YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Paris Court Issued Simultaneous Site Blocking Orders Against ISPs, DNS Resolvers and VPNs

    Paris Court Issued Simultaneous Site Blocking Orders Against ISPs, DNS Resolvers and VPNs

    Since 2024, the Paris Judicial Court has gradually expanded the typical piracy site blocking orders beyond residential Internet providers.

    The initial order required Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco to actively block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers, confirming that third-party intermediaries can be required to take responsibility. Not much later, VPN providers were added to the blocking roster.

    Initially, these orders were to address circumvention techniques for domains that were already blocked through ISPs. The DNS resolver and VPN provider blockades limited these loopholes. Several blocking orders have followed since, but a series of orders that came out at the Paris Judicial Court take a different approach.

    On March 18, Judge Jean-Christophe Gayet issued seven simultaneous rulings, targeting a broad range of online intermediaries that enable access to pirate sports streams in France. The cases were filed by the Spanish professional football league LaLiga, which requested blocking measures against 35 domain names of sports streaming sites.

    The pirate sites listed include librefutboltv.su, which has over 27 million monthly visits, as well as smaller ones such as tflix.live, daddylive.dad, yallashooot.video, ballcontrol.click, and kora-live.im.

    The targeted intermediaries span every layer of the technical stack: this includes major French ISPs, alternative DNS resolvers such as Google, Cloudflare, and Quad9, as well as several of the world’s largest VPN providers.

    Court: LaLiga Lacks Standing

    Interestingly, however, LaLiga was not victorious in court. In each of the seven cases, the court declared the league’s claims inadmissible.

    The court explained that, under Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, the right to bring blocking injunctions applies to rightsholders, broadcasting companies, and professional sports leagues. However, the court interprets that last category narrowly.

    To qualify for protection, sports leagues must be created by a state-delegated federation under French law, specifically under Articles L. 131-14 and L. 132-1 of the Sports Code. As a Spanish association with no delegation from the French state, LaLiga does not meet that definition.

    LaLiga argued that the law should also cover foreign leagues that commercialize their audiovisual rights, and that reading it otherwise would discriminate against non-French rights holders. However, the court rejected these arguments.

    The restriction has nothing to do with LaLiga’s nationality, the court noted; the league simply needs a subdelegation from the French state to qualify for protection via site-blocking orders. Additionally, the court concluded that LaLiga is not directly harmed by piracy in France, as it assigned its exclusive French broadcast rights to beIN Sports France.

    This same reasoning applied to all seven cases and initially appears to be a major setback for the football league. However, help was just around the corner.

    beIN Sports Steps In

    beIN Sports France, which holds exclusive broadcast rights to LaLiga in France as part of a deal with the Spanish league, intervened voluntarily in all seven cases.

    As the company that acquired exclusive French broadcasting rights for LaLiga, it qualifies under the second category in Article L. 333-10. Unlike LaLiga, beIN could also point to documented harm, including evidence that 35 disputed domain names were streaming LaLiga matches, with beIN Sports branding visible in the pirate feeds.

    The court ultimately concluded that there was grave and repeated infringement of beIN Sports France’s exclusive rights in all seven cases and granted the blocking orders in its name.

    Blocking The Full Stack

    What further stands out is the fact that these orders all came out on the same day, targeting nineteen French ISPs, three DNS resolvers, a CDN provider, and four VPN services. This broad approach ensures that the most popular circumvention options are immediately cut off.

    The orders run until June 21, 2026, and are also dynamic in nature. This means that new domain names can be added in the future, once they are approved for blocking by France’s audiovisual regulator, ARCOM.

    The ISP order will have the most direct impact. It includes France’s largest providers, such as Orange, SFR, Free, and Bouygues Telecom, as well as various smaller ones.

    If subscribers try to circumvent these blocking measures by switching to alternative DNS resolvers, orders against Google, Cloudflare, and Quad9 will prevent this.

    VPN providers are not necessarily an option either, as the court granted blocking orders against ProtonVPN, as well as CyberGhost and ExpressVPN. LaLiga also referenced orders against NordVPN and Surfshark jointly, but TorrentFreak was unable to locate these.

