Copy a file and create destination directory

Replace a mkdir and cp with install using the -D option to create the destination directory if needed. Before:

public/i/% : i/%
    mkdir -p public/i
    cp $< $@
    chmod 644 $@

After:

public/i/% : i/%
    install -m 644 -D $< $@

Create destination directory in a Python script

This is one extra line, using pathlib.

Before opening the output file for writing,

Path(outfile).parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

This creates a Path object for the intended pathname of the output file, gets its parent directory, and makes that directory and all parents if it does not exist.

So I know this blog still starts a lot of processes to rebuild, but I got rid of a few.

Bonus links

Community Gardens in Jean Sweeney Open Space Park by Margie Siegal. (My prediction is that the nutritional benefit will be dwarfed by the people skills building benefit. Any cooperative project is good for getting better at any other cooperative project.)

The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically After Massive AI Rebrand by Maggie Harrison Dupré. (People are obviously getting off the slop and touching grass. Or rutabagas or whatever they’re growing in their community garden plots.)

CEO of Palantir Says AI Will Seize Power Away From College-Educated Women by Frank Landymore. (Oh, never mind, I heard this dude is progressive now?)

Apple suddenly shutters its Support Community forums for no clear reason by David Price. (The reason is clear if you read the forums. A lot of regular people’s questions about Apple products are stuff like, what’s this confusing, creepy-looking advertising feature or “how do I turn off this AI slop that started showing up? Apple had to decide whether to pay attention to real customer concerns and fix the stuff that forum posters are on about, invest a bunch of moderator hours in a Potemkin village makeover, or just shut the forums down.)

Creators quit pro-AI platforms, summary by Thomas McKinlay of a paper by Huang, H., Fu, R., & Ghose, A. If you work in social media (e.g. influencer marketing), pay attention to the AI stance of the platforms you’re investing in. The platforms that are investing the most in AI (e.g. X, Quora) will likely see decreasing engagement from creators. (Human YouTubers are trying to stand out from the slop by doing AI-free collabs and encouraging users to rely on subscriptions more, algorithms less. Related: cleaning up YouTube)

THE FIRST LESSON IS: NO ONE’S EVEN LOOKING by Dave Trott. I think most people in our business believe ordinary people will notice every ad and study each ad carefully….[W]e are each exposed to roughly 1,000 ads per day. Of that, 4% are remembered favourably and 7% are remembered unfavourably. But the important number is – 89% of advertising isn’t noticed or remembered.

But it’s worse than it appears

The even worse part is that a brand with a high blocking rate that’s looking at conventional adtech/martech metrics is going to be looking at data from an unrepresentative, more trackable fraction of the audience. And the higher the block rate, the worse that any decisions based on that data are going to be.

More later.

Related

Good morning, AdExchanger

We still have time to save the halo effect

B L O C K in the U S A

Google stole a damn sammich

Winners don’t click search ads

Bonus links

BuzzFeed Stock in Free Fall as Pivot to AI Blows Up in Its Face by Victor Tangermann. (There was only one BuzzFeed News but management is discovering that anybody can make slop.)

Publicis closes $2.2bn LiveRamp deal, betting ‘neutral’ tech can still be a competitive advantage by Cameron Clarke. Given LiveRamp’s widespread use across the advertising industry, the question of its neutrality has been one of the deal’s hottest talking points since it was announced in May. (But a brand that focuses on early adopters should look at their customers’ use of UOOMs, authorized agents, and Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP). You can’t assume that all audiences are equally well represented in LiveRamp.)

Big Tech claims voters’ AI backlash is “anti-Trump” not “anti-tech” by Ashley Belanger. (File this one under “cool story bro.” They’re the same thing. Trump is a cryptocurrency and social media tycoon—he’s as much a “tech CEO” as any of the rest.)

More from Texas Linux Fest

Texas Linux Fest 2026 Observations by Borislav Sabotinov. Stable enterprise distributions, design for reducing AI errors, cloud workspaces for developers, home labs, and more.

