tactical gambits based on this data, but honestly, I don't want to improve the world by swaying the ultra-rich. Mostly, I've spent the decade since I read the Gilens/Page paper working on mass mobilizations and mass opionion-influencing. I reasoned (or maybe rationalized) that while oligarchs were running the nation now, that was subject to change, and that was a change that I was sure wouldn't come from America's plutocrats committing mass class-suicide.

Then, something incredible happened. All this decade, a tide of antitrust vigor has swept the planet. The EU has passed big, muscular tech competition laws like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and has by God enforced them, and have patched the enforcement weaknesses in the GDPR. EU member-states – France, Germany, Spain – have passed their own big, ambitious national laws that go further than DSA/DMA. Even Ireland – a country that deliberately prostrated itself to US Big Tech – is getting in on the act, with the country's Social Media Czar railing against the "enshittification" of tech:

https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/chairman-of-irish-social-media-regulator-says-europe-should-not-be-seduced-by-mario-draghis-claims/a526530600.html

Not just the EU, of course. Australia and Canada have taken some big swings at Big Tech, and Canada is pressing ahead with its digital services tax of 3% for onshore earnings of tech companies with more than CAD20m in annual turnover, despite the fact that Trump has promised to end all trade talks with Canada in retaliation:

https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7

Antitrust fever has swept both of the world's superpowers. Under Trump I, the DOJ and FTC brought key cases against Facebook and Google, and then Biden's antitrust enforcers went to town on all forms of monopoly, carrying on the Trump cases and reviving some of the law's most elegant weapons from a more civilized age, like the Robinson-Patman Act:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-sues-pepsico-rigging-soft-drink-competition

Admittedly, Trump's FTC and DOJ have carried on some of Biden's work, even as they've killed some of the Biden era's most important cases, and made a general Trumpian mockery of the idea that antitrust law is a tool for economic justice:

https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/weekly-rewind-62725

Trump killing antitrust law is normal. That's what politics have been like for this whole century, and it's what politics are like in every other domain: billionaires get their way on climate, on labor, on whatever bullshit they get into their fool fucking heads:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/06/27/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-married-wedding-venice/84349820007/

But it's a mistake to think that Trump killed antitrust enforcement in the USA out of a special conservative deference to millionaires and enthusiasm for corrosive and predatory monopolies. In the UK, four consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers presided over the best competition law enforcement in British history – and it was Labour's Keir Starmer who fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

It is completely normal for both "progressive" and "conservative" parties to wield the entire apparatus of state to the benefit of powerful monopolists. The antitrust enforcement – in the US, the UK, the EU, Australia, Germany, France and Spain – are totally aberrant. And it's not just in these countries where political science's law of gravity reversed itself: there've been giant, brutal antitrust cases in Japan and South Korea, and China has passed aggressive tech antitrust laws that strike directly at the giant Chinese tech companies that Cold War 2.0 creeps insist are just branches of the Chinese Communist Party:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/07/backstabbed/#big-data-backstabbing

This is fucking wild.

This is water flowing uphill.

This is pigs flying.

This is hell freezing over.

There is no billionaire constituency for antimonopoly work. Oligarchs aren't funneling dark money to trustbuster orgs. Antimonopoly work strikes at the beating heart of the system that creates and sustains billionaires.

This is a political outcome that the people want, and that billionaires hate, and billionaires are losing.

How is this happening? Why is this happening? I don't know, exactly. I suspect that some of this is related to Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Monopolists corrupt our political system, maim and impoverish workers, gouge their customers on enshittified, overpriced garbage. They are an existential threat to the survival of the human species.

The system is so broken and the mainstream of politics endlessly gaslights us, telling us that corrupt and degraded institutions are either just fine ("America Was Always Great" -H. Clinton) or need to be destroyed, rather than redeemed ("Delete CFPB" -E. Musk). People know that the system only caters to the whims of billionaires and tells the rest of us to eat shit. They hate the fucking system.

Over and over again, we've seen outbreaks of furious, joyous, uncompromising leftist activism: Occupy, Bernie 2016, Bernie 2020, George Floyd, the Women's March, No Kings, Climate Strikes, on and on. Over and over, liberal "centrists" have joined with the right to crush these movements.

