Dan Gillmor

The pro-crypto legislation didn't pass after all, and some of the credit for this surely must go to Molly White (@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io). She is without question doing the best, most relentless coverage of that irredeemably slimy and corrupt industry -- joined at the hip with the irredeemably corrupt Trump world. And there's ample evidence that her work informs the debate in a significant way.

A carpenter friend in California told me today that the price of copper has gone through the roof -- e.g. $100 for a short section of pipe. He said the data centers are hoovering up raw materials in such a frenzy that the cost of essentially all construction materials is insane. I haven't seen any coverage of this angle (apart from IT hardware) in the media, but I guarantee that regular folks have noticed. More Trump-caused damage, and the worst is ahead of us, not behind.

The tech oligarchs are rallying around Elon Musk to block a filmmaker from advertising a deeply reported documentary that lays bare what a slimy -- and dangerous -- person Musk is. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/elon-musk-documentary-trailer-rejected-tiktok-youtube-1236710259/ (Meanwhile, Corporate Journalism continues to support him. Of course.)

The AI panic looks like an orchestrated con: The bosses of these rapacious, sleazy, and infinitely sloppy companies are angling for government permission to be a cartel. This would be followed, as certain as day follows night, by the bailout they all know they'll need when their bubble deflates.

If you support "age verification" online, you are supporting a system that GUARANTEES privacy meltdowns -- endangering all of us -- because the giant databases of scanned IDs are perpetually hacked by criminals who sell private data. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/03/hackers-had-a-live-feed-of-every-id-this-verification-company-scanned-for-over-a-year/

Google has become an enemy of the open web, and it's increasingly locking down Android to dominate (with Apple) mobile computing. https://keepandroidopen.org/ A once-principled company gets more and more control-freakish, for money and power. Nothing Google does now is surprising, just predictable.

Ridiculous spam of the day warns me that "Every month you live with tinnitus [ringing in the ears], roughly 3% of your brain cells die off." If so, I've been making do with roughly zero brain cells for at least 30 years. A miracle!

If you trust your data to a company like Microsoft, you are gambling with your future, as a slew of nonprofits discovered to their horror. https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html

The Trump-infected US Postal Service isn't just threatening to wreck mail-in voting. It's under way. So we have to take our ballots to a dropbox or cast them in person. In other words, the regime's election fuckery has worked, while the press ho-hummed as usual. https://www.thurstoncountywa.gov/news/we-are-still-getting-ballots-should-have-counted-primary

If you use Fastmail for your email, you can now select to have your data reside in the EU rather than the US. If a nation state is out to spy on you, this won't fix much. But it does add a layer of surveillance protection in some ways. https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/16796454162063-Choosing-your-data-residency#howtoswitch

Susan Collins isn't just a pretend-moderate Republican who's supported almost every catastrophic Trump policy and nominee (including all the current radical-right Supreme Court "justices"). She's also corrupt as hell. https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-susan-collins-navatek-campaign-donations-investigation?ref=levernews.com Fine reporting, as usual, from ProPublica.

Latest reminder that you should assume the following about any statement from Trump's ICE/DHS goons claiming to exonerate the regime of bad acts: They're probably lying. https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/dabury-ice-school-bus-arrest-cnn-murphy-22414500.php

Sheeran's capitulation to right-wing arena owners has so outraged other musicians that they're pulling out -- at great financial cost to themselves -- of his tour. https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/finneas-aaron-rowe-exit-ed-sheeran-tour-protest-macklemore-dropped-pal-rcna597948

"Worse on Purpose" is great. It focuses on consumer products, and their relentless decline in quality as brands get absorbed by enshittification-happy financial manipulators. But the site also tells you who's NOT wrecking things -- who you can still trust. https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ (I'm a donor.)

Serial liars like Trump and his apparatchiks have a huge advantage over people who tell the truth, because they can count on journalists to parrot the lies in their coverage, thereby giving equal weight to reality and bullshit. Example: Trump spokesperson quote in this story: https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/alan-ritchson-jack-reacher-novel-die-trying-1236870453/

Today's "AI" uh-oh: I was inquiring with two chatbots (Claude and Gemini) about best techniques -- to the extent possible -- for removing data from an SSD I plan to sell. Both of them suggested command line (Linux) scripts that would have erased my main laptop drive. Oh sure I trust this stuff...

Putin-connected Russian oligarch's megabucks gift to Trump Jr. distills Trump world sleaze: flagrant graft and contempt for everyone not connected to by far the most corrupt crew ever in American business/politics. https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin Great, great reporting by ProPublica.

Musk's Tesla modified contracts with customers -- without the customers' permission -- long after they were signed. How does this differ from outright fraud? https://electrek.co/2026/06/03/tesla-retroactively-modified-fsd-contracts-supervised/

Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc makes a deal with Newsmax to use the latter's right-wing spewings as AI training data, thereby ensuring that anyone looking for even remotely accurate output from the Ai is on a fool's errand: https://ir.newsmax.com/news/news-details/2026/Newsmax-and-Meta-Enter-AI-Content-Partnership-/default.aspx?utm_source=www.status.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=bari-s-new-60-slate

Constantly, when I read articles on the NY Times website (Firefox in Android), the site pops up annoying "upgrade" offers and demands that I use the app. Is there any way to remove these vandalisms permanently?

Trump regime's despotism grows and grows. Banning a secure email service is just the latest step. https://reason.com/2026/08/27/rubio-uses-terrorism-law-to-ban-secure-email-service/

Journalism's latest evergreen story: "Trump says deal is close to end Iran war" -- and headlines like these run routinely, and almost never do news outlets bother to mention that he's said this again and again and it's never been true. At least not yet. Big Journalism genuinely doesn't get it.

