Today's links

• The long game: Breaking up Big Tech is a long-run project.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: ARRRRR!; Watching paint dry; CEOs are tall, lucky, men; Harpercollins demands authors' AI rights; Victorian bumwipe; Ted Koppel's stupid book; Alan Moore to unpublished authors; Anne Frank's US visa application was rejected; Google breakup.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

The long game (permalink)

Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:

https://gizmodo.com/meta-learns-that-nothing-is-a-monopoly-if-you-just-wait-long-enough-2000687691

This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition, which is the only circumstance in which pro-monopoly economists and lawyers say that mergers should be blocked.

Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that:

a) It was bad economic policy to try and prevent monopolization, since monopolies are "efficient" and arise because companies are so totally amazing that we all voluntarily buy their products and pay for their services and;

b) The anti-monopoly laws on the books are actually pro-monopoly laws, and if you look at them just right, you'll find that what Congress really intended was for monopolies to be nurtured and protected:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The one exception these monsters of history were willing to make to their pro-monopoly posture was this: if a corporation undertakes a merger because they are seeking a monopoly, then the government should step in and stop them. This is a great standard to come up with if what you really want to do is nothing, because how can you know why a company truly wants to buy another company? Who can ever claim to know what is in another person's heart?

This is a great wheeze if you want to allow as many monopolies as possible, unless the guy who's trying to get that monopoly is Mark Zuckerberg, because Zuck is a man who has never had a criminal intention he did not immediately put to writing and email to someone else.

This is the guy who put in writing the immortal words, "It is better to buy than to compete," and "what we’re really buying is time," and who described his plans to clone a competitor's features as intended to get there "before anyone can get close to their scale again":

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

Basically, Zuck is the guy who works until 2:30 every night, and then, before turning in, sends some key executive a fully discoverable, immortally backed-up digital message that reads, "Hey Bob, you know that guy we were thinking about killing? Well, I've decided we should do it. And for avoidance of doubt, it's 100% a murder, and right now, at this moment, I am premeditating it."

And despite this wealth of evidence as to Zuckerberg's intention at the time, US regulators at the FTC and EU regulators at the Commission both waved through those mergers, as well as many other before and since. Because it turns out that in the pro-monopoly world, there are no bright lines, no mergers so nakedly corrupt that they should be prevented. All that stuff about using state power to prevent deliberate monopolization was always and forever just bullshit. In the pro-monopoly camp, all monopolies are warmly welcome.

It wasn't always this way. In the trustbusting era, enforcers joined with organized labor and activists for all kinds of human rights, from universal sufferage to ending Jim Crow, to smash corporate power. Foundational to this fight was the understanding that concentrated corporate power presented a serious danger: first, because of the way that it could corrupt our political process, and second, because of the difficulty of dislodging corporate power once it had been established.

In other words, trustbusters sought to prevent monopolies, not merely to break up monopolies once they were formed. They understood that a company that was too big to fail would also be too big to jail, and that impunity rotted societies from within.

Then came the project to dismantle antitrust and revive the monopolies. Corporatists from the University of Chicago School of Economics and their ultra-wealthy backers launched a multipronged attack on economics, law, and precedent. It was a successful bid to bring back oligarchy and establish a new class of modern aristocracy, whose dynastic fortunes would ensure their rule and the rule of their descendants for generations to come.

A key part of this was an attack on the judiciary. Like other professionals, federal judges are expected to undergo regular "ongoing education" to ensure they're current on the best practices in their field. Wealthy pro-monopolists bankrolled a series of junkets for judges called the "Manne Seminars," all-expenses-paid family trips to luxury resorts, where judges could be indoctrinated with the theory of "efficient monopolies":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

40% of all federal judges attended a Manne Seminar, and empirical studies show that after graduating, these judges changed the way they ruled, to favor monopolies:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352?login=false

The terrible beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to get all the judges into a Manne Seminar – you just need to get enough judges to attend that they will create a wall of precedent that every other judge will feel hemmed in by when they rule on antitrust cases. Those judgments further shore-up the pro-monopoly precedent, setting the stage for the next pro-monopoly judgment, and the next, and the next.