    The Cloudflare order is the most technically comprehensive of the batch. It covers not only Cloudflare’s public DNS resolver but also its CDN, reverse proxy service, and WARP service under a single ruling. The court requires Cloudflare to block the domains across its infrastructure, by whatever technical means it chooses.

    Some of the defendants raised counterarguments in court. For example, several VPN providers argued that Article L. 333-10 conflicts with the EU E-Commerce Directive, while others sought a referral to the Court of Justice. However, none of these arguments convinced the court.

    Site Blocking Evolution

    The seven court orders represent the most comprehensive single-day blocking action under France’s sports piracy framework, as far as we know. Whereas initial orders targeted single intermediary categories, these come in one full sweep.

    LaLiga president Javier Tebas is pleased with the outcome and thanks beIN for their cooperation.

    “These rulings represent a significant step forward because they extend protection to the entire technical ecosystem that piracy currently relies on. The fight against audiovisual fraud must grow through collaboration, as is the case here with beIN Sports France, which has been key to developing a solid and effective defense in the French market,” Tebas said.

    After multiple successful site-blocking petitions, it’s clear that the French court sees a blocking role for a wide variety of intermediaries. This was recently confirmed by the Paris Court of Appeal too.

    —-

    A copy of the ISP blocking order (RG 25/10055) is available here (pdf). The Cloudflare order (RG 25/08543) can be found here (pdf). The Google order (RG 25/08548) is available here (pdf). The Quad9 order (RG 25/10053) is available here (pdf). The ProtonVPN order (RG 25/10054) is available here (pdf). The CyberGhost/ExpressVPN order (RG 25/08569) is available here (pdf).

    Below is a list of all 35 targeted domain names:

    • daddylive.dad
    • daddylive2.top
    • daddylivehd.world
    • daddyliveru.top
    • rojadirecta.at
    • rojadirectaenvivo.me
    • rojadirectaenvivo.sx
    • la12hd.com
    • jalaace2.cc
    • jalaliveace3.cc
    • stream196tp.com
    • hoca4u.xyz
    • bfpc.jllivetx.cc
    • bienkoora.live
    • kora-live.im
    • yalla1shoot.com
    • camel1.live
    • yacine-tv.com
    • ppv.to
    • live-match-tv.net
    • librefutboltv.su
    • yallashooot.video
    • tv.tflix.app
    • hesgoal.im
    • rojadirecta-tv.net
    • directfr.sbs
    • koora-live.net
    • live.sia-live.live
    • s3.stream-on.live
    • yacine-tv.watch
    • ar.kora-top.space
    • envivolibre.com
    • pl.yalashoot.xyz
    • tflix.live
    • ballcontrol.click

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

  • MAHA and science-based public health: Can’t we all just get along?

    The answer is: Very likely not, at least not as long as MAHA embraces quackery and antivax pseudoscience—not that that didn’t stop STAT News from ignoring the elephant in the room, vaccines, in search of a “kumbaya” moment between MAHA and public health.

    The post MAHA and science-based public health: Can’t we all just get along? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Between contempt and shame

    Between contempt and shame

    It’s been eighteen months since a fire in my husband’s home. A missing contemporaneous entry on the system that records a person’s clinical history meant no one knew that an incident had taken place. So my husband was left for the next twenty hours alone in a fire-damaged home with no heat or light, as emergency services turned utilities off for safety. A Patient Safety investigation took place six months later because my formal complaint flagged that no serious incident report had been documented even after the fact.

    What has followed has become a carer’s fight, my fight, for transparency, candour and any crumb of accountability that might be offered. During this period there has been another hospital admission for my husband which has required another investigation after potential breaches under the Mental Health Act around use of force and treatment without consent, bypassing a second opinion independent assessment. These are the facts as they stand, with an investigation report pending, overseen by the Care Quality Commission.

    Over the last six months I started to notice an inability to look in the mirror. Like I was hiding from myself. I stopped going swimming because I was worried about how I might look to others. I bought clothes that were too big for me and spent a lot of time considering cancelling a minibreak with my son for fear Parisiennes would think I was too fat for Paris. I obsessed about food and weight and felt shame in my body. These feelings and thoughts were pervasive and they created a disgust inside me at who I was and how I looked.

