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Author: tio

  • Real-Debrid’s Renewed Piracy Crackdown Follows Corporate Restructuring

    Real-Debrid’s Renewed Piracy Crackdown Follows Corporate Restructuring

    Real-Debrid is a French-operated premium link generator that can download files from cyberlockers and cache torrents for instant streaming.

    The service has long been a key tool for many Stremio and Kodi, and is also widely used as unlimited cloud storage by Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby users who pair it with Sonarr and Radarr.

    At the end of 2024, the service made headlines by implementing far-reaching anti-piracy measures, including hash and keyword filters. These changes were made to appease rightsholders following a formal notice from the Fédération Nationale des Éditeurs de Films (FNEF), the French film distributors’ trade body. Despite user backlash, Real-Debrid retained much of its user base.

    A few days ago, complaints about Real-Debrid’s filtering started rearing their head again. Now it appears to be worse. Cached torrents that previously played without problems now return an error message: “File was removed from debrid service due to copyright infringement.”

    Stremio error

    stremio error

    Real-Debrid has taken action, whether voluntarily or not, but the operators have not commented publicly and did not respond to our request for comment either. The company’s most recent public communication, on its official X account, is close to six months old.

    A New and Broader Piracy Filter

    According to user reports circulating on Reddit and elsewhere, the new filter does not target specific torrent hashes, as the 2024 measures did. Instead, it appears to screen against filename patterns common to almost all scene and P2P releases.

    ElfHosted, a managed hosting provider that offers Stremio and Plex stacks, among others, has published a documented list of names that it linked to the new Real-Debrid filter. The list includes names of release groups such as [rartv], [rarbg], and [eztv], as well as source markers including WEB-DL, WEBDL, WEB-Rip, WEBRip and AMZN.

    This suggests that the removals are based on characteristics that are not directly triggered by the content itself, but by the filename. This means that files without ‘forbidden’ keywords or tags should survive, for now.

    That theory is confirmed by a r/Piracy user who notes “only 4k or 4k HDR kind of streams have been removed and not 1080p ones” for the same shows. This does not mean that lower-quality releases are safe by definition; it all depends on whether the keyword filter is triggered.

    “Most Users Lost 50-70% of Their Libraries”

    ElfHosted built a tool called LitterBox that checks a user’s Real-Debrid library and counts how many cached torrents now return the infringement error. The company’s founder commented on Reddit that “most users have lost 50-70% of their libraries.”

    Litterbox

    litterbox

    ElfHosted has a commercial interest in the matter, as it points users to the bundles it sells for a Real-Debrid competitor. However, it is also the only named third-party source publishing technical details.

    Exactly how bad users are impacted appears to differ per setup. Stremio users don’t appear to be hit as hard as those using Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby with Sonarr and Radarr. The latter try to load cached files, which has been removed.

    Real-Debrid’s Corporate Restructuring

    While the user impact is serious and undeniable, it is not immediately clear why Real-Debrid took this action. There is a largely unconfirmed and unverified report on an anonymous Netlify subdomain that appears to offer a timeline and context. While we can’t confirm most of it, the mention of a corporate restructuring is correct.

    Information obtained by TorrentFreak from the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI), which maintains the French company registry, shows that Real-Debrid’s parent company, XT Network, underwent some legal changes recently.

    On April 27, the registered office had already moved from Levallois-Perret to Montreuil. Ten days later, on May 7, the company was converted from a société à responsabilité limitée (SARL) to a société par actions simplifiée (SAS).

    XT NETWORK

    xt

    The two founders no longer appear as managers of the new company. Their roles are now held by holding companies: HOWLOO, a single-shareholder SARL based in Saint-Avertin, and DEVIUS, a single-shareholder SARL based in Saint-Herblain.

    These types of restructuring operations can be done to change the liability of the persons and entities involved. What the reason is in this case is unknown, but it happened mere days before the renewed piracy crackdown.

    The legal page on Real-Debrid’s website confirms the change and now identifies the owner as “XT Network SAS, Société par Actions Simplifiée au capital de 7000€, 86 Rue Voltaire, 93100 Montreuil,” where it previously listed XT Network SARL as the owner.

    What’s Next

    There has been no shortage of speculation or user complaints. Initially, the Real-Debrid subreddit ran a megathread covering the situation, but this has since been removed, and the posts now require approval from a moderator.

    The discussion continues elsewhere, but real answers can only come from XT Network. If those come in, we will update the article accordingly.

    For now, however, it appears that Real-Debrid is starting to toughen its stance against piracy even further. Last time, its actions only resulted in a relatively mild drop in traffic, but if the current situation continues, that will be much worse this time around.

    —

    A copy of the INPI attestation for XT Network, dated May 14, 2026, is available here (pdf).

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

  • Balkan News Network to Be Sold to Orbán-Linked Fund in 30 euro Million Deal

    A sprawling Balkan media empire known for its independent journalism is being quietly prepared for sale to an investment fund with deep ties to the political orbit of former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, according to a leaked draft contract.