So here we are, a couple generations into the project to brainwash judges, monopolize the economy and establish a new aristocracy, and a judge just ruled that Meta isn't an illegal monopoly, even though Mark Zuckerberg literally put his explicit criminal intent in writing.

What are we to do? Should we despair? Does this mean it's all over?

Not hardly. Reversing 40+ years of pro-monopoly policy was always going to be a slog, with many setbacks on the way. That's why antitrust has historically sought to prevent monopolies. Once monopolies have conquered your economy, getting rid of them is far harder, or, as the joke from eastern Canada goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."

But you have to play the ball where it lies. The fact that Meta can deliberately set out to create a monopoly and still evade judgment is more reason to fight monopolies, not less – it's (more) evidence of how just corrupted and illegitimate our judicial system has become.

We've been here before. The first antitrust laws were passed to do the hard work of smashing existing monopolies, not the relatively easy task of preventing monopolization. Of course: before there is a law, there has to be a crime. Antitrust law was passed because of a monopoly problem, not as a pro-active measure to prevent the problem from arising.

Our forbears smashed monopolies that were, if anything, far more ferocious than Big Tech. They vanquished oligarchs whose perfidy and ruthlessness put today's ketamine-addled zuckermuskian mediocrities in the shade. How they did it is not a mystery: they just put in the hard yards of building coalitions and winning public sentiment.

They did it before and we can do it again. We know how it's done. We remember their names and what they did. Take Ida Tarbell, the slayer of John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Tarbell was a brilliant, fierce writer and orator, fearless and brilliant. She was the first woman in America to get a science degree, and a key driver of the movement for universal suffrage. But in addition to all that, she was an anti-monopolist.

Tarbell's father was a Pennsylvania oil man who'd been ruined by Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Determined to see him avenged, Tarbell researched the many tendrils of Rockefeller's empire and his devious tactics, and laid them bare in a pair of wildly successful serialized books, The History of the Standard Oil Company, Volumes I & II (published first in the popular national magazine Collier's):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/13/a-monopoly-isnt-the-same-as-legitimate-greatness/

Tarbell's History changed the way the country saw Rockefeller. She punctured his myth of brilliance and competence, and showed how he owed his fortune to swindling and cheating. She cut him down to size. She was a key figure in the American trustbusting movement, a catalyst for the revolution that saw Rockefeller and his fellow oligarchs overthrown.

This took a hell of a long time. The Sherman Act (which was used to break up Standard Oil) was passed in 1890, but Standard Oil wasn't broken up until 1912. It took perseverance through setback after setback, it took the compounding tragedies that drove people to question the order and demand change, and it took unglamorous organizing and dramatic street-fights to escape from oligarchy's powerful gravity well.

Today, we are back at square one, but we have advantages that Tarbell and the other trustbusters lacked. For one thing, we have them, the lessons of their fight and the inspiration of their victory. For another, we have the political wind at our back. All over the world, from China to Canada, from the EU to the USA, politicians have felt emboldened (or forced) to launch anti-monopoly efforts the likes of which have not been seen since the Carter administration:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants

What's more, these enforcers aren't alone – they can and do collaborate. Because these tech companies run the same swindles in every country in the world, enforcers can collaborate on building cases against them. After all the facts of Big Tech's crimes are virtually identical, whether you're in the UK, Singapore, South Korea, Canada or Germany:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

This is an advantage that the trustbusters who took down Rockefeller could only dream of. Like Big Tech, Rockefeller had a global empire, but unlike Big Tech, Rockefeller abused each of the nations of the world in distinct ways. In America, Rockefeller ran the refineries and pipelines; in Germany, he had a stranglehold on the ports.

Even if the Rockefeller-era trustbusters wanted to collaborate, sending memos back and forth across the Atlantic by zeppelin, all they could offer each other was warm wishes. US pipeline investigations had nothing to add to German port investigations.

