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  • ‘Something wasn’t right’: Wrong sperm given to UK families by IVF clinics in northern Cyprus

    Families of seven children believe the wrong sperm or egg donors were used in their IVF treatment.

  • Welcome, Daily Show Viewers! Learn More About EFF and Privacy’s Defender

    About EFF

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. EFF’s work to protect your rights on the internet is supported by over 30,000 members who have joined our mission by donating just this year.

    For over 35 years, our lawyers, activists, and technologists have been thinking about the next big thing in tech before anyone else—whether that’s age verification, AI, or Palantir. Whatever causes you fight for, you rely on the internet to do so. And EFF protects the infrastructure of rebellion. 

    JOIN EFF TODAY

    To learn more about our work, follow EFF on social media and subscribe to EFF’s EFFector newsletter below to learn about the ways the internet and online rights are changing and what that means for you. And join EFF to support our fight—because if you use technology, this fight is yours. 

    Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, by Cindy Cohn

    In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press), EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.

    “Let’s Sue the Government” T-Shirt

    [

    Sometimes our supporters call EFF a merch store with a law firm attached because our stickers, hoodies and shirts are so well known. Our “Let’s Sue the Government” shirt tells people: When your rights are at risk, you don’t stay quiet.

    EFF’s History

    In early 1990, the U.S. Secret Service conducted raids tracking the distribution of a document illegally copied from a telecom company’s computer; one of those targeted was an Austin, TX publisher named Steve Jackson, whose computers were seized but later returned without any charges filed. Jackson’s business had suffered, and he discovered that the government had read and deleted his customers’ emails. He sought a civil liberties organization to represent him for this violation of his rights, but no existing organization understood the technology well enough to grasp the free speech and privacy issues at hand.

    But a few well-informed technologists did understand. Mitch Kapor, former president of Lotus Development Corp.; John Perry Barlow, a Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead; and John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, decided to do something about it – and so the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born in July 1990. The Steve Jackson Games case turned out to be an extremely important one for the early internet: For the first time, a court held that electronic mail deserves at least as much protection as telephone calls.

    EFF’s original logo, in use from 1990-2018

    EFF continued to take on cases that set important precedents for the treatment of rights in cyberspace. In our second big case, Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, the United States government prohibited a University of California mathematics Ph.D. student from publishing online an encryption program he had created. Years earlier, the government had placed encryption on the United States Munitions List, alongside bombs and flamethrowers, as a weapon to be regulated for national security purposes; our lawsuit established that written software code is speech protected by the First Amendment, and the further ruled that the export control laws on encryption violated Bernstein’s rights by prohibiting his constitutionally protected speech.  Now everyone has the right to “export” encryption software—by publishing it on the Internet—without prior permission from the U.S. government. 

    Since then we’ve fought against government and corporate abuses of our Constitutional rights, on issues including warrantless wiretapping by intelligence agencies, the panopticon of street-level surveillance that seeks to track everything we do, and the corporate surveillance that turns our clicks into their commodity, as well as issues of antitrust and intellectual property, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and much more. We are lawyers, technologists, activists, and lobbyists who work every day for the privacy, security and dignity of all who use technology – and if you use technology, this fight is yours, too.

    EFF’s Greatest Hits

    While many early battles over the right to communicate freely and privately stemmed from government censorship, today EFF is fighting for users on many other fronts as well.

    Today, certain powerful corporations are attempting to shut down online speech, prevent new innovation from reaching consumers, and facilitating government surveillance. We challenge corporate overreach just as we challenge government abuses of power.

    JOIN EFF TODAY

    We also develop technologies that can help individuals protect their privacy and security online, which our technologists build and release freely to the public for anyone to use.

    In addition, EFF is engaged in major legislative fights, beating back digital censorship bills disguised as intellectual property proposals, opposing attempts to force companies to spy on users, championing reform bills that rein in government surveillance, documenting police technology and where it’s used, helping users protect themselves from surveillance, and much more.

    Learn more about some of EFF’s most impactful work— Download a PDF of our new catalog, “Now That’s What I Call Digital Rights!

  • Violence and US Influencers Mar Serbia’s Local Elections

    Addressing the nation on Sunday evening, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić hailed the ruling Serbian Progressive Party’s (SNS) performance in 10 small municipal elections as if he had secured a massive national mandate. But outside the president’s press conference, independent watchdogs and media outlets painted a grimly different picture, describing an election day marred by heavy fraud and gang violence.

    “It is 10 to zero. Thank you, Serbia,” Vučić declared, claiming that a “huge evil” had been narrowly avoided. Projecting an image of magnanimity, he added: “I hope that we will experience future elections as a democratic game, as a holiday, and not as a war.”

    He went on to accuse the political opposition of “pulling guns and harassing people,” positioning his party as the nation’s defender of stability.

    However, reports from the ground completely shattered the ruling party’s narrative of a peaceful democratic exercise. According to the independent news outlet N1, the local elections quickly descended into “scenes of street violence,” featuring gangs armed with sticks, physical brawls, and “bloody heads” in the municipalities of Bor, Bajina Bašta, and Kula.

    The Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), an independent election watchdog, rated the election day anywhere from “bad to worst.” In a scathing preliminary assessment, the organization noted that the sheer intensity of the physical violence overshadowed a massive apparatus of systemic fraud, which included parallel voter registries, compromised ballot secrecy, and the organized migration of voters across municipal lines.

    This violent ground game appears to be the physical manifestation of the massive dark money operations recently exposed in preliminary campaign finance reports, which showed the ruling party funneling tens of millions of dinars into these small towns. CRTA’s findings on Sunday revealed how those off-the-books resources were deployed on the ground. Observers recognized public servants imported from other Serbian towns acting among the “thugs and operatives for dirty work” who were terrorizing the polling stations.

    International observers voiced sharp condemnation. “This is not just alarming — it is unacceptable,” the European Democratic Party (EDP) said in a statement, pointing to illegally inflated electoral rolls, detained journalists, and passive police forces.

    Sandro Gozi, the EDP Secretary General, noted that Sunday’s events were not the picture of a normal democratic election, but rather “a system under pressure, using pressure in return.”

    Yet, amid the mounting reports of beaten citizens and severe electoral irregularities, the ruling party deployed a bizarre new tactic: a trio of American “election monitors” who spent the day recording glowing reviews for social media.

    Speaking to a local Kula TV Instagram channel right outside a polling station, American operative Jake Hoffman confidently reported that his team had “so far not seen any issues” and that “everything was good.”

    He then handed the camera to his colleague, Michelle Sassouni, who enthusiastically described the voting process as a “well-oiled machine” where “everybody knew exactly what their job was.” A third American, Peter Finnochio, chimed in to declare: “It’s great seeing democracy in action here in Serbia.”

    The irony was stark: while the Americans were filming their cheerful dispatches, independent media and CRTA explicitly identified Kula as one of the epicenters of the day’s most severe violence, where police cordons ultimately had to be deployed to separate ruling party supporters from students and the opposition.