    The planned 30 million euro ($32.5 million) sale of United Group’s media assets to a Luxembourg-based fund has raised fresh alarms about the creeping influence of illiberal governments over the press in Eastern Europe. The media properties slated for sale include the N1 and Nova television networks, which have historically served as rare bastions of critical reporting in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro.

    The revelation, brought to light by the local investigative outlet Raskrikavanje, follows a string of controversial editorial shake-ups and a leaked audio recording that suggested direct meddling in the network’s leadership by Serbia’s increasingly authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vučić.

    While the final contract has not yet been signed, the draft designates a Luxembourg fund called European Future Media Investments (EFMI) as the official buyer. However, details buried in the document—including notification addresses and key contacts—point directly to Alpac Capital, a Portuguese investment firm. The contract lists Pedro Vargas David, Alpac Capital’s director, as a primary representative.

    Vargas David is well-known in European media circles. In 2022, Alpac Capital acquired a majority stake in Euronews, the pan-European broadcasting network. A subsequent investigation by independent European media, including France’s Le Monde and Hungary’s Direkt36, revealed that the Euronews acquisition was heavily financed by Hungarian state capital and companies closely allied with Orbán’s powerful propaganda apparatus.

    According to leaked internal documents from that earlier deal, one of the primary goals of the Euronews investment was to “mitigate left-wing bias” in the press. Financing for the purchase was traced back to Gyula Balásy, a Hungarian businessman whose empire has secured lucrative state contracts for years, and whose companies are now the subject of an investigation launched by Hungarian police just days before a recent change in government leadership.

    Legal representation for EFMI in the current United Group buyout is being handled by Moore Legal Kovács, a Hungarian law firm, further cementing the deal’s Budapest ties.

    A Hollow Promise of Independence?

    According to the draft contract, United Group is required to undergo a massive corporate reorganization before the 30 million euro sale is finalized. The network’s sprawling assets—including N1 television stations across the Balkans, the Serbian weekly Radar, and a 51 percent stake in Montenegro’s Vijesti—will be consolidated under a single corporate umbrella, Adria News.

    The contract contains several clauses explicitly promising “editorial independence.” The buyers have pledged to respect European rules on media pluralism, shield the newsrooms from commercial and political influence, and establish an independent advisory body of international media professionals.

    But for many journalists in the region, those promises ring hollow following months of severe internal turmoil and alleged political capitulation.

    Last August, a leaked audio recording published by OCCRP exposed a conversation between United Group’s newly appointed CEO, Stan Miller, and Vladimir Lučić, the director of Serbia’s state-owned telecom operator, Telekom Srbija. The two men were caught discussing the ouster of Aleksandra Subotić, the long-time director of United Media.

    The audio made it clear that the initiative to fire Subotić came directly from President Vučić.

    “I understand that the President called you and is very upset, and I can understand that, but I have to find a way to do it quickly and efficiently,” Miller was heard telling Lučić. “When I promise something, I do it. I am a person of my word.”

    Miller explained his strategy on the recording: “I cannot fire Aleksandra today, as we discussed, okay? I have to make that company very small in Serbia, if you know what I mean. To separate it. It takes time for that, and that is what we agreed upon.”

    The plan swiftly materialized. In late February, Subotić was fired, coinciding with the launch of a new corporate entity, Adria News Network (ANN). By early April, the purge reached the newsroom floor, with Igor Božić, the head of the N1 newsroom, removed from his post. Brent Sadler, a former CNN anchor, was subsequently installed as Chief Executive News Editor to oversee editorial standards across the network.

    The impending sale to Alpac Capital marks a bitter conclusion for the journalists who built the network. In early November of last year, sensing a shift in corporate winds, editors and directors of United Group’s media outlets submitted a formal request to the owners—including the private equity firm BC Partners—proposing a management buyout. They wanted to purchase the media networks themselves to protect their editorial independence.

    A month later, their offer was flatly rejected.

    According to Božić, the owners informed the journalists that they “do not wish to sell the media to a third party for now,” and claimed they were working with regulators to make the outlets “even more independent.”

    Months later, the leaked 30 million euro contract tells a distinctly different story. Representatives for BC Partners, Stan Miller, and Alpac Capital did not respond to requests for comment.

  • As Tick Bites Surge, Conspiracy Theories Follow

    This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

    “Tell you what,” Drew Maciel told his Instagram followers in April, “I’m sick of finding dead moose.” He zoomed in on a dead bull moose lying prone on the ground, running the camera over clusters of ticks nestled within every crevice of the corpse.

    Maciel is a shed hunter, meaning he collects antlers that have been naturally “shed” by wildlife. But a winter tick feeding frenzy in Maine, driven by rising temperatures, means that this year he kept finding dead animals. Up to 90% of the moose calves tracked by scientists in recent years have been bled to death by ticks — an ongoing crisis in a state that prizes these largest of all deer species.