    I have sat in weekly meetings supporting my husband and been on the receiving end of contempt and hostility from professionals that has left me feeling anxious and distressed. Each time I have to tamp down these feelings so as to be able to be better than the professional in front of me and to not appear wounded and upset or angry in case there are repercussions for my husband, who is detained under their care. I felt a moral injury, a cognitive dissonance so strong that it was as though the trauma being experienced by my husband was mine too. A safeguarding social worker from the local authority, who had been asked to assess what had happened during this most recent admission, said to me, your account of what has happened sounds like you have experienced ‘vicarious trauma.’ Yes, that made sense, but it still didn’t connect with the part of my brain that couldn’t look in the mirror, that felt disgusted to be me. I felt so ashamed of myself that I tried, bizarrely, to think myself smaller every time I left the house. Vicarious trauma wasn’t enough to startle me out of what was happening to me. A thought formed this morning, in a pause created probably from the space that relative stability for my husband has allowed me, to realise I have become the receptacle, my body held the trauma, the trauma was me. It’s all I’ve been able to see and feel these many months. Not in any cognisant way, just that everything hurt. It was painful to live. I felt heavy and ungainly, like I made too much noise when I moved, took up too much space in the world outside.

    The distance between me and trauma had shrunk to nothing. The boundary between my husband’s experience and mine, between the system’s treatment of him and its now treatment of me, between external contempt and internal shame. All of it dissolved. I was it. I was shame and disgust and contempt and so diminished.

    I wrote this a couple of days ago, needed to get it out of my head….

    If I start I can’t stop

    so I don’t start

    Not beginning

    so I consider ending

    Beginning is to fall away from myself

    Submission gives way to nothingness

    There is annihilation in the stopping and starting

    Stopping offers raw naked emptiness

    Starting brings soft suffocating silence

    In the dark I cease to exist

    There is no start or stop

    just absolution

    What has been my experience of systems to date? It’s been about invalidation, gaslighting, obfuscation, a hierarchy of power and dominion brought to bear on individuals and their families, like myself, who don’t enter a room or a meeting or write an email or make a complaint from an equal position. We write, I write, for someone to hear and respond with care and attention to awful things that have happened. I tell the system harm has come to the person I love, can you say sorry and tell me that you won’t do it again. The sorry gets hidden in places that are hard to find. And sorries are a long time coming. And written in words other than sorry or we caused harm and we failed you. You must be so distressed by what happened to you and the impact on your family must be devastating. It feels like obliteration of all that is meaningful to enter into the system from a place of honesty and hope and to receive contempt and arrogance and a flexing of superiority and game playing, but always a zero-sum game.

    Where to go now. How to be now. Now I know what has been happening to me, in me. I’ve always known what the system was capable of, I just got caught in a fight I wasn’t winning. Awareness frees me from the power play, but it doesn’t assuage the internalised emotional assault that had taken up residence within me without my permission. It speaks to all families and carers and their vulnerability to harm caused from a narrative that says we care but a subtext that says we don’t really. I have been kept fragile whilst refusing to be finished, whilst still being diminished.

    ****

    Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

    The post Between contempt and shame appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026)

    Today’s links

    • Austerity creates fascism: We can’t afford to not afford nice things.
    • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
    • Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper’s Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from the Trump presidency; Spike Lee x Bernie Sanders; France v password hashing; Algorithms as Central European folk-dances; Save Comcast; Lex Luthor v export controls; Zuckerberg in the dock.
    • Upcoming appearances: Toronto, San Francisco, London, Berlin, NYC, Hay-on-Wye, London.
    • 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.


    A line of Nazis at the Nuremburg rally, throwing Nazi salutes. Their backs are to us. Facing them is a hand-tinted group of child laborers from the early 20th century, squinting suspiciously at them.

    Austerity creates fascism (permalink)

    I’m worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I’m worried about the psychosis that makes our “capital allocators” spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That’s some next-level underpants-gnomery:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism

    The thing that worries me about billionaires’ AI psychosis isn’t concern for their financial solvency. No, what I worry about is what happens when the seven companies that comprise a third of the S&P 500 stop trading the same $100b IOU around while pretending it’s in all of their bank accounts at once and implode, vaporizing a third of the US stock market.