    The facade of international legitimacy crumbles entirely upon examining the monitors themselves. Hoffman and Sassouni are not credentialed democracy experts; they are a husband-and-wife duo from Florida who co-host a conservative political podcast called “Moderately Outraged.” Hoffman, who runs a digital marketing agency and recently ran a failed campaign for the Florida State House, serves as a National Committeeman for the Young Republicans.

    Rather than objectively observing the election, watchdogs argue they functioned as imported content creators, providing the ruling party with a sanitized digital alibi while actual voters faced intimidation.

    The deployment of these monitors in Serbia mirrors a strategy previously documented by OCCRP and the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE) during local elections in Georgia last October. In that instance, the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE) reported that Georgia brought in a network of 29 foreign “fake observers”—including Hoffman—just as independent watchdogs were being suppressed by the state. That network, affiliated with the Hungary-based Center for Fundamental Rights, publicly praised Georgia’s heavily criticized polls.

    In Serbia, local watchdogs view this as a direct continuation of that exact tactic. Raša Nedeljkov, program director at CRTA, noted that these foreign operatives act as “supervisors” for ruling party polling chiefs, calling their appearance “a step further in destroying the integrity of the elections.”

    For local democratic advocates, the damage has already been done.

    “The election day bluntly confirmed what was already seen during the campaign,” CRTA concluded in its final report, pointing to the extreme criminalization of state institutions and the weaponization of public resources. “In short, this can hardly be called an election.”

  • The Case for Ska

    The Case for Ska

    In a 2016 episode of the popular cop-themed comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, lead character Jake (played by Andy Samberg) has a flashback to 1998, when he was featured on a local news broadcast decked out in checkered sunglasses, a black bowler hat, white shirt, and suspenders. “Ska defines who I am as a person and I will never turn my back on ska,” he declares. When the scene flashes forward to present, Jake denies having any regrets, before admitting to his fellow detective that yes, actually, he should.

  • Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026)

    Today’s links

    • Market participation is exhausting: No one wants to be the sucker at the table.
    • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
    • Object permanence: EMI DRM v Brazil; “The Information”; Genome patenter v copyright troll (let them fight); Green investing isn’t; Trump loves Big Tech; Kleptones’ “24 Hours”; Lasermonks; Ransomware hospital; News co-ops; AI “art” sucks; Swisscom wifi is $838/24h; Millennials don’t exist; Why Microsoft’s chatbot turned Nazi; NYC’s best dumpster-dived food; RIP Diana Wynne Jones; What really happened at the student protests in Trafalgar Square; Church-owned insurer has secret pedo priest files; Names that break databases; Reality-based communities; Hugo for websites; Cop cabs; Fake pediatrician group; Bring Your Own Bigwheeel; “How To Talk About Videogames.”
    • Upcoming appearances: Montreal, London, NYC, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London.
    • Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
    • Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
    • Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
    • Colophon: All the rest.


    An early 20th C painting advertising a magic show, it features a mustachioed, tuxedoed conjurer beating the Devil at poker with four aces in his hand, as a giggling demon on his shoulder whispers advice in his ear and the Devil looks chagrined. The image has been altered: the Devil now has Trump hair and orange skin. The demon perched on the magician's shoulder has the face of Adam Smith.

    Market participation is exhausting (permalink)

    We’re a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I’m good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can’t parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it’s almost comical (it’s a running joke in my family).

    Luckily, I’m married to a woman with incredible spacial sense. My wife Alice can sit at one end of a basketball court and look at the scoreboard at the other end and say, “It’s 1″ off-center to the right and 1° off true clockwise.” She’ll be right. She’s also a crack shot and an extremely proficient gamer (she was the first woman to play e-sports internationally, on the English Quake team).

    I’m good at stuff she’s not good at. I don’t mind wading through personal admin and bookkeeping processes, while she finds these excruciating (and interestingly, it’s reversed when it comes to work-related admin, which I find torturous and which she excels at). I love listening to audiobooks, which she can’t focus on at all. She loves instrumental music, which I broadly find tedious; while I find it much easier to work while listening to music with great lyrics.

    This is great. As a couple, we make up for one another’s deficits and complement one another’s strengths. Obviously, this is also true as a species: we all like doing different stuff in different ways, and that’s good, because there is a lot of stuff to do, and it’s pretty damned heterogenous. A complex, dynamic world demands a complex, dynamic response.

    This is a bedrock of cybernetics, the study of systems control. The “law of requisite complexity” states, “in order to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts”:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)

    Cyberneticians and systems designers understand that their job is partly to design a set of controls that are as complex as the system they modulate, and partly to simplify that system to make it possible to control. Think of how you can make a database search run faster by confining it to one field in records from the past year, or how you can hold down the shift key to constrain a rectangular selection tool so it draws perfect squares.

    This happens cognitively, too. Pretty much anyone can track their expenses from a work trip, but the company bookkeeper needs to have a certain “head for figures” that lets them do this all day long, for everyone’s expenses, so we limit the kinds of bookkeeping we ask normies to do, and reserve the heavy lifting for specialists.

    As a freelancer, I hire a bunch of people who have cognitive strengths that I lack. My accountant isn’t just a person who knows more about tax law than I do – he’s also someone who can manage the reconciliation of all my bookkeeping spreadsheets better than I ever could, and without the psychic trauma I experience when I try to do this on my own.

    Likewise, my publisher employs copyeditors and proofreaders who find the typos that my brain just doesn’t see, and when they send me back my marked-up manuscripts for review, I ask my mom to give them a pass, because she finds the typos they miss.

    Sitting between me and my publishers are my agents (I have several of these, one for English-language literary deals, another for foreign rights, another for media, and yet another for speaking engagements). I love these folks, partly because the better they are at their jobs, the easier it is for me to pay my mortgage, but especially because they really enjoy doing things I hate doing: a) asking for money, and; b) haggling.

    For me, haggling is (at best) embarrassing. At worst, it’s humiliating. It’s always exhausting. But for my agents, it’s invigorating. Many’s the time I’ve gotten on a video call with my agents after they’ve concluded a successful deal and they’re glowing. Call it what you will: cognitive diversity, emotional diversity, neurodiversity…my agents and I have it, and it’s good for all of us.

    And here’s the thing that makes these world-class hagglers great: they can switch it off. They’re competitive as hell, they love to bargain hard, but they understand that they’re playing an iterated game, and if they crush the publishers’ representatives they’re up against, then they’ll ruin my good name.

    More: when the bargaining’s done and we’re having a nice chat about everyday things, or getting together for dinner, they’re not on. They’re just normal, not wrestling over every detail. Bargaining is what they do, it’s not who they are.

    That doesn’t just make them bearable as human beings, it also makes them better at their jobs. There’s an old pal with whom I’ve done some creative work, and at one point I needed to pay them for their part in a project. They asked me to route the payment through their manager, and this manager assumed I was just another production hiring my buddy, and let loose with his full power at me over this payment, haggling for paperwork that would make Creative Commons releases impossible, as well as other (normal but not appropriate in this case) conditions. I emailed my pal, who emailed their manager to stand down and treat this as a friendly negotiation, whereupon Mr Hyde became Dr Jekyll and we wrapped things up in about ten minutes.

