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The beloved 2009 Nintendo video game Tomodachi Life has always allowed players to create cute, customizable little human characters (called Mii’s) who can explore virtual worlds, play minigames, and independently form social relationships with one another.

But for a long time, queer fans of the game complained that the Mii’s could never be gay, bisexual, aromantic, or nonbinary. However, the game’s upcoming sequel, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, is about to change that — and fans are delighted.

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In a video about the sequel, which comes out in April, Nintendo explained that players will be able to choose a nonbinary gender while creating their Mii’s and will also be able to set their Mii’s “dating preferences” to allow them to date and marry one or more genders or none at all, Kotaku reported.

Fans of the original game initially petitioned Nintendo to allow gay marriage. On May 7, 2014, Nintendo America Inc. responded by saying that it “never intended to make any form of social commentary” with the game.

“The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans will see that Tomodachi Life was intended to be a whimsical and quirky game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social commentary,” the company said.

However, two days later, Nintendo apologized to disappointed fans and explained that the company couldn’t change the game’s design with a software update. The company then promised that if it released a future installment of the game, it would “strive to design a game-play experience from the ground up that is more inclusive, and better represents all players.” 

Fans of the game celebrated the upcoming change in a Reddit forum, writing comments like, “The fact that I can accurately represent my partner and bestie is so cool,” Really caught me by surprise…. This is terrific,” and “They made non binary and gays. They let us choose MORE than one gender. This is the real dream I’m never complaining again.”

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You’ve probably heard — we’re currently experiencing very high RAM prices due mostly to increased demand from AI data centers.

If you’ve been priced out of new RAM you are going to want to get as much value out of the RAM you already have as possible, and that’s where today’s hack comes in: if you’re on a Debian system read about ZRam for how to install and configure zram-tools to enable and manage the Linux kernel facilities that enable compressed RAM by integrating with the swap-enabled virtual memory system. We’ve seen it done with the Raspberry Pi, and the concept is the same.

Ubuntu users should check out systemd-zram-generator instead, and be aware that zram might already be installed and configured by default on your Ubuntu Desktop system.

If you’re interested in the history of in-kernel memory compression LWN.net has an old article covering the technology as it was gestating back in 2013: In-kernel Memory Compression. For those trying to get a grip on what has happened with RAM prices in recent history, a good place to track memory prices is memory.net and if you swing by you can see that a lot of RAM has gone up as much as four times in the last three or four months.

If you have any tips or hacks for memory compression on other platforms we would love to hear from you in the comments section!

Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something:

I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.

Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just filed a lawsuit against his own IRS, demanding that taxpayers pay him $10 billion.

Ten. Billion. Dollars.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Miami, claims that Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization were grievously harmed when IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica back in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was caught, prosecuted, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence—the system worked, justice was served, case closed. But apparently that’s not enough for a man whose appetite for grift has no discernible ceiling.

Before we dive into why this lawsuit is weapons-grade insane, let’s establish some context that the complaint conveniently glosses over.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Every major party nominee since Nixon had done so voluntarily. Trump’s excuse? He was being audited and would release them after the audit was complete. Somehow, nearly a decade later, those returns were never officially released. There’s no clear evidence the audit ever existed. The whole thing had the distinct aroma of a man who had something to hide.

In 2020, the New York Times obtained 17 years of Trump’s tax records from Littlejohn. The reporting revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely by reporting chronic business losses. The House Ways & Means Committee later obtained and released some of his returns through proper legal channels.

And the result of all this exposure? Trump won the 2024 election and his net worth has skyrocketed in such an obvious way that, contra Karoline Leavitt’s statement, it would be difficult to find anyone who legitimately believes that Trump isn’t profiting off his Presidency.

According to Forbes, Trump’s wealth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, driven largely by his crypto ventures and the value of Trump Media and Technology Group. So grievous was the harm from this leak that Trump is now richer than he’s ever been.

Which brings us to the lawsuit. Trump is demanding $10 billion—more than his entire current net worth—from the federal government. The federal government he controls and which he’s stocked with cronies.

I need to repeat that. Donald Trump is trying to more than double his personal wealth by simply demanding that the IRS, which he controls, give him $10 billion in taxpayer funds. This goes beyond corruption. You need a different word for this altogether.

Let’s break down the multiple levels on which this is absolutely batshit:

The President is suing his own government. Think about this for a moment. Trump controls the executive branch. The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. The Department of Justice—which would normally defend the government in such lawsuits—is currently headed by an Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General who previously worked as Trump’s personal lawyers and who have repeatedly made it clear that they view their current jobs as still being the President’s personal lawyers. The idea that Trump can file a lawsuit against agencies he controls, staffed with loyalists who seem to believe they work for him personally rather than the American people, is so blatantly corrupt that it puts pretty much all past corruption to shame.

As I wrote last year when Trump demanded a mere $230 million in a similar scheme, this creates a situation where Trump’s own lawyers get to decide whether Trump’s claims should be successful—and potentially how much taxpayer money flows directly into his pocket. The fact that it’s now more than 40 times that amount just demonstrates that his corruption has no upper bound.

The damages claimed are laughable. The complaint lists the horrifying “harm” Trump suffered. Hold onto your hats:

ProPublica published at least 50 articles as a result of Defendants’ unlawful disclosures, many of which contained false and inflammatory claims about Defendants’ confidential tax documents.

And:

Because of Defendants’ wrongful conduct, Plaintiffs were subject to, among many others, at least eight (“8”) separate stories in the New York Times which wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history

Eight. Stories. In the New York Times. That’s apparently worth $10 billion in damages. From the US taxpayer. Trump has probably generated more negative headlines in a single weekend of Truth Social posts.

And if the stories were really defamatory (note: they weren’t) sue those publications for defamation and… see how that goes. Because Trump’s defamation lawsuits have a remarkable track record of getting laughed out of court.

But here—clever, clever, clever—this case need never go to court. The IRS and the DOJ (both run by Trump loyalists) can just “settle” and hand over however much taxpayer money Trump wants.

