YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • King of Jazz and the Construction of Names

    King of Jazz and the Construction of Names

    Where do public monikers come from and what do they say about culture?

    One of the more eclectic titles to enter the public domain in 2026 was Universal’s King of Jazz, a two-strip Technicolor musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, Bing Crosby, and even Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The work features stunning visuals, comical moments, and grand musical numbers. At the center of it all is the titular “King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman.

    While the film does not accurately explain how Whiteman came to receive the name—instead presenting a fictional animated sequence from in-house director Walter Lantz—it presents the moniker as his. But how did Whiteman actually come to be known as the “King of Jazz,” and what does that say about cultural production? Let’s break down the origins of this moniker.

    The Original Dixieland Jazz Band ca. 1921

    Jazz as a recorded venture originated with the 1917 recording of “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band. The earliest origin of the word was traced to “jass” for playing something “with pep” before the spelling changed to jazz. Following this, the earliest known references to a “King of Jazz/Jass” date to 1919. On January 12, 1919, the New York based paper, The Sun, referenced Ted Lewis as “the King of Jazz.” That same year, the Ted Lewis Jazz Band recorded “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gave Me” for Columbia.

    An image of jazz clarinetist, Horace George circa 1914. The text below him reads: Expert Clarionet Leader, Who Resigned from the Monogram Theatre
    Horace George ca. 1914

    On April 9, 1919, the East St. Louis Daily Journal gave clarinetist Horace George the moniker “the King of Jass.” Notably, Horace George was also referred to as the “Clarinet King.” Horace George’s history in music has been largely overlooked, but he was present throughout the earliest years of jazz’s development. George’s recording career—as best as we can understand today—was sparse, with only a handful of records being cut under his own name. One crucial pairing was with Shelton Brooks, composer of the jazz standard, “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The pairing’s partnership dissolved in June 1920. 

    Paul Whiteman began recording music in 1920 with his “Ambassador Orchestra” while performing at Atlantic City’s Ambassador Hotel, before dropping the Ambassador title altogether later. Their first release came under Victor Records with “Best Ever Medley,” which included Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Throughout the 1920s, the group—commonly known as the Paul Whiteman Orchestra—would record many popular hits. In 1924, the Orchestra teamed up with George Gershwin to make the first ever recording of “Rhapsody in Blue.” By 1930, Whiteman was the star personality called the “King of Jazz,” meant to carry the Universal Picture film of the same name. Whiteman received this name as early as August 15, 1923 at an event with New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

    THE EVENING STAR, WASHINGTON BIRDS ON ANTENNA TIE UP JAZZ RADIOED FROM GOTHAM DINNER A flock of harmless-looking swallows, perched on the antenna of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company’s radio broadcasting station WCAP, played havoc for a time last night with the jazzy strains of Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra as they started on a long journey over the ether waves. Whiteman was being crowned “King of Jazz” at a banquet given in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York and the music from his aggregation of jazz artists was “coming through clearly.” Suddenly and apparently without reason the wave length increased from 469 to 479 meters. The vacuum tubes, so necessary to radio broadcasting, got hot and the plate current increased so greatly that it was necessary to reduce the voltage to save the tubes. Even after this reduction the plate current was 650 milamperes, instead of a normal 700 milamperes. All emergency apparatus was placed in readiness for immediate use. A break was thought certain. The engineers were puzzled. About this time some one in the…
    Excerpt from the August 15, 1923 edition of The Evening Star

    That Paul Whiteman is the one to end up as the “King of Jazz” in a major Hollywood motion picture of the day is not surprising, given the social benefits that he enjoyed as a white male in the early twentieth century. Jazz was created and shaped by Black musicians, many of whom were marginalized by the recording, touring, and publicity systems that elevated white bandleaders like Whiteman. Artists like Horace George, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and countless others innovated and shaped the sound and musical language of jazz.

    A 1930 poster promoting King of Jazz with a caricature of Paul Whiteman on it.
    A 1930 poster for King of Jazz

    Recognizing this does not diminish Whiteman’s popularity or influence in his own time. Rather, it highlights the whitewashing and flattening of history and culture that arises over time. This kingly title exists within the broader social and commercial structures that shaped the musical landscape of the early twentieth century. The persistence of the moniker tells us as much about race, access, and media power as it does about musical achievement, and invites us to revisit the era with a wider lens.