    These haggler types do very well in our society, which is organized around the idea of efficient markets, where everyone is always bargaining to the last breath in order to “maximize their utility.”

    This ideology isn’t just an observation (“society is a market”), it’s also a demand (“society should be a market”). People who find aggressive haggling invigorating have taken over the operations of our civilization, and they are determined to convert everything to a marketplace, from waiting on hold for the IRS to looking for a parking place:

    https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/markets-in-everything/#no-th-enq

    The people running this game are so invigorated by haggling that they can’t not haggle. They make putting a price on everything into a virtue. They want to be able to sell their kidneys. More importantly, they want to buy your kidneys.

    In Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People, there’s a memorable incident in which Sheryl Sandberg is shocked to the roots of her hair when she is told that she can’t go to Mexico and buy a kidney if her child gets sick. Her child isn’t even sick! She’s just offended that this hypothetical situation wouldn’t be resolved by bargaining:

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

    For these people, cheating is just bargaining by another means. They embrace bizarre concepts like “revealed preferences,” the idea that if you say you’re dissatisfied with a bargain, but you accept it anyway, you have a “revealed preference” for the deal. In other words, if someone sells their kidney to Sheryl Sandberg in order to make the rent, they have a “revealed preference” for having only one kidney – and if they sell their privacy to Sheryl Sandberg in order to stay in touch with the people they love, they have a “revealed preference” for having their data extracted and exploited by Facebook:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

    Trump is the apotheosis of this. The true “art of the deal” is just cheating. That’s why he stiffed his workers, stiffed his suppliers, stiffed his backers and stiffed his base. If you can cheat and get away with it, it’s not even cheating: “that makes you smart”:

    https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

    “Caveat emptor” makes sense at a yard-sale or an estate auction – but it’s no way to operate a government or conduct your daily life. It’s exhausting:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

    Running the world on “caveat emptor” isn’t just a transfer from workers to the wealthy, it’s a transfer from people who are exhausted by bargaining to people who are invigorated by it. It’s a way of transforming just one of the many differences in how humans think into the single most important success criterion, the major determinant of your life’s chances. It’s a way for the invigorated to utterly dominate the exhausted. It’s the elevation of “stop hitting yourself” into political ideology.

    The antidote to this is something John Ganz calls “The Club Med theory.” He argues that while mostly we sneer at inclusive holiday resorts as a way to go on vacation without having to engage with another country’s culture and people, that the original value of these resorts (still present today) is the way they let you go on vacation without participating in markets:

    https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-club-med-theory

    Club Med was founded by an Olympian named Gérard Blitz whose insight was that “what people seek from a holiday is not luxury or material comfort, but happiness.” For Blitz, the value of an inclusive resort wasn’t the open bar and the buffet, “it’s the relief from participation in the everyday economy.”

    As Ganz points out, class differences (between guests, at least) are erased at inclusive resorts. The richest person at the resort eats and drinks the same food, goes on the same excursions, and participates in the same activities as the poorest person at the resort (yes, this is less true of today’s inclusive resorts, which are full of “up-charges,” representing the triumph of people who are invigorated by bargaining over people who are exhausted by it).

    For Ganz, the beauty of an inclusive resort is that it removes the “cognitive demands” of a market economy, which are inherently stressful: “Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy.”

    Ganz proposes that “this is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree.” Why would the resort restaurants improve their food quality if they’re not competing for your business? Why would servers hustle to make you happy if they’re not competing for tips?

    But this is not what happens. Resort-goers love the bartenders at the swim-up bar, and they are frustrated to the point of fury with the people selling necklaces, sunglasses and massages on the beach. These sellers “live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services.” It’s exhausting to be them, and it’s exhausting to be approached by them.

    Ganz says that the best strategy to get someone to part with their money isn’t necessarily to provide good service. As he learned in his stockbroker days, you can also “pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away.” In an unregulated market, you don’t get a single vendor who comes around and offers you sunglasses once a day. The equilibrium of that market is to be woken from your nap or interrupted from your book every five minutes by someone who’s hustling to make the rent. The economy doesn’t “price in the externality” of your plummeting satisfaction with your holiday.

    Ganz isn’t the first person to observe this. As he points out, in 1963, Galbraith wrote:

    Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt.

    I read Ganz’s short post last week and it stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it – and the more I thought that there was something missing from it: the idea that there are some people who hate a life without bargaining. These people are invigorated by bargaining and exhausted by “total physical and mental inertia.” They need to be hustling.

    The people who turn up their noses at an inclusive resort aren’t just people who want to have the “authentic experience” of a distant land – some of them are people who want to spend all day hustling and being hustled. People who need that energy.

    Those people have a place in the world. I don’t want those people trying to sell me a timeshare or trying to rope me into their MLM, but I’d love to have them negotiating on behalf of my union:

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

    But even then, I’d want them to be like my agents, capable of stepping back from constant bargaining and to cease their remorseless seeking of advantage. I wouldn’t want them to be Sandbergian would-be buyers of kidneys, full of self-serving tales of revealed preferences, caveat emptor and “that makes me smart.”

    As with anything, the dose makes the poison. I know lots of hustlers who are fun as hell to hang around, whom I’d trust with my life or at least my password. A lot of libertarians fit this mold: people who are truly committed to voluntarism and intrinsic generosity.

    But libertarianism, like any movement, is a coalition, and within that coalition is a large group of people – people who are invigorated by bargaining – who are committed to dominating others by exhausting them. For them, bargaining isn’t a cognitive demand, it’s a cognitive invigorator. To the extent that they understand this, they think it’s just a sign that they are born to rule. Caveat emptor. Revealed preferences. That makes me smart.

    What’s more, for people on the losing side of this trade, losing the bargain means being poorer, and being poorer means more cognitive demands – rationing out your pennies and eeling through the impossibly narrow gaps between payday and the day the bills are due. This produces a winner-take-all dynamic in which the losers of the bargaining game have less energy and wherewithal to bargain the next time around.

    This is beautifully unpacked in (what else) a science fiction novel, Naomi Kritzer’s Liberty’s Daughter, a young adult novel about the teen daughter of a libertarian cult leader who is growing up on a seastead:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

    Kritzer’s novel beautifully plays out the “stop hitting yourself” justifications that eventually allow her libertarians to enslave others – after all, in a truly voluntaristic society, why wouldn’t you have the freedom to sell yourself into slavery? And if you claim later that you’re unhappy with this arrangement, tough shit – you’ve got a “revealed preference” for being a slave.

    Caveat emptor. If you’re the kind of person who gets charged up by bargaining, then you were born to rule.

    If bargaining means cheating, well, “that makes you smart.”

