Enshittification News

Today's links Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the Haunted Mansion; Opening chord from A Hard Day's Night; Mondrian Pong; "IP": Patent trolls v...

Hackers paid to make a malicious link the top Google Search result.

The UK is moving forward with its efforts to ban social media for young people. Ahead of this week’s House of Lords debate on the topic, we’re getting you situated with a primer on what’s been happening and what it all means. What was the last vote about? On 9 March, the House of Commons discussed...

A Serve Robotics robot crashed through a Chicago bus shelter.

WebinarTV hosts 200,000 “webinars.” A Zoom call you may thought was private might be one of them.

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Support us on Patreon » Last month, Mike participated in the Cato Institute‘s Section 230 at 30 event to mark the 30th anniversary of the passage of Section 230. The event featured a series of fireside chats and panels that went deep on the past, present, and future of the all-important law, and...

All modern major U.S. media mergers follow the same trajectory. Executives pump out a bunch of pre-merger lies about job creation and innovation that are parroted by a lazy access press, followed by the rubber stamping by corrupt regulators, followed by oodles of price hikes, layoffs, and quality...

All the people who have always brushed off concerns about surveillance tech, please come get your kids. And then let someone else raise them. Lots of people are fine with mass surveillance because they believe the horseshit spewed by the immediate beneficiaries of this tech: law enforcement...

Ozer, With Decades of Experience in Technology and Civil Liberties Law, Will Succeed Cindy Cohn as Organization’s Leader SAN FRANCISCO – Nicole Ozer has been appointed as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation effective June 1. Ozer is a legal expert on privacy and surveillance,...

As many of the AI stories on Walled Culture attest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training data. To create high-quality large language models (LLMs) massive quantities of training data are required. In the current genAI stampede,...

Today's links Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't do your job; Coping...

Artist Sam Lavigne created ‘Slow LLM’ to make people question their dependence on tools like Claude and ChatGPT. Or at least, make them super annoying to use.

Trump's war strategy depends on Number Go Up. But the markets aren't believing him as much as they used to. Plus, Elon Musk found liable for fraud, and third party populist candidates gain steam.

Two years ago, Congress passed the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America” Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law—but it also included a relatively big...

The company's new support chatbot is better than what came before — but still missing the one feature that millions are clamoring for

Two years ago, Congress passed the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America” Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) . The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law — but it also included a relatively...

Today's links Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bluetooth headsets; Fruit sticker decoder; iPod batteries v DRM; Bruces's SXSW keynote;...

Do Sam Altman and Fidji Simo have an alignment problem?

Today's links William Gibson vs Margaret Thatcher: The Street Finds Its Own Alternatives For Things. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Prison for spamming; Dotcom layoffs; Ethernet action-figures; UK libel reform; "Poe's Detective"; God's customer service center; "Making...

In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg called privacy the future of social networking. Not anymore

While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from last week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against...

Today's links Tools vs uses: Don't fall for it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free S&P 500 companies; Make Pop Rocks; "Ain't Misbehavin'"; "Car Hacker's Handbook"; Pirates in...

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s ....

From Ticketmaster to Paramount to Hewlett Packard, the Trump administration and corporate America are involved in an orgy of corruption. Finally, we are seeing the first rea investigation take place.

Recognizing the Worst in Government Transparency The Foilies were written by EFF's Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and MuckRock's Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Anna Massoglia. Art by Shelby Criswell. For the last six years, a class of journalism students at the University of Nevada,...

Today's links Corrupt anticorruption: Notes from a target-rich environment. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Tentacle sphere; EU Venn; Obama v cryptography; Trump v protesters; Amazon coders x Amazon warehouse workers; Bruces's ETECH speech; Steven King x unions; Tax-free...

Today's links Three more AI psychoses: Everybody calm down. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: "Jules, Penny and the Rooster"; Superinjunction; Harper Lee's kids v cheap paperbacks; 3D printed cat battle-armor; Black sf. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent...

Conseil d'État upholds Criteo's €40M GDPR fine CNIL fined CRITEO, the biggest online advertisement and tracking company in Europe €40 Mio based on complaints by noyb and Privacy International. franziska 13 March 2026

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434 , a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement. “I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared...

EFF has long warned against age-gating the internet . Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet. They create unnecessary and unconstitutional barriers for adults and young people to access information and express themselves online. They hurt small and open-source...

Today's links AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit: In case there was ever any doubt. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of...

Have you ever seen a really creepy targeted ad online? One that revealed just how much these companies know about your life? It's unsettling enough to see how much companies know about you—but now we have confirmation that the government is also tapping the advertising surveillance machine to get...

Over the last decade or so, the tech industry has tried, and mostly failed, to make “smart glasses”—tech-infused glasses with cameras, AI, maps, displays, and more—a thing. But in the past year, products like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses and Oakley’s Meta Glasses have gone from a curious niche to...

Today's links Ad-tech is fascist tech: Surveillance advertising is just surveillance. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Washpo v Bernie; Activists v Saif Gadaffi's London mansion; Spacefaring v contract language; Tuna-can tiffin pail; France v encryption. Upcoming...

The rapidly escalating conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which started when the company refused to let the government use its technology to spy on Americans, has now gone to court. The Department of Defense retaliated by designating the company a “supply chain risk” (SCR). Now, Anthropic...

The government should not help a religious institution to punish or deter members from inquiring about their faith. Yet, once again , the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society is trying to use flimsy copyright claims to exploit the special legal tools available to copyright owners in order to unmask...

The company tells Platformer it will let experts opt out of the controversial feature — but how different is it than what every other AI company is doing?

Today's links Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us: A billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Librarians Against DRM; Copyright maximalist MP is a pirate; "The Monster"; The perversity of...

The SAFE act, introduced by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), is the first of many likely proposals we will see to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008 — and while imperfect, it does propose a litany of real and...

Join EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in conversation with 404 Media Cofounder Jason Koebler to discuss Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, Cindy’s personal story of standing up to the Justice Department, taking on the NSA, and tangling with the FBI to protect...

We're celebrating the launch of Privacy's Defender, a new book by EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn on Thursday, March 12—and we want you to join us! Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the...

The Iran war may be catastrophic. Plus, Ticketmaster gets hit in its first week at trial, opposition to the Paramount-Warner deal is fractured, and the economy is slowing. It's a very ugly moment.

The Trump DOJ settled with Ticketmaster, while state enforcers said they'll continue. The judge is mad, the parties showed "absolute disrespect for the court, for the jury, for this entire process."

For the last hundred years, women have had pivotal and far too often unsung roles in building and shaping the technology that we now use every day. Many have heard of Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computer programming, but far fewer know Mary Allen Wilkes , a prominent modern programmer who wrote...

In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us. Anna Politkovskaya Jillian York, Activist This International Women’s Day, I want to honor the memory of Anna Politkovskaya ,...

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from...

A protest at OpenAI headquarters suggests the backlash to military AI is growing — even if its politics are still half-formed. PLUS: The Pentagon declares Anthropic a supply chain risk

The FTC said former Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield helped work with the OPEC oil cartel. The Trump FTC let him off the hook. And now he's back.

Southern California residents are noticing new license plate readers that appear to be operated by the Border Patrol. Some have had confusing encounters with agents.

We've all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You're right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples' locations, new reporting has confirmed. For...

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity. David Greene: Shin, please introduce yourself to the Speaking Freely community. Shin Yang : My name is Shin Yang. I am a queer writer with a legal background and experience in product management. I am the steward of Lezismore, an independent,...

Shunned by the government, and newly appealing to consumers, the company is at a crossroads

Sam Altman’s deal with the Pentagon seems too good to be true. What happens when the public realizes that?

The U.S. military has officially ended its $200 million contract with AI company Anthropic and has ordered all other military contractors to cease use of their products. Why? Because of a dispute over what the government could and could not use Anthropic’s technology to do. Anthropic had made it...

EFF, along with the national ACLU and the ACLU affiliates in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit urging the court to require a warrant for border searches of electronic devices, an argument EFF has been making in the...

Digital Dragnets Violate Fourth Amendment, Brief Argues WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law filed a brief Monday urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule...

Arab princes, Western bankers, Silicon Valley AI guys, and Israeli hawks are all part of one blob. And they just started a war. Plus, the Ticketmaster trial starts...

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that...

MIT Press Publishes EFF Executive Director’s Book As She Prepares to Depart Organization After 25 Years SAN FRANCISCO – Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn will launch her memoir, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press, March 10),...

In a big win for protesters’ rights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned a lower court’s dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester’s devices and digital data and a nonprofit’s social media data. The case, Armendariz v. City of Colorado Springs ,...

AI safety researchers have long worried that a government would seek to use AI for domestic surveillance and autonomous killing. The Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic threatens to make it a reality

Editor's note: a previous version of this newsletter went out with Matt Hughes' name on it, that's my editor who went over it for spelling errors and loaded it into the CMS. Sorry! Hey all! I’m going to start hammering out free pieces

Phishing and data breaches are a constant on the internet. The single best defense against both is to use a password manager to generate and automatically fill a unique password for every site. While 1Password has recently raised their prices , and researchers have recently published potential...

Do you remember the last time you were carded at a bar or restaurant? It was probably such a quick and normal experience, that you barely remember it. But have you ever been carded to use the internet? Being required to present your ID to access content online is becoming a growing reality for...

PLUS: The Substack post that tanked the markets, continued

California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged Amazon led a price-fixing conspiracy of online retailers to inflate prices across the entire economy. And he's demanding an immediate halt.

The Secretary of Defense has given an ultimatum to the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their...

It's the State of the Union this week. Plus, a big loss for Ticketmaster, Bernie Sanders is a doomer on AI, and United hints at a JetBlue merger.