TECHLASH 3

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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities...


"The F.C.C.’s interpretation of its authority to define broadband internet service akin to phone service exceeded legal definitions in the Telecommunications Act. The F.C.C. lacks the statutory authority to impose its desired net-neutrality policies”. 

The term net neutrality was coined in 2003 by Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, who warned that broadband internet service providers could become gatekeepers of internet access and block or charge for access to certain content.

The concept was championed by Google, Facebook and Netflix. The companies lobbied the F.C.C. to create rules to prevent preferential treatment of content by the internet service providers.

In 2010, the F.C.C. under the Democratic chairman, Julius Genachowski, created the first proposals for net neutrality rules, stirring waves of public interest. The rules prompted street protests, torrents of email comments and even threats of violence against commissioners who opposed the rules.

In recent years, the issue has lost much of its public momentum. Anger has since turned toward social media platforms for their spread of misinformation and harms to young users. The rules continued to be a contentious partisan issue that pit tech giants against broadband providers.

The court’s decision put an end to the Biden administration’s hallmark tech policy, which had drawn impassioned support from consumer groups and tech giants like Google and fierce protests from telecommunications giants like Comcast and AT&T.

“Our fight to stop the government’s unwarranted internet takeover has resulted in a major victory”, said Grant Spellmeyer, the chief executive of a small cable trade group, ACA Connects.

Brendan Carr, whom Mr. Trump has named as the incoming F.C.C. chair, has been a strong critic of net neutrality.  Mr. Carr said that “the work to unwind the Biden administration’s regulatory overreach will continue”.

The court’s decision doesn’t affect state laws on net neutrality in California, Washington and Colorado. 

Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down by Appeals Court

Cecilia Kang New York Times




The ruling against the FCC by three Republican judges isn’t shocking, but their reasoning is shoddy, a mish-mash of tired industry claims paired with a willful misrepresentation of how the internet actually works.

As Matt Wood, an experienced telecommunications attorney and my colleague at Free Press, explains: “Beyond being a disappointing outcome, the 6th Circuit’s opinion is just plainly wrong at every level of analysis. The decision missed the point on everything from its granular textual analysis and understanding of the broader statutory context, to the court’s view of the legislative and agency history, all the way to its conception of Congress’s overarching policy concerns”.

Under the leadership of Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC moved in April 2024 to restore Net Neutrality and the essential consumer protections that rest under Title II of the Communications Act, which had been gutted under the first Trump administration. 

This was an all-too-rare example in Washington of a government agency doing what it’s supposed to do: Listening to the public and taking their side against the powerful companies.

The phone and cable industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good or important: They sued to overturn the rules.

The court ruled against the FCC and deemed internet access to be an “information service” largely free from FCC oversight. This decision will let the incoming Trump FCC abdicate its responsibility to protect internet users so it can focus on its new priority of threatening TV broadcasters and social-media sites to carry more pro-Trump views.

Throughout most of the country, the most essential communications service of this century will be operating without any real government oversight, with no one to step in when companies rip you off or slow down your service.

The hypocrisy of crushing light-touch regulations while aggressively pursuing government censorship is something to behold.



Children under 14 in Florida are no longer allowed to use social media after a new law went into effect. It will require social media sites to delete existing accounts for those under 14 years of age within 90 days, or the platforms could face fines of up to $50,000 for each violation.

The Sunshine State does allow minors aged 14 and 15 to still use social media, but only with parental consent.

House Bill 3, the "Online Protections for Minors", had received overwhelming, bi-partisan support from state legislators, and Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law last year. However, the state's Attorney General Ashley Moody has said she will delay enforcing the law until late February, pending a judge's ruling on a motion for a preliminary injunction.

It is unclear how many minors in Florida are now on the various social media apps, and as a result, there may be no easy solution to ensure compliance.

Supporters of the ban have said it is necessary to protect children online. So far at least, the tech companies haven't done enough to protect kids online. Lawmakers have clearly taken the view that more needs to be done.

If the ban is upheld, it could lead to other states following suit, and it could finally change the way social media operates in the future. This also comes as a nationwide ban on TikTok is still looming.

Florida Minors Under 14 Now Banned From Using Social Media Platforms

Peter Suciu Forbes







The U.S. clampdown on unrestricted online pornography escalated as 2025 began, with those in Florida losing access to the world’s most popular adult site on Jan. 1.