    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 DIY circumcision revision (CW gross) https://web.archive.org/web/20010618005738/https://www.subgenius.com/subg-digest/v5/0206.html

    #25yrsago Gen X guide to Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20010302143848/http://www.omnigroup.com/~cirocco/dizney/index.html

    #25yrsago Hugo for best website https://web.archive.org/web/20010404222727/http://www.conjose.org/wsfs/wsfs_web.html

    #20yrsago America’s worst WiFi hotels https://web.archive.org/web/20060404214142/http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2006/3/27/21911/4235/hotels/Worst_WiFi_Hotels_2006

    #20yrsago Help Peter Beagle sue the film-house that made “The Last Unicorn” https://web.archive.org/web/20060116061435/http://www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp/

    #20yrsago EMI releases Brazilian DRM CDs that totally hose their customers https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/24/emi-releases-brazilian-drm-cds-that-totally-hose-their-customers/

    #20yrsago Video reveals Belarus electoral fraud https://web.archive.org/web/20060506233026/http://www.media-ocean.de/2006/03/26/does-youtube-video-proove-election-fraud-in-belarus/

    #20yrsago Kleptones new mashup double-CD free to download: “24 Hours” https://web.archive.org/web/20060810172451/http://www.kleptones.com/pages/downloads_24h.html

    #20yrsago Steve Jobs, 2002: “You need the right to manage music on all devices” https://web.archive.org/web/20060509144710/http://www.songbirdnest.com/nivi/blog/jobs_france

    #20yrsago Monks in Wisconsin refill printer cartridges https://web.archive.org/web/20060324043723/http://lasermonks.com/

    #20yrsago DRM is Killing Music https://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=2686

    #20yrsago Swisscom WiFi at London conference centre costs $838.73/24h https://web.archive.org/web/20060329090917/https://benhammersley.com/FCE47259-78BA-4B5E-ABF2-F39B93520C85/Blog/C9043A4D-F791-4B7F-A8A7-3484779B4748.html

    #20yrsago Most expensive Google ad keywords listed https://web.archive.org/web/20060325094245/http://www.cwire.org/2006/03/23/updated-highest-paying-adsense-keywords/

    #20yrsago LA Times slams Marvel for trying to steal “superhero” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-mar-26-ed-superhero26-story.html

    #15yrsago Microsoft switches off privacy for Hotmail users in war-torn and repressive states https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/microsoft-shuts-https-hotmail-over-dozen-countries

    #15yrsago Wisconsin GOP uses sunshine laws to harass prof who speculated about links with pressure group https://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/

    #15yrsago Koch-pranking Beast editor runs for Congress https://web.archive.org/web/20110326042435/http://www.murphycanhascongress.com/

    #15yrsago Did Limewire shutdown really cause P2P music infringement to drop 30%? https://web.archive.org/web/20110428175101/http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/03/24/cnet_and_others_get_it_wrong_miss_the_actual_story.php

    #15yrsago Man who wants to patent genome gets legal threat for embedding James Joyce quote in artificial lifeform https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/03/14/craig-venters-genetic-typo/

    #15yrsago James Gleick’s tour-de-force: The Information, a natural history of information theory https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/24/james-gleicks-tour-de-force-the-information-a-natural-history-of-information-theory/

    #15yrsago NYT paywall sub is $100 more expensive than WSJ, Economist and Daily combined https://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the

    #15yrsago RIP, Diana Wynne Jones https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/27/diana-wynne-jones-obituary

    #15yrsago Front-line report from Trafalgar Square paints a radically different picture https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/03/trafalgar-square-police-young

    #15yrsago Deathless: Cat Valente’s beautiful fantasy of Stalinist Russia and the Siege of Leningrad https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/28/deathless-cat-valentes-beautiful-fantasy-of-stalinist-russia-and-the-siege-of-leningrad/

    #10yrsago Cop Cabs: The NYPD has at least three fake taxis on NYC’s streets https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/mar/28/nypd-taxicabs/

    #10yrsago Peer-reviewed online expert system will help you if you’ve been poisoned https://www.webpoisoncontrol.org/

    #10yrsago The “American College of Pediatricians” is a hate group with fewer than 200 members https://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/28/speaking-of-bad-science-never-trust-the-american-college-of-pediatricians

    #10yrsago Ransomware gets a lot faster by encrypting the master file table instead of the filesystem https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/petya-ransomware-skips-the-files-and-encrypts-your-hard-drive-instead/

    #10yrsago Security-conscious darkweb crime marketplaces institute world-leading authentication practices https://web.archive.org/web/20160331091155/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/some-dark-web-markets-have-better-user-security-than-gmail-instagram

    #10yrsago Saudi embassy hired mafiosi to smuggle Turkish PM Erdoğan’s son out of Italy ahead of money laundering charges https://web.archive.org/web/20160311095055/https://awdnews.com/top-news/rome’s-police-spokesman-saudi-embassy-helped-erdoğan’s-son-to-escape-the-police-custody-using-a-forged-saudi-passport-and-disguised-as-an-arab-diplomat

    #10yrsago Photos from Bring Your Own Bigwheel 16 https://www.jwz.org/photos/2016-03-27-bigwheel/

    #10yrsago How to Talk About Videogames: a book that is serious (but never dull) about games https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/28/how-to-talk-about-videogames-a-book-that-is-serious-but-never-dull-about-games/

    #10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

    #10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

    #10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

    #10yrsago Ransomware hackers steal a hospital. Again. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/03/hospital-declares-internet-state-of-emergency-after-ransomware-infection/

    #10yrsago STUCK: Public transit’s moment arrives just as public spending disappears https://web.archive.org/web/20160327040633/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-immobile-masses-why-traffic-is-awful-and-public-transit-is-worse

    #10yrsago East Harlem’s secret museum of gorgeous junk rescued from NYC’s trash https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fascinating-photos-from-the-secret-trash-collection-in-a-new-york-sanitation-garage

    #10yrsago Heatmaps of the human body in varying emotional states https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321664111

    #10yrsago Man exonerated after video shows unprovoked police beating, cops insist all is well https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/video-clears-texas-man-of-assaulting-cop-did-police-commit-perjury/

    #10yrsago What you think about Millennials says a lot about you, nothing about them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HFwok9SlQQ

    #10yrsago Jerks were able to turn Microsoft’s chatbot into a Nazi because it was a really crappy bot https://web.archive.org/web/20160325221619/http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-make-a-not-racist-bot

    #10yrsago When the antibiotics run out, maybe we can use GMO maggots to stave off infection https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12896-016-0263-z

    #10yrsago King Arthur’s grave was a hoax invented by cash-strapped 12th C monks https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/medieval-monks-used-king-arthurs-grave-as-an-attraction-to-raise-money/

    #10yrsago Eating from the trash of New York’s finest grocers and restaurants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJmCUSb-ZVo

    #10yrsago Catholic Church-owned insurer has secret files on paedophile priests https://www.theage.com.au/national/secret-archive-of-paedophile-crime-kept-by-catholic-churchs-insurers-20160317-gnlc6k.html

    #10yrsago Names that break databases https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems

    #10yrsago Cops arrest public defender who was representing her client, face no discipline https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/23/complaint-board-finds-police-officers-violated-policy-arresting-public-defender-who-demanded-they-stop-questioning-her-clients/