The complaint undermines itself. In a truly galaxy-brained move, Trump’s lawyers included this gem from Littlejohn’s deposition:

When asked, “so you were looking to do something to cause some kind of harm to him?” Mr. Littlejohn responded, “Less about harm, more just about a statement. I mean, there’s little harm that can actually be done to him, I think. . . He’s shown a remarkable resilience.”

They put this in their own complaint. The guy who leaked the documents, when asked under oath whether he intended to cause harm, essentially said “nah, you can’t really hurt that guy.” And Trump’s lawyers thought this helped their case.

Or… they knew that it doesn’t matter how bad the complaint actually is because Trump is effectively playing both sides, and that means the side the benefits Trump personally (at the expense of the American taxpayer) is almost certain to win out.

Isn’t it great the Roberts Supreme Court said there’s nothing the courts can do to stop this?

The legal theory is absurd. The complaint argues that the IRS should have known Littlejohn would leak documents because… the Treasury Inspector General had warned about “security deficiencies” in the IRS’s data protection systems. By this logic, any time any government system has any vulnerability, taxpayers should be on the hook for billions if that vulnerability is ever exploited. It’s malpractice dressed up in legal formatting.

The complaint also leans heavily on politicized language that has no place in a legal filing:

From May 2019 through at least September 2020, former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, who was jointly employed by the IRS and/or one of its contractors, illegally obtained access to, and disclosed Plaintiffs’ tax returns and return information to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other leftist media outlets.

“Leftist media outlets.” In a legal complaint. Filed by a sitting president. Against his own government. Demanding $10 billion. This is a political document, rather than a serious legal complaint. Because, again, the legal stance here makes no difference. There is no adversarial process. Only Trump’s insatiable desire to take people’s money.

This is especially rich given everything else happening. This lawsuit lands at a time when Trump’s administration is gutting the IRS’s enforcement capabilities, when the DOJ has been transformed into Trump’s personal law firm, and when the government is lurching from shutdown to shutdown. But sure, let’s cut Donald Trump a check for ten billion dollars because reporters wrote stories about his taxes—taxes he refused to release voluntarily despite decades of precedent (and which also, once leaked, didn’t appear to do him the slightest bit of political damage).

For all the talk about cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the president himself is attempting to walk off with enough taxpayer money to fund the entire National Endowment for the Arts for the next 60 years.

And the most galling part? Every other presidential candidate in modern history released their tax returns willingly. Trump’s entire complaint rests on the premise that he was harmed by the public learning information that every other candidate simply… disclosed. The audacity of claiming $10 billion in damages for being forced into a transparency that was voluntary for everyone else is genuinely breathtaking.

Littlejohn broke the law. He knew it, he did it anyway, and he’s paying for it with five years of his life. Some have argued he was a whistleblower serving the public interest; others say a law is a law. But none of that matters here, because what Trump is doing has nothing to do with justice or compensation for actual harm.

This is a sitting president attempting to use the legal system to transfer $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury—which belongs to the American people—into his personal bank account. The case will be litigated by a Justice Department stuffed with his former personal attorneys. The damages he claims are fantastical. The harm he allegedly suffered resulted in him getting richer than ever and winning re-election.

So yes, Karoline, you’re right: this is absurd. Just not in the way you meant.

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Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief.

Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts to kidnap people who are just trying to follow the law by performing their required check-ins. The sweeping up of anyone in the area who looks a little bit foreign any time federal officers are actually engaged in a “targeted” arrest.

There’s so much of it happening every day that it’s easy to lose sight of all the victims of this administration’s cruelty. There’s a human cost that never factors into the administration’s calculations because, well, most of the upper echelon ghouls don’t actually consider these people to be “human.”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has been tracking thousands of immigration cases since the anti-migrant surge began. What he’s collected — and this is only a small part of it — should make your blood boil. After all, you still have some pumping through your veins, even if the administration seems to be able to function on bile alone.

Consider the case of Sonik Manaserian, a 70-year-old Iranian refugee who fled religious persecution in her country, arriving in the United States in May of 1999. Her asylum request didn’t work out and she was given an order of removal in October 1999. However, she was not deported and has lived here for the past 18 years under an Order of Supervision and Unsupervised Parole (OSUP) after she was picked up by ICE in 2008. In other words, as long as she continued to check in with the immigration court, she could stay indefinitely.

That ended once Trump took office and sent his goon squads out to remove pretty much anyone he felt didn’t belong here. ICE officers arrested her at a check-in last November, without any prior notice or warrant for arrest. The government has already admitted it doesn’t really have any way to deport her to Iran since our government has no diplomatic relationship with the country for obvious reasons. ICE can’t deport her, but it also won’t release her. She’s been stuck in a detention center since this arrest — a place where she can’t receive the medical help she needs. On top of that, ICE lost the medication she had on her when she was arrested and denied her an opportunity to attend a pre-scheduled medical appointment.

Why? Because it can. Even the government can’t explain why it’s doing this to her, instead assuming it can continue to do what it wants as long as it keeps tapping the 26-year-old order of removal. The California judge handling her petition lays this all out in devastating fashion:

Respondents do not contest either of these claims—or, indeed, any of Petitioner’s other claims. Respondents’ Answer to the Petition consists of three sentences, two of which recite the procedural history of this case. The remaining sentence reads, in full, “[a]t this time, Respondents do not have an opposition argument to present.” They have not denied or contested any of the factual allegations in the Petition. They have not offered any additional facts or defenses. They have not argued that different statutes or regulations should govern this case. They have not lodged any relevant documents, despite being ordered to do so.

These are the actions of a government that feels it’s above the law. It can’t even be bothered to fake something up that might be taken as a counterargument. Instead, it hands in three sentences and moves on to address the outcome of another violation of rights in similarly cavalier fashion. Look at these assholes, the court says without actually using any of those words:

Thus, it appears that Respondents arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.

Further, having acknowledged that they have no opposition to present to Petitioner’s habeas petition, have they voluntarily released her? No. Thus, Petitioner remains in custody, and her counsel, and the Court, are required to expend resources and effort to address a matter that Respondents either cannot be bothered to defend or realize is indefensible.