    Now in the public domain, King of Jazz and other recordings by Whiteman are accessible and tangible to many more of us by a simple click. The celebration of these past works further emphasizes his social benefits, but also allow for closer examination of this historical moment. There is the potential for us to discover more of Horace George’s work and other overlooked jazz artists of the time—to disentangle the moniker from one man, and to understand the broader moment without barrier.

    To dive in more check out our curated list of media referenced in this post.

  • GitHub Reports DMCA Takedown Record and Surging Anti-Circumvention Claims

    GitHub Reports DMCA Takedown Record and Surging Anti-Circumvention Claims

    GitHub, home to hundreds of millions of code repositories, takes pride in being the largest and most advanced development platform in the world.

    Like other platforms that host user-generated content, this massive code library occasionally runs into copyright infringement issues too.

    As an intermediary, GitHub allows rightsholders to submit DMCA takedown notices to get infringing content removed. In addition, it also accepts DMCA anti-circumvention notices, requesting the removal of projects that bypass copy controls and restrictions.

    The best-documented anti-circumvention claim on GitHub was sent by the RIAA back in 2020. At the time, the music industry group requested the removal of the open-source youtube-dl project, which is used by YouTube ripper software.

    After initially removing the repository, GitHub later decided to reinstate the project, arguing that it doesn’t violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions. This decision still holds today, as the project remains on GitHub, despite having its website taken down by similar complaints.

    Circumvention Claims Increased 41%

    When the RIAA sent its anti-circumvention notices, these were still rare. In that year, GitHub only received 63 of these per year. That has increased more than tenfold since.

    GitHub’s full-year transparency report that was just released reveals that it received 645 circumvention claims in 2025. That’s up 41% from a year earlier, and the bar chart shared by GitHub shows that these removal requests are clearly in an upward trend.

    Circumvention Claims

    github dmca

    The initial boost in reports came in 2022, after GitHub updated its DMCA takedown submission form with questions explicitly related to circumvention. Providing that option triggered many more submitters to tick that box, raising the number of ‘circumvention’ claims.

    Processing circumvention notices is quite costly for the company, as they are carefully reviewed by legal experts and engineers, to ensure that developers’ projects are not taken down without valid reasons.

    “In cases where we are unable to determine whether a claim is valid, we will err on the side of the developer, and leave the content up,” GitHub writes in its policy, also pointing out that it has a million-dollar Developer Defense Fund for those who need it.

    Surge in DMCA removals

    The transparency report also covers ordinary takedown notices, which are much more common. In 2025, GitHub processed 2,661 takedown notices in 2025, which affected 47,228 repositories.

    The number of targeted repositories surged 51.6% compared to 2024, while the number of notices also went up by roughly a third.

    Repos Affected by Takedowns

    project takedown

    As shown above, August and November accounted for nearly half the year’s total, with 12,030 and 11,357 repositories taken down respectively. That pattern strongly suggests a small number of bulk complaints against projects with many forks, rather than a broad industry-wide surge.

    Taken down

    github dmca

    GitHub Applauds Landmark DMCA Liability Ruling

    The latest transparency report was announced in a blog post this week, where GitHub also referenced the Supreme Court ruling in Cox v. Sony. Which also affects its platform.

    Previously, copyright holders had successfully pushed expansive theories of secondary liability, arguing that platforms could be held contributorily liable for user infringement even without direct involvement. That made intermediaries less likely to defend or protect users. The Supreme Court decision changed this.

    “The Court’s opinion reinforced that service providers are not automatically liable for copyright infringement by users without evidence of intent to encourage or materially contribute to infringement,” GitHub’s Margaret Tucker noted.

    This echoes comments it made earlier, where GitHub characterized the ruling as a key victory.

    “This is a landmark victory for the open internet and for every developer who depends on platforms like GitHub to build, share, and collaborate on code. GitHub will always stand up for developers and for keeping the internet open,” GitHub wrote.

    This doesn’t mean that GitHub will fundamentally change its DMCA policy, of course; this just gives them more room to side with developers, when appropriate.

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

  • Should you really trust health advice from an AI chatbot?