Bonus links

From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet by Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron Shaw, and Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons by Lisa Macpherson and Anna Tumadóttir. (Will collaborative projects survive scraper bots and slop input?)

Everyone Everywhere Hated Meta’s New AI Training Terms. Now, They’re On Pause by Samantha Cole. (Where there’s a privacy violation against individual users, there’s probably some kind of racket being run against companies. Google stole a damn sammich.)

It’s Time For City Builders To Embrace Productive Chaos by Eden Kupermintz. (Fan theory: politics lags gaming rules. We have new urbanism today because of what worked in SimCity.)

Abstract

The story of open source and the Internet is a story of dystopia timelines that didn’t happen. We avoided the Clipper Chip, key escrow. And the Fritz Chip, DRM mandates. Sure, threats to security, and DRM lock-in, are still there, but thanks to a lot of hard work, they’re manageable. Today’s biggest threat, though, isn’t coming from outside forces like governments or big copyright holders. Our ongoing collapse of trust and rise of crime is rooted in some good ideas from open source, gone wrong.

It’s not just social media scams and deepfakes. Dishonest business practices from the sketchier corners of the Internet have gone mainstream. We’re in a rugpull economy now. Let’s figure out where we went wrong and how to get back on track.

Intro

I was going to give my practical privacy tips talk, but then it turned out that they gave me the big room, so I wanted to think about the big picture.

Why are we doing privacy tips in the first place? Why not: How to share more of your personal information with brands you love? Why is privacy even a feature?

Privacy is not about something to hide. In a lot of situations, the reason we have privacy is that it makes a market work. Imagine you go on vacation, and go to an old-fashioned rug market. Are you going to hand every rug merchant your shopping list, budget, and departure date?

The basics of privacy are like the basics of not showing your cards in a card game. When privacy breaks down, a lot of other human activities break down, including markets.

Normie corporate privacy

And, of course, there are a lot of deceptive people out there. So the stuff that we used to do as privacy nerds has gotten all mainstream and corporate.

The Federal Trade Commission says scams are up 3x since 2020.

The Pew Research Center, in Online Scams and Attacks in America Today, says that 73% of U.S. adults have experienced some kind of online scam or attack.

When you give up too much information, you make it too easy to target you. Scams you’re likely to believe, malware that looks like software you want, whatever. So the kind of privacy advice I used to share with privacy nerds is now part of mainstream corporate IT best practices. CSO Online recommends:

• Push a vetted ad-blocking extension to managed browsers through policy rather than leaving it to users to install it.

• Favor browsers with built-in tracking protection.

• Block ad and tracking domains at the DNS or secure web gateway layer; this reaches in-app ads on managed phones.

• Disable advertising identifiers on corporate mobile devices through mobile device management (MDM) and restrict ad-supported consumer apps on devices holding sensitive data.

Wherefore do the wicked prosper?

How did it get so far?

The prophet Jeremiah asked,

Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?

That’s not what I expected the Internet would get us. The Internet, and free software, were going to be awesome. I started running desktop Linux in 1994, back when you had to exit your own X mode lines, and you could zorch your (tube) monitor if you got it wrong. Yes, that was actually a thing.

Linux and the Internet kept getting better.

Internet 2, dystopia 0

The open source scene has beaten some powerful dystopia narratives.

• Cryptography key escrow (the “Clipper Chip”). From 1993 to 1996, US policy was to assert control over encryption, and require a back door for the government. See Privacy’s Defender by Cindy Cohn for the inside story on how the freedom-loving side beat that one.

• DRM mandates (the “Fritz Chip”) The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, introduced in 2002, was the high-water mark of the DRM dystopia story.

Encryption backdoors and DRM are both still around, but last I checked the one remaining device in my house that will play DVDs is one of the Linux boxes. Both have gone from extinction-level threat to manageable problem.

Yes, we still need to get political and stay political to keep them from coming back, but for now, open source and the Internet have won.

Now the dystopia is coming from inside the house

But now we have dystopia at home.

A public service announcement from the FBI says “cyber criminals are using search engine advertisement services to impersonate brands and direct users to malicious sites.