Pornhub has campaigned against the requirement for age verification through government-issued ID, and along with other sites has demonstrated its strength of feeling by shutting down access from within the state rather than requesting ID.

With 3 billion monthly visits to Pornhub’s website from the U.S., the new restrictions suddenly change everything.

VPNMentor detected a surge of 1150% in VPN demand [in Florida] in the first few hours after the new law came into effect on January 1.

This follows similar surges in Utah and Texas.

Banning access to content—whether completely or absent personally identifiable information—is a privacy minefield. As EFF warned, “mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy, and introduce more harm than they seek to combat”.

VPNs enable users to mask their locations—pretending to be somewhere they’re not, by routing their web traffic via a server in that different place. With a click or a tap, a user stops presenting as being in Florida and is suddenly transported to New York or Boston—or even Singapore or London. 

But before you download and install a VPN promising to make these restrictions vanish, you need to be careful—you might be taking a very serious risk with your data and your device. 

The U.S. cyber defense agency warned against the use of personal VPNs, that they “simply shift residual risks from your ISP to the VPN provider, often increasing the attack surface.”

These risks are especially prevalent on mobile devices.

Porn Ban—New Threat For iPhone, iPad, Android Users

Zak Doffman Forbes

The gripping, true story of one woman’s battle to expose and shut down a criminal online porn empire...


Brian Willoughby, a social scientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah,  knows he’s doing a good job when parents become uncomfortable. 

Part of his job involves telling them that their teenagers are looking at pornography — hard-core, explicit, often violent. Sometimes, the conversation is with a church group.

He studies the pornography habits of adolescents and the impact this has on relationships. 

“I’m not saying porn is good — but I am saying it’s a reality”, he said. 

Scholars who study the adolescent use of online pornography say that the behavior is so commonplace and impossible to prevent that a more pragmatic approach is required. 

When it comes to pornography, they want us to talk about it.

The aim: to teach adolescents that the explicit content they encounter is unrealistic, misleading about many sexual relations and, as a result, potentially harmful. 

Long gone are the days of nude magazines that left much to the imagination. “That was nudity, sexualized”, Dr. Willoughby said of the pornography of yesteryear. 

On average, Americans first see online pornography at age 12, according to a 2023 survey of adolescents by Common Sense Media, and 73 percent of those aged 17 and under have seen it, a figure consistent with other research. Of those who watch pornography, whether intentionally or by stumbling into it accidentally, more than half reported seeing violence, including rape, choking or someone in pain.

Recent scholarly papers call for teaching adolescents “porn literacy”, having doctors ask young people about their pornography viewing and starting conversations between teenagers and their parents.

With artificial intelligence and other technologies, the virtual-sex experience will become ever more personal and intense. “We have to start talking about this”, said Emily Pluhar, a clinical psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School.

In 2021, a study of 630 Dutch adolescents found that adolescents who watched more pornography engaged in more advanced sexual behaviors at a younger age, like heavy petting and oral sex. “Adolescents may practice what they have seen and learned, and that pornography use and sexual behaviors may reinforce each other over time”, the authors noted. 

Vitally, as pornography use has grown among American adolescents, young people are waiting longer on average to experiment with actual sex. In 2021, about one-third of high-school students reported having had sex, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a sharp drop from a decade earlier, when the figure was closer to 50 percent. 

Educating adolescents about pornography begins with an unassailable truth: Online pornography is unrealistic.

“Porn is a movie — what we see is not reality”, said Beata Bothe, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, where she studies pornography use. This might be obvious to some older adolescents, she said, but not to the younger consumers of pornography “who have no real-life sexual experience”.

That’s to say nothing of the violent pornography, which Dr. Pluhar considers most potentially harmful to a viewer. “We’re talking about a woman being thrown down and raped”, she said. 

Ideally, society would find ways to discourage pornography, including adopting more effective tools to block it.



"Porn Babylon" is the satanic world system that includes, in addition to the world porn-religious empire, also the “Porn Empire”, the porn-commercial and porn-political empire..

PORNO IMPERO Alexxx Mannucci







FightFight the New Drug

The number of homeless people in the country had risen to the highest level on record.

Between 2023 and 2024 homelessness increased by 18%, to roughly 771,000 people. That is nearly as many people as live in North Dakota. The vast majority of the uptick comes from people living in shelters—picture hotel rooms or rows of beds—rather than sleeping rough, as is common on the West Coast and in some southern states. 