    But where scientists see the hand of climate change at work — average temperatures in Maine have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1985 — others see the designs of a global cabal. 

    “Human engineered biological warfare,” read a comment on Maciel’s video posted by Dries Van Langenhove, a far-right former member of the Belgian government who was recently convicted of violating the country’s Holocaust denial laws. The comment got 32,000 likes. “It’s Bill Gates,” someone else posted.  

    Chuck Lubelczyk, an ecologist with Maine Medical Center, collects ticks at a site in Cape Elizabeth. (Portland Press Herald/Getty Images via Grist/John Ewing)

    These posts are part of a wave of tick-related conspiracy theories garnering millions of views online. In April, a self-proclaimed holistic doctor claimed on Instagram to have spoken with multiple farmers in the Midwest who told her that they were finding boxes of ticks dumped on their properties. “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk,” she posted alongside a video that got 10 million views across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The MAHA Moms Coalition, a nationwide group inspired by the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, reposted the claim asking affected farmers to come forward.

    “Something is happening with ticks right now, and farmers are starting to talk.”

    The theory dates back to 2023, with viral claims that Pfizer and Valneva, pharmaceutical companies developing a vaccine for Lyme disease, were planting boxes of ticks on farms to drum up demand for their product. 

    A separate theory that gained traction around the same time linked a British research program to genetically modify cattle ticks, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to rising cases of red meat allergies in the U.S. The biggest problem with that theory is that the allergy, Alpha-gal syndrome, is caused by the bite of a Lone Star tick — a completely different species from the cattle ticks in the research program.

    While all these conspiracies involve different ticks, different diseases and different alleged culprits, they are often treated as interchangeable evidence of the same broader claim: that rising tick encounters are a part of a nefarious human plot. 

    The theories are right about one thing: Ticks are getting worse. Some of the same ecological changes fueling Maine’s winter tick boom are also making tick encounters more common in broad swaths of the U.S. The arachnids are showing up earlier in the year, expanding into new terrain, and biting people more often than they used to. But the force driving those shifts is not a clandestine bioweapons program, a vaccine plot or Bill Gates — it’s climate change. 

    A screenshot of an Instagram post furthering the unproven claim that Midwestern farmers are finding boxes of ticks on their properties. (Instagram)

    Richard Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, said a warming world is “bringing ticks out earlier in the year” in states like New York, where he lives. “It used to be we were pretty safe in the month of May,” he said. “Now, not so much.”

    Tick season is off to an unusually early start across most of the U.S. this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an alert published late last month. Emergency room visits for tick bites in four of the five geographic regions the agency tracks are the highest they’ve been for this time of year since the CDC started keeping tabs on tick-borne illness rates in 2017. 

    While the CDC hasn’t said what’s behind the uptick in bites this spring, ample snow cover earlier in the year helped insulate adult ticks from the cold of winter, and an early spring bloom across much of the U.S. likely brought those hungry adults out of the leaf litter earlier than normal. But regardless of the specific dynamics at play this year, rising average temperatures will lead to more robust tick exposure on balance. That’s because warmer temperatures both coax ticks north into territory that was once too cold to host them and also extend the length of time that ticks are active every year.

    Tick season is off to an unusually early start across most of the U.S. this year.

    More tick bites mean more opportunities for infection — and the list of infections doctors are watching for is getting longer. Positive tests for alpha-gal syndrome have increased a hundredfold since 2013; nearly half a million people in the U.S. now carry an allergy to red meat. Cases of anaplasmosis, a disease carried by black-legged ticks that hospitalizes roughly 30% of the people who contract it, increased sixteenfold between 2000 and 2017. Babesiosis, a malaria-like illness also carried by black-legged ticks, has risen roughly 10% year over year since 2015. It’s not uncommon now for a single tick to carry two or more diseases. 

    Ecologists who study ticks see an interwoven mix of factors driving these increases. Land use and wildlife changes are increasing contact between humans and ticks. Invasive and expanding tick species are bringing different disease risks to new parts of the country. And better testing and reporting of tick-borne illnesses is making diseases more visible. But there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that those trends are unfolding against the backdrop of climate change.

    Ostfeld worries that the complexity of the factors that lead to higher rates of tick-borne disease, paired with the allure of online conspiracies, will make it harder for people to understand why backyards in some parts of the country are getting more dangerous. “The more I read about people actually believing some of these conspiracy theories, the more I worry that even moderately complex explanations or phenomena we care about — like how likely we are to get bitten by a tick — might be too much,” he said.

    Scientists collect Lone Star ticks, which can cause an allergic reaction to red meat, for research. (Portland Press Herald/Getty Images via Grist/Ben McCanna)

    It doesn’t help that conspiracies about ticks have now been legitimized by federal government officials. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has at various times in his career opined that Lyme disease, which now affects an estimated half a million Americans every year, was created as a byproduct of vaccine research and originally used as a military bioweapon. (This flies in the face of genomic evidence that the bacterium causing Lyme has existed in North America for at least 60,000 years.)

    Both Kennedy and Tucker Carlson, one of America’s most prominent Republican-aligned media figures, have hosted the writer Kris Newby on their podcasts in recent years. In both cases, Newby espoused debunked claims about the military origins of Lyme.  

    Conspiracies about ticks have now been legitimized by federal government officials.

    The idea that Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses were created by a U.S. military bioweapons program is so pervasive that a formal initiative to investigate the origin has twice been introduced by lawmakers in the House of Representatives. Chris Smith, a Republican representative from New Jersey who spearheaded those efforts, was successful on his second attempt. A directive in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026, signed by President Donald Trump last December, includes a provision requiring the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the military used ticks as biological warfare agents in the middle of the 20th century. 

    “GAO will be fully empowered to leave no stone unturned, and now it’ll have a congressional mandate to get to the bottom of it, because they were weaponizing ticks,” Smith said at a Lyme disease roundtable convened by Kennedy last year. 

    But away from the congressional roundtables and viral videos, the plot begins to lose some of its drama. Even in the Midwest, where millions of social media viewers have been told that boxes of ticks are being dumped on unsuspecting farmers, evidence of foul play is hard to find. Terry Hoerbert and her husband Bob own Little Brown Cow Dairy, a small dairy farm in Delavan, Illinois. The lane down to the farm is short, Terry said, so she would have seen someone dropping off packages of ticks. Had the Hoerberts heard of any other farms in the area receiving packages of live ticks?

    “We have not,” Terry told me. “You are the first to enlighten us.”

    The post As Tick Bites Surge, Conspiracy Theories Follow appeared first on Truthdig.

  • What You Should Know About the CEOs Traveling to China With Trump

    President Donald Trump calls the entourage of 12 CEOs accompanying him to China an “incredible gathering” of America’s “greatest businessmen/women.”

    Well, it may be an incredible gathering. But to characterize them as America’s greatest business leaders — who are assumed to be leading America’s competitive charge against China — is misleading.

    The American CEOs traveling with Trump to China don’t think of themselves as being in competition with China. In fact, they’d like nothing better than to make more money for themselves and their shareholders by setting up more lower-cost, highly productive factories and research facilities in China and hiring more Chinese talent.

    It’s an important distinction. The CEOs of Chinese companies are in business not only to make money but also to strengthen China’s geopolitical power in the world. The CEOs of American companies want to make gobs of money, of course, but they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about strengthening America’s geopolitical power in the world.

    They’d like nothing better than to make more money for themselves and their shareholders.

    This basic difference is airbrushed away in breathless media stories about the competitive race between the American and Chinese economies — the so-called race for supremacy in AI, advanced semiconductors, supercomputers, solar wafers, biotechnology and other industries of the future.

    The distinction never appears in the breezy press coverage of Trump’s trip to China, along with his “U.S. corporate” delegation.

    Take Elon Musk, obviously a conspicuous presence in Trump’s CEO delegation. Musk’s Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai produces over a third of Tesla’s global car sales. It’s also Tesla’s most productive factory. In February 2025, Musk opened a second factory in Shanghai, a $200 million plant focused on producing Megapack batteries. Nearly 40% of Tesla’s entire battery supply chain relies on Chinese companies.

    All good for Musk and for Tesla shareholders, but what about American workers, who aren’t getting this work? What about America’s national security, which could be compromised if China gains further global dominance over batteries (as well as other renewables)? Do you think Musk cares?

    Or consider Apple’s Tim Cook, also in Trump’s CEO delegation. China has become the gravitational core of Apple’s supply chain. Indeed, much of Apple’s success is due to Cook’s move to consolidate virtually all of his company’s manufacturing in China. About 90% of iPhones are assembled there, backed by massive investments in local supplier expertise and infrastructure. Cook explains that he’s taking advantage of China’s “unmatched” expertise in advanced tooling and manufacturing.

    Since 2008, Apple has worked with Chinese suppliers to train 30 million workers there and has transferred practical engineering knowledge of how to make complex things from American engineers to thousands of Chinese engineers in hundreds of Chinese factories and research centers. Apple’s Cupertino, California, headquarters has sent so many American engineers to China to teach Chinese engineers that it even persuaded United Airlines to schedule three weekly flights from San Francisco to Chengdu and Hangzhou.

    A third CEO in Trump’s delegation is Jane Fraser, CEO of Citigroup. Her goal has been to expand the bank’s (and its clients’) investments in China by growing Citigroup’s team in China and capturing market share for the corporation in high technology and advanced manufacturing.

    Does he assume that the rest of us don’t know?

    Fraser’s moves may be good for Citigroup’s bottom line, but they may not be good for America. As she connects international investors with opportunities within China, she may be siphoning off potential investments in high technology and advanced manufacturing in the United States.

    Another American CEO in Trump’s delegation is Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Huang’s goal is to get China to buy Nvidia’s AI and its advanced H200 processors, even at the risk that Chinese computer scientists and engineers might reverse-engineer them, as they have so many other technologies America once dominated.

    Huang argues that with roughly half of all the world’s artificial intelligence researchers, China is strategically vital for American tech companies. Huang may be right, but what’s strategically vital for American AI companies may not be in the strategic interest of the United States. The capacities that increase these corporations’ profits and returns to their American investors (including the pay packages of their CEOs) do not necessarily increase the productivity, knowledge or strategic strength of America’s AI.

    Doesn’t Trump know this? Does he assume that the rest of us don’t know? Is he really ignorant of the fact that Chinese corporations are tethered to China, but the CEOs of Tesla, Apple, Nvidia and other so-called American corporations are not strategically bound to America? American CEOs aren’t paid to worry about the competitiveness of the United States, nor the number of good jobs in America, nor even about American national security.

    Maybe Trump knows all this but doesn’t care. When it comes to making big money doing global deals, Trump’s merry band of CEOs has about as much loyalty to the United States as does Trump himself.

    The post What You Should Know About the CEOs Traveling to China With Trump appeared first on Truthdig.

  • UK Sanctions Late Azerbaijani Crime Boss’ Brother, Alleging He Plotted Attacks for Tehran

    British authorities sanctioned the brother of a slain Azerbaijani crime boss this week, accusing him of plotting attacks on behalf of the Iranian government.

    Namiq Salifov—whose brother, Nadir “Lotu Guli” Salifov, led a notorious Eurasian crime syndicate before his 2020 murder—was among several individuals targeted in a sanctions package announced by the U.K. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper on May 11.

    “This package of sanctions directly targets organisations and individuals who threaten security on UK streets and stability in the Middle East,” Cooper said. “Criminal proxies backed by parts of the Iranian regime who threaten security in the UK and Europe will not be tolerated, nor will illicit finance networks.”

    On Thursday, the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) updated its sanctions list with new personal details for Salifov, namely his date of birth. OCCRP reporters used these details to verify his identity against information in the public domain.

    In a separate notice, the FCDO accused Salifov of involvement in “hostile activity” for the Iranian government, including by “threatening, planning or conducting attacks against persons and assets in the United Kingdom or any other country.” 

    British officials did not provide specific evidence for the allegations against Salifov. 

    U.S. authorities, on the other hand, have previously accused Salifov of being a vor-v-zakone — or “thief-in-law,” a top member of the Russian mob. In a series of court filings, prosecutors alleged his association — and rivalry — with two men convicted of an Iran-backed plot to kill a regime critic on the streets of New York City.

    In October, a U.S. judge sentenced two of Salifov’s associates, Polad Omarov and Rafat Amirov, to 25 years in prison for a failed “murder-for-hire” plot against Iranian-American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad. 

    Both were high-ranking members of an Azerbaijani faction of the Russian mob founded by Salifov’s late brother, Nadir, a group prosecutors claim is responsible for “murders, assaults, extortions, kidnappings, robberies, and arsons, in the United States and abroad.”

    According to U.S. prosecutors, the plot was hatched by senior members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, who offered $500,000 for Alinejad’s murder.

    “This case is part of a well-documented and disturbing rise in plots involving criminal networks paid by Iran to target dissidents in the United States and around the world,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said when the two men were sentenced.

    While Namiq Salifov was not charged with the murder plot, U.S. prosecutors alleged he was locked in a bitter “power struggle” with Omarov at the time of the latter’s arrest. 

    The rift followed the August 2020 murder of Nadir Salifov, who was shot dead in Antalya, Turkey. Although the syndicate “initially aligned” with Namiq Salifov, the power vacuum sparked internal rivalries.

    The U.K.’s latest sanctions comes after a recent spate of attacks against Jewish communities and Iranian regime opponents fueled public speculation of Tehran-backed plots on Britain’s streets amid hostilities in the Middle East. 

    “Given that police investigations are ongoing, it would not be appropriate to comment on who ultimately might be behind these specific incidents,” U.K. Security Minister Dan Jarvis said in an April 20 statement.

    The May 11 sanctions package also targeted the Zindashti criminal network, an organization associated with alleged drug trafficker Naji Sharifi Zindashti. In 2024, the U.S. and U.K. sanctioned Zindashti in a joint action, accusing his organization of acting as a hit squad for Iranian government-backed plots against critics abroad.

    Also designated were members of the Zarringhalam family, whom the U.S. Treasury sanctioned in 2025 for allegedly operating a massive Iranian “shadow banking” network that has laundered billions of dollars.

  • HIV prevention and treatment services faltering, warns UNAIDS

    Decades of gains in the fight against AIDS are under growing threat as donor funding declines and community-based health services collapse in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries, the head of the joint UN programme on HIV/AIDS warned on Thursday.

  • UN welcomes $1.8 billion US boost for humanitarian operations

    An additional $1.8 billion in US humanitarian funding will allow the United Nations and its partners to expand emergency relief operations reaching millions of people worldwide, as rising global needs and funding shortfalls force aid agencies to scale back assistance.

  • Former Top Zelensky Aide Jailed in $10.5 Million Corruption Case

    A Ukrainian anti-corruption court ordered the pretrial detention of Andriy Yermak, the former chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky, on Thursday, marking the most significant legal action to date against a former member of the president’s inner circle.

    The court set bail for Yermak at 140 million hryvnias ($3.2 million). He is suspected of involvement in a scheme to launder roughly $10.5 million through the development of “Dynasty,” a luxury real estate project near the capital.

    Yermak has denied the allegations. He stated in court that he does not have the personal funds required to post bail, and his defense team announced plans to appeal the ruling.

    The detention order escalates a sprawling anti-corruption probe dubbed Operation “Midas.” According to earlier reporting by OCCRP, investigators believe the illicit funds channeled into the luxury construction project are tied to a broader network of alleged kickbacks and money laundering connected to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear energy operator.

  • Pluralistic: Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (14 May 2026)

    Today’s links


    A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that's playing 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI'. Next to it appears this text: 'This book - ostensibly about AI, but more broadly about the new world of hyper-capitalism and high tech - is stunning in its clarity and breadth of vision. In trying to keep some kind of grasp on what is going on in the world, I read Doctorow obsessively. —Brian Eno'

    Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (permalink)

    My next book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon’s monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I’m pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn’t just the right way to reach an audience, it’s also the best way to reach them:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

    A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that's playing 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI'. Next to it appears this text: 'An eye-opening take on AI . . . A sharply worded, irreverent, and deadly serious call to see through the sleight-of-hand performance of AI promoters. —Kirkus Reviews'

    Reverse Centaur is a book about the realpolitik and the political economy of AI, written by a tech critic (me!) who is sick to the back teeth of hearing about AI. Central to the book’s thesis:

    • The AI bubble is exceptionally bad and dangerous:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/07/dump-the-pumpers/#alpo-eaters-anonymous

    A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that's playing 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI'. Next to it appears this text: 'A bracing, daringly optimistic plan for how we can free ourselves from the awfulness. —John Hodgman (on Enshittification)'

    • The AI bubble is part of a lineage of pump-and-dump swindles created by monopolists who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow even after they’ve saturated their markets:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

    • In service to that stock swindle, AI companies have cooked up all kinds of ways to “juke the stats” to paint a false picture of AI adoption:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

    A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that's playing 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI'. Next to it appears this text: 'A masterly polemic, its scope so sweeping that it does, finally, seem to explain every pungent odor wafting from Silicon Valley. —Harper՚s (on Enshittification)'

    • AI is a normal technology, and in the absence of the bubble, we’d call this collection of technically interesting, sometimes useful tools “plug-ins”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

    • A chatbot can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can absolutely convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can’t do your job:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

    • Despite the fact that the AI can’t do your job, there are many ways that AI can be used to erode your wages and working conditions:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/#veena-dubal

    • The workers who say that their jobs are worse and the things they produce are much worse as a result of AI are correct; but the workers who say their work is much better thanks to AI are also correct. This only seems like a riddle until you understand that the most important fact about any technology (including AI) isn’t what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

    A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that's playing 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI'. Next to it appears this text: 'You could not ask for a clearer, more ambitious or better-written business book than this one . . . Doctorow deserves thanks for his service. —The Financial Times (on Enshittification)'

    • When a boss fires a worker and gives their jobs to an AI, it usually means that they don’t care if that job is done well, which is why customer service jobs are being handed over to AI:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice

    • Bosses also love firing coders and replacing them with AI – first, because bosses are really angry about the decades when tech workers were in short supply and bosses had to pretend to like them, and second, because if you’re selling AI as a way to replace workers, what better way to convince a potential customer than to fire the workers your own company depends upon? (All that said, the coders who are excited about their new AI coding tools have a point – when a worker is in charge of their work and thus when and how they use a tool, we should defer to their own experience):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

    • Artists are also a favorite target of AI bosses, which is weird, because the wages of creative workers add up to a total that rounds to zero when compared with the unimaginably large sums AI companies will have to take in if they are to pay back the trillions they’ve spent to date (let alone the trillions more they’re proposing to spend in the near term). All of this raises a foundational question: can AI “art” ever be good? (Spoiler: probably not):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

    • Media companies say they have the answer to the AI art question: they’ll create (or assert) a copyright that lets them control AI training. This is an incredibly transparent ruse: media companies are artists’ class enemies, and if we get a new right to control AI training, our bosses will demand that we sign it away to them as part of their non-negotiable, one-sided standard contracts:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for

    A mockup of a smartphone displaying an audiobook app that's playing 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI'. Next to it appears this text: 'Essential to understanding today’s digital economy. —Rohit Chopra, Former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (on Enshittification)'

    • For creative workers, the answer to these new would-be tech bosses isn’t asserting a new right that will be expropriated by the old media bosses who’ve been ripping us off forever. Our salvation lies in leaning into the US Copyright Office’s interpretation that holds that AI-generated works can’t be copyrighted, because copyright is only for human creations. That means that the only way our bosses can get a copyright over the things they want to sell is to pay us to make them:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

    • Many of the seemingly urgent AI questions that people won’t shut up about are distractions, because they assume that AI will lastingly infiltrate every part of our society. In reality, the AI companies are losing unimaginable amounts and have no path to profitability:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/30/accounting-gaffs/#artificial-income

    • The only jobs that AI can do better than humans are jobs that shouldn’t exist, like figuring out how to maximize undetectable wage-theft:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

    • AI is also really good at figuring out how to do individualized price-gouging, another thing that shouldn’t exist:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

    • Despite AI’s manifest unsuitability to do jobs that should exist, bosses keep firing people and replacing them with chatbots that do their jobs very badly. This allows bosses to indulge their solipsistic fantasy of a world without people, in which customers, workers and suppliers are statistical artifacts and bosses are unitary geniuses who simply imagine a product or service and then it is delivered, without any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

    • This is catastrophic, and not just for the parties involved today. The AI bubble will pop, and when it does, the chatbots that do these jobs (badly) will be switched off. Meanwhile, the workers those chatbots replaced will have retrained, retired, or become “discouraged.” No one will be around to do those (necessary) jobs. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

    • The real existential AI threat isn’t that we’ll accidentally teach the word-guessing program so many words that it awakens and becomes a vengeful god. The real risk is that when the bubble bursts we’ll indulge the ruling class’s reflex to austerity, and that this will continue the decades of mass economic traumatization that makes people into easy marks for fascists:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/12/always-great/#our-nhs

    • But when the AI bubble pops, that won’t be the end of AI – it will be the end of the bubble. When the AI bubble pops, we’ll have mountains of GPUs at fire-sale prices, skilled workers liberated from the imperative to help their bosses promote their stock swindle, and open source models that will yield tremendous dividends to anyone who sets out to optimize them:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/16/post-ai-ai/#productive-residue

    As you can see from the links above, I developed The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI in the same way that I developed Enshittification: in public, through a series of essays, which I periodically synthesized into major, widely shared speeches:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

    Making my working notes public is a hugely effective way of producing and refining critical work, and it’s been my method for 25 years now:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

    It’s a method that’s let me produce a string of international bestsellers, published by some of the largest publishers in the world. Nevertheless, Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

    That’s because I have an iron-clad requirement that my work be sold in open formats, without the “digital rights management” that blocks you from moving the books you bought on Amazon to someone else’s apps. Digital rights management (DRM) enjoys bizarre legal protections so that it’s a felony for me to give you the tools you need to move the books I wrote out of an Amazon app and into a competitor’s app:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/#world-turned-upside-down

    What’s more, these outrageous legal rights extend around the world, because the US Trade Representative spent decades bullying America’s trading partners into passing laws that criminalize the act of fixing the defects in America’s tech exports, which is why farmers can’t fix their John Deere tractors, hospitals can’t fix their Medtronic ventilators, and no one can sell you an app that stops Apple and Google from spying on your phone:

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

    Amazon’s Audible controls 90% (!) of the audiobook market, and they will not sell any book unless they can permanently lock it to their platform. That means that every time a writer sells you an audiobook on Audible, they create a “switching cost” that stops you from leaving Audible for a competitor. Not only is this fundamentally unjust, it’s also terrible for creators: if our audiences can’t leave Amazon, then we can’t leave Amazon either, which means Amazon can (and does!) steal millions of dollars from writers without losing our business:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

    Which is where these Kickstarter campaigns come in. Whenever I sell a new book to a publisher, I arrange to make my own independent audiobook for it, which I sell everywhere except the platforms that have mandatory DRM: Audible, Apple and Audiobooks.com. There are some very good DRM-free audiobook stores, notably Libro.fm and Downpour.com (Google Play also sells audiobooks without DRM). But most people have never heard of these, so it wasn’t until I started pre-selling my audiobooks on Kickstarter that I was able to make my stubborn refusal to sell out to Audible into a paying proposition. My agent tells me that if I’d sold out to Audible, I’d have paid off my mortgage and I’d be able to give my kid a full ride through a fancy US college. I don’t make that kind of money from these Kickstarters, but they do very well nevertheless, and they’re a critical part of my family’s finances.

    The Kickstarter is live for the next three weeks:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

    A mockup of 'The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI' and 'Enshittification' on e-readers, and smartphones displaying audiobook apps, as well as the paperback edition of 'Reverse Centaur.'

    You can pre-order print copies of Reverse Centaur, as well as DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks (narrated by me!) for Reverse Centaur and Enshittification. Normally, I offer custom-signed copies of the print books, but Enshittification was so successful that I haven’t stopped touring it and I’m in a new city every couple of days, so there’s no way I can reliably get into a warehouse to sign the latest batch of orders. Instead, I’ll be posting the contact details for every bookstore that’s hosting me on my tours (US in June, UK in September) and you can order signed copies from them, which I’ll personalize after my events there so they can ship them to you.

    A mockup of a new Framework 13

    I’ve also decided to raise money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), the nonprofit I’ve worked at for nearly 25 years. EFF is the oldest, best and most effective tech rights organization in the world, and its mission has only gotten more important over the years. EFF’s outreach folks are offering a special membership package for backers of the Kickstarter, which includes an EFF hat and stickers, as well as an Enshittification pin and two Enshittification stickers:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/24/poop-emoji-plus-plus/#devin-washburn

    The audiobook is fully recorded and finalized and you can listen to the first hour of it here:

    https://archive.org/details/reverse-centaur-audio-sample

    It came out great (as always!), thanks to the terrific direction of Gabrielle De Cuir of Skyboat Media and editing from Wryneck Studios’ John Taylor Williams. Gabrielle’s directed all my audiobooks since 2017, and John’s been mastering my podcasts since 2006 (!!), so we constitute a very well-oiled machine.

    Working out my ideas in public allows me to produce my Pluralistic newsletter, and with it, a large volume of free, high-quality work that’s licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that lets anyone reproduce, translate, redistribute and even sell my articles. If you’ve enjoyed that work, I hope you’ll consider backing the campaign! Selling books is how I pay the bills and keep the lights on, and as ever, this is the only way you can get a major publisher’s ebooks and audiobooks with no DRM and no “terms of service.” These are truly ebooks and audiobooks that you own. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them out – so long as you don’t violate copyright law, we’re all cool:

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai

    Hey look at this (permalink)


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

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #25yrsago RIP, Douglas Adams http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1326657.stm

    #20yrsago Douglas Coupland models his life & books on net rumors about him https://web.archive.org/web/20060515220320/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/posts.html?pg=6

    #15yrsago Vindictive lumber baron’s far-flung heirs inherit, 91 years after his death https://abcnews.com/Business/lumber-barons-descendants-receive-inheritance-92-years-death/story?id=13569633

    #15yrsago R2D2 trashcan https://web.archive.org/web/20171208014511/https://i.imgur.com/x3w0I.jpg

    #15yrsago Napier’s Bones: math and mysticism make for great international adventure https://memex.craphound.com/2011/05/12/napiers-bones-math-and-mysticism-make-for-great-international-adventure/

    #15yrsago China’s shonky Disneyland-a-like park closed https://web.archive.org/web/20110515073221/https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/05/13/fake-disney-theme-park-in-china-forced-to-close/

    #10yrsago Open letter to from EFF to members of the W3C Advisory Committee https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/open-letter-members-w3c-advisory-committee

    #10yrsago Gallery show of forks stolen from rich people, sealed to preserve crumbs & saliva https://web.archive.org/web/20160505183026/https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/27/crumbs-and-all-prince-harry-hillary-clinton-and-julia-gillard-have-cutlery-swiped-for-exhibition

    #10yrsago German publishers owe writers €100M in misappropriated royalties https://uebermedien.de/4444/schoener-verlegen-mit-dem-geld-anderer-leute/

    #10yrsago Chinese state-backed corporations beat US lawsuits with sovereign immunity https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-companies-lawsuits-idUSKCN0Y2131/

    #10yrsago Anal fisting site breached: 100K passwords, usernames, email addresses and IPs extracted https://web.archive.org/web/20160511121337/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/rosebuttboard-ip-board

    #10yrsago Reading With Pictures: awesome, classroom-ready comics for math, social studies, science and language arts https://memex.craphound.com/2016/05/12/reading-with-pictures-awesome-classroom-ready-comics-for-math-social-studies-science-and-language-arts/

    #5yrsago Crooked Timber’s Ministry for the Future Seminar https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/12/seminar-for-the-future/#imaginations

    #1yrago Trump can’t do ANYTHING for his base https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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


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

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

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

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

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

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

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


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

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

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

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

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

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

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

    ISSN: 3066-764X

  • Law & Political Economy, or Legal Theory & Capitalism?

    Over the past several years, a number of legal scholars have engaged the question of whether and how to reignite the critical impulse in legal theory. This inquiry has been less about a nostalgic revival of Critical Legal Studies, and more about how to meaningfully address a contemporary moment defined by an unrelenting proliferation of crises. Given this aim, one natural question concerns the…

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