Gary got a free festival ticket and agreed to go halves on a full-price one for Rita, but now he won’t stop going on about it. He says calling it a favour is simply a fact. You decide who the party pooper is

• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror

The way he presents it makes me feel as though I’m being a burden or that I now owe him something

Continue reading...

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, where each week we share the saga of an organization that couldn’t get out of its own way when it comes to security. This week’s tale comes courtesy of Dahvid Schloss, a professional red teamer who was also involved (as a supervisor) in last week’s story about hackers shoveling snow in order to gain access to restricted areas. This time, it was Schloss himself who broke in, and he used the promise of better connectivity to do it. On one assignment, Schloss was asked to test the physical and network security of a company that was near the top of the Fortune 500 and had a reputation for sponsoring and providing the trophy for an international sporting competition. According to him, there were three copies made of the trophy: one for the winner, one for the host nation itself, and one for the sponsor. When Schloss was conducting his audit, the location he visited was undergoing construction, creating problems with the office Wi-Fi that all the employees noticed and hated. So when Schloss and his team invaded the place and started probing the wireless network, no one questioned them. “So, you got three of us that are kind of walking through this campus with antennas sticking out of our laptops. We were not being secretive at all, but we figured this is California and there’s plenty of tech bros and nerds everywhere so antennas sticking out of a computer is not going to scare people,” Schloss said. “But everyone kept coming up to us – not to ask us if we were supposed to be there, but to ask us if we were going to fix the Wi-Fi.” After wandering the building, Schloss and his team came to the marketing department where one of the trophies, which he estimates was worth at least $250,000 (or, perhaps, priceless as there are only three), was sitting in a case. Knowing that his job was to test overall security and not just network security, he opened up the case and proceeded to remove the trophy. Someone from the marketing department saw Schloss pulling the trophy out of the case and talked to him while he was doing it. Their question: “Are you here to fix the Wi-Fi?” When he answered “yes,” the marketing people ignored him as he slipped the trophy into his backpack. He took the trophy out of the building and held onto it for two and a half weeks, with no one saying anything about it. However, when it came time for him to give a presentation to the company executives, he brought the prize with him. “We walked to the boardroom and the first thing I do in this boardroom is I pull out the trophy and I put it on the table,” Schloss told us. “And all these executives are sitting around there as we're about to give this security report on where the maturity is at and that was like enough said, right? You could see the eyes just popping open.” What we can learn from this story is that employees tend to trust people in the workplace, even outside contractors. If they think that someone belongs in the building, they won’t question that person’s motives, even if they see them doing wrong. I’m reminded of a situation that took place at a job I was working at many years ago. It was around 6 pm and most people had left the office, but the cleaning lady was there sweeping up when I heard a commotion coming from my coworker’s cubicle. My colleague, who had been at the gym and left her wallet at her desk, returned to find the cleaner taking cash out of her wallet. At first I didn’t believe it and thought there must be a misunderstanding because the cleaning lady, unlike Schloss’ set of fake Wi-Fi repairmen, was legitimately supposed to be working that night. However, my coworker caught her red-handed and she later admitted stealing the money. So train your staff to question everyone, especially strangers who look like they belong in the building. ®

NASA’s New Horizons probe has woken itself up after 321 days of hibernation. The aerospace agency sent commands to the probe last July, instructing it to commence hibernation on August 7 and then resume activity in July 2026. On July 23, NASA checked to see if New Horizons had obeyed the instruction to wake up and was pleased to find it was online again. New Horizons’ main job was to make our first ever visit to Pluto, which it accomplished in 2015, before zipping off to visit a Kuiper Belt object named Arrokoth in 2019. At the time of writing, NASA says the probe is 64.04 astronomical units (AU) from Earth, or 9.5 billion km/5.9 billion miles. A quick reminder: A single AU is 93 million miles/150 million kilometers, which we mention because New Horizons has travelled 23.0 AU beyond Arrokoth since its 2019 visit. That’s a greater distance than the 19 AU between the Sun and Uranus. NASA says it puts New Horizons into hibernation mode to save resources when it’s cruising and doesn’t bother sending it any commands or downloading data while the craft is dozing. The agency is content with that arrangement because scientists have observed no other Kuiper Belt object the craft can visit. NASA therefore devised an extended mission plan that calls for New Horizons to gather data about the Sun’s interactions with the outer reaches of the solar system – but to do so passively and hoard resources in case observers find an object the probe is capable of visiting for a closer look. If no interesting rock can be found, New Horizons will exit the Kuiper Belt sometime in 2028 or 2029, then sail out of the solar system. Humanity has built just two working spacecraft – the Voyagers – that achieved that feat. Both passed through the heliosheath, a distant region where the solar wind starts to run out of puff as interstellar gases push into the solar system. The heliosheath ends at the heliopause, a boundary at which the pressure of the solar wind and the interstellar medium are equal. Astroboffins think the heliopause is at about 130 AU. Voyager 2 is at about 140 AU and Voyager 1 has travelled 170 AU. ®