And the FBI recommends installing an ad blocker. We are on the way to an new kind of dystopia when a major law enforcement agency of the USA is saying that a major company in the USA is doing so much crime you got to just block them. So how did we get here?

Today’s scam and surveillance dystopia has its roots in the open source scene.

We can still beat this one, and this time it’s really on us.

From open source to surveillance dystopia by way of economics

Commoditize the complement was awesome back in the days of “old Google.” Replace expensive single-vendor systems with Linux, plus whatever hardware works best at the time for a reasonable price.

Hardware as a commodity was a good idea. The problem happened when “content” was treated as a commodity. Adtech constantly tries to get the most expensive possible ad into the cheapest possible context.

For adtech, surveillance was never about the surveillance. It was about connecting the reader of some expensive content to some other context where you could show them an ad for cheaper.

A recent paper shows I’m right. A Longitudinal Study of Extended User IDs in the Online Advertising Ecosystem, by Michael Smith, Riley Grossman, Krzysztof Franaszek, Antonio Torres-Agüero, Pritam Sen, Cristian Borcea, and Yi Chen, describes how web trackers are giving “user IDs” to bots. If it were about the surveillance, this would have been a big deal. But it wasn’t. (A small mention in AdExchanger, that’s about it. Update 11 Nov 2025: Also covered in ADOTAT: LiveIntent Says Its Graph Is “Authenticated Daily.” It Gave a Bot an ID.) Adtech is a racket against the web publisher.

Why did advertising-supported web sites turn out to be so hard?

The old magazine business model was something like this: subscriptions cover the cost of printing and postage, and ads pay for the content. Without printing and postage, the ads should pay for things. But it didn’t work.

Walt Mossberg recalled,

[W]e were seated next to the head of this advertising company, who said to me something like, “Well, I really always liked AllThingsD and in your first week I think Recode’s produced some really interesting stuff.” And I said, “Great, so you’re going to advertise there, right? Or place ads there.” And he said, “Well, let me just tell you the truth. We’re going to place ads there for a little bit, we’re going to drop cookies, we’re going to figure out who your readers are, we’re going to find out what other websites they go to that are way cheaper than your website and then we’re gonna pull our ads from your website and move them there.”

The first generation of adtech was all about good ad, bad context.

But then it got worse.

The “progress” of online advertising was in creating ever more efficient auction-based markets, to match an ad to a user in real time. In 2006, Jakob Nielsen pointed out the problem with those, in Search Engines as Leeches on the Web. An auction-based market tends to capture all the advertisers’ profits, as they bid up the price of ads to where the cost of the ad equals the expected profit from additional customer.

As the auction gets more and more efficient, some slots go un-sold. Which explains why Big Tech systems are now deliberately designed to match scammers and victims.

The biggest example of adversarial personalization is the Big Tech senior fraud situation. Many older people are spending less money on discretionary purchases but are sitting on retirement savings, so Big Tech ML systems automatically “learn” to match them not with legit products and services, but with fraud operators.

Scam bidders don’t just fill in the ad impressions to the people normal advertisers don’t want (or, that Google and Meta ML “learns” not to serve normal ads to). Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, but those fraudulent advertisers are also acting as shill bidders to drive up the auction prices for the legit advertisers.

Meta makes 10% of ad revenue from fraud directly—but possibly much more because the bidding functions representing all the other ads must pay more in order to outbid the numerous scams. If Meta is so good at AI then what’s this doing here?

Number must go up

Advertising revenue globally is about a trillion dollars, hard to estimate, maybe a little more. Meta and Google ad revenue, added together, is about half that. 580 billion if you add their Q2 2026 revenue and annualize it (multiply the quarterly number by four). The only way left to grow is to keep taking a bigger and bigger fraction of every sale, and the way to do that to keep dumping more good ads into bad contexts, and scam and malware ads everywhere.

A majority of a major industry is now controlled by two transnational crime organizations.

Crime is inevitable for Meta and Google now that they control a majority of advertising but must continue to grow at startup-like rates.

