YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Relying on drugs to stop obesity would be ‘societal failure’, says Chris Whitty

    England’s top doctor says the drugs should be for a minority and more effort is needed to prevent obesity in the first place.

  • Belarusian Businessman Claims Former Cyprus President’s Family Held Firms For Him

    Prior to a court battle over ownership of his assets, Belarusian businessman Yury Chyzh has produced a written admission that he used “nominee” owners to maintain control of two firms registered in Cyprus. 

    The nominee owners of the two firms included his three children, Chyzh wrote in a letter to the Cyprus Registrar of Companies. The previous nominee owner was a firm owned by the daughter and business partners of Nicos Anastasiades, the former president of Cyprus, which is a member of the European Union.

    Chyzh was under EU sanctions at the time.

    Nominee owners are figureheads who appear in official paperwork to meet regulatory requirements, but do not actually control a company.

    “I have always owned these companies through trustees and nominee beneficiaries,” Chyzh wrote in the August 2024 letter, which was obtained by the civil society group Rabochy Ruch and shared with the Belarusian Investigative Center. 

    From 2017, Chyzh’s three children were added in succession as a “nominal beneficiary” of the Cyprus firms Welgro Services Limited and Profax Investments Limited, according to Chyzh. Before then, he wrote, he owned both firms “through Imperium Nominees Limited.”

    Imperial Nominees is a corporate service provider, and Chyzh’s firms were only two among many clients. Corporate records show that Imperium Nominees is owned by the daughters and previous business partners of Anastasiades, who was Cyprus’ president from 2013 to 2023.

    The timing is critical. Between 2012 and 2015, Chyzh was under EU sanctions for financially supporting the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, Belarus’ notoriously corrupt and authoritarian president. 

    Anastasiades said he had no ownership of Imperium or the law firm bearing his name, as he transferred his shares to his daughter and former business partners before assuming the presidency. 

    His former business partner, Theophanis Th. Philippou, speaking for the owners of the law and corporate services firms, strongly denied any “unlawful or improper conduct.”

    Family Businesses

    Chizh’s latest legal battle in Belarus comes five years after he was arrested on fraud and money laundering charges, after reportedly falling out of favor with Lukashenko. Chizh was convicted in 2023.

    In July 2021, five months after his arrest, the Minsk Economic Court declared his Triple Group of companies bankrupt due to debts to creditors. The court terminated the bankruptcy proceedings in 2024. It is unclear what the outcome of the bankruptcy process was.

    The bankruptcy included one of his key companies, TriplePharm, which is majority owned by the firms he wrote about in his letter to the Cypriot corporate registry, Welgro Services Limited and Profax Investments Limited. 

    Chyzh filed a lawsuit in September 2025 against those two Cypriot companies in a Belarus court in an effort to regain control of his assets. Chyzh’s three children have been called as third parties in the case on the side of the Cypriot firms that are being sued, Welgro Services Limited and Profax Investments Limited. The lawsuit is ongoing.

    Both those Cypriot companies were also serviced until the end of 2015 by two more firms owned by Anastasiades’ daughters and his former business partners, according to corporate records. 

    Imperium Services Ltd was secretary for the companies, while the Nicos Chr. Anastasiades and Partners law firm acted as legal advisers. 

    Anastasiades owned the majority of Imperium Services, as well as the law firm that bears his name, until his presidency beginning in February 2013. Just before assuming office, he passed his shares to his daughter Elsa, — and his business partners,Philippou and Stathis Lemis. His other daughter, Ino, was added as a shareholder in 2015. 

    The former president said he was “unaware and therefore unable to answer” questions emailed by CIReN, OCCRP’s member center in Cyprus. “In lieu of any other reply,” he attached a letter he sent to Cyprus’ parliament in 2021.

    “Since the transfer of the shares I have had absolutely no relationship or connection with the firm that bears my name,” Anastasiades wrote to parliament that year. “Nor does the composition of the share capital in any way justify the claim that it is the law firm ‘of the president’s daughters.’”

    He told CIReN that the law firm would provide more “detailed answers.”

    The firm’s partners include both Anastasiades’ daughters, as well as Lemis and Philippou, who are managing partners. All four of them are also shareholders of Imperium companies. 