    #10yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV systems has been known since 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20160322204109/https://kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

    #5yrsago Dirty NYPD cops can’t lose https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

    #5yrsago Dreaming and overfitting https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#dreamtime

    #5yrsago Good news about news co-ops https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#good-news

    #5yrsago Zuckerpunch https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/25/facebook-has-a-facebook-problem/#played-for-zuckers

    #5yrsago Green investing is a fraud https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/greenwashing/#bargaining

    #

    1yrago Trump loves Big Tech https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america

    #1yrago Why I don’t like AI art https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted

    #1yrago The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/26/not-me-us/#the-people-no

    #1yrago Reality-Based Communities https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/27/use-your-mentality/#face-up-to-reality

    #1yrago Big Tech and “captive audience venues” https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies

    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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  • EFF’s Cindy Cohn on The Daily Show! Tonight Monday, March 30

    EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn will be on The Daily Show tonight, Monday March 30, at 11 pm ET and PT, speaking with host Jon Stewart. Cindy will discuss her long history of fighting for privacy online and her new book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press). The book details her own personal story alongside her role representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders. 

    You can watch the interview on Comedy Central, and extended episodes are released shortly thereafter on Paramount Plus as well as in segments on YouTube. We will also share the interview when it is uploaded and available online as well. 

    About The Daily Show

    The Daily Show is a long-running comedy news show that covers the biggest headlines of the day. It has won 26 Primetime Emmy Awards and has introduced the world to now well-known actors and comedians such as Steve Carell, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, and Trevor Noah, as well as hosts of their own current shows, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. 

  • Global Age Verification Measures: 2024 in Review

    EFF has spent this year urging governments around the world, from Canada to Australia, to abandon their reckless plans to introduce age verification for a variety of online content under the guise of protecting children online. Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat.

    Kids Experiencing Harm is Not Just an Online Phenomena

    In November, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, claimed that legislation was needed to protect young people in the country from the supposed harmful effects of social media. Australia’s Parliament later passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, which bans children under the age of 16 from using social media and forces platforms to take undefined “reasonable steps” to verify users’ ages or face over $30 million in fines. This is similar to last year’s ban on social media access for children under 15 without parental consent in France, and Norway also pledged to follow a similar ban.

    No study shows such harmful impact, and kids don’t need to fall into a wormhole of internet content to experience harm—there is a whole world outside the barriers of the internet that contributes to people’s experiences, and all evidence suggests that many young people experience positive outcomes from social media. Truthful news about what’s going on in the world, such as wars and climate change is available both online and by seeing a newspaper on the breakfast table or a billboard on the street. Young people may also be subject to harmful behaviors like bullying in the offline world, as well as online.

    The internet is a valuable resource for both young people and adults who rely on the internet to find community and themselves. As we said about age verification measures in the U.S. this year, online services that want to host serious discussions about mental health issues, sexuality, gender identity, substance abuse, or a host of other issues, will all have to beg minors to leave and institute age verification tools to ensure that it happens. 

    Limiting Access for Kids Limits Access for Everyone 

    Through this wave of age verification bills, governments around the world are burdening internet users and forcing them to sacrifice their anonymity, privacy, and security simply to access lawful speech. For adults, this is true even if that speech constitutes sexual or explicit content. These laws are censorship laws, and rules banning  sexual content usually hurt marginalized communities and groups that serve them the most. History shows that over-censorship is inevitable.

    This year, Canada also introduced an age verification measure, bill S-210, which seeks to prevent young people from encountering sexually explicit material by requiring all commercial internet services that “make available” explicit content to adopt age verification services. This was introduced to prevent harms like the “development of pornography addiction” and “the reinforcement of gender stereotypes and the development of attitudes favorable to harassment and violence…particularly against women.” But requiring people of all ages to show ID to get online won’t help women or young people. When these large services learn they are hosting or transmitting sexually explicit content, most will simply ban or remove it outright, using both automated tools and hasty human decision-making. This creates a legal risk not just for those who sell or intentionally distribute sexually explicit materials, but also for those who just transmit it–knowingly or not. 

    Without Comprehensive Privacy Protections, These Bills Exacerbate Data Surveillance 

    Under mandatory age verification requirements, users will have no way to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used in unexpected ways, or even shared to unknown third parties. Millions of adult internet users would also be entirely blocked from accessing protected speech online because they are not in possession of the required form of ID. 

    Online age verification is not like flashing an ID card in person to buy particular physical items. In places that lack comprehensive data privacy legislation, the risk of surveillance is extensive. First, a person who submits identifying information online can never be sure if websites will keep that information, or how that information might be used or disclosed. Without requiring all parties who may have access to the data to delete that data, such as third-party intermediaries, data brokers, or advertisers, users are left highly vulnerable to data breaches and other security harms at companies responsible for storing or processing sensitive documents like drivers’ licenses. 

    Second, and unlike in-person age-gates, the most common way for websites to comply with a potential verification system would be to require all users to upload and submit—not just momentarily display—a data-rich government-issued ID or other document with personal identifying information. In a brief to a U.S. court, EFF explained how this leads to a host of serious anonymity, privacy, and security concerns. People shouldn’t have to disclose to the government what websites they’re looking at—which could reveal sexual preferences or other extremely private information—in order to get information from that website. 

    These proposals are coming to the U.S. as well. We analyzed various age verification methods in comments to the New York Attorney General. None of them are both accurate and privacy-protective. 

    The Scramble to Find an Effective Age Verification Method Shows There Isn’t One

    The European Commission is also currently working on guidelines for the implementation of the child safety article of the Digital Services Act (Article 28) and may come up with criteria for effective age verification. In parallel, the Commission has asked for proposals for a ‘mini EU ID wallet’ to implement device-level age verification ahead of the expected roll out of digital identities across the EU in 2026. At the same time, smaller social media companies and dating platforms have for years been arguing that age verification should take place at the device or app-store level, and will likely support the Commission’s plans. As we move into 2025, EFF will continue to follow these developments as the Commission’s apparent expectation on porn platforms to adopt age verification to comply with their risk mitigation obligations under the DSA becomes clearer.

    Mandatory age verification is the wrong approach to protecting young people online. In 2025, EFF will continue urging politicians around the globe to acknowledge these shortcomings, and to explore less invasive approaches to protecting all people from online harms. 

    This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.

  • EFF, Civil Society Groups, Academics Call on UK Home Secretary to Address Flawed Data Bill

    Last week, EFF joined 30 civil society groups and academics in warning UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Department for Science, Innovation & Technology Secretary Peter Kyle about the law enforcement risks contained within the draft Data Use and Access Bill (DUA Bill).

    Clause 80 of the DUA Bill weakens the safeguards for solely automated decisions in the law-enforcement context and dilutes crucial data protection safeguards. 

    Under sections 49 and 50 of the Data Protection Act 2018, solely automated decisions are prohibited from being made in the law enforcement context unless the decision is required or authorised by law. Clause 80 reverses this in all scenarios unless the data processing involves special category data. 