Excuses, excuses

But this platform, it’s so big! This is why you don’t hire a Big Tech CEO to manage a Burger King. “There are so many Burger Kings with so many customers! How could we possibly mop all the restrooms?” You just have to hire enough people. And if the rules of the platform ad “game” were less scam-friendly, less work by employees would be required anyway.

But union busting! Don’t Big Tech CEOs hate hiring moderators? Especially moderators who unionize? The crime is built in to the rules of the ad system, not just in the amount of work invested.

The problem isn’t scale or labor/management issues. The problem is deliberate design and policy decisions. Two good examples are:

• The Google trademark policy is designed to deliver scams and malware in search ads. Google stole a damn sammich

• Meta’s ad system is designed to work for deceptive sellers. but I want to turn people into dinosaurs

What legit brands need from advertising

Advertising works when

content + signal ≥ interruption + resources + risk

Advertising can provide two benefits to the audience: it can support some kind of resource (which technically doesn’t have to be “content,” bus bench ads are a thing, too) and it can send a credible signal of the advertiser’s intentions in the market.

And advertising asks the audience to pay, with some kind of interruption—otherwise it would be not advertising, but content marketing—and spend some kind of resources, such as battery and bandwidth, and often accept some kind of risk.

Michael Farmer points out that:

• The 2009-2024 sales growth rate of 40 out of 60 major advertisers has been very depressed, averaging (as a group) only 2% per year for 15 years.

• By contrast, the market had real GDP growth of 2.4% per year plus inflation of 2.3% per year — so the benchmarked nominal GDP growth rate was 4.7% per year.

Advertising has stopped working for legit brands, and very few people in the ad industry have paid attention. So much crime, so little pay.

What I was wrong about

I thought that legit brands would want some form of post-creepy advertising, designed for honest sellers. What I did was point out the ad medium/brand mismatch. I did say that today’s surveillance advertising is optimized for the needs of deceptive sellers, and doesn’t carry the signal that legitimate brands need. Right so far.

But here’s where I messed up. As an Internet Optimist, I assumed that the decision-makers for the highest-reputation brands would be dissatisfied enough with the situation to seek out advertising media better suited to costly signaling.

But that’s not what was happening, if I had been paying attention to other trends.

Brand decision-makers did take steps to deal with the problem that a higher-reputation brand doesn’t benefit from an advertising system optimized for lower-quality sellers—but did it the other way around, by cutting quality and/or service and burning brand reputation.

But I was wrong about ad reform. Brands let their quality and reputation slide in order to match the available advertising, not the other way around.

Bernadette Banner, an expert in historic garments and in making and altering clothing in general, did a video on selecting fabrics. But in a rugpull economy, that’s harder than it looks.

The unfortunate reality is that those sorts of recommendations do not stand the test of time The recommendation section will become obsolete especially when shops start going out of business, especially the really highly recommended small businesses. Or with bigger more reliable brands it’s very common that these get bought up by private equity and become enshittified and so their quality degrades.

So what can we do about it?

This is our mess to clean up.

We’re not going to get off the Internet and touch grass. Get to the public library and volunteer to help people get their privacy issues fixed.

TODO add link to Alameda library drop-in help sessions.

Privacy is a collective problem. It’s not personal. We’re all safer when less money is flowing to scammers and to Big Tech.

And people inside big companies want to do the right thing, you just have to be able to justify it. I still think Google could go legit again.

The jury system can save us (again)

A December 17, 2002 jury verdict was, in my opinion, the end of the DRM dystopia narrative. In a Not guilty verdict, the jury straight-up jury nullified the anticircumvention section of the DMCA.

Today, juries are handing over some pretty good privacy verdicts. Thanks to the California legislature, we have some good tools to use against surveillance dystopia, and other states do too.

The fight against surveillance and scam dystopia does not have to be prohibitively expensive.

More: Audience Q&A

Election news

Monique Priestley has been elected to the state Senate in Vermont, representing Orange County. Yes, this week was a big election for the Internet, but this particular result is encouraging in another way.

