Prologue: The Dragon That Couldn’t Be Slain

A Denver com­pany that de­vel­oped le­gal soft­ware tried. They failed.

A game stu­dio that made soft­ware for Disney tried. They spent over a year and hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars. They had a team of pro­gram­mers in Armenia, over­seen by an American PhD in math­e­mat­ics. They failed.

Commodore Computers tried. After three months of star­ing at the source code, they gave up and mailed it back.

Steam looked at it once, dur­ing the Greenlight era. “Too niche,” they said. “Nobody will buy it. And if they do, they’ll re­turn it.”

For nearly four decades, Wall Street Raider ex­isted as a kind of im­pos­si­ble ob­ject—a game so com­plex that its own cre­ator barely un­der­stood parts of it, writ­ten in a pro­gram­ming lan­guage so prim­i­tive that pro­fes­sional de­vel­op­ers could­n’t de­code it. The code was, in the cre­ator’s own words, “indecipherable to any­one but me.”

And then, in January 2024, a 29-year-old soft­ware de­vel­oper from Ohio named Ben Ward sent an email.

Michael Jenkins, 80 years old and un­der­stand­ably cau­tious af­ter decades of failed at­tempts by oth­ers, was hon­est with him: I ap­pre­ci­ate the en­thu­si­asm, but I’ve been through this be­fore. Others have tried—tal­ented peo­ple with big bud­gets—and none of them could crack it. I’ll send you the source code, but I want to be up­front: I’m not ex­pect­ing mir­a­cles.

A year later, that same 29-year-old would an­nounce on Reddit: “I am the cho­sen one, and the game is be­ing re­made. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

He was jok­ing about the “chosen one” part. Sort of.

This is the story of how Wall Street Raider—the most com­pre­hen­sive fi­nan­cial sim­u­la­tor ever made—was born, nearly died, and was res­ur­rected. It’s a story about ob­ses­sion, about code that takes on a life of its own, about a game that ac­ci­den­tally changed the ca­reers of hun­dreds of peo­ple. And it’s about the 50-year age gap be­tween two de­vel­op­ers who, de­spite meet­ing in per­son for the first time only via video call, would trust each other with four decades of work.

Michael Jenkins was sup­posed to be study­ing. Instead, he was fill­ing note­books with ideas for a board game.

Not just any board game. Jenkins wanted to build some­thing like Monopoly, but in­stead of ho­tels and rail­roads, you’d buy and sell cor­po­ra­tions. You’d is­sue stock. You’d ex­e­cute merg­ers. You’d struc­ture lever­aged buy­outs. The game would sim­u­late the en­tire ma­chin­ery of American cap­i­tal­ism, from hos­tile takeovers to tax ac­count­ing.

There was just one prob­lem: it was im­pos­si­ble.

“Nobody’s go­ing to have the pa­tience to do this,” Jenkins re­al­ized as he stared at his pro­to­type—a board cov­ered in tiny pa­per stock cer­tifi­cates, a cal­cu­la­tor for work­ing out the math, ses­sions that stretched for hours with­out reach­ing any sat­is­fy­ing con­clu­sion.

The game he wanted to make re­quired some­thing that did­n’t ex­ist yet: a per­sonal com­puter.

So Jenkins waited. He grad­u­ated from Harvard Law in 1969. He worked as an econ­o­mist at a na­tional con­sult­ing firm. He be­came a CPA at one of the world’s largest ac­count­ing firms. He prac­ticed tax law at a pres­ti­gious San Francisco firm, struc­tur­ing bil­lion-dol­lar merg­ers—the ex­act kind of trans­ac­tions he dreamed of sim­u­lat­ing in his game.

And all the while, he kept fill­ing note­books.

Jenkins be­gan sketch­ing ideas for a cor­po­rate board game while at Harvard Law School

Sixteen years af­ter those first note­books, Jenkins fi­nally got his hands on what he’d been wait­ing for: a Kaypro per­sonal com­puter.

It had a screen about five inches across. It ran CP/M, an op­er­at­ing sys­tem that would soon be for­got­ten when MS-DOS ar­rived. It was prim­i­tive be­yond be­lief by mod­ern stan­dards.

The Kaypro portable com­puter, with its iconic built-in screen

Jenkins pulled out a slim book­let that came with the ma­chine—a guide to Microsoft Basic writ­ten by Bill Gates him­self. He’d never writ­ten a line of code in his life. He had no for­mal train­ing in com­put­ers. But that night, he sat down and typed:

The com­puter said hello.

“As soon as I did that,” Jenkins later re­called, “I re­al­ized: oh, this is­n’t that com­pli­cated.”

What hap­pened next be­came the stuff of leg­end in the small com­mu­nity of Wall Street Raider devo­tees. Jenkins stayed up un­til five in the morn­ing, writ­ing “all kinds of crazy stuff”—fake con­ver­sa­tions that would prank his friends when they sat down at his com­puter, lit­tle pro­grams that seemed to know things about his vis­i­tors.

It was a hoot. It was also the be­gin­ning of an ob­ses­sion that would con­sume the next four decades of his life.

Within a year, Jenkins had built some­thing he ac­tu­ally wanted: the first crude ver­sion of Wall Street Raider. It al­ready had a mov­ing stock ticker scrolling across that tiny five-inch screen. It al­ready had news head­lines stream­ing past. It was ugly and in­com­plete, but it was real.

Meanwhile, his law prac­tice was suf­fer­ing. “I was sit­ting in my of­fice pro­gram­ming in­stead of drum­ming up busi­ness,” he ad­mit­ted. Only his side busi­ness—a se­ries of tax guides called “Starting and Operating a Business” that would even­tu­ally sell over a mil­lion copies across all fifty states—kept him fi­nan­cially afloat.

The most com­plex parts of Wall Street Raider weren’t writ­ten dur­ing nor­mal work­ing hours. They were writ­ten in the dead of night, in what Jenkins called “fits of ra­tio­nal­ity.”

Picture this: It’s three in the morn­ing. Jenkins is hunched over his com­puter, try­ing to work out how to code a merger. Not just any merger—a merger where every party has to be dealt with cor­rectly. Bondholders. Stockholders. Option hold­ers. Futures po­si­tions. Interest rate swap coun­ter­par­ties. Proper ra­tios for every facet. Tax im­pli­ca­tions for every trans­ac­tion.

“I felt like if I go to bed and I get up in the morn­ing, I won’t re­mem­ber how to do this. So I just stayed up un­til I wrote that code.”

The re­sult? Code that worked per­fectly—code that he tested for years and knew was cor­rect—but code that even he did­n’t fully un­der­stand any­more.

“When I look at that code to­day, I still don’t re­ally quite un­der­stand it,” he ad­mit­ted. “But I don’t want to mess with it.”

This be­came the pat­tern. Jenkins would ob­sess over a fea­ture un­til the logic crys­tal­lized in his mind, usu­ally some­time af­ter mid­night, and then race to get it coded be­fore the frag­ile un­der­stand­ing slipped away. The game grew layer by layer, each new fea­ture build­ing on the ones be­fore, each line of code a record of what Jenkins un­der­stood about cor­po­rate fi­nance at that par­tic­u­lar mo­ment in his life.

Years later, Ben Ward would give this phe­nom­e­non a name: The Jenkins Market Hypothesis.

“The hy­poth­e­sis,” Ward wrote in an email to Jenkins, “is that as­set prices in the game re­flect com­pe­ti­tion be­tween Michael Jenkins’ un­der­stand­ing of how Wall Street Raider worked at the point in time that he wrote the code over the past 40 years.”

In other words: the game’s sim­u­lated mar­ket was re­ally just forty dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Michael Jenkins, from forty dif­fer­ent stages of his life, all com­pet­ing with each other.

Jenkins loved the the­ory. “I think it’s very much re­lated to chaos the­ory,” he replied.

In 1986, Michael Jenkins re­tired from law and CPA prac­tice at the age of 42. His tax guides were sell­ing well, and his pub­lisher had agreed to re­lease Wall Street Raider. He thought he might spend a few years pol­ish­ing his hobby pro­ject.

Thirty-four years later, he was still at it.

“I chuckle when I get emails from cus­tomers who ask me when the team is go­ing to do one thing or the other. Well, the team is me. Ronin Software is def­i­nitely a one horse op­er­a­tion and al­ways has been.”

The game that started as a Monopoly vari­ant had be­come some­thing mon­strous and mag­nif­i­cent. By the time Jenkins was done, Wall Street Raider con­tained:

1,600 sim­u­lated com­pa­nies, each with its own fi­nan­cials

Antitrust reg­u­la­tions (toggleable for those who wanted “robber baron” mode)

Consolidated tax ac­count­ing based on ac­tual IRS reg­u­la­tions (Jenkins had been trained by the per­son who lit­er­ally wrote those reg­u­la­tions)

A karma sys­tem that tracked your eth­i­cal vi­o­la­tions and in­creased your chances of get­ting caught the more you cheated

A 271-page man­ual that was sold sep­a­rately be­cause it was sim­ply too dense to give away

Hidden be­neath all this ma­chin­ery was some­thing that did­n’t dawn on most play­ers un­til they’d been im­mersed in the game for months or years: an enor­mous amount of text. New events, sce­nar­ios, and mes­sages would con­tinue to pop up long af­ter a player thought they’d seen every­thing—of­ten laced with Jenkins’ trade­mark tongue-in-cheek grave­yard hu­mor. The game was­n’t just deep me­chan­i­cally; it was deep nar­ra­tively, in ways that only re­vealed them­selves over time.

The orig­i­nal Wall Street Raider: from DOS (left) to Windows (right) — dense, com­plex, and un­de­ni­ably dated

The game had, in short, be­come the most com­pre­hen­sive fi­nan­cial sim­u­la­tor ever cre­ated—so com­plex that most peo­ple bounced off it, but those who broke through be­came de­voted for life.

“The Dwarf Fortress of the stock mar­ket.”

Jenkins played chess against the world. He’d re­lease a new fea­ture, and within weeks, some clever player would email him: “Man, I found how to make tril­lions of dol­lars overnight with that new fea­ture.”

“I felt at times like the IRS plug­ging loop­holes,” Jenkins ad­mit­ted. Every ex­ploit be­came a patch. Every patch cre­ated new edge cases. The code grew more in­tri­cate, more lay­ered, more in­com­pre­hen­si­ble to any­one but its cre­ator.

And then some­thing strange started hap­pen­ing.

The emails started ar­riv­ing from around the world, and they weren’t about bugs.

One came from the Philippines:

“I’ve been play­ing your game since I was 13 years old, liv­ing in a third world coun­try. Couldn’t even af­ford to buy the full ver­sion. So I played the two-year demo for years and years. And it taught me so much that now I’m work­ing for Morgan Stanley as a forex trader in Shanghai.”

Another came from a hedge fund man­ager:

“I played Wall Street Raider for years and no­ticed that buy­ing cheap com­pa­nies—com­pa­nies with low PE ra­tios—and turn­ing them around seemed very prof­itable in the game. But I was­n’t do­ing that with my real clients. I was­n’t do­ing well. Finally I de­cided to just start do­ing what I’d been do­ing in Wall Street Raider.”