    Abi has had very mixed results when asking a chatbot for guidance about her health issues.

  • Pluralistic: Georgia’s voting technology blunder (18 Apr 2026)

    Today’s links


    A hand dropping a ballot in a box; the box is a complicated, many-geared machine. On its faceplate is an 'I voted' sticker that has been modified to read 'I voted?'

    Georgia’s voting technology blunder (permalink)

    Nearly 25 years ago, in the aftermath of Bush v Gore, I got involved in a bunch of ugly tech policy fights over voting machines. The hanging chad debacle in Florida prompted Congress to appropriate funds for states to purchase new touchscreen voting machines based on a robust, open standard. The problem was, those machines didn’t exist.

    The voting machine industry in those days was already very consolidated (it’s far more consolidated today). They went shopping for a standards body that would publish a spec for a “standard” voting machine that could soak up those federal dollars in time for the 2004 election. The only taker was the IEEE, who unwisely offered to serve as host for this impossible rush job.

    Once the voting machine reps were around a table at IEEE – largely sheltered from antitrust scrutiny thanks to the broad latitude enjoyed by firms engaged in standardization, which is otherwise uncomfortably close to collusion – they admitted what everyone already knew: there was zero chance they were going to develop a new standard in time for the election.

    Instead, they decided they were going to publish a “descriptive standard.” Rather than designing a new standard, they’d write down the specs of their own products – the same products that were considered so defective they needed to be replaced before the election – and call that the standard.

    That was my first encounter with this issue as an activist. I had just started at EFF and a lot of our supporters were IEEE members, who were appalled to see their professional association being used to launder this incredibly politically salient, technically incoherent scam. We got a ton of IEEE members to write to the board, who shut down the standards committee and kicked the voting machine companies to the curb.

    The voting machine companies weren’t done, though. Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They’d crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.

    This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold’s voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.

    Diebold didn’t dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company’s copyright.

    Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send “takedown notices” to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn’t remove the content “expeditiously,” they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.

    Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages.

    (Incidentally: anyone who tells you that “online safety” requires us to make online platforms liable for their users’ speech needs to explain how this wouldn’t empower every crooked company whose dirty laundry had ended up online wouldn’t just do what Diebold did. It’s not technically insanity to do the same thing over again in expectation of a different outcome, but it is awfully stupid and reckless.)

    That might have been the end of things, except for the kids at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Two students, Nelson Pavlosky and Luke Smith, were outraged by Diebold and they had accounts on Swarthmore’s webserver. So they uploaded thousands of copies of the leaked memos, but linked to just one of them from a page about the leak. As soon as that copy was deleted by Swarthmore’s webmasters in response to a DMCA takedown from Diebold, the students updated the link to point to another copy. And another. And another.

    That’s where EFF got involved. We repped the Online Policy Group, whose page linking to the Swarthmore resources was taken down by a Diebold notice. We won. The memos became a matter of public record. The Swarthmore kids started a nationwide network called “Students for Free Culture.” It was pretty danged cool.

    That wasn’t the end of the Diebold story, though. Diebold was and is a very diversified conglomerate that made a lot of tabulating machines: ATMs, cash-registers, medical monitoring devices…and voting machines. Every one of these machines produced a paper-tape of its tabulations as an audit trail that could be used to reconstruct its calculations if it crashed…except the voting machines. The voting machines that kept crashing, and whose crashes presented a serious risk to the legitimacy of US elections in the wake of the worst electoral crisis in the country’s history.

    Diebold’s stated reason for this was that adding a paper tape was haaaard (even though all its other machines had paper audit tapes). Not only was this a very unconvincing excuse, it was downright alarming in light of the promise of Walden O’Dell (Diebold CEO and prominent Bush fundraiser) to help “Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president”:

    https://fairvote.org/diebold-partisanship-and-public-interest-elections/

    Now, to be clear, I don’t think that O’Dell was going to steal the election for Bush (that’s the Supreme Court’s job). Rather, he was just a loudmouth asshole CEO who supported the (up to that point) worst president in American history, and who also made garbage products that were not fit for purpose.