    “We definitely deny all allegations of unlawful or improper conduct on the part of our firm,” Philippou wrote in an emailed response to questions, including how often sanctions lists were checked against companies being provided with corporate services.

    Anastasiades’ daughters did not directly respond to questions. Nor did Lemis. Chyzh did not respond to a request for comment. 

    ‘Significant Turnover’

    Chyzh’s August 2024 letter to the Cyprus Registrar of Companies came in the run-up to his legal battle in Belarus over control of the companies. 

    “I am sending you this letter in order to notify you of the situation that has developed,” Chyzh wrote in the letter, which was notarized in Moscow.

    Although they appeared on documents as the owners, Chyzh wrote that his children “have always performed only intermediary functions, acting on my behalf and under my instructions. I have always been and remain the real beneficiary of Welgro Services Limited and Profax Investments Limited.”

    Chyzh also pointed out that his children were born in 1988, 1990 and 1996. That would have made them about 20, 18 and 12 years old when the first of the companies was formed in 2008.

    “They did not have the financial or other capabilities to establish the companies,” he wrote.

    While the outcome of the bankruptcy of Chizh’s Belarusian companies is unclear, corporate documents from Belarus show that TriplePharm is active today, and is 90-percent-owned by the Cyprus companies.

    Chyzh noted that the Cyprus firms are “members of” companies in Belarus. “These Belarusian companies represent businesses with a long history and significant turnover,” he added. 

    In 2011, a subsidiary of Profax called Bertament Limited received a $222 million loan from another Cypriot firm, Mabor Co Ltd. Mabor was described in annual financial reports as a “related party” to Bertament. This means the two companies share some degree of common ownership or control, suggesting the possibility that the same beneficiary of Bertament may have had shares in, and possibly full control over, Mabor.

    Mabor was also owned, on paper, by Imperium Nominees. Philippou, the shareholder of Imperium Nominees and managing partner of Nicos Chr. Anastasiades and Partners law firm, signed the documents for Mabor’s funds transfers. It is not clear if the loan was repaid. 

    Philippou did not respond to a question about whether Chyzh owned Mabor.

    Financial filings show that the company recorded $4.3 billion in turnover in 2011, from re-exporting Russian petroleum products from Belarus.

    Mabor was dissolved in July 2024, a month before Chyzh appealed to the Cyprus registry to recognize his ownership of Profax.

    Reached by phone, Philippou said he remembered the company name, but declined to comment on specifics. He did not respond to questions about Mabor in writing.

    In January 2012, Bertament Limited signed a contract for a 16-day stay for a group of Belarusians at a Russian ski resort. The $25,000 invoice for the trip was issued to Philippou, who did not reply to a question from reporters about it.

    The guestlist included Chyzh, two businessmen currently sanctioned by the EU, and several athletes and beauty queens, as well as Lukashenko’s personal priest. The holiday coincided with a trip Lukashenko made to the same resort, where he met with then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

  • On day seven of Middle East war, no let-up in suffering

    The escalating war in the Middle East has heightened growing concerns about further civilian suffering and displacement in the region and far beyond, UN agencies said on Friday.

  • Weekly Roundup: March 6

    On Monday, Veena Dubal interviewed Aziza Ahmed about her new book, Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS. The conversation covers why women were initially excluded from receiving AIDS diagnoses and support, the feminist lawyers and activists who fought against these policies, the adverse public health consequences of carceral feminism, and much else! On Tuesday…

    Source

  • Pirate Streaming Portal ‘P-Stream’ Shuts Down Following ACE/MPA Pressure

    Pirate Streaming Portal ‘P-Stream’ Shuts Down Following ACE/MPA Pressure

    Last month, we reported on a new push from the Motion Picture Association and the ACE anti-piracy alliance, hoping to identify several pirate site operators.

    They obtained DMCA subpoenas at a California federal court, requiring Discord and Cloudflare to share all personal information they have on customers associated with domains such as hdfull.org, sflix.fi, and pstream.mov.

    MPA/ACE targets

    pstreamsub

    ACE has used these subpoenas as an intelligence-gathering tool for years. While these efforts are often fruitless, as many site owners use fake data, they occasionally have some effect. That’s also true for the latest round, which has motivated P-Stream to shut down permanently.

