Cory Doctorow

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
@doctorow.

Archived at pluralistic.net

I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.

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Last Notes

2026-05-30 09:48:23 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Carneyism without Carney; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/30/rupture/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-17 16:38:52 UTC

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@nprofile…ysg3 I'm sorry to hear it

2026-05-17 16:24:33 UTC

Travis McGee on Enshittifcation
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2026-05-17 11:49:31 UTC

Urban exuberance
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2026-05-16 19:52:12 UTC

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My next book is *The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI*, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the *right* way to reach an audience, it's also the *best* way to reach them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
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2026-05-16 19:51:21 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/16/technopoly/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-15 05:48:24 UTC

Hey #Ubuntu friends: I keep fatfingering the numlock key and switching off my numeric keypad. I used Tweaks to set "Numeric keypad always enters digits" to true, but hitting numlock still switches off the numeric keypad. I also tried using xmodmap to set numlock to blank, but it rejected every identifier I tried for the key ("77," "0xff7f," "Num_Lock") with "bad keycode value".
Ideas?
Thanks!

2026-05-14 11:44:53 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Kickstarting "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/14/who-it-does-it-for/
#Pluralistic
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2026-05-11 10:12:55 UTC

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Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #HayOnWye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
* SXSW #London, Jun 2
https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901
* #NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html
* #Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
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2026-05-11 10:12:45 UTC

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Upcoming appearances:
* #Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/
* Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
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2026-05-11 10:12:30 UTC

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My ebooks and audiobooks (from FSGxMCD, Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
https://craphound.com/shop/
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2026-05-11 10:12:12 UTC

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My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
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My latest nonfiction book is the internationally bestselling "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
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2026-05-11 10:12:02 UTC

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Saturday's threads: Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox; and more!
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116544826522569554
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2026-05-11 10:11:51 UTC

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#10yrsago Safe Patient Project: searchable spreadsheet tells Californians whether their doc is on probation, and why https://web.archive.org/web/20160507002350/http://consumersunion.org/research/california-doctors-on-probation/
#5yrsago The Memex Method https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
#5yrsago How copyright filters lead to wage-theft https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music
#1yrago Who broke the internet? https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman
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2026-05-11 10:11:33 UTC

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#10yrsago Conservative economics: what’s happened to the UK economy after a year of Tory rule https://web.archive.org/web/20160509113126/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/what-has-happened-to-the-economy-under-the-tories-in-six-charts-a7017131.html
#10yrsago Save iTunes: how the W3C’s argument for web-wide DRM would have killed iTunes https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-itunes
#10yrsago America’s courts are going dark https://www.justsecurity.org/30920/courts-going-dark/
#10yrsago Panama Papers: New Zealand is the go-to money launderer for crooked Latin Americans https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/panama-papers/303356/nz-at-heart-of-panama-money-go-round
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2026-05-11 10:11:16 UTC

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#15yrsago Ann Arbor library acquires lending, sharing and copying rights to Creative Commons music catalog https://annarborchronicle.com/2011/04/28/ann-arbor-library-signs-digital-music-deal/
#15yrsago Tin robot on Karel Čapek’s grave https://www.gilesorr.com/travels/Prague2011/BestPrague.20110421.6142.GO.CanonSX10.html
#15yrsago Just look at this banana Dalek. https://web.archive.org/web/20110716022131/https://www.daleksoftheday.com/2011/05/banana-dalek.html
#15yrsago NRA and Florida gag pediatricians: no more firearm safety advice for parents https://www.npr.org/2011/05/07/136063523/florida-bill-could-muzzle-doctors-on-gun-safety
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2026-05-10 09:45:16 UTC

How the avionics system tells you "You haven't got a prayer"
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2026-05-09 21:53:23 UTC

Play the anarchist piano!
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2026-05-07 21:06:06 UTC

Google puts the NYC skyline in the background of the Android weather forecast for North York, a suburb of Toronto.
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2026-05-07 09:24:32 UTC

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@nprofile…q5pf @nprofile…nurl Anyone who trusts the Libdems after the Coalition government needs their head examined (but not by an NHS therapist who has entrusted their medical records to Palantir).