    My concern about a massive collapse in the capital markets isn’t that workers will suffer directly. Despite all the Wonderful Life rhetoric about your money being in Joe’s house and the Kennedy house and Mrs Macklin’s house, the reality is that 95% of US workers have $955 saved for retirement. You could nuke the whole financial system and not take a dime out of most workers’ pockets:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

    No, the thing that has me terrified about AI is that when it craters and takes the economy with it, that we will respond the same way we have during every financial crisis of the 21st century: with austerity, and austerity breeds fascism.

    There’s a direct line from every K-shaped recovery to every strong-man who’s currently sending masked gunmen into the streets. The Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban rose to power after people who’d been suckered into denominating their mortgages in Swiss francs lost their houses when the currency markets moved suddenly, because the swindlers who’d sold them those mortgages took the position that wanting to live somewhere automatically made you an expert in forex risk, so caveat fuckin’ emptor, baby.

    Back in America, Obama decided to bail out the banks and not the people. His treasury secretary Tim Geithner told him the banks were headed for a catastrophic crash and could only be saved if he “foamed the runways” with everyday Americans’ mortgages. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure as banks, flush with public cash, threw them out of their homes and then flipped them to investment banks who became the country’s worst slumlords:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

    Americans were understandably not entirely happy with this outcome. So when Hillary Clinton replied to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with “America is already great,” her message was, “Vote for me if you think everything is great; vote for Trump if you think everything is fucked“:

    https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/clinton-america-is-already-great-220078

    “Austerity begets fascism” is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there’s a good empirical basis for believing it. In “Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right” four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:

    https://catherinedevries.eu/NHS.pdf

    Here’s how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that “public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards.” Good public services are the basis for “the social contract between rulers and the ruled” – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.

    When public services go wrong, people don’t always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they “withdraw their support” for the system.

    Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants” who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to “deserving natives.”

    (This is grimly hilarious, given that the wizened, decrepit rich world is critically dependent on migrants as a source of healthy, working-age workers who pay massive amounts into the system while barely making use of it, many of whom plan on retiring to their home countries when they do reach the age where they’re likely to extract a net loss to the benefits system.)

    Enter the NHS, a beloved institution that is hailed as the pride of the nation by both the political left and the right. The majority of Britons use the NHS, with only 12-14% of the population “going private,” so when the NHS declines, everybody notices (what’s more, even people with private care use the NHS for many of their needs).

    Britons love the NHS and they want the government to spend more on it. There’s “a broad public consensus that the government is not going far enough when it comes to funding.” That’s because generations of cuts to the NHS have left it substantially hollowed out, with major parts of the service handed over to for-profit entities who overcharge and underserve.

    The most tangible and immediate evidence of this slow-motion collapse comes when your local general practitioner (“family doctor” or “primary care physician” in Americanese) shuts down. The UK has lost 1,700 GP practices since 2013.

    Reasoning that a GP closure would make people angry at the system, the economists behind the paper wanted to see what happened to people’s political beliefs when their GP’s office shut. They relied on the GP Patient Survey, a longitudinal study run by NHS England and Ipsos Mori. The survey asks a statistically significant random sample of patients from every GP practice in the NHS and then weights the results “to reflect the demographic characteristics of the local population according to UK Census estimates.” It’s good data.

    The researchers cross-referenced this with various high-quality instruments that measured the political views of Britons, like the U Essex Understanding Society Panel, drawing on 13 years’ worth of surveys from 2009-2022, gaining access to a protected version of the dataset with fine-grained geographic information about survey respondents, which allowed them to link responses to the “catchment areas” for specific GPs’ office. They combined this data with the British Election Study panel, which has surveyed voters 29 times since 2014.

    Most of the paper describes the careful work the researchers did to analyze, cross-reference and validate this data, but what interested me was the conclusion: that people who see a severe degradation in the quality of the services they rely on switch their political affiliation to one of Britain’s fascist parties – UKIP, the Brexit Party, or Reform – parties that have called for ethnic cleansing in Britain.