    P-Stream Shuts Down

    A few hours ago, P-stream’s operator, Pas, informed TorrentFreak that they decided to shut down the website effective immediately. This decision is a direct result of the DMCA subpoena and the added legal pressure, which previously resulted in the loss of the Discord server as well.

    People who try to access the site’s official domain are now redirected to a shutdown message. Pas stresses that P-Stream never hosted any infringing material, but the operator can’t afford to mount a legal defense if it came to that.

    “Although P-Stream does NOT host, control, or guarantee any media or content, I can’t afford to fight that in court. So to be safe, P-Stream will no longer host a public instance,” the operator writes.

    P-Stream’s shutdown message

    shutdown

    While the operator regrets the shutdown, Pas also mentions that the project was life-consuming and took its toll, so the decision to throw in the towel could be a healthy one on that front too.

    Code Remains Public

    P-Stream was launched in April 2024, when movie-web was shut down by legal pressure from Hollywood. It eventually grew into a popular project of its own with close to an estimated ten million visits last month.

    P-Stream, 24-hours ago

    p-stream

    However, two years after its predecessor’s demise, history is repeating, perhaps in more ways than we now know.

    The P-Stream project was largely based on sudo-flix, which itself was a successor to the original movie-web code. Today, the (alleged) P-Stream code remains available as well, through publicly available GitHub repositories. Whether these repos are controlled by the site’s operator is unknown.

    As always, there will likely be people who try to keep the project going, and once they become popular enough, these projects will come on Hollywood’s radar, repeating the same process.

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

  • ‘I’m still haunted that he died alone’: The last voices of the Covid inquiry

    Bereaved families have the final say as the Covid inquiry completes three years of public hearings.
  • Young Americans Aren’t Buying Old Narratives on China

    Young Americans Aren’t Buying Old Narratives on China

    Call it what you want. Post-America. The American Century of Humiliation. The decline of the Burger Reich. However you slice it, the United States’ de facto role as the global hegemon is waning. The wheel of disillusionment turns, and reasons for Americans to grow tired become redundant: dire economic conditions for working people; the cringe-ification of the government apparatus through DOGE; civilians shot in the street by ICE agents; militarized police; towns driven to madness by the hum of AI data centers; the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran; President Donald Trump’s links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; the disappearance of immigrants at home; and a direct hand in the Gaza genocide abroad, to name just a few. Who, then, could blame American youth for looking at how other countries govern?

  • Pluralistic: Blowtorching the frog (05 Mar 2026) executive-dysfunction

    Today’s links

    • Blowtorching the frog: If I must have enemies, let them be impatient ones.
    • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
    • Object permanence: Bill Cosby v Waxy; Rodney King, 20 years on; Peter Watts v flesh-eating bacteria; American authoritarianism; Algebra II v Statistics for Citizenship; Ideas lying around; Banksy x Russian graffists; TSA v hand luggage; Hack your Sodastream; There were always enshittifiers.
    • Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
    • Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
    • Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
    • Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
    • Colophon: All the rest.


    Elon Musk wielding a flamethrower; he is roasting the snout of a giant frog

    Blowtorching the frog (permalink)

    Back in 2018, the Singletrack blog published a widely read article explaining the lethal trigonometry of a UK intersection where drivers kept hitting cyclists:

    https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-this-type-of-road-junction-will-keep-killing-cyclists/

    There are lots of intersections that are dangerous for cyclists, of course, but what made Ipsley Cross so lethal was a kind of eldritch geometry that let the cyclist and the driver see each other a long time before the collision, while also providing the illusion that they were not going to collide, until an instant before the crash.

    This intersection is an illustration of a phenomenon called “constant bearing, decreasing range,” which (the article notes) had long been understood by sailors as a reason that ships often collide. I’m not going to get into the trigonometry here (the Singletrack article does a great job of laying it out).

    I am, however, going to use this as a metaphor: there is a kind of collision that is almost always fatal because its severity isn’t apparent until it is too late to avert the crash. Anyone who’s been filled with existential horror at the looming climate emergency can certainly relate.