That’s the other “fuck you” this administration uses. There’s the overt stuff that makes headlines and whips up the frothy loyalists. Then there’s stuff like this where the government doesn’t even care enough about the people it’s illegally locking up to even toss a few paragraphs of boilerplate into the mix. This is just part of the dehumanization process: the administrative shrug. A collective GOP “so what” when confronted about the violations of the law.

“Worst of the worst” always meant “people the bigots in charge don’t like.” This ruling deals with a Mexican man who has lived here since 2006 with his wife, raising three children and, like most migrants, working hard, paying taxes, and living clean. When asked about this, the administration shrugs again — a shrug that prompts an order for his release:

Respondents make no suggestion that Audberto J. has a criminal history, and the Court concludes he has none.

There’s more in that thread and it’s all awful. There’s the Minnesota man who was arrested and tossed in a detainment center despite having active refugee status. Or how about the mother with a 5-month-old baby and recently discovered heart condition who was arrested and sent to a detention center 1,100 miles away from her child and her primary physician? Are you cool with that, Trump voters? The court certainly isn’t.

Ms. Lah has already lost important bonding and nursing time with her baby. While the Court recognizes that many families are suffering due to Operation PARRIS and other ICE actions in the District of Minnesota, there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.

It is craven. This is the government’s shrug in response to a judge asking why it sent Lah to a detention center in Houston, Texas almost immediately after arresting her.

On January 14, 2026, Respondents filed their one-page Response to Petition For Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion to Transfer but it did not actually respond to the Petition nor follow Judge Davis’s Order to Show Cause. Respondents assert that Ms. Lah was transferred to Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026, within hours of Ms. Lah’s arrest, “due to local detention bed space shortage.” Respondents’ Motion asserts that the transfer occurred before the Court’s Order to Show Cause enjoining removal. Respondents submitted the Declaration of Angela Minner in support of their Motion and purportedly attached documents in support. No documents were attached, and no support was otherwise provided.

In any normal world, the people handing in this sloppy work would be reprimanded by their superiors and perhaps even taken off immigration cases. That will never happen here. Not bothering to do the job right is just an easy way to do what you want while providing a minimum amount of lip service to any notions of the federal rules of procedure. If it destroys lives, harms people, or actually deports them to places where they’ll end up dead, so be it. They were never considered people by this administration in the first place.

A couple weeks ago, in the wake of the murder of Renee Good, we wrote about “border czar” Tom Homan’s ridiculous TV comments suggesting that if Democrats didn’t stop calling ICE & CBP murderers for murdering people, that they’d just be forced to murder again. Now that that has happened, with the murder of Alex Pretti, Homan was shipped off to Minneapolis to replace fascist-fashion lover Greg Bovino, and he gave a speech Thursday morning that the press so desperately wanted to portray as him “de-escalating” the mess in Minneapolis.

So much of the coverage is about the supposed “drawdown” of federal troops in Minneapolis:

But, if you listen to his actual words, he’s still the same old Tom Homan, and this is all for show. He talked about how he supposedly “begged” for the toning down of rhetoric:

Homan: "I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March — if the rhetoric doesn't stop, there is gonna be bloodshed. And there has been. I wish I wasn't right. I don't want to see anybody die."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:38:44.966Z

Hey Tom, gonna be bloodshed from who?

From who, Tom?

Because last I checked, the bloodshed has been entirely one-sided. Citizens of Minneapolis haven’t shot anyone, Tom. Your agents have.

But, instead, Homan only wants the “de-escalation” to go in one direction, saying he demands that the rhetoric against law enforcement be toned down, not the demonization of people throughout the Minneapolis / St. Paul region:

Homan: "I call upon those officials to stand shoulder to shoulder with us to tone down the dangerous rhetoric and condemn all unlawful acts against law enforcement in the community"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:39:56.596Z

Where are the calls to de-escalate the dangerous, hateful language against Somali immigrants? Or asylum seekers? Or anyone exercising their First Amendment rights? Those don’t count, Tom?

And, as Radley Balko points out, Homan has been at the front lines of encouraging violence:

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me."–Homan in February"Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely."– Tom Homan in March"I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room"– Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) 2026-01-29T15:32:03.784Z

So, look, if we want to “tone down the rhetoric” and stop the “bloodshed,” that is entirely on the federal government and people like you, Tom Homan, to do.

But this is Tom Homan. And he can’t help himself. When asked how many ICE & CBP agents are on the ground, he talked about how 3,000 of them are “in theater.” That’s a freaking military term, Tom. You’re admitting that ICE & CBP is an invading force.

Q: Can you be specific about how many ICE and CBP agents are currently operating in the state?HOMAN: 3,000. There's been some rotations. They've been in theater a long time. Day after day, can't eat in restaurants, people spin on you, blowing whistles at you. But my main focus now is draw down

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:57:19.995Z

As for the complaint that they “can’t eat in restaurants,” maybe that’s because they’re dining in restaurants, and then kidnapping the staff. Maybe don’t do that?

Also, when asked why they needed 3,000 thugs to invade a city, he lied again, and claimed “because of the threats of violence.”

CNN: How did we get to a place where we had Bovino having Border Patrol agents stopping citizens in interior of the country, asking them ID, creating fear? Who made the decisions to allow this kind of operation to proceed?HOMAN: The reason for the massive deployment is bc of the threats & violence

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:49:26.506Z

There has been little violence from citizens of Minneapolis. Just federal officers crashing cars, tear gassing people for no reason at all, kidnapping, beating, and disappearing people. Oh, and shooting at least three people so far. The “threat of violence” came entirely from your forces. Don’t gaslight America and say they had to come because of threats of violence.

You are the threats of violence.

As for the news headlines about a “drawdown,” that’s bullshit as well. In the video above, Homan says the pace of any “drawdown” is dependent on the “hateful rhetoric” stopping. Way to admit to a blatant First Amendment violation, Tom: “the beatings will continue until you’re nicer to us” is a violation of basic fundamental rights.

Homan also admitted that federal thugs will only leave one they get “cooperation” from the city and state governments, getting help in further kidnapping and disappearing more residents.