Today's tech monopolists may be bigger than any one government, but they're not bigger than all the governments whose people they're abusing.

The trustbusters who brought down Rockefeller did something knowable and repeatable. Their work did not arise out of the lost arts of a fallen civilization. The work of taking down today's monopolists requires only that we recover our ancestors' moral fire and perseverance. No one needs to figure out how to build a pyramid without power tools or embalm a Pharaoh.

We merely have to build and sustain a global movement to destroy oligarchy.

(Merely!)

Yes, that's a hell of a big lift. But we're not alone. There are billions of people who suffer under oligarchy and an infinite variety of ways to erode its power, as a prelude to smashing that power. Our allies in antitrust include the voters who put Zohran Mamdani into office, going from less than 1% in the polls to a commanding majority in a three-way race, running on an anti-oligarch platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

(No coincidence that one of our most effective fighters is now co-leading Mamdani's transition team):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/15/unconscionability/#standalone-authority

Trustbusting alone will not end oligarchy and trustbusters alone cannot break up the monopolies. As with the original trustbusters, the modern trustbusting movement is but a part of a coalition that wants a world organized around the needs of the many, not the few.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Your Smartphone, Their Rules: How App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/app-store-oligopoly

• The Age of Extraction https://the-antimonopolist.ghost.io/the-age-of-extraction/

• HOPE Hacking Conference Banned From University Venue Over Apparent ‘Anti-Police Agenda’ https://www.404media.co/hope-hacking-conference-banned-from-university-venue-over-apparent-anti-police-agenda/

• HOPE CONFERENCE BANNED BY ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY https://www.2600.com/content/hope-conference-banned-st-johns-university

• unshittified.club https://unshittified.club/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Brit backpackers take Indian call-centre jobs https://web.archive.org/web/20051210103452/http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1284171

#20yrsago Laser etching doesn’t necessarily void your warranty https://web.archive.org/web/20051126194823/http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/11/will_laser_etching_apple_gear.html

#20yrsago UCLA to MPAA shill: ARRRRRRR! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-18-fi-glickman18-story.html

#20yrsago RIAA prez: Lots of companies secretly install rootkits! It’s no biggie! https://web.archive.org/web/20051125041201/http://www.malbela.com/blog/archives/000375.html

#20yrsago Sony offers MP3s in replacement for rootkit CDs https://web.archive.org/web/20051124233458/https://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

#15yrsago TSA forces cancer survivor to remove prosthetic breast https://web.archive.org/web/20101120213044/http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13534628

#15yrsago How the Victorians wiped their bums https://web.archive.org/web/20101123191021/http://wellcomelibrary.blogspot.com/2010/11/item-of-month-november-2010-victorian.html

#15yrsago Understanding the “microcredit crisis” in Andhra Pradesh https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012652/https://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/11/18/the-lessons-of-andhra-pradesh/

#15yrsago Canadian Heritage Minister inadvertently damns his own copyright bill https://web.archive.org/web/20101121054805/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5456/125/

#15yrsago TSA confiscates heavily-armed soldiers’ nail-clippers https://redstate.com/erick/2010/11/18/another-tsa-outrage-n37064

#15yrsago Chris McKitterick pirates his own book https://mckitterick.livejournal.com/653743.html

#15yrsago Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet https://web.archive.org/web/20120609051421/http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2010/11/chinese_twitter_sentence_a_yea.html

#15yrsago RuneScape devs refuse to cave in to patent trolls https://web.archive.org/web/20101119012943/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/31597/UKBased_RuneScape_Dev_Jagex_Wins_Patent_Infringement_Lawsuit.php

#10yrsago Manhattan DA calls for backdoors in all mobile operating systems https://web.archive.org/web/20151120003032/https://manhattanda.org/sites/default/files/11.18.15

#10yrsago Watching paint dry: epic crowfunded troll of the UK film censorship board https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/charlielyne/make-the-censors-watch-paint-drying?ref=video

