If you are run­ning Android 8 or higher, a virus has been in­stalled on your de­vice and is silently await­ing re­mote ac­ti­va­tion. Over the past few months, de­vices around the world have been in­fected with this novel strain, with as many as 4 bil­lion Android hand­sets and tablets es­ti­mated to have al­ready been con­t­a­m­i­nated, mean­ing that around half of all hu­man­ity may be at risk from this threat.

Disguising it­self as the in­nocu­ously-ti­tled “Android Developer Verifier” (ADV) process, this tro­jan horse runs sur­rep­ti­tiously in the back­ground as a sys­tem ser­vice with full root priv­i­leges, qui­etly await­ing an ac­ti­va­tion sig­nal. The ser­vice can­not be blocked, dis­abled, or re­moved. Unlike a com­mon­place bit of mal­ware, this ex­tra­or­di­nary strain won’t be de­tected and neu­tral­ized by Play Protect (the mal­ware scan­ning and re­me­di­a­tion ser­vice that is in­stalled on all Android Certified de­vices). In fact, Play Protect is it­self the vec­tor through which this virus is trans­mit­ted and in­stalled.

That is be­cause it is Google them­selves who is prop­a­gat­ing ADV. And once ac­ti­vated, this malev­o­lent process has ex­actly one goal: to block you from run­ning soft­ware by de­vel­op­ers who haven’t been ap­proved cen­trally by Google.

Threat mas­querad­ing as Protection

We first raised the alarm about the Android Developer Verification pro­gram last September (“F-Droid and Google’s Developer Registration Decree”) shortly af­ter it was first an­nounced. Google’s loom­ing re­quire­ment that all Android de­vel­op­ers reg­is­ter them­selves cen­trally is ra­tio­nal­ized as a so­lu­tion to help stem the spread of mal­ware. However it does­n’t ac­tu­ally fea­ture any ca­pa­bil­i­ties to pre­vent a malev­o­lent ac­tor from dis­trib­ut­ing mal­ware in the first place; the only al­leged ben­e­fit of ADV is that it may help slow the ac­tions of an al­ready-iden­ti­fied re­cidi­vist by re­quir­ing that they cre­ate (or buy) an­other ac­count in or­der to con­tinue dis­trib­ut­ing their mal­ware with a new sign­ing key.

For this fairly nar­row threat vec­tor of mal­ware re­cidi­vism, a va­ri­ety of con­sid­er­ably less dra­con­ian so­lu­tions have been pro­posed. Play Protect it­self could be en­hanced to scru­ti­nize more closely those newly-in­stalled apps that have el­e­vated per­mis­sions or that were ob­tained through sus­pect chan­nels, con­tin­u­ing with their re­cently touted ad­vances in on-de­vice se­cu­rity ca­pa­bil­i­ties. Or a sys­tem of fed­er­ated ver­i­fiers might be im­ple­mented (as pro­posed in “DCM: A Developers Certification Model for Mobile Ecosystems”, 2023) that would em­power end-users to se­lect their own trusted cu­ra­tors and au­thor­i­ties for ex-ante ap­proval. Instead, Google has used this mi­nor vec­tor as a pre­text to rad­i­cally re-en­gi­neer the en­tire Android ecosys­tem by fiat, up­end­ing a 18 year tra­di­tion of open soft­ware de­vel­op­ment and po­si­tion­ing them­selves as the world’s sole gate­keeper for which apps are per­mit­ted to ex­ist.

What They Talk About When They Talk About Malware

Should a de­vel­oper — con­trary to our rec­om­men­da­tion — elect to reg­is­ter them­self with Google as a “verified” de­vel­oper, they should ex­pect to sign up for an ac­count and pay a fee, sur­ren­der de­tailed per­sonal in­for­ma­tion and up­load gov­ern­ment-is­sued iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, and then pro­ceed to reg­is­ter the iden­ti­fiers and sign­ing keys for all the apps they in­tend to dis­trib­ute (now or ever).

But the most di­a­bol­i­cal stage is the com­pul­sory agree­ment to the Android Developer Console Terms of Service. There are nu­mer­ous causes for dis­quiet in this doc­u­ment, but the most con­cern­ing of all ought to be:

6.5 If You vi­o­late any of the Terms or if You dis­trib­ute mal­ware or other harm­ful ap­pli­ca­tions, Google may ter­mi­nate Your ac­cess to the ADC…

6.5 If You vi­o­late any of the Terms or if You dis­trib­ute mal­ware or other harm­ful ap­pli­ca­tions, Google may ter­mi­nate Your ac­cess to the ADC…

This rea­son­able-sound­ing clause begs the ques­tion: what ex­actly is meant by “malware”? No de­f­i­n­i­tion of the term is to be found any­where in the doc­u­ment. With the ab­sence of any for­mal de­f­i­n­i­tion, stan­dard, or guide­line, it im­plic­itly states:

…and “malware” means what­ever we say it means.

…and “malware” means what­ever we say it means.

As we dis­cussed in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading”, be­ware the dan­gers of al­low­ing the ter­mi­nol­ogy of de­bate to be de­fined by those who don’t have your best in­ter­ests at heart. Malware be­ing syn­ony­mous with “software we don’t like” means that they can uni­lat­er­ally dic­tate — dri­ven ei­ther by busi­ness in­cen­tives or by be­ing com­pelled by a suf­fi­ciently pow­er­ful gov­ern­ment — what the mal­ware-du-jour de­f­i­n­i­tion is to be.

For prece­dent, per­sonal con­tent fil­ter­ing in the form of “ad block­ers” has long since been banned from the Play Store, and they have even clas­si­fied some in­stances as mal­ware. How long be­fore they des­ig­nate all ad-block­ing soft­ware as mal­ware, block in­stal­la­tion on all Android cer­ti­fied de­vices world­wide, and per­ma­nently des­ig­nate all de­vel­op­ers of this class of soft­ware as mal­ware cre­ators? Such a move would cer­tainly be aligned with their com­mer­cial in­cen­tives as the global ad-tech mo­nop­o­list, and would be com­pletely in ac­cor­dance with the lan­guage of their ADC Terms and Conditions.

Like a Lead Balloon

In terms of vol­un­tary de­vel­oper up­take, they re­cently claimed that “over 99% of [Play de­vel­op­ers’] apps have been reg­is­tered” sug­gests that ADV is some­how a pop­u­lar and widely-ac­cepted dic­tate. That could­n’t be fur­ther from the truth: those 99% of de­vel­op­ers were auto-opted-in with­out their in­formed con­sent due to be­ing al­ready bound by their Play Store agree­ments.

In fact, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have signed a pe­ti­tion op­pos­ing ADV. The Open Letter at keepan­droidopen.org de­nounc­ing the pro­gram has been signed by over 70 or­ga­ni­za­tions around the world, in­clud­ing the EFF, FSF, FSFE, ACLU, and the in­es­timable Forbrukerrådet. Any in­ter­net search, chat­bot query, or so­cial me­dia poll will con­firm that the op­po­si­tion to this pro­gram is over­whelm­ing and the con­dem­na­tion is uni­ver­sal. 90% of view­ers of the de­vel­oper round­table video where they at­tempt to de­fend the pro­gram reg­is­tered a dis­like of the spec­ta­cle, and even Google Gemini re­sponds to in­quiries about the pop­u­lar­ity of the pro­gram with:

Aside from Google it­self, find­ing full-throated, en­thu­si­as­tic sup­port for the manda­tory Android Developer Verification pro­gram in the tech com­mu­nity is vir­tu­ally im­pos­si­ble.

The back­lash is over­whelm­ingly dom­i­nant—head­lined by the “Keep Android Open” coali­tion of civil rights and open-source groups fiercely op­pos­ing the cen­tral reg­is­tra­tion re­quire­ment.

Aside from Google it­self, find­ing full-throated, en­thu­si­as­tic sup­port for the manda­tory Android Developer Verification pro­gram in the tech com­mu­nity is vir­tu­ally im­pos­si­ble.

The back­lash is over­whelm­ingly dom­i­nant—head­lined by the “Keep Android Open” coali­tion of civil rights and open-source groups fiercely op­pos­ing the cen­tral reg­is­tra­tion re­quire­ment.

And yet their lock­down blitzkrieg pro­ceeds apace. Legislators and reg­u­la­tors have thus far been un­re­cep­tive to the out­cry. Our own po­si­tion as a bas­tion of soft­ware free­dom and re­spect for user rights and pri­vacy is in ex­treme jeop­ardy. The F-Droid model of se­cu­rity and trust through open-source trans­parency is fun­da­men­tally at odds with the “trust me bro” se­cu­rity model of the closed-source com­mer­cial app stores. And while these two mod­els have been able to co-ex­ist for the past 16 years of F-Droid’s ex­is­tence, it ap­pears that Google in­tends to es­tab­lish a regime where they alone have a mo­nop­oly on the de­f­i­n­i­tions of “security” and “trust”.

What to Expect in the Days to Come

We do not yet know the ex­act fail­ure mode to ex­pect when the ADV ac­ti­va­tion is trig­gered on September 30. If you are one of the 580 mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, or Thailand, know that these are the first four tar­gets of the ADV lock­down ac­cord­ing to their pub­lished time­line (global roll­out is omi­nously pre­dicted to then oc­cur through­out “2027 and be­yond”).