    In the decades since, voting machines have been the subject of lots of scrutiny by the information security community, because they suck. Time after time, the most sphincter-puckering defects in widely used machines have come to light:

    https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

    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

    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. They told so many outlandish lies about this that Fox ended up paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle the case:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems#Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox_News_Network

    That’s when something very weird happened. A bunch of people who had been skeptical of voting machines since the Brooks Brothers Riot suddenly became history’s most ardent defenders of those same garbage voting machines. The cartel of voting machine companies – who had a long track record of using bullshit legal threats to silence their (mostly progressive) critics – were drafted into The Resistance(TM), and anyone who thought voting machines were trash was dismissed as a crazy person who has been totally mypillowpilled:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20210203113531/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-machines-election-steal-conspiracy-flaws/

    There’s a name for this: it’s called “schismogenesis”: when one group of people define themselves in opposition to someone else. If the other team does X, then your team has to oppose X, even if you all liked X until a couple minutes ago:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

    This schismogenic reversal persists to this very day. Every time Trump promotes another election denier to his cabinet, a federal agency, or a judgeship, the idea that voting machines are garbage becomes more Stop the Steal-coded, even though voting machines are, objectively, garbage.

    Which is bad. It’s bad because we are going into another election season where the stakes are – incredibly – even higher than Bush v Gore, and electoral authorities and state legislatures are making the world’s most unforced errors in their voting machine procurement decisions, and if you’ve conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.

    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. 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. 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!

    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. 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/

    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.

    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. 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.

    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.

    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? 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. 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.

    And here’s the stupidest part: as Appel explains, there is a much more secure way to do this, and it’s very cheap:

    Just use their existing Dominion ICP (polling-place) scanners to count preprinted, hand-marked optical-scan “bubble ballots” that the voter has marked with a pen.

    This is what other states are doing. As Appel writes, “This doesn’t even require a software upgrade of any kind. Although it would be a fine idea to install a software upgrade that addresses known security vulnerabilities in the ICX and ICP, the ICP can count hand-marked ballots with or without the upgrade.”

    This is a purely unforced error, in other words. As such, it’s part of a series of shitty vote-tech choices that politicians and officials have been making since Bush v Gore. Truly, we live in the stupidest timeline.

    Hey look at this (permalink)


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

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #20yrsago GW Bush’s iPod contains “illegal” (according to RIAA) music https://memex.craphound.com/2006/04/16/gw-bushs-ipod-contains-illegal-according-to-riaa-music/

    #20yrsago Fan fiction community for McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches https://web.archive.org/web/20120112221730/https://mcgriddlefanfic.livejournal.com/profile/

    #10yrsago High tech/high debt: the feudal future of technology makes us all into lesser lessors https://web.archive.org/web/20160415150308/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/rental-company-control/478365/

    #10yrsago Three pieces of statistical “bullshit” about the UK EU referendum https://timharford.com/2016/04/three-pieces-of-brexit-bullshit/

    #10yrsago Southwest Air kicks Muslim woman off plane for switching seats https://web.archive.org/web/20160416041342/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-woman-kicked-off-plane-as-flight-attendant-said-she-did-not-feel-comfortable-with-the-a6986661.html

    #10yrsago China’s Internet censors order ban on video of toddler threatening brutal cops https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2016/04/minitrue-4/

    #10yrsago Tiny South Pacific island to lose free/universal Internet lifeline https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pacific/299017/niue-to-get-better-internet-service-at-a-cost

    #10yrsago The Everything Box: demonological comedy from Richard “Sandman Slim” Kadrey https://memex.craphound.com/2016/04/16/the-everything-box-demonological-comedy-from-richard-sandman-slim-kadrey/

    #5yrsago People’s Choice Communications https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#charter-hires-scabs

    #5yrsago “Anti-voter-suppression” companies are lobbying to kill HR1 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#tissue-thin

    #5yrsago $100m deli made $35k in 2019/20 https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#hometown

    #5yrsago Mass-action lawsuit against Facebook https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/16/where-it-hurts/#sue-facebook

    #1yrago Trump fought the law and Trump won https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/16/weaponized-admin-incompetence/#kill-all-the-lawyers

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

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

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

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

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

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

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

    How to get Pluralistic:

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

    Pluralistic.net

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

    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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

    https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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

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

    Medium (no ads, paywalled):

    https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

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

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

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

    ISSN: 3066-764X

  • DLARC Adds New Radio Resources to Celebrate World Amateur Radio Day

    DLARC Adds New Radio Resources to Celebrate World Amateur Radio Day

    Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications, a library devoted to ham radio, shortwave, and related topics, announces a number of new collections to mark World Amateur Radio Day.