Jan Arie en Vlad uit Middelharnis zijn woensdag onderscheiden met een zilveren medaille door burgemeester Ada Grootenboer-Dubbelman. Dat gebeurde omdat zij hebben ingegrepen bij een overval op een supermarkt. "Door hun optreden kon erger worden voorkomen", schrijft de politie.

Een tankstation aan de Tjalklaan in Rotterdam-Delfshaven is in de nacht van woensdag op donderdag overvallen door twee mannen. Eén van hen dreigde met een vuurwapen en eiste geld uit de kassa. Met een onbekende buit zijn ze daarna gevlucht.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De overheid heeft aan het begin van de coronaperiode het grootste deel van de financiële problemen opgevangen voor kleine bedrijven die zwaar getroffen werden. Dat meldt het Centraal Planbureau (CPB) na een analyse van de balansen van kleine ondernemingen in 2020.

Banken speelden een beperkte rol. Van de bedrijven die de meeste overheidssteun ontvingen, had 77 procent in 2020 niet meer geleend dan voor de coronacrisis uitbrak. Ook bij bedrijven die minder of geen steun kregen van de overheid zag het CPB geen duidelijke toename van bancaire leningen.

Ook heeft een minderheid van de eigenaren hun bedrijf tijdens de coronacrisis financieel ondersteund, bijvoorbeeld door extra geld uit te lenen aan hun bedrijf of eerder verstrekte leningen sneller terug te betalen.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - ABN AMRO heeft een boete van 8,5 miljoen euro gekregen van De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) om gebrekkige antiwitwascontroles. Volgens de toezichthouder was sprake van structurele tekortkomingen in de uitvoering van de controles bij klanten die in een hoge risicocategorie vallen. Dit heeft ABN AMRO naar buiten gebracht in een persverklaring.

De hittegolf van juni was historisch vroeg en uitzonderlijk lang, met lokaal 40 graden en de warmste week ooit gemeten.Meteorologen waarschuwen dat zulke extremen door klimaatverandering veel waarschijnlijker zijn geworden, maar verwachten voor de rest van de zomer eerder kortere, net-aan hittegolven dan een kopie van juni.

De hittegolf van juni 2026 zette nieuwe bakens. In delen van Limburg werd voor het eerst zo vroeg in het jaar de grens van 40 graden gehaald, terwijl eind juni volgens meteorologen de warmste week ooit werd gemeten. De episode duurde twaalf dagen en was daarmee uitzonderlijk lang voor zo vroeg in de zomer.

De vraag is nu niet of er nog warme periodes volgen, maar of de zomer zichzelf kan overtreffen. Volgens weerman David Dehenauw is dat op korte termijn niet het meest waarschijnlijke scenario: er komt mogelijk opnieuw een hittegolf aan, maar wel een heel nipte, met maxima rond 30 à 31 graden en lagere minimumtemperaturen dan tijdens de junipiek.Dat verschil is cruciaal, want juist die zwoele nachten maken hitte fysiek en maatschappelijk zwaarder.

Wie alleen naar dagrecords kijkt, mist dus het echte verhaal. De nieuwe realiteit is niet per se dat elk zomerblok records breekt, maar dat extreme warmte steeds vroeger opduikt, langer aanhoudt en minder afkoelt zodra de zon onder is.

Het KNMI definieert een hittegolf als minstens vijf aaneengesloten zomerse dagen van 25 graden of meer, waarvan er minimaal drie tropisch zijn, dus 30 graden of hogerFormeel hoeft het dus niet eens 38 of 40 graden te worden om toch een serieuze belasting voor zorg, infrastructuur en arbeidsomstandigheden te veroorzaken.

Dat maakt de centrale vraag misschien ongemakkelijker dan ze klinkt. Niet: krijgen we deze zomer nog zo’n spektakelstuk als in juni? Maar: zijn we intussen zo gewend geraakt aan extreme hitte dat alleen een nieuw record nog als nieuws voelt?