    The metaphor isn’t exact. “Constant bearing, decreasing range” is the result of an optical illusion that makes it seem like things are fine right up until they aren’t. Our failure to come to grips with the climate emergency is (partly‡) caused by a different cognitive flaw: the fact that we struggle to perceive the absolute magnitude of a series of slow, small changes.

    ‡The other part being the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics, obviously

    This is the phenomenon that’s invoked in the parable of “boiling a frog.” Supposedly, if you put a frog in a pot of water at a comfortable temperature and then slowly warm the water to boiling, the frog will happily swim about even as it is cooked alive. In this metaphor, the frog can only perceive relative changes, so all that it senses is that the water has gotten a little warmer, and a small change in temperature isn’t anything to worry about, right? The fact that the absolute change to the water is lethal does not register for our (hypothetical) frog.

    Now, as it happens, frogs will totally leap clear of a pot of warming water when it reaches a certain temperature, irrespective of how slowly the temperature rises. But the metaphor persists, because while it does not describe the behavior of frogs in a gradually worsening situation, it absolutely describes how humans respond to small, adverse changes in our environment.

    Take moral compromises: most of us set out to be good people, but reality demands small compromises to our ethics. So we make a small ethical compromise, and then before long, circumstances demand another compromise, and then another, and another, and another. Taken in toto, these compromises represent a severe fall from our personal standards, but so long as they are dripped out in slow and small increments, too often we rationalize our way into them: each one is only a small compromise, after all:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#thinkdifferent

    Back to the climate emergency: for the first 25 years after NASA’s James Hansen testified before Congress about “global heating,” the changes to our world were mostly incremental: droughts got a little worse, as did floods. We had a few more hurricanes. Ski seasons got shorter. Heat waves got longer. Taken individually, each of these changes was small enough for our collective consciousness to absorb as within the bounds of normalcy, or, at worst, just a small worsening. Sure, there could be a collision on the horizon, but it wasn’t anything urgent enough to justify the massive effort of decarbonizing our energy and transportation:

    https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

    It’s not that we’re deliberately committing civilizational suicide, it’s just that slow-moving problems are hard to confront, especially in a world replete with fast-moving, urgent problems.

    But crises precipitate change:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrEdbKwivCI

    Before 2022, Europe was doing no better than the rest of the world when it came to confronting the climate emergency. Its energy mix was still dominated by fossil fuels, despite the increasing tempo of wildfires and floods and the rolling political crises touched off by waves of climate refugees. These were all dire and terrifying, but they were incremental, a drip-drip-drip of bad and worsening news.

    Then Putin invaded Ukraine, and the EU turned its back on Russian gas and oil. Overnight, Europe was plunged into an urgent energy crisis, confronted with the very real possibility that millions of Europeans would shortly find themselves shivering in the dark – and not just for a few nights, but for the long-foreseeable future.

    At that moment, the slow-moving crisis of the climate became the Putin emergency. The fossil fuel industry – one of the most powerful and corrupting influences in Brussels and around the world – was sidelined. Europe raced to solarize. In three short years, the continent went from decades behind on its climate goals to a decade ahead on them:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never

    Putin could have continued to stage minor incursions on Ukraine, none of them crossing any hard geopolitical red lines, and Europe would likely have continued to rationalize its way into continuing its reliance on Russia’s hydrocarbon exports. But Putin lacked the patience to continue nibbling away at Ukraine. He tried to gobble it all down at once, and then everything changed.

    There is a sense, then, in which Putin’s impatient aggression was a feature, not a bug. But for Putin’s lack of executive function, Ukraine might still be in danger of being devoured by Russia, but without Europe taking any meaningful steps to come to its aid – and Europe’s solar transition would still be decades behind schedule.