Homan: "The withdrawal of law enforcement resources here is dependent upon cooperation … as we see that cooperation happen, then the redeployment will happen"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-01-29T13:43:34.390Z

And, so far, the people of Minneapolis are not impressed and have seen no evidence of any such drawdown or de-escalation.

Tom Homan wasn’t sent to de-escalate anything other than all the negative press attention from federal thugs murdering people in the Twin Cities. And most of the media ate it right up.

The story of Minneapolis is not a story of “threats of violence.” It’s a story of violence, murder, and mayhem entirely from federal officers. The story of the people of Minneapolis is a story of a community banding together to help each other and support each other in the face of such unhinged and unnecessary violence.

We’ve been running our annual public domain game jam for eight years now, and as far as game jams go, it’s always been on the long side of the scale with a full month for people to work on their games. A lot of jams are much shorter, and that’s worth keeping in mind today as we’re just a little more than 24 hours away from the deadline for the latest installment, Gaming Like It’s 1930! The ticking clock doesn’t mean you’ve missed the boat, it means now is the perfect time to get creative, whip up a simple game, and make your submission!

There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. In past years, we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display in even the most basic of games, so if you don’t have anything to do tonight, why not try your hand?

Head over to the game jam page on Itch, read the full rules, and get some ideas about works you might use. Submissions close at midnight tomorrow, January 31st, and after that we’ll be diving in to choose winners in our six categories. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.

We’ve already had some excellent submissions, and we can’t wait to see what else comes in tomorrow night. Your game could be one of them!

If you’ve been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to be “restoring trust in journalism.”

It’s… not going well.

Weiss’ inaugural “town hall” with opportunistic right wing grifter Erika Kirk was a ratings dud, her new nightly news broadcast has been an error-prone hot mess, and her murder of a 60 Minutes story about Trump concentration camps — and the network’s decision to air a story lying about the ICE murder of Nicole Good — has spurred a revolt among the CBS journalists that haven’t quit yet.

Weiss has, as all fail-upward media brunchlords do, repeatedly tried to blame her staffers for both her incompetence and for not doing more to coddle her public image. Things have gotten so heated at the crumbling CBS that Weiss has had to “pause” her “Honestly” podcast to put out fires at CBS:

“Thursday morning on her Free Press platform, Weiss said that taking on CBS News is a “huge responsibility,” before continuing, “So here is the news: ‘Honestly’ is taking a little bit of a pause. I know it is hard to hear that, it’s definitely hard for me to do that because I love doing this show. But I think and I hope that you will understand why.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not forever; we’ll be back in just a few short months,” she added.”

There’s a dash of hubris there for Weiss to think that she can fix the problems at CBS in “just a few short months.” There’s every indication Weiss not only has absolutely no idea what she’s doing, but that she lacks the introspection to be able to realize that she’s the problem and to adjust accordingly. That likely means she continues to flounder until she’s inevitably replaced by somebody even worse.

As we’ve noted previously, the problem for Weiss isn’t that she’s bad at journalism (though that’s certainly true). The problem for Weiss is that she’s bad at ratings-grabbing propaganda, the primary function she was hired for. If you’re going to create noxious state race-baiting propaganda, you have to at least make it entertaining — something Roger Aisles understood well.

Weiss’ incompetence is trouble for a CBS/Paramount parent company that has not only seen ratings in free fall at CBS, they’ve watched their stock drop 40 percent since Larry Ellison’s clumsy hostile takeover attempt of Warner Brothers (and CNN, HBO).

Ellison, fresh off his new co-ownership stake in TikTok, clearly wants to dominate both old and new media and to create a modern version of state television. The sort of thing we’ve seen in countries like Russia and Hungary, where autocrats have hollowed out what was left of media and turned it into an extension of the state (something we’ve already seen across much of U.S. corporate media and Fox News):

During the Soviet era, at times of govt instability, the state broadcaster would typically preempt scheduled broadcasts by airing performances of Swan Lake

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) 2026-01-26T02:59:44.529Z

If there’s any bright spot to this mess, it’s that absolutely nobody in this chain of dysfunction, from the trust fund nepobaby son of Larry Ellison, to the weird contrarian culture war trolls they’re hiring to spread agitprop, have the slightest idea what they’re doing.

If U.S. media and democracy is saved from these zealots, it won’t be thanks to competent media reforms by the opposition party (which pretty broadly don’t exist in the United States, yet), it will be thanks to the raw, blistering hubris and incompetence of folks like Bari Weiss and David Ellison.

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.

Courts disagreed. They recognized that copying works in order to understand, index, and locate information is a classic fair use—and a necessary condition for a free and open internet.

Today, the same argument is being recycled against AI. It’s whether copyright owners should be allowed to control how others analyze, reuse, and build on existing works.

Fair Use Protects Analysis—Even When It’s Automated

U.S. courts have long recognized that copying for purposes of analysis, indexing, and learning is a classic fair use. That principle didn’t originate with artificial intelligence. It doesn’t disappear just because the processes are performed by a machine.

Copying that works in order to understand them, extract information from them, or make them searchable is transformative and lawful. That’s why search engines can index the web, libraries can make digital indexes, and researchers can analyze large collections of text and data without negotiating licenses from millions of rightsholders. These uses don’t substitute for the original works; they enable new forms of knowledge and expression.

Training AI models fits squarely within that tradition. An AI system learns by analyzing patterns across many works. The purpose of that copying is not to reproduce or replace the original texts, but to extract statistical relationships that allow the AI system to generate new outputs. That is the hallmark of a transformative use. 

Attacking AI training on copyright grounds misunderstands what’s at stake. If copyright law is expanded to require permission for analyzing or learning from existing works, the damage won’t be limited to generative AI tools. It could threaten long-standing practices in machine learning and text-and-data mining that underpin research in science, medicine, and technology. 

Researchers already rely on fair use to analyze massive datasets such as scientific literature. Requiring licenses for these uses would often be impractical or impossible, and it would advantage only the largest companies with the money to negotiate blanket deals. Fair use exists to prevent copyright from becoming a barrier to understanding the world. The law has protected learning before. It should continue to do so now, even when that learning is automated. 

A Road Forward For AI Training And Fair Use 

One court has already shown how these cases should be analyzed. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that using copyrighted works to train an AI model is a highly transformative use. Training is a kind of studying how language works—not about reproducing or supplanting the original books. Any harm to the market for the original works was speculative. 

The court in Bartz rejected the idea that an AI model might infringe because, in some abstract sense, its output competes with existing works. While EFF disagrees with other parts of the decision, the court’s ruling on AI training and fair use offers a good approach. Courts should focus on whether training is transformative and non-substitutive, not on fear-based speculation about how a new tool could affect someone’s market share. 

AI Can Create Problems, But Expanding Copyright Is the Wrong Fix 

Workers’ concerns about automation and displacement are real and should not be ignored. But copyright is the wrong tool to address them. Managing economic transitions and protecting workers during turbulent times may be core functions of government, but copyright law doesn’t help with that task in the slightest. Expanding copyright control over learning and analysis won’t stop new forms of worker automation—it never has. But it will distort copyright law and undermine free expression. 

Broad licensing mandates may also do harm by entrenching the current biggest incumbent companies. Only the largest tech firms can afford to negotiate massive licensing deals covering millions of works. Smaller developers, research teams, nonprofits, and open-source projects will all get locked out. Copyright expansion won’t restrain Big Tech—it will give it a new advantage.  

Fair Use Still Matters

Learning from prior work is foundational to free expression. Rightsholders cannot be allowed to control it. Courts have rejected that move before, and they should do so again.

Search, indexing, and analysis didn’t destroy creativity. Nor did the photocopier, nor the VCR. They expanded speech, access to knowledge, and participation in culture. Artificial intelligence raises hard new questions, but fair use remains the right starting point for thinking about training.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no.

So the DOJ arrested him anyway.

On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. Journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort followed the protesters through the church’s publicly accessible doors to cover the story. They streamed the protest. They asked questions. They committed acts of journalism.

And by this morning they were both in federal custody (though since released).

Organizers of the protest, to the extent they had any real organizational control, were arrested. Pictures of at least one of those arrests were run through one AI platform or another to make those arrested appear to be in more distress than they actually had been.

When that didn’t quench the thirst for cruelty and fascism of this particular regime, Pam Bondi’s DOJ then attempted to go after the journalists themselves. For what crime? Anyone’s guess, honestly. The DOJ attempted to get arrest warrants for Fort and Lemon from the courts, which told them to fuck all the way off. The DOJ then attempted to appeal the rejection without informing the lower court, and attempted to get the Appeals Court to hide the request under seal. That wasn’t successful either.

But rather than admitting that violating the First Amendment rights of journalists was a total stinker of an endeavor, the DOJ convened a grand jury, apparently got an indictment, and then both Lemon and Fort were arrested at Bondi’s direction.

Local Minnesota reporter Georgia Fort, along with former CNN journalist Don Lemon, were arrested by federal agents following their coverage of a protest at a church in St. Paul. Don Lemon’s attorney said he was “taken by federal agents” on the evening of Thursday, Jan. 29, while he was in Los Angeles covering the Grammy Awards. Local independent journalist Georgia Fort was also arrested at her home by federal agents.

A statement from the Center of Broadcast Journalism called the arrest “An assault on press and on the 1st Amendment.”

“Georgia Fort, a trusted and cherished journalist in Minnesota, was arrested in the early morning hours for doing her job by covering a pop-up protest at Cities Church in St. Paul,” the statement read. “It is an outrage that a vetted and credentialed member of the media would be in any way prosecuted for doing her appointed duty in covering news. If the federal government can come for Georgia no member of the supposed ‘free’ press is safe.” 

This is incredibly dumb for a variety of reasons. For starters, the Minnesota courts, where any trial will take place, are not going to take kindly to the idea that it told the DOJ its requests for arrest warrants were hot garbage only to have that same DOJ end run around the courts to make those same arrests via a grand jury. It’s a slap in the face to the very court system within which the DOJ will have to operate. Elie Mystal is spot on about this at The Nation.

The arrests of the two journalists are clearly unconstitutional. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to know that arresting journalists for covering the news is a clear violation of the First Amendment. Lemon’s arrest is also flatly illegal. Last week, the Trump administration went to a federal magistrate judge, Douglas L. Micko, to ask for an arrest warrant for Lemon. The judge refused. The Trump administration then appealed and lost that appeal. The legal system literally said the government couldn’t arrest Lemon, but the government arrested him anyway, and they went all the way to Los Angeles (far from Minnesota) to get him.

Georgia Fort is a prominent Black journalist based in Minnesota. She was out front in covering the George Floyd protests, and expertly covered the trial of his killer, Derek Chauvin. I have little doubt that this prior reporting is among the reasons she was targeted by the Trump administration.

Add to that the very open question, based on the law that the DOJ is citing here, whether any of this actually violates a statute, by anyone involved in this at all. I would very much argue that it does not, by plain reading of the law. As Quinta Jurecic at the Atlantic notes, the legal argument is garbage.

The indictment itself makes for a strange read. No attorneys other than political appointees appear on the filing—a hint that career Justice Department employees might not have wanted to be involved. The government treats Lemon and Fort as co-conspirators of the protesters without acknowledging any protections afforded by their role as journalists. Both charges derive from the FACE Act, a 1994 law meant to prevent anti-abortion protestors from restricting access to reproductive-health clinics. Here, though, the Justice Department is leveraging a lesser-known portion of the statute that provides similar protections for freedom of religion in places of worship. Kyle Boynton, who recently departed from his position as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division, told me that this provision of the FACE Act has never been used—probably because “it’s plainly unconstitutional” as an overreach of Congress’s authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause. Boynton, who prosecuted FACE Act cases and crimes committed against houses of worship while at the Justice Department, was unimpressed with the legal reasoning in the indictment. “I think it’s very likely to face dismissal,” he said. Not only might courts find the statute unconstitutional, but Lemon and Fort could also contest the charges on First Amendment grounds, and the indictment doesn’t clearly show a FACE violation to begin with.

But it’s even dumber than that. As Dan Froomkin points out, part of the indictment tries to argue that the “overt acts” needed to prove a “conspiracy” is… that these journalists… interviewed the pastor. Or, as the DOJ says, “peppered him with questions.”

My goodness. How dare he commit acts of journalism?

Separately, you can watch the Don Lemon stream footage. He makes it very clear that he is there in his capacity as a journalist. He is not actually interrupting services. He is there covering the story. The same is true of Fort.

Both arrested journalists are Black. The head of the DOJ’s “civil rights division,” Harmeet Dhillon, celebrated by retweeting Republican operative Mike Davis calling Lemon “a klansman.”

Davis, for those unfamiliar, went on a right-wing fabulist’s podcast before the 2024 election and promised that if Trump won, opponents would be “hunted.” He promised “retribution.” He said: “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious…. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

That guy is now calling a Black journalist a “klansman” for doing journalism, while the head of Civil Rights retweets it approvingly.

It’s not just Davis and Dhillon joyfully cheering on this blatant attack on the First Amendment. The White House itself posted a black and white photo of Don Lemon cheering on his arrest, calling it (ridiculously) the “St. Paul Church Riots” (there were no riots) and tweeting “When life gives you lemons…” along with chain emojis.

That will likely go right into Lemon’s filing for vindictive prosecution.

Courts have already ordered both Lemon and Fort released, though they’ll be back in court. In Lemon’s case, the judge refused to issue the requested $100k bond the government asked for. The court also will allow him to travel internationally on a pre-planned trip, even though the government demanded he hand over his passport. All of this seems clearly designed for blatant intimidation over media coverage.

The DOJ is now treating journalism as conspiracy, questions as overt acts, and coverage as crime. Courts told them no and they did it anyway—gleefully celebrating the end of the rule of law, openly gloating about punishing the President’s critics for their speech.

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Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary this month as the internet’s most reliable knowledge source. Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: the volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers. The same institution founded on the principle of easy and open community collaboration could now be proving unmovable—trapped between the need to adapt and an institutional resistance to change.

Wikipedia’s Digital Sclerosis

Political economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for studying the ways communities successfully manage shared resources—the “commons.” Wikipedia’s two founders (Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger) established the internet’s open-source encyclopedia 25 years ago on principles of the commons: its volunteer editors create and enforce policies, resolve disputes, and shape the encyclopedia’s direction.

But building around the commons contains a trade-off, Ostrom’s work found. Communities that make collective decisions tend to develop strong institutional identities. And those identities sometimes spawn reflexively conservative impulses.

Giving users agency over Wikipedia’s rules, as I’ve discovered in some of my own studies of Wikipedia, can lead an institution away ultimately from the needs of those the institution serves.

Wikipedia’s editors have built the largest collaborative knowledge project in human history. But the governance these editors exercise increasingly resists new generations of innovation.

Paradoxically, Wikipedia’s revolutionarily collaborative structure once put it at the vanguard of innovation on the open internet. But now that same structure may be failing newer generations of readers.

Does Wikipedia’s Format Belong to Readers or Editors?

There’s a generational disconnect today at the heart of Wikipedia’s current struggles. The encyclopedia’s format remains wedded to the information-dense, text-heavy style of Encyclopaedia Britannica—the very model Wikipedia was designed to replace.

A Britannica replacement made sense in 2001. One-quarter of a century ago, the average internet user was older and accustomed to reading long-form content.

However, teens and twentysomethings today are of a very different demographic and have markedly different media consumption habits compared to Wikipedia’s forebears. Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers are accustomed to TikTok, YouTube, and mobile-first visual media. Their impatience for Wikipedia’s impenetrable walls of text, as any parent of kids of this age knows, arguably threatens the future of the internet’s collaborative knowledge clearinghouse.

The Wikimedia Foundation knows this, too. Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article, before the reader considers whether to dive into the article’s full text.

So last June, the Foundation launched a modest experiment they called “Simple Article Summaries.” The summaries consisted of AI-generated, simplified text at the top of complex articles. Summaries were clearly labeled as machine-generated and unverified, and they were available only to mobile users who opted in.

Even after all these precautions, however, the volunteer editor community barely gave the experiment time to begin. Editors shut down Simple Article Summaries within a day of its launch.

The response was fierce. Editors called the experiment a “ghastly idea” and warned of “immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia’s credibility.

Comments in the village pump (a community discussion page) ranged from blunt (“Yuck“) to alarmed, with contributors raising legitimate concerns about AI hallucinations and the erosion of editorial oversight.

Revisiting Wikipedia’s Past Helps Reveal Its Future

Last year’s Simple Summaries storm, and sudden silencing, should be considered in light of historical context. Consider three other flashpoints from Wikipedia’s past:

In 2013, the Foundation launched VisualEditor—a “what you see is what you get” interface meant to make editing easier—as the default for all newcomers. However, the interface often crashed, broke articles, and was so slow that experienced editors fled. After protests erupted, a Wikipedia administrator overrode the Foundation’s rollout, returning VisualEditor to an opt-in feature.

The following year brought Media Viewer, which changed how images displayed. The community voted to disable it. Then, when an administrator implemented that consensus, a Foundation executive reversed the change and threatened to revoke the admin’s privileges. On the German Wikipedia, the Foundation deployed a new “superprotect” user right to prevent the community from turning Media Viewer off.

Even proposals that technically won majority support met resistance. In 2011, the Foundation held a referendum on an image filter that would let readers voluntarily hide graphic content. Despite 56 percent support, the feature was shelved after the German Wikipedia community voted 86 percent against it.

These three controversies from Wikipedia’s past reveals how genuine conversations can achieve—after disagreements and controversy—compromise and evolution of Wikipedia’s features and formats. Reflexive vetoes of new experiments, as the Simple Summaries spat highlighted last summer, is not genuine conversation.

Supplementing Wikipedia’s Encyclopedia Britannica-style format with a small component that contains AI summaries is not a simple problem with a cut-and-dry answer. Though neither were VisualEditor or Media Viewer.

Why did 2025’s Wikipedia crisis result in immediate clampdown, whereas its internal crises between 2011-’14 found more community-based debates involving discussions and plebiscites? Is Wikipedia’s global readership today witnessing the first signs of a dangerous generation gap ?