2026-05-07 08:20:55 UTC

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I can easily imagine that *I* will find some of those post-bubble tools useful, and that in 20 years I will still be using them, just as today, I am still using some of those early post-dotcom bubble services and tools.
And despite all that, *IT IS NOT WORTH IT*.
The residue that is left behind by *every* bubble is subsidized, but that subsidy doesn't come from the deep-pocketed investors who are gripped by "irrational exuberance."
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2026-05-07 08:20:40 UTC

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Not everything that got built in those heady days was good, but many good things got built.
I can easily imagine that the post-bubble AI scene will produce benefits comparable to Web 2.0 - projects built by and for people who want to do useful and fun things, without being distracted by the mirage of illusory billions promised by the stock swindlers who created the bubble.
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2026-05-07 08:20:28 UTC

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He offered to sell me ten lifetime's supply of branded t-shirts for $20. I turned him down.
That was the birth of Web 2.0. All of a sudden, people who wanted to make *real* things that were *good* could do so, because they could find skilled workers, hardware, and office space at such knock-down prices that they could be funded out of pocket or put on a credit card. People got to pursue the web they wanted, free from asshole bosses and VCs.
18/

2026-05-07 08:20:16 UTC

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Almost overnight, the legion of humanities undergrads who'd been treated to subsidized training in perl, Python and HTML found themselves looking for work. Servers could be purchased in bulk for pennies on the dollar (with user data still on them!). I bought a "dining room set" of six $1,000+ fancy office chairs for $50 each (still wrapped in plastic!) from a dotcom founder who was selling them on the sidewalk out front of his failed startup's office in the Mission.
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2026-05-07 08:20:05 UTC

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And there will be lots of open source models that have barely been optimized (why make an open source model more efficient when you're raising capital based on the promise of outspending everyone else in order to dominate a world of ubiquitous, pluripotent, winner-take-all centralized AI?):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue
That's a situation not unlike the post-dotcom bubble of the early 2000s.
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2026-05-07 08:19:55 UTC

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The GPUs will still be there, and if we don't "sweat the assets" by running them as hot and hard as they can tolerate, they won't burn out in 2-3 years. There will be lots of applied statisticians, skilled data-labelers, etc, looking for work.
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2026-05-07 08:02:42 UTC

Going to the UK polls today? Remember, Labour is the party that just greenlit Palantir being in charge of all the health data in our NHS:
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/05/07/minister-gives-palantirs-nhs-platform-a-clean-bill-of-health/5230642
While the Greens are the party that has put Palantir on notice that all of its contracts will be torn up and the company will be ejected from the country after the next general election:
https://greenparty.org.uk/2026/01/22/zack-polanski-tells-defence-surveillance-corporation-palantir-to-pack-its-bags-and-get-the-hell-out-of-the-nhs/

2026-05-06 10:49:12 UTC

One of my bedrock beliefs is that capitalists *really* hate capitalism. They may name their beloved institutes after the likes of Adam Smith, but they ignore everything Smith had to say about the necessity of competition to keep markets from turning into monopolies:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck/#price-giver
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/06/champerty-loves-company/#circle-of-life
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2026-05-05 14:08:28 UTC

Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion/

2026-05-05 12:36:07 UTC

Political change is downstream of coalition building, and coalitions are fragile, because by definition they are not fully aligned; they share some goals but often violently disagree about others. A coalition forms when groups set aside their differences to pursue the common elements of their agenda.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/05/three-is-a-magic-number/#coalitions
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2026-05-04 10:44:37 UTC

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Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years *after* some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.
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2026-05-04 10:44:30 UTC

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It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil).
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2026-05-04 10:44:14 UTC