He at­tached a doc­u­ment: an au­dited re­port from Price Waterhouse, show­ing a 10-year pe­riod where he’d av­er­aged a 44% com­pounded an­nual re­turn us­ing strate­gies he’d learned from a video game.

“Your game has changed my life.”

Jenkins heard it again and again. From CEOs. From in­vest­ment bankers. From traders and pro­fes­sors and fi­nance stu­dents. People who’d played the free demo ver­sion as teenagers in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries and par­layed what they learned into ca­reers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. People who’d been stone ma­sons won­der­ing if they could do some­thing more.

By his own count, over 200 CEOs and in­vest­ment bankers had reached out over the years to say that Wall Street Raider had shaped their ca­reers.

“I cre­ated the game be­cause it was fun to do so,” Jenkins said. “But I’ve been pleas­antly sur­prised to see the pos­i­tive im­pact it has had on the lives of a lot of peo­ple who grew up play­ing it for years and years.”

Players from around the world credit the game with launch­ing their fi­nance ca­reers

It was, it turned out, not just a game. It was ac­ci­den­tally one of the most ef­fec­tive fi­nan­cial ed­u­ca­tion tools ever cre­ated—a sim­u­la­tor so re­al­is­tic that its lessons trans­ferred di­rectly to real mar­kets.

Everyone wanted to mod­ern­ize Wall Street Raider. Everyone failed.

The in­ter­est was ob­vi­ous. Here was a game with proven ed­u­ca­tional value, de­voted fans, and game­play depth that put most com­peti­tors to shame. The only prob­lem was the in­ter­face—a relic of the 1990s Windows era, all drop­down menus and tiny text boxes and graph­ics that looked, as one long­time player put it, “like they came from the dark ages.”

So they came, the would-be sav­iors, with their teams and their bud­gets and their am­bi­tions.

A Denver com­pany that de­vel­oped le­gal soft­ware sent their pro­gram­mers. They could­n’t make it work.

A game stu­dio that did work for Disney as­sem­bled a team in Armenia, over­seen by an American PhD in math­e­mat­ics. They spent over a year and “lots of money”—by some ac­counts, hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars—try­ing to port the game to iPad.

“None of their peo­ple had the kind of in-depth knowl­edge of cor­po­rate fi­nance, eco­nom­ics, law, and tax­a­tion that I was able to build into the game,” Jenkins ex­plained. “So they sim­ply could­n’t code the sim­u­la­tion cor­rectly when they did­n’t have a clue how it should work.”

Commodore Computers, back in 1990, li­censed the DOS ver­sion. After three months of try­ing to un­der­stand the source code, they mailed it back.

Steam, dur­ing the Greenlight era, re­jected it out­right. “Too niche,” they said. “Almost no graph­ics. Looks clumsy and prim­i­tive.”

The pat­tern was al­ways the same. Professional pro­gram­mers would look at Jenkins’ 115,000 lines of prim­i­tive BASIC—code that “broke all the rules for good struc­tured pro­gram­ming”—and try to rewrite it in some­thing mod­ern. C++, usu­ally. They’d make progress for a while, get 60% or 80% of the way there, and then hit a wall.

The prob­lem was­n’t tech­ni­cal skill. The prob­lem was that to rewrite the code, you had to un­der­stand the code. And to un­der­stand the code, you had to un­der­stand cor­po­rate fi­nance, tax law, eco­nom­ics, and se­cu­ri­ties reg­u­la­tion at the same depth as some­one who’d spent decades as a CPA, tax at­tor­ney, and econ­o­mist.

Those peo­ple did­n’t tend to be­come video game pro­gram­mers.

“My 115,000 lines of prim­i­tive BASIC source code,” Jenkins ad­mit­ted, “was ap­par­ently in­de­ci­pher­able to any­one but me.”

The skele­tons piled up around the dragon.

“Imagine a dragon that needs slay­ing, with skele­tons of fallen knights all around it”

The End of the Road

By his late sev­en­ties, Michael Jenkins was run­ning out of op­tions.

His e-com­merce provider had gone bank­rupt, tak­ing six months of in­come with them. Payment proces­sors kept re­ject­ing him—some be­cause of ob­scure tax com­pli­ca­tions from sell­ing soft­ware in hun­dreds of coun­tries, oth­ers be­cause their le­gal de­part­ments did­n’t want to be as­so­ci­ated with any­thing fi­nance-re­lated. For a pe­riod, you lit­er­ally could­n’t buy Wall Street Raider any­where.

“At one point the chal­lenges got so over­whelm­ing,” Jenkins ad­mit­ted, “that I se­ri­ously con­sid­ered just shut­ting down every­thing.”

In 2020, a gam­ing jour­nal­ist named AJ Churchill sent Jenkins a sim­ple email ask­ing whether up­grades to Speculator (a com­pan­ion game) were in­cluded in the pur­chase price.

Jenkins’ re­sponse was… more than Churchill ex­pected:

“Also, as a reg­is­tered user, you can buy Wall Street Raider at the dis­counted price of $12.95. As I make re­vi­sions over a pe­riod of a year or two, I even­tu­ally de­cide when I’ve done enough that it’s time to is­sue an up­grade ver­sion, but there is no timetable. And to be frank, I’m run­ning out of fea­si­ble ideas for im­prove­ments to both games, and there may only be one or two more up­grades to ei­ther pro­gram.

Otherwise, at age 76, I may be fi­nally com­ing near the end of de­vel­op­ment with my lim­ited soft­ware skills, un­less I can li­cense my code to a large soft­ware/​game com­pany that is will­ing to hire the kind of ex­pen­sive pro­gram­ming tal­ent that writes soft­ware for firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs—who would be the only pro­gram­mers ca­pa­ble of port­ing my game to iOS, Android, or to a classy-look­ing Windows GUI. And that is very un­likely.

I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of any­one ever be­ing able to port it.”

Churchill posted the ex­change to the r/​ty­coon sub­red­dit with the ti­tle: “I reached out to the 79-year-old cre­ator of Wall Street Raider and here’s what he wrote back.”

The post got some at­ten­tion. People com­mented about what a shame it was. A few bought the game out of cu­rios­ity. And then, like most Reddit posts, it faded into ob­scu­rity.

Hear the story from Michael Jenkins and Ben Ward them­selves.

But some­where in Ohio, a young soft­ware de­vel­oper read it. And he could­n’t get the im­age of a Bloomberg ter­mi­nal out of his head.

Ben Ward’s first mem­ory of pro­gram­ming was go­ing to the li­brary as a small child and check­ing out a mas­sive text­book on C++ game de­vel­op­ment.

“I barely prob­a­bly knew how to read at that point,” he re­called. “I had no idea how to in­stall a com­piler, run the code that was in this book. But it just kind of got me think­ing.”

Ward was, by his own ad­mis­sion, a ter­ri­ble stu­dent. He had ADHD that went un­di­ag­nosed un­til adult­hood. He spent more time help­ing his class­mates with their home­work than do­ing his own. His two-year pro­gram­ming de­gree took five years to com­plete.

Ben Ward, the de­vel­oper who would fi­nally crack the code

But when it came to code, some­thing clicked.

At 18, work­ing at his un­cle’s man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pany, Ward built a man­age­ment sys­tem in three months that re­placed their spread­sheets. It ran the busi­ness for five years. He went on to build ERP and ware­house man­age­ment sys­tems, worked at fin­tech com­pa­nies, and be­came a se­nior full-stack de­vel­oper.

A main­tained uBlock Origin fil­ter list to hide all traces of YouTube shorts videos.

Copy the link be­low, go to uBlock Origin > Dashboard > Filter lists, scroll to the bot­tom, and paste the link un­der­neath the ‘Import…’ head­ing:

https://​raw.githubuser­con­tent.com/​i5heu/​ublock-hide-yt-shorts/​mas­ter/​list.txt

> uBlock Origin sub­scribe link < (does not work on GitHub)

> uBlock Origin sub­scribe link < (does not work on GitHub)

After the ini­tial cre­ateor of this list @gijsdev is now van­ished for half a year, i ( i5heu ) took it on me to main­tain this list.

This pro­ject is an in­de­pen­dent, open-source ini­tia­tive and is not af­fil­i­ated with, en­dorsed by, spon­sored by, or as­so­ci­ated with Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, or YouTube.

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Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch On YouTube

In a move that has de­lighted fans of clas­sic sci­ence fic­tion, Warner Bros. Discovery has be­gun up­load­ing full episodes of the iconic se­ries , pro­vid­ing free ac­cess to the show just as it de­parts from the ad-sup­ported stream­ing plat­form Tubi. The tran­si­tion comes at a piv­otal time for the se­ries, which has main­tained a ded­i­cated fol­low­ing since its orig­i­nal run in the 1990s. Viewers no­ticed no­ti­fi­ca­tions on Tubi in­di­cat­ing that all five sea­sons would no longer be avail­able af­ter February 10, 2026, ef­fec­tively re­mov­ing one of the most ac­ces­si­ble free stream­ing op­tions for the space opera. With this shift, Warner Bros. Discovery ap­pears to be steer­ing the prop­erty to­ward its own dig­i­tal ecosys­tem, lever­ag­ing YouTube’s vast au­di­ence to rein­tro­duce the show to both long­time en­thu­si­asts and a new gen­er­a­tion.

The up­loads started with the pi­lot episode, “The Gathering,” which serves as the en­try point to the se­ries’ in­tri­cate uni­verse. This was fol­lowed by sub­se­quent episodes such as “Midnight on the Firing Line” and “Soul Hunter,” re­leased in se­quence to build nar­ra­tive mo­men­tum. The strat­egy in­volves post­ing one episode each week, al­low­ing au­di­ences to ex­pe­ri­ence the story at a paced rhythm that mir­rors the orig­i­nal broad­cast sched­ule. This ap­proach not only en­cour­ages weekly view­er­ship but also fos­ters on­line dis­cus­sions and com­mu­nal watch­ing events, much like the fan com­mu­ni­ties that formed dur­ing the show’s ini­tial air­ing. The episodes are hosted on a chan­nel af­fil­i­ated with Warner Bros., com­plete with links to pur­chase the full se­ries, blend­ing free ac­cess with op­por­tu­ni­ties for deeper en­gage­ment through of­fi­cial mer­chan­dise and dig­i­tal own­er­ship.

Babylon 5’s move to YouTube rep­re­sents a broader trend in con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion, where legacy ti­tles are re­vi­tal­ized through free plat­forms to com­pete in a crowded stream­ing land­scape. Tubi’s re­moval of the se­ries aligns with pe­ri­odic li­brary ro­ta­tions com­mon among ad-based ser­vices, where li­cens­ing agree­ments ex­pire and con­tent mi­grates to new homes. For Warner Bros. Discovery, this ini­tia­tive could sig­nal plans to ex­pand the fran­chise’s vis­i­bil­ity, es­pe­cially amid on­go­ing in­ter­est in re­boots and spin-offs that have been ru­mored in re­cent years. The com­pa­ny’s own­er­ship of the prop­erty, ac­quired through merg­ers, po­si­tions it to ex­per­i­ment with hy­brid mod­els that com­bine free episodic re­leases with pre­mium of­fer­ings on plat­forms like Max.