    Enshittification is one of those drip-drip-drip phenomena, too. Platform bosses have a keen appreciation of how much value we deliver to one another – community, support, mutual aid, care – and they know that so long as we love each other more than we hate the people who own the platforms, we’ll likely stay glued to them. Mark Zuckerberg is a master of “twiddling” the knobs on the back-ends of his platforms, announcing big, enshittifying changes, and then backing off on them to a level that’s shittier than it used to be, but not as shitty as he’d threatened:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

    Zuck is a colossal asshole, a man who founded his empire in a Harvard dorm room to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow undergrads, a man who knowingly abetted a genocide, a man who cheats at Settlers of Catan:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

    But despite all these disqualifying personality defects, Mark Zuckerberg has one virtue that puts him ahead of his social media competitor Elon Musk: Zuck has a rudimentary executive function, and so he is capable of backing down (sometimes, temporarily) from his shittiest ideas.

    Contrast that with Musk’s management of Twitter. Musk invaded Twitter the same year Putin invaded Ukraine, and embarked upon a string of absolutely unhinged and incontinent enshittificatory gambits that lacked any subtlety or discretion. Musk didn’t boil the frog – he took one of his flamethrowers to it.

    Millions of people were motivated to hop out of Musk’s Twitter pot. But millions more – including me – found ourselves mired there. It wasn’t that we liked Musk’s Twitter, but we had more reasons to stay than we had to go. For me, the fact that I’d amassed half a million followers since some old pals messaged me to say they’d started a new service called “Twitter” meant that leaving would come at a high price to my activism and my publishing career.

    But Musk kept giving me reasons to reassess my decision to stay. Very early into the Musk regime, I asked my sysadmin Ken Snider to investigate setting up a Bluesky server that I could move to. I was already very active on Mastodon, which is designed to be impossible to enshittify the way Musk had done to Twitter, because you can always move from one Fediverse server to another if the management turns shitty:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

    But for years, Bluesky’s promise of federation remained just that – a promise. Technically, its architecture dangled the promise of multiple, independent Bluesky servers, but practically, there was no way to set this up:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/

    But – to Bluesky’s credit – they eventually figured it out, and published the tools and instructions to set up your own Bluesky servers. Ken checked into it, and told me that it was all do-able, but not until a planned hardware upgrade to the Linux box he keeps in a colo cage in Toronto was complete. That upgrade happened a couple months ago, and yesterday, Ken let me know that he’d finished setting up a Bluesky server, just for me. So now I’m on Bluesky, at @doctorow.pluralistic.net:

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

    I am on Bluesky, the service, but I am not a user of Bluesky, the company. That means that I’m able to interact with Bluesky users without clicking through Bluesky’s abominable terms of service, through which you permanently surrender your right to sue the company (even if you later quit Bluesky and join another server!):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

    Remember: I knew and trusted the Twitter founders and I still got screwed. It’s not enough for the people who run a service to be good people – they also have to take steps to insulate themselves (and their successors) from the kind of drip-drip-drip rationalizations that turn a series of small ethical waivers into a cumulative avalanche of pure wickedness:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

    Bluesky’s “binding arbitration waiver” does the exact opposite: rather than insulating Bluesky’s management from their own future selves’ impulse to do wrong, a binding arbitration waiver permanently insulates Bluesky from consequences if (when) they yield the temptation to harm their users.

    But Bluesky’s technical architecture offers a way to eat my cake and have it, too. By setting up a Bluesky (the service) account on a non-Bluesky (the company) server, I can join a social space that has lots of people I like, and lots of interesting technical innovations, like composable moderation, without submitting to the company’s unacceptable terms of service:

    https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

    If Twitter was on the same slow enshittification drip-drip-drip of the pre-Musk years, I might have set up on Bluesky and stayed on Twitter. But thanks to Musk and his frog blowtorch, I’m able to make a break. For years now, I have posted this notice to Twitter nearly every day:

    Twitter gets worse every single day. Someday it will degrade beyond the point of usability. The Fediverse is our best hope for an enshittification-resistant alternative. I’m @pluralistic@mamot.fr.

    Today, I am posting a modified version, which adds:

    If you’d like to follow me on Bluesky, I’m @doctorow.pluralistic.net. This is the last thread I will post to Twitter.

    Crises precipitate change. All things being equal, the world would be a better place without Vladimir Putin or Elon Musk or Donald Trump in it. But these incontinent, impatient, terrible men do have a use: they transform slow-moving crises that are too gradual to galvanize action into emergencies that can’t be ignored. Putin pushed the EU to break with fossil fuels. Musk pushed millions into federated social media. Trump is ushering in a post-American internet:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

    If you’re reading this on Twitter, this is the long-promised notice that I’m done here. See you on the Fediverse, see you on Bluesky – see you in a world of enshittification-resistant social media.