#10yrsago CEOs are lucky, tall men https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky

#10yrsago America’s CEOs and hedge funds are starving the nation’s corporations to death https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-cannibalized/

#10yrsago EU official: all identified Paris attackers were from the EU https://web.archive.org/web/20151116223023/https://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/11/16/3722838/all-paris-attackers-identified-so-far-are-european-nationals-according-to-top-eu-official/

#10yrsago The Web is pretty great with Javascript turned off https://www.wired.com/2015/11/i-turned-off-javascript-for-a-whole-week-and-it-was-glorious/

#10yrsago If the Paris attackers weren’t using cryptography, the next ones will, and so should you https://insidesources.com/new-york-times-article-blaming-encryption-paris-attacks/

#10yrsago Zero: the number of security experts Ted Koppel consulted for hysterical cyberwar book https://www.techdirt.com/2015/11/19/ted-koppel-writes-entire-book-about-how-hackers-will-take-down-our-electric-grid-never-spoke-to-any-experts/

#10yrsago How a paid FBI informant created a terror plot that sent an activist to jail for 9 years https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/an-fbi-informant-seduced-eric-mcdavid-into-a-bomb-plot-then-the-government-lied-about-it/

#10yrsago Google steps up to defend fair use, will fund Youtubers’ legal defenses https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2015/11/a-step-toward-protecting-fair-use-on.html?m=1

#10yrsago Alan Moore’s advice to unpublished authors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuaWu2uhmRQ

#10yrsago Private funding of public services is bankrupting the UK https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/11748960/The-PFI-hospitals-costing-NHS-2bn-every-year.html

#10yrsago The US government turned down Anne Frank’s visa application https://www.reuters.com/article/2007/02/14/us-annefrank-letters-idUSN1430569220070214/#HmyajvjLmsX2tVYf.97

#10yrsago Seriously, try “view source” on google.com https://xkcd.com/1605/#10yrsago

#5yrsago Tyson execs bet on covid spread in unsafe plant https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#you-bet-your-life

#5yrsago Disney stiffs writer https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#disneymustpay

#5yrsago Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#asl

#5yrsago Canada's GDPR https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#consent

#5yrsago Telehealth chickenizes docs https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#telehealth

#5yrsago The Mounties lied about social surveillance https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#rcmp

#5yrsago Race, surveillance and tech https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/18/always-get-their-rationalisation/#asl

#1yrago Harpercollins wants authors to sign away AI training rights https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/18/rights-without-power/#careful-what-you-wish-for

#1yrago Forcing Google to spin off Chrome (and Android?) https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/19/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/#shiny-and-chrome

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: Enshittification at the Internet Archive, Nov 21
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-talk-enshittification-tickets-1839608451399

• Virtual: Enshittification with Vass Bednar (Vancouver Public Library), Nov 21
  https://www.crowdcast.io/@bclibraries-present

• Toronto: Jailbreaking Canada (OCAD U), Nov 27
  https://www.ocadu.ca/events-and-exhibitions/jailbreaking-canada

• San Diego: Enshittification at the Mission Hills Branch Library, Dec 1
  https://libraryfoundationsd.org/events/doctorow

• Seattle: Neuroscience, AI and Society (University of Washington), Dec 4
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/neuroscience-ai-and-society-cory-doctorow-tickets-1735371255139

• Madison, CT: Enshittification at RJ Julia, Dec 8
  https://rjjulia.com/event/2025-12-08/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Hamburg: Chaos Communications Congress, Dec 27-30
  https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

Recent appearances (permalink)

• It’s not your job to fix the internet (Vergecast)
  https://www.theverge.com/podcast/822822/enshittification-cory-doctorow-interview-vergecast

• Enshittification with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel (Peoples & Things)
  https://newbooksnetwork.com/cory-doctorow-on-enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it

• Enshittification and Extraction: The Internet Sucks Now, with Tim Wu (Oxford Internet Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYxMQJ9c94

• Working it out: Job security in the AI era (Web Summit)
  https://websummit.com/summaries/lis25/working-it-out-job-security-in-the-ai-era/

• How to dis-Enshittify the world (Blood In the Machine)
  https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-to-dis-enshittify-the-world-with

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

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

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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ISSN: 3066-764X

The federal government claims that the day after it was sued for allegedly abusing detainees at an ICE detention center, a “system crash” deleted nearly two weeks of surveillance footage from inside the facility.  