De Nederlandsche Bank heeft ABN Amro opnieuw berispt vanwege tekortschietend witwastoezicht, ruim vijf jaar nadat het OM een megaschikking van bijna 480 miljoen euro trof met de bank omdat het de zaken niet op orde had.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas "forever chemicals" in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure. Testing has found the levels of Pfas in single servings of some contaminated foods to be equivalent to drinking many glasses of contaminated water.

While regulators have focused on reining in Pfas in water, the chemicals are widely used throughout the food system, and there was hope that the agency under Robert F Kennedy Jr would take the threat more seriously. Kennedy leads the "make America healthy again" (Maha) movement, of which eliminating toxic chemicals from food is a cornerstone. [...] The November 2023 petition called on the FDA to check for up to 30 Pfas compounds in a range of produce, fish, eggs, milk and bread. The agency did not respond within the six-month timeframe required by law, but TEJTF scaled back its petition in 2025 to ask the agency to set advisory thresholds for PFOA and Pfos, two of the most common and dangerous Pfas compounds, in seafood and milk.

Recent FDA testing found 70% of seafood samples contain the chemicals, while independent milk testing found it in 12% of 50 samples, including extremely high levels in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature brands. The FDA rejected the revised petition, stating it plans to take action on setting standards for Pfas, and there is "insufficient evidence to support [TEJTF's] request." The agency said it plans to set less non-binding "action levels" that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. "Tolerance levels," or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on slide, “Roma and Leslie, July 1966" date stamped on slide Juy 1966

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Today's links

• Post-political: What a "leftist" is.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: MSFT x OSCON; Parental spyware; "Resurrection Man"; Brexit do-over petition; Workplace email spying; Record label internet death penalty; News should be cheap, free and chaotic; "Jughead".
• Upcoming appearances: London, Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• 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.

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Post-political (permalink)

There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."

Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

"Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

"Horseshoe theory" (the idea that the far right and the far left actually bend around to meet each other) is bullshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/26/horsehoe-crab/#substantive-disagreement

The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.

Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.

I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated

This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"

Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/26/sole-and-despotic-dominion/#then-they-came-for-me

This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:

https://www.status.news/p/infowars-the-onion-alex-jones-ben-collins

But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp

That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."

If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/25/the-other-shoe-drops/#quid-pro-quo

Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/owners-homes-left-empty-more-28622796

Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:

https://apnews.com/article/california-farmer-nectarines-lawsuit-patent-4f7bc8ab185e8b9cbdd6d6ad4f2aabd1

As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").

Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.

In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/30/players-of-games/#know-when-to-fold-em

Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807

Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/#to-save-it

Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.

If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:

https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf

If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf

If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.

"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.

Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.

(Image: Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0, modified)

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Hell Is Other People https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-hell-is-other-people/

• Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-people-lose-treasured-media-when-prisons-change-tablet-contracts/

• Jay Rosen’s Internet Archive: an Introduction https://pressthink.org/2026/07/jay-rosens-internet-archive-an-introduction/

• Zohran Mamdani on the Promise of America https://jacobin.com/2026/07/zohran-mamdani-independence-day-address

• The official website of Nand to Tetris courses https://www.nand2tetris.org/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Why Microsoft was invited to OSCON https://web.archive.org/web/20010701102931/http://www.oreilly.com/news/osconint_0601.html

#25yrsago The Extent of Systematic Monitoring of Employee E-mail and Internet Use https://web.archive.org/web/20010711204804/http://www.privacyfoundation.org/workplace/technology/extent.asp

#20yrsago BPI: We should be able to cut off your Internet https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/10/bpi-we-should-be-able-to-cut-off-your-internet/

#20yrsago Technology for parents to spy on kids https://web.archive.org/web/20060711084212/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/09/BIGMOTHER.TMP

#20yrsago Dale Bailey's "The Resurrection Man" https://memex.craphound.com/2006/07/09/southern-gothic-science-fiction-collection/

#10yrsago A law prof responds to students who anonymously complained about #blacklivesmatter tee https://backspace.com/notes/2016/07/law-professors-response-to-black-lives-matter-shirt-complaint.php

#10yrsago UK government rejects Brexit do-over petition with 4.1m signatures https://web.archive.org/web/20160709101514/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-government-rejects-eu-referendum-petition-latest-a7128306.html

#10yrsago New Zealanders raise millions to buy beach and donate it to the public https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-36759321

#10yrsago Jughead: Zdarsky’s reboot is funny, fannish, and freaky https://memex.craphound.com/2016/07/10/jughead-zdarskys-reboot-is-funny-fannish-and-freaky/

#5yrsago Biden's Right to Repair will include electronics, too https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/10/unnixing-the-fix/#r2r-plus-plus

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• London: Idler Festival, Jul 11
  https://www.idler.co.uk/festival/

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/cory-doctorow/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Can AI be Saved From Capitalism? (Everyday Anarchism)
  https://www.everydayanarchism.com/192-can-ai-be-saved-from-capitalism-cory-doctorow/

• Lawfare Daily
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1KIwaYRs1g

• How to Think About AI (Organized Money)
  https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/how-to-think-about-ai-with-cory-doctorow

• Breaking Points
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJmUbkRqXeE

• A.I. Enshittifies Everything (Slate)
  https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2026/06/cory-doctorow-thinks-a-i-is-overvalued-and-overrated-and-still-a-threat

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Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "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

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "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

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Colophon (permalink)

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

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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.

---

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ISSN: 3066-764X

While a project manager is frequently called upon for their planning ability, the real skill we want from project managers is their ability to communicate. The job of a project manager is to align the team doing the work, with the organization goals driving the work, with the management and leadership teams trying to understand the work, while juggling all the constraints like budgets, timelines, and the endlessly changing expectations for the project. A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. A bad one will cost their weight in gold.

Mark was hired on as a contractor, reporting to Tegan. Tegan was fresh out of business school, complete with an MBA and a variety of project-management training certifications. Unfortunately for Mark and the rest of the team, and especially unfortunately for Tegan, she had absolutely no real world experience. To make matters worse, this wasn't just a software project: they were working on a system which matched newly developed software with newly designed mechanics and custom build control electronics. A group of experienced software engineers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers all found themselves reporting to a bright and shiny MBA. It's a role that she probably could have grown into, but management saw all the acronyms she continuously put after her name, and decided she could just take the whole thing over with no real guidance.

It went badly pretty much from the beginning. Tegan was not a talented communicator. For example, Mark's team needed to know: on what timeline were the electrical engineers going to deliver the first prototypes, so the software team could start running bench tests of their software? Tegan's response was a fortune cookie message about balancing the complicated pipelines and lanes on the Gantt chart and hitting all of their milestones; like a fortune cookie, it was vague, important sounding, but ultimately empty.

Of course, the natural reaction amongst the engineers was to just route around the damage: the various teams could talk to each other just fine without going through Tegan. That, unfortunately, did not go over well with management. Tegan, as the project manager, was their insight into the project. They needed her in the loop on everything. And she couldn't just be informed, she had an MBA. She needed to be making decisions. But she was unqualified to make those decisions, which meant the project gradually ground to a halt. Tegan's emails got more vague, her meetings got longer but accomplished less, and after a certain point, she just stopped replying to key email threads.

The first few days of radio silence seemed like a gift. But as time passed and Tegan seemed uninterested or unable to reply to any of the questions the team had for her, the project started to flounder. The engineering teams escalated this problem to management. Management presumably went back to Tegan. At some point, feeling the weight of everything going wrong around her, Tegan sent out this email, which is definitely the best and clearest communication she managed during the project. It's arguably the clearest, and most accurate communication one could make in this situation:

Team,
I understand all the issues but there are complex interrelations that must be worked out. I am currently constipated on each issue and will let you know when there is movement.

• Tegan
  MBA, CAPM, PMP

Her email cost the project many person-hours as all the engineering teams took a break to have a good laugh about the project manager admitting, in writing, that she was full of crap.

There was, eventually, movement. Tegan moved on to a new position at a different company. Her replacement, Pam, wasn't a new hire, but instead a transfer from another department. She wasn't a great project manager, certainly not worth her weight in gold, but she had enough experience to avoid the worst mistakes, and most important: she was good at regular communication in order to keep things moving.

