YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Myriad fragments, one tragedy: How four years of war changed Ukraine

    Although fighting had been raging in the east of Ukraine since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, most in the country did not believe all-out war would occur. With the full-scale invasion now reaching the four-year mark, many Ukrainians cannot believe it has gone on for so long, with no end in sight. 
  • Belgian Pirate Site Blocking Order Targets Cloudflare and Google, But Not Their DNS

    Belgian Pirate Site Blocking Order Targets Cloudflare and Google, But Not Their DNS

    Belgium has become one of Europe’s most active testing grounds when it comes to pirate site-blocking enforcement.

    The country’s two-step system, where a court issues an injunction and a government department (BAPO) then determines how it is implemented, has resulted in a series of diverse site-blocking orders since the framework launched in 2025.

    An Eclectic Site Blocking Push

    The first order, obtained by sports broadcaster DAZN in April 2025, started quite aggressively. It required ISPs and third-party DNS resolvers, including Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco’s OpenDNS, to stop resolving over 100 pirate domains. If not, they would risk a fine of €100,000 per day.

    Cisco refused to comply with the order and instead pulled OpenDNS out of Belgium entirely. Cloudflare and Google remained in Belgium and cooperated, though each did so in its own way.

    A second blocking order followed in July last year, requiring various intermediaries, including ISPs, hosting companies, and payment services, to block shadow libraries. Initially, Internet Archive’s Open Library was also targeted, but this decision was eventually reversed after the U.S. non-profit agreed to geo-block certain content on its service.

    Meanwhile, Cisco reportedly appealed the initial site-blocking order and returned to Belgium. While this appeal remains ongoing, the Belgian site-blocking machine didn’t stop.

    Last November, an order obtained by Disney, Netflix, Sony, Apple, and others, targeted popular movie piracy sites, including 1337x and Soap2day. Notably, this order only applied to Belgium’s five major ISPs. DNS resolvers were nowhere on the list, likely due to Cisco’s appeal.

    First IPTV Blocking Order

    A new order, issued by the Court of Brussels, targets five illegal IPTV services: LEMEILLEURIPTV, BESTIPTVABO, ATLASPRO12, OTT PREMIUM, and MIJNIPTV. The order was obtained by Belgian broadcasters RTL Belgium and RTBF, whose broadcasts were distributed by these services without permission.

    IPTV targets
    iptv block

    The implementation decision, published by Belgium’s Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright and Related Rights Committed Online (BAPO), described the IPTV services as “structurally dedicated to the mass infringement of audiovisual content”.

    Note: While the BAPO implementation order does not explicitly name the rightsholders, it lists specific content from RTL Belgium and RTBF. Both broadcasters confirmed obtaining an IPTV blocking order against Belgian ISPs at the Brussels court earlier this month.

    According to information shared by the rightsholders, the services used cryptocurrency, which they see as a sign of illegality. In addition, the IPTV services showed users how to circumvent blocking measures.

    All in all, the implementation order requires Belgium’s five major ISPs, Proximus, Telenet, Orange Belgium, Mobile Vikings, and DIGI Communications, to block domain names associated with these IPTV services. This also applies to mirror sites and redirect domains that can be added to the blocklist in future updates.

    Cloudflare and Google Are Back, But Not for DNS

    The ISPs will have to use DNS-based blocking measures, as is standard procedure in most countries. However, DNS blocking measures are not requested from Cloudflare and Google, which are also covered by the injunction.

    The order names the American tech companies as intermediaries and requires them to help stop the IPTV services through other routes.

    Specifically, if Cloudflare acts as a CDN or hosting provider, it must take measures to prevent Belgian users from accessing the named IPTV services. Crucially, Cloudflare’s DNS resolver and WARP service are not covered.

    Google is not required to block the domains on its DNS resolver either. Instead, Google must de-index the relevant domains from its search results, deactivate associated Google Ads, and block access through Google Sites and Google Cloud services where applicable.