    In short, this would enable law enforcement to use automated decisions about people regarding their socioeconomic status, regional or postcode data, inferred emotions, or even regional accents. This increases the already broad possibilities for bias, discrimination, and lack of transparency at the hands of law enforcement.

    In the government’s own Impact Assessment for the DUA Bill, the Government acknowledged that “those with protected characteristics such as race, gender, and age are more likely to face discrimination from ADM due to historical biases in datasets.” Yet, politicians in the UK have decided to push forward with this discriminatory and dangerous agenda regardless. 

    Further, given the already minimal transparency around automated decision making, individuals affected in the law enforcement context would have no or highly limited routes to redress.

    The DUA Bill puts marginalised groups at risk of opaque, unfair and harmful automated decisions. Yvette Cooper and Peter Kyle must address the lack of safeguards governing law enforcement use of automated decision-making tools before time runs out.

    The full letter can be found here. 

  • UK Politicians Continue to Miss the Point in Latest Social Media Ban Proposal

    The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means.

    What was the last vote about? 

    On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed amendments tabled by the House of Lords in the government’s flagship legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. 

    The House of Lords previously tabled an amendment to “prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users” of “all regulated user-to-user services,” to be implemented by “highly-effective age assurance measures,” which effectively banned under-16s from social media. When this proposal came before the House of Commons, MPs defeated it by 307 votes to 173. 

    Instead, the Commons proposed its own amendment: enabling the Secretary of State to introduce provisions “requiring providers of specified internet services” to prevent access by children, under age 18 rather than 16, to specified internet services or to specified features; and to restrict access by children to specified internet services which ministers provide. 

    Who does this give powers to?

    The Commons proposal redirects power from the UK Parliament and the UK’s independent telecom regulator Ofcom to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, currently Liz Kendall, who will be able to restrict internet access for young people and determine what content is considered harmful…just because she can. The amendment also empowers the Secretary of State to limit VPN use for under 18s, as well as restrict access to addictive features and change the age of digital consent in the country; for example, preventing under-18s from playing games online after a certain time.  

    Why is this a problem? 

    This process is devoid of checks or accountability mechanisms as ministers will not be required to demonstrate specific harms to young people, which essentially unravels years-long efforts by Ofcom to assess online services according to their risks. And given the moment the UK is currently in, such as refusing to protect trans and LGBTQ+ communities and flaming hostile and racist discourses, it is not unlikely that we’ll see ministers start restricting content that they ideologically or morally feel opposed to, rather than because the content is harmful based, as established by evidence and assessed pursuant to established human rights principles. 

    We know from other jurisdictions like the United States that legislation seeking to protect young people typically sweeps up a slew of broadly-defined topics. Some block access to websites that contain some “sexual material harmful to minors,” which has historically meant explicit sexual content. But some states are now defining the term more broadly so that “sexual material harmful to minors” could encompass anything like sex education; others simply list a variety of vaguely-defined harms. In either instance, this bill would enable ministers to target LGBTQ+ content online by pushing this behind an under-18s age gate, and this risk is especially clear given what we already know about platform content policies. 

    How will this impact young people? 

    The internet is an essential resource for young people (and adults) to access information, explore community, and find themselves. Beyond being spaces where people can share funny videos and engage with enjoyable content, social media enables young people to engage with the world in a way that transcends their in-person realm, as well as find information they may not feel safe to access offline, such as about family abuse or their sexuality. In severing this connection to people and information by banning social media, politicians are forcing millions of young people into a dark and censored world. 

    How did each party vote? 

    The initial push to ban under-16s from social media came from the Conservative Party, who have since accused the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “dither and delay” for not committing to the ban. The Liberal Democrats have also called this “not good enough.” The Labour Party itself is split, with 107 Labour Party MPs abstaining in the vote on the House of Lords amendment. 

    But we know that the issue of young people’s online safety is a polarizing topic that politicians have—and will continue to—weaponize for public support, regardless of their actual intentions. This is why we will continue to urge policymakers and regulators to protect people’s rights and freedoms online at all moments, and not just take the easy route for a quick boost in the polls.

    How does this bill connect to the Online Safety Act?

    The draft Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that came from the Lords provided that any regulation pertaining to the well-being of young people on social media “must be treated as an enforceable requirement” with the Online Safety Act. The Commons amendment, however, starts out by inserting a new clause that amends the Online Safety Act. 

    For more than six years, we’ve been calling on the UK government to pass better legislation around regulating the internet, and when the Online Safety Act passed we continued to advocate for the rights of people on the internet—including young people—as Ofcom implemented the legislation. This has been a protracted effort by civil society groups, technologists, tech companies, and others participating in Ofcom’s consultation process and urging the regulator to protect internet users in the UK.

    The MPs amendment essentially rips this up. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall recently said that ministers intended to go further than the existing Online Safety Act because it was “never meant to be the end point, and we know parents still have serious concerns. That is why I am prepared to take further action.” But when this further action is empowering herself to make arbitrary decisions on content and access, and banning under-18s from social media, this causes much more harm than it solves. 

    Is the UK alone in pushing legislation like this? 

    Sadly, no. Calls to ban social media access for young people have gained traction since Australia became the first country in the world to enforce one back in December. On 5 March, Indonesia announced a ban on social media and other “high-risk” online platforms for users under 16. A few days later, new measures came into effect in Brazil that restricts social media access for under-16s, who must now have their accounts linked to a legal guardian. Other countries like Spain and the Philippines have this year announced plans to ban social media for under-16s, with legislation currently pending to implement this.

    What are the next steps?

    The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill returns to the House of Lords on 25 March for consideration of the new Commons amendments. The bill will only become law if both Houses agree to the final draft. 

    We will continue to stand up against these proposals—not only to young people’ free expression rights, but also to safeguard the free flow of information that is vital to a democratic society. The issue of online safety is not solved through technology alone, especially not through a ban, and young people deserve a more intentional approach to protecting their safety and privacy online, not this lazy strategy that causes more harm than it solves. 

    We encourage politicians in the UK to look into what is best, not what is easy, and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms. 

  • Explosive Misinformation: A Guide to Mushroom Clouds, ‘Sonic Weapons’ and Disintegration

    Explosive Misinformation: A Guide to Mushroom Clouds, ‘Sonic Weapons’ and Disintegration

    Since launching the military campaign against Iran on Feb. 28, the US and Israel have dropped thousands of bombs on the country. Videos of explosions have become a source of misinformation and misunderstanding, with many of the strikes incorrectly attributed to a particular munition and many explosive effects – seen in footage and images falsely attributed to “mystery” or illegal weapons.

    The post appears to suggest that a nuclear explosion happened in Iran. Source: X/cirnosad

    “The video does not show a nuclear explosion—something that I am astonished even needs to be clarified,” Dr NR Jenzen-Jones, Director of Armament Research Services, a weapons intelligence consultancy, told Bellingcat.

    Mushroom clouds can form when explosions produce hot gases that quickly rise and encounter resistance from denser, colder air. (Clouds created by nuclear weapons can also vary significantly in appearance.)