    It’s been fun, until it wasn’t.

    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 Waxy threatened with a lawsuit by Bill Cosby over “House of Cosbys” vids https://waxy.org/2006/03/litigation_cosb/

    #15yrsago Proposed TX law would criminalize TSA screening procedures https://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2011/03/texas-legislation-proposes-felony-charges-for-tsa-agents/

    #15yrsago Rodney King: 20 years of citizen photojournalism https://mediactive.com/2011/03/02/rodney-king-and-the-rise-of-the-citizen-photojournalist/

    #15yrsago Mobile “bandwidth hogs” are just ahead of the curve https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/02/2027209/High-Bandwidth-Users-Are-Just-Early-Adopters

    #15yrsago Peter Watts blogs from near-death experience with flesh-eating bacteria https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?category_name=flesh-eating-fest-11

    #15yrsago How a HarperCollins library book looks after 26 checkouts (pretty good!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je90XRRrruM

    #15yrsago Banksy bails out Russian graffiti artists https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/04/banksy-bails-out-russian-graffiti-artists/

    #15yrsago TSA wants hand-luggage fee to pay for extra screening due to checked luggage fees https://web.archive.org/web/20110308142316/https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TSA_BAGGAGE_FEES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-03-03-16-50-03

    #15yrsago US house prices fall to 1890s levels (where they usually are) https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Paper-Economy/2011/0303/Home-prices-falling-to-level-of-1890s

    #10yrsago Whuffie would be a terrible currency https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-wealth-inequality-is-even-worse-in-reputation-economies/

    #10yrsago Ditch your overpriced Sodastream canisters in favor of refillable CO2 tanks https://www.wired.com/2016/03/sodamod/

    #10yrsago Why the First Amendment means that the FBI can’t force Apple to write and sign code https://www.eff.org/files/2016/03/03/16cm10sp_eff_apple_v_fbi_amicus_court_stamped.pdf

    #10yrsago Apple vs FBI: The privacy disaster is inevitable, but we can prevent the catastrophe https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/privacy-apple-fbi-encryption-surveillance

    #10yrsago The 2010 election was the most important one in American history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw41BDhI_K8

    #10yrsago As Apple fights the FBI tooth and nail, Amazon drops Kindle encryption https://web.archive.org/web/20160304055204/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/amazon-removes-device-encryption-fire-os-kindle-phones-and-tablets

    #10yrsago Understanding American authoritarianism https://web.archive.org/web/20160301224922/https://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

    #10yrsago Proposal: replace Algebra II and Calculus with “Statistics for Citizenship” https://web.archive.org/web/20190310081625/https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/03/algebra-ii-has-to-go.html

    #10yrsago Panorama: the largest photo ever made of NYC https://360gigapixels.com/nyc-skyline-photo-panorama/

    #1yrago Ideas Lying Around https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

    #1yrago There Were Always Enshittifiers https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/object-permanence/#picks-and-shovels

    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

    • “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 (1066 words today, 43341 total)

    • “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

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    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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    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/
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  • ‘Moment of reckoning’ needed in social care, says Louise Casey

    The chair of the independent commission on social care recommends introducing a full-time dementia tsar, and new fast-track passport system for people diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND).

  • Congress Is Considering Abolishing Your Right to Be Anonymous Online

    Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., speaks at a rally in support of the Kids Online Safety Act on Dec. 10, 2024, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Accountable Tech

    In August 2024, the Biden administration hosted hundreds of influencers at the White House for the first-ever Creator Economy Conference. Neera Tanden, a senior Biden adviser, took to the stage and bemoaned anonymity online. The influencers alongside her agreed, pushing the idea that anonymous speech on the internet is harmful, and regulation is needed to force the use of real names on social media. The audience whispered excitedly as those on stage spoke about how proposed laws like the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, could unmask every troll. 