    This omission of any third-party DNS restrictions is almost certainly not accidental. Cisco’s appeal of the April 2025 order resulted in a Brussels court suspending enforcement of the DNS blocking requirement, allowing OpenDNS to resume operations in Belgium pending a final ruling.

    With that legal challenge still unresolved, rightsholders appear to have opted for a more defensible scope, targeting Cloudflare and Google in their roles as infrastructure providers rather than as DNS operators.

    Exploring the Blocking Limits

    The latest blocking order shows how Belgium’s blocking regime continues to calibrate itself in real time. Each new order is seemingly shaped by the legal and practical fallout from the last.


    April 2025: Initial DAZN order aggressively targets ISPs and third-party DNS resolvers. Cisco pulls OpenDNS from Belgium.

    July 2025: Second order requires various intermediaries to block shadow libraries.

    Summer 2025: Cisco appeals; court suspends DNS blocking requirement, allowing OpenDNS to return.

    Nov 2025: Broad order against movie piracy sites applies strictly to ISPs. DNS resolvers are omitted.

    Current: Broadcasters RTL & RTBF obtain IPTV blocking order. Cloudflare and Google are targeted, but are not required to block DNS.

    Whether the broader DNS blocking orders will return depends in part on how Cisco’s appeal resolves. A ruling against DNS blocking obligations could permanently reshape the scope of future Belgian orders, and there may be even broader repercussions.

    Increasingly, European countries are granting ever more far-reaching pirate site blocking orders, covering a broad range of intermediaries, including DNS resolvers, but also VPN providers.

    While these orders have been given the green light in France, Spain, and elsewhere, they are not uncontested. Given what’s at stake, the European Court of Justice will likely be asked to weigh in eventually to lay out the ground rules.

    —

    A copy of the latest blocking implementation order, published by the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright and Related Rights Committed Online, is available here (pdf).

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

  • Regulating Hours, Dismantling Work

    The social theorist André Gorz wrote these lines in 1980, toward the beginning of what we now think of as the neoliberal era. And yet, in 2026, at what we might think of as the end of that era, the same situation presents itself, unresolved. That situation is a crisis of work. Economists call it the polarization of the labor market—the hollowing out of the “middle-class” manufacturing sector…

    Source

  • Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself (23 Feb 2026)

    Today’s links

    • Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar.
    • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
    • Object permanence: “Lawer” threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake people-finder; Minor HP disenshittification; US v developing world at WIPO; TfL v anagram tube-map; Disneyland waiting; Internet of Garbage.
    • 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.


    The Muse Thalia, pictured brandishing a comedy mask and putting a laurel wreath on a bust of a bearded figure. It has been altered. The bust has an extra set of eyes and ears. Thalia has two extra sets of arms, one ending in lion's paws, the other in lobster's claws. She has one cyclopean eye. Her comedy mask is now a tragedy mask. The image has been tinted blue.

    Deplatform yourself (permalink)

    The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999’s All Tomorrow’s Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: “What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?”

    https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

    Gibson’s answer stuck with me for decades:

    What we’re doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn’t see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it’s very apparent.

    I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

    In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It’s gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

    There’s no grace period, so that’s a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

    This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.

    All this century, I’ve asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn’t happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there’s already a luxury brand called “Acne”:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acne_Studios

    One anti-commodification measure that’s worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the “grace period” that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

    There’s more than one way to be ugly, of course. The “edgelords” that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape “jokes” and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it’s going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the “dark corners” of the internet. But that’s changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that “every woman and girl” should be “sent to a gulag” – has had dinner at the White House:

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nick-fuentes-women-gulag/

    Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become “cool” within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):

    https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-taboo-left-is-copyright-infringement

    As Broderick writes, “cool” isn’t just “trends” (“hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration”). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were “begrudgingly canonized” by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today’s version of artist management teams is “hype houses.” All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: “getting attention.”

    Which brings Broderick to his main question:

    If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?

    His answer: “You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself.”