    This is what has me scared. We can see the looming economic crises in our near future. If it’s not the AI crash that triggers the next wave of austerity, it’ll be the oil crisis created by Trump’s bungling in the Strait of Epstein. And of course, we could always get a twofer, because the Gulf States that were pouring hundreds of billions into AI data-centers now need every cent to rebuild the LNG shipping terminals and oil refineries that Iran blew up after Trump, Hegseth and Netanyahu started murdering all the schoolgirls they could target. Once they nope out of the AI bubble, that could trigger the collapse.

    This is a study about the NHS, but it’s not just about the NHS. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that people react this way when they experience cuts to their road maintenance, their schools, their community centers, and any other service they rely on. Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called ‘organized loneliness’ – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.

    The crisis is coming, but whether we do austerity when it gets here is our choice. Everywhere we turn, political leaders are rejecting generations of failed austerity in favor of “sewer socialism” – the idea that you get people to trust their government by earning that trust. Zohran Mamdani is fixing 100,000 potholes in the first 100 days, despite the multi-billion dollar deficit that outgoing Mayor Eric Adams created by “running the city like a business”:

    https://prospect.org/2026/04/10/zohran-mamdani-getting-new-york-city-believe-in-government/

    In Canada and the UK, party leaders like Avi Lewis (NDP) and Zack Polanski (Greens) are vowing to fight the coming crises by spending, not cutting. Compare that with UK fascist leader Nigel Farage, who says that if he’s elected, he’ll create a “paramilitary style” British ICE, building concentration camps for 24,000 migrants, with the hope of deporting 288,000 people per year:

    https://www.thenerve.news/p/reform-deportation-operation-restoring-justice-data-surveillance-palantir-uk-labour

    “Socialism or barbarism” isn’t just a cliche – it’s actually a choice on the ballot.

    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)

    #25yrsago The Server of Amontillado https://web.archive.org/web/20070112024841/http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012

    #25yrsago Mastercard threatens the moderator of rec.humor.funny https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Apr/mcrhf.html

    #15yrsago Sweden exports sweatshops: Ikea’s first American factory https://web.archive.org/web/20190404035900/https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-apr-10-la-fi-ikea-union-20110410-story.html

    #15yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party promises national broadband and net neutrality https://web.archive.org/web/20110412064952/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5734/125/

    #15yrsago Flapper’s dictionary: 1922 https://bookflaps.blogspot.com/2011/04/flappers-dictionary.html

    #15yrsago Toronto’s Silver Snail to leave Queen Street West https://web.archive.org/web/20110409181737/http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/970520–the-silver-snail-comics-icon-sold-to-move

    #15yrsago WI county clerk whose homemade voting software found 14K votes for Tea Party judge is an old hand at illegal campaigning https://web.archive.org/web/20110412121323/http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/article_7e777016-62b2-11e0-9b74-001cc4c002e0.html

    #15yrsago Canadian Tories’ campaign pledge: We will spy on the Internet https://web.archive.org/web/20110412125250/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5733/125/

    #15yrsago France to require unhashed password storage https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12983734

    #15yrsago Central European folk-dancers illustrated sorting algorithms https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html

    #10yrsago Save Comcast! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-comcast

    #10yrsago Goldman Sachs will pay $5B for fraudulent sales of toxic debt, no one will go to jail https://web.archive.org/web/20160412155435/https://consumerist.com/2016/04/11/goldman-sachs-to-pay-5b-to-settle-charges-of-selling-troubled-mortgages-ahead-of-the-financial-crisis/

    #10yrsago How could Lex Luthor beat the import controls on kryptonite? https://lawandthemultiverse.com/2016/04/11/batman-v-superman-and-import-licenses/

    #10yrsago Congresscritters spend 4 hours/day on the phone, begging for money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylomy1Aw9Hk

    #10yrsago Philippines electoral data breach much worse than initially reported, possibly worst ever https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/every-voter-in-philippines-exposed/

    #10yrsago A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control https://web.archive.org/web/20260311032317/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/cashless-society/477411/

    #10yrsago Boston Globe previews a front page from the Trump presidency https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf

    #10yrsago Spike Lee interviews Bernie Sanders: Vermont, Trump, Clinton, guns and Brooklyn https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/bernie-sanders-interviewed-by-spike-lee-thr-new-york-issue-880788/

    #5yrsago Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting “Black Lives Matter” https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/10/brand-safety-rupture/#brand-safety

    #5yrsago Google’s short-lived data-advantage https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

    #1yrago Zuckerberg in the dock https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/11/it-is-better-to-buy/#than-to-compete

    #1yrago The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about) https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/#oligarchism

    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.