    This narrative of online safety, particularly in relation to children, has become central to the bipartisan effort to censor and deanonymize the internet for everyone. Today, a package of a dozen “child online safety” bills is moving forward in the House of Representatives with bipartisan support. The laws, framed as a way to crack down on harmful content and make the internet safer, would force social media companies to enact invasive identity verification measures in order to keep children from accessing online spaces.

    The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.

    Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street.


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    Already, the U.S. government is flooding social media platforms with subpoenas seeking to unmask hundreds of anonymously run anti-ICE social media accounts. These laws would make it all the more easier for the government to target and prosecute those who dissent. 

    Vulnerable members of society will suffer most. Trans people under attack from the government could be identified and outed without their consent. Undocumented immigrants could be cut off from the ability to communicate and connect with advocates. Young people seeking abortions in states with restrictive laws might no longer have the ability to access information safely and anonymously.

    Not only will a de-anonymized internet be valuable to the government as it seeks to tighten control, it will also make it easier for any corporation or bad actor to intimidate, blackmail, or exploit people by leveraging their own data against them.

    The quest to remove anonymous speech from the web is not new. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, have long pursued these laws, arguing that online anonymity fuels pornography, exploitation, and general moral decay. In recent years, Democrats have become integral to advancing these proposals, falsely claiming that surveillance laws will crack down on Big Tech or curb social media addiction.

    The laws will lead to more data being collected on kids, which predatory companies can then use to target them in more invasive ways.

    None of these surveillance laws do any of that. In fact, the laws will lead to more data being collected on kids, which predatory companies can then use to target them in more invasive ways. Already, these bills are standing in the way of protecting kids online: Last week, the FTC said it would decline to enforce COPPA, a landmark law that mandates the protection of children’s data, in order to incentivize ID verification.

    The laws would create a massive new market for third-party identification vendors, many funded by the same tech investors who backed social media giants, such as Peter Thiel, who funded ID verification platform Persona via his investment group Founders Fund. Smaller apps will be forced to shoulder the enormous cost of enacting identity verification measures, hindering their ability to operate, and making it harder to compete with Big Tech companies that are leveraging these laws to consolidate power.

    It’s no surprise then that Big Tech companies are also heavily involved in lobbying for various versions of these laws. Elon Musk has endorsed KOSA. The Digital Childhood Alliance, a group that frequently posts about the dangers of “Big Tech,” is secretly funded by Meta, and has played a role in pushing the App Store Accountability Act. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told a court that Apple and Google should verify the identity of every smartphone user at the operating system level, which would permanently end anonymous internet access for everyone.

    This exact invasive scheme is being boosted by Democratic lawmakers like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who recently signed an ID verification law for all operating systems, including Linux, and has mused about banning all social media for users under the age of 16.

    “Young people still have human rights.”

    These efforts have “been brewing for or for a few years now, but just in the last few months, we’ve seen a lot of momentum,” said David Greene, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While it’s tempting to take a paternalistic attitude toward young people, Greene said that it’s crucial to recognize young people have rights too, and often use the internet when taking part in social justice movements.

    “Young people still have human rights,” he said, “and that includes the right to access information and to associate with other people and to speak to the world. These laws are designed to diminish those rights.”


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    Young people have led campuswide protests against the genocide in Gaza and against ICE across the country. Laws that restrict and surveil online access would severely limit their speech and ability to organize. And as the U.S. escalates attacks in the Middle East and immigration agents exert more power at home, activists are becoming concerned by the assault on anonymous speech.

    “Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home,” Evan Greer, director of digital rights group Fight for the Future, posted to Bluesky.

    The Kids Online Safety Act, co-sponsored by members of both parties, is one of the most dangerous proposals currently making its way through Congress. The law would empower state attorneys general to mass censor any content online deemed “harmful to minors.” The Heritage Foundation has already come out publicly and said it plans to leverage KOSA and similar “online safety” laws to remove LGBTQ+ content and abortion content from the internet. 

    Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the lead co-sponsor of KOSA, said that it was essential to pass the law to protect “minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture.” Jonathan Haidt, the author of the bestselling book “The Anxious Generation,” who has played a major role in rallying political and public support for these laws globally, has promoted the fringe theory that some young people become trans because of the social media they consume.