    DLARC now offers a selection of each of the “big three” American amateur radio magazines: CQ, QST, and 73. The library recently added every issue of CQ Amateur Radio magazine published from its launch in 1946 through 1963, 230 issues in all. In addition, DLARC includes 530 issues of QST Magazine from its founding in 1915 through 1961, and every issue of 73 Amateur Radio: 516 issues published from 1960 to 2003.

    73 Amateur Radio was published by Wayne Green W2NSD, who donated a complete set of the magazines to Internet Archive before he died so that they would be freely available to the world. QST is published by The American Radio Relay League, a membership organization for U.S. ham radio operators founded in 1914. CQ was published by Dick Ross, K2MGA. The issues of QST and CQ in the DLARC collections have entered the public domain. These three magazine collections are just a small part of the more than 9,500 issues of ham radio magazines available in the DLARC library.

    In addition, DLARC has added a new collection of Review of International Broadcasting newsletters. Review of International Broadcasting was a newsletter devoted to the shortwave listening hobby, covering notable content heard on the air, news about legitimate broadcasters and pirate radio stations, program schedules, and radio hardware tips. The new collection includes 107 issues published from 1978 through 1997, many of which were scanned from the collection of publisher Glenn Hauser.

    A selection of issues of Review of International Broadcasting

    Finally, DLARC is home to a new collection of material from the Texas A&M Amateur Radio Club. The collection includes club newsletters, QSL cards, meeting minutes, slides, and other material collected and created by the group. Founded in 1912, the club is one of the oldest university radio clubs in existence. 

    World Amateur Radio Day is celebrated annually on April 18 to commemorate the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union in Paris in 1925.

    Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a generous grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact me at kay@archive.org.

  • Crypto Critic Maxine Waters’s New Primary Foe Got Over Two-Thirds of Money From Crypto

    Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., is the scourge of cryptocurrencies on Capitol Hill, burnishing her bona fides by supporting tighter oversight from her perch as ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee. If Democrats win the midterm elections, Waters is poised to become the chair of the influential committee.

    Crypto donors are trying to make sure that never happens.

    The woman mounting a long-shot challenge to Waters in California’s 43rd Congressional District has drawn more than two-thirds of her donations from the cryptocurrency industry.

    Nonprofit executive Myla Rahman, 53, who is running as a younger alternative to the 87-year-old Waters, has taken 69 percent of her campaign contributions from crypto figures.

    Rahman’s biggest single donor is Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse, a leading voice pushing for looser regulations on crypto who has been active in the debate over pending crypto legislation in Congress.

    Garlinghouse’s $6,600 donation last month helped bring Rahman’s total haul to $14,540 since announcing her long-shot campaign in February. The total haul is a pittance compared to what it would take to mount a viable campaign against Waters, a legendary figure who is serving her 18th term in the House. California’s primary election takes place on June 2. (Ripple Labs declined to comment.)

    The total haul is a pittance compared to what it would take to mount a viable campaign against Waters, a legendary figure.

    Still, any opposition funding could serve as a nuisance to Waters, a relative lightweight when it comes to fundraising compared to other top names in Congress. (Neither Waters’s nor Rahman’s campaigns responded to requests for comment.)

    Rahman’s second biggest benefactor was Colin McLaren, the head of government relations at the crypto advocacy nonprofit Solana Policy Institute. He chipped in $3,500.

    The crypto industry has ample reason to target Waters. While other Democrats have proven more accommodating, Waters has supported tighter oversight from her powerful position in the House Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over the crypto industry.

    With Waters potentially assuming the helm of the committee next year, crypto is racing to win passage of a favorable regulatory framework in the form of a bill called the Clarity Act. Despite widespread support among the Republicans, the industry has faced intense pushback from banks and credit unions who worry that passage of the law could lead to a stampede of deposits out of their institutions and into crypto exchanges.

    Ripple, which has an estimated valuation of $50 billion, fought a yearslong legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission that centered on the issues under debate in Congress right now.