People detained at ICE’s Broadview Detention Center in suburban Chicago sued the government on October 30; according to their lawyers and the government, nearly two weeks of footage that could show how they were treated was lost in a “system crash” that happened on October 31.

“The government has said that the data for that period was lost in a system crash apparently on the day after the lawsuit was filed,” Alec Solotorovsky, one of the lawyers representing people detained at the facility, said in a hearing about the footage on Thursday that 404 Media attended via phone. “That period we think is going to be critical […] because that’s the period right before the lawsuit was filed.”

Earlier this week, we reported on the fact that the footage, from October 20 to October 30, had been “irretrievably destroyed.” At a hearing Thursday, we learned more about what was lost and the apparent circumstances of the deletion. According to lawyers representing people detained at the facility, it is unclear whether the government is even trying to recover the footage; government lawyers, meanwhile, said “we don’t have the resources” to continue preserving surveillance footage from the facility and suggested that immigrants detained at the facility (or their lawyers) could provide “endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.” 

It should be noted that ICE and Border Patrol agents continued to be paid during the government shutdown, that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” provided $170 billion in funding for immigration enforcement and border protection, which included tens of billions of dollars in funding for detention centers. 

People detained at the facility are suing the government over alleged horrific treatment and living conditions at the detention center, which has become a site of mass protest against the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. 

Solotorovsky said that the footage the government has offered is from between September 28 and October 19, and from between October 31 and November 7. Government lawyers have said they are prepared to provide footage from five cameras from those time periods; Solotorovsky said the plaintiffs’ attorneys believe there are 63 surveillance cameras total at the facility. He added that over the last few weeks the plaintiffs’ legal team has been trying to work with the government to figure out if the footage can be recovered but that it is unclear who is doing this work on the government’s side. He said they were referred to a company called Five by Five Management, “that appears to be based out of a house,” has supposedly been retained by the government. 

“We tried to engage with the government through our IT specialist, and we hired a video forensic specialist,” Solotorovsky said. He added that the government specialist they spoke to “didn’t really know anything beyond the basic specifications of the system. He wasn’t able to answer any questions about preservation or attempts to recover the data.” He said that the government eventually put him in touch with “a person who ostensibly was involved in those events [attempting to recover the data], and it was kind of a no-name LLC called Five by Five Management that appears to be based out of a house in Carol Stream. We were told they were on site and involved with the system when the October 20 to 30 data was lost, but nobody has told us that Five By Five Management or anyone else has been trying to recover the data, and also very importantly things like system logs, administrator logs, event logs, data in the system that may show changes to settings or configurations or deletion events or people accessing the system at important times.”

Five by Five Management could not be reached for comment.

Solotorovsky said those logs are going to be critical for “determining whether the loss was intentional. We’re deeply concerned that nobody is trying to recover the data, and nobody is trying to preserve the data that we’re going to need for this case going forward.”

Jana Brady, an assistant US attorney representing the Department of Homeland Security in the case, did not have much information about what had happened to the footage, and said she was trying to get in touch with contractors the government had hired. She also said the government should not be forced to retain surveillance footage from every camera at the facility and that the “we [the federal government] don’t have the resources to save all of the video footage.”

“We need to keep in mind proportionality. It took a huge effort to download and save and produce the video footage that we are producing and to say that we have to produce and preserve video footage indefinitely for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, indefinitely, which is what they’re asking, we don’t have the resources to do that,” Brady said. “we don't have the resources to save all of the video footage 24/7 for 65 cameras for basically the end of time.”