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Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.
A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world.
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2026-05-04 10:44:02 UTC

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Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:
https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11
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2026-05-04 10:43:53 UTC

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Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.
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2026-05-04 10:43:40 UTC

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But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make *two* panels that were each *40%* efficient:
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly
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2026-05-04 10:43:31 UTC

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The world consumes *seventeen times* more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet *forever*:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility
The infrastructure of renewables - panels, batteries, transmission lines - requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes.
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2026-05-04 10:43:20 UTC

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Meanwhile, *not* transitioning to renewables *absolutely* requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are *fuels*, while renewables are *infrastructure*. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a *lot* of fossil fuels.
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2026-05-04 10:39:05 UTC

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As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable, cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.
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2026-05-04 10:38:37 UTC

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In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has *vastly* accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:
https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/
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2026-05-04 10:38:19 UTC

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For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com
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2026-05-04 10:38:10 UTC

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But to *really* max out on demand destruction, you need *both* rationing *and* a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is *incredibly* cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are *also* incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too.
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2026-05-04 10:36:25 UTC

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose *Hope in the Dark* got me through the first Trump administration and whose *A Paradise Built In Hell* inspired my novel *Walkaway*:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene
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2026-05-02 11:50:23 UTC

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You can follow these posts as a daily blog at pluralistic.net: no ads, trackers, or data-collection!
Here's today's edition: https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/02/denazification/denazification.jpg
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2026-05-02 11:50:13 UTC

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Recent appearances:
* Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor
* When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8
* Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612
* The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P
* Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech
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2026-05-02 11:49:58 UTC

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2026-05-02 11:49:40 UTC

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Upcoming appearances:
* #Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/
* Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification
* #Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* #Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
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2026-05-02 11:49:26 UTC

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2026-05-02 11:33:27 UTC

Comrade Trump continues his streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech exports:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/02/denazification/no-more-mx-nice-lib
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2026-04-30 14:43:36 UTC

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Surveillance pricing is also used to determine how much you get paid; when that happens, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination." Gig platforms like Uber use surveillance data about their drivers to predict which workers are most desperate, and those drivers are offered *less* money per mile and per hour, because a desperate worker will take whatever is on offer. Gig work apps for health-care do the same thing to nurses:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point
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2026-04-30 14:43:28 UTC

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Plexure advertises its ability to use surveillance data to find out when a customer has just gotten a paycheck so that vendors can increase the price of their usual breakfast sandwich order. This isn't aimed at wealthy people - it's explicitly designed to target people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
8/

2026-04-30 14:43:17 UTC

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It's pitched as the Robin Hood of pricing policies, gouging the rich to finance discounts for the poor. But in practice, that's not at *all* how surveillance pricing works. Instead, surveillance pricing is most often used to levy a "desperation premium" on people who have fewer choices and less leverage.
For example, there's a McDonald's investments portfolio company called Plexure that supplies surveillance pricing tools to fast food restaurants.
7/

2026-04-30 14:41:44 UTC

If you want to piss me off, it's easy: just breezily assert that our tech regulation problems are the result of the fast pace of technological change racing ahead of the plodding speed of governmental action:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something
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2026-04-28 06:10:54 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Vicky Osterweil's "The Extended Universe"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/28/mouseketeers/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-27 14:01:22 UTC

To opt out, just don't have a face
#London #FacialRecognition
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2026-04-27 08:48:51 UTC

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But here's where there's a critical difference between enshittifying AI and enshittifying a profitable tech business like app stores or search engines. AI is the money-losingest project the human race has ever attempted. At $1.4 trillion and counting, the AI companies and their "frontier models" are so deep in the red that I can't see any way that any of these firms will survive:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge
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2026-04-27 08:48:44 UTC