A hero for our authoritarian times: https://www.cltampa.com/news/a-77-year-old-republican-man-is-staging-a-solo-protest-against-st-petes-flock-cameras/

It's essential that people understand the flagrant contempt for law that Elon Musk demonstrates on an ongoing basis. A current example: dozens of fossil fuel generating turbines with no permits and poisonously placed near black communities. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pollution-musks-unpermitted-xai-power-project-hits-hardest-black-communities-2026-07-14/#pitchforks

“People who have no reverence will destroy a mountain to get the coal out of it or destroy a field to get a crop out of it. They’ll make extravagant assumptions about their own competence and intelligence, and they’ll make extravagant mistakes." -- Wendell Berry. Blog post: https://dangillmor.com/2026/09/01/wendell-berry-r-i-p/

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/117000692716570698 I never, ever use apps if there is a web mobile version...Apps give corporations control over you.

This so-called "expert" witness in a liability trial used AI to create a supposed report on behalf of his corporate client. If there's any justice in the world, he's discredited himself forever as an expert -- and the company's lawyers (who lost the case) should be punished. https://www.404media.co/show-how-3m-is-0-at-fault-expert-witness-used-chatgpt-to-write-report-defending-company-in-deadly-explosion-lawsuit/?ref=weekly-roundup-newsletter

The odious surveillance company Flock has been teaching police how to spy on Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights. https://www.404media.co/r/beaca1b1?m=ea6b4c29-f97b-4025-aaeb-1d01a70b3b30

Yet another example of the Trump regime and its minions openly defying a court order: https://www.npr.org/2026/09/02/nx-s1-5952211/usps-whistleblower-lawyer-reaction-mail-ballots Also yet another example of a judge doing absolutely nothing about it. The regime is winning its war on the rule of law.

Corporate and establishment Democrats are desperately trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed from being Michigan's U.S. Senate nominee. They claim it's his (for them) too-progressive views. Nowhere in the news coverage have I seen talk of another plausible (if ugly) reason: they're worried about his name.

Ed Zitron has been on this for a long time, but good to see that the NY Times finally is digging into Silicon Valley OG Larry Ellison's sleazeball ways -- and his prop-up-Oracle-stock-until-it-crashes bets on AI. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/magazine/larry-ellison-ai-oracle.html

White House correspondents and their bosses demonstrate their total lack of self-respect by inviting Trump to their dinner, and applauding him, despite his escalating war on democracy and journalism. What a pathetic bunch of quislings they are. https://abcnews.com/amp/Politics/trump-attend-rescheduled-white-house-correspondents-dinner-friday/story?id=135027808

Capital One has never been what I'd call an admirable financial institution, but when it all but calls Trump a mega money launderer, you'd think that would be a bigger deal deserving more than a few no-big-deal-right stories (like this): https://abcnews.com/US/capital-closed-hundreds-trumps-bank-accounts-2021-anti/story?id=135273257

Governments want nothing more than to control what people say and read and hear online, and corporate monopolists are their natural allies. So the "kid safety settlement" by Facebook and states is going to be disastrous for everyone who cares about free speech. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/26/meta-just-paid-nearly-17-billion-to-make-sure-it-gets-to-write-the-kid-safety-rules-for-every-other-social-media-platform/

All corruption, all the time in Trump world, exhibit 67,456: https://abcnews.com/US/capital-closed-hundreds-trumps-bank-accounts-2021-anti/story?id=135273257 Big bank closed Trump accounts for "anti-money laundering reasons"...

From the reliably excellent @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io: Crypto barons spent >$200 billion since 2024 to buy a friendly Congress. They got "a bill too corrupt for Democrats to pass, a Republican majority too cowardly to rein in the president, and a president who won’t sign anything that meaningfully threatens his $1.4 billion-a-year grift." https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-107/

All corruption, all the time in Trump world, exhibit 64,003: https://www.levernews.com/the-winklevoss-twins-gave-trump-10-million-after-regulatory-win/

@mattgriffin@masto.ai I'm still a fan of what he's doing with this project, at least for now.

Scumbag owner of Madison Square Garden spies on everyone who comes into the place, but makes an exception for Taylor Swift and her celebrity friends. https://www.wired.com/story/for-taylor-swift-madison-square-gardens-controversial-cameras-briefly-went-dark/

Book excerpt in the New Yorker by longtime Google employee who dared to dissent. It turned out poorly for her. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-voice-of-google There was a time, way back, when Google was a righteous and honorable company, but it's long, long gone.

@omnivorous_narrator@mastodon.social Will check that out.

@inthehands@hachyderm.io I see no indication of inaccuracies there.

@mattgriffin@masto.ai I didn't know that. But given the stuff he's writing, getting stuff wrong would put him in some legal jeopardy, I'd think.

@mattgriffin@masto.ai Looks like ex-Palantir (with some current consulting. But I take your point, though I think this may be a case where the past can be redeemed by current work.

Conde Nast's online subscription services are the absolute worst I've seen. I've come to believe that it's on purpose -- to deter me from canceling.

R.I.P. John Dvorak, one of the most influential tech journalists and commentators. I'll miss his amiable crankiness.

@muddle@infosec.exchange not in a million years

@muddle@infosec.exchange Not in a million years..

@mattgriffin@masto.ai Link?

Status is my media newsletter of choice. I pay for it. (Not cheap but it goes on sale periodically.) This piece, which you can read if you give them an email address, helps explain why I pay. It calls the White House correspondents' dinner with Trump what it was: a disgrace. https://www.status.news/p/the-white-house-correspondents-disgrace?utm_source=www.status.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=the-white-house-correspondents-disgrace