Wikipedia Needs to Air Its Sustainability Crisis

A still deeper crisis haunts the online encyclopedia: the sustainability of unpaid labor. Wikipedia was built by volunteers who found meaning in collective knowledge creation. That model worked brilliantly when a generation of internet enthusiasts had time, energy, and idealism to spare. But the volunteer base is aging. A 2010 study found the average Wikipedia contributor was in their mid-20s; today, many of those same editors are now in their forties or fifties.

Meanwhile, the tech industry has discovered how to extract billions in value from their work. AI companies train their large language models on Wikipedia’s corpus. The Wikimedia Foundation recently noted it remains one of the highest-quality datasets in the world for AI development. Research confirms that when developers try to omit Wikipedia from training data, their models produce answers that are less accurate, less diverse, and less verifiable.

The irony is stark. AI systems deliver answers derived from Wikipedia without sending users back to the source. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and countless other tools have learned from Wikipedia’s volunteer-created content—then present that knowledge in ways that break the virtuous cycle Wikipedia depends on. Fewer readers visit the encyclopedia directly. Fewer visitors become editors. Fewer users donate. The pipeline that sustained Wikipedia for a quarter century is breaking down.

What Does Wikipedia’s Next 25 Years Look Like?

The Simple Summaries situation arguably risks making the encyclopedia increasingly irrelevant to younger generations of readers. And they’ll be relying on Wikipedia’s information commons for the longest timeframe of any cohort now editing or reading it.

On the other hand, a larger mandate does of course remain at Wikipedia to serve as stewards of the information commons. And wrongly implementing Simple Summaries could fail this ambitious objective. Which would be terrible, too.

All of which, frankly, are what open discussions and sometimes-messy referenda are all about: Not just sudden shutdowns.

Meanwhile, AI systems should credit Wikipedia when drawing on its content, maintaining the transparency that builds public trust. Companies profiting from Wikipedia’s corpus should pay for access through legitimate channels like Wikimedia Enterprise, rather than scraping servers or relying on data dumps that strain infrastructure without contributing to maintenance.

Perhaps as the AI marketplace matures, there could be room for new large language models trained exclusively on trustworthy Wikimedia data—transparent, verifiable, and free from the pollution of synthetic AI-generated content. Perhaps, too, Creative Commons licenses need updating to account for AI-era realities.

Perhaps Wikipedia itself needs new modalities for creating and sharing knowledge—ones that preserve editorial rigor while meeting audiences where they are.

Wikipedia has survived edit wars, vandalism campaigns, and countless predictions of its demise. It has patiently outlived the skeptics who dismissed it as unreliable. It has proven that strangers can collaborate to build something remarkable.

But Wikipedia cannot survive by refusing to change. Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning research reminds us that the communities that govern shared resources often grow conservative over time.

For anyone who cares about the future of reliable information online, Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary is not just a celebration. It is an urgent warning about what happens when the institutions we depend on cannot adapt to the people they are meant to serve.

Dariusz Jemielniak is Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a Full Professor at Kozminski University in Warsaw, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He served for a decade on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and is the author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Stanford University Press).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy this week’s videos!

Westwood Robotics is proud to announce a major update: THEMIS Gen2.5, the world’s first commercial full-size humanoid robot capable of manipulation on the move!

Now that you mention it, the bit at the end where the robot picks up a can while walking? I haven’t seen a lot of that.

[ Westwood Robotics ]

Last year, Helix showed that a single neural network could control a humanoid’s upper body from pixels. Today, Helix 02 extends that control to the entire robot—walking, manipulating, and balancing as one continuous system.

Why yes, I am a normal human and this is very similar to the default state of my kitchen.

[ Figure ]

Harry Goldstein, our Editor in Chief, went to meet Sprout from Fauna Robotics. He was skeptical at first, but Sprout won him over with its robotic charm.

[ Fauna Robotics ]

Kimberly Elenberg is showing how the data collected by robotic responders can save lives in mass casualty events.

[ Carnegie Mellon University ]

The educational robotics market is tough, but you’ve got to hand it to Sphero—going strong since 2011, which is pretty incredible.

[ Sphero ]

If you want to fly in crazy conditions, you have to flight test in those conditions. Here’s how and why we do it!

[ Zipline ]

I want to be impressed more by the idea of 3D printing skin and skeleton at the same time, but come on, animals have been doing that for literally hundreds of years without even trying.

[ JSK Lab, University of tokyo ]

If there is a market for small bipedal robots that can both ski and be dinosaurs, LimX has it covered.

[ LimX ]

How do you remotely control robots that change shape? We introduce a method for user-guided control of modular robots using reconfigurable joint-space joysticks (JoJo) and real-time optimization. We demonstrate this system on two different robots, Mori3 and Roombots. The video shows examples of these robots performing object manipulation, locomotion, human-assistance, and reconfiguration, controlled by our system.

[ EPFL Reconfigurable Robotics Lab ] via [ Nature Communications ]

Quadrotor Biplane Tailsitter (QBiT) UAVs at four different sizes (4, 12, 25, and 50 lbs) developed at Texas A&M University. QBiT combines the mechanical simplicity of a quadrotor drone with the cruise efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft.

[ Texas A&M University ]

There’s a new DARPA challenge for “novel drone designs that can carry payloads more than four times their weight, which would revolutionize the way we use drones across all sectors.”

[ DARPA ]

Here are a couple of plenary and keynote talks from IROS 2025, from Marco Hutter and Karinne Ramirez Amaro.

[ IROS 2025 ]

This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.

In your career, you are likely to face many choices and job opportunities. One I faced was whether to participate in a development project involving teams from around the world. It presented a great opportunity for personal and professional enrichment.

Throughout my 40-year career with Honeywell, I have held leadership roles for such projects in Australia, China, Finland, and India.

You might be offered similar assignments. Here are some benefits of taking on international projects.

Gain professional insights and advancement

As a rule, international projects are large in scope and involve many critical components, making them ideal for your professional growth. Such projects are likely to be identified by your organization as essential to the business and, as such, present opportunities for individual achievement and recognition.

They also can give you the opportunity to work with many technical aspects—which would allow you to see beyond the scope of smaller-scale projects.