There are many things we don’t know about what to ex­pect on September 30. Some com­mon ques­tions that we do not yet have the an­swer to, for those in the af­flicted re­gions, are:

What will hap­pen if I try to in­stall or launch the F-Droid app?

What will hap­pen to all the apps I’ve in­stalled through F-Droid? Will they be dis­abled? Deleted?

If apps that I rely on are sud­denly dis­ap­peared, what hap­pens to the data they con­tain? Can I still re­trieve it?

With all soft­ware in­stal­la­tions and launches now be­ing re­ported back to Google for ver­i­fi­ca­tion, what spe­cific in­for­ma­tion does that teleme­try in­clude?

We have reached out to the mal­ware ven­dor with our in­quiries. In the com­ing weeks and months lead­ing up to the lock­down, we will be pub­lish­ing more guid­ance and sup­port for those due to be im­pacted by ADV.

The Spanish gov­ern­ment has com­menced is­su­ing di­rec­tives to state-con­trolled en­ti­ties to black­list U.S. data an­a­lyt­ics firm Palantir Technologies.

The de­ci­sion stems di­rectly from grow­ing of­fi­cial con­cern over the po­ten­tial mis­use of clas­si­fied in­for­ma­tion linked to na­tional se­cu­rity.

Moncloa has in­structed com­pa­nies over­seen by the State Society of Industrial Participations (SEPI) to halt fu­ture con­tract­ing with the Miami-based ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and data analy­sis multi­na­tional.

The di­rec­tive im­pacts ma­jor en­ti­ties re­spon­si­ble for high-level state com­mu­ni­ca­tions and mil­i­tary in­tel­li­gence, in­clud­ing Telefónica, Indra, and the mil­i­tary ship­builder Navantia.

National Sovereignty Concerns

According to cor­po­rate board sources, the prime min­is­ter’s of­fice com­mu­ni­cated the ban to listed com­pa­nies to pre­vent any con­tracts that could jeop­ar­dize Spanish na­tional sov­er­eignty.

The po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ven­tion has al­ready dis­rupted ad­vanced pro­cure­ment pipelines, in­clud­ing a near-fi­nal­ized pro­ject with Navantia and a ne­go­ti­ated col­lab­o­ra­tion agree­ment with the Guardia Civil that was ve­toed by Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska.

The re­stric­tions mir­ror re­cent reg­u­la­tory and po­lit­i­cal push­back against Palantir else­where in Europe.

Former French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu an­nounced on June 10 that France would cease work­ing with the firm, while German cy­berde­fense au­thor­i­ties and se­cret ser­vices have in­creas­ingly fa­vored European al­ter­na­tives like the French com­peti­tor ChaosVision.

Defense Procurement Deadlock

Despite the broader pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor black­list, Palantir con­tin­ues to main­tain ac­tive con­tracts with the Spanish Ministry of Defense.

The firm holds a €16.5 mil­lion con­tract signed in 2023 with the Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS), which is sched­uled to ex­pire this up­com­ing November.

Military lead­er­ship, in­clud­ing the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Navy, has lob­bied Defense Minister Margarita Robles to re­new the con­tract, cit­ing the plat­for­m’s op­er­a­tional su­pe­ri­or­ity.

However, Moncloa has yet to make an of­fi­cial de­ter­mi­na­tion re­gard­ing the de­fense con­tract ex­ten­sion as the ex­pi­ra­tion date ap­proaches.

Geopolitical Friction and Domestic Alternatives

The do­mes­tic black­list co­in­cides with sharp geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sion be­tween Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the in­com­ing U.S. ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Palantir founders Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp have deep fi­nan­cial and po­lit­i­cal ties to Donald Trump, whose po­lit­i­cal plat­form con­flicts di­rectly with the diplo­matic po­si­tions main­tained by Madrid.

In re­sponse to the per­ceived risks of re­ly­ing on for­eign de­fense soft­ware, Spain is ac­cel­er­at­ing fund­ing for do­mes­tic tech­nol­ogy plat­forms to pre­serve na­tional data sov­er­eignty.

The ex­ec­u­tive re­cently ap­proved an €115 mil­lion in­vest­ment in the Catalan firm Openchip, part of a broader €5 bil­lion state-backed gi­gafac­tory pro­ject, fi­nanced largely by SEPI Digital.

Today in Tedium: Recently, I passed 20,000 fol­low­ers on Bluesky, which I did­n’t re­ally say any­thing about. Sure, I thought about it, but then I had de­cided to my­self, what’s the point? Soon, there will be an­other mark I can point to and feel weird about. The thing about so­cial me­dia these days is that the good stuff all too of­ten pulls you in, but at the end of the day, you end up feel­ing hol­low. Perhaps it’s for this rea­son that, when I spot­ted a thread ask­ing about what my fa­vorite so­cial net­work of all time was, my an­swer was­n’t Twitter or Bluesky or even Tumblr. It was, of all things, a fo­rum for news de­sign­ers that ex­isted in the mid-2000s called Visual Editors. It barely worked, hon­estly: It had a chat op­tion that was pop­u­lar with de­sign­ers wait­ing for their pages to get proofed late in the evening, but it would of­ten go down with no warn­ing. But from a com­mu­nity stand­point, it was spec­tac­u­lar. Why don’t many mod­ern so­cial net­works feel like that? Today’s Tedium pon­ders the fate of the web fo­rum. — Ernie @ Tedium

110k

The num­ber of news­groups that many mod­ern Usenet providers, in­clud­ing GigaNews and SuperNews, pro­mote as be­ing avail­able on their ser­vices. The Usenet sys­tem, with roots in the late 1970s, was the first fo­rum-like sys­tem many early in­ter­net users re­lied on, with the other pri­mary op­tion be­ing email list­servs. But by the late 1990s, the not-par­tic­u­larly-graph­i­cal Usenet was al­ready falling out of fa­vor.

Why the Web even­tu­ally moved in the di­rec­tion of fo­rums

If you think about it, the web fo­rum was a ter­ri­ble fit for the way the Web worked. We al­ready tech­ni­cally had a tool that al­lowed peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate with one an­other in a fo­rum set­ting in the early ’90s—Usenet.

Or, at least, that’s what it seemed like. So I won­dered, well, what did peo­ple think about the growth of web fo­rums on Usenet? And that led me in the di­rec­tion of a fas­ci­nat­ing post from mod­ern-day fu­tur­ist Eric Hunting.

Posting on alt.hy­per­text in the thread “Forums in the Web,” in April 1994, Hunting more or less pre­dicted what web fo­rums would be­come in just a cou­ple of years:

One of the things lack­ing in the en­vi­ron­ment of the Web is a means of us­ing Web pages as a medium for con­duct­ing open dis­cus­sions or fo­rums as you have in USENET. The rea­son for this is prob­a­bly that there is no means of pack­ag­ing pages, along with all their as­so­ci­ated graph­ics and mul­ti­me­dia data, like fo­rum posts nor would it be prac­ti­cal to dis­trib­ute such po­ten­tially huge amounts of data among fo­rum servers as with USENET.

One of the things lack­ing in the en­vi­ron­ment of the Web is a means of us­ing Web pages as a medium for con­duct­ing open dis­cus­sions or fo­rums as you have in USENET. The rea­son for this is prob­a­bly that there is no means of pack­ag­ing pages, along with all their as­so­ci­ated graph­ics and mul­ti­me­dia data, like fo­rum posts nor would it be prac­ti­cal to dis­trib­ute such po­ten­tially huge amounts of data among fo­rum servers as with USENET.

His post, which is a bit wordy, de­scribes the con­cept of threads, URLs as or­ga­niz­ing struc­tures, and what might or might not work. Essentially, the ad­di­tion of im­ages and mul­ti­me­dia, a sec­ond-class cit­i­zen on a text-based fo­rum like Usenet, would sig­nif­i­cantly re­shape how peo­ple in­ter­acted on fo­rums. One area where he was wrong, un­for­tu­nately, is a com­mon one. He as­sumed that the lack of anonymity would lead peo­ple to be­have a bit bet­ter on­line:

It’s one thing to toss out a hun­dred lines of spon­ta­neous vin­dic­tive­ness to the face­less USENET server, an­other thing to have to main­tain that mass of nas­ti­ness for a spe­cific pe­riod of time on one’s own com­puter. A Web Forum post would­n’t be a mes­sage on a pa­per air­plane tossed to the aether. It would be a bill­board in your own home.

It’s one thing to toss out a hun­dred lines of spon­ta­neous vin­dic­tive­ness to the face­less USENET server, an­other thing to have to main­tain that mass of nas­ti­ness for a spe­cific pe­riod of time on one’s own com­puter. A Web Forum post would­n’t be a mes­sage on a pa­per air­plane tossed to the aether. It would be a bill­board in your own home.

Welp, not so much. But Hunting would­n’t have to wait long to see an im­ple­men­ta­tion of a web fo­rum in the wild. In June 1994, CERN’s Ari Luotonen de­vel­oped what is be­lieved to be the first Web-based fo­rum soft­ware, WWW Interactive Talk (WIT).

“[Bear] in mind that this was put to­gether in a big hurry in a few days so for­give me if it does­n’t do yet all the things that it could do,” Luotonen wrote.

The soft­ware did not live for long, and no longer ap­pears on the W3C web­site—a sur­prise be­cause much of its early work has more or less stayed on­line. Not this, though—though a lit­tle Internet Archive Wayback-foo even­tu­ally helped me find where the archive file was hid­ing.

In hopes of kick­ing back off a trend in W3C-generated fo­rums, I up­loaded the soft­ware to GitHub. And for kicks, I got it to run in a Docker con­tainer.

(Want to try it your­self? I put it on the Web here. Watch out for falling spam.)

While the W3C was first, there are lots of ex­am­ples of sim­i­lar tools out there. For ex­am­ple, the Collaborative Cork Board (CoCoBoard) was de­vel­oped at the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the same place that launched Mosaic into the world. That tool es­sen­tially turned email replies into fo­rum threads.

It was­n’t long be­fore this pie in the sky con­cept, once the ex­per­i­men­tal ter­ri­tory of early Web de­vel­op­ers work­ing in CGI and Perl, found in­ter­est with big busi­nesses. These were pro­moted as one of many ex­am­ples of group­ware. Odds are, you prob­a­bly did not get your first ex­pe­ri­ence post­ing on a Web fo­rum us­ing an open-source tool, but a com­mer­cial one.

One of the first com­pa­nies to suc­cess­fully launch a web fo­rum startup was Lundeen & Associates, which cre­ated the WebCrossing fo­rum tool, which was an­nounced in the fall of 1995. Within a year, a num­ber of ma­jor pub­li­ca­tions, in­clud­ing the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The New York Times, and Salon, had put the soft­ware to work—in the Times’ case, it was part of its 1996 elec­tion cov­er­age. While later tools be­came bet­ter known, WebCrossing may be one of the few in­ter­net-na­tive soft­ware tools to re­main in ac­tive de­vel­op­ment for more than 30 years.

(A tes­ta­ment to its legacy: Salon used the soft­ware as the an­chor of its dig­i­tal com­mu­nity for more than 15 years, only shut­ting it down in 2011 out of con­cerns it was­n’t where the Web was go­ing. With an­other 15 years of ret­ro­spect, can we ar­gue that this was prob­a­bly a bad move? Perhaps.)

But WebCrossing was far from alone. The web­site Perlwatch has a list of lit­er­ally hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent fo­rum sys­tems, some of which vary in lev­els of ob­scu­rity. The list, as far as I can tell, has not been up­dated in years, de­spite the site claim­ing oth­er­wise. But it is an ex­cel­lent his­toric doc­u­ment of what it was like look­ing for a bul­letin board sys­tem in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

But even with all this com­pe­ti­tion, the most dom­i­nant player in ’90s fo­rum soft­ware ben­e­fited from be­ing the free op­tion. Matt’s Script Archive, a col­lec­tion of Perl-based web­site tools (including guest­books and page coun­ters), hit on some­thing im­por­tant with WWWboard.

That tool, a prim­i­tive fo­rum tech­nol­ogy that barely worked, nonethe­less made threaded dis­cus­sions ac­ces­si­ble by nor­mal peo­ple, even if it meant fo­rums that ex­tended well past the point of load­abil­ity and se­cu­rity is­sues that never get patched. (We wrote a whole thing about it last week in case you want to dive in more.)

We quickly sur­passed the lim­ited ca­pa­bil­i­ties of WWWBoard. But the fo­rum it­self would even­tu­ally get left in the dust, too.

Five key ex­am­ples of web fo­rum soft­ware that are es­sen­tial to in­ter­net his­tory

Ultimate Bulletin Board. This soft­ware, later known as UBB and UBB.classic, found broad pop­u­lar­ity on the in­ter­net thanks in large part to its low cost. It was a sig­nif­i­cant step up from WWWboard, in a good way. The soft­ware was orig­i­nally de­vel­oped around 1996 by Social Strata, which ex­ists to­day un­der the name CrowdStack. (That said, its his­tory is a bit wind­ing, so not every ver­sion may work the same.)

Slash. Developed by Rob Malda in 1998 as a way to help man­age the fo­rums on his pop­u­lar tech-news site Slashdot, Slash proved supremely in­flu­en­tial as a com­mu­nity man­age­ment tool. (A big part of the rea­son? It came with re­ally strong self-mod­er­a­tion fea­tures that were later copied by plat­forms like Hacker News, Digg, and Reddit.) While it’s not to­tally clear if Slashdot it­self still uses Slash to­day (Malda, for one, left years ago), the site SoylentNews is known to use a di­rect fork of it.

vBul­letin. This is one of the more rec­og­niz­able fo­rum plat­forms on the in­ter­net, in part be­cause of its use on some very promi­nent fo­rums. Notably, Something Awful’s in­fa­mous fo­rums use vBul­letin, but that’s only half the story there: The soft­ware was forked years ago, and has been heav­ily mod­i­fied and cus­tomized by SA’s mod­er­a­tors and own­ers over the past two decades. At this point, it’s more theirs than vBul­let­in’s.

ph­pBB. While vBul­letin, which came out around the same time as ph­pBB, is a com­mer­cial tool, ph­pBB has al­ways been free and open source, and as a re­sult, has found a mas­sive com­mu­nity of peo­ple will­ing to write ex­ten­sions for it. The sim­i­lar nodeBB is a mod­ern­iza­tion of the ph­pBB ap­proach and mostly works the same.

Discourse. While it’s not the only tool of its kind, the de­ci­sion by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron to build a new type of fo­rum soft­ware was a big deal in 2014. After all, it was a medium in se­vere need of rein­ven­tion. (The move to a Ruby code­base, for ex­am­ple, was an im­por­tant shift at a time when many fo­rums still ran on PHP or Perl.) It can be seen as a con­tin­u­a­tion of Stack Exchange, a pop­u­lar plat­form for pro­gram­mer dis­cus­sions that Atwood co-founded in 2008.

1985

The year that The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, also known as The Well, first got its start. It is one of the longest con­tin­u­ously run­ning on­line com­mu­ni­ties in dig­i­tal cul­ture, and un­like most bul­letin boards or on­line ser­vices of its kind, it suc­cess­fully made the jump to the Web. It re­mains ac­tive to­day as a paid pri­vate com­mu­nity. (The Well ac­tu­ally spon­sored Tedium a mil­lion moons ago, which I re­al­ize is a cool thing to be able to say.)

Before there was Markdown, there was BBCode

One chal­lenge that a lot of early fo­rums had to nav­i­gate was the ne­ces­sity of san­i­tiz­ing the text that peo­ple posted in fo­rums. People could post lit­er­ally any­thing in a form, and it could break the site, en­cour­age ex­ploits, the whole bit.

(When you don’t san­i­tize, you run into is­sues like mak­ing it pos­si­ble to put CSS on MySpace pages.)

But on the other hand, you still wanted your web­sites to have at least some style to them, in a con­trolled way, with­out a lot of ex­tra junk. These days, a lot of plat­forms use Markdown to solve this prob­lem, in part be­cause of its ubiq­uity. But be­fore that, peo­ple post­ing on fo­rums needed al­ter­na­tive op­tions that made room for fun if not for putting mal­ware on your fo­rum.

That led to the cre­ation of BBCode in 1998, first start­ing with UBB, then spread­ing to other fo­rum plat­forms like ph­pBB and vBul­letin. (There is a BBCode dot org ded­i­cated to this script­ing lan­guage, but I refuse to link to it be­cause it’s now a Web3 SEO play.) While it does­n’t get the mod­ern level of at­ten­tion Markdown does, it is both older and more ca­pa­ble than Markdown is, for bet­ter or worse.

A sub­set of HTML, it ef­fec­tively re­placed the < or > with [ and ], and re­moved the abil­ity to add a bunch of ex­tra stuff that the HTML spec was ca­pa­ble of do­ing. Forum own­ers nat­u­rally ap­pre­ci­ated this be­cause it gave them a bit of con­trol over what users could do on their plat­form. JavaScript might be off the table, but 300 point text? Suddenly pos­si­ble. A li­brary of com­mon im­ages? Absolutely, they were called im­age macros. And fea­tures that make the fo­rum more us­able? You bet.

This lingo would some­times shape the com­mu­nity as a whole. Fans of Something Awful, for ex­am­ple, likely re­mem­ber the fo­rums had a num­ber of im­age macros, most no­tably :10bux:, which dis­played an im­age of a $10 bill, re­flect­ing the fo­rum’s in­fa­mous one-time en­try fee. And on some fo­rums, BBCode would end up get­ting used in ex­per­i­men­tal ways, help­ing to gen­er­ate some early meme cul­ture. In its own way, BBCode was what made fo­rums more than just Usenet in HTML for­mat.

The down­side is that the se­cu­rity rea­sons were more pro­nounced in the­ory than in prac­tice. A 2005 blog post by de­vel­oper Chris Shiflett ar­gued that the se­cu­rity rea­son for BBCode was a lot weaker than it seemed:

As reg­u­lar read­ers of Security Corner know, in­put must al­ways be fil­tered. When you’re al­low­ing users to en­ter very com­plex data, cre­at­ing a whitelist of ac­cept­able char­ac­ters can be very dif­fi­cult. Because of this, many de­vel­op­ers em­ploy very weak fil­ter­ing rules for such in­put and rely on the es­cap­ing per­formed by htm­len­ti­ties() for pro­tec­tion.While htm­len­ti­ties() can save you from poorly fil­tered data, re­ly­ing on es­cap­ing alone is not ideal. Because an at­tacker can send any type of data, it’s equally un­wise to rely on BBCode for pro­tec­tion—you can’t as­sume that the at­tack­ers will abide by your rules un­less you en­force those rules in your pro­gram­ming logic.

As reg­u­lar read­ers of Security Corner know, in­put must al­ways be fil­tered. When you’re al­low­ing users to en­ter very com­plex data, cre­at­ing a whitelist of ac­cept­able char­ac­ters can be very dif­fi­cult. Because of this, many de­vel­op­ers em­ploy very weak fil­ter­ing rules for such in­put and rely on the es­cap­ing per­formed by htm­len­ti­ties() for pro­tec­tion.

While htm­len­ti­ties() can save you from poorly fil­tered data, re­ly­ing on es­cap­ing alone is not ideal. Because an at­tacker can send any type of data, it’s equally un­wise to rely on BBCode for pro­tec­tion—you can’t as­sume that the at­tack­ers will abide by your rules un­less you en­force those rules in your pro­gram­ming logic.

But even if the se­cu­rity rea­sons did­n’t mat­ter so much, Shiflett con­ceded that it was good for users and may in some cases even be eas­ier to re­mem­ber than ac­tual HTML. (Though on the other hand, one pre­sumes BBCode did dis­cour­age some peo­ple from try­ing out fo­rums en­tirely. Those were the peo­ple who even­tu­ally went to Facebook.)

A sim­i­lar con­cept in con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems as­so­ci­ated with WordPress, the short­code, be­came a pop­u­lar tech­nique for help­ing vi­su­ally mod­ify or or­ga­nize con­tent on a page. (Tedium uses short­codes with Markdown.)

More video games should be pro­grammed with a lit­tle BBCode.

But what may be the most in­ter­est­ing legacy for BBCode in the mod­ern day might not even be fo­rums. The game de­vel­op­ment tool Godot has adopted the script­ing lan­guage for writ­ing for­mat­ted text within its node-dri­ven in­ter­face. Which, given Godot’s surge in pop­u­lar­ity over the past few years, likely means that a lot of mod­ern games you en­joy might be se­cretly tak­ing ad­van­tage of a tool de­vel­oped for fo­rum soft­ware built in Perl roughly 30 years ago.

Guess we can in­di­rectly blame Unity for help­ing give BBCode a sec­ond wind. What a story arc.

“We’re shrink­ing the world. It used to be that just a few peo­ple saw your photo. Now many do. We helped peo­ple in Tunisia broad­cast what was hap­pen­ing, and they could hear peo­ple around the world sup­port­ing them.”

“We’re shrink­ing the world. It used to be that just a few peo­ple saw your photo. Now many do. We helped peo­ple in Tunisia broad­cast what was hap­pen­ing, and they could hear peo­ple around the world sup­port­ing them.”

— Dick Costolo, the for­mer CEO of Twitter (in the pre-Elon days), dis­cussing what made Twitter such a pow­er­ful tool. While this shrink­ing of our world might seem like a good thing (with the Arab Spring a go-to ex­am­ple at the time Costolo was lead­ing the com­pany), re­cent think­ing has moved in a dif­fer­ent di­rec­tion. “There is some­thing ter­ri­bly wrong with so­cial me­dia,” psy­chol­o­gist Nigel Barber ar­gued in 2024. “The prob­lem is that they are run by an en­gage­ment al­go­rithm that ig­nores the prin­ci­ples of suc­cess­ful com­mu­ni­ties.” The con­cept of con­tent col­lapse likely also plays a role here. “The prob­lem is not lack of con­text,” cul­tural an­thro­pol­o­gist Michael Wesch wrote in 2009 about the then-new con­cept of YouTube. “It is con­text col­lapse: an in­fi­nite num­ber of con­texts col­laps­ing upon one an­other into that sin­gle mo­ment of record­ing.”

Why did fo­rums lose out to so­cial me­dia? I think the short an­swer comes down to nov­elty. Much like Usenet a decade ear­lier, we were ready for some­thing dif­fer­ent, hav­ing seen the weak­nesses of fo­rums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We were ready to let some­one else han­dle the tech­nol­ogy part.

Plus, there’s the is­sue of scale. In so many ways, hav­ing a fo­rum run by some­one in a com­mu­nity on shared host­ing meant that you could­n’t have a com­mu­nity un­less there was some­one will­ing to take on that com­mit­ment. They were on the hook not just to pay for the host­ing, but to spend a ter­ri­ble night man­ag­ing things when the server got full, hacked, or sim­ply over­heated be­cause Slashdot linked one of your threads.

In many ways, the tech­ni­cal ar­gu­ment made it an easy tar­get for Web 2.0. There’s a rea­son why Digg, Reddit, and StackOverflow are per­haps the best man­i­fes­ta­tions of that era of tech­nol­ogy. They were pur­pose-built com­mu­nity plat­forms that mod­ern­ized things just enough for peo­ple who were look­ing for some­thing a lit­tle bet­ter than we were get­ting from the thing that your friend built.

We tried the fo­rum thing. We wanted some­thing else. Not nec­es­sar­ily be­cause it was bet­ter, though sure, maybe it was. But be­cause it was dif­fer­ent.

I want to pose a ques­tion: Is it pos­si­ble that on­line users just have non­stop shiny ob­ject syn­drome, and even if fo­rums worked cor­rectly and did the job, users would still move onto some­thing else be­cause we’re never happy? I think the ar­gu­ment is pretty strongly yes.

That said, I do think that as the in­ter­net ma­tures into some­thing that is more fur­ni­ture in our lives, per­haps some of us will slow down. Maybe we’ll log into a fo­rum and re­al­ize what we ac­tu­ally wanted out of our on­line ex­pe­ri­ence was never the abil­ity to reach every­one, but to reach the small num­ber of peo­ple that think kind of like us. Maybe the “collisions” that mod­ern so­cial net­works cre­ate just make things worse, even if it means we don’t get the oc­ca­sional ego boost of Patton Oswalt re­ply­ing to our tweet or what­ever.

There was charm to all that barely-work­ing PHP and Perl code that I think we’re still try­ing to re­cap­ture a quar­ter-cen­tury later.

–

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Website | Join an in­stance | Create an in­stance | Chat with us | Donate

Be part of a net­work of mul­ti­ple small fed­er­ated, in­ter­op­er­a­ble video host­ing providers. Follow video cre­ators and cre­ate videos. No ven­dor lock-in. All on a plat­form that is com­mu­nity-owned and ad-free.

Developed with ❤ by Framasoft

Introduction

PeerTube is a free, de­cen­tral­ized and fed­er­ated video plat­form de­vel­oped as an al­ter­na­tive to other plat­forms that cen­tral­ize our data and at­ten­tion, such as YouTube, Dailymotion or Vimeo. 🎬

To learn more:

This two-minute video (hosted on PeerTube) ex­plain­ing what PeerTube is and how it works

PeerTube’s pro­ject home­page, join­peer­tube.org

Demonstration in­stances:

peer­tube.cpy.re (stable) peer­tube2.cpy.re (Nightly) peer­tube3.cpy.re (RC)

peer­tube.cpy.re (stable)

peer­tube2.cpy.re (Nightly)

peer­tube3.cpy.re (RC)

This video demon­strat­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion be­tween PeerTube and Mastodon (a de­cen­tral­ized Twitter al­ter­na­tive)

✨ Features

All fea­tures for view­ers | All fea­tures for con­tent cre­ators | All fea­tures for ad­min­is­tra­tors

Video stream­ing, even in live!

Just up­load your videos, and be sure they will stream any­where. Add a de­scrip­tion, some tags and your video will be dis­cov­er­able by the en­tire video fe­di­verse, not just your in­stance. You can even em­bed a player on your fa­vorite web­site!

You are used to host­ing live events? We got you cov­ered too! Start livestream­ing from your fa­vorite client, and even host per­ma­nent streams!

Keep in touch with video cre­ators

Follow your fa­vorite chan­nels from PeerTube or re­ally any other place. No need to have an ac­count on the in­stance you watched a video to fol­low its au­thor, you can do all of that from the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, and plenty oth­ers), or just with good ol’ RSS.

An in­ter­face to call home

Be it as a user or an in­stance ad­min­is­tra­tor, you can de­cide what your ex­pe­ri­ence will be like. Don’t like the col­ors? They are easy to change. Don’t want to list videos of an in­stance but let your users sub­scribe to them? Don’t like the reg­u­lar web client? All of that can be changed, and much more. No UX dark pat­tern, no min­ing your data, no video rec­om­men­da­tion bull­shit™.

Communities that help each other

In ad­di­tion to vis­i­tors us­ing P2P with WebRTC to share the load among them, in­stances can help each other by caching one an­oth­er’s videos. This way even small in­stances have a way to show con­tent to a wider au­di­ence, as they will be shoul­dered by friend in­stances (more about that in our re­dun­dancy guide).

Content cre­ators can get help from their view­ers in the sim­plest way pos­si­ble: a sup­port but­ton show­ing a mes­sage link­ing to their do­na­tion ac­counts or re­ally any­thing else. No more pay-per-view and ad­ver­tise­ments that hurt vis­i­tors and al­ter cre­ativ­ity (more about that in our FAQ).

🙌 Contributing

You don’t need to be a pro­gram­mer to help!

You can give us your feed­back, re­port bugs, help us trans­late PeerTube, write doc­u­men­ta­tion, and more. Check out the con­tribut­ing guide to know how, it takes less than 2 min­utes to get started. 😉

You can also join the cheer­ful bunch that makes our com­mu­nity:

Matrix (bridged on Discord): #peertube:matrix.org

Forum: https://​fra­ma­col­ibri.org/​c/​peer­tube

Feel free to reach out if you have any ques­tions or ideas! 💬

📦 Create your own in­stance

See the pro­duc­tion guide, which is the rec­om­mended way to in­stall or up­grade PeerTube. For hard­ware re­quire­ments, see Should I have a big server to run PeerTube? in the FAQ.

See the com­mu­nity pack­ages, which cover var­i­ous plat­forms (including YunoHost and Docker).

📖 Documentation

If you have a ques­tion, please try to find the an­swer in the FAQ first.

User doc­u­men­ta­tion

See the user doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Admin doc­u­men­ta­tion

See how to cre­ate your own in­stance.

See the more gen­eral ad­min doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Tools doc­u­men­ta­tion

Learn how to im­port/​up­load videos from CLI or ad­min your PeerTube in­stance with the tools doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Technical doc­u­men­ta­tion

See the ar­chi­tec­ture blue­print for a more de­tailed ex­pla­na­tion of the ar­chi­tec­tural choices.

See our REST API doc­u­men­ta­tion:

OpenAPI 3.0.0 schema: /support/doc/api/openapi.yaml

Spec ex­plorer: docs.join­peer­tube.org/​api-rest-ref­er­ence.html

See our ActivityPub doc­u­men­ta­tion.

License

Logo

CC BY-SA 4.0, by Framasoft

Code

Copyright (C) 2015 – 2025 PeerTube Contributors (see CREDITS.md)

This pro­gram is free soft­ware: you can re­dis­trib­ute it and/​or mod­ify it un­der the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as pub­lished by the Free Software Foundation, ei­ther ver­sion 3 of the License, or (at your op­tion) any later ver­sion.

This pro­gram is dis­trib­uted in the hope that it will be use­ful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; with­out even the im­plied war­ranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more de­tails.

You should have re­ceived a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this pro­gram. If not, see https://​www.gnu.org/​li­censes/.

Today I’m kick­ing off my most am­bi­tious Maker’s Pet pro­ject yet: oom­woo, an open-source home ro­bot vac­uum that you can build your­self. Open hard­ware, open firmware, open soft­ware — and built in pub­lic, from the first com­mit.

No cloud re­quired. No ven­dor lock-in. It maps your home with an af­ford­able 2D LiDAR and nav­i­gates on its own, runs lo­cally, and in­te­grates na­tively with Home Assistant. If you’re into Raspberry Pi, ROS 2, 3D print­ing, or just the idea of own­ing a vac­uum you fully un­der­stand and con­trol — this one’s for you.

About the name: “oomwoo” is a ro­ta­tional am­bi­gram — it reads the same flipped 180°, just like the ro­bot it­self roam­ing your floor in every di­rec­tion.

What oom­woo is

oom­woo is a build-it-your­self ro­bot vac­uum de­signed for the maker com­mu­nity:

Affordable and fully open — hard­ware, soft­ware, and firmware

2D LiDAR map­ping and au­tonomous nav­i­ga­tion with ROS 2 / Nav2

Native Home Assistant in­te­gra­tion for lo­cal con­trol

3D-printable, doc­u­mented, hack­able chas­sis

Local-first — no cloud needed for every­day clean­ing, ever

Home-appliance qual­ity — not a throw­away build

Step-by-step, zero-to-hero build in­struc­tions, with a com­plete bill of ma­te­ri­als so you can source every part your­self

Optional ex­tras — cloud fea­tures, and even­tu­ally an app store of ROS 2 apps to cus­tomize how your vac­uum be­haves — will layer on top. But the core promise never changes: the vac­uum al­ways works cloud-free and lo­cal, out of the box.

Where the pro­ject is to­day

This is gen­uinely early — and that’s the point of build­ing in pub­lic. The first mile­stone (v0) is a bare-bones, work­ing build:

3D-printed chas­sis

ROS 2 Gazebo sim­u­la­tion

LiDAR with man­ual SLAM

ROS 2 on a Raspberry Pi 5 and/​or ESP32 run­ning mi­cro-ROS (final ar­chi­tec­ture still be­ing de­cided)

The open-source de­liv­er­ables I’m work­ing to­ward: bill of ma­te­ri­als, 3D-printable files, ROS 2 pack­ages, firmware, a mo­tor-dri­ver and sen­sor PCB, full build / bringup / trou­bleshoot­ing docs, and demo videos.

Build it with me — mas­sively in par­al­lel

oom­woo is or­ga­nized so the com­mu­nity can build it in par­al­lel. The ro­bot and its soft­ware are split into self-con­tained mod­ules. You pick what­ever mod­ule in­ter­ests you, work on it when­ever you want, and sub­mit your work as a pull re­quest. Multiple peo­ple can tackle the same mod­ule — the best so­lu­tion sur­faces over time.

Modules ready to start right now in­clude:

ROS 2 URDF + Gazebo sim­u­la­tion — ro­bot model, TF, bumper, sim

First clean — cov­er­age clean­ing while SLAM-mapping and ex­plor­ing

Dust bin — de­sign, 3D print, and test

Vacuum fan / blower as­sem­bly — blower mo­tor, im­peller, vo­lute hous­ing

If you’d like to jump in, the GitHub repo has the mod­ule list, the ar­chi­tec­ture doc, and con­tri­bu­tion guide­lines.

Follow along

I’ll be shar­ing progress, dead ends, and wins as they hap­pen:

GitHub: github.com/​mak­er­spet/​oom­woo — code, docs, and dis­cus­sions

Discord: join the build chat

YouTube: build-in-pub­lic chan­nel

Reddit: r/​Ar­duinoAn­dRo­bot­ics

X: @0OMWO0

Follow OOMWOO build

Open-source ro­bot vac­uum com­mu­nity build up­dates

Parts Kit

Everything about oom­woo stays open — you can source every part your­self. If you’d rather skip the parts hunt, a con­ve­nience kit (motors, PCB, brushes, gas­kets, LiDAR) will be avail­able here at Maker’s Pet, from the same maker be­hind this pro­ject. The kit is a con­ve­nience, never a re­quire­ment.

More oom­woo: re­pos & tu­to­ri­als

Main pro­ject (RFCs, BOM, de­sign docs): github.com/​mak­er­spet/​oom­woo

oom­woo-one — first model, ROS 2 + Gazebo sim­u­la­tion: github.com/​mak­er­spet/​oom­woo-one

oom­woo-in­stall — ROS 2 / Docker dev en­vi­ron­ment: github.com/​mak­er­spet/​oom­woo-in­stall

Tutorial: How to source the BOM for oom­woo

A few days ago, 18 states and the DOJ Antitrust Division signed a se­ries of de­crees with three ma­jor egg pro­duc­ers, Cal-Maine, Versova, and Hickman’s Egg Ranch, the largest egg pro­duc­ers in the coun­try. The al­le­ga­tion, backed with hard-to-re­fute ev­i­dence in­clud­ing quotes from CEOs, is these en­ti­ties op­er­ated a naked con­spir­acy to ma­nip­u­late the price of eggs from 2022 – 2025. That was ex­actly the time bird flu on poul­try farms was rip­ping through the sup­ply chain for egg pro­duc­tion.

Readers of this site won’t be sur­prised at this news. Last year, BIG pub­lished an in­ves­tiga­tive se­ries called Hatching a Conspiracy, in which Basel Musharbash dis­cussed what looked like a con­spir­acy. His ar­gu­ment was that egg pro­duc­ers were us­ing the avian flu cri­sis as a veil to raise prices. Basically, con­sol­i­da­tion had cre­ated con­cen­trated power, and the shock of the flu let them ex­ploit it. He high­lighted the role of Cal-Maine, the in­dus­try’s “bellwether,” as well as the his­tory of an­titrust vi­o­la­tions in the in­dus­try.

While most nor­mal peo­ple at the time thought some­one was likely scam­ming them, that is not the mes­sage you heard from the in­dus­try, elite me­dia, or econ­o­mists. Throughout the al­leged con­spir­acy, in­dus­try ex­ec­u­tives and an­a­lysts were say­ing that there was noth­ing to see ex­cept a sup­ply shock of a dis­ease killing lots of hens. As one in­dus­try ex­ec­u­tive put it at the time, it’s all just “supply dis­rup­tion, ‘act of God’ type stuff.”

Economists chor­tled at the no­tion of a con­spir­acy. During the 2024 cam­paign, when Kamala Harris meekly sug­gested price goug­ing to tame in­fla­tion, she ran into a buz­z­saw of re­sis­tance from Democratic-leaning econ­o­mists, who were openly sneer­ing at her in the New York Times.

“Egg prices went up last year — it’s be­cause there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg pro­duc­tion,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard econ­o­mist for­merly in the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion…Mr. Furman said there was a risk that poli­cies meant to curb cor­po­rate price goug­ing could in­stead keep the econ­omy from ad­just­ing. If prices do not rise in re­sponse to strong de­mand, new com­pa­nies may not have as much in­cli­na­tion to jump into the mar­ket to ramp up sup­ply.“This is not sen­si­ble pol­icy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up be­ing a lot of rhetoric and no re­al­ity,” he said. “There’s no up­side here, and there is some down­side.”

“Egg prices went up last year — it’s be­cause there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg pro­duc­tion,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard econ­o­mist for­merly in the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion…

Mr. Furman said there was a risk that poli­cies meant to curb cor­po­rate price goug­ing could in­stead keep the econ­omy from ad­just­ing. If prices do not rise in re­sponse to strong de­mand, new com­pa­nies may not have as much in­cli­na­tion to jump into the mar­ket to ramp up sup­ply.

“This is not sen­si­ble pol­icy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up be­ing a lot of rhetoric and no re­al­ity,” he said. “There’s no up­side here, and there is some down­side.”

Price ac­tion seemed to con­firm Furman’s view. In 2025, egg prices dropped dra­mat­i­cally, and then fur­ther this year, though they are still roughly 40% above where they were in 2019. And these price de­clines sug­gested that sup­ply and de­mand were do­ing their mag­i­cal work. Populists were mocked as ig­nor­ing nat­ural mar­ket forces. Pundit Matt Yglesias called the the­ory of egg price ma­nip­u­la­tion “slopulism,” the Cato Institute blogged “Egg Prices Don’t Need to Be Investigated—It’s Just Supply and Demand, and here’s phil­an­thropist John Arnold.

John Arnold@johnarnold

It’s al­most as if egg prices are set by mar­ket forces in­clud­ing sup­ply shocks and not by a pro­ducer car­tel that de­cides how much to gouge con­sumers.

1:28 AM · Jan 13, 2026 · 138K Views

50 Replies · 86 Reposts · 871 Likes

But lo and be­hold, this com­plaint has stone cold ev­i­dence. It in­cludes many state­ments from egg pro­ducer CEOs email­ing and tex­ting one an­other on how to ma­nip­u­late prices up­ward. And it turns out, when they felt threat­ened by le­gal ac­tion, the al­leged price-fix­ing stopped. Suddenly, the avian flu epi­demic was no longer push­ing up prices.

To un­der­stand what they were do­ing, we have to start with how egg prices are set.

Egg pro­duc­ers don’t sell eggs to con­sumers, they sell whole­sale to su­per­mar­kets, pack­aged goods com­pa­nies, restau­rants, and so forth. There are two mar­kets for whole­sale eggs. Most go via con­tracts be­tween egg pro­duc­ers and big buy­ers. For in­stance, roughly 28% of Cal-Maine’s pro­duc­tion is sold to Walmart, through a spe­cial sup­ply arrange­ment. But there’s also an elec­tronic ex­change, called the Egg Clearinghouse, for eggs sold in the spot mar­ket, aka ex­tra eggs. Egg pro­duc­ers are usu­ally net sell­ers of eggs, but they have con­tracts to pro­vide eggs, and some­times can’t ful­fill those con­tracts through their own pro­duc­tion. Other egg pro­duc­ers might have ex­tra eggs. So there is buy­ing and sell­ing of sur­plus eggs on the Egg Clearinghouse.

As Bloomberg’s Matthew Levine puts it, there’s a small mar­ket - the Egg Clearinghouse - and there’s the big mar­ket, which are the con­tracts be­tween buy­ers and egg pro­duc­ers. Where do the prices for the pri­vate buy­ers and sell­ers come from? Well, they come from the Egg Clearinghouse. Specifically, a com­pany called Urner Barry looks at prices for dif­fer­ent re­gions based on trades and bids on and off that ex­change, their an­a­lysts do as best they can to es­ti­mate prices across re­gions, and then they pub­lish a price of where they imag­ine sup­ply and de­mand in­ter­sect.

In other words, the cleared price in the small mar­ket sets the price for the big one. Here’s Cal-Maine’s an­nual re­port: “Many of our sales arrange­ments with cus­tomers, par­tic­u­larly for con­ven­tional eggs, are based on for­mu­las that take into ac­count, in vary­ing ways, in­de­pen­dently quoted re­gional whole­sale mar­ket prices for eggs.” And it uses Urner Barry pric­ing charts.

And therein lies the al­leged scam. If you can get Urner Barry to pub­lish higher prices from the small num­ber of eggs sold on the Egg Clearinghouse, then the price that, say, Walmart pays on its bil­lions of eggs goes up.

Such bench­marks, as well as ma­nip­u­la­tion of them, are com­mon. This egg in­dex is sim­i­lar to how a few banks used to set a key in­ter­est rate called LIBOR, the price of lend­ing short-term funds to one an­other, and a bench­mark for credit cards, com­mer­cial lend­ing, and a whole host of credit prod­ucts. The LIBOR price-fix­ing case dragged on for years, and is quite fa­mous.

The al­leged egg con­spir­acy it­self was pretty sim­ple. Evidence showed egg pro­duc­ers were col­lud­ing to trick Urner Barry into rais­ing its pub­lished price. Here’s the Antitrust Division press re­lease:

As the com­plaint al­leges, Defendants con­spired to in­flate Urner Barry’s price quo­ta­tions by agree­ing to: (1) sub­mit a large num­ber of bids; (2) cause mul­ti­ple Defendants to bid in or­der to sig­nal to Urner Barry that a di­verse set of mar­ket par­tic­i­pants needed to buy eggs; (3) sub­mit a large num­ber of bids in the hours lead­ing up to the pub­li­ca­tion of Urner Barry’s price quo­ta­tions; (4) sub­mit bids that were un­likely to lead to ex­e­cuted trades; and (5) ex­e­cute trades at pre­mium prices.

As the com­plaint al­leges, Defendants con­spired to in­flate Urner Barry’s price quo­ta­tions by agree­ing to: (1) sub­mit a large num­ber of bids; (2) cause mul­ti­ple Defendants to bid in or­der to sig­nal to Urner Barry that a di­verse set of mar­ket par­tic­i­pants needed to buy eggs; (3) sub­mit a large num­ber of bids in the hours lead­ing up to the pub­li­ca­tion of Urner Barry’s price quo­ta­tions; (4) sub­mit bids that were un­likely to lead to ex­e­cuted trades; and (5) ex­e­cute trades at pre­mium prices.

Producers were sub­mit­ting fake bids, con­duct­ing sham trans­ac­tions at high prices off the ex­change, and co­or­di­nat­ing to make it look like there was more de­mand than there was.

The most re­mark­able part of the com­plaint is one par­tic­u­lar quote. At a cer­tain point, Urner Barry was con­sid­er­ing low­er­ing is pub­lished price of eggs in re­sponse to a lack of de­mand. So one of the al­leged con­spir­a­tors wrote a fel­low CEO, say­ing “[a]s a group we need to bid like they vote in Chicago, early and of­ten.” In short, they should sub­mit fake pur­chase or­ders at el­e­vated prices, to con­vince the in­dex to raise prices. In this case, it worked; Cal-Maine, Versova, and Hickman’s then col­lec­tively sub­mit­ted dozens of bids, ver­sus just five for the rest of the mar­ket. The price was then higher than it should have been.

What I like about that quote is­n’t just that it’s ev­i­dence of col­lu­sion, it’s ac­tu­ally a joke premised on rig­ging the mar­ket the way ma­chine politi­cians rig elec­tions. These guys weren’t just al­legedly price-fix­ing, they were hav­ing a lot of fun do­ing it. And they even vi­o­lated the Stringer Bell rule, as this stuff was in email.

There’s a lot more ev­i­dence in the com­plaint, even though the com­plaint is pretty short (and it says the DOJ with­held a lot of ev­i­dence.) For in­stance:

After re­ceiv­ing Hickman’s CEO’s di­rec­tive to “[b]id early and of­ten,” on December 22, a se­nior Versova ex­ec­u­tive told an­other Versova ex­ec­u­tive to “light up the north­west bids please. .02 over.” That ex­ec­u­tive agreed and then placed bids at a price that was two cents greater than Urner Barry’s price quo­ta­tion for the Northwest. Prospective sell­ers were re­quired to call prior to ac­cept­ing these bids. Then, when one of the Versova ex­ec­u­tives noted that the “NW bids are get­ting hit”—mean­ing that a seller was of­fer­ing to sell the eggs to Versova to meet Versova’s bid—the other Versova ex­ec­u­tive stated that he should delete the bids, sug­gest­ing that Versova did not need the eggs.

After re­ceiv­ing Hickman’s CEO’s di­rec­tive to “[b]id early and of­ten,” on December 22, a se­nior Versova ex­ec­u­tive told an­other Versova ex­ec­u­tive to “light up the north­west bids please. .02 over.” That ex­ec­u­tive agreed and then placed bids at a price that was two cents greater than Urner Barry’s price quo­ta­tion for the Northwest. Prospective sell­ers were re­quired to call prior to ac­cept­ing these bids. Then, when one of the Versova ex­ec­u­tives noted that the “NW bids are get­ting hit”—mean­ing that a seller was of­fer­ing to sell the eggs to Versova to meet Versova’s bid—the other Versova ex­ec­u­tive stated that he should delete the bids, sug­gest­ing that Versova did not need the eggs.

Here are some other quotes:

“We are bid­ding up. Let’s hold it to­day.” — Text mes­sage from a Cal-Maine ex­ec­u­tive to Hickman’s CEO on October 14, 2022.“If we all bid in our re­spec­tive ar­eas for the 3 – 5 loads min­i­mum we are short… the mar­ket re­porters will have to ad­dress.” — Email re­sponse from Hickman’s CEO on December 19, 2022″Please con­sider post­ing strong bids, early and of­ten. The mar­ket re­porters don’t get in for an­other hour, so it will be good for them to see di­verse bid­ding upon log­ging on.” — Email from Hickman’s CEO to se­nior ex­ec­u­tives from Cal-Maine, Versova, and oth­ers on December 20, 2022″Hurry[.] There are only 16 bids on ECI right now and 15 of them are ours” — Email from Hickman’s CEO later on December 20, 2022″Finally!!!!” — Written re­ac­tion from the CEO of Cooperative A when for­ward­ing Urner Barry price in­crease re­ports to Cal-Maine on August 9, 2023

“We are bid­ding up. Let’s hold it to­day.” — Text mes­sage from a Cal-Maine ex­ec­u­tive to Hickman’s CEO on October 14, 2022.

“If we all bid in our re­spec­tive ar­eas for the 3 – 5 loads min­i­mum we are short… the mar­ket re­porters will have to ad­dress.” — Email re­sponse from Hickman’s CEO on December 19, 2022

“Please con­sider post­ing strong bids, early and of­ten. The mar­ket re­porters don’t get in for an­other hour, so it will be good for them to see di­verse bid­ding upon log­ging on.” — Email from Hickman’s CEO to se­nior ex­ec­u­tives from Cal-Maine, Versova, and oth­ers on December 20, 2022

“Hurry[.] There are only 16 bids on ECI right now and 15 of them are ours” — Email from Hickman’s CEO later on December 20, 2022

“Finally!!!!” — Written re­ac­tion from the CEO of Cooperative A when for­ward­ing Urner Barry price in­crease re­ports to Cal-Maine on August 9, 2023

The al­leged scam went on for years. Until the hol­i­day sea­son in 2024, the egg pro­duc­ers “continued to lobby Urner Barry,” ask­ing the pric­ing in­dex to hike its pub­lished prices and to ig­nore trans­ac­tions at lower prices from non-con­spir­a­tors when do­ing its bench­mark­ing. So what fi­nally ended the al­leged con­spir­acy? It turns out that “price quo­ta­tions dropped sig­nif­i­cantly from their February 2025 peak af­ter Defendants learned of the Department of Justice in­ves­ti­ga­tion and were in­structed to pre­serve doc­u­ments on March 5, 2025.”

When egg pro­duc­ers re­al­ized they might get in trou­ble, they stopped the al­leged scheme. Here’s a chart show­ing price ac­tion and an­titrust.

Still, what a prof­itable con­spir­acy it was. Cal-Maine made more than $1 bil­lion in prof­its in 2023, triple its 2022 earn­ings. And it made $1.8 bil­lion in 2024, al­most en­tirely as a re­sult of higher prices As Musharbash put it:

All of this ex­tra profit is com­ing from higher sell­ing prices, which have been earn­ing Cal-Maine un­prece­dented 70 – 145 per­cent mar­gins over farm pro­duc­tion costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the in­dus­try’s largest firms — as peo­ple in the egg busi­ness do — we can be pretty con­fi­dent that the other large egg pro­duc­ers are also rak­ing in prof­its off the rel­a­tively small dip in egg pro­duc­tion.

All of this ex­tra profit is com­ing from higher sell­ing prices, which have been earn­ing Cal-Maine un­prece­dented 70 – 145 per­cent mar­gins over farm pro­duc­tion costs per dozen. Taking Cal-Maine as the “bellwether” for the in­dus­try’s largest firms — as peo­ple in the egg busi­ness do — we can be pretty con­fi­dent that the other large egg pro­duc­ers are also rak­ing in prof­its off the rel­a­tively small dip in egg pro­duc­tion.

Seeing the writ­ing on the wall for egg prices, Cal-Maine has re­cently been us­ing its cash haul to di­ver­sify into pre­pared foods in which eggs are an in­put, mean­ing while they still seek to sell eggs at high prices, they now have lines of busi­ness that ben­e­fit from lower prices as well.

Still, they all got caught. So how much trou­ble are they in? Well ac­cord­ing to the set­tle­ment, the egg pro­duc­ers must pay in ag­gre­gate $3 mil­lion in penal­ties, must do­nate 53 mil­lion eggs to food banks, and can no longer fix prices. Cal-Maine was the ring­leader here - it had to do­nate 30 mil­lion eggs, Versova gave 20 mil­lion, and Centrum do­nated 3 mil­lion.

Is that enough? Well, let’s start with a very ba­sic con­cern. If you’re look­ing at some of these clear emails and texts and won­der­ing why there’s no crim­i­nal charge for price-fix­ing, you’re not alone. Most an­titrust lawyers I know are mock­ing this set­tle­ment as a farce, since it looks so ob­vi­ously like crim­i­nal be­hav­ior but in­stead ended up with a no-ad­mit/​no-deny park­ing ticket. But let’s put that aside, and just look at the cost/​ben­e­fit. Cal-Maine has to pay $1.5 mil­lion, let’s throw in an­other $1.5 mil­lion to cover the cost of the 30 mil­lion eggs they had to do­nate. That means they are out $3 mil­lion, for a scheme that net­ted them more than $3 bil­lion. That’s a thou­sand-fold re­turn.

Importantly, these firms also ad­mit­ted no wrong­do­ing, mean­ing there can be no fol­low-on civil suits for vic­tims us­ing such ad­mis­sions. Restaurants and con­sumers who paid for eggs are out of luck. And the al­leged con­spir­a­tors are re­leased from all claims.

Crime, as it turns out, pays. Allegedly.

This story is in part about the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, but it’s also about state en­forcers who signed onto this set­tle­ment. Traditionally, states fol­low the lead of the Federal gov­ern­ment, be­cause the Federal Antitrust Division has a lot more lawyers and is usu­ally do­ing the in­ves­ti­ga­tion. That’s likely what hap­pened here. State en­forcers prob­a­bly had lit­tle choice but to sign on and get some eggs for hun­gry peo­ple in their states, or just drop it en­tirely. Still, the value of not re­leas­ing crim­i­nal or civil claims is real. And while it would have re­quired some bold­ness, I wish some state en­forcers had been will­ing to drop the case and make a state­ment that though they could­n’t con­tinue it due to re­source con­straints, they would refuse to sign onto a bad deal. Alas.

There are two other ob­ser­va­tions here that are more pos­i­tive. One is that this egg story is a help­ful real world ex­am­ple of how price-fix­ing works, a con­fir­ma­tion of the greed­fla­tion the­ory that emerged in the pan­demic. From 2022 – 2025, nor­mal peo­ple could see what was go­ing on, while elites de­nied it.

It was a bizarre state of af­fairs. Cal-Maine ac­tu­ally listed as an in­vestor risk that the avian flu epi­demic might end, lead­ing to lower egg prices and thus less profit. And yet most pow­er­ful peo­ple sim­ply dis­missed the no­tion that there were in­cen­tives to fix prices, just point­ing to sup­ply and de­mand as all-pow­er­ful forces.

As with most price fix­ing schemes in boom-bust com­mod­ity in­dus­tries, it was­n’t that sup­ply and de­mand did­n’t mat­ter, but that the mech­a­nism for ex­trac­tion was to take ad­van­tage of a sup­ply dis­rup­tion and grab as much while they could. Corporations en­gaged in al­leged price-fix­ing or mo­nop­o­liza­tion of­ten need an al­ibi, and avian flu was the al­ibi.

The sec­ond ob­ser­va­tion is that an­titrust, even used by cor­rupt or feck­less ac­tors, can ac­tu­ally de­liver re­sults. Donald Trump has been a very poor President in terms of con­sol­i­da­tion, al­low­ing a merger boom, and gen­er­ally seek­ing to al­low large po­lit­i­cally con­nected firms to or­ga­nize mar­kets as they wish. Even so, when egg pro­duc­ers were threat­ened with le­gal con­se­quences and ex­po­sure, they low­ered prices.

It’s not a very sat­is­fy­ing out­come. Yes, we were be­ing ex­ploited, and now we know it. And the bad guys got away with it. But then, there’s a rea­son Americans are very an­gry, and that the es­tab­lish­ment has lost cred­i­bil­ity with the pub­lic. This egg case is just one more con­firm­ing data point that the wealth of the su­per­rich is com­ing straight out of your pock­et­book.

Thanks for read­ing! Your tips make this newslet­ter what it is, so please send tips on weird mo­nop­o­lies, sto­ries I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this is­sue of BIG, you can sign up here for more is­sues, a newslet­ter on how to re­store fair com­merce, in­no­va­tion, and democ­racy. Consider be­com­ing a pay­ing sub­scriber to sup­port this work, or if you are a pay­ing sub­scriber, giv­ing a gift sub­scrip­tion to a friend, col­league, or fam­ily mem­ber. If you re­ally liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

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Kimi K2.7 Code, an open-weight model, is now gen­er­ally avail­able in GitHub Copilot. This is the first open-weight model of­fered as a se­lec­table op­tion in the Copilot model picker, giv­ing you more choice and a lower-cost op­tion for your cod­ing work­flows.

Kimi K2.7 Code is hosted by GitHub on Microsoft Azure.

This model is billed at provider list pric­ing un­der us­age-based billing. See GitHub Copilot’s pric­ing for mod­els and re­quests for de­tails.

Availability in GitHub Copilot

Kimi K2.7 Code is be­gin­ning to roll out to Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Max plans. You’ll be able to se­lect the model in the model picker in Visual Studio Code. Rollout will be grad­ual and we’ll con­tinue to mon­i­tor the mod­el’s qual­ity and per­for­mance.

We’ll ex­pand to Copilot Business, Enterprise, and ad­di­tional sur­faces over the com­ing weeks. Check back soon if you don’t see it yet.

You’ll be able to se­lect the model in the model picker in:

Visual Studio Code ver­sion 1.127.0 or later

Visual Studio ver­sion 17.14.6 or later

Copilot CLI

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GitHub Mobile iOS and Android

JetBrains ver­sion 1.9.1 – 251 or later

Xcode

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Enabling ac­cess for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise

Kimi K2.7 Code is off by de­fault for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise. Plan ad­min­is­tra­tors must en­able the Kimi K2.7 Code pol­icy in Copilot set­tings be­fore any­one in their or­ga­ni­za­tion can se­lect it. If the pol­icy is left off, the model stays un­avail­able to that or­ga­ni­za­tion.

We rec­om­mend ad­min­is­tra­tors re­view open-weight mod­els against their own se­cu­rity, com­pli­ance, and data-gov­er­nance re­quire­ments be­fore en­abling them.

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30 June 2026

No mat­ter what you’re do­ing, from build­ing a civ­i­liza­tion on Mars to get­ting a sum­mer in­tern­ship, you will have to ask peo­ple for help. Yet, most peo­ple get this cru­cial skill wrong. They put them­selves at the front of their re­quest, when they should be putting the other per­son there. But is­n’t get­ting help just charisma and luck? No, ask­ing for help is a skill, not an at­tribute you are as­signed at birth like green eyes.

How do you ask for help from peo­ple? There is only one prin­ci­ple. Put your­self in their mind. All good com­mu­ni­ca­tion is grounded in an un­der­stand­ing of the read­er’s mind. And so, I have some heuris­tics I would rec­om­mend when you ask for help from peo­ple you don’t know.

One heuris­tic to re­mem­ber is that help is about peo­ple be­fore it is about pro­jects. When you ask for help from some­one, their help­ing your pro­ject is pred­i­cated on them want­ing to help you. So, you should make it clear that you are some­one worth help­ing. One of the strongest ways to show that you’re worth help­ing is to demon­strate that you are a se­ri­ous per­son. You might claim that you want to en­ter ma­chine learn­ing or learn to lift weights. Lots of peo­ple say that though, and the way you show that you’re se­ri­ous is by show­ing proof of work. A trained model, a blog post that shows depth and thought and a vlog of your train­ing are all ways to show that you are se­ri­ous.

Another way is per­sonal con­nec­tion: you could say “Steve sug­gested I reach out” which sit­u­ates you more warmly in their mind. But be care­ful here, be­cause you’re bor­row­ing against some­one else’s cred­i­bil­ity. If this per­son does­n’t like Steve, then this might hurt your cred­i­bil­ity. Or, if you aren’t as good as Steve says, his cred­i­bil­ity is hurt.

And fi­nally, we get to in­sti­tu­tional cred­i­bil­ity. You could men­tion that you’re a stu­dent at some fa­mous uni­ver­sity, or work at a large cor­po­ra­tion. This is the weak­est be­cause at best it proves you cleared a fil­ter once, and noth­ing more. It also does­n’t sit­u­ate you to them specif­i­cally and can feel like you’re sig­nalling sta­tus. So use it spar­ingly and avoid mak­ing it your only source of cred­i­bil­ity.

Once you have sit­u­ated your­self (or not), the next step is to ex­plain con­text. Before you ask them for help, you have to an­swer the ques­tion: what is go­ing on here? If you have done the pre­vi­ous step well, you have bor­rowed their at­ten­tion and you must spend it ju­di­ciously. Here, your de­scrip­tion must be so short as to be un­sum­ma­riz­able. You are spend­ing lent at­ten­tion which is the most pre­cious cur­rency. To do this, think of what makes your con­text con­nect to things that they would al­ready know. Do not ex­plain to your elected rep­re­sen­ta­tive the fac­tion­al­ism of your uni­ver­sity club, but do ex­plain how the club con­nects to their leg­isla­tive pri­or­i­ties. Or when ask­ing a sci­en­tist for an in­tern­ship, don’t talk about how you’ve loved sci­ence since you were a child, but do talk about how you’ve im­ple­mented and ex­tended their pa­per from 2023.

The next heuris­tic is to make your re­quest easy to ac­cept. Making some­thing easy to ac­cept largely is about re­duc­ing the cost of ac­cep­tance. One clear kind of cost is the mag­ni­tude. Do ask some­one for twenty min­utes of their time, but don’t ask them to read your five-hun­dred-page man­u­script in a week. Another is to make it spe­cific: ask­ing for a re­source to start with is bet­ter than “can I pick your brain?”. When you’ve made your re­quest, make it low fric­tion for them. If you’re ask­ing for an in­tro­duc­tion, write a blurb about your­self which they can for­ward. If you have a ques­tion, ask it in writ­ing rather than over a call. And last on cost, make your ask bounded. Don’t ask for re­cur­ring oblig­a­tions like be­ing your men­tor for your whole life, but do keep it lim­ited to ask­ing them to read a blog post. If that in­stance goes well, they’ll gladly read more.

My last heuris­tic is stranger: make it easy to say no. You might think that the worst out­come is a no, but the worst out­come is a pres­sured, be­grudg­ing yes. If you get a no, a good re­sponse is for you to thank them for their time and move on. Making your mes­sage carry emo­tional guilt or pes­ter­ing them over time will not have the ef­fect you in­tend. Your co­er­cion will have poi­soned your re­la­tion­ship with this per­son while you feel the false glow of a hard-won vic­tory. A per­son who helps you with grit­ted teeth is one who will never help you again. And even then, the help will be a half-hearted ef­fort to get rid of the oblig­a­tion you man­u­fac­tured. By con­trast, help freely given is ef­fort­less, the way you’d hold the door open for some­one. Help will­ingly given keeps your con­science clear, free from the bur­den of hav­ing pres­sured some­one. And help, when given from the heart, is the foun­da­tion of a re­la­tion­ship where both of you con­tribute to what you’re build­ing.

These are only heuris­tics. You can, when fol­low­ing the prin­ci­ple, re­order or drop them al­to­gether. What mat­ters is whether you’re think­ing from the per­spec­tive of your reader. Except. Never lie. All your asks for help come from the per­son at­tached to them — you. And if your reader gets even a whiff of some­thing off, then no re­quest, no mat­ter how small, spe­cific, low-fric­tion, and bounded, can get a yes.

Edit: added a line on how to re­spond when you get a no.

Someone left a com­ment on my blog re­cently ask­ing if I’d mind mak­ing my lan­guage more in­clu­sive. They did­n’t get some of the cul­tural ref­er­ences I’d used and sug­gested it would be eas­ier if I used tropes which were more glob­ally known.

Here’s the thing. No.

All my blog posts start with a sim­ple de­c­la­ra­tion:

HTML<!doctype html> <html lang=en-GB>

There’s a rea­son for that. It is more than the lan­guage I speak; it is the cul­ture I live in, the way that I think, and the ac­cent I use.

When your AI bot reads this text aloud, it should do so with a British ac­cent0. That’s how I speak. It is OK to hear a slightly un­fa­mil­iar ac­cent. You’ll be able to fig­ure out what I’m say­ing. Your world won’t col­lapse if I don’t start each sen­tence with “Howdy, y’all!”

But what should you do if you come across a con­cept you don’t un­der­stand?

When The Wicked Witch of the TERFs re­leased the first Harry Potter book “Philosopher’s Stone”, it was pub­lished in the USA with a dif­fer­ent ti­tle; “Sorcerer’s Stone”. There were also a dozen other lan­guage changes - which caused great con­ster­na­tion in the fan­dom.

What do you think hap­pens if Skip or Madison come across a kid eat­ing “a sher­bet lemon” or a de­scrip­tion of Hermione’s “fringe” or dis­cover Harry wear­ing a jumper? Will their lit­tle minds col­lapse un­der the knowl­edge that peo­ple far away use dif­fer­ent words?

No. And nei­ther will you.

It is OK if things are un­fa­mil­iar to you.

Up un­til my mid-twen­ties, I had never seen or eaten a Twinkie. They were a cul­tural lode­stone in a hun­dred books and films, but not the sort of thing I could buy lo­cally. So I used my con­text clues. They seemed like an un­ap­peal­ing food­stuff which, nev­er­the­less, were in­ex­plic­a­bly pop­u­lar.

As a kid, I could re­cite all the lyrics to Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby with­out get­ting half the ref­er­ences. The brain is mal­leable and can fit in new con­cepts with rel­a­tive ease.

So if you see a ref­er­ence to Count Duckula, or hear me ex­claim “Accrington Stanley!”, or even blush as I de­scribe an ut­ter wanker - please take it as a sign that the hege­mony is not uni­ver­sal and some peo­ple ex­ist in a cul­tural mi­lieu dif­fer­ent to your own.

And breathe. It’ll be OK.

OK, ac­cents are a whole can of worms. Regional English is var­ied. I’m not sure if there are any BCP-style tags for in­tra-coun­try ac­cents. ↩︎

OK, ac­cents are a whole can of worms. Regional English is var­ied. I’m not sure if there are any BCP-style tags for in­tra-coun­try ac­cents. ↩︎