The report’s most shocking revelation is that the number of homeless people in families with children rose 39% year-on-year—a reversal of a slow but steady decline in the years preceding the covid-19 pandemic. Three big things contributed to the surge: a housing shortage that has driven up rents and home prices, an influx of asylum-seekers that overwhelmed some cities, and disasters that displaced people.

Many states with consistently high rates of homelessness (California and New York) or those that saw big increases this year (Hawaii and Massachusetts) have some of the priciest housing in the country. 

A third of people counted were chronically homeless, and may suffer from drug addiction or struggle with mental illness, which make it harder to stay housed. But most people fall in and out of homelessness depending on their finances. When pandemic-era programmes that offered rental assistance and prevented landlords from evicting tenants expired, more people may have been pushed onto the streets.

Three places absorbed the most migrants: Chicago, Denver and New York City. In Chicago migrants camped inside police stations. Denver created a bussing scheme of its own, sending people on to their final destinations rather than allowing them to camp on the streets. The states those cities belong to—Illinois, Colorado and New York—each saw corresponding rises in homelessness. New York City attributes almost 88% of its increase to asylum-seekers housed in the city’s shelters.

Homelessness rises to a record level in America

The Economist




Palestinian Authority’s (PA) temporarily suspended Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank for what they described as broadcasting “inciting material and reports that were deceiving and stirring strife” in the country.

Al Jazeera criticised the PA ban, saying the move is “in line with the [Israeli] occupation’s actions against its staff”.

“It's a crime against journalism”, said freelance journalist Ikhlas al-Qarnawi, “Al Jazeera coverage has documented Israeli crimes against Palestinians, especially during the ongoing genocide”.

Since the beginning of the war, about 150 journalists have been working from the journalists’ tents at Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital, for 20 local, international and Arab media outlets.

Journalists, including those from Al Jazeera, have been forced to work from hospitals after their headquarters and media offices were destroyed.

Al-Aqsa TV correspondent Mohammed Issa said from the hospital that the PA’s ban contradicts international laws that guarantee journalistic freedom and could further endanger journalists.

“The PA’s decision obscures the truth and undermines the Palestinian narrative, especially a leading network like Al Jazeera”, Issa said, adding that the ban reinforces Israel’s narrative that “justifies the targeting of Palestinian journalists”.

Israel has killed at least 217 journalists and media workers in Gaza since the beginning of its war on Gaza on October 7, 2023.

Four of them were Al Jazeera journalists: Samer Abudaqa, Hamza al-Dahdouh, Ismail al-Ghoul and Ahmed al-Louh.

‘Crime against journalism’: Gaza journalists decry PA’s Al Jazeera ban

Maram Humaid Al Jazeera




A peer-reviewed study performed at a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laboratory by high school students has confirmed the presence of a high level of DNA contamination in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

The study, published in the Journal of High School Science, was authored by three students at Centreville High School in Clifton, Virginia, and performed under the supervision of FDA scientists. Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., an investigative medical reporter, was the first to report on the study.

The research, performed at the FDA’s White Oak Campus in Maryland, found that levels of residual DNA in the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine were 6 to 470 times higher than regulatory safety limits. The students tested two lots of the vaccine, finding they contained “residual DNA to a level that exceeds 10 ng [nanograms] per dose”.

“The potential health risk posed by residual small DNA fragments is currently unknown”, the study stated. The authors also said that DNA contamination may result in insertional mutagenesis — or DNA mutations — that can cause cancer.

Kevin McKernan, who first identified DNA contamination in the shots in 2023, said DNA in vaccines can pose health risks because the DNA “could integrate into the genome and cause disruption of the genome … or it could disrupt other genes that are related to cancer”.

The new findings challenge “years of dismissals by regulatory authorities, who had previously labelled concerns about excessive DNA contamination as baseless”, Demasi wrote on Substack.

The findings also align with earlier reports from independent laboratories in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany and France, she said.

McKernan, founder of Medicinal Genomics, told The Defender that eight studies have found DNA over the limit. 

Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher said that in “light of this evidence, the COVID-19 genetic injections must be immediately recalled, to protect the public from further harm”.