Likewise, you can gain an understanding of different global markets and how to meet diverse customer needs.

It can significantly expand your company’s market reach to enter new geographic areas. It also can lead to a better understanding of local preferences, regulations, and technical standards, making the products more appealing to customers in other countries.

Planning for working globally

When embarking on a global, multisite assignment, seek help to define your role. The project could require you to take on several different positions such as project manager, program manager, scrum leader, architect, requirements analyst, designer, and user experience lead. Which role would be best suited for you? You should decide based on your skills, long-term career growth, and the project’s needs.

Regardless of which role you have, it is important to have an understanding of the team’s other members, including their skills and competencies and how best to interact with them.

A key decision early on is whether you’ll have to colocate at one location and, if so, for how long. There are different types of colocation, including frequent travel between offices, a temporary relocation known as a “bubble assignment,” and an expatriate assignment that involves relocating to another country for a period of time.

Travel between offices makes sense when there are more than two locations involved in the project and your role requires your presence at each. Although weekly communication can be done via virtual meetings, there is no substitute for occasional face-to-face interaction.

Participation in global product development empowers engineers to drive innovation, achieve career growth, and make a meaningful impact in the global marketplace and on society itself.

Bubble assignments require longer on-site presence but without the rigor and complexity of an expat assignment. Generally, bubble assignments last three to six months.

Expat assignments are suitable when the project scope requires a multiyear engagement. They involve relocating to that country for the duration of the project. You and your employer should be clear about taxes, salary, benefits, housing, and other implications.

Your compensation is a significant consideration. It’s not just about how much money you earn. Consider maintaining your salary in your home country’s currency. The benefits include maintaining your bank and automatic payroll deposits, avoiding currency fluctuation and potentially adverse inflation.

Depending on the length of your stay, you might have to pay income tax in several countries. Make sure you understand the tax implications before embarking on any long assignments.

In addition, find out about your health insurance coverage when living abroad.

Trust is the word

Many critical aspects define a successful global assignment, including communication across time zones, managing cultural barriers and expectations, ensuring each site has employees with the expertise and skills needed, and setting clear project goals and time frames.

Most importantly, establish and maintain trust. Every member on the global team must have everyone’s best interests, including the company’s, in mind.

Trust is not easily gained, but it can be easily—and quickly—lost. To establish trust, the project leadership must be transparent, communicate frequently, set clear goals and boundaries, and define roles that match the participants’ skills, capabilities, and long-term interests.

It’s also critical that you and your team fulfill your promises on time.

Overcoming challenges

Large, complex, multilocation projects present other significant challenges that must be understood and managed.

Think about your company’s organizational structure and boundaries. Is there a consistent reporting structure with shared goals and expectations? Or are there potentially competing interests at the executive level?

If the latter, think about how you will navigate those boundaries. And find a way to align the organization in a way that benefits all participants and teams.

A method Honeywell has used to navigate such challenges is to create a “hub and spoke” approach to the critical disciplines of program management, architecture, and design. The approach includes offering management, verification, validation, and quality assurance with the intent that each participating site has representation in all four cornerstone areas.

Consider your computer systems. Is your company set up to allow for IT collaboration across sites and geographic boundaries? Having the right multisite computing privileges to ensure frictionless virtual teamwork is vital.

Are there legal issues such as export restrictions or government regulations? Are there intellectual property constraints when working with other countries? Also consider other impediments such as tariffs and customs duties; where the parts of your product are manufactured; product and component licensing; and use of open-source technology.

Addressing those issues starts with training the workforce in different countries about company-approved methods and restrictions, as well as having multisite tools that allow for intercountry collaboration.

Discover personal enrichment

In addition to contributing to your professional growth, actively engaging in a global development project can be personally enriching. Working with people in different countries, with distinct cultures and languages, can broaden your understanding of the world and can create lasting friendships.

That can extend to your family by hosting international colleagues in your home country and by affording your family the ability to travel with you. Children and adults can benefit from engaging with diverse people from around the world.

Taking an active part in global development offers numerous advantages for an individual. You can broaden your horizons, gain exposure to diverse markets, and develop a deeper understanding of global consumer needs. The experience can enhance your problem-solving skills and encourage innovative thinking.

Engineers who navigate the challenges of global product development become more adept at overcoming communication barriers, managing logistical complexities, and adapting to varying consumer preferences.

Ultimately, active participation in global product development empowers engineers to drive innovation, achieve career growth, and make a meaningful impact in the global marketplace and on society itself.

As fairies for the Irish or leeks for Welsh,
it’s the secret lives of small hidden machines,
their junctures, and networks that inspire me:
Mystic hidden functionaries that make
our made world live, brave little servo motors,
whose couplers, whose eccentric fire-filled
sensors are encased in bakelite with brass
screws, who stare with red eyes, who gauge moisture,
who notice tiny motions and respond,
whose cooling fans call out in white-noise
registers like older folk singers–I can
almost hear their earlier songs, their strong voices
now yelps, their thumps, their throbs, their hum, their chant–,
they click, they whir, they are sent spinning
inside like teen girls giggling over boy bands.
Most of all: ones waiting silently, concealing
the surprise of their purpose, tasks not yet known,
their true natures found only in connections.

Those that listen, those that speak,
those that control cool and heat,
those that open doors, those that lock
all the things that we’ve forgot,
those that hide, those that disclose
those embedded in our clothes
those in our ears, those in our hearts
those that bring together, those a part
of divisions, those like birds,
like parrots that complete our words,
those like fish, those that entrap,
those that free, those that freely flap
in fierce winds, those that replace
what we have lost, those that see
at night, in fog, in brightness, in fear,
those that show what we hold dear,
those that tempt, those that repel,
those that buy and those that sell,
those that keep us alive, those that
don’t, won’t, couldn’t and cannot.

Parts of one mind, not mine, blunt orchestra
of information, bundles of feelers
reaching out to touch us, teach us, guide us
to form better futures better understood.
May your sounds, your chimes, your silence calm us.
May your tender tendrils touch what we seek.
Small parts becoming one being intertwined,
a world in itself, remind us to be kind.