To un­der­stand the sig­nif­i­cance of this de­vel­op­ment, a brief look at Babylon 5’s his­tory pro­vides con­text. Created by J. Michael Straczynski, the se­ries pre­miered in 1993 as a ground­break­ing space opera that un­folded over five sea­sons, con­clud­ing in 1998. Set in the mid-23rd cen­tury, it cen­ters on a mas­sive space sta­tion called Babylon 5, which serves as a diplo­matic hub for var­i­ous alien species and hu­mans in the af­ter­math of dev­as­tat­ing in­ter­stel­lar wars. The sta­tion, or­bit­ing a neu­tral planet, be­comes a fo­cal point for po­lit­i­cal in­trigue, al­liances, and con­flicts among fed­er­a­tions rep­re­sent­ing Earth, the Minbari, Centauri, Narn, and oth­ers.

Unlike many con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous shows, Babylon 5 was con­ceived as a sin­gle, co­he­sive nar­ra­tive arc re­sem­bling a novel for tele­vi­sion, with each sea­son cor­re­spond­ing to a year from 2258 to 2262. This struc­ture al­lowed for long-term char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment and es­ca­lat­ing plot­lines, in­clud­ing themes of war, peace, prophecy, and an­cient cos­mic forces. The se­ries was in­no­v­a­tive for its use of com­puter-gen­er­ated im­agery in vi­sual ef­fects, a rar­ity at the time, and its de­par­ture from episodic for­mats in fa­vor of se­ri­al­ized sto­ry­telling that in­flu­enced later hits like Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse. Production faced chal­lenges, in­clud­ing net­work changes from PTEN to TNT for the fi­nal sea­son, but it amassed crit­i­cal ac­claim for its depth and world-build­ing.

The show’s legacy ex­tends be­yond tele­vi­sion, spawn­ing nov­els, comics, and tele­films that ex­panded its lore. Its hu­man-cen­tric yet mul­ti­cul­tural per­spec­tive, por­tray­ing Earth as a mid-tier power in a vast galaxy, res­onated with au­di­ences seek­ing com­plex sci-fi be­yond utopian vi­sions. A decade be­fore the main events, hu­man­ity nar­rowly es­caped an­ni­hi­la­tion in the Earth-Minbari War, an event that un­der­scored the fragility of in­ter­stel­lar re­la­tions and set the stage for the sta­tion’s role as a bea­con of hope.

As episodes con­tinue to roll out on YouTube, fans are al­ready spec­u­lat­ing on whether this sig­nals a full re­vival or sim­ply a nos­tal­gic re-re­lease. For now, the weekly drops of­fer a timely way to re­visit or dis­cover a cor­ner­stone of genre tele­vi­sion, en­sur­ing Babylon 5’s en­dur­ing place in sci-fi his­tory. With over 110 episodes across its run, the grad­ual roll­out promises months of con­tent, keep­ing the sta­tion’s lights on for view­ers world­wide.

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As part of its mis­sion to pre­serve the web, the Internet Archive op­er­ates crawlers that cap­ture web­page snap­shots. Many of these snap­shots are ac­ces­si­ble through its pub­lic-fac­ing tool, the Wayback Machine. But as AI bots scav­enge the web for train­ing data to feed their mod­els, the Internet Archive’s com­mit­ment to free in­for­ma­tion ac­cess has turned its dig­i­tal li­brary into a po­ten­tial li­a­bil­ity for some news pub­lish­ers.

When The Guardian took a look at who was try­ing to ex­tract its con­tent, ac­cess logs re­vealed that the Internet Archive was a fre­quent crawler, said Robert Hahn, head of busi­ness af­fairs and li­cens­ing. The pub­lisher de­cided to limit the Internet Archive’s ac­cess to pub­lished ar­ti­cles, min­i­miz­ing the chance that AI com­pa­nies might scrape its con­tent via the non­prof­it’s repos­i­tory of over one tril­lion web­page snap­shots.

The Wayback Machine’s snap­shots of news home­pages plum­met af­ter a “breakdown” in archiv­ing pro­jects

Specifically, Hahn said The Guardian has taken steps to ex­clude it­self from the Internet Archive’s APIs and fil­ter out its ar­ti­cle pages from the Wayback Machine’s URLs in­ter­face. The Guardian’s re­gional home­pages, topic pages, and other land­ing pages will con­tinue to ap­pear in the Wayback Machine.

In par­tic­u­lar, Hahn ex­pressed con­cern about the Internet Archive’s APIs.

“A lot of these AI busi­nesses are look­ing for read­ily avail­able, struc­tured data­bases of con­tent,” he said. “The Internet Archive’s API would have been an ob­vi­ous place to plug their own ma­chines into and suck out the IP.” (He ad­mits the Wayback Machine it­self is “less risky,” since the data is not as well-struc­tured.)

As news pub­lish­ers try to safe­guard their con­tents from AI com­pa­nies, the Internet Archive is also get­ting caught in the crosshairs. The Financial Times, for ex­am­ple, blocks any bot that tries to scrape its pay­walled con­tent, in­clud­ing bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the Internet Archive. The ma­jor­ity of FT sto­ries are pay­walled, ac­cord­ing to di­rec­tor of global pub­lic pol­icy and plat­form strat­egy Matt Rogerson. As a re­sult, usu­ally only un­pay­walled FT sto­ries ap­pear in the Wayback Machine be­cause those are meant to be avail­able to the wider pub­lic any­way.

“Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely con­sid­ered to be the ‘good guys’ and are used by ‘the bad guys’ like OpenAI,” said Michael Nelson, a com­puter sci­en­tist and pro­fes­sor at Old Dominion University. “In every­one’s aver­sion to not be con­trolled by LLMs, I think the good guys are col­lat­eral dam­age.”

To pre­serve their work — and drafts of his­tory — jour­nal­ists take archiv­ing into their own hands

The Guardian has­n’t doc­u­mented spe­cific in­stances of its web­pages be­ing scraped by AI com­pa­nies via the Wayback Machine. Instead, it’s tak­ing these mea­sures proac­tively and is work­ing di­rectly with the Internet Archive to im­ple­ment the changes. Hahn says the or­ga­ni­za­tion has been re­cep­tive to The Guardian’s con­cerns.

The out­let stopped short of an all-out block on the Internet Archive’s crawlers, Hahn said, be­cause it sup­ports the non­prof­it’s mis­sion to de­moc­ra­tize in­for­ma­tion, though that po­si­tion re­mains un­der re­view as part of its rou­tine bot man­age­ment.

“[The de­ci­sion] was much more about com­pli­ance and a back­door threat to our con­tent,” he said.

When asked about The Guardian’s de­ci­sion, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that “if pub­lish­ers limit li­braries, like the Internet Archive, then the pub­lic will have less ac­cess to the his­tor­i­cal record.” It’s a prospect, he im­plied, that could un­der­cut the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s work coun­ter­ing “information dis­or­der.”

After 25 years, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive are still work­ing to de­moc­ra­tize knowl­edge

The Guardian is­n’t alone in reeval­u­at­ing its re­la­tion­ship to the Internet Archive. The New York Times con­firmed to Nieman Lab that it’s ac­tively “hard block­ing” the Internet Archive’s crawlers. At the end of 2025, the Times also added one of those crawlers — archive.org_bot — to its ro­bots.txt file, dis­al­low­ing ac­cess to its con­tent.

“We be­lieve in the value of The New York Times’s hu­man-led jour­nal­ism and al­ways want to en­sure that our IP is be­ing ac­cessed and used law­fully,” said a Times spokesper­son. “We are block­ing the Internet Archive’s bot from ac­cess­ing the Times be­cause the Wayback Machine pro­vides un­fet­tered ac­cess to Times con­tent — in­clud­ing by AI com­pa­nies — with­out au­tho­riza­tion.”

Last August, Reddit an­nounced that it would block the Internet Archive, whose dig­i­tal li­braries in­clude count­less archived Reddit fo­rums, com­ments sec­tions, and pro­files. This con­tent is not un­like what Reddit now li­censes to Google as AI train­ing data for tens of mil­lions of dol­lars.

“[The] Internet Archive pro­vides a ser­vice to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of in­stances where AI com­pa­nies vi­o­late plat­form poli­cies, in­clud­ing ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” a Reddit spokesper­son told The Verge at the time. “Until they’re able to de­fend their site and com­ply with plat­form poli­cies…we’re lim­it­ing some of their ac­cess to Reddit data to pro­tect red­di­tors.”

Kahle has also al­luded to steps the Internet Archive is tak­ing to re­strict bulk ac­cess to its li­braries. In a Mastodon post last fall, he wrote that “there are many col­lec­tions that are avail­able to users but not for bulk down­load­ing. We use in­ter­nal rate-lim­it­ing sys­tems, fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms, and net­work se­cu­rity ser­vices such as Cloudflare.”

Currently, how­ever, the Internet Archive does not dis­al­low any spe­cific crawlers through its ro­bots.txt file, in­clud­ing those of ma­jor AI com­pa­nies. As of January 12, the ro­bots.txt file for archive.org read: “​​Welcome to the Archive! Please crawl our files. We ap­pre­ci­ate it if you can crawl re­spon­si­bly. Stay open!” Shortly af­ter we in­quired about this lan­guage, it was changed. The file now reads, sim­ply, “Welcome to the Internet Archive!”

There is ev­i­dence that the Wayback Machine, gen­er­ally speak­ing, has been used to train LLMs in the past. An analy­sis of Google’s C4 dataset by the Washington Post in 2023 showed that the Internet Archive was among mil­lions of web­sites in the train­ing data used to build Google’s T5 model and Meta’s Llama mod­els. Out of the 15 mil­lion do­mains in the C4 dataset, the do­main for the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) was ranked as the 187th most pre­sent.

Hundreds of thou­sands of videos from news pub­lish­ers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI mod­elsIn May 2023, the Internet Archive went of­fline tem­porar­ily af­ter an AI com­pany caused a server over­load, Wayback Machine di­rec­tor Mark Graham told Nieman Lab this past fall. The com­pany sent tens of thou­sands of re­quests per sec­ond from vir­tual hosts on Amazon Web Services to ex­tract text data from the non­prof­it’s pub­lic do­main archives. The Internet Archive blocked the hosts twice be­fore putting out a pub­lic call to “respectfully” scrape its site.

“We got in con­tact with them. They ended up giv­ing us a do­na­tion,” Graham said. “They ended up say­ing that they were sorry and they stopped do­ing it.”

“Those want­ing to use our ma­te­ri­als in bulk should start slowly, and ramp up,” wrote Kahle in a blog post shortly af­ter the in­ci­dent. “Also, if you are start­ing a large pro­ject please con­tact us …we are here to help.”