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And AI companies can enshittify their products in all the traditional ways: after a customer integrates AI in their lives and businesses in ways that are hard to escape, the AI company can raise prices, insert ads, and route queries to cheaper models that cost less to run and produce worse outputs.
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2026-04-25 11:34:53 UTC

day's threads (a thread)
Inside: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/25/machiavellian/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-24 19:52:52 UTC

Surfin' firefighters
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2026-04-24 12:58:39 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: A free, open visual identity for enshittification; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-24 12:51:59 UTC

To my surprise, my life's work has turned out to be a long series of attempts to get people to engage with the abstract, distant issues of tech policy before it's too late. This is hard, because people naturally devote their attention to things that are concrete and immediate (for very good reasons!).
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/#devin-washburn
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2026-04-23 12:49:31 UTC

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@nprofile…s0kv You need to keep reading this thread!

2026-04-23 12:45:14 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The (other) problem with automatic conversion of free software to proprietary software; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/23/poison-pill/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-23 12:35:02 UTC

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Image:
Muhammad Mahdi Karim (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Wildebeest,_Ngorongoro.jpg
GNU FDL
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html
eof/

2026-04-23 12:34:51 UTC

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Reimplementation is *good, actually*. And honestly, if corporations are foolish enough to reimplement their code using an LLM, and in so doing, create a vast *new* commons of public domain software, well, that's not exactly the freesoftwarepocalypse, is it?
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2026-04-23 12:34:45 UTC

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Free software authors re-implement each other's code all the time, often because they think the license the original code was released under sucks. Literally the coolest free software thing I've seen in the past 12 months included a reimplementation of Raspberry Pi's PIO module to escape from its bullshit patent encumbrances:
https://youtu.be/BbWWGkyIBGM?si=vO5zLH3OG5JLW7OP&t=2253
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2026-04-23 12:34:37 UTC

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Combining these clean-room reimplementations with cloud software or tivoization could create hybrid forms of commons-enclosure that are more virulent than the current strains.
But reimplementation itself is *not a risk to free software*. Reimplementation is the *bedrock* of free software. GNU/Linux itself is a reimplementation of AT&T Unix.
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2026-04-23 12:34:26 UTC

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Does that mean that Malus is a meaningless stunt? No, because this automated reimplementation *does* create *some* risks to our software commons. A troll who doesn't care about selling software could clone every popular free software project and make public domain versions that would be confusing and maybe demoralizing.
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2026-04-23 12:34:11 UTC

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There's nothing you can do to stop me, any more than you could stop me from giving away the text of a Shakespeare play you sold me. You can't stick a license agreement or terms of service between me and the product that binds me to *pretend* that your public domain software is copyrighted - that's *also* not allowed under copyright.
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2026-04-23 12:34:02 UTC

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In other words, if you're a corporation hoping to use Malus to knock off a free software project so that you can adapt it and distribute it without having to make your modifications available, Malus's code will not suit your needs. If you give me code that Malus produced, *you can't stop me from doing anything I want with it*. I can sell it. I can give it away. I can make a competing product that reproduces all of your code and sell it at a 99% discount.
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2026-04-23 12:28:02 UTC

An interesting stunt: Malus.sh will take your money and in exchange it will ingest any free/open source code you want, refactor that code using an LLM, and spit out a "clean room" version that is freed from all the obligations imposed by the original project's software license:
https://www.404media.co/this-ai-tool-rips-off-open-source-software-without-violating-copyright/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/23/poison-pill/#kobayashied
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2026-04-22 15:28:40 UTC

If I could abolish one piece of received wisdom about tech policy, it would be this: "Tech moves at the speed of innovation and regulation moves at the speed of government, so regulation will always lag behind tech."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/22/uber-for-nurses/#go-meta
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2026-04-20 17:24:19 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Comrade Trump; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-20 16:58:17 UTC

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This is a deeply shitty timeline, but Comrade Trump keeps tripping over his red tie. Let's take the wins.
eof/