    For young people, “the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool” are “whatever is unacceptable on those platforms.” In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that’re blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you’d expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.

    Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers’ influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in “shadowy corners” like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.

    This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there’s nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming is a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert’s Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.

    But by and large it’s not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it’s copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

    Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.

    Broderick’s theory predicts that the “coolest” media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew’s “The People’s Joker,” an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People’s Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Joker

    A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as “a copyright rats nest” based on a web series that is “completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms”:

    https://pagesix.com/2026/02/14/hollywood/how-nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie-skirted-copyright-law/

    Despite this/because of this, NTBTSTM just had “the biggest opening ever for a live-action Canadian film”:

    https://x.com/hertzbarry/status/2023521583923663342

    Broderick’s conclusion is that “as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen,” but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.

    And here’s where Broderick really got me: “the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content.”

    I make a lot of “unmonetizable content,” starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it’s always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).

    I do this to “woo the muse of the odd,” a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling’s 1991 keynote for the Game Developers’ Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:

    https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt

    It’s a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:

    In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “woo the muse of the odd.” A good science fiction story is not a “good story” with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn’t be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!

    I don’t think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don’t know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

    It’s been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue “finds its own use for things.” Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at “following demographics and carefully meeting expectations,” thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the “recommodification machine” that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there’s one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – “unmonetizable content,” the Kryptonite of the platforms.

    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 Mysterious “lawer” threatens to sue me over Bad Samaritan story https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/20/mysterious-lawer-threatens-to-sue-over-bad-samaritan-story/

    #20yrsago Flickr set documents locations in Neal Stephenson trilogy https://www.flickr.com/photos/notlikecalvin/sets/72057594068198516/

    #20yrsago How the US is boning the developing world at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20060501000000*/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004434.php

    #20yrsago Why kids are on MySpace https://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

    #20yrsago Transport for London censors anagram Tube map https://web.archive.org/web/20060222021226/https://www.unfortu.net/anagrammap/

    #20yrsago More clues to identity of author of EFF-sliming article in The Reg https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/22/more-clues-to-identity-of-author-of-eff-sliming-article-in-the-reg/

    #20yrsago US copyright head: world “totally rejects” webcasting restrictions https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/21/us-copyright-head-world-totally-rejects-webcasting-restrictions/

    #20yrsago Copyright office head denounces “big mistake” of extending copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060329162217/https://www.ibiblio.org/yugen/video/too_long.mp4

    #20yrsago Artists paint Detroit’s derelict buildings Tiggeriffic Orange https://web.archive.org/web/20060411143941/http://www.thedetroiter.com/nov05/disneydemolition.php

    #20yrsago Canadian Uni bans WiFi because its safety can’t be proved https://web.archive.org/web/20060307004018/http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=38093&PageMem=1

    #15yrsago Overcome information overload by trusting redundancy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/22/information-overload-probabilistic

    #15yrsago Embattled PS3 hacker raises big bank to fight Sony https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/02/george-hotz-secures-enough-donations-to-fight-sony-rap-battle-begins/

    #15yrsago How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/empty-suit-the-chaotic-way-that-anonymous-makes-decisions/

    #15yrsago America’s Chief Apocalypse Officer, a Fed job ad from 1956 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210020542/http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-post-attack-job-description-1956.html

    #15yrsago What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/what-happens-when-you-stick-your-head-into-a-particle-accelerator/

    #15yrsago Saif Gadaffhi, plagiarist https://web.archive.org/web/20110225114903/https://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

    #15yrsago Google App to help locate people in Christchurch quake https://web.archive.org/web/20110222091007/http://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/

    #15yrsago Photos of kids waiting at Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20110301045827/https://arinfishkin.com/fishkin_delayed_gratification.html

    #15yrsago Westboro Baptist Church attempts to lure Anonymous into attacking it? https://www.siliconrepublic.com/life/were-not-attacking-westboro-baptist-church-anonymous