Nikolai Petrovsky, Ph.D., director of biotechnology company Vaxine Pty Ltd., told Demasi that the findings are a “smoking gun” and that the new study “clearly shows the FDA was aware of these data”.

The FDA did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the study.



A scientific study concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort...

A genomic analysis conducted by three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, concluded that a segment of the “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper.

Jason Bannan, a doctor of microbiology and former senior scientist at the FBI, has dedicated more than a year of his life to discovering the origins of Covid. 

Despite being the only US national intelligence agency to conclude that a lab leak was likely, the FBI and Mr Bannan were snubbed from a National Intelligence Council briefing with Joe Biden.

The National Intelligence Council (NIC), a body of senior intelligence officers that organised the review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had been transmitted from an animal to a human, along with four intelligence agencies.

Mr Bannan, who joined the FBI as part of the agency’s efforts to bolster its expertise in germ weapons, toxins and biological warfare post 9/11, has since retired but is calling for the evidence backing a lab leak theory to be reassessed.

The conclusion from the US review published in August 2021 was that it would be hard to confirm the origin without cooperation from China. 

China’s only cooperation has so far been a joint report with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2021 which said the virus most likely moved from bats to humans via another animal.

FBI ‘found evidence Covid was lab leak but was not allowed to brief president’

Michael Searles The Telegraph

LETTURE






After a long period of falling population due to declining fertility, a last-ditch attempt has been made to save humanity by dividing us into separate communities, each under the supervision of “watchers”, raised and trained by AIs known as mothers. 

Within these communities “all reproductive taboos would be lifted” in the hope of jumpstarting human evolution by provoking “mutations on a far shorter timescale than in any previous evolutionary process”.

Humanity begins to change, producing individuals possessed of the ability to scan and control the minds of others, as well as people with extra eyes, or the ability to breathe through gills or to photosynthesise. 

Meanwhile, the AIs designed to watch over us also continue to evolve, and finally merge themselves with humans and other animals.




The portrait of humans evolving psychic powers in a post-apocalyptic future recalls the strand of 1960s and 70s science fiction that produced books such as Kate Wilhelm’s "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" (1976). 




Similarly, the novel’s non-linear, mosaic structure is reminiscent of recent novels, such as Sequoia Nagamatsu’s "How High We Go in the Dark" (2022), that have used discontinuous narratives to explore the transformation of human society by climate change and other stressors.

In one of the book’s more shocking moments, an entire strain of humanity is wiped out by a watcher who is overcome with disgust at what he considers their repulsive appearance and animalistic lovemaking. 

Ideas of selfhood and bodily autonomy begin to break down. 

Cloning blurs the notion of individuality in ways that challenge grammar (“We turned fifteen, and the shortest me quickly grew taller”); in other stories people learn to enter and inhabit the minds of others, with catastrophic results.

In its final stages, it offers a powerful corrective to the assumption of human primacy, instead reminding us that we are not the endpoint in the process of evolution, but simply one link in a much longer chain.

UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD Hiromi Kawakami

James Bradley The Guardian





Joanna Russ sold her first sci-fi story in 1959, at the age of 22, and rose through the ranks of genre magazine writers over the next decade. Much like her lifelong friend Samuel R. Delany, she theorized and criticized sci-fi as well as created it, and also like Delany, she would move later into more realist storytelling. During the 1960s, Russ and Delany—along with James Tiptree Jr. (born Alice Sheldon)—helped carve out the space for a literary science fiction during the genre’s humanistic, experimental “New Wave”.

Science fiction, Russ later recalled, whatever its overt politics, came with an overarching message of change: Charting a world outside our own, it also showed how “things can be really different”. In her narratives about alternate futures and possible worlds, one found not just gee-whiz wonder and spine-tingling danger, but also liberation. 

In 1966, Russ completed her first two tales about a “six-fingered pick-lock” named Alyx, who would become a recurring character. Alyx was something new at the time: Women in genre fiction did not normally slice their way through opponents, rescue captives singlehandedly, commandeer pirate ships, seduce the historical Blackbeard (no, really), or leave male chauvinists to die in a strange planet’s ice and snow. If Alyx did not represent political feminism, her sharp blades and sharper remarks at least pointed the way.




Russ’s turn to explicit politics—and her coming out as a lesbian—required another awakening: the Cornell Conference on Women, held between semesters in January 1969. The event led her to support, in clear terms, a “feminist opposition to women’s oppression”, grounded in “our own anger and our own healthy selfish desires for a more happy life”. 