    Non-nuclear explosive test in Canada. Source: Defence Research and Development Canada.

    “Certain types of explosive munitions, such as those working on the fuel-air explosive (FAE) and thermobaric principles, are particularly poorly understood by non-specialists. As a result, these and other types of munitions are routinely misidentified,” Jenzen-Jones said.

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    Often posts about explosives are incorrect or inaccurate because of a lack of knowledge about how explosives work, but in other cases misinterpretations are deliberate. Joe Dyke, director of programmes at Airwars, told Bellingcat that deliberate disinformation that shifts responsibility of a strike is the most common they see, with posts often sharing flimsy but “scientific sounding” analysis.

    Better understanding explosives can make it easier to identify misinformation surrounding explosions. 

    This guide explains explosives, their characteristics and the impact they have on people and infrastructure. We highlight the differences between thermobaric and Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), two types of explosives that are frequently the subject of misinformation.

    What Are Explosives?

    Explosives are energetic materials capable of causing death and destruction through a rapid release of energy. The blast creates pressure waves emanating from the epicentre. These waves can directly kill or injure people and shatter objects into lethal fragments.

    High explosives are typically used in warheads and shells; they differ from low explosives which are often used in rocket propellants. The supersonic speed of the explosive reaction- classified as detonation- also separates the two kinds of explosives. During detonation, temperatures can rise above 3,000 °C, but only briefly and very close to the reaction zone, Dr Sabrina Wahler, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology focusing on research of detonation products told Bellingcat.

    Graphic showing a high explosive with a detonator (initiator or blasting cap) before and after the detonation begins. The chemical reaction zone is shown as the explosive detonates. Source: Justin Baird for Bellingcat.

    The detonation creates a shockwave, which is a visible wave or bubble in high speed videos. The shockwave impacts people and objects before the sound of the blast can be heard.

    Visible shockwave emanating from the blast, ahead of the fireball or blast wind, in screenshots showing a surface explosion. Source: Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Counter-WMD Test Support Division (CXT) via Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

    The shockwave is the result of the pressure pushing air away from the blast in the positive phase. When the air rushes back in the negative phase, it creates a suction effect.

    Visualisation of pressure phases of an explosion. Source: Justin Baird for Bellingcat.

    The shockwave arrival time, combined with a known distance, has been used to estimate the explosive weight of blasts, including the Beirut explosion in 2020.

    Reactive materials, such as aluminium powder, are often added to explosives to improve performance. These metals react with the gaseous products from the detonation, resulting in increased energy output, Jacqueline Akhavan, a Professor of Explosive Chemistry at Cranfield University, told Bellingcat.

    Ammonium nitrate based Tannerite exploding targets with various amounts of aluminum powder added. Exploding targets are popular and widely available in the United States. Military ordnance also uses similar aluminised explosive compositions. Source: United States Department of Agriculture.

    Sometimes, reactive metals such as aluminium from the explosive composition can be seen burning outside the fireball, indicating an explosive with reactive metal.

    Photo of ammonium nitrate with aluminium powder exploding. Burning aluminium powder can be seen outside the fireball. Annotation by Bellingcat to indicate some of the burning powder. Source: United States Department of Agriculture.

    The size of a fireball does not necessarily indicate the blast’s power. In movies and airshows, a “Hollywood shot” involves igniting large amounts of gasoline with small amounts of explosives, creating spectacular fireballs with minimal pressure.

    “Hollywood shot (‘wall of fire’) done with detonation cord and gasoline.” Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    Thermobaric, and dense inert metal explosives (DIME), are other types of explosive compositions where metals are added to modify specific effects.

    Thermobaric Explosives

    In January 2024, after an attack in Gaza, social media posts appeared claiming that thermobaric explosives “literally sucks the air out of the children’s lungs and causes them to internally explode”. According to an article by Dr Rachel Lance, a biomedical engineer specialising in patterns of injury and trauma from explosions “there is no evidence that thermobarics pull the air out of the lungs”. 

    There were also claims that thermobaric weapons incinerate people. According to a report by the Armament Research Services, the effects of this type of explosion “are of the same nature as those expected from a conventional high explosive”. The only difference is that the duration of each effect is likely to be longer from a few milliseconds to tens of milliseconds and in a pressure wave with a lower peak.

    This occurs because thermobaric explosives add a significant amount of fuel or reactive metals to the explosive composition. Some of the fuel burns after detonation. These munitions are effective against cave or bunker systems, as the pressure wave can travel further throughout the structure.

    Graph showing the “pressure history inside the blast wave; high explosive vs.TBX and EBX detonations.” Source: W.A. Trzciński, L. Maiz Thermobaric and enhanced blast explosives – properties and testing methods (Review) via Wiley Online Library.

    Visual differences can indicate the types of explosives used. Even within the same category, explosives may appear different because of variations in chemical composition, conditions where the explosion occurs, and video quality.

    Comparison of KOR, a thermobaric explosive, and TNT, in a test by TÜBİTAK SAGE, a Turkish Defense Research Organization. Source: X/TÜBİTAK SAGE.

    Many countries, including the US, Russia, China, Ukraine, Iran and Turkey, use enhanced blast and thermobaric explosives. Russia has used them in Ukraine and Syria. Israel uses munitions that have variants featuring thermobaric warheads, but the use of thermobaric explosives has not been confirmed.

    Fuel-air explosives are similar to thermobaric explosives, but function differently. Both are volumetric weapons, but fuel-air explosives disperse a cloud of fuel, then the explosion occurs.

    A video showing a test of a US fuel-air explosive munition. Source: jaglavaksoldier.

    Dense Inert Metal Explosives

    Unsubstantiated claims of DIME munitions have regularly surfaced since 2006, when they were first alleged to have been used in Gaza. Similar claims have reappeared in Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023. 

    Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) are typically used in munitions intended to reduce civilian harm. Non-reactive metals, like tungsten, added to the explosives reduce the area impacted by the blast, but increase the power. Often munitions filled with DIME replace steel casing with carbon fibre to reduce fragmentation.

    Photo of a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) test by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Non-reactive metal particulates can be seen at the edges of the fireball. Annotation by Bellingcat. Source: US AFRL, 2006.

    Some sources refer to DIME as a multiphase blast explosive, a term that also covers some explosives with reactive metals. Photos from testing show mannequins near the blast coated in tungsten powder.

    Mannequin coated in tungsten powder following the testing of a GBU-39 A/B FLM, a DIME filled variant of the GBU-39 bomb. Source: ITEA Journal via DTIC.

    Some claims of DIME use in Gaza mention the presence of powder or microscopic shrapnel found on victims. “Peppering” and “tattooing” are mentioned (warning: graphic content) as common injuries in blast victims, where the explosion propels small debris like sand into the body, along with fragments of various sizes.

    Impacts of fragments and tungsten powder on blocks of ballistic gel at different distances from three tests. Source: Latin American Journal of Solids and Structures, 2024, 21(3), e535.