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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.

    How to get Pluralistic:

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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

  • Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 04/13/2026

    Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 04/13/2026

    The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

    Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

    This week we have one newcomer on the list. “Project Hail Mary” is the most shared title.

    The most torrented movies for the week ending on April 13 are:

    Movie Rank Rank last week Movie name IMDb Rating / Trailer
    Most downloaded movies via torrent sites
    1 (…) Project Hail Mary 8.4 / trailer
    2 (1) Hoppers 7.5 / trailer
    3 (7) Avatar: Fire and Ash 7.4 / trailer
    4 (3) Crime 101 7.0 / trailer
    5 (2) Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man 6.9 / trailer
    6 (4) Send Help 7.0 / trailer
    7 (6) Scream 7 5.7 / trailer
    8 (…) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie 6.5 / trailer
    9 (8) One Battle After Another 7.7 / trailer
    10 (9) Wuthering Heights 6.2 / trailer

    Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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

  • Streeting denies changing pay deal for resident doctors

    A current six-day strike in England is set to end at 06:59 on Monday.
  • 30th April: IIPDW presents Understanding Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction

    30th April: IIPDW presents Understanding Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction

    Our IIPDW webinar on Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction is coming up!
    We’re looking forward to welcoming our panellists:
    • David Healey – Professor of Psychiatry, researcher and author with longstanding knowledge of PSSD, and founder of Rxisk.org
    • Yassie Pirani – therapist, researcher and educator on PSSD, she serves on the leadership team of the Canadian PSSD Society.
    • Roy Whaley – Roy volunteers for the PSSD Network to raise awareness, having lived with PSSD for 18 years.
    You can read more on all of our panellists’ life and work on Eventbrite via the green button below.
    The discussion will be moderated by our brilliant IIPDW Board Member, Stevie Lewis. After experiencing a gruelling protracted withdrawal from an antidepressant, Stevie is a UK-based campaigner working for better support services for those affected by prescribed harm.
    As always with IIPDW webinars, much of the time will be given to audience questions. So if there’s something you’d like to know on the topic of PSSD, come along to the webinar.
    If you can’t make it on the day, you can still get your ticket via Eventbrite to receive a copy of the recording.

    The post 30th April: IIPDW presents Understanding Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • RapidIPTV Kingpin ‘Dash the Iranian’ Gets Two Years Prison Under Spanish Plea Deal

    RapidIPTV Kingpin ‘Dash the Iranian’ Gets Two Years Prison Under Spanish Plea Deal

    In June 2020, Spanish police led a Europe-wide operation that arrested 11 people connected to a pirate IPTV platform with two million subscribers.

    Europol and Eurojust announced the action with considerable fanfare but declined to name the service. However, at the time we confirmed that a key target was RapidIPTV, a platform that had been quietly running an IPTV streaming empire since at least 2014.

    The authorities saw Amir Z. as the alleged mastermind behind the empire, which also offered a ‘franchise’ model. The man, known to his colleagues as “Dash the Iranian,” was arrested, and this week, after nearly six years of pre-trial proceedings, the prosecution formally started in court.

    RapidIPTV Kingpin Goes to Trial

    Spain’s National Court (Audiencia Nacional) began hearing the case on Tuesday against five defendants, all of Iranian origin. The charges cover membership of a criminal organization, intellectual property crimes, offenses against the market and consumers, as well as money laundering.

    In sharp contrast to the multi-year wait following the arrests, the trial was relatively short-lived.

    After three hours of negotiation, all defendants reached an agreement with prosecutors, according to EFE. The prosecution agreed to drop the most serious charge, membership of a criminal organization, after the defendants pleaded guilty to the three other charges.

    This resulted in a large sentencing reduction. The prosecution had originally sought 22 and a half years of prison time for Amir Z., but the agreed sentence was just over two years. Similarly, the money-laundering fine that initially could be as high as €70 million was reduced to €8 million as part of the deal.