I spent $0 supporting Meta & Google which earns billions of dollars annually off of unchecked fraud and scams, supports child s*xual abuse material (CSAM) websites with ad placements, and seeks to addict and manipulate people of all ages. I spent $0 on targeted ads abusing your sensitive data (your phone number, IQ, education level, annual income, and political leanings, as examples)….My campaign used privacy-protective, non-traditional platforms to fundraise and manage voter information.

It’s possible to win without Google and Meta.

And that’s good. Brazil isn’t the only country that’s going to have to come up with a way to protect people from the various harms that these companies inflict, and their influence on politics. Just having them steal your sandwich is getting off lightly.

Here in the USA, most of the potential for improvement is at the state level, at least for now.

States are going after Meta and Google about a variety of bad behavior, including privacy violations and mental health issues resulting from habit-forming design. But if you grab on to one of these problems and really follow it backward, it turns out that every harm perpetrated against a user is the result of some scheme being run against an advertiser. Google didn’t set out to steal your sandwich—that was a side effect of policy changes made to unfairly drive up the price of search ads, above what legit restaurants would pay.

A solid advertiser protection law would end up mostly helping consumers, by cutting off user harms at the root. (Related: a privacy law shortcut)

In The answer to fighting ad fraud goes further than regulators’ proposals, Rob Leathern from InfoHawk is partly right about ad libraries. But every ad needs to be in a library, and every user of the platform needs to be able to see it. Privacy is about collective safety. A library only for “qualified organizations” is not enough—if Big Tech knows anything about existing qualified organizations, it’s how to subvert or neutralize them. A new trademark enforcer or NGO with a better algorithm, or an investigator on a trial engagement from a legit advertiser needs to be able to sniff around without warning. And platforms have enough bandwidth to make life hell for owners of small business websites, they should be able to host ad libraries with some of it.

More: Surviving the rugpull economy: notes and links from my talk at Texas Linux Fest

Bonus links

Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House? by Brian Krebs. Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

Has YouTube lost its cap? Why is Google allowing so many dubious ads? by Gordon Young. How many of these commercials would ever be cleared to run on conventional television? (icymi: cleaning up YouTube. Ever notice how YouTubers will promote sponsors, sell merch, ask people to join their Patreon, even follow them on other video services…but nobody says anything about turning the surveillance ads back on?)

Bonus links

Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV, Part IVb: Iron Ends by Bret Devereaux. (Is it possible to make a playable World War II game where the Axis has a chance—without changing the economic rules to make it so that, in-game, totalitarian states are not dumb and bad?)

Google admits AI search makes less money, but it’s fixing that with more ads by Ryan Whitwam. As part of the financial disclosure, Google announced an expansion of ads in AI Mode. If you do decide to dip into Google’s search chatbot, you’ll probably see more contextual advertising. These ads will begin appearing in more international markets soon.

Related

It’s the death of the price tag, finished off by AI pricing by Bob Sullivan. If it feels like everything you do today is a video game with surprise gremlins attacking at every turn, that’s because—it is. Booby traps are everywhere. You can’t so much as buy a coffee, an avocado, or a curtain rod without you and your data being entered into a cynical value extraction experiment.

Bonus links

Turning an Old Phone’s Motherboard into an RC Plane Controller by Maya Posch. The smartphone was bought used for $23, with the default Xiaomi ROM overwritten by LineageOS to get a more lightweight and up to date Android installation on it.

Even more ads are coming to Google search, Google says by Matt Binder. (You still have to block these, at least according to the FBI. Winners don’t click search ads)

We Must Kill Windows For A Just Future by Chris Person. They will extract rent from you and your employer at every plausible juncture and give you garbage in exchange. You must accept in your heart that Windows is a lost cause.

No one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught me that he was wrong. by danah boyd. And when it comes to internet-enabled predation, the biggest risk is not teenagers using the latest social media site. The biggest risk is single moms using online dating apps. Pedophiles seek out these women to get access to their children. It’s sick. But no one wants to hear that. They want to focus on the digital tools young people use….Truth be told, I’d have no problem if certain social media platforms would be banned for everyone. I think that many of the products in this space have devolved into garbage.