2026-04-20 16:58:12 UTC

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Thanks to Trump, we might see criminal prosecutions - and a primary challenge for any Dem that gets in the way of a serious, Nuremberg-style reckoning with Trumpismo and its gangsters:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification
Look, all things being equal, I would have preferred that Trump had keeled over from a mid-burger stroke on the campaign trail in 2016. But when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla.
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2026-04-20 16:58:02 UTC

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Fury over Trumpismo is pushing even the most useless Democratic leaders to sign up for billionaire taxes:
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/zohran-tax-rich-hochul-nyc
Thanks to Comrade Trump, the median Democratic voter will no longer be satisfied with Kente cloth photo-ops and little ping-pong paddles stenciled with "down with this sort of thing":
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/ping-pong-paddles-to-a-gun-fight/
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2026-04-20 16:57:53 UTC

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Trump is succeeding where Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC failed: he's making the case for Democrats to defenestrate their useless, sellout, Epstein-poisoned leaders. All across the country, radical Dems and avowed socialists are sweeping primaries and elections, as voters realize that Blue No Matter Who will doom them to eternal torment in the Manchin-Synematic Universe:
https://prospect.org/2026/02/11/progressive-win-new-jersey-anti-ice-organizing-mejia/
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2026-04-20 16:57:44 UTC

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And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that imposed those anticircumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! The post-American internet is at hand:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
But Trump has *even more* praxis up his spraytan-stained sleeves.
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2026-04-20 16:57:35 UTC

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Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponizing US tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off (by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison and swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu), he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries or companies at the click of a mouse:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/#doomer-challenge
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2026-04-20 16:57:27 UTC

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But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade: specifically, the US forced all of its trading partners to adopt "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to modify US tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbors the tools to use generic ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/#mere-ornaments
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2026-04-20 16:57:09 UTC

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Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as the American tech bosses kept their enshittificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot.
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2026-04-20 16:57:02 UTC

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There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data-centers to host it for every "digitally sovereign" country.
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2026-04-20 16:56:46 UTC

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Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snood-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily enshittifying Big Tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off Big Tech. We let US tech companies update (that is, downgrade) the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches.
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2026-04-20 16:56:39 UTC

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Energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global *technology* transition.
For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy invading defective tech exports were digital rights hippies like me, and our victories were modest and far between.
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2026-04-18 13:31:58 UTC

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Angelenos! I'll be at the #LosAngeles Festival of Books SUNDAY (Apr 19) for a panel called "Nature or Nurture: How Humans and AI Are Changing Each Other" with Adam Becker, Joanne McNeil, and Lucas Cantor Santiago:
https://www.latimes.com/events/festival-of-books/schedule?eventId%5B56624ef6-1a3f-40d7-8897-9e46d5e61c95%5D=ea981e7e-4aa8-4a4c-9001-6fd8427e8e9e&performerId%5B56624ef6-1a3f-40d7-8897-9e46d5e61c95%5D
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2026-04-18 13:31:13 UTC

Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Georgia's voting technology blunder; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/18/dominion-sucks-actually/
#Pluralistic
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2026-04-18 13:15:17 UTC

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And even if the files make it to the outside contractor safely, that contractor could "change the inputs (ballot images) or outputs (tabulations)."
So this is very bad. Voting machines suck. Raffensperger sucks.
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2026-04-18 13:15:04 UTC

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As Appel writes, "it would be fairly easy for an unsophisticated attacker to alter ballot-image files–just replace the ballots they don’t like with copies of the ones they do like."
Then there's the step where these files are zipped up and transferred to the outside vendor for the audit - a step that Raffensperger has not explained.
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2026-04-18 13:14:50 UTC

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First, the BMDs are super-hackable, so we don't trust them to print the same info in the QR code as they print in the human-readable text (which no one looks at anyway). If we don't trust them to print accurate info in the QR code, then why would we trust them to accurately generate that 200dpi QR code that's generated for the audit?
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2026-04-18 13:14:39 UTC