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Voor wie even niet had opgelet: Donald Trump kwam deze week tot het inzicht dat het Iraanse regime bestaat uit onbetrouwbare schurken, terwijl Iraniërs juist ontdekten dat ze in het diepst van hun hart ontzettend graag Donald Trump willen vermoorden. Verwarrend! Het Memorandum of Understanding is derhalve weinig meer waard, en om dat kracht bij te zetten bombardeerde Amerika Iran vannacht helemaal de moeder, in reactie op herhaaldelijke gedoetjes in de Straat van Hormuz. Negentig militaire doelen, vergeleken met 80 in de nacht ervoor. Getroffen, onder andere: luchtverdedigingssystemen, kustbewakingssystemen, opslagplaatsen voor raketten en drones, maritieme militaire middelen en logistieke infrastructuur langs de kust. Iran zegt bij monde van Ghalibaf: "Spaar je nutteloze verzet, want je zakt alleen maar dieper weg: de Straat van Hormuz opent alleen met 'Iraanse regelingen', niet met Amerikaanse dreigementen." Nutteloos, mooi woord, enigszins van toepassing op deze oorlog tot dusver, maar wat niet is kan nog komen.

Afijn, Iran slaat zoals wel vaker terug door Amerikaanse legerbases aan te vallen in Bahrein en Koeweit, terwijl het Witte Huis zich volgens Axios instelt op gevechten van 'dagen, misschien weken'. Bovendien gaat Amerika volgens Trump vanaf nu agressie beantwoorden met 'een verhouding van twintig tegen één'. Ondertussen hekelt het Iraanse BuZa nadrukkelijk de rol van de NAVO in de huidige oorlog. Lang verhaal, enigszins verkort: het is een zooitje, en we gaan live.

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Maar natuurlijk!

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BONGURI has added a photo to the pool:

熱田神社の紙垂がに揺れていました。
Photo taken at Hase area, Ina city, Nagano pref.

Via Reddit (vertaald & ingekort):

Op 1 juli heb ik een camper geboekt bij Indie Campers voor een reis van 12 tot en met 18 juli. Voordat ik betaalde, vroeg ik de AI-chatbot op hun officiële website of ik naar Montenegro kon reizen. De bot garandeerde expliciet dat dit mogelijk was. Vertrouwend hierop heb ik het volledige bedrag betaald. [Ik deed navraag bij de klantenservice, dat duurde meer dan 48 uur. Toen] gaven ze aan dat hun algemene voorwaarden reizen naar Montenegro strikt verbieden. Ik heb onmiddellijk om annulering en volledige terugbetaling gevraagd, omdat ik door hun platform misleid was.

De boete: Het bedrijf verklaarde dat ze “geen verantwoordelijkheid nemen voor AI-antwoorden”. Uiteindelijk verwerkten ze de annulering, maar pasten ze hun standaard boete voor late annulering toe, waardoor ik slechts 5% terugbetaald kreeg en 95% van mijn geld zelf hield.

Het juridische antwoord is vrij simpel. Een uitvoer van een AI-chatbot is hetzelfde als een tekst in je veelgestelde vragen of folder. Als daar duidelijk staat dat je naar Montenegro mag reizen, dan is dat een toezegging waar ze aan gebonden zijn.

Het kan dat ergens in de algemene voorwaarden staat dat je met de camper in de EU moet blijven (Montenegro is er bijna, maar nog niet helemaal). Grote letters winnen van kleine, dus dat heeft juridisch dan geen betekenis. Maar let op: de grotelettertekst moet wel expliciet “ja, je mag naar Montenegro” bevatten en niet “je mag in heel Europa er mee reizen” of iets dergelijks.

De opmerking dat het bedrijf “geen verantwoordelijkheid [neemt] voor AI-antwoorden” is natuurlijk volkomen van de gekke. Er is Zweedse jurisprudentie dat chatbots niet mogen misleiden, en we hebben de Canadese analogie als lichtend voorbeeld.

Het probleem is dus vooral dat het bedrijf “nietes” zegt na de klacht, en dan weigert iets te doen om het goed te maken. Dat is een bekende in het consumentenrecht, en het maakt eigenlijk niet uit of dit “onze chatbot kletst maar wat” of “onze medewerker mocht dat niet zeggen” is. Hoe haal je je recht?

De vraagsteller woont in Spanje (staat in de comments) en Indie Campers is zo te zien een Nederlands bedrijf. Bij grensoverschrijdende consumentengeschillen kun je laagdrempelig en goedkoop via het European Consumer Centre (ECC) bemiddeling aanvragen.

Ook heeft de vraagsteller met creditcard betaald. Daar een geschil aanmaken of een terugboeking vragen is mogelijk, en vaak minstens zo effectief als een gerechtelijke procedure.

Arnoud

Het bericht De camperverhuurder houdt mijn geld nadat ik misleid ben door hun AI-chatbot! verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

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