She added that the government would be amenable to saving all footage if the plaintiffs “have endless hard drives that we could save things to, because again we don’t have the resources to do what the court is ordering us to do. But if they have endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.”

Magistrate Judge Laura McNally said they aren’t being “preserved from now until the end of time, they’re being preserved for now,” and said “I’m guessing the federal government has more resources than the plaintiffs here and, I’ll just leave it at that.” 

When McNally asked if the footage was gone and not recoverable, Brady said “that’s what I’ve been told.”  

“I’ve asked for the name and phone number for the person that is most knowledgeable from the vendor [attempting to recover] the footage, and if I need to depose them to confirm this, I can do this,” she said. “But I have been told that it’s not recoverable, that the system crashed.”

Plaintiffs in the case say they are being held in “inhumane” conditions. The complaint describes a facility where detainees are “confined at Broadview inside overcrowded holding cells containing dozens of people at a time. People are forced to attempt to sleep for days or sometimes weeks on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete floor. They are denied sufficient food and water […] the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable […] the physical conditions are filthy, with poor sanitation, clogged toilets, and blood, human fluids, and insects in the sinks and the floor […] federal officers who patrol Broadview under Defendants’ authority are abusive and cruel. Putative class members are routinely degraded, mistreated, and humiliated by these officers.” 

You might foolishly think the purpose of Microsoft Windows was to run your programs so you can do stuff.

But Microsoft understands that what you really want is an agentic AI-first computer platform. Who wants to get work done when they could be arguing with Copilot?

How do you manage all these incredibly secure and reliable AI agents? Microsoft brings you: the Agent 365 platform! [YouTube]

Even better, you’ll be getting the same great capabilities in Windows 11. Microsoft has put a full Copilot agent into preview builds. The agent platform runs in the background, all the time, with full access to all your personal files. [Microsoft]

There’s just one teensy problem — Microsoft’s built a welcome mat for malicious software:

Agentic AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.

Fortunately, Microsoft has duly warned you it’s your problem to keep the agent system switched off, and to check the agents to make sure they don’t do bad things. And can’t be prompt-injected.

You can do all that, right? That’s what you bought a computer to do, right? Watch battling malware agents play Robot Wars?

But Microsoft is here to keep the quality coming! Here’s a remarkable job ad for a senior product designer at Microsoft: [LinkedIn, archive]

You’ll be a part of an army of passionate, world-class AI experimenters.

Vibe Windows is going just great.

• Video — Podcast

OnlyFans will start running background checks on people signing up as content creators, the platform’s CEO recently announced. 

As reported by adult industry news outlet XBIZ, OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair announced the partnership in a LinkedIn post. Blair doesn’t say in the post when the checks will be implemented, whether all types of criminal convictions will bar creators from signing up, if existing creators will be checked as well, or what countries’ criminal records will be checked. 

OnlyFans did not respond to 404 Media's request for comment.

“I am very proud to add our partnership with Checkr Trust to our onboarding process in the US,” Blair wrote. “Checkr, Inc. helps OnlyFans to prevent people who have a criminal conviction which may impact on our community's safety from signing up as a Creator on OnlyFans. It’s collaborations like this that make the real difference behind the scenes and keep OnlyFans a space where creators and fans feel secure and empowered.”  

Many OnlyFans creators turned to the platform, and to online sex work more generally, when they’re not able to obtain employment at traditional workplaces. Some sex workers doing in-person work turned to online sex work as a way to make ends meet—especially after the passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act in 2018 made it much more difficult to screen clients for escorting. And in-person sex work is still criminalized in the U.S. and many other countries. 

“Criminal background checks will not stop potential predators from using the platform (OF), it will only harm individuals who are already at higher risk. Sex work has always had a low barrier to entry, making it the most accessible career for people from all walks of life,” performer GoAskAlex, who’s on OnlyFans and other platforms, told me in an email. “Removing creators with criminal/arrest records will only push more vulnerable people (overwhelmingly, women) to street based/survival sex work. Adding more barriers to what is arguably the safest form of sex work (online sex work) will push sex industry workers to less and less safe options.” 