    Because all sides agreed to the plea deal, it cannot be appealed by any party. This effectively ends the prosecution. The sentences for the remaining defendants were not reported.

    €12 Million for the Rights-Holders

    In addition to the €8 million fine to the state, the sentence also includes a damages fee of €12 million for the affected companies. The court also ordered the confiscation of all material seized during the raids, as well as all funds and accounts held by the defendants.

    The private prosecution coalition was an unusually large one. Warner Bros, Universal, Columbia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, New Line, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and LaLiga had all joined the action under Spain’s acusación particular mechanism, to hold the IPTV operators responsible.

    How much money can eventually be recouped has yet to be seen, but with an estimated 2 million subscribers, the operation generated substantial revenue.

    A Building in Iran, a Flat in Barcelona

    The money-laundering element of the case was also notable. Prosecutors alleged that the group moved approximately €25.1 million through payment processors, cryptocurrency exchanges, shell companies, and falsified invoices.

    Specific transactions identified by investigators included the construction of a residential building in Iran, the purchase of a Barcelona property valued at €1.6 million, and the purchase of two luxury vehicles worth a combined €400,000.

    rapidiptv-seize

    Those figures partially overlap with what was already public: at the time of the 2020 raids, Europol reported that police seized real estate, cars, jewelry, cash, and cryptocurrency worth approximately €4.8 million, and €1.1 million frozen in bank accounts.

    The platform used various domain names, including rapidiptv.com, rapidiptv.net, iptvstack.com, and the iptv.community forum. According to the prosecution, it captured signals from licensed pay-TV platforms and routed them through a private server network of 50 servers in at least 13 countries across Europe and North America.

    Interestingly, iptvstack.com and iptv.community both remain operational at the time of writing.

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

  • Since They Won’t Remind You, Here’s What Drs. John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, Actually Said 6 Years Ago

    The next time these doctors claim they were right, let’s remind them exactly what they claim to have been right about.

    The post Since They Won’t Remind You, Here’s What Drs. John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, Actually Said 6 Years Ago first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • Pluralistic: Don’t Be Evil (11 Apr 2026)

    Today’s links


    A sci-fi pulp robot holding a grotesque inverted severed head of a beared man aloft, zapping it with rays from its eye-visor. Behind the robot is a scene of collapsing Roman pillars.

    Don’t Be Evil (permalink)

    How I knew I was officially Old: I stopped being disoriented by the experience of meeting with grown-ass adults who wanted to thank me for the books of mine they’d read in their childhoods, which helped shape their lives. Instead of marveling that a book that felt to me like it was ten seconds old was a childhood favorite of this full-grown person, I was free to experience the intense gratification of knowing I’d helped this person find their way, and intense gratitude that they’d told me about it (including you, Sean – it was nice to meet you last night at Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal!).

    Now that I am Old, I find myself dwelling on key junctures from my life. It’s not nostalgia (“Nostalgia is a toxic impulse” – J. Hodgman) – rather, it’s an attempt to figure out how I got here (“My god! What have I done?” – D. Byrne), and also, how the world got this way.

    There’s one incident I return to a lot, a moment that didn’t feel momentous at the time, but which, on reflection, seems to have a lot to say about this moment – both for me, and for the world we live in.

    Back in the late 1990s, I co-founded a dotcom company, Opencola. It was a “free/open, peer-to-peer search and recommendation system.” The big idea was that we could combine early machine learning technology with Napster-style P2P file sharing and a web-crawler to help you find things that would interest you. The way it was gonna work was that you’d have a folder on your desktop and you could put things in it that you liked and the system would crawl other users’ folders, and the open web, and copy things into your folder that it found that seemed related to the stuff you liked. You could refine the system’s sensibilities by thumbs-up/thumbs-downing the suggestions, and it would refine its conception of your preferences over time. As with Napster and its successors, you could also talk to the people whose collections enriched your own, allowing you to connect with people who shared even your most esoteric interests.

    Opencola didn’t make it. Our VCs got greedy when Microsoft offered to buy us and tried to grab all the equity away from the founders. I quit and went to EFF, and my partners got very good jobs at Microsoft, and the company was bought for its tax-credits by Opentext, and that was that.