    #15yrsago Egyptian orders a pizza for the Wisconsin demonstrators https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/from-cairo-to-madison-some-pizza-049888#ixzz1EXkqdxcu

    #15yrsago Metaphotos of landmarks made from hundreds of superimposed tourist snaps https://web.archive.org/web/20110219193205/http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hundreds-of-tourist-photos

    #15yrsago Armed Services Edition books: abridgements and pocket-editions for doughboys https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/literature-on-the-frontlines-the-history-of-armed-services-edition-books/?doing_wp_cron=1771432700.1463210582733154296875

    #15yrsago 3D printing’s first copyright complaint goes away, but things are just getting started https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/20/3d-printings-first-copyright-complaint-goes-away-but-things-are-just-getting-started/

    #15yrsago Imperial Scott Walker, the worker-hating AT-AT Destroyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110224024111/https://simulacrumb.tumblr.com/#3388763986

    #10yrsago Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20160322142114/https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Arbitration_as_Wealth_Transfer_1.pdf

    #10yrsago Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/big-victory-judge-pushes-jewel-v-nsa-forward

    #10yrsago What a serious keysigning ceremony looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

    #10yrsago Pseudoscientific terror ended fluoridation in Calgary, now kids’ teeth are rotting https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12215

    #10yrsago Manual typewriter + servos = polyfingered robot dictaphone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSCL4YOd5E

    #10yrsago Sarah Jeong’s Harvard lecture: “The Internet of Garbage” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUSctMLLNUE

    #10yrsago Citing copyright, Army blocks Chelsea Manning from receiving printouts from EFF’s website https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks-chelsea-manning-reading-eff-blog-posts

    #10yrsago Improve your laptop stickering technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRDql6wBIQ

    #10yrsago Photo of Bernie Sanders being arrested in 1963 Chicago protest https://web.archive.org/web/20160220024814/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bernie-sanders-1963-chicago-arrest-20160219-story.html

    #10yrsago Uber uses customer service reps to push anti-union message to drivers https://qz.com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message

    #10yrsago The latest DNS bug is terrifying, widespread, and reveals deep flaws in Internet security https://web.archive.org/web/20160222231840/http://dankaminsky.com/2016/02/20/skeleton/

    #10yrsago 19th century spam came by post, prefigured modern spam in so many ways https://web.archive.org/web/20160915000000*/http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/

    #10yrsago Republican Congressmen backed by airline money kill research on legroom and passenger safety https://web.archive.org/web/20160221163010/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/21/backed-by-airline-dollars-congress-rejects-effort-to-address-shrinking-legroom/

    #5yrsago The Paltrow-Industrial Complex https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#goopy

    #5yrsago Facebook vs Australia https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#facecrook

    #5yrsago K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#wealth-tax

    #5yrsago What Democrats need to do https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/22/sorcerers-apprentice/#do-something

    #5yrsago Tech trustbusting’s moment has arrived https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/20/escape-velocity/#trustbusting-time

    #1yrago Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

    #1yrago We bullied HP into a minor act of disenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

    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 (1035 words today, 351334 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

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    https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

    https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

    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

  • Reporter’s Notebook: How to Investigate Shadow Fleets

    In the world of maritime trade, some ships play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek. They rapidly change flags, shift ownership, and even cut their tracking systems mid-voyage. These “dark fleet” tactics are often employed by vessels involved in nefarious activities such as sanctions evasion, arms trafficking or illegal fishing.

    At first sight, the trail of such ships can appear hard to follow. Yet the evidence is often still there, scattered across open sources. With perseverance, it can be possible to uncover more information about who is behind these shadowy vessels.

    As an example, we’ll walk you through some of the OSINT resources we consulted to investigate three Syrian ships which were sanctioned by the European Union for allegedly helping Russia transport grain stolen from occupied territory in Ukraine. (You can read our full investigation here.) 