Jessica Starling, who also creates adult content on OnlyFans, told me in a call that their first thought was that if someone using OnlyFans has a prostitution charge, they might not be able to use the platform. “If they're trying to transition to online work, they won’t be able to do that anymore,” they said. “And the second thing I thought was that it's just invasive and overreaching... And then I looked up the company, and I'm like, ‘Oh, wow, this is really bad.’”

Checkr is reportedly used by Uber, Instacart, Shipt, Postmates, and Lyft, and lists many more companies like Dominos and Doordash on its site as clients. The company has been sued hundreds of times for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act or other consumer credit complaints. The Fair Credit Reporting Act says that companies providing information to consumer reporting agencies are legally obligated to investigate disputed information. And a lot of people dispute the information Checkr and Inflection provide on them, claiming mixed-up names, acquittals, and decades-old misdemeanors or traffic tickets prevented them from accessing platforms that use background checking services.  

Checkr regularly acquires other background checking and age verification companies, and acquired a background check company called Inflection in 2022. At the time, I found more than a dozen lawsuits against Inflection alone in a three year span, many of them from people who found out about the allegedly inaccurate reports Inflection kept about them after being banned from Airbnb after the company claimed they failed checks. 

How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone

Innocent sites are being delisted from Google because of copyright takedown requests against rampant OnlyFans piracy.

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“Sex workers face discrimination when leaving the sex trade, especially those who have been face-out and are identifiable in the online world. Facial recognition technology has advanced to a point where just about anyone can ascertain your identity from a single picture,” Alex said. “Leaving the online sex trade is not as easy as it once was, and anything you've done online will follow you for a lifetime. Creators who are forced to leave the platform will find that safe and stable alternatives are far and few between.”

Last month, Pornhub announced that it would start performing background checks on existing content partners—which primarily include studios—next year. "To further protect our creators and users, all new applicants must now complete a criminal background check during onboarding," the platform announced in a newsletter to partners, as reported by AVN. 

Alex said she believes background checks in the porn industry could be beneficial, under very specific circumstances. “I do not think that someone with egregious history of sexual violence should be allowed to work in the sex trade in any capacity—similarly, a person convicted of hurting children should be not able to work with children—so if the criminal record checks were searching specifically for sex based offences I could see the benefit, but that doesn't appear to be the case (to my knowledge). What's to stop OnlyFans from deactivating someone's account due to a shoplifting offense?” she said. “I'd like to know more about what they're searching for with these background checks.”

Even with third-party companies like Checkr doing the work, as is the case with third-party age verification that’s swept the U.S. and targeted the porn industry, increased data means increased risk of it being leaked or hacked. Last year, a background check company called National Public Data claimed it was breached by hackers who got the confidential data of 2.9 billion people. The unencrypted data was then sold on the dark web.

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As of today, three more states join the list of 17 that can’t access Pornhub because of age verification laws.

404 MediaSamantha Cole

“It’s dangerous for anyone, but it's especially dangerous for us [adult creators] because we're more vulnerable anyway. Especially when you're online, you're hypervisible,” Starling said. “It doesn't protect anyone except OnlyFans themselves, the company.” 

OnlyFans became the household name in independent porn because of the work of its adult content creators. Starling mentioned that because the platform has dominated the market, it’s difficult to just go to another platform if creators don’t want to be subjected to background checks. “We're put in a position where we have very limited power," they said. "So when a platform decides to do something like this, we’re kind of screwed, right?” 

Earlier this year, OnlyFans owner Fenix International Ltd reportedly entered talks to sell the company to an investor group at a valuation of around $8 billion.

Luxembourg has officially entered the era of 3D-printed living. Standing at just about 11.5 feet wide and 58 feet long, the Tiny House LUX squeezes innovation, sustainability, and style into a remarkably compact 506-square-foot footprint. Developed by Coral Construction Technologies – a division of ICE Industrial Services – and designed by ODA Architects, this petite dwelling isn’t just a one-off experiment. It’s a bold prototype for a new kind of housing solution in one of Europe’s most expensive and space-limited markets.

Luxembourg’s housing crisis is no secret. The nation needs about 7,000 new homes each year but delivers barely half that number – and only a fraction qualify as affordable. Meanwhile, countless leftover slivers of land sit empty because they’re too narrow or irregular  for traditional construction. Tiny House LUX asks a simple question: what if these forgotten gaps became homes instead of wasted potential?

Architect Bujar Hasani of ODA Architects, together with the Municipality of Niederanven, set out to prove it’s possible. Their vision was to design a durable, permanent home – not a temporary pod or prefabricated box – that meets Luxembourg’s high building standards while using modern digital fabrication to keep costs, materials, and timelines in check.

To bring that vision to life, ODA teamed up with Coral Construction Technologies, a company specializing in on-site 3D concrete printing, along with collaborators Georgios Staikos. Using a mobile robotic printer, the team translated Hasani’s architectural model into precise toolpaths, layer by layer, directly on site. Unlike many 3D-printed homes that depend on imported dry mixes, Tiny House LUX uses standard local concrete from nearby batching plants – a first for Luxembourg and a sustainability win that reduces transport emissions.

The printing process itself took about a week, with the entire build – from foundation to finishing – completed in just four weeks. Even more impressive: several architectural details, like the shower niche and wall-mounted toilet cavity, were printed directly into the walls. No extra cutting or patching required – just pure efficiency and precision.

In another national first, the home sits not on a concrete slab but on a wooden platform supported by screw foundations. This clever engineering move reduces the environmental footprint, simplifies installation, and allows the structure to be dismantled or relocated later on – a nod to circular design thinking.

Inside, the house feels anything but cramped. A long, continuous sightline from front to back makes the space appear larger than its 506 square feet. Smartly placed built-ins line the walls, keeping the center open and airy. The palette mixes 3D-printed concrete with warm wood finishes and minimalist furnishings – including design-forward pieces like the Cocon armchair and UM barstool by Master & Master, and the Bandaska vase by DECHEM studio.

Beyond the wow factor of its printing process, Tiny House LUX is built to perform. The walls use mineral-based insulation and reinforcement, avoiding synthetic materials. Solar panels on the roof power both the home and a thin film floor-heating system, while large south-facing windows maximize natural light and heat gain.

Diagonal lines embedded in the concrete walls become channels for light, creating dynamic focal points. Hidden lighting around the ceiling brings additional light to the compact space making it feel brighter and larger than it actually is.

The result is a small yet sophisticated dwelling that generates its own energy, conserves resources, and fits seamlessly into an existing neighborhood – all while showing how advanced technology can serve real social and environmental goals.

While Tiny House LUX currently serves as a municipal test pilot, its implications stretch far beyond Niederanven. Imagine a city that can quickly and affordably infill its forgotten plots of land with energy-smart, beautifully designed homes – all using local materials, digital design, and robotic precision.

The Tiny House Luxe being printed:

To learn more about the Tiny House LUX designed by ODA Architects with Coral Construction Technologies doing the 3D printing, please visit odaarchitects.lu.

Final photography by BoyPlaysNice.
Process photography courtesy of Coral Architects and ODA Architects.

An erotic roleplay chatbot and AI image creation platform called Secret Desires left millions of user-uploaded photos exposed and available to the public. The databases included nearly two million photos and videos, including many photos of completely random people with very little digital footprint. 

The exposed data shows how many people use AI roleplay apps that allow face-swapping features: to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of everyone, from the most famous entertainers in the world to women who are not public figures in any way. In addition to the real photo inputs, the exposed data includes AI-generated outputs, which are mostly sexual and often incredibly graphic. Unlike “nudify” apps that generate nude images of real people, these images are putting people into AI-generated videos of hardcore sexual scenarios.