    The US Air Force has accepted delivery of at least 500 DIME-filled GBU-39A/B bombs, and has used at least 23 in combat. No transfers of GBU-39 A/B FLM bombs from the US to any other country, including Israel, have been reported, and a Bellingcat analysis of GBU-39 strikes in Gaza between October 2023 and January 2026 did not find any evidence of this variant being used.

    There is currently no conclusive evidence that militaries aside from the US have used DIME in combat.

    Clues From Clouds

    Clouds, and the colours of the smoke can provide clues about the type of explosive. However, chemical composition, environmental conditions, and location can all affect how explosions appear. 

    Clouds

    This footage, originally posted on social media in November 2025, shows an explosion in Gaza.

    Video of an explosion in Gaza, falsely attributed as a thermobaric weapon. Source: X/@Eng_china5.

    The visible cloud in the video is a condensation or Wilson cloud, caused by an explosive shockwave interacting with humid air. This same effect is visible in videos of the Beirut explosion in 2020, when ammonium nitrate exploded at the port after a fire.

    Video of the 2020 Beirut ammonium nitrate explosion. Source: X/Borzou Daragahi.

    Smoke colours

    Colours in the smoke of an explosion can help identify the gases, which in turn can help identify the explosive material, Dr Rachel Lance told Bellingcat. “Yellow, orange, and red tones each indicate the presence of specific chemicals.” 

    Black smoke means “the bomb produced a lot of fire and inefficiency, because materials burned instead of detonated, and was probably a homemade or improvised explosive”. White or light grey smoke indicates “an efficient detonation, and that tells us it was a pure, high-grade material inside,” Lance said.

    Left: Reddish-orange smoke after the ammonium nitrate explosion at Beirut in 2020. Centre: Fuel heavy “Hollywood shot” explosion. Right: C4 explosion. Sources: Borzou Daragahi, DVIDS/Lance Cpl. Kayla LeClaire, and DVIDS/Sgt. Tara Fajardo Arteaga.

    Some munitions, like cruise or ballistic missiles, may have efficient high explosives, as well as low explosive propellants or fuel. The area targeted, such as buildings, may lead to dust or debris that obscure the gases created by the explosion. 

    In some cases, multiple bright fireballs are launched into the sky, accompanied by a rapid humming or throbbing sound and bright flashes. This typically happens when solid-fuel rocket motors, like those in air defence or ballistic missiles, are burning or exploding.

    Venezuelan Buk Air Defense System rocket motors ‘cooking off’ after being targeted by US strikes in Jan. 2026. Source: X/Osinttechnical.

    Geolocation

    Geolocation of the explosion site can help identify or rule out potential explanations. Large explosions can be caused by much smaller bombs hitting storage sites or production sites for ammo. The geolocation of the video below indicated that the location hit was a storage area for missiles.

    Video shared by a user claiming this video shows the use of a GBU-57 “Massive Ordnance Penetrator”. A now-suspended user claimed the video showed the “Mother of All Bombs”. Source: Osint613.

    Blast Effects on People

    Misinformation regarding blast effects on people might lead to reports of harm to be wrongly dismissed or false claims about mystery weapons to spread.

    In February 2026, claims of “vaporisation” or disintegration of people due to thermobaric weapon explosions appeared online. Days later, counterclaims argued that explosives can’t “disintegrate” people and thermal effects were not responsible.

    According to multiple studies, even less powerful explosives can cause disintegration. When explosions occur in enclosed spaces, such as inside a building, they reflect shock waves, leading to increased blast effects.

    The effects of the shock wave on some structures can be seen in the first part of this video. Source: Canadian Armed Forces.

    Blast injuries are generally classified into four categories, based on what mechanism is causing the injuries.

    Categories of blast injuries. Source: Justin Baird for Bellingcat.

    The primary effect, the blast itself, “puts tremendous strains on human tissue, causing them to rip and tear, both internally and externally, so massive internal bleeding can occur,” Brian Castner, a weapons investigator for Amnesty International, told Bellingcat.

    Primary injuries can lead to a variety of symptoms, including vertigo, vomiting blood, and bleeding from the ears. A viral post shared by the White House Press Secretary claimed to be firsthand testimony from a Venezuelan security guard following US strikes in Venezuela. The post alleged that the US used a sonic weapon without any supporting evidence, and the symptoms described are typical of primary blast injuries.

    The secondary effect results from the metal fragments of the munition. Some weapons are specifically designed to break into uniform small pieces, Castner said. “Even small fragments, the size of a bullet, can break a bone, since the metal is flying through the air so quickly,” the weapons investigator explained.

    Even single fragments can injure or kill people hundreds of metres away from a blast. People close to it may be largely disintegrated, often described (warning: graphic content) as “total body disruption” in Forensic Medicine.

    A non-graphic video showing the destruction that explosives are capable of inflicting on various materials. Source: Ballistic High-Speed.

    “Combined, these blast and fragmentary effects can do horrific damage to the human body, and if a person is close enough to a large munitions detonation, leave little trace they ever existed,” Castner told Bellingcat.

    A recent Bellingcat investigation into three specific US-made munitions used in Gaza found videos showing small pieces of human bodies consistent with total body disruption, at several different strikes within the dataset.

    Screenshot from a video showing one area hit by a GBU-39 bomb at Khadija School, Gaza in July 2024. A separate graphic video shows a boy in this area collecting a small part of a person. Source: X/Eye on Palestine.

    Explosions can also cause burns or thermal injuries. Temperature is not the most relevant factor, because “by the time a human body is exposed to the temperatures of a burning explosive, people will have severe trauma and death,” Dr Lance told Bellingcat.

    In many real-world cases “the blast pressure reaches farther than the thermal flash,” Dr Sabrina Wahler said. “The thermal danger becomes much larger and longer lasting when the explosion occurs in a confined space, when the formulation supports continued burning with air, or when the detonation triggers secondary fires that keep generating heat well after the initial blast,” she noted.

    Flash burns are often seen on exposed parts of the body close to the blast (warning: graphic content). Explosions that start fires or contain incendiary materials can result in severe burns.

    Are These Explosives Legal?

    Misinformation often raises questions about legality, with false claims that specific weapons are inherently illegal or misrepresenting how they work. This is one of the reasons that nations conduct legal reviews of new weapons, Michael Meier, a former Senior Advisor to the Army Judge Advocate General for Law of War, and current Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, told Bellingcat.

    Thermobarics and DIME are legal if their use complies with specific principles of international humanitarian law (IHL) and the law of armed conflict (LOAC), such as proportionate and discriminate use, experts told Bellingcat.

    “Even lawful weapons can be used in an unlawful manner”, Michael Meier said. One example is when they are directed against civilians or when they are used in a manner that breaches the principles of distinction or proportionality, he explained.

    “The law’s ability to prevent harm is constrained by the compromises between military necessity and humanity made in its creation,” Dr Arthur van Coller, Professor of International Humanitarian Law at the STADIO Higher Education and a legal expert on thermobaric explosives, told Bellingcat.

    “As a result, weapons that cause immense destruction may remain lawful (even nuclear weapons) if they fit within legal definitions, even when their humanitarian impact is severe,” van Coller explained.

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