    Red Flags 

    Our case began with a curious detail: Leaked documents obtained by reporters revealed that multimillion-dollar ships which once belonged to the Syrian government had been sold for just $1 each in 2023. 

    After the sale — to an opaque offshore firm in the Seychelles — the ships began to shed their old identities. They repeatedly changed names, and at times went dark by disabling the transmitters that commercial vessels are required to keep on to broadcast their locations. 

    This behavior caught our attention, as did another red flag, so to speak: The vessels were frequently changing their countries of registration, and flying what are known as flags of convenience. This refers to flags from jurisdictions that allow ship owners to register their vessels far from home, often with minimal oversight, low taxes, and fast, easy registration. While legal, these registries have been criticized by regulatory agencies and rights groups for lowering labor and safety standards as they compete to attract shipowners. 

    Navigating Ship Data Sources

    After deciding to probe who was behind the flag-hopping Syrian vessels, the first step was to collect their basic details. Like people, ships have several identifiers, and gathering this information is the starting point for any investigation.

    Some markers are more reliable than others. While names, flags, owners and radio IDs can all change, there is one data point that is permanent: The seven-digit code known as an IMO number, which is assigned to a ship at construction and never changes. 

    You can find a vessel’s IMO number by searching its name on the website of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which is accessible with a free account. This official database also provides information about a ship’s history, including past and current names and registered flags. 

    After confirming a vessel’s IMO number and flag, you can then approach the country where it is registered to seek documents that typically include information about the owner, sometimes the operator, and key vessel particulars such as tonnage, build year, and class.

    While some ship registries are searchable online, others remain opaque or completely inaccessible — as is the case in Syria. Lloyds’ List, an outlet that covers the shipping industry, has a useful directory with contact information for the world’s ship registries. 

    We found that emails sent to generic registry addresses were almost always ignored. It was more effective to determine the person responsible for the country’s registration system, and then send them a short, polite email directly. 

    Third-party databases can also help fill information gaps in official sources. Equasis, which offers free accounts, can add further details on ownership and management, while paid databases such as Lloyd’s List, Sayari, and Orbis can offer even deeper insights. Yet while these third-party sources are valuable, their findings should always be treated as leads and verified against official documents.

    It’s also important to be on the lookout for a worrying new development: the proliferation of fake ship registries. These are unrecognized operations that issue documents which appear official but have no legal standing. For shipowners seeking to hide illicit activities, they provide the perfect cover.

    We quickly identified one such phony registry when we emailed authorities in Timor-Leste about one of the Syrian ships that was flying its flag. Timor-Leste’s National Directorate Maritime Transport told OCCRP that it did not maintain an international ship registry and that it had no knowledge of the vessel we enquired about. 

    To spot such fake registries, first confirm whether it is recognized by the IMO or the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF). If not, it’s likely fraudulent. Dodgy websites and inconsistent or duplicated registry numbers are other warning signs.

    Tracking a Ship’s Movements

    You’ve uncovered some information about a ship and its owner and now you want to know where it’s been. There are several avenues to explore.

    For safety reasons, commercial vessels are required to broadcast their location via AIS transponders. This and other tracking data is collected and visualized on sites like MarineTraffic.com, where you can follow a ship’s live movements. 

    However, accessing information about a vessel’s historical routes is more difficult. This satellite data is collected by private companies who sell it for a hefty fee. Thankfully, a platform known as Global Fishing Watch provides free access to this information and a helpful interface for mapping a vessel’s path. After creating a free account, you can use the platform’s map to find specific ships or look into activities in certain locations.

    Things get even tricker, however, when ships deliberately turn off their AIS transponders — as was the case with the Syrian vessels. In such instances, you’ll have to turn to other resources to help connect the dots. 

    One of the strongest types of proof you can obtain is satellite imagery, as it offers definitive evidence of a vessel being in a precise location at a specific time. In the case of the Syrian ships, satellite images confirmed the ships’ presence at grain terminals of Russian-occupied ports in Ukraine — a strong indication that they were still aiding Moscow in this sanctioned trade.  

    Free resources such as Google Earth can provide such satellite imagery, as well as paid tools that give free access to journalists and activists, like planet.com. Maxar, which has some of the best coverage, may waive fees if your story is in the public interest. 

    There’s another important resource you shouldn’t overlook: humans. Not only are there professional boat trackers, such as the Bosphorus Observer consultancy, who spotted some of the Syrian ships we were investigating during their “dark” periods, but there are also amateur enthusiasts who take photos of ships at ports and then post them online, on sites like MarineTraffic and VesselFinder, with locations and timestamps. 

    But nothing beats seeing something with your own eyes. For the Syria investigation, reporters from our partner SIRAJ were tipped off that one of the vessels was docked in the country’s Latakia port. When a journalist arrived at the yard to look for the ship, they found a large freighter, but the name was hidden behind a tarp that had been hung across the hull. Then came a gust of wind — lifting the tarp just long enough to see its name. 

  • More Research, Less Cancer: £250m raised to transform the future of cancer research  

  • MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge

    Returning from my hiatus, I couldn’t decide on a specific new topic, mainly because so much bad stuff happened in my absence. So, in this post I back up a bit to reflect on how RFK Jr.’s “make America healthy again” is nothing new. What is new is that the antiscience-cranks are in charge.

    The post MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • There is no over or under diagnosis of ADHD or Autism, just a confused cacophony of opinions.

    There is no over or under diagnosis of ADHD or Autism, just a confused cacophony of opinions.

     Selma was taken into care as a two-year-old following severe neglect. Both her parents had substance misuse problems. After failed foster care placements, she was placed in a residential children’s home at age eleven. Diagnosed with an attachment disorder when she was five, at age twelve, presenting with impulsive and disorganised behaviour, she was diagnosed with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). At fifteen, she stopped attending school. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with autism. Now, 23-years-old, in the intervening years she has also been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and is questioning her gender identity. She considers herself “multiply neurodivergent.” She is prescribed several different psychiatric medications.

    Jordan is a 32-year-old comedian who was diagnosed with ADHD a year ago. He knew many fellow comedians who had received the diagnosis and who, like him, were energetic, quick witted, and lived a hectic, somewhat disorganised, lifestyle. He paid for an assessment and discovered that he had ADHD. A diligent student who achieved well at school but often acted as the “class clown,” he was popular, sociable, and hard working. He now considers ADHD his “superpower.” Jordan recently stopped taking the dextroamphetamine he was prescribed because he believed his creativity had declined since beginning to take it.

    Sarah, a successful 44-year-old musician, who regularly performs in front of live audiences was diagnosed with autism three years ago. A shy person, she believes the diagnosis provided her with an explanation for why she was often late, had trouble in relationships, and had that nagging feeling that everyone around her was thriving, while she was not. She was now wondering if there was more to what she was experiencing than just autism. Recently, she felt confused, was crying a lot, and didn’t know why. She now wonders if she also has bipolar disorder.

    Adam is an 18-year-old overweight boy diagnosed with autism when he was 4-years-old. He has significant learning difficulties and attends a special school. He is pleasant most of the time but is prone to outbursts in which he can become aggressive. He needs help with many activities of daily living. He is an only child and his mother, a single parent who adores him, worries about what will happen to him when she passes away.

    Whilst the above cases are fictional, they are based on real life clinical and personal stories I’ve encountered. I often wonder what any of the myriad of cases like these, have in common in terms of their histories, level of functioning, and clinical needs – let alone the way they experience the world – to justify classifying them in the same psychiatric categories. In the outpatient child and adolescent mental health clinic in the UK national health service where I worked until recently, our manager announced that 80% of our patients are “neurodivergent.”

    Rates of diagnosing ADHD and autism have risen exponentially, alongside the growing popularity of the concept of neurodivergence. Some argue that there is an epidemic of over-diagnosing, while others suggest that we have been under-diagnosing for decades. But maybe the issue is not over or under diagnosis. Rather, it is the culture of psychiatric diagnosis, or even deeper – the morphing of medical categories into identities.

    ADHD and autism, like most psychiatric labels, are social constructs rather than biological facts. Like a will-o-the-wisp, evidence of their existence as tangible, measurable conditions found in the hardwiring of the bodies and brains of those labelled, disappears into thin air upon close examination. However, the belief there is a neurological basis to these conditions and that the population can be divided into a “neurodiverse” oppressed and misunderstood grouping and an ableist “neurotypical” oppressor grouping, is prevalent.

    Australian sociologist Judy Singer first coined term neurodiversity in 1998 in a thesis documenting the emergence of a new “disability and social movement” led by ‘autistic’ individuals. She captured the zeitgeist of the “decade of the brain” – a 1990s initiative launched by American President George H. W. Bush to raise public awareness of, and support for, brain research. The hope was that such research would unlock the secrets of the mind and create new ways of understanding and treating mental disorders. The seduction implied in understanding the self through neuro accounts survived, despite the billions of dollars of subsequent research essentially drawing a blank. No unique, characteristic, and reliable findings in genetic, neuroanatomical, neurofunctional, or neurochemical investigations have been discovered. This is why all assessments for conditions like ADHD and autism rely on subjective interpretations drawn from things like questionnaires or observations. There is no hard biological data like a blood test or brain scan. Crucially, there is no neuro in neurodiversity.

    Take neuro out of neurodiversity and we are left with the only reliable statement we can make about the human condition in general: that there is diversity. We are all unique. Ultimately, we are all neurodiverse, making the concept, and its sub-categories (like ADHD and autism), painfully useless at differentiating and classifying different types of people.

    The vacuum of evidence coupled with the zeal of new converts has encouraged the neurodiversity envelope to keep expanding. Depending on which definition you use it can now can include, not just ADHD and autism, but bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dyspraxia, dyslexia, epilepsy, psychopathy, sociopathy, Tourette’s syndrome, oppositional defiant disorder, and sometimes the whole umbrella category of mental disorder/illness.

    Within the neurodiversity movement, there are a variety of different voices presenting their own views as the only authentic representation and criticising any definition, theory, or practice that has not been developed by “neurodiverse” people. Hostility to a material scientific approach is thus promoted and the public narrative on ADHD, autism, and neurodivergence is infused with scientism, meaning faith-based claims masquerading as scientific ones.

    As neurodiversity swallowed up ADHD and autism, they were no longer viewed as just disorders to be treated and/or supported but, rather, identities to be valued. Conflicting interests resulted in contradictory versions arising. Many parents felt that these are disorders needing treatment, while activists claimed these are natural differences needing validation. Some saw them as empowering identities; others felt stigmatised and disempowered. Many live out these contradictions seeing it as a specific difference, yet expecting others (such as employers) to make accommodations to them as if they have a disability/disorder.

    This confusion of constructs has reached a peak where the neurodiversity balloon is so full of hot air it may be close to bursting. Trust in agency, free-will, relationships, family, geographical communities, or social class antagonisms, dissolve into the haze of cult-like online, neuro-deterministic communities detached from material reality and absorbed in creating exclusionary language and using pseudo-activist concepts to silence critics. Meanwhile, demand for services becomes so overstretched that those, like Adam, with considerable clinical and other support needs, are at risk of losing out.

    A determined effort to end the neurodiversity mystification is long overdue.

    ****

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

    The post There is no over or under diagnosis of ADHD or Autism, just a confused cacophony of opinions. appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Streeting says he takes Leeds maternity care inquiry concerns ‘extremely seriously’

    The health secretary will meet bereaved families on Monday, as delay into maternity care probe drags on.

  • ‘I thought I was going to die’ – Woman calls for tighter weight-loss jabs checks

    Emma Dyer says she collapsed on her bathroom floor and began vomiting blood after buying jabs online.