That opposition led to a brace of essays and nonfiction writing, eventually collected in "Magic Mommas,Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts"; "To Write as a Woman"; and "What Are We Fighting For?". These volumes show her embracing one of the main realizations of feminism from the era: that the personal is political. But in them we also find Russ dismantling various patriarchal canons, taking down the pretensions of psychoanalysis, linking feminism to socialism (“capitalists are thieves”), and explaining what white feminists gain by noticing race and acting in solidarity with women of color. 

True feminism involves listening to others—to people unlike you—and asking what you do, and do not, hold in common.




I love my body dearly and yet I would copulate with a rhinoceros if I could become not-a-woman. There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.


In "The Female Man"—her best and by far most influential novel—created four women, with a world for each. Cheery, self-confident Janet hails from the idyllic all-female planet of Whileaway, a society “in the future. But not our future”. She has transformed herself into a “female man” in order to escape the confines of femaleness.

Joanna is both the author and a character on our Earth who plays host when Janet visits our America. Needy, cat-loving Jeannine comes from a New York where “the Depression is still world-wide”; her desperate straits have led her to believe that she has no choice but to catch a man. Joanna says that Jeannine “has been maimed almost to death by a vigilant self-suppression quite irrelevant to anything she once wanted or loved”. “Everything in the world…seems to say to her, ‘You can’t’”.

These three women—or, if you prefer, three versions of one woman from three timelines—prepare Russ’s readers for feminist anger: We want to do something about (or to) the society that has created Jeannine, and maybe about the one that created us. We might yearn to visit Whileaway or rage because we can’t get what Janet has. The novel’s fourth woman, Jael, channels that anger. Showing up halfway through the novel, she announces: “I’m the spirit of the author and know all things”. She also sets in motion what counts as a plot, revealing that she’s a military attaché from a timeline with one all-female and one all-male nation, Womanlanders and Manlanders, who carry on a multi-decade shooting war. 

"The Female Man" shows how women—even women living in different worlds—establish links to one another. Interweaving Jeannine and Joanna’s frustrating day-to-day with the sexy facts about Janet’s utopian Whileaway, and then with grisly ones about the kidnappings and the sex slaves (on both sides) in Manland and Womanland, the ideal keeps interrupting the real, and vice versa. Whileaway offers collective childcare, comprehensive career training for young adults, polyamory if you want it, solitude if you want that, and a revered old age. As we see how these utopian but entirely reasonable elements constitute Janet’s everyday life, we also see what’s missing, what we might crave, in the life of our Earth in 1975, or in 2024. 

Part of the genius of "The Female Man" lies in how its utopian and dystopian worlds need each other: Joanna’s contemporary Earth looks exciting and full of promise to Depression-era Jeannine, but it also looks bizarre and backwards to Janet and like an unconquered territory to Jael. One woman alone, Russ suggests, cannot save herself, let alone anyone else: We need to find alternate versions of ourselves and allies who do not look just like us.




This promise of collective self-emancipation becomes even more pronounced in Russ’s 1980 realist novel "On Strike Against God", which swerves from sarcasm to glee. Its hero, Esther, discovers lesbian love with a back rub and a vibrator, but cannot truly find liberation until she discovers the community of “my first Lesbian bar”.

Russ’s women, from Alyx to Janet, Joanna, Jeannine, and Jael to Esther, discover traps, social and physical, but do not stay there: They break free or die. The traps that they explore are, by and large, not of a science-fiction variety but the kind depicted in the fiction we now call naturalistic: They emerge from social or economic (or, rarely, ecological) systems that seem too big to change. 




If you do not want to die, physically or spiritually, then you must seek your own joy with others who are like you, Russ insists, and share this sense of joy. Only then, if you can, will you be able to change a system. Living in this world as a woman, especially as a straight or straight-passing woman, meant “learning to despise one’s self”. 

Russ wrote to show women—sometimes, especially, queer women—how to imagine a better world. Russ’s stories overflow with what we might now call nonbinary people—women disguised as men, women who identify with gay men. Russ’s fiction sometimes imagines a world without, or beyond, binary gender, like the one to which the Abbess flees, or like Whileaway, where women cannot be subordinate because there are no men.



BATTLE OF THE BLUES GLORED PLAYLIST 25 12 24


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