Meanwhile, the right has only moved from strength to strength by offering a libidinal, furious promise of root-and-branch change. The only team that's promising radical change is the right. Parties like UK Labour and the Democrats offer austerity and genocide with slightly more polite aesthetics ("[If I'm elected], fundamentally nothing will change" -J. Biden).

I think that centrist suppression of the left has pushed 90 percent of the energy for major change into right wing nihilist movements, but the anti-corporate, anti-monopolist energy has not dissipated. It's formed a kind of invisible political wind that has filled the sails of these antimonopoly projects all over the world.

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. Zohran Mamdani just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary election. That wasn't supposed to happen. The worst people on Earth showered the hereditary King of New York with so much money it was coming out of his fucking pores and he still ate shit. Guys who've got so much money they were able to get Columbia University to collude in shipping its students off to gulags for having the temerity to oppose genocide tried to do it to Mamdani and we kicked their teeth in.

The world is organized around the whims of billionaires, but it doesn't have to be. Most of us are not esoteric authoritarian freaks pining for a CEO of America who'll track us all using mandatory Fitbits and assign us jobs based on an AI's estimation of our cranial geometry. Those ideas are not popular. Now, it's true that this century has been defined by extremely unopopular ideas winning the day. But anything that can't go on eventually stops.

Sure, they smeared Jeremy Corbyn and replaced him with Austeritybot 3000, and Labour is collapsing as a result, and if an election were called today, Nigel Farage would sweep the board, assuming the PM's seat ahead of a Ba'ath Party style majority.

But on today's Trashfuture podcast, I learned about the leadership contest for the Green Party, in which genuinely progressive candidate, Zack Polanski, is running:

https://backzack.com/

Labour has walked away from voters. The Tories are in chaos. The Libdems permanently discredited themselves in the coalition government. The youthquake that buoyed up Corbyn was driven by a desperate hunger for change. The party grandees that purged Labour of everyone who wanted a better country have created a massive constituency that's up for grabs. I

I'm desperate for change, too. I've joined the Greens, and I'll be voting for Polanski in the leadership race:

https://join.greenparty.org.uk/join-us/

(Image: Frank Vincentz, Petri Krohn, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

What is a democratic socialist? https://coreyrobin.com/2025/06/26/what-is-a-democratic-socialist/
Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2502053122
Decon: Dual system offering an emergency decontamination tool for Chemical Crowd Control Agent (CCCA) exposure and app for protestor mobilization https://nedc.mesausa.org/team/california-2025/
Promises The ‘Trump Phone’ Would Be ‘Made In USA’ Lasted 1/100th Of A Scaramucci https://www.techdirt.com/2025/06/27/promises-the-trump-phone-would-be-made-in-usa-lasted-1-100th-of-a-scaramucci/
Digital Services Tax to stay in place despite G7 deal https://financialpost.com/technology/canadas-digital-services-tax-g7

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Secret Congressional policy reports published https://web.archive.org/web/20050629020405/http://www.opencrs.com/

#20yrsago Brazil to US pharma co: slash AIDS drug prices or lose patent https://web.archive.org/web/20190918065156/https://www.ft.com/content/816699fe-e50a-11d9-95f3-00000e2511c8

#20yrsago Hilary Rosen: Killing Napster didn’t bring market control https://web.archive.org/web/20050629010724/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/hilary-rosen/the-wisdom-of-the-court-_3259.html

#15yrsago Canadian cops’ history of agents provocateurs and the G20 https://memex.craphound.com/2010/06/27/canadian-cops-history-of-agents-provocateurs-and-the-g20/

#15yrsago Stiglitz: spending cuts won’t cure recession https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/osborne-s-first-budget-it-s-wrong-wrong-wrong-2011501.html

#5yrsago Snowden on tech's Oppenheimers https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#oppenheimers

#5yrsago Santa Cruz bans predictive policing https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/27/belated-oppenheimers/#banana-slugs

#1yrago Copyright takedowns are a cautionary tale that few are heeding https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/
Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059
Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place
Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/
DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825
New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
http://www.contraflowscifi.org/
San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw
Forward Kentucky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs
Democrats Abroad
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

- 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 (the-bezzle.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
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

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/
Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026
Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

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Currently writing:

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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