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As Appel points out, this is the same stupid plan that Raffensperger tried in 2024, where he called the OCR step an "audit" of the QR tabulation. Back then, he grabbed 200dpi "ballot image files" from the Dominion BMDs and ran them through OCR software run by a company called Enhanced Voting. Appel sums up the fundamental incoherence of this approach.
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2026-04-18 13:14:25 UTC

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He can still be terrible in other ways - and he *is*.
Raffensperger has announced his plan to circumvent the Georgia legislature by using Dominion ICX touchscreens to produce ballots with QR codes, which will then be tabulated in Dominion ICP scanners - but then he's going to "verify" the tabulation by running those same ballots through optical character recognition (OCR) software.
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2026-04-18 13:14:14 UTC

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These machines still suck, to be clear (the fact that they don't suck for the mypillovian reasons that Tucker Carlson believes doesn't mean they're *good*) - but thanks to SB189, they are way less dangerous to democracy than they might be.
But not if Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger gets his way. Raffensperger is another guy who was drafted into The Resistance(TM) after he refused to commit election fraud for Trump, but he's *also* not *good*.
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2026-04-18 13:13:44 UTC

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So Georgia's state leg passed Senate Bill 189, which establishes that "The text portion of the paper ballot marked and printed by the electronic ballot marker indicating the elector’s selection shall constitute the official ballot and shall constitute the official vote for purposes of vote tabulation." In other words, you can't count by scanning QR codes, you have to actually interpret the human-readable text on these ballots.
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2026-04-18 13:13:31 UTC

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That means that a BMD could output different choices in the QR code than it prints in the human-readable part - and the Dominion BMD machines they use in Georgia run outdated software that's *super*-hackable:
https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/02/24/georgia-still-using-tragicomically-insecure-voting-system/
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2026-04-18 13:13:18 UTC

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This problem is greatly exacerbated if these ballot papers are tabulated by a machine that reads a QR code or barcode, rather than interpreting the human-readable information on the ballot. People are even less likely to pull out their phones and scan the QR code to ensure it matches the words on the paper.
27/

2026-04-18 13:13:05 UTC

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We have, at long last, progressed to the point where we use "ballot marking devices" (BMDs) that produce a paper record that can be hand-counted. The problem is that voters barely ever glance at these paper ballots before dropping them in the box to make sure the choices they made on the touchscreen are correctly reflected on the ballot - only 7% of voters carefully inspect their ballots!
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2026-04-18 13:12:57 UTC

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Appel's latest is an alarming note about Georgia's new plan to "tabulate" ballots using OCR software:
https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/04/10/ballot-tabulation-by-uploading-scanned-images-for-ocr-is-quite-insecure/
The Georgia legislature has wisely banned the use of QR codes on the paper ballots generated by touchscreen voting machines.
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2026-04-18 13:12:42 UTC

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Just because *some* voting machine criticism is conspiratorial nonsense, it doesn't follow that voting machines are *good*, nor does it follow that every voting machine critic is a swivel-eyed loon or ratfucking Roger Stone protege.
Take, for example, Princeton's Andrew Appel, a computer scientist who's been publishing well-informed, well-documented warnings about defects in voting machines for years and years.
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2026-04-18 13:10:34 UTC

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Pretty much everyone I knew thought that voting machines were garbage technology...right up to the moment that the My Pillow guy, Tucker Carlson, and a whole menagerie of conspiratorial Trumpland mutants started peddling a bizarre story about how Hugo Chavez colluded with the Canadian voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems (who bought Diebold's voting machine business when they finally dumped the division) to rig the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
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2026-04-18 13:10:23 UTC

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The hits just kept on coming:
https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120655/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1
At Defcon, the amazing Matt Green has presided over the Voting Village, where it's an annual tradition for hackers to probe voting machines. This exercise has produced a string of terrifying revelations that precisely described how these machines suck:
https://www.votingvillage.org/cfp
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