    As KOSA has encountered growing backlash, more lawmakers have started pushing proposed ID verification at the operating system or app store level. On Wednesday, the X account for the House Energy and Commerce Committee boosted a dubious poll from far right think tank the American Principles Project, a group that has opposed abortion and same-sex marriage, declaring, “The OVERWHELMING majority of voters agree—app stores should have to verify users’ age to prevent minors from downloading apps without parental consent.” 

    But enacting identity verification at the app store level does nothing to address the privacy issues at play. Privacy activists and those fighting the law have sounded the alarm about how the App Store Accountability Act creates a sprawling, insecure data-sharing pipeline that mandates divulging highly sensitive user age data with millions of general-audience apps. This is why users in some states are being forced to provide their government IDs to download things like a weather app or calculator app. The way the law equates the entire internet and treats every app in the app store as inherently pornographic will also inevitably chill speech.

    The way the law equates the entire internet and treats every app in the app store as inherently pornographic will inevitably chill speech.

    Rising reactionary sentiment and right-wing extremism under Trump has accelerated the push for online age verification, Greer said. “Online protest, documenting war crimes, even news articles could be suppressed [if these laws pass].” Already, similar versions of these laws are playing out abroad. Soon after the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act took effect last summer, the law was used to restrict content, including videos documenting police violence, posts challenging the government’s narratives on Palestine, and a subreddit dedicated to documenting Israel’s war crimes.

    China, Saudi Arabia, and Russia have used their vast online surveillance systems to crack down on speech challenging the government, imprisoning activists who leverage social media to challenge power. Dozens more countries are seeking to replicate authoritarian-style internet surveillance within their own borders. Indonesia, Malaysia, France, and Australia are among those that have embraced identity verification systems that would eliminate anonymous speech online under the guise of protecting children. 


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    “The through-line couldn’t be clearer: destroying online anonymity is a way for government to be able to identify ­— and ultimately punish — dissenters,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group. “In the United States, the federal government’s recent demands that online services identify critics of DHS and ICE serves as a chilling example of the types of attacks on lawful speech that such laws will only enable further.” 

    The harms of widespread government censorship, he said, are only compounded by the “massive privacy and security threats posed by collecting personally identifiable information en masse.” Systems built to remove anonymity in the name of “child safety” will be used to identify whistleblowers, protest organizers, and critics of federal agencies, Cohn said. “At this point, not seeing the planet-sized red flags is more a result of willful blindness than anything else,” he said. 

    For journalists, dissidents, and vulnerable communities, the ability to gather and share information anonymously online is critical. Just this week, The Atlantic reported that the Pentagon is seeking to use powerful AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to mass surveil U.S. citizens by harvesting broad swaths of commercially available data. Age verification laws would dramatically expand the collection of identity-linked browsing and speech data, endangering users and creating new troves of data for commercial and government exploitation.

    LGBTQ+ youth frequently rely on anonymous online spaces to explore identity and seek support, particularly in hostile states. Kansas recently invalidated hundreds of trans residents’ driver’s licenses. As harmful laws that target LGBTQ+ people spread, openly identifying as LGBTQ+ online could put people in danger. Tying online access to government-issued IDs will also deter vulnerable young people from seeking help or gaining information about crucial topics like abuse or sexual health. Reproductive justice activists have been sounding the alarm about state efforts to de-anonymize organizations providing abortion and reproductive health information online.

    Whistleblowers especially rely on anonymous accounts to call out corporate or government wrongdoing. During Trump’s first administration, dozens of employees and scientists within the government set up “rogue” Twitter accounts, revealing firsthand information about the administration’s efforts to gut federal agencies and censor scientific information. The “rebel” accounts mirroring those of NASA, the U.S. National Park Service, and other agencies revealed crucial research on topics like climate change to the public. 

    The push to eliminate online anonymity is ultimately a fight over whether the internet remains a space for dissent and free expression or further becomes a dystopian digital panopticon that operates as an arm of the surveillance state. A free society depends on the right to publish and consume information anonymously and to organize and speak privately. Age verification policies only bolster the power of Big Tech and give the government complete authority to surveil and censor online speech.

    The post Congress Is Considering Abolishing Your Right to Be Anonymous Online appeared first on The Intercept.