    (Well, not quite – several of the programmers who worked on the project have rebooted it, which is very cool!)

    https://opencola.io/

    But back in the Opencola days, we three partners would have these regular meetings where we’d brainstorm ways that we could make money off of this extremely cool, but frankly very noncommercial idea. As with any good brainstorming session, there were “no bad ideas,” so sometimes we would veer off into fanciful territory, or even very evil territory.

    It’s one of those evil ideas that I keep coming back to. Sometimes, during these money-making brainstorm sessions, we’d decompose the technology we were working on into its component parts to see if any subset of them might make money (“Be the first person to not do something no one has ever not done before” – B. Eno).

    We had a (by contemporary standards, primitive) machine-learning system; we had a web crawler; and we had a keen sense of how the early web worked. In particular, we were really interested in a new, Linux-based search tool that used citation analysis – a close cousin to our own collaborative filter, harnessing latent clues about relevance implicit in the web’s structure – to produce the best search results the web had ever seen. Like us, this company had no idea how to make money, so we were watching it very carefully. That company was called “Google.”

    That’s where the evil part came in. We were pretty sure we could extract a list of the 100,000 most commonly searched terms from Google, and then we could use our web-crawler to capture the top 100 results for each. We could feed these to our Bayesian machine-learning tool to create statistical models of the semantic structure of these results, and then we could generate thousands of pages of word-salad for each of those keywords that matched those statistical models, along with interlinks that could trick Google’s citation analysis model. Plaster those word-salad pages with ads, and voila – free cash flow!

    Of course, we didn’t do it. But even as we developed this idea, the room crackled with a kind of dark, excited dread. We weren’t any smarter than many other rooms full of people who were engaged in exercises just like this one. The difference was, we loved the web. The idea of someone deliberately poisoning it this way churned our stomachs. The whole point of Opencola was to connect people with each other based on their shared interests. We loved Google and how it helped you find the people who wrote the web in ways that delighted and informed you. This kind of spam, aimed at wrecking Google’s ability to help people make sense of the things we were all posting to the internet, was…grotesque.

    I didn’t know the term then, but what we were doing amounted to “red-teaming” – thinking through the ways that attackers could destroy something that we valued. Later, we tried “blue-teaming,” trying to imagine how our tools might help us fight back if someone else got the same idea and went through with it.

    I didn’t know the term “blue-teaming” then, either. Once I learned these terms, they brought a lot of clarity to the world. Today, I have another term that I turn to when I am trying to rally other people who love the internet and want it to be good: “Tron-pilled.” Tron “fought for the user.” Lots of us technologists are Tron-pilled. Back in the early days, when it wasn’t clear that there was ever going to be any money in this internet thing, being Tron-pilled was pretty much the only reason to get involved with it. Sure, there were a few monsters who fell into the early internet because it offered them a chance to torment strangers at a distance, but they were vastly outnumbered by the legion of Tron-pilled nerds who wanted to make the internet better because we wanted all our normie friends to have the same kind of good time we were having.

    The point of this is that there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn’t their genius – it was their callousness. When we brainstormed ways to break the internet, we felt scared and were inspired to try to save it. When they brainstormed ways to break the internet, they created pitch-decks.

    And still: the old web was good in so many ways for so long. The Tron-pilled amongst us held the line. When we build a new, good, post-American internet, we’re going to need a multitude of Tron-pilled technologists, old and young, who build, maintain – and, above all, defend it.

    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)

    #25yrsago Trotsky’s assassination – according to the FBI https://web.archive.org/web/20010413212536/http://foia.fbi.gov/trotsky.htm

    #25yrsago Online headline-writing guidelines from Jakob Nielsen https://memex.craphound.com/2001/04/09/headline-writing-guidelines-from-legendary-usability/

    #25yrsago Floppy-disk stained-glass windows https://web.archive.org/web/20010607052511/http://www.acme.com/jef/crafts/bathroom_windows.html

    #15yrsago English school principal announces zero tolerance for mismatched socks https://nationalpost.com/news/u-k-school-cracks-down-on-bad-manners

    #1yrago EFF’s lawsuit against DOGE will go forward https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/09/cases-and-controversy/#brocolli-haired-brownshirts

    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.

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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