    Waters’s most recent campaign filing on April 15 showed that she had a little over $300,000 on hand. Many recent contributions came from the banks and credit unions squaring off against crypto on Capitol Hill.

    Despite her stance on crypto regulation, Waters also received a campaign donation from Ripple Labs co-founder and Democratic megadonor Chris Larsen. He gave $3,300 to Waters on March 6, only a few days after Garlinghouse made his donation to Rahman.

    Larsen gave one of the crypto industry’s highest-profile contributions to Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign.


    Related

    Democrats Have a Gerontocracy Problem. The Crypto Industry Is Using That to Its Advantage.

    Rahman’s campaign does not mark crypto’s first quixotic campaign against a prominent congressional industry critic. The crypto industry also funded a Republican challenger in 2024 in an attempt to unseat Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren in deep-blue Massachusetts and a since-suspended primary challenge to Democratic California Rep. Brad Sherman.

    In Sherman’s race, the crypto industry made clear its intention to leverage a message of generational change against critics of blockchain currencies.

    The post Crypto Critic Maxine Waters’s New Primary Foe Got Over Two-Thirds of Money From Crypto appeared first on The Intercept.

  • Pregnancy vaccine reduces baby hospital admissions for RSV by 80%

    A study confirms the vaccine gives excellent protection for babies against life-threatening chest infections.

  • ‘I’m the lucky one’ – more than one in three young men now live with their parents

    Last year, the highest proportion of men aged 20-34 were still living at home since at least 2007 as the rising cost of living takes hold.
  • How to Avoid a Cold War

    How to Avoid a Cold War

    Daniel bessner is an Assistant Professor in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, the co-host of the American Prestige podcast, and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. In an essay last year for the Ideas Letter, Bessner reviewed recent scholarly literature on the Cold War, concluding “that responsibility for the Cold War lies, in the final analysis, with the United States.” He is the co-editor of the new book Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, available from Cambridge University Press. Prof. Bessner joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss why it is so vital in our own time to examine and learn the lessons of the Cold War. 

  • Keep Pushing: We Get 10 More Days to Reform Section 702

    In a dramatic middle-of-the-night stand off, a bipartisan set of lawmakers pushing for true reform and privacy protections for Americans bought us some more time to fight! They are holding out for, at a minimum, the requirement of an actual probable cause warrant for FBI access to information collected under the mass spying program known as 702.


    A reauthorization with virtually no changes was defeated because a core group of lawmakers held strong; they know that people are hungry for real reform that protects the privacy of our communications. We now have a 10-day extension to continue to push Congress to pass a real reform bill. 


    The Lawmakers rallied late Thursday night to reject a proposed amendment that made gestures at privacy protections, but it would not have improved on the status quo and would have reauthorized Section 702 for five more years to boot. 

    Take action

    TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform

    Section 702 is rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues that need fixing. The National Security Agency collects full conversations being conducted by and with targets overseas – including by and with Americans in the U.S. –  and stores them in massive databases. The NSA then allows other agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to access untold amounts of that information. In turn, the FBI takes a “finders keepers” approach to this data: they reason that since it’s already collected under one law, it’s OK for them to see it. 

    Under current practice, the FBI can query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant. What’s more, victims of this surveillance  won’t even know and have very few ways of finding out that their communications have been surveilled. EFF and other civil liberties advocates have been trying for years to know when data collected through Section 702 is used as evidence against them.  

    Reforming Section 702 is even more urgent because of revelations hinted at by Senator Ron Wyden’s public statements concerning a “secret interpretation” of the law that enables surveillance of Americans, and a public  “Dear Colleague” letter he sent to fellow Senators about FBI abuse of Section 702. 

    That’s right—the way the government conducts mass surveillance is so secret and unaccountable even the way they interpret the law is classified. 

     “In many cases these will be law-abiding Americans having perfectly legitimate, often sensitive, conversations,” Wyden wrote. “These Americans could include journalists, foreign aid workers, people with family members overseas – even women trying to get abortion medication from an overseas provider. Congress has an obligation to protect our country from foreign threats and protect the rights of these and other Americans.” 

    We have 10 days to make it clear to Congress: 702 needs real reforms. Not a blanket  reauthorization. Not lip service to change. Real reform.

    Take action

    TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform