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  • Fewer heat-related deaths in 2025 despite warmest summer

    Summer 2025 was the warmest UK summer on record, with four heatwaves, a top temperature of nearly 38C and a mean temperature of 16.1C
  • How Corporations Hijacked Identity Politics

    The Fourteenth Amendment was written as an instrument to deliver the bounties of emancipation to freedwomen and freedmen. Yet it fell far short of this original intent, not least because the Supreme Court drastically limited the actors and, ultimately, the actions that might be targeted by the amendment’s guarantees of “due process” and “equal protection.” During the same interval of time, however…

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  • Canada Charges Suspect in Extortion Against South Asian Community

    Canadian police have charged a man in Calgary in an extortion investigation involving members of the city’s South Asian community, after a series of threats, property attacks and at least one shooting. Investigators said the case involved demands for large sums of money and, in some instances, pressure to hand over control of businesses.

    Police said Calgary has recorded 41 extortion attempts since January 2025, including 18 shootings at homes, businesses, or vehicles. Authorities said victims were also threatened through international phone calls and social media and urged others to come forward, warning that fear of retaliation and pressure from within the community may be stopping some people from reporting the crimes.

  • Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026)

    Today’s links



    A hand-tinted picture of a 1950s Univac control room, the walls lined with computer cabinets, a male operator in a suit seated at a steel desk replete with control knobs and an oscilloscope. The image has been altered. A shiny robot is bursting out of a hole in the checked floor; the back wall bears the Anthropic logo, and the main computer cabinet now has the Claude Code logo.

    It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (permalink)

    Anthropic’s developers made an extremely basic configuration error, and as a result, the source-code for Claude Code – the company’s flagship coding assistant product – has leaked and is being eagerly analyzed by many parties:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778

    In response, Anthropic is flooding the internet with “takedown notices.” These are a special kind of copyright-based censorship demand established by section 512 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 512), allowing for the removal of material without any kind of evidence, let alone a judicial order:

    https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-races-to-contain-leak-of-code-behind-claude-ai-agent-4bc5acc7

    Copyright is a “strict liability” statute, meaning that you can be punished for violating copyright even if you weren’t aware that you had done so. What’s more, “intermediaries” – like web hosts, social media platforms, search engines, and even caching servers – can be held liable for the copyright violations their users engage in. The liability is tremendous: the DMCA provides for $150,000 per infringement.

    DMCA 512 is meant to offset this strict liability. After all, there’s no way for a platform to know whether one of its users is infringing copyright – even if a user uploads a popular song or video, the provider can’t know whether they’ve licensed the work for distribution (or even if they are the creator of that work). A cumbersome system in which users would upload proof that they have such a license wouldn’t just be onerous – it would still permit copyright infringement, because there’s no way for an intermediary to know whether the distribution license the user provided was genuine.

    As a compromise, DMCA 512 absolves intermediaries from liability, if they “expeditiously remove” material upon notice that it infringes someone’s copyright. In practice, that means that anyone can send a notice to any intermediary and have anything removed from the internet. The intermediary who receives this notice can choose to ignore it, but if the notice turns out to be genuine, they can end up on the hook for $150,000 per infringement. The intermediary can also choose to allow their user to “counternotify” (dispute the accusation) and can choose to reinstate the material, but they don’t have to. Just as an intermediary can’t determine whether a user has the rights to the things they post, they also can’t tell if the person on the other end of a takedown notice has the right to demand its removal. In practice, this means that a takedown notice, no matter how flimsy, has a very good chance of making something disappear from the internet – forever.

    From the outset, DMCA 512 was the go-to tool for corporate censorship, the best way to cover up misdeeds. I first got involved in this back in 2003, when leaked email memos from Diebold’s voting machine division revealed that the company knew that its voting machines were wildly insecure, but they were nevertheless selling them to local election boards across America, who were scrambling to replace their mechanical voting machines in the wake of the 2000 Bush v Gore “hanging chad” debacle, which led to Bush stealing the presidency:

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

    The stakes couldn’t be higher, in other words. Diebold – whose CEO was an avowed GW Bush partisan who’d promised to “deliver the votes for Bush” – was the country’s leading voting machine supplier. The company knew its voting machines were defective, that they frequently crashed and lost their vote counts on election night, and that Diebold technicians were colluding with local electoral officials to secretly “estimate” the lost vote totals so that no one would hold either the official or Diebold responsible for these defective machines:

    https://www.salon.com/2003/09/23/bev_harris/

    Diebold sent thousands of DMCA 512 takedown notices in an attempt to suppress the leaked memos. Eventually, EFF stepped in to provide pro-bono counsel to the Online Policy Group and ended Diebold’s flood:

    https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold

    Diebold wasn’t the last company to figure out how to abuse copyright to censor information of high public interest. There’s a whole industry of shady “reputation management” companies that collect large sums in exchange for scrubbing the internet of information their clients want removed from the public eye. They specialize in sexual abusers, war criminals, torturers, and fraudsters, and their weapon of choice is the takedown notice. Jeffrey Epstein spent tens of thousands of dollars on “reputation management” services to clean up his online profile:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/business/media/jeffrey-epstein-online.html

    There are lots of ways to use the takedown system to get true information about your crimes removed from the internet. My favorite is the one employed by Eliminalia, one of the sleazier reputation laundries (even by the industry’s dismal standards).

    Eliminalia sets up WordPress sites and copies press articles that cast its clients in an unfavorable light to these sites, backdating them so they appear to have been published before the originals. They swap out the bylines for fictitious ones, then send takedowns to Google and other search engines to get the “infringing” stories purged from their search indices. Once the original articles have been rendered invisible to internet searchers, Eliminalia takes down their copy, and the story of their client’s war crimes, rapes, or fraud disappears from the public eye:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#dark-ops

    The takedown system is so tilted in favor of censorship that it takes a massive effort to keep even the smallest piece of information online in the face of a determined adversary. In 2007, the key for AACS (a way of encrypting video for “digital rights management”) leaked online. The key was a 16-digit number, the kind of thing you could fit in a crossword puzzle, but the position of the industry consortium that created the key was that this was an illegal integer. They sent hundreds of thousands of takedowns over the number, and it was only the determined action of an army of users that kept the number online:

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

    The shoot-first, ask-questions-never nature of takedown notices makes for fertile ground for scammers of all kinds, but the most ironic takedown ripoffs are the Youtube copystrike blackmailers.

    After Viacom sued Youtube in 2007 over copyright infringement, Google launched its own in-house copyright management system, meant to address Viacom’s principal grievance in the suit. Viacom was angry that after they had something removed from Youtube, another user could re-upload it, and they’d have to send another takedown, playing Wack-a-Mole with the whole internet. Viacom didn’t want a takedown system, they wanted a staydown system, whereby they could supply Google with a list of the works whose copyrights they controlled and then Youtube would prevent anyone from uploading those works.

    (This was extremely funny, because Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would “rough up” clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom’s shows, and sometimes Viacom’s lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed:)

    https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/broadcast-yourself/

    Youtube’s notice-and-staydown system is Content ID, an incredibly baroque system that allows copyright holders (and people pretending to be copyright holders) to “claim” video and sound files, and block others from posting them. No one – not even the world’s leading copyright experts – can figure out how to use this system to uphold copyright:

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

    However, there is a large cohort of criminals and fraudsters who have mastered Content ID and they use it to blackmail independent artists. You see, Content ID implements a “three strikes” policy: if you are accused of three acts of copyright infringement, Youtube permanently deletes your videos and bars you from the platform. For performers who rely on Youtube to earn their living – whether through ad-revenues or sponsorships or as a promotional vehicle to sell merchandise, recordings and tickets – the “copystrike” is an existential risk.

    Enter the fraudster. A fraudster can set up multiple burner Youtube accounts and file spurious copyright complaints against a creator (usually a musician). After two of these copystrikes are accepted and the performer is just one strike away from losing their livelihood, the fraudster contacts the performer and demands blackmail money to rescind the complaints, threatening to file that final strike and put the performer out of business:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/08/copyfraud/#beethoven-just-wrote-music

    The fact that copyright – nominally a system intended to protect creative workers – is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve is ironic, but it’s not unusual. Copyright law has been primarily shaped by creators’ bosses – media companies like Viacom – who brandish “starving artists” as a reason to enact policies that ultimately benefit capital at the expense of labor.

    That was what inspired Rebecca Giblin and me to write our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism: how is it that copyright has expanded in every way for 40 years (longer duration, wider scope, higher penalties), resulting in media companies that are more profitable than ever, with higher gross and net revenues, even as creative workers have grown poorer, both in total compensation and in the share of the profits they generate?

    https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

    The first half of Chokepoint Capitalism is a series of case studies that dissect the frauds and scams that both media and tech companies use to steal from creative workers. The second half are a series of “shovel-ready” policy proposals for new laws and rules that would actually put money in artists’ pockets. Some of these policy prescriptions are copyright-related, but not all of them.

    For example, we have a chapter on how the Hollywood “guild” system (which allows unionized workers to bargain with all the studios at once) has been a powerful antidote to corporate power. This is called “sectoral bargaining” and it’s been illegal since 1947’s Taft-Hartley Act, but the Hollywood guilds were grandfathered in. When we wrote about the power of sectoral bargaining, it was in reference to the Writers Guild’s incredible triumph over the four giant talent agencies, who’d invented a scam that inverted the traditional revenue split between writer and agent, so the agencies were taking in 90% and the writers were getting just 10%:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#WME-CAA-next

    Two years later, the Hollywood Writers struck again, this time over AI in the writers’ room, securing a stunning victory over the major studios:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

    Notably, the writers strike was a labor action, not a copyright action. The writers weren’t demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control whether their work could be used to train an AI. They struck for the right not to have their wages eroded by AI – to have the right to use (or not use) AI, as they saw fit, without risking their livelihoods.

    Right now, many media companies are demanding a new copyright that would allow them to control AI training, and many creative workers have joined in this call. The media companies aren’t arguing against infringing uses of AI models – they’re arguing that the mere creation of such a model infringes copyright. They claim that making a transient copy of a work, analyzing that work, and publishing that analysis is a copyright infringement:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

    Here’s a good rule of thumb: any time your boss demands a new rule, you should be very skeptical about whether that rule will benefit you. It’s clear that the media companies that have sued the AI giants aren’t “anti-AI.” They don’t want to prevent AI from replacing creative workers – they just want to control how that happens.

    When Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, it’s not to prevent AI models from being trained on their catalogs and used to pauperize the workers whose work is in those catalogs. What these companies want is to be paid a license fee for access to their catalogs, and then they want the resulting models to be exclusive to them, and not available to competitors:

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

    These companies are violently allergic to paying creative workers. Disney takes the position that when it buys a company like Lucasfilm, it secures the right to publish the works Lucasfilm commissioned, but not the obligation to pay the royalties that Lucasfilm owes when those works are sold:

    https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/30/disney-still-must-pay/#pay-the-writer

    As Theresa Nielsen Hayden quipped during the Napster Wars: “Just because you’re on their side, it doesn’t mean they’re on your side.” If these companies manage to get copyright law expanded to restrict scraping, analysis, and publication of factual information, they won’t use those new powers to increase creators’ pay – they’ll use them the same way they’ve used every new copyright created in the past 40 years, to make themselves richer at the expense of artists:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/03/just-a-stick/#authorsbargain

    The Claude Code leak is full of fascinating information about a tool that – like Diebold’s voting machines – is at the very center of the most important policy debates of our time. Here’s just one example: Claude is almost certainly implicated in the US missile that murdered a building full of little girls in Iran last month:

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

    Of course I see the irony. Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright’s “limitations and exceptions,” arguing that it can train its models on any information it can find, and that it can knowingly download massive troves of infringing works for that purpose. It’s darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands in order to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company’s gross incompetence:

    https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/04/01/158240/anthropic-issues-copyright-takedown-requests-to-remove-8000-copies-of-claude-code-source-code#comments

    But what’s objectionable about Anthropic – and the AI sector – isn’t copyright. The thing that makes these companies disgusting is their gleeful, fraudulent trumpeting about how their products will destroy the livelihoods of every kind of worker:

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

    And it’s their economic fraud, the inflation of a bubble that will destroy the economy when it bursts:

    https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/

    It’s their enthusiastic deployment of AI tools for mass surveillance and mass killing. (Anthropic is no exception, despite what you may have heard:)

    https://www.thetechbubble.info/p/how-much-a-dollar-cost

    If the media bosses get their way, and manage to make it even more illegal – and practically harder – to host, discuss, and publish facts about copyrighted works, then leaks like the Claude Code disclosures will never see the light of day. It’s only because of decades of hard-fought battles to push back on this nonsense that we are able to identify and learn about the defects in Claude Code that are revealed by this source-code leak.

    I’m angry about the AI industry, but not because of copyright. I’m angry at them for the reasons Cat Valente articulated so well in her “Blood Money” essay:

    https://catvalente.substack.com/p/blood-money-the-anthropic-settlement

    These companies’ stated goals are terrible:

    They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator.

    These goals are entirely compatible with copyright. The New York Times is suing over AI – and they’re licensing their writers’ words to train an AI model:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/media/new-york-times-amazon-ai-licensing.html

    The NYT wants more copyright. You know what the NYT doesn’t want? More labor rights. The NYT are vicious union-busters:

    https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

    If we creative workers are going to pour our scarce resources into getting a new policy to address the threats that our bosses – and the AI companies they are morally and temperamentally indistinguishable from – represent to our livelihoods, then let that new policy be a renewed sectoral bargaining right for every worker. It was sectoral bargaining (a collective, solidaristic right) and not copyright (an individual, commercial right) that saw off AI in the Hollywood writers’ strike.

    Copyright positions the creative worker as a small business – an LLC with an MFA – bargaining B2B with another firm. To the extent that copyright helps us, it is largely incidental. Sure, we were able to file for a few thousand bucks per book that Anthropic downloaded from a pirate site to train its models on. But Anthropic doesn’t have to use a shadow library to get those books – it can just pay our bosses to get them.

    It’s great that Claude Code’s source is online. It’s great that we have the ability to pore over, analyze and criticize this code, which has become so consequential in so many ways. It’s great the copyright is weak enough that this is possible (for now).

    Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding labor rights will gain much, for every worker, including our audiences. It’s an idea that our bosses – and AI hucksters – hate with every fiber of their beings.


    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 Desperate WI Republican congressman struggling to get by on $174K turns to copyright trolling https://web.archive.org/web/20110404001110/http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/gopers-demand-sean-duffy-salary-tape-be-pulled-from-the-internet.php?ref=fpblg

    #15yrsago Redditor outs astroturfer with 20 accounts https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/gepnl/gamepro_g4tv_and_vgchartz_gamrfeed_have_been/

    #15yrsago Britain’s back-room negotiations to establish a national, extrajudicial Internet censorship regime https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/minister-confirms-voluntary-site-blocking-discussions/

    #15yrsago Elephantmen: Dr Moreau meets apocalyptic noir science fiction comic https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/31/elephantmen-dr-moreau-meets-apocalyptic-noir-science-fiction-comic/

    #10yrsago Bitcoin transactions could consume as much energy as Denmark by the year 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20160401031103/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-could-consume-as-much-electricity-as-denmark-by-2020

    #10yrsago Online casino bankrolls largest-ever, ruinously expensive war in Eve Online https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/31/11334014/eve-online-war/

    #10yrsago Russia bans Polish “Communist Monopoly” board-game https://www.newsweek.com/russia-bans-polands-communist-monopoly-being-anti-russian-438972?rx=us

    #10yrsago “Reputation management” companies apparently induce randos to perjure themselves by pretending to be anonymous posters https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/31/latest-reputation-management-bogus-defamation-suits-bogus-companies-against-bogus-defendants/

    #10yrsago Leak: Alaska superdelegate denies duty to represent her state’s voters in 2016 elections https://web.archive.org/web/20160717042158/http://usuncut.com/politics/alaska-superdelegate/

    #10yrsago Phishers trick Mattel into transferring $3M to a Chinese bank https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mattel-vs-chinese-cyberthieves-its-no-game/

    #10yrsago CNN celebrates Sanders’ six primary victories by airing a “documentary” about Jesus https://fair.org/home/as-sanders-surges-cable-news-runs-prison-reality-show-jesus-documentary/

    #10yrsago Hungarian ruling party wants to ban all working cryptography https://web.archive.org/web/20160405014411/http://budapestbeacon.com/public-policy/fidesz-wants-make-encryption-software-illegal/33462

    #10yrsago Embroidered toast https://www.behance.net/gallery/31502957/Everyday-bread#

    #5yrsago AI has a GIGO problem https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#imagenot

    #5yrsago Sacklers to use Purdue bankruptcy to escape justice https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#claims-extinguished

    #5yrsago Cuba is a vaccine powerhouse https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#Soberana-Abdala

    #5yrsago AT&T will lay off thousands more https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/31/vaccine-for-the-global-south/#we-dont-have-to-care

    #1yrago Private-sector Trumpism https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade


    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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    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)



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    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

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

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

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



    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

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

    • “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


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  • Tribal Rule Trumps Regulation as Yemen Warlords Plunder Marble

    Tribal Rule Trumps Regulation as Yemen Warlords Plunder Marble

    Standing in the arid, scorchingly hot desert of central Yemen’s Marib province, Abdullah Ahmed Ali Shawdaq appears in his element. 

    The tribal warlord, who is sporting a crisp white shirt and a camouflage-patterned scarf wrapped around his head, is surrounded by a coterie of young men in military gear, carrying rifles and walkie talkies. 

    These are members of his militia who also serve as his protection detail, escorting their leader in pick-up trucks across the region’s rocky, flood-prone roads. 

    But the middle-aged sheikh is not only a military commander whose forces have helped fend off Houthi rebels. He is also a businessman. 

    Satellite views of the Thaniyah mountain range in Marib province, Yemen, between 2014 and 2025, show the expansion of quarries.

    Since the outbreak of Yemen’s civil war, Shawdaq has cemented his grip over marble quarries in Marib’s Thaniyah mountain range, where he told reporters he employs thousands of workers who use heavy machinery to extract, cut, and transport huge chunks of the valuable stone. 

    “Everyone has a destiny written for him,” he said of how his father first discovered marble in the desert’s hillsides. 

    Today, anyone with the resources to do so is free to mine the mountains “without any intervention” from the state, he added.  

    Legally, this is not the case. Extracting marble in Yemen requires a government license and payment of royalties, with the natural resource considered property of the state. However, Yemen’s more than decade-long civil war has fractured and paralyzed the country’s bureaucracy, disrupting the official licensing process and robbing the industry of government oversight. 

    As a result, the lucrative marble sector in Marib province is operating largely as a free-for-all, illustrating the immense challenges of governance in the impoverished but resource-rich state riven by war.

    “Tribal sheikhs consider themselves above the authority,” said Anwar Qasim Saeed, the director of minerals for the licensing authority run by Yemen’s internationally-recognized government (IRG). He confirmed that no official licenses have been issued for marble excavation in Marib province since the conflict began in 2014.

    “The areas aren’t easy for the state to claim as its own because, in [the tribes’] view, ‘this is ours,’” explained Ismail Nasser Al Ganad, a geologist who previously chaired Yemen’s mineral licensing body. “We tell them yes, the mountains are indeed yours, but the resources beneath them also belong to the state.”

    Though tribal leaders have long served as key powerbrokers in Yemen, they have become an even more influential force in Marib since the conflict erupted. This is particularly true for tribes that have helped government forces repel Houthi incursions in the province, says Mohammed Ali Thamer, a Yemeni researcher in international economics and relations.

    With government oversight falling by the wayside and tribal leaders rising to fill the void, the entire mining industry has been left vulnerable to “waves of random prospecting, scavenging, looting, and the destruction of mines,” he added. 

    Shawdaq, a leader in the powerful Abida tribe, initially told reporters that he operated his quarries without a license and that he had stopped paying the state dues since the war.

    “We are prepared to pay anything to the state, but it must provide us with fuel, electricity, and essential services,” he told reporters, adding that the state has been “negligent.” 

    Yet the sheikh pivoted during a follow-up conversation by phone, claiming he paid the government annual fees and held a license covering all his activities. His demeanor then changed and he accused OCCRP of provoking him and interfering in his affairs.

    He later sent reporters several documents showing he had paid tax on his marble company’s profits to authorities in Marib, though he did not provide any evidence of holding a valid license or having paid annual fees or royalties. He did not respond to questions about how many quarries he owns.

    The IRG’s Ministry of Oil and Minerals, and the affiliated licensing authority, did not respond to requests to comment about Shawdaq’s case. 

    Lost Potential

    A centuries-old staple of Yemeni construction, marble is the main source of income in the desert northeast of Marib city, where quarries create jagged white scars etched into the brown slopes of the surrounding mountains.  

    There are no farms or livestock as far as the eye can see on the flat plains below the mines, but only small makeshift houses hosting the miners in basic conditions.  

    The surrounding sands are littered with massive marble boulders which are transported by truck for sale in the domestic market or to neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman. 

    Wearing a patterned scarf, and an ornate jambiya — traditional Yemeni dagger —   another quarry owner delved into how tribal views of ownership clash with the perspective of the state. 

    Ali Abdallah Saleh Ruqaisian, who also belongs to Marib’s Abida tribe, said the sheikhs “own” the mountains by ancestral right. “We have ancestral traditions and customs,” he explained, noting that a senior sheikh had long ago “ruled on this matter.” 

    “This mountain is mine,” he said, gesturing toward a rock formation. He said he realized the site’s value over a decade ago, opened a quarry, and later handed it to an investor for a fee of 100,000 Saudi riyals (approximately $26,000). 

    “I don’t pay the state anything,” he told reporters. “We don’t pay and we won’t pay… The state wants the citizen to remain under its boot. … After the oil, now they want to take our hard work? No.”

    Before the war, a World Bank report estimated that investment in new large quarries in Yemen’s marble and granite sector could generate $20 to $30 million in annual sales. One obstacle, local media reported at the time, was a lack of transportation and export infrastructure. 

    The war has divided the country, and the licensing authority, in two. The conflict has also deepened logistical challenges, with the Saudi-backed IRG sitting in Aden on one side, and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels controlling the country’s previous capital Sanaa.. 

    “In Sana’a they work independently from the one in Aden… There are no joint projects, nor are there any funded projects,” said IAl Ganad, the former chair of Yemen’s mineral licensing body.

    The war has also seen old roads cut off, and new routes opened through the desert that are “susceptible to looting, robbery, and sometimes killing by some tribes if ‘desert transit fees’ are not paid,” said Thamer, the researcher. 

    And tracing who owns what — or where the profits are going — is nearly impossible. 

    Like the rest of the state, corporate registries are split between Yemen’s two administrations, and their maintenance appears to be minimal.

    The tribal leader Shawdaq, for instance, is the director general manager of Abdullah Ahmed Bin Shawdaq for Marble & Granite Establishment, which has advertised custom-cut white marble on Facebook. 

    While Shawdaq showed reporters an IRG-issued commercial registration card from 2022, his company is absent from the IRG’s official online registry.

    Records obtained by reporters show the company sold a little over 81 tonnes of marble to a Saudi firm for over $2,300 in February 2025. When asked about this sale, Shawdaq said this was a sample exported with “official export permits” for technical evaluation. 

    Clashes at the Quarries 

    Yemen’s tribes have long exercised varying levels of autonomy and influence in the country, particularly in times of conflict and crisis. 

    They are “one of the most important factors that affect the Yemeni state’s policy” and “the largest pressure group in the country throughout history,” reads a 2020 report from the Abaad Studies and Research Center, a Yemeni non-profit. 

    The power of tribes in Marib is connected to the region’s military dynamics, especially since 2020 when the tribes fought significant battles against the Houthis, making them an important ally of the IRG.

    However, the alliance is fragile. 

    Tribal interests do not always align with those of the government, said Luca Nevola, a Yemen analyst at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based research center. He noted how Marib’s marble quarries have become a flashpoint for violence.  

    In May 2025, for instance, Abida tribesmen ambushed IRG forces and captured 25 soldiers. 

    “The reason behind the clash was the IRG forces’ intervention in a tribal dispute over a stone quarry,” Nevola said. 

    The ongoing war has also cost Yemen untold amounts of desperately-needed revenue from mining marble and other minerals in Marib. Amid the conflict, most miners are able to escape paying fees to the government, said Ali Mohamed Ali Ghaithan, who runs the only licensed iron mine in Marib.

    “When entrepreneurs working in this sector manipulate the system, operating outside the government’s purview, the state suffers substantial losses,” he said.

  • X Asks Court to Dismiss Music Piracy Lawsuit After Supreme Court’s Cox Ruling

    X Asks Court to Dismiss Music Piracy Lawsuit After Supreme Court’s Cox Ruling

    In a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of ‘breeding’ mass copyright infringement.

    The social media company allegedly failed to respond adequately to takedown notices and lacked a proper termination policy.

    The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), for example, claimed it had sent over 300,000 formal infringement notices, many of which didn’t lead to immediate removals.

    “Twitter routinely ignores known repeat infringers and known infringements, refusing to take simple steps that are available to Twitter to stop these specific instances of infringement of which it is aware,” the music companies alleged.

    X Won the First Battle

    In 2024, X scored a partial win when the court dismissed the music publishers’ direct and vicarious copyright infringement claims, and partially dismissed claims of contributory infringement.

    The court concluded that X can’t be held liable for making it ‘very easy’ to upload infringing material or for monetizing pirated content. Those characteristics are not exclusive to infringing material and apply to legitimate content.

    While this was a partial win for X, most of the contributory infringement claim remained intact, and the lawsuit was allowed to move forward on those grounds.

    Among other things, the music companies argued that X is liable because it willingly turned a blind eye to pirating users, especially those who have a blue checkmark. However, according to a new filing by X this week, new legal developments warrant a full dismissal now.

    Cox Sets the New Standard

    Last Friday, X informed the Tennessee federal court about the Supreme Court decision in Cox v. Sony, which was decided in favor of the ISP last week. This ruling also concerns a ‘repeat infringer’ case, and it sets a clear standard for contributory copyright infringement.

    Under the Supreme Court’s new standard, a service provider can only be held contributorily liable if it intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can be shown in just two ways: the provider actively induced copyright infringement through specific acts, or the service has no substantial non-infringing uses. Nothing else qualifies.

    X argues that the music publishers’ surviving claim fails both tests. Social media is clearly capable of substantial non-infringing uses, and the publishers never alleged that X took specific steps to actively encourage infringement.

    The social media platform argues that, under the new Cox precedent, the contributory infringement claim fails as a matter of law and the entire case should be dismissed.

    “F the DMCA”

    To stress that there is a high bar for these infringement claims, X directly references some of the most damning evidence in the Cox case, which was not enough to establish liability.

    “Cox even expressed contempt for copyright law, writing emails with comments like ‘F the DMCA.’ Despite these facts, the Supreme Court had no trouble reversing the jury’s contributory-infringement verdict, because such facts were not ‘evidence of express promotion, marketing, and intent to promote infringement,” X notes in its filing.

    The comparison is somewhat ironic, as Elon Musk himself once publicly described the DMCA as a “plague on humanity”, which the music publishers cited in their original complaint as evidence of a hostile attitude toward copyright.

    While controversial, these statements don’t appear to matter for a contributory infringement claim, as they don’t actively induce copyright infringement. Therefore, X believes that the present case should be dismissed.

