A man has been charged after the Australian MP Helen Haines was allegedly attacked with a car outside her electorate office in the state of Victoria.
Haines, who is an independent MP, has lost one leg as a result of the incident and surgeons were fighting on Tuesday to save the other leg. Police say 43-year-old Brendan Nugent has been charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury, intentionally causing serious injury and causing harm to a commonwealth public official.
Annie Kelly speaks to Guardian Australia political editor Tom McIlroy
Continue reading...Redundancies beckon as British Cycling restructures while former cyclists and employees raise concerns over return of ‘toxic culture’
British Cycling’s most successful world track championships campaign in over a decade, in which they topped the medal table in the first qualifying event for the 2028 Olympic Games, was achieved against a backdrop of allegations of misconduct and looming redundancies.
Despite a traumatic buildup to the championships in Shanghai, which saw star sprinter Matt Richardson withdrawn from competition on the eve of the event due to allegations of “discriminatory remarks,” the British squad recovered to win six gold medals, three silver and three bronze medals.
Continue reading...Een server van een organisatie die ‘antifa-websites’ zou hosten ‘is vorige week door de Amsterdamse politie in beslag genomen. Privacy-activisten die niet willen dat de inhoud van de servers met de VS wordt gedeeld, betoogden dinsdag bij het OM in Amsterdam.
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Gruwelijk gruwelijk gruwelijk. De 29-jarige Hajar was sinds 5 oktober vermist, tot haar lichaam afgelopen vrijdag werd aangetroffen in een koffer aan de Amsteldijk. De politie maakt vanavond bekend dat er een verdachte is aangehouden in de zaak. Te weten om een 23-jarige Somaliër zonder vaste woon of verblijfplaats. "In het onderzoek kwamen camerabeelden naar voren waarop zij met een op dat moment onbekende man te zien is. Deze man is op dat moment als getuige aangemerkt. Vanochtend vroeg werd het duidelijk dat hij als verdachte betrokken is bij de dood van Hajar. Om 08.20 kwam er een melding in Noord-Holland binnen van een geweldincident in een woning. Een 23-jarige man werd in de omgeving van de woning aangetroffen." De man verblijft sinds zijn zesde in Nederland en beschikt over een verblijfsvergunning voor onbepaalde tijd. Tja. Halsema: "De feiten die tot nu toe over de verdachte bekend zijn, kunnen voeding geven aan een lopen maatschappelijk en politiek debat over de achtergrond van daders. Daarvoor is dit niet de plek en nu niet het moment. Geweld tegen vrouwen is een groot, diepgeworteld sociaal en cultureel probleem dat onze samenleving sinds heel lang teistert en dat in alle delen van onze samenleving voorkomt." Dat u het weet.
PARIJS (ANP) - EssilorLuxottica, het brillenconcern achter onder meer zonnebrillenmerk Ray-Ban en keten Pearle Opticiens, heeft de opbrengsten uit de tak voor AI-brillen en hoorbrillen opgevoerd. De omzet van de divisie wearables, waaronder ook de veelbesproken camerabril van Ray-Ban en Meta valt, nam in het afgelopen kwartaal met een vijfde toe.
De tak voor deze brillen leverde EssilorLuxottica in het derde kwartaal 486 miljoen euro op, tegen 402 miljoen euro in hetzelfde kwartaal een jaar eerder. Het is volgens persbureau Bloomberg voor het eerst dat deze cijfers apart worden gerapporteerd. Onder wearables vallen naast de Meta-bril bijvoorbeeld ook de Nuance Audio-brillen met ingebouwde gehoorondersteuning.
De belangrijkste activiteiten van het concern zijn het maken van traditionele brillen en monturen en de verkoop daarvan via eigen winkelketens. De omzet van de bedrijfsonderdelen voor brillen, oogzorg en medische technologie steeg afgelopen kwartaal met ruim 6 procent tot 7 miljard euro.
Kritiek
De groei bij AI- en hoorbrillen bevestigt volgens topbestuurders Francesco Milleri en Paul du Saillant het "sterke momentum" achter deze "opkomende categorie" waarin EssilorLuxottica naar eigen zeggen de leiding neemt.
Vanuit verschillende hoeken klinkt ondertussen in toenemende mate kritiek op de AI-brillen zoals die van Meta in samenwerking met Ray-Ban en Oakley, waarmee video- en geluidsopnames gemaakt kunnen worden. Zo zijn er zorgen over de privacy van mensen die zonder hun weten kunnen worden gefilmd. Een aantal Nederlandse organisaties stapt naar de rechter, omdat de camerabril niet aan privacywetgeving zou voldoen. Optiekketen Hans Anders heeft eerder de verkoop van de Meta-bril opgeschort.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De politie heeft een verdachte aangehouden in de zaak van de overleden 29-jarige Hajar uit Amsterdam, meldt het Amsterdamse OM namens de driehoek. Het gaat om een 23-jarige man uit Somalië, zonder vaste woon- of verblijfplaats.
De vrouw was sinds 4 oktober vermist. Haar lichaam werd afgelopen vrijdag gevonden in het water aan de Amsteldijk in Amsterdam-Zuid. De politie zei eerder al ervan uit te gaan dat ze door een misdrijf om het leven kwam.
BRUSSEL (ANP) - De NAVO stuurt extra "middelen" naar de regio rond de Zwarte Zee, meldt een woordvoerder op X. Daar werden voor de kust van NAVO-landen Bulgarije en Roemenië afgelopen weken meerdere koopvaardijschepen geraakt door drones. Bulgarije vroeg daarom al om extra hulp bij de dronebestrijding.
Volgens de woordvoerder hebben de ambassadeurs van de NAVO-landen dinsdag de situatie op de Zwarte Zee besproken. De extra middelen zijn onder meer bedoeld voor "surveillance, verkenning en forensisch onderzoek", schrijft ze op X.
De Bulgaarse premier Rumen Radev wees na de drone-incidenten naar Moskou. Rusland en Oekraïne beschieten op die zee al langer elkaars schepen, maar koopvaardijschepen bleven meestal gespaard.
Radev sprak donderdag al met de Roemeense president Nicușor Dan en NAVO-chef Mark Rutte over de aanvallen. Dinsdag maakte hij bekend dat de Verenigde Staten op verzoek van Bulgarije een militair vliegtuig hebben gestuurd om te patrouilleren boven de Zwarte Zee.
I published my first story in 1988, when I was 17 years old. Today, at 55, I've published more than 30 books, with three more coming in the next year or so. In the intervening years, I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about publishing.
I've had plenty of opportunity to reflect on publishing: I've been a bookseller and worked in libraries, I wrote a column for Publishers Weekly, self-published a few books of my own, published the first-ever book licensed under Creative Commons, and broke several Kickstarter records for audiobook projects. But most of all, I've worked with publishing professionals: publicists, marketing directors, operations people, copyeditors, and, above all, editors.
My first novel editor was the magnificent Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who supported my publishing career from the very start, donating to help send me to the Clarion science fiction writers' workshop and inviting me to come read slush at Tor Books whenever I was in New York. Patrick didn't teach me everything I know about publishing, but he sure taught me a lot about publishing, and hardly a day goes by without my having cause to reflect on one of our many discussions over our decades-long professional and personal association.
Out of all the things I learned about publishing from Patrick, one truth stands out above all: publishing is "the act of making something public." Publishing may or may not involve editing, layout, printing, binding, marketing or other activities that we associate with publishing houses, but publishing always involves identifying a work, identifying an audience, and finding ways to connect that work to that audience.
This definition does a lot of useful work. For one thing, it locates publishing as part of the hard problem of human society, namely, "getting people to care about something that matters to you." Beyond publishing, this is the crux of politics, religion and commerce:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
For another, this definition lets us understand that (for most of its existence) Google was the most successful publisher in human history. No other institution of any kind connected more works with more audiences. Lots of people have heard of Google's wildly unsuccessful motto "Don't be evil," but far fewer are familiar with Google's wildly successful mission statement, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
But all of that is in the past tense. With its AI projects – AI summaries, the Gemini chatbot – Google has abandoned the practice of "connecting works with audiences." Today, Google's function is to plunder all the works on the internet and chop them up and arrange them in an unimaginably vast, multidimensional array for the explicit purpose of preventing audiences from connecting with those works.
For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers whereby they allowed Google to crawl their sites and Google located audiences and connected them with the pages on those sites. Today, that cycle has turned vicious, with Google acting as a parasite that extracts value from the web's publishers and offers nothing in return.
This is entirely in keeping with the enshittification hypothesis: that once a platform is liberated from the disciplining forces of competition, regulation, labor and interoperability, it will squeeze its suppliers and users and harvest all the value for itself:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
But AI represents a new phase in enshittification. Google has assayed enshittificatory gambits in the past, like deliberately worsening its search results in order to force you to search repeatedly, which gave the company more chances to show you ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
But as sleazy as those gambits were, they were profitable. In some important sense, they were sustainable. Assuming Google could carry on indefinitely scamming its users in this way, they'd continue to bring in more cash than they spent, and continue to be the world's most successful publisher, connecting works and audiences (albeit in a deliberately degraded way).
Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company's financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google's ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.
In Tim Wu's Age of Extraction, Wu lays out a thesis about how intermediaries – middlemen who perform a useful function connecting different groups, firms and individuals – are prone to developing "main character syndrome," abandoning their role as facilitators for others and abusing their position to make themselves the prime beneficiary of the transactions they facilitate:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691177/the-age-of-extraction-by-tim-wu/
Google has a scorching case of main character syndrome, and nowhere is that more obvious than in its AI-fueled transformation into web-scale parasite. The fact that this gambit might well destroy Google and the publishers the company once served – rather than merely enshittifying search with worse results and more ads – makes the whole thing look more like a Mafia bust-out than the enshittification of the first half of the 2020s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out
It's certainly an ignominious end for history's most successful publisher (as was).
Tell Doug Ford: Say NO to Waymo https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/
Bizarre Blanets and Weird Worlds https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/10/bizarre-blanets-and-other-weir.html
The Showrunners Network https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spacecommand/the-showrunners-network?ref=8rypb4
Christian Conman Jim Bakker is Dead https://skepchick.org/2026/10/christian-conman-jim-bakker-is-dead/
#25yrsago Reenacting the Civil War with 44,000 ceramic cats in handmade uniforms https://web.archive.org/web/20011021022729/http://www.phillyburbs.com/intelligencerrecord/news/news_intell/1332513.htm
#20yrsago More on publishing and “okaysellers” https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/bestsellers_oka/#008116
#15yrsago HOWTO make a Frankenstein hat https://web.archive.org/web/20111022194802/http://deliacreates.blogspot.com/2011/10/hey-frankie.html
#15yrsago Copyright policy in the UK: an evidence-free zone https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/cant-look-now-finding-film-online/
#15yrsago Clockwork Fagin on Escape Pod https://delivery-edge.libsyn.com/shows/18601/items/1737698/EP315_ClockworkFagin.mp3
#10yrsago At long last, America’s racist, crazy tough-on-crime prosecutors are losing elections https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2828803
#5yrsago Imperfections in your Bluetooth beacons allow for unstoppable tracking https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/21/sidechannels/#ble-eding
#1yrago Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty
Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22
https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46
Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24
https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai
Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30
https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/
Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8
https://kilkenomics.com/
Courtenay: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10
https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23
https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html
Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25
https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation
Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28
https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/
Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9
https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/
Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6
https://montreal2027.ca/en
Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8
AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily)
AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/
AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia)
https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/
How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"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 (thebezzle.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
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
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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A recent incident where Jerry Seinfeld responded to hecklers accusing him of supporting genocide by saying, “I am a racist, it’s a genocide, I’m into it,” showed that the comedian isn’t ashamed to defend his pro-Israel stance. But now the beloved comedian is proving more than ever that he’s not backing down: Jerry Seinfeld has announced that in response to criticism of his support for Israel, he will be dating another 17-year-old.
Damn! Looks like Israel got a new attack dog, and his name is Jerry Seinfeld.
During an interview on SiriusXM’s ‘We Got Company,’ Seinfeld doubled down on his defense of Israel, stating, “They say I can’t support Israel. They heckle my performances. They slander me online. But I won’t apologize. In fact, thanks to the constant harassment these people put me through, I will be dating another 17-year-old.”
“I’ve had enough! I thought about doing ‘Unfrosted 2’ to get back at these jerks, but I wanted to go even further,” he continued. “So I will be prowling parks near high schools in search of a new underage girlfriend. I don’t care what my haters think. I don’t care what my wife thinks. And I don’t care what the 17-year-old thinks. We’re going to be in love, and she is going to be 17 and very busty for her age. You thought the age gap was bad when I was 39? Just wait until I have a 17-year-old girlfriend NOW. I’m going to be proud as ever to support Israel and have a 17-year-old girlfriend. Because calling me a racist comes with consequences. And those consequences are 17 years old.”
Whoa! No matter where you stand on the Israel issue/72-year-olds dating children, you’ve gotta admire Seinfeld’s conviction here.
Looks like when you mess with Jerry, you get the horns. If you’re an anti-Israel activist, you may want to think twice before the next time you heckle Seinfeld.