The Guardian’s moves to limit the Internet Archive’s ac­cess made us won­der whether other news pub­lish­ers were tak­ing sim­i­lar ac­tions. We looked at pub­lish­ers’ ro­bots.txt pages as a way to mea­sure po­ten­tial con­cern over the Internet Archive’s crawl­ing.

A web­site’s ro­bots.txt page tells bots which parts of the site they can crawl, act­ing like a “doorman,” telling vis­i­tors who is and is­n’t al­lowed in the house and which parts are off lim­its. Robots.txt pages aren’t legally bind­ing, so the com­pa­nies run­ning crawl­ing bots aren’t ob­lig­ated to com­ply with them, but they in­di­cate where the Internet Archive is un­wel­come.

For ex­am­ple, in ad­di­tion to “hard block­ing,” The New York Times and The Athletic in­clude the archive.org_bot in their ro­bots.txt file, though they do not cur­rently dis­al­low other bots op­er­ated by the Internet Archive.

To ex­plore this is­sue, Nieman Lab used jour­nal­ist Ben Welsh‘s data­base of 1,167 news web­sites as a start­ing point. As part of a larger side pro­ject to archive news sites’ home­pages, Welsh runs crawlers that reg­u­larly scrape the ro­bots.txt files of the out­lets in his data­base. In late December, we down­loaded a spread­sheet from Welsh’s site that dis­played all the bots dis­al­lowed in the ro­bots.txt files of those sites. We iden­ti­fied four bots that the AI user agent watch­dog ser­vice Dark Visitors has as­so­ci­ated with the Internet Archive. (The Internet Archive did not re­spond to re­quests to con­firm its own­er­ship of these bots.)

This data is not com­pre­hen­sive, but ex­ploratory. It does not rep­re­sent global, in­dus­try-wide trends — 76% of sites in the Welsh’s pub­lisher list are based in the U. S., for ex­am­ple — but in­stead be­gins to shed light on which pub­lish­ers are less ea­ger to have their con­tent crawled by the Internet Archive.

In to­tal, 241 news sites from nine coun­tries ex­plic­itly dis­al­low at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawl­ing bots.

Most of those sites (87%) are owned by USA Today Co., the largest news­pa­per con­glom­er­ate in the United States for­merly known as Gannett. (Gannett sites only make up 18% of Welsh’s orig­i­nal pub­lish­ers list.) Each Gannett-owned out­let in our dataset dis­al­lows the same two bots: “archive.org_bot” and “ia_archiver-web.archive.org”. These bots were added to the ro­bots.txt files of Gannett-owned pub­li­ca­tions in 2025.

Some Gannett sites have also taken stronger mea­sures to guard their con­tents from Internet Archive crawlers. URL searches for the Des Moines Register in the Wayback Machine re­turn a mes­sage that says, “Sorry. This URL has been ex­cluded from the Wayback Machine.”

“USA Today Co. has con­sis­tently em­pha­sized the im­por­tance of safe­guard­ing our con­tent and in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty,” a com­pany spokesper­son said via email. “Last year, we in­tro­duced new pro­to­cols to de­ter unau­tho­rized data col­lec­tion and scrap­ing, redi­rect­ing such ac­tiv­ity to a des­ig­nated page out­lin­ing our li­cens­ing re­quire­ments.”

Gannett de­clined to com­ment fur­ther on its re­la­tion­ship with the Internet Archive. In an October 2025 earn­ings call, CEO Mike Reed spoke to the com­pa­ny’s anti-scrap­ing mea­sures.

“In September alone, we blocked 75 mil­lion AI bots across our lo­cal and USA Today plat­forms, the vast ma­jor­ity of which were seek­ing to scrape our lo­cal con­tent,” Reed said on that call. “About 70 mil­lion of those came from OpenAI.” (Gannett signed a con­tent li­cens­ing agree­ment with Perplexity in July 2025.)

About 93% (226 sites) of pub­lish­ers in our dataset dis­al­low two out of the four Internet Archive bots we iden­ti­fied. Three news sites in the sam­ple dis­al­low three Internet Archive crawlers: Le Huffington Post, Le Monde, and Le Monde in English, all of which are owned by Group Le Monde.

Some French pub­lish­ers are giv­ing AI rev­enue di­rectly to jour­nal­ists. Could that ever hap­pen in the U. S.?

The news sites in our sam­ple aren’t only tar­get­ing the Internet Archive. Out of the 241 sites that dis­al­low at least one of the four Internet Archive bots in our sam­ple, 240 sites dis­al­low Common Crawl — an­other non­profit in­ter­net preser­va­tion pro­ject that has been more closely linked to com­mer­cial LLM de­vel­op­ment. Of our sam­ple, 231 sites all dis­al­low bots op­er­ated by OpenAI, Google AI, and Common Crawl.

As we’ve pre­vi­ously re­ported, the Internet Archive has taken on the Herculean task of pre­serv­ing the in­ter­net, and many news or­ga­ni­za­tions aren’t equipped to save their own work. In December, Poynter an­nounced a joint ini­tia­tive with the Internet Archive to train lo­cal news out­lets on how to pre­serve their con­tent. Archiving ini­tia­tives like this, while ur­gently needed, are few and far be­tween. Since there is no fed­eral man­date that re­quires in­ter­net con­tent to be pre­served, the Internet Archive is the most ro­bust archiv­ing ini­tia­tive in the United States.

“The Internet Archive tends to be good cit­i­zens,” Hahn said. “It’s the law of un­in­tended con­se­quences: You do some­thing for re­ally good pur­poses, and it gets abused.”

Photo of Internet Archive home­page by SDF_QWE used un­der an Adobe Stock li­cense.

I re­cently got a smart sleep mask from Kickstarter. I was not ex­pect­ing to end up with the abil­ity to read strangers’ brain­waves and send them elec­tric im­pulses in their sleep. But here we are.

The mask was from a small Chinese re­search com­pany, very cool hard­ware — EEG brain mon­i­tor­ing, elec­tri­cal mus­cle stim­u­la­tion around the eyes, vi­bra­tion, heat­ing, au­dio. The app was still rough around the edges though and the mask kept dis­con­nect­ing, so I asked Claude to try re­verse-en­gi­neer the Bluetooth pro­to­col and build me a sim­ple web con­trol panel in­stead.

The first thing Claude did was scan for BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) de­vices nearby. It found mine among 35 de­vices in range, con­nected, and mapped the in­ter­face — two data chan­nels. One for send­ing com­mands, one for stream­ing data.

Then it tried talk­ing to it. Sent maybe a hun­dred dif­fer­ent com­mand pat­terns. Modbus frames, JSON, raw bytes, com­mon head­ers. Unfortunately, the de­vice said noth­ing back, the pro­to­col was not a stan­dard one.

So Claude went af­ter the app in­stead. Grabbed the Android APK, de­com­piled it with jadx. Turns out the app is built with Flutter, which is a bit of a prob­lem for re­verse en­gi­neer­ing. Flutter com­piles Dart source code into na­tive ARM64 ma­chine code — you can’t just read it back like nor­mal Java Android apps. The ac­tual busi­ness logic lives in a 9MB bi­nary blob.

But even com­piled bi­na­ries have strings in them. Error mes­sages, URLs, de­bug logs. Claude ran strings on the bi­nary and this was the most pro­duc­tive step of the whole ses­sion. Among the thou­sands of lines of Flutter frame­work noise, it found:

* Hardcoded cre­den­tials for the com­pa­ny’s mes­sage bro­ker (shared by every copy of the app)

* All fif­teen com­mand builder func­tion names (e.g. to set vi­bra­tion, heat­ing, elec­tric stim­u­la­tion, etc.)

We had the shape of the pro­to­col. Still did­n’t have the ac­tual byte val­ues though.

Claude then used blut­ter, a tool specif­i­cally for de­com­pil­ing Flutter’s com­piled Dart snap­shots. It re­con­structs the func­tions with read­able an­no­ta­tions. Claude fig­ured out the en­cod­ing, and just read off every com­mand byte from every func­tion. Fifteen com­mands, fully mapped.

Claude sent a six-byte query packet. The de­vice came back with 153 bytes — model num­ber, firmware ver­sion, se­r­ial num­ber, all eight sen­sor chan­nel con­fig­u­ra­tions (EEG at 250Hz, res­pi­ra­tion, 3-axis ac­celerom­e­ter, 3-axis gy­ro­scope). Battery at 83%.

Vibration con­trol worked. Heating worked. EMS worked. Music worked. Claude built me a lit­tle web dash­board with slid­ers for every­thing. I was pretty happy with it.

That could have been the end of the story.

Remember the hard­coded cre­den­tials from ear­lier? While pok­ing around, Claude tried us­ing them to con­nect to the com­pa­ny’s MQTT bro­ker — MQTT is a pub/​sub mes­sag­ing sys­tem stan­dard in IoT, where de­vices pub­lish sen­sor read­ings and sub­scribe to com­mands. It con­nected fine. Then it started re­ceiv­ing data. Not just from my de­vice — from all of them. About 25 were ac­tive:

Claude cap­tured a cou­ple min­utes of EEG from two ac­tive sleep masks. One user seemed to be in REM sleep (mixed-frequency ac­tiv­ity). The other was in deep slow-wave sleep (strong delta power be­low 4Hz). Real brain­waves from real peo­ple, some­where in the world.

The mask also does EMS — elec­tri­cal mus­cle stim­u­la­tion around the eyes. Controlling it is just an­other com­mand: mode, fre­quency, in­ten­sity, du­ra­tion.

Since every de­vice shares the same cre­den­tials and the same bro­ker, if you can read some­one’s brain­waves you can also send them elec­tric im­pulses.

For ob­vi­ous rea­sons, I am not nam­ing the prod­uct/​com­pany here, but have reached out to in­form them about the is­sue.

This whole thing made me re­visit Karpathy’s Digital Hygiene post, and you prob­a­bly should too.

The re­verse en­gi­neer­ing — Bluetooth, APK de­com­pi­la­tion, Dart bi­nary analy­sis, MQTT dis­cov­ery — was more or less one-shot­ted by Claude (Opus 4.6) over a 30′ au­tonomous ses­sion.

Update: this some­how reached #1 on HN and folks have been ask­ing for the claude con­ver­sa­tion tran­script. I’ve added it here.

The Vim pro­ject is happy to an­nounce that Vim 9.2 has been re­leased. Vim 9.2 brings sig­nif­i­cant en­hance­ments to the Vim9 script­ing lan­guage, im­proved diff mode, com­pre­hen­sive com­ple­tion fea­tures, and plat­form-spe­cific im­prove­ments in­clud­ing ex­per­i­men­tal Wayland sup­port.

Comprehensive Completion: Added sup­port for fuzzy match­ing dur­ing in­sert-mode com­ple­tion and the abil­ity to com­plete words di­rectly from reg­is­ters (CTRL-X CTRL-R). New ‘completeopt’ flags like nosort and near­est of­fer finer con­trol over how matches are dis­played and or­dered.

Modern Platform Support: Full sup­port for the Wayland UI and clip­board has been added. On Linux and Unix-like sys­tems, Vim now ad­heres to the XDG Base Directory Specification, us­ing $HOME/.config/vim for user con­fig­u­ra­tion.

UI Enhancements: A new ver­ti­cal tab­panel pro­vides an al­ter­na­tive to the hor­i­zon­tal tabline. The MS-Windows GUI now sup­ports na­tive dark mode for the menu and ti­tle bars, along with im­proved fullscreen sup­port and higher-qual­ity tool­bar icons.

Interactive Learning: A new built-in in­ter­ac­tive tu­tor plu­gin (started via :Tutor) pro­vides a mod­ern­ized learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence be­yond the tra­di­tional vim­tu­tor.

Significant lan­guage en­hance­ments in­clud­ing na­tive sup­port for Enums, Generic func­tions, and the Tuple data type. Built-in func­tions are now in­te­grated as ob­ject meth­ods, and classes now sup­port pro­tected _new() meth­ods and :defcompile for full method com­pi­la­tion.

The ma­tu­rity of Vim9 scrip­t’s mod­ern con­structs is now be­ing lever­aged by ad­vanced AI de­vel­op­ment tools. Contributor Yegappan Lakshmanan re­cently demon­strated the ef­fi­cacy of these new fea­tures through two pro­jects gen­er­ated us­ing GitHub Copilot:

Battleship in Vim9: A com­plete im­ple­men­ta­tion of the clas­sic game, show­cas­ing classes and type aliases. [GitHub]

Number Puzzle: A logic game demon­strat­ing the ef­fi­ciency of mod­ern Vim9 for in­ter­ac­tive plu­g­ins. [GitHub]

Vim 9.2 in­tro­duces sig­nif­i­cant en­hance­ments to how changes are vi­su­al­ized and aligned in diff mode:

Linematch Algorithm: Includes the “linematch” al­go­rithm for the ‘diffopt’ set­ting. This aligns changes be­tween buffers on sim­i­lar lines, greatly im­prov­ing diff high­light­ing ac­cu­racy.

Diff Anchors: The new ‘diffanchors’ op­tion al­lows you to spec­ify an­chor points (comma-separated ad­dresses) to split and in­de­pen­dently diff buffer sec­tions, en­sur­ing bet­ter align­ment in com­plex files.

Inline Highlighting: Improves high­light­ing for changes within a line. This is con­fig­urable via the “inline” sub-op­tion for ‘diffopt’. Note that “inline:simple” has been added to the de­fault ‘diffopt’ value.

Here are some ex­am­ples for the im­proved in­line high­light­ing:

Several long-stand­ing de­faults have been up­dated to bet­ter suit mod­ern hard­ware and work­flows. These val­ues have been re­moved from de­faults.vim as they are now the in­ter­nal de­faults.

On (Always vis­i­ble in non-com­pat­i­ble mode)

These ex­am­ples demon­strate how to use the pow­er­ful new com­ple­tion and in­tro­spec­tion tools avail­able in Vim 9.2.

Vim’s stan­dard com­ple­tion fre­quently checks for user in­put while search­ing for new matches. It is re­spon­sive ir­re­spec­tive of file size. This makes it well-suited for smooth auto-com­ple­tion.

vim9script

def InsComplete()

if getcharstr(1) == ‘’ && get­line(‘.’)->str­part(0, col(‘.’) - 1) =~ ‘\k$’

SkipTextChangedIEvent()

feed­keys(“", “n”)

en­dif

end­def

def SkipTextChangedIEvent(): string

# Suppress next event caused by

vim9script

var se­lect­ed_­match = nul­l_string

var all­files: list

def GrepComplete(arglead: string, cmd­line: string, cur­sor­pos: num­ber): list

re­turn ar­glead->len() > 1 ? sys­tem­list($‘grep -REIHns “{arglead}“’ ..

′ –exclude-dir=.git –exclude=”.*” –exclude=“tags” –exclude=“*.swp”’) : []

end­def

def VisitFile()

if (selected_match != nul­l_string)

var qfitem = getqflist({lines: [selected_match]}).items[0]

if qfitem->has_key(‘bufnr’) && qfitem.lnum > 0

var pos = qfitem.vcol > 0 ? ‘setcharpos’ : ‘setpos’

exec $‘:b +call\ {pos}(”.”,\ [0,\ {qfitem.lnum},\ {qfitem.col},\ 0]) {qfitem.bufnr}’

set­buf­var(qfitem.bufnr, ‘&buflisted’, 1)

en­dif

en­dif

end­def

def FuzzyFind(arglead: string, _: string, _: num­ber): list

if all­files == nul­l_list

all­files = sys­tem­list($’find {get(g:, “fzfind_root”, ”.“)} \!

\( -path “*/.git” -prune -o -name “*.swp” \) -type f -follow’)

en­dif

re­turn ar­glead == ‘’ ? all­files : all­files->match­fuzzy(ar­glead)

end­def

def FuzzyBuffer(arglead: string, _: string, _: num­ber): list

var bufs = ex­e­cute(‘buffers’, ‘silent!’)->split(“\n”)

var al­t­buf = bufs->in­dexof((_, v) => v =~ ‘^\s*\d\+\s\+#’)

if al­t­buf != -1

[bufs[0], bufs[al­t­buf]] = [bufs[altbuf], bufs[0]]

en­dif

re­turn ar­glead == ‘’ ? bufs : bufs->match­fuzzy(ar­glead)

end­def

def SelectItem()

se­lect­ed_­match = ‘’

if getcmd­line() =~ ‘^\s*\%(Grep\|Find\|Buffer\)\s’

var info = cmd­com­plete_info()

if info != {} && info.pum_vis­i­ble && !info.matches->empty()

se­lect­ed_­match = info.se­lected != -1 ? info.matches[info.se­lected] : info.matches[0]

setcmd­line(info.cmd­line_orig) # Preserve search pat­tern in his­tory

en­dif

en­dif

end­def

com­mand! -nargs=+ -complete=customlist,GrepComplete Grep VisitFile()

com­mand! -nargs=* -complete=customlist,FuzzyBuffer Buffer exe ‘b ’ .. se­lect­ed_­match->match­str(‘\d\+’)

com­mand! -nargs=* -complete=customlist,FuzzyFind Find exe !empty(selected_match) ? $‘e {selected_match}’ : ‘’

nnoremap

vim9script

def CmdComplete()

var [cmdline, cur­pos] = [getcmdline(), getcmd­pos()]

if getchar(1, {number: true}) == 0 # Typehead is empty

&& !pumvisible() && cur­pos == cmd­line->len() + 1

&& cmd­line =~ ‘\%(\w\|[*/:.-]\)$’ && cmd­line !~ ‘^\d\+$’

feed­keys(“\

For au­to­matic popup menu com­ple­tion as you type in search or : com­mands, in­clude this in your .vimrc:

vim9script

def CmdComplete()

var [cmdline, cur­pos, cmd­mode] = [getcmdline(), getcmd­pos(), ex­pand(′

Other Improvements and ChangesMany bugs have been fixed since the re­lease of Vim 9.1, in­clud­ing se­cu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, mem­ory leaks and po­ten­tial crashes.

See the help­file for other im­prove­ments: :h new-other-9.2

Changes to ex­ist­ing be­hav­iour is doc­u­mented at: :h changed-9.2

A few new func­tions, au­to­com­mands, ex com­mands and op­tions have been added: :h added-9.2

The full list of patches is doc­u­mented at: :h patches-9.2

For over 30 years, Vim has been “Charityware,” sup­port­ing chil­dren in Kibaale, Uganda. Following the pass­ing of Bram Moolenaar, the ICCF Holland foun­da­tion was dis­solved, and its mis­sion has been car­ried for­ward by a new part­ner.

ICCF Holland Dissolution: Because the char­ity could not be sus­tained in its orig­i­nal form with­out Bram, ICCF Holland was dis­solved and its re­main­ing funds were trans­ferred to en­sure con­tin­ued sup­port for the Kibaale pro­ject.

Partnership with Kuwasha: To en­sure that aid re­mained un­in­ter­rupted, all spon­sor­ship ac­tiv­i­ties were moved to Kuwasha, a long-term part­ner based in Canada that now man­ages the pro­jects in Uganda.

Continuing the Legacy: Vim re­mains Charityware. We en­cour­age users to con­tinue sup­port­ing the needy chil­dren in Uganda through this new tran­si­tion.

For in­for­ma­tion on how to sup­port this cause, please visit the Sponsor page.We would like to thank every­body who con­tributed to the pro­ject through patches, trans­la­tions, and bug re­ports. We are very grate­ful for any sup­port.You can find the new re­lease on the Download page.

This page con­tains a cu­rated list of re­cent changes to main branch Zig.

Also avail­able as an RSS feed.

This page con­tains en­tries for the year 2026. Other years are avail­able in the Devlog archive page.

This page con­tains a cu­rated list of re­cent changes to main branch Zig.

Also avail­able as an RSS feed.

This page con­tains en­tries for the year 2026. Other years are avail­able in the Devlog archive page.

As we ap­proach the end of the 0.16.0 re­lease cy­cle, Jacob has been hard at work, bring­ing std. Io.Evented up to speed with all the lat­est API changes:Both of these are based on user­space stack switch­ing, some­times called “fibers”, “stackful corou­tines”, or “green threads”.They are now avail­able to tin­ker with, by con­struct­ing one’s ap­pli­ca­tion us­ing std.Io.Evented. They should be con­sid­ered ex­per­i­men­tal be­cause there is im­por­tant fol­lowup work to be done be­fore they can be used re­li­ably and ro­bustly:di­ag­nose the un­ex­pected per­for­mance degra­da­tion when us­ing IoMode.evented for the com­piler­builtin func­tion to tell you the max­i­mum stack size of a given func­tion to make these im­ple­men­ta­tions prac­ti­cal to use when over­com­mit is off.With those caveats in mind, it seems we are in­deed reach­ing the Promised Land, where Zig code can have Io im­ple­men­ta­tions ef­fort­lessly swapped out:const std = @import(“std”);

pub fn main(init: std.process.Init.Min­i­mal) !void {

var de­bug_al­lo­ca­tor: std.heap.De­bugAl­lo­ca­tor(.{}) = .init;

const gpa = de­bug_al­lo­ca­tor.al­lo­ca­tor();

var threaded: std.Io.Threaded = .init(gpa, .{

.argv0 = .init(init.args),

.environ = init.en­v­i­ron,

de­fer threaded.deinit();

const io = threaded.io();

re­turn app(io);

fn app(io: std.Io) !void {

try std.Io.File.std­out().writeStreamin­gAll(io, “Hello, World!\n”);

$ strace ./hello_threaded

ex­ecve(”./​hel­lo_threaded”, [”./hello_threaded”], 0x7ffc1da88b20 /* 98 vars */) = 0

mmap(NULL, 262207, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f583f338000

arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x7f583f378018) = 0

prlim­it64(0, RLIMIT_STACK, NULL, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, rlim_­max=RLIM64_IN­FIN­ITY}) = 0

prlim­it64(0, RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=16384*1024, rlim_­max=RLIM64_IN­FIN­ITY}, NULL) = 0

sigalt­stack({ss_sp=0x7f583f338000, ss_flags=0, ss_­size=262144}, NULL) = 0

sched_getaffin­ity(0, 128, [0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31]) = 8

rt_sigac­tion(SI­GIO, {sa_handler=0x1019d90, sa_­mask=[], sa_flags=SA_RE­STORER, sa_re­storer=0x10328c0}, {sa_handler=SIG_DFL, sa_­mask=[], sa_flags=0}, 8) = 0

rt_sigac­tion(SIG­PIPE, {sa_handler=0x1019d90, sa_­mask=[], sa_flags=SA_RE­STORER, sa_re­storer=0x10328c0}, {sa_handler=SIG_DFL, sa_­mask=[], sa_flags=0}, 8) = 0

writev(1, [{iov_base=“Hello, World!\n”, iov_len=14}], 1Hello, World!

) = 14

rt_sigac­tion(SI­GIO, {sa_handler=SIG_DFL, sa_­mask=[], sa_flags=SA_RE­STORER, sa_re­storer=0x10328c0}, NULL, 8) = 0

rt_sigac­tion(SIG­PIPE, {sa_handler=SIG_DFL, sa_­mask=[], sa_flags=SA_RE­STORER, sa_re­storer=0x10328c0}, NULL, 8) = 0

ex­it_­group(0) = ?

+++ ex­ited with 0 +++

Swapping out only the I/O im­ple­men­ta­tion:const std = @import(“std”);

pub fn main(init: std.process.Init.Min­i­mal) !void {

var de­bug_al­lo­ca­tor: std.heap.De­bugAl­lo­ca­tor(.{}) = .init;

const gpa = de­bug_al­lo­ca­tor.al­lo­ca­tor();

var evented: std.Io.Evented = un­de­fined;

try evented.init(gpa, .{

.argv0 = .init(init.args),

.environ = init.en­v­i­ron,

.backing_allocator_needs_mutex = false,

de­fer evented.deinit();

const io = evented.io();

re­turn app(io);

fn app(io: std.Io) !void {

try std.Io.File.std­out().writeStreamin­gAll(io, “Hello, World!\n”);

ex­ecve(”./​hel­lo_evented”, [”./hello_evented”], 0x7fff368894f0 /* 98 vars */) = 0

mmap(NULL, 262215, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f70a4c28000

arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x7f70a4c68020) = 0

prlim­it64(0, RLIMIT_STACK, NULL, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, rlim_­max=RLIM64_IN­FIN­ITY}) = 0

prlim­it64(0, RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=16384*1024, rlim_­max=RLIM64_IN­FIN­ITY}, NULL) = 0

sigalt­stack({ss_sp=0x7f70a4c28008, ss_flags=0, ss_­size=262144}, NULL) = 0

sched_getaffin­ity(0, 128, [0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31]) = 8

mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f70a4c27000

mmap(0x7f70a4c28000, 548864, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f70a4ba1000

io_ur­ing_setup(64, {flags=IORING_SETUP_COOP_TASKRUN|IORING_SETUP_SINGLE_ISSUER, sq_thread­_cpu=0, sq_thread­_i­dle=1000, sq_en­tries=64, cq_en­tries=128, fea­tures=IOR­ING_FEAT_S­IN­GLE_MMAP|IOR­ING_FEAT_N­ODROP|IOR­ING_FEAT_­SUB­MIT_STA­BLE|IOR­ING_FEAT_R­W_CUR_­POS|IOR­ING_FEAT_CUR_PER­SON­AL­ITY|IOR­ING_FEAT_­FAST_POLL|IOR­ING_FEAT_POL­L_32BITS|IOR­ING_FEAT_SQPOL­L_NON­FIXED|IOR­ING_FEAT_EX­T_ARG|IOR­ING_FEAT_­NA­TIVE_­WORK­ERS|IOR­ING_FEAT_RSR­C_­TAGS|IOR­ING_FEAT_C­QE_SKIP|IOR­ING_FEAT_LINKED_­FILE|IOR­ING_FEAT_REG_REG_RING|IOR­ING_FEAT_RECVSEND_BUN­DLE|IOR­ING_FEAT_MIN_­TIME­OUT|IOR­ING_FEAT_R­W_ATTR|IOR­ING_FEAT_NO_IOWAIT, sq_off={head=0, tail=4, ring_­mask=16, ring_en­tries=24, flags=36, dropped=32, ar­ray=2112, user_addr=0}, cq_off={head=8, tail=12, ring_­mask=20, ring_en­tries=28, over­flow=44, cqes=64, flags=40, user_addr=0}}) = 3

mmap(NULL, 2368, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED|MAP_POPULATE, 3, 0) = 0x7f70a4ba0000

mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_SHARED|MAP_POPULATE, 3, 0x10000000) = 0x7f70a4b9f000

io_ur­ing_en­ter(3, 1, 1, IORING_ENTER_GETEVENTS, NULL, 8Hello, World!

) = 1

io_ur­ing_en­ter(3, 1, 1, IORING_ENTER_GETEVENTS, NULL, 8) = 1

mun­map(0x7f70a4b9f000, 4096) = 0

mun­map(0x7f70a4ba0000, 2368) = 0

close(3) = 0

mun­map(0x7f70a4ba1000, 548864) = 0

ex­it_­group(0) = ?

+++ ex­ited with 0 +++

Key point here be­ing that the app func­tion is iden­ti­cal be­tween those two snip­pets.Mov­ing be­yond Hello World, the Zig com­piler it­self works fine us­ing std.Io.Evented, both with io_ur­ing and with GCD, but as men­tioned above, there is a not-yet-di­ag­nosed per­for­mance degra­da­tion when do­ing so.

If you have a Zig pro­ject with de­pen­den­cies, two big changes just landed which I think you will be in­ter­ested to learn about. Fetched pack­ages are now stored lo­cally in the zig-pkg di­rec­tory of the pro­ject root (next to your build.zig file).For ex­am­ple here are a few re­sults from awebo af­ter run­ning zig build:$ du -sh zig-pkg/*

13M freetype-2.14.1-alzUk­Ty­BqgB­wke4J­sot997WYS­pl207I­j9oO-2QOv­GrOi

20K opus-0.0.2-vuF-cMAkAAD­Vs­m707MYCtP­mqmRs0gzg84Sz0qG­b­b5E3w

4.3M pulseau­dio-16.1.1-9-mk_62MZkN­wBaFwiZ­7ZVrYRIf_3dTqqJR5PbM­R­CJz­SuLw

5.2M uu­code-0.1.0-ZZjBPvtWUACf5dqD_f9I37VGF­s­N24436CuceC5p­TJ25n

728K vaxis-0.5.1-BWN­V_Ax­EC­QCj3p4Hcv4U3Y­o1W­MU­J7Z2­FU­j0Ukpu­JGxQQ

It is highly rec­om­mended to add this di­rec­tory to the pro­ject-lo­cal source con­trol ig­nore file (e.g. .gitignore). However, by be­ing out­side of .zig-cache, it pro­vides the pos­si­bil­ity of dis­trib­ut­ing self-con­tained source tar­balls, which con­tain all de­pen­den­cies and there­fore can be used to build of­fline, or for archival pur­poses.Mean­while, an ad­di­tional copy of the de­pen­dency is cached glob­ally. After fil­ter­ing out all the un­used files based on the paths fil­ter, the con­tents are re­com­pressed:$ du -sh ~/.cache/zig/p/*

2.4M freetype-2.14.1-alzUk­Ty­BqgB­wke4J­sot997WYS­pl207I­j9oO-2QOv­GrOi.tar.gz

4.0K opus-0.0.2-vuF-cMAkAAD­Vs­m707MYCtP­mqmRs0gzg84Sz0qG­b­b5E3w.tar.gz

636K pulseau­dio-16.1.1-9-mk_62MZkN­wBaFwiZ­7ZVrYRIf_3dTqqJR5PbM­R­CJz­SuLw.tar.gz

880K uu­code-0.1.0-ZZjBPvtWUACf5dqD_f9I37VGF­s­N24436CuceC5p­TJ25n.tar.gz

120K vaxis-0.5.1-BWN­V_BFEC­QB­bX­eTeFd48uTJR­jD5a-KD6kPuKanz­zVB01.tar.gz

The mo­ti­va­tion for this change is to make it eas­ier to tin­ker. Go ahead and edit those files, see what hap­pens. Swap out your pack­age di­rec­tory with a git clone. Grep your de­pen­den­cies all to­gether. Configure your IDE to auto-com­plete based on the zig-pkg di­rec­tory. Run baobab on your de­pen­dency tree. Furthermore, by hav­ing the global cache have com­pressed files in­stead makes it eas­ier to share that cached data be­tween com­put­ers. In the fu­ture, it is planned to sup­port peer-to-peer tor­rent­ing of de­pen­dency trees. By re­com­press­ing pack­ages into a canon­i­cal form, this will al­low peers to share Zig pack­ages with min­i­mal band­width. I love this idea be­cause it si­mul­ta­ne­ously pro­vides re­silience to net­work out­ages, as well as a pop­u­lar­ity con­test. Find out which open source pack­ages are pop­u­lar based on num­ber of seed­ers!The sec­ond change here is the ad­di­tion of the –fork flag to zig build.In ret­ro­spect, it seems so ob­vi­ous, I don’t know why I did­n’t think of it since the be­gin­ning. It looks like this:zig build –fork=[path]

This is a pro­ject over­ride op­tion. Given a path to a source check­out of a pro­ject, all pack­ages match­ing that pro­ject across the en­tire de­pen­dency tree will be over­rid­den.Thanks to the fact that pack­age con­tent hashes in­clude name and fin­ger­print, this re­solves be­fore the pack­age is po­ten­tially fetched.This is an easy way to tem­porar­ily use one or more forks which are in en­tirely sep­a­rate di­rec­to­ries. You can it­er­ate on your en­tire de­pen­dency tree un­til every­thing is work­ing, while us­ing com­fort­ably the de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ment and source con­trol of the de­pen­dency pro­jects.The fact that it is a CLI flag makes it ap­pro­pri­ately ephemeral. The mo­ment you drop the flags, you’re back to us­ing your pris­tine, fetched de­pen­dency tree.If the pro­ject does not match, an er­ror oc­curs, pre­vent­ing con­fu­sion:$ zig build –fork=/home/andy/dev/mime

er­ror: fork /home/andy/dev/mime matched no mime pack­ages

If the pro­ject does match, you get a re­minder that you are us­ing a fork, pre­vent­ing con­fu­sion:$ zig build –fork=/home/andy/dev/dvui

info: fork /home/andy/dev/dvui matched 1 (dvui) pack­ages

This func­tion­al­ity is in­tended to en­hance the work­flow of deal­ing with ecosys­tem break­age. I al­ready tried it a bit and found it to be quite pleas­ant to work with. The new work­flow goes like this:Fail to build from source due to ecosys­tem break­age.Tin­ker with –fork un­til your pro­ject works again. During this time you can use the ac­tual up­stream source con­trol, test suite, zig build test –watch -fincremental, etc.Now you have a new op­tion: be self­ish and just keep work­ing on your own stuff, or you can pro­ceed to sub­mit your patches up­stream.…and you can prob­a­bly skip the step where you switch your build.zig.zon to your fork un­less you ex­pect up­stream to take a long time to merge your fixes.

The Windows op­er­at­ing sys­tem pro­vides a large ABI sur­face area for do­ing things in the ker­nel. However, not all ABIs are cre­ated equally. As Casey Muratori points out in his lec­ture, The Only Unbreakable Law, the or­ga­ni­za­tional struc­ture of soft­ware de­vel­op­ment teams has a di­rect im­pact on the struc­ture of the soft­ware they pro­duce. The DLLs on Windows are or­ga­nized into a heirar­chy, with some of the APIs be­ing high-level wrap­pers around lower-level ones. For ex­am­ple, when­ever you call func­tions of ker­nel32.dll, ul­ti­mately, the ac­tual work is done by nt­dll.dll. You can ob­serve this di­rectly by us­ing ProcMon.exe and ex­am­in­ing stack traces.What we’ve learned em­pir­i­cally is that the nt­dll APIs are gen­er­ally well-en­gi­neered, rea­son­able, and pow­er­ful, but the ker­nel32 wrap­pers in­tro­duce un­nec­es­sary heap al­lo­ca­tions, ad­di­tional fail­ure modes, un­in­ten­tional CPU us­age, and bloat.This is why the Zig stan­dard li­brary pol­icy is to Prefer the Native API over Win32. We’re not quite there yet - we have plenty of calls into ker­nel32 re­main­ing - but we’ve taken great strides re­cently. I’ll give you two ex­am­ples.Ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion, Windows does not have a straight­for­ward way to get ran­dom bytes.Many pro­jects in­clud­ing Chromium, bor­ingssl, Firefox, and Rust call SystemFunction036 from ad­va­pi32.dll be­cause it worked on ver­sions older than Windows 8.Unfortunately, start­ing with Windows 8, the first time you call this func­tion, it dy­nam­i­cally loads bcrypt­prim­i­tives.dll and calls ProcessPrng. If load­ing the DLL fails (for ex­am­ple due to an over­loaded sys­tem, which we have ob­served on Zig CI sev­eral times), it re­turns er­ror 38 (from a func­tion that has void re­turn type and is doc­u­mented to never fail).The first thing ProcessPrng does is heap al­lo­cate a small, con­stant num­ber of bytes. If this fails it re­turns NO_MEMORY in a BOOL (documented be­hav­ior is to never fail, and al­ways re­turn TRUE).bcryptprimitives.dll ap­par­ently also runs a test suite every time you load it.All that ProcessPrng is re­ally do­ing is NtOpenFile on “\\Device\\CNG” and read­ing 48 bytes with NtDeviceIoControlFile to get a seed, and then ini­tial­iz­ing a per-CPU AES-based CSPRNG.So the de­pen­dency on bcrypt­prim­i­tives.dll and ad­va­pi32.dll can both be avoided, and the non­de­ter­min­is­tic fail­ure and la­ten­cies on first RNG read can also be avoided.Read­File looks like this:pub ex­tern “kernel32″ fn ReadFile(

hFile: HANDLE,

lp­Buffer: LPVOID,

nNum­berOf­Byte­sToRead: DWORD,

lp­Num­berOf­Bytes­Read: ?*DWORD,

lpOver­lapped: ?*OVERLAPPED,

) call­conv(.winapi) BOOL;

NtReadFile looks like this:pub ex­tern “ntdll” fn NtReadFile(

FileHandle: HANDLE,

Event: ?HANDLE,

ApcRoutine: ?*const IO_APC_ROUTINE,

ApcContext: ?*anyopaque,

Victorian-era ‘vinegar valen­ti­nes’ show that trolling ex­isted long be­fore so­cial me­dia or the in­ter­ne­tAmer­i­cans wake up and smell the cof­fee price surge—skip­ping Starbucks, brew­ing at home, and drink­ing Diet Coke for caf­feine and The Associated PressPrivate eq­ui­ty’s play­book to shake off the zom­bies: meet the con­tin­u­a­tion ve­hi­cleMacKen­zie Scott says her col­lege room­mate loaned her $1,000 so she would­n’t have to drop out—and is now in­spir­ing her to give away bil­lion­sRo­mance scam from the front lines of the $16 bil­lion fraud cri­sis: 6 dead dogs, a miss­ing $39,000, and a wronged widow‘Amer­i­ca’s Got Talent’ cre­ator Simon Cowell has given up work­ing on Fridays be­cause ‘it’s point­less’—and re­search shows he’s right

Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months—for all white-col­lar work to be au­to­mated by AIMacKenzie Scott says her col­lege room­mate loaned her $1,000 so she would­n’t have to drop out—and is now in­spir­ing her to give away bil­lion­s­Some folks on Wall Street think yes­ter­day’s U. S. jobs num­ber is ‘implausible’ and thus due for a down­ward cor­rec­tio­nAna­log-ob­sessed Gen Zers are buy­ing $40 app block­ers to limit their so­cial me­dia use and take a break from the ’slot ma­chine in your pock­et’Ac­tress Jennifer Garner just took her $724 mil­lion or­ganic food em­pire pub­lic. She started her ca­reer mak­ing just $150 weekly as a ‘broke’ un­der­studyEv­ery U.S. Olympian was promised a $200,000 pay­out, but how much they ac­tu­ally keep de­pends on where they live

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Platforms bend over back­ward to help DHS cen­sor ICE crit­ics, ad­vo­cates say

Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem sued for co­erc­ing plat­forms into cen­sor­ing ICE posts.

Pressure is mount­ing on tech com­pa­nies to shield users from un­law­ful gov­ern­ment re­quests that ad­vo­cates say are mak­ing it harder to re­li­ably share in­for­ma­tion about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on­line.

Alleging that ICE of­fi­cers are be­ing doxed or oth­er­wise en­dan­gered, Trump of­fi­cials have spent the last year tar­get­ing an un­known num­ber of users and plat­forms with de­mands to cen­sor con­tent. Early law­suits show that plat­forms have caved, even though ex­perts say they could refuse these de­mands with­out a court or­der.

In a law­suit filed on Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ac­cused Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of co­erc­ing tech com­pa­nies into re­mov­ing a wide range of con­tent “to con­trol what the pub­lic can see, hear, or say about ICE op­er­a­tions.”

It’s the sec­ond law­suit al­leg­ing that Bondi and DHS of­fi­cials are us­ing reg­u­la­tory power to pres­sure pri­vate plat­forms to sup­press speech pro­tected by the First Amendment. It fol­lows a com­plaint from the de­vel­oper of an app called ICEBlock, which Apple re­moved from the App Store in October. Officials aren’t rush­ing to re­solve that case—last month, they re­quested more time to re­spond—so it may re­main un­clear un­til March what de­fense they plan to of­fer for the take­down de­mands.

That leaves com­mu­nity mem­bers who mon­i­tor ICE in a pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion, as crit­i­cal re­sources could dis­ap­pear at the de­part­men­t’s re­quest with no warn­ing.

FIRE says peo­ple have le­git­i­mate rea­sons to share in­for­ma­tion about ICE. Some com­mu­ni­ties fo­cus on help­ing peo­ple avoid dan­ger­ous ICE ac­tiv­ity, while oth­ers aim to hold the gov­ern­ment ac­count­able and raise pub­lic aware­ness of how ICE op­er­ates. Unless there’s proof of in­cite­ment to vi­o­lence or a true threat, such ex­pres­sion is pro­tected.

Despite the high bar for cen­sor­ing on­line speech, law­suits trace an es­ca­lat­ing pat­tern of DHS in­creas­ingly tar­get­ing web­sites, app stores, and plat­forms—many that have been will­ing to re­move con­tent the gov­ern­ment dis­likes.

Officials have or­dered ICE-monitoring apps to be re­moved from app stores and even threat­ened to sanc­tion CNN for sim­ply re­port­ing on the ex­is­tence of one such app. Officials have also de­manded that Meta delete at least one Chicago-based Facebook group with 100,000 mem­bers and made mul­ti­ple un­suc­cess­ful at­tempts to un­mask anony­mous users be­hind other Facebook groups. Even en­crypted apps like Signal don’t feel safe from of­fi­cials’ seem­ing over­reach. FBI Director Kash Patel re­cently said he has opened an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into Signal chats used by Minnesota res­i­dents to track ICE ac­tiv­ity, NBC News reported.

As DHS cen­sor­ship threats in­crease, plat­forms have done lit­tle to shield users, ad­vo­cates say. Not only have they some­times failed to re­ject un­law­ful or­ders that sim­ply pro­vided a “a bare men­tion of ‘officer safety/​dox­ing’” as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, but in one case, Google com­plied with a sub­poena that left a crit­i­cal sec­tion blank, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) re­ported.

For users, it’s in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult to trust that plat­forms won’t be­tray their own poli­cies when faced with gov­ern­ment in­tim­i­da­tion, ad­vo­cates say. Sometimes plat­forms no­tify users be­fore com­ply­ing with gov­ern­ment re­quests, giv­ing users a chance to chal­lenge po­ten­tially un­con­sti­tu­tional de­mands. But in other cases, users learn about the re­quests only as plat­forms com­ply with them—even when those plat­forms have promised that would never hap­pen.

Government emails with plat­forms may be ex­posed

Platforms could face back­lash from users if law­suits ex­pose their com­mu­ni­ca­tions to the gov­ern­ment, a pos­si­bil­ity in the com­ing months. Last fall, the EFF sued af­ter DOJ, DHS, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol failed to re­spond to Freedom of Information Act re­quests seek­ing emails be­tween the gov­ern­ment and plat­forms about take­down de­mands. Other law­suits may sur­face emails in dis­cov­ery. In the com­ing weeks, a judge will set a sched­ule for EFF’s lit­i­ga­tion.

“The na­ture and con­tent of the Defendants’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions with these tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies” is “critical for de­ter­min­ing whether they crossed the line from gov­ern­men­tal ca­jol­ing to un­con­sti­tu­tional co­er­cion,” EFF’s com­plaint said.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mario Trujillo told Ars that the EFF is con­fi­dent it can win the fight to ex­pose gov­ern­ment de­mands, but like most FOIA law­suits, the case is ex­pected to move slowly. That’s un­for­tu­nate, he said, be­cause ICE ac­tiv­ity is es­ca­lat­ing, and de­lays in ad­dress­ing these con­cerns could ir­repara­bly harm speech at a piv­otal mo­ment.

Like users, plat­forms are seem­ingly vic­tims, too, FIRE se­nior at­tor­ney Colin McDonnell told Ars.

They’ve been forced to over­ride their own ed­i­to­r­ial judg­ment while nav­i­gat­ing im­plicit threats from the gov­ern­ment, he said.

“If Attorney General Bondi de­mands that they re­move speech, the plat­form is go­ing to feel like they have to com­ply; they don’t have a choice,” McDonnell said.

But plat­forms do have a choice and could be do­ing more to pro­tect users, the EFF has said. Platforms could even serve as a first line of de­fense, re­quir­ing of­fi­cials to get a court or­der be­fore com­ply­ing with any re­quests.

Platforms may now have good rea­son to push back against gov­ern­ment re­quests—and to give users the tools to do the same. Trujillo noted that while courts have been slow to ad­dress the ICEBlock re­moval and FOIA law­suits, the gov­ern­ment has quickly with­drawn re­quests to un­mask Facebook users soon af­ter lit­i­ga­tion be­gan.

“That’s like an ac­knowl­edge­ment that the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, when ac­tu­ally chal­lenged in court, was­n’t even will­ing to de­fend it­self,” Trujillo said.

Platforms could view that as ev­i­dence that gov­ern­ment pres­sure only works when plat­forms fail to put up a bare-min­i­mum fight, Trujillo said.

An open let­ter from the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) doc­u­mented two in­stances of tech com­pa­nies com­ply­ing with gov­ern­ment de­mands with­out first no­ti­fy­ing users.

The let­ter called out Meta for un­mask­ing at least one user with­out prior no­tice, which groups noted “potentially” oc­cured due to a “technical glitch.”

More trou­bling than buggy no­ti­fi­ca­tions, how­ever, is the pos­si­bil­ity that plat­forms may be rou­tinely de­lay­ing no­tice un­til it’s too late.

After Google “received an ICE sub­poena for user data and ful­filled it on the same day that it no­ti­fied the user,” the com­pany ad­mit­ted that “sometimes when Google misses its re­sponse dead­line, it com­plies with the sub­poena and pro­vides no­tice to a user at the same time to min­i­mize the de­lay for an over­due pro­duc­tion,” the let­ter said.

“This is a wor­ry­ing ad­mis­sion that vi­o­lates [Google’s] clear promise to users, es­pe­cially be­cause there is no le­gal con­se­quence to miss­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s re­sponse dead­line,” the let­ter said.

Platforms face no sanc­tions for re­fus­ing to com­ply with gov­ern­ment de­mands that have not been court-or­dered, the let­ter noted. That’s why the EFF and ACLU have urged com­pa­nies to use their “immense re­sources” to shield users who may not be able to drop every­thing and fight un­con­sti­tu­tional data re­quests.

In their let­ter, the groups asked com­pa­nies to in­sist on court in­ter­ven­tion be­fore com­ply­ing with a DHS sub­poena. They should also re­sist DHS “gag or­ders” that ask plat­forms to hand over data with­out no­ti­fy­ing users.

Instead, they should com­mit to giv­ing users “as much no­tice as pos­si­ble when they are the tar­get of a sub­poena,” as well as a copy of the sub­poena. Ideally, plat­forms would also link users to le­gal aid re­sources and take up le­gal fights on be­half of vul­ner­a­ble users, ad­vo­cates sug­gested.

That’s not what’s hap­pen­ing so far. Trujillo told Ars that it feels like “companies have bent over back­ward to ap­pease the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.”

The tide could turn this year if courts side with app mak­ers be­hind crowd­sourc­ing apps like ICEBlock and Eyes Up, who are su­ing to end the al­leged gov­ern­ment co­er­cion. FIRE’s McDonnell, who rep­re­sents the cre­ator of Eyes Up, told Ars that plat­forms may feel more com­fort­able ex­er­cis­ing their own ed­i­to­r­ial judg­ment mov­ing for­ward if a court de­clares they were co­erced into re­mov­ing con­tent.

DHS can’t use dox­ing to dodge First Amendment

FIRE’s law­suit ac­cuses Bondi and Noem of co­erc­ing Meta to dis­able a Facebook group with 100,000 mem­bers called “ICE Sightings–Chicagoland.”

The pop­u­lar­ity of that group surged dur­ing “Operation Midway Blitz,” when hun­dreds of agents ar­rested more than 4,500 peo­ple over weeks of raids that used tear gas in neigh­bor­hoods and caused car crashes and other vi­o­lence. Arrests in­cluded US cit­i­zens and im­mi­grants of law­ful sta­tus, which “gave Chicagoans rea­son to fear be­ing in­jured or ar­rested due to their prox­im­ity to ICE raids, no mat­ter their im­mi­gra­tion sta­tus,” FIRE’s com­plaint said.

Kassandra Rosado, a life­long Chicagoan and US cit­i­zen of Mexican de­scent, started the Facebook group and served as ad­min, mod­er­at­ing con­tent with other vol­un­teers. She pro­hib­ited “hate speech or bul­ly­ing” and “instructed group mem­bers not to post any­thing threat­en­ing, hate­ful, or that pro­moted vi­o­lence or il­le­gal con­duct.”

Facebook only ever flagged five posts that sup­pos­edly vi­o­lated com­mu­nity guide­lines, but in warn­ings, the com­pany re­as­sured Rosado that “groups aren’t pe­nal­ized when mem­bers or vis­i­tors break the rules with­out ad­min ap­proval.”

Rosado had no rea­son to sus­pect that her group was in dan­ger of re­moval. When Facebook dis­abled her group, it told Rosado the group vi­o­lated com­mu­nity stan­dards “multiple times.” But her com­plaint noted that, con­fus­ingly, “Facebook poli­cies don’t pro­vide for dis­abling groups if a few mem­bers post os­ten­si­bly pro­hib­ited con­tent; they call for re­mov­ing groups when the group mod­er­a­tor re­peat­edly ei­ther cre­ates pro­hib­ited con­tent or af­fir­ma­tively ‘approves’ such con­tent.”

Facebook’s de­ci­sion came af­ter a right-wing in­flu­encer, Laura Loomer, tagged Noem and Bondi in a so­cial me­dia post al­leg­ing that the group was “getting peo­ple killed.” Within two days, Bondi bragged that she had got­ten the group dis­abled while claim­ing that it “was be­ing used to dox and tar­get [ICE] agents in Chicago.”

McDonnell told Ars it seems clear that Bondi se­lec­tively uses the term “doxing” when peo­ple post im­ages from ICE ar­rests. He pointed to “ICE’s own so­cial me­dia ac­counts,” which share fa­vor­able opin­ions of ICE along­side videos and pho­tos of ICE ar­rests that Bondi does­n’t con­sider dox­ing.

“Rosado’s cre­ation of Facebook groups to send and re­ceive in­for­ma­tion about where and how ICE car­ries out its du­ties in pub­lic, to share pho­tographs and videos of ICE car­ry­ing out its du­ties in pub­lic, and to ex­change opin­ions about and crit­i­cism of ICE’s tac­tics in car­ry­ing out its du­ties, is speech pro­tected by the First Amendment,” FIRE ar­gued.

The same goes for speech man­aged by Mark Hodges, a US cit­i­zen who re­sides in Indiana. He cre­ated an app called Eyes Up to serve as an archive of ICE videos. Apple re­moved Eyes Up from the App Store around the same time that it re­moved ICEBlock.

“It is just videos of what gov­ern­ment em­ploy­ees did in pub­lic car­ry­ing out their du­ties,” McDonnell said. “It’s noth­ing even close to threat­en­ing or dox­ing or any of these other the­o­ries that the gov­ern­ment has used to jus­tify sup­press­ing speech.”

Bondi bragged that she had got­ten ICEBlock banned, and FIRE’s com­plaint con­firmed that Hodges’ com­pany re­ceived the same no­ti­fi­ca­tion that ICEBlock’s de­vel­oper got af­ter Bondi’s vic­tory lap. The no­tice said that Apple re­ceived “information” from “law en­force­ment” claim­ing that the apps had vi­o­lated Apple guide­lines against “defamatory, dis­crim­i­na­tory, or mean-spir­ited con­tent.”

Apple did not reach the same con­clu­sion when it in­de­pen­dently re­viewed Eyes Up prior to gov­ern­ment med­dling, FIRE’s com­plaint said. Notably, the app re­mains avail­able in Google Play, and Rosado now man­ages a new Facebook group with sim­i­lar con­tent but some­what tighter re­stric­tions on who can join. Neither ac­tiv­ity has re­quired ur­gent in­ter­ven­tion from ei­ther tech gi­ants or the gov­ern­ment.

McDonnell told Ars that it’s harm­ful for DHS to wa­ter down the mean­ing of dox­ing when push­ing plat­forms to re­move con­tent crit­i­cal of ICE.

“When most of us hear the word ‘doxing,’ we think of some­thing that’s threat­en­ing, post­ing pri­vate in­for­ma­tion along with home ad­dresses or places of work,” McDonnell said. “And it seems like the gov­ern­ment is ex­pand­ing that de­f­i­n­i­tion to en­com­pass just shar­ing, even if there’s no threats, noth­ing vi­o­lent. Just shar­ing in­for­ma­tion about what our gov­ern­ment is do­ing.”

Expanding the de­f­i­n­i­tion and then us­ing that term to jus­tify sup­press­ing speech is con­cern­ing, he said, es­pe­cially since the First Amendment in­cludes no ex­cep­tion for “doxing,” even if DHS ever were to pro­vide ev­i­dence of it.

To sup­press speech, of­fi­cials must show that groups are in­cit­ing vi­o­lence or mak­ing true threats. FIRE has al­leged that the gov­ern­ment has not met “the ex­tra­or­di­nary jus­ti­fi­ca­tions re­quired for a prior re­straint” on speech and is in­stead us­ing vague dox­ing threats to dis­crim­i­nate against speech based on view­point. They’re seek­ing a per­ma­nent in­junc­tion bar­ring of­fi­cials from co­erc­ing tech com­pa­nies into cen­sor­ing ICE posts.

If plain­tiffs win, the cen­sor­ship threats could sub­side, and tech com­pa­nies may feel safe re­in­stat­ing apps and Facebook groups, ad­vo­cates told Ars. That could po­ten­tially re­vive archives doc­u­ment­ing thou­sands of ICE in­ci­dents and re­con­nect webs of ICE watch­ers who lost ac­cess to val­ued feeds.

Until courts pos­si­bly end threats of cen­sor­ship, the most cau­tious com­mu­nity mem­bers are mov­ing lo­cal ICE-watch ef­forts to group chats and list­servs that are harder for the gov­ern­ment to dis­rupt, Trujillo told Ars.

Ashley is a se­nior pol­icy re­porter for Ars Technica, ded­i­cated to track­ing so­cial im­pacts of emerg­ing poli­cies and new tech­nolo­gies. She is a Chicago-based jour­nal­ist with 20 years of ex­pe­ri­ence.

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