    “If the Supreme Court had issued this opinion three years ago, X believes this Court would have dismissed Plaintiffs’ contributory-infringement claim in its entirety. Indeed, virtually every contributory-infringement case Plaintiffs cited in opposing X’s motion to dismiss – including the Fourth Circuit case on which this Court relied – is no longer good law,” X writes.

    Millions at Stake

    X is not simply flagging the Supreme Court ruling for the record. The social media platform asks Judge Trauger for a status conference before both sides spend millions more on a case that may have already been rendered pointless.

    There are various motions pending while the case is heading to summary judgment, and X asks the court to reconsider whether the new Cox precedent warrants a more streamlined process.

    “If the Court would prefer to address these issues at summary judgment, X is prepared to do so. But both sides are now poised to spend millions of dollars in fees and expert expenses in the coming months on issues that Cox makes irrelevant as a matter of law,” X writes.

    X says that it plans to move for judgment on the pleadings, or alternatively, it will ask the court to reconsider its earlier motion to dismiss ruling in light of new legal reality. For now, X is proposing a hearing to find the most efficient path forward.

    Whatever the court decides, the legal standoff between X and the music industry will be far from over. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s company filed a landmark antitrust complaint against the NMPA, Sony, Universal, and other major music publishers, alleging that they “weaponized” the DMCA to force licensing deals.

    A copy of X’s notice, filed earlier this week at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, is available here (pdf).

    Update: The music companies filed a response in court, agreeing to stay the matter temporarily, until the court decides how to move forward (pdf).

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

  • The Doctor’s Voice: Why AI Health Chatbots Believe Medical Lies

    Framing misinformation as coming from “a senior doctor” overrides skepticism

    The post The Doctor’s Voice: Why AI Health Chatbots Believe Medical Lies first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

  • How DWeb Camp is Being Built in Berlin

    How DWeb Camp is Being Built in Berlin

    At the legendary c-base, technologists, activists, and artists gathered to shape the next chapter of the decentralized web.

    c-base is a space station that “crashed” and is being reconstructed along the Spree river by a group of Berlin hackers. Some call it the mother of all hackerspaces.

    On a gray February morning in Berlin, people wandered down a dark ramp into a space station.

    Not a metaphorical one—at least not entirely. c-base, with its blinking lights, maze of cables, and decades of hacker lore, has long described itself as a space station that crashed on Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Since the mid-1990s it has been a gathering place for coders and tinkerers who prefer to build the future themselves rather than wait for it to arrive.

    On this particular morning, they had come to design something new.

    In February, an invitation had circulated across Europe’s decentralized technology networks: come to c-base and help shape the next DWeb Camp, a five-day gathering that will take place this July in the forests of Brandenburg.

    There was no fixed agenda, and no finished plan.

    Just a question.

    If we were to build the next version of DWeb Camp together, what might it look like?

    Before long, the room filled. Peer-to-peer developers had come from Edinburgh, free-software advocates from Berlin, privacy-first technologists from Shanghai, and policy thinkers from Copenhagen. Artists, funders, open-source builders, and organizers filtered in carrying laptops and winter coats. Most of them had never met before.

    They had come not just to attend—but to help build something.

    The timing was not accidental. Across the world, the systems shaping the internet—and increasingly public life—are consolidating. Governments tighten control. Platforms encroach on our privacy. The internet as we know it is splintering, and along with it, our consensus about what is true. For many in the room that morning, the pressing question was can we restructure the web before it hardens into something more destructive than its early architects ever imagined?

    DWeb Camp, first held in Northern California in 2019, grew out of that concern. The gathering was conceived as a place where technologists, artists, organizers, and policymakers might come together to begin building a more decentralized web.

    A web built less like a pyramid and more like a forest. Distributed. Resilient. Sharing resources underground.

    This summer, DWeb Camp’s theme is “Root Systems,” and it moves to Europe for the first time. The meeting at c-base was an early step in imagining what might grow there.

    For an hour, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle answered the questions of DWeb Sr. Organizer, Wendy Hanamura, in a wide-ranging chat about public AI, his successes and failures, and the imperative for decentralization in this political moment.

    Origins of a Decentralized Gathering

    “It feels like I’m coming home,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said when he opened the morning.

    Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.

    “A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”

    Collective Intelligence

    “It feels like I’m coming home,” Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, said when he opened the morning.

    Kahle traces some of the inspiration for DWeb Camp to the Chaos Communication Camp, the sprawling hacker gathering he first attended in 2003. But his vision was always more focused: an event where technologists could work alongside artists, organizers, and policymakers to imagine and build the infrastructure of a decentralized web.

    “A web that’s more private, more reliable, but still fun,” he said, hopping up and down. “A web with many winners.”

    Collective Intelligence

    At c-base, Kahle and a dozen core organizers didn’t arrive with a finished program. Instead they facilitated breakout conversations, solicited unconference topics, and most importantly, listened.

    Throughout the day, small circles formed across the space station, and similar themes surfaced again and again.

    Not everything, participants suggested, needs to scale to billions of users. Perhaps some of the most important decentralized tools will serve smaller networks—families, communities, groups of collaborators who know one another. An intimate web, as some people called it, rather than the global one.

    Others spoke about shared infrastructure in a broader sense: not just software, but the resources communities could distribute. Buildings. Time. Convenings. Knowledge. The question, several people suggested, was not simply how to build better tools but how to sustain the ecosystems that allow those tools to exist.

    Hölke Brammer, of the Hypercerts Foundation, offered a framework that drew nods around the table.

    “It’s said, first you need the values,” he recited.
    “Then governance.
    Then the right incentives.
    And finally the technology to build it.”

    DWeb Camp tries to bring all of those layers together in the same place at the same time. Which means inviting not just engineers but researchers, economists and storytellers.

    Marek Tuszynski, co-founder of Tactical Tech, offered a wry observation about how the technology world often divides itself.

    “They say technology is inspired in San Francisco,” he recounted. “It’s built in China. And criticized in Europe.”

    The challenge, he suggested, was to move beyond those boxes—to collaborate across them.

    Later, when participants were asked what would make the camp most valuable, one answer surfaced repeatedly.

    “To find the people I want to work with after Camp,” someone said, “and figure out how to keep working together on an on-going basis.”

    Grounded in Place

    Franzi and Marv, two of the stewards of the Alte Holle Collective, share the terrain of the 100,000 sq. meters retreat site.

    DWeb Camp has always been shaped by the places where it occurs.

    When organizers began looking for a European site, they eventually settled on Alte Hölle, a forested property in Brandenburg about an hour southwest of Berlin.

    The decision had as much to do with the people stewarding the land as with the landscape itself.

    In 2021, a collective of friends who met at Chaos Communications Camp purchased the property—once a Stasi recreation site—with the intention of turning it into a long-term gathering place for artists, hackers, and activists.

    Their question was straightforward.

    Why build a camp only to dismantle it a few days later?   Why not create infrastructure that could remain?

    Two of the site’s stewards, Franzi and Marv, joined the gathering at c-base. Rather than simply presenting the site, they participated in the discussions, listening carefully to the people who will soon gather there.

    “We share a lot of the same values,” they said. “We are a volunteer group that supports [you] and is an ally for [your] event.” 

    The goal, for DWeb organizers, is not merely to occupy Alte Hölle but to contribute to it—to plant something, rather than simply passing through.

    The field where some 700+ campers will pitch their tents in Brandenburg.

    Partners with Principles

    Afri of Department of Decentralization demonstrates the programmable badge his team is developing for DWeb Camp. Via radio waves, you will be able to talk person to person at Camp, without going to the cloud or WIFI.

    Strong collaborators don’t just support your vision. They push you to live up to it.

    Berlin’s Department of Decentralization (DoD)—a collective formed after organizing ETHBerlin in 2018—has encouraged DWeb Camp organizers to align our tools more closely with our principles. That means prioritizing open-source infrastructure wherever possible.

    Tickets will be sold through PreTix.
    The schedule will run on PreTalx.
    Collaborative documents will live on CryptPad.
    Camp communications will be via Matrix.

    Tools designed with privacy and security in mind. Not just talking about decentralization, but practicing it.

    Building Across Borders

    Some of the organizers of DWeb Camp from Alte Hölle, Department of Decentralization and the Internet Archive came together at c-base in February to plan for July.

    Based across North America and Europe, the organizers of DWeb Camp 2026 have lineages that span the globe—Nigeria, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Ukraine, Canada, Japan, and the United States. We come from different political contexts. Different assumptions about technology. Different cultural norms. The challenge–and the promise–is to weave those perspectives into something coherent, yet distinct. 

    Toward the end of the day at c-base, Kahle returned to a theme that was disarmingly simple.

    Welcome.

    “This is a really special community…they welcomed me twenty years ago,” he said. “You may not be aware of the effect you have by saying ‘welcome’ to somebody from a foreign place. I think it is a hallmark of a community that is living and thriving.”

    That small gesture, he suggested, can shape the direction of entire communities. “I hope that DWeb Camp is to your liking, if it’s not, say so, and let’s basically make it better. Let’s build something together.” 

    Because DWeb Camp has never been a finished product.

    It is something closer to a living system. It’s shaped by the people who show up, the relationships they form, and the ideas that take hold.

    And in the forests of Brandenburg this July, those connections—technical, social, and human—will begin to spread beneath the surface.

    Like any root system, their real strength may lie in what we cannot see.

    View the fireside chat with Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura.