Today's links

• What's a "public internet?": You don't want Nigel Farage moderating your social media, right?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• 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.

What's a "public internet?" (permalink)

The "Eurostack" is a (long overdue) project to publicly fund a European "stack" of technology that is independent from American Big Tech (as well as other powers' technology that has less hold in Europe, such as Chinese and Russian tech):

https://www.euro-stack.info/

But "technological soveriegnty" is a slippery and easily abused concept. Policies like "national firewalls" and "data localization" (where data on a country's population need to be kept on onshore servers) can be a means to different ends. Data localization is important if you want to keep an American company from funneling every digital fact about everyone in your country to the NSA. But it's also a way to make sure that your secret police can lay hands on population-scale data about anyone they might want to kidnap and torture:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.

But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.

In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a public internet that the whole public controls – not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will I see, and which ones can I block?"

A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.

Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.

Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver billions of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fight-for-44/#slowpokes

(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable – a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)

The private sector cannot deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.

Fiber itself is cheap like borscht – it's literally made out of sand – but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.

Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland. Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidden mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it – ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiate called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/symmetrical-10gb-for-119/#utopia

So government have to be involved in fiber, but how should they involve themselves in it? One model – the worst one – is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the cheapest part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.

In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out. They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.

They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give great service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.

They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations – unlike governments – are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Goverments can improve on this situation by regulating a monopoly fiber company. They can require the company to assume a "universal service" mandate, meaning they must connect any home or business that wants it at a set rate. Governments can ban junk fees, set minimum standards for customer service and repair turnarounds, and demand neutral carriage. All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate mafeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.

That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a private monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep them honest.

Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or with contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into. The government builds a data-center with all the necessary switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.

This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities – mostly conservative towns in red states – have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:

https://ilsr.org/articles/municipal-broadband-skyrocket-as-alternative-to-private-models/

(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)

This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:

https://www.patreon.com/collection/869728?view=condensed

Remember: Sarah Palin got her start in politics as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Do you want to have to rely on Sarah Palin for your internet service?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/119567308?collection=869728

How about Rob Ford? Do you want the crack mayor answering your tech support calls? I didn't think so:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can also do something called "essential facilities sharing":

https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Orders/1999/fcc99238.pdf

Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.

If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP and allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies. In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to get internet access and the right to provide internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city – you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.

That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop. When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center. A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.

This is a truly public internet service – one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access. It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.

The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services. That's fair enough, though it does require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Just as with the example of fiber, there are a lot of ways the EU and member states could achieve "technological sovereignty." They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector – sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.

The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks. For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-been-trained-for-this-life-after-the-newag-drm-disclosure

The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.

As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban – or Emmanuel Macron:

https://jacobin.com/2025/06/france-solidarity-urgence-palestine-repression

Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone. Austria's doing it right now!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/austrian-government-agrees-plan-allow-150831232.html

Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24647268

Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:

https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/germanys-new-surveillance-laws-raise-privacy-concerns

So there's good reasons to worry about having your data – and your apps – hosted in an EU cloud.

To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological public goods.

For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky. EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices. The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.

The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:

https://justingarrison.com/blog/2024-12-02-run-a-bluesky-pds-from-home/

Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.

Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans. These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks – they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.

This is essential facilities sharing for services. Combine it with public data centers and tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.

In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet. They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers – safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other. If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#230

A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed public goods that are designed to allow everyone to participate in both using and providing internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago. Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can't afford to have "digital soveriegnty" be "national firewalls 2.0" – we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Jailbroken: A Story of Corporate Overreach, Police Abuse of Power, and Modern Tech https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-selfpublished-author-spread-his-story

• Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters https://nordiclarp.org/2025/06/20/star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-the-blockbuster-to-end-all-blockbusters/

• MIT student prints AI polymer masks to restore paintings in hours https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/mit-student-prints-ai-polymer-masks-to-restore-paintings-in-hours/

• Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice https://theonion.com/letter-to-congress/

• Dems’ Crypto Schemers Have Entered The Chat https://www.levernews.com/dems-crypto-schemers-have-entered-the-chat/?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=social-link&utm_campaign=social-link-buffer

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Tit of justice reinstated by Supreme Torturer Gonzales https://web.archive.org/web/20050910170445/http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-24-doj-statue_x.htm

#20yrsago What tomorrow’s Grokster Supreme Court ruling will mean https://web.archive.org/web/20050827114341/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003742.php

#15yrsago Toronto’s secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor https://web.archive.org/web/20100628022932/http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/828372–man-arrested-and-left-in-wire-cage-under-new-g20-law

#10yrsago Why parents in Cincinnati camp out for 16 days to get a kindergarten spot https://medium.com/@hellogerard/waiting-for-kindergarten-62a14d4f1ce5

#10yrsago Stephen Harper ready to sign TPP and throw Tory rural base under the bus https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/stephen-harper-ready-to-sign-tpp-and-throw-tory-rural-base-under-the-bus/

#10yrsago How the UK Prime Minister’s office gets around Freedom of Information requests https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/downing-st-accused-of-deliberate-attempts-to-avoid-freedom-of-information-requests-as-exstaff-reveal-automated-deletion-system-10325231.html

#10yrsago They’re tearing down the Adventurer’s Club https://memex.craphound.com/2015/06/25/theyre-tearing-down-the-adventurers-club/

#10yrsago David Byrne and St Vincent celebrate Color Guard with astounding Contemporary Color show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8jSWQtC_fA

#5yrsago 759 Trump atrocities https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#m-o

#5yrsago How Big Tech distorts discourse https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/25/canada-reads/#oii

#1yrago Mirion Malle's "So Long Sad Love" https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-step/#the-fog-of-love

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: How To Academy with Riley Quinn, Jul 1
  https://howtoacademy.com/events/cory-doctorow-the-fight-against-the-big-tech-oligarchy/

• Manchester: Picks and Shovels at Blackwell's Bookshop, Jul 2
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-1308451968059

• Manchester: Co-operatives UK Co-op Congress keynote, Jul 4
  https://www.uk.coop/events-and-training/events-calendar/co-op-congress-2025-book-your-place

• Virtual: ORG at 20: in conversation with Maria Farrell, Jul 16
  https://www.openrightsgroup.org/events/org-at-20-cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-maria-farrell/

• DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
  https://politics-prose.com/cory-doctorow-10825

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

• San Francisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
  https://app.gopassage.com/events/doctorow25

Recent appearances (permalink)

• If We Had a Choice, Would We Invent Social Media Again? (The Agenda/TVO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJw38uIcmEw

• Forward Kentucky
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMxBBMBkZs

• Democrats Abroad
  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/demsabroadca/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-Enshittification-e34blmg/a-ac0jn7i

Latest books (permalink)

• • 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

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583.

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• 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/

• 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

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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

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

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

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

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

https://twitter.com/doctorow

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

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

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

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

ISSN: 3066-764X

Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company with a presence in thousands of communities across the U.S., has stopped agencies across the country from searching cameras inside Illinois, California, and Virginia, 404 Media has learned. The dramatic moves come after 404 Media revealed local police departments were repeatedly performing lookups around the country on behalf of ICE, a Texas officer searched cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion, and lawmakers recently signed a new law in Virginia. Ordinarily Flock allows agencies to opt into a national lookup database, where agencies in one state can access data collected in another, as long as they also share their own data. This practice violates multiple state laws which bar the sharing of ALPR data out of state or it being accessed for immigration or healthcare purposes.

The changes also come after a wave of similar coverage in local and state-focused media outlets, with many replicating our reporting to learn more about what agencies are accessing Flock cameras in their communities and for what purpose. The Illinois Secretary of State is investigating whether Illinois police departments broke the law by sharing data with outside agencies for immigration or abortion related reasons. Some police departments have also shut down the data access after learning it was being used for immigration purposes.

“Some states, like California, do not allow any sharing across state borders. For those states, Flock has disabled National Lookup to make compliance easier,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley wrote in a public blog post on June 19. 

In that blog post, titled “Setting the Record Straight: Statement on Flock Network Sharing, Use Cases, and Federal Cooperation,” Langley says he is writing to provide transparency on “recent clickbait-driven reporting and social media rumors that mischaracterize Flock’s LPR devices.” Rather than refuting any of our reporting, he instead explains that as a result of it, Flock has decided to perform numerous internal audits about how police are using the network that exactly aligns with 404 Media’s reporting, and that Flock has decided to make specific changes to how Flock works to ensure that local police are complying with state data sharing laws, which include disabling the national lookup tool in California.

That post followed another published by the company a few days earlier, which discussed an audit Flock conducted on what agencies were accessing data in Illinois. “Since we initiated the audit in May, 47 agencies have been removed from access to Illinois data,” that blog post reads. 

Flock has also removed the national lookup feature for cameras in Virginia, according to an internal Flock message viewed by 404 Media. 404 Media granted the source who shared it anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. On Tuesday a Flock spokesperson confirmed in an email to 404 Media that the changes to Virginia data access are complete.

In May, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin signed a new law which will limit the use of such data to specific criminal investigations, human trafficking, stolen vehicles, and missing persons cases, the local TV outlet WAVY reported. The law comes into effect July 1, the report added.

Flock cameras work by continuously scanning the plates, model, and color of vehicles driving by. Law enforcement can then access data collected from their own cameras, but Flock also allows state and nationwide lookups. For a nationwide search, agencies are able to search other police departments’ cameras if they in turn make theirs available for search. But this can result in illegal data sharing if such access violates state law. 

404 Media reported in May that local police around the country were performing Flock lookups on behalf of ICE. That included lookups on cameras administered by the Danville, Illinois Police Department, triggering the audit there. 404 Media also reported cops in California are illegally sharing Flock data with agencies out of state, and searched cameras related to an “immigration protest.”

Flock says it conducted an internal audit of agencies that had access to Illinois data. If an agency was found to have affirmed compliance with Illinois law while also conducting multiple searches using reasons impermissible under state law, then Flock revoked their access to Illinois data. Flock also wrote that “All out of state agencies with access to Illinois data are being re-educated  on Illinois-specific legal requirements and product functionality,” and that the company is placing new emphasis on “responsible sharing, with updated training content, in-product guidance, and communications to reinforce compliance.”

Flock also said it launched a new tool that blocks impermissible searches in real time. “If a search involving Illinois camera data includes terms that indicate an impermissible purpose under Illinois law, the Illinois data will automatically be excluded,” the company wrote.

Flock said it also has plans for an AI-based tool that will identify suspicious searches and allow agencies to require case numbers when their cameras are searched (as opposed to the vague reasons such as “immigration” in some of the data 404 Media obtained).

404 Media’s investigation into local police departments performing Flock lookups for ICE was based on a “Network Audit” obtained by researchers by public records requests. A Network Audit shows what agency searched another agency's Flock cameras, and for what stated purpose. The investigation into a Flock search performed for “had an abortion, search for female,” was based on Network Audits from other police departments obtained by 404 Media. The sheriff in that case said the family was worried for the woman’s safety and so authorities used Flock in an attempt to locate her.

Since publishing those articles and much of the related data, other outlets have dug into the information themselves. For example, Suncoast Searchlight used the data we published to find the Florida Highway Patrol tapped Flock cameras to aid immigration crackdowns; the Evanston Roundtable used it to find its police department shared access to its cameras with agencies that performed searches related to immigration; the Central Current reports officials in Syracuse, New York, are investigating their data sharing practices the outlet reviewed the data; and KUSA-TV Denver found Loveland Police Department’s Flock cameras were used for “ICE” searches.

And several cities have decided not to renew or expand their contracts with Flock. The City of Austin let its contract with Flock lapse, in part because of concerns around ICE access to the data. The City of San Marcos decided to not place additional cameras in the city. The San Marcos Police Department also changed their policy to require outside law enforcement agencies to file a request concerning a specific crime in order to receive Flock data, Spectrum News 1 reported. 

The Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety said it blocked outside access to its cameras after learning the data was being searched by departments “focused on immigration-related violations,” local media reported.

“License plate readers can serve as an important tool for law enforcement, but these cameras must be regulated so they aren’t abused for surveillance, tracking the data of innocent people or criminalizing lawful behavior. No one seeking legal healthcare services in Illinois should face harassment or jail—period,” Secretary Giannoulias told 404 Media in a statement.

Flock declined to comment further on its changes to California data access.

A software engineer in Michigan has coded a version of Balatro that runs off playing cards. The un-released demake of the popular video game is a prototype meant to run on the Gameboy Advanced through an e-Reader, a 2000s era accessory that loaded games onto the console via a strip of dot code printed onto a card.

The Balatro e-Reader port is the work of Michigan-based software engineer Matt Greer, a man with a love for both the addictive card game and Nintendo’s strange peripheral. Greer detailed the Balatro prototype on his personal blog and published a YouTube video showing off a quick round. 

Greer’s e-Reader Balatro is a work in progress. It’s only got a few of the jokers and doesn’t understand all of the possible poker hands and how to score them. In his blog, he said he thinks he could code the whole thing out but there would be limitations. “E-Reader games can comfortably work with 32 bit numbers,” he said on his blog. “So the highest possible score would be 4,294,967,295. Real Balatro uses 64 bit numbers so scores can absolutely go into the stratosphere there.”

Another numeric problem is that the e-Reader will only allow a game to render four numbers of five digits each. So printing a large score would require the coder to use up two of the “number” slots available. “A lot of this can be worked around with sprites and some clever redesigning and careful pruning back of features (this would be a demake after all),” Greer said. “I do think this challenge could be overcome, but it would probably be the hardest part of this project.”

Nintendo released the e-Reader in the U.S. in 2002. Like many of the company’s peripherals from the 90s and 2000s, it was a strange niche piece of hardware. Players would plug the thing into a Gameboy’s cartridge port and then swipe a playing card through a scanner to load a game. It was a weird way to play retro titles like Balloon Fight, Ice Climbers, and Donkey Kong.

“I got one when it launched back in 2002, and eventually got most of the NES games and a lot of Super Mario Advance 4 cards, but that was about it,” Greer told 404 Media. “When it first came out I was hyped for it, but ultimately not much was done with it in America so my interest in it didn't last too long back then sadly.”

But his interest picked up in the last few years and he’s been coding new games for the system. He plans to release a set of them later this month that includes Solitaire and a side-scrolling action game. “It’s such a strange way to deliver games. It’s tedious and slow to scan cards in, but at the same time, the physical nature of it all, I dunno, it’s just really cool to me,” Greer said. 

That clunky nature has its charm and Greer said that writing games for it is a fun design challenge. “The e-reader combines many different aspects that I enjoy,” he said. “The challenge of trying to squeeze a game into such a small space. The graphic design and artwork of the cards themselves. The hacking and reverse engineering aspect of figuring out how this whole system works (something that has mostly been done by people other than me), and the small nature of the games which forces you to keep your scope down. I think my personality works better doing several small projects instead of one big one.”

Greer is also a huge Balatro fan who has beaten the game’s hardest difficulty with every possible deck and completed all the games challenges except for a jokerless run. “I’ll probably eventually do completionist++  just because I can't seem to stop playing the game, but I'm not focused on it,” Greer said. The completionist++ achievement is so difficult to achieve that the game’s creator, LocalThunk, only got it a few days ago.

Greer said he’d love to focus on a full de-make of Balatro, but he won’t release it without LocalThunk’s blessing. “I have my doubts that will happen,” Greer said. “If I ever do make a complete demake, I'd probably make it a regular GBA game though.” LocalThunk did not respond to 404 Media’s request for a comment.

He said that porting Balatro to the e-reader is possible, but that he’ll probably just make it a full GBA game instead. Coding the game to be loaded from several cards would require too many sacrifices. “I don’t think it’s right for me to cut jokers,” he said. “I’m sure LocalThunk took a long time balancing them and I wouldn’t want to change the way their game plays if I can help it. By making a regular GBA game, I could easily fit all the jokers in.”

There are several Balatro demakes. There’s a very basic version running on Pico-8, a mockup of another browser based Balatro on Itch, and a Commodore-64 port that was taken offline after the publisher found it. 

One of the many copyright cases in progress against chatbot vendor Anthropic is Bartz v. Anthropic, where several authors brought a class action suit in August 2024 for violating their copyrights when the company downloaded their books from pirate sites and trained chatbots on them. [Complaint, PDF; case docket]

The authors don’t claim that Anthropic’s Claude bot spat out copies of their text, as in the music publishers’ case against Anthropic. This case is just about the training.

Anthropic bought a huge amount of print books and scanned them into a private library to train from. But it also downloaded 7 million pirate copies of books from LibGen and Books3.

Anthropic says the training was all fair use. They filed a motion for summary judgement in March. [Motion, PDF]

Today, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s training itself was broadly fair use — but that using pirated copies was not. And there will be a trial on the extent of Anthropic’s copyright violation and what the damages add up to. [Order on fair use, PDF]

The first part of this ruling is a stupendous win for AI:

The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative … If this training process reasonably required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a transformative use.

This is a big open door for the other LLM vendors to train on books, as long as they buy copies first. A lot of people really hate that part of this ruling. But Alsup has long been a huge fan of fair use, so fair use is the thing he’s trying to protect here.

But the second part of the ruling is where Anthropic finds out:

Authors argue Anthropic should have paid for these pirated library copies. This order agrees.

… The downloaded pirated copies used to build a central library were not justified by a fair use. Every factor points against fair use … A separate justification was required for each use. None is even offered here except for Anthropic’s pocketbook and convenience.

So what happens next?

We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.

Statutory damages go from $750 a book up to $150,000. For each of those 7 million books.

It’s pretty certain this new ruling will be brought up immediately in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms — where Facebook trained Llama on a pile of books from LibGen, because CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that would be fine. Whoops.

As Judge Alsup says:

There is no carveout, however, from the Copyright Act for AI companies.

• Video version

Michael Kalus posted a photo:

Fansly, a popular platform where independent creators—many of whom are making adult content—sell access to images and videos to subscribers and fans, announced sweeping changes to its terms of service on Monday, including effectively banning furries.

The changes blame payment processors for classifying “some anthropomorphic content as simulated bestiality.” Most people in the furry fandom condemn bestiality and anything resembling it, but payment processors—which have increasingly dictated strict rules for adult sexual content for years—seemingly don’t know the difference and are making it creators’ problem.

The changes include new policies that ban chatbots or image generators that respond to user prompts, content featuring alcohol, cannabis or “other intoxicating substances,” and selling access to Snapchat content or other social media platforms if it violates their terms of service. 

Under a section called “policy clarifications” in an email announcing the changes, Fansly wrote:

“Anthropomorphic Content - Our payment processing partners classify some anthropomorphic content as simulated bestiality. As a general guideline, Kemonomimi (human-like characters with animal ears/tails) is permitted, but full fursonas, Kemono, and scalie content are prohibited in adult contexts.

Hypnosis/Mind Control - This prohibition includes all synonymous terms (mesmerize, mindfuck, mindcontrol, hypno) regardless of context.

Wrestling Content - Professional, studio-produced adult wrestling is permitted. Amateur or party wrestling content is prohibited as it may be interpreted as non-consensual activity. Even when consensual, content that simulates force, struggle, or non-consent violates our policies.

Public Spaces & Recording Locations - Sexual activity is prohibited in all public spaces. Nudity is prohibited in public spaces where it's not legally permitted. Both nudity and sexual activity are prohibited on third-party private property without owner permission or in any location visible to the public.” 

If creators fall into “one of these impacted niches,” Fansly wrote in the email, they’ll need to review and remove any content that’s against the updated terms of service by June 28. “We'll conduct reviews after June 28th to ensure platform-wide compliance,” the platform said.

Furries that use fursuits in content are popular on Fansly, as are Vtubers—people who use a virtual avatar, often controlled by motion tracking software—that use furry or anthropomorphic cosplay.  

“I will have to spend a few hundred dollars as a Vtuber to go and completely REPLACE my model,” Amity, a Vtuber creator on Fansly, told me. She’ll have to remove all her existing furry content, too. 

“Fansly is my main source of income. It is how I support myself,” Amity said. “And this screws me and several other content creators over in a bad way. Fansly has been a safe haven for furries and people that aren’t allowed to use Onlyfans or other such sites. Accepting us with open arms, until now...”

“The majority of the blame for this change lies with the payment processors and I wish we had one that didn’t try to police adult content like current processors do,” TyTyVR, another Fansly creator, told me. “However, I cannot help but feel like we’ve been betrayed by Fansly. They would rather drop their creators than let go of the payment processors that are dictating what can and can’t be posted.”

In 2021, OnlyFans announced that it would ban “sexually-explicit conduct” from the site, citing payment processor pressure. It reversed the decision days later, after widespread public backlash. Fansly said at the time that it was receiving “4,000 applications an hour” from creators looking to move to the site in the days after OnlyFans said it was banning sexually-explicit content.

“Thank you, we won't let you down,” Fansly wrote on Twitter.

Last year, Stripe dropped Wishtender, a platform that allows people to make wishlists and send gifts anonymously.

And in September 2024, Patreon made changes to its content guidelines that “added nuance under ‘Bestiality’ to clarify the circumstances in which it is permitted for human characters to have sexual interactions with fictional mythological creatures,” clarifying that “sexual interaction between a human and a fictional mythological creature that is more humanistic than animal (i.e. anthropomorphic, bipedal, and/or sapient)” is forbidden but portrayals of sex outside of those guidelines was allowed.

Fansly did not respond to a request for comment.