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Welcome to the Bogosity Podcast for the week of March 22 2026,
the podcast that wants you to want it.
This is your host, Shane Killian.
Next week is the fifth weekend in the month, so no podcast.
But for now, let's delocalize the News of the Bogus.
The goal of AI is for it to be able to do anything humans can do.
Of course, that isn't always good.
A grandmother was falsely accused of bank fraud,
even though she'd never set foot in the state were the crime allegedly took place.
And it all happened because of AI facial recognition.
Humans falsely accuse people, now AI is falsely accusing people! Another one checked off!
Okay, so look: AIs are gonna screw up. They're going to hallucinate.
There are going to be false positives and false negatives and false everything else.
Which is one reason among many that they shouldn't be used as evidence!
Case in point: Tennessee grandmother Angela Lipps, who was arrested by US Marshals at her Tennessee home
because a facial recognition AI matched her to surveillance footage from a bank in North Dakota.
A suspect had allegedly used a fake Army ID to withdraw thousands of dollars.
Facial recognition matched Lipps, then a detective concluded she was the suspect.
He didn't do any actual detecting or anything.
Why, that might actually be work!
Seriously, with his access, he probably could have ruled her out in minutes!
Instead, he had the Marshals arrest Lipps at gunpoint while she was babysitting four children.
She was brought to a Tennessee jail as a fugitive wanted in North Dakota.
Were she sat for four months while North Dakota did nothing!
And during that time, she lost her home, her car, and even her dog!
After four months, she was finally extradited to North Dakota, where she was able to hire a lawyer,
and the lawyer easily gathered bank records and transaction logs and,
as the detective should have done initially, easily showed she was in Tennessee,
over 1200 miles away from Fargo, where the crime was supposedly committed.
After being incarcerated in June, she was finally released and all charges dropped on Christmas Eve.
Quote: "While I was in jail I lost everything.
My family put my personal belongings into storage, but the bill couldn't be paid. Everything is gone. Everything.
I lost my rental home in a mobile home park. I lost my Social Security income.
I lost my health insurance. I lost my doctors. I lost my dog.
I lost my car, a Chrysler Sebring convertible and everything inside of it... Everything."
The authorities didn't even offer to help her pay for the trip home!
Quote: "I had my summer clothes on, no coat, it was so cold outside, snow on the ground, scared,
I wanted out but I didn't know what I was going to do, how I was going to get home."
She also missed Halloween and Thanksgiving,
and had to deal with the humiliation of her neighbors watching her get arrested.
Quote: "I am now living with neighbors in the trailer park.
I have no car, no money, and no way to start over on my own.
I have always been an independent woman. I cannot start life again with nothing."
Now, understand: if you're held as a fugitive awaiting extradition, you don't get bail.
So she had to stay in the Tennessee jail for 108 days.
But section 3182 of Title 18 of the US Code,
regarding "Fugitives from State or Territory to State, District, or Territory,"
quite clearly says that if the charging state doesn't show up within 30 days, they can let her go.
So why didn't they???
This should never have happened! And let's understand this:
the problem here is not AI. The problem is government.
Whatever benefit AI might have as an investigative tool, it should never be used as evidence!
In my opinion, any AI recognition should be treated like an anonymous tip.
And we know how unreliable those are!
Let me explain quite clearly how inexcusable this is:
For 25 years since the Patriot Act, we've been living in this financial big brother dystopia.
All of our bank records are spied on and recorded, and the government can grab our transactions
and whereabouts from our phone companies at any time, no warrant needed.
And we're supposed to believe they had no way of figuring this out for themselves,
and they just had to believe the AI?
I mean, come on! One advantage of living in this privacy-destroying surveillance state
has to be that they can easily find out if you're someone who had this bank account or not,
or if you were anywhere near the state at the time!
What's the purpose of all this financial spying otherwise?
AI or not, she should have been eliminated as a suspect within minutes.
Likely with her not even knowing about it!
The driving force behind the controversy around this story is AI. It shouldn't be.
Blaming the AI is wrongheaded. Blame the police for continually refusing to do their jobs!
Presenting: the greatest game this side of Yuggoth!
You are H.P. Lovecraft's cat, and your name is Ni***
...Right. We can't say that on a podcast.
Anyway, that's the point: Your name is a joke.
So now, you are out for revenge. You become...the NecronomiCat!
Using the Necronomicon, you come to the present day to buy a gat.
That's a gun. For a cat.
It's a phat cat gat.
But the Necronomicon is treacherous, and it let in Lovecraft's monsters.
Now, in a crumbling world, you must fight!
Build your team, buy guns and armor,
buy items of dubious legality, defeat the bosses of each level.
Then take Lovecraft down!
Play NecronomiCat! The link is at cat.bogosity.tv.
Yeah, we're doing cat.bogosity.tv, not...that other one.
What, you want me to get kicked off the Internet or something?
So you all know I love efforts to archive the creative output of our civilization for posterity,
as much as the big content cartels might hate it.
This story is about Gaming Alexandria, a website dedicated to the preservation of the history of gaming.
Not the games themselves, but associated media such as box art, manuals, and journalism.
They've been funded in part through Patreon subscriptions, and that's where the trouble came in.
Project head Dustin Hubbard was forced to issue apologies to the community
because his effort to translate foreign games, mostly Japanese, relied heavily on AI.
He was basically bullied into posting:
"No Patreon dollars will be used to fund AI. I sincerely apologize.
My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we've never had access to before.
I felt this project was a good step towards that,
but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI.
I understand that using Patreon funding for this was not the correct way to go about it."
He put in his own personal funds to compensate.
I'm sorry, but Hubbard did absolutely nothing wrong!
What was even the problem, other than just the knee-jerk anti-AI bigots,
probably not even real supporters but sent in from whatever
backchannel on Discord or Bluesky or wherever the mob is sent from,
who just hate anything AI regardless of the benefit.
I mean, how many of them were offering to help translate? I'm guessing none!
You went from a situation where content was inaccessible to a wide range of people to one where it was accessible.
Maybe not perfect, maybe not as good as a real translator,
but orders of magnitude better than nothing!
What, because AI makes mistakes? Like human translators don't?
Anyone else remember "All your base are belong to us"?
His project is actually pretty awesome.
He experimented with Gemini to make an OCR and translation process
that could take scans of magazines and turn them into useful tools for Western researchers.
Hubbard said he was "blown away" by the results.
While he still recommends professional human translators where possible, he said that Gemini, quote:
"gets you a large percentage of the way there quickly."
And so he vibe-coded an interface to show the original PDF scans
alongside the AI-generated text for easy comparison.
He posted the code to GitHub and shared the code on his Patreon as a beta.
The tool runs locally on Windows, Mac, or Linux,
and it can search, download, and edit Gaming Alexandria's files from the cloud or work with local files.
Quote: "This app has been something I never would have dreamed could exist.
Now I can finally read and enjoy these Japanese magazines I've been scanning for years.
A large part of that is due to your believing in my work and funding me so thank you so much for that."
And the toxic backlash he got from that was insane.
Legend of Zelda historian Max Nichols wrote on Bluesky:
"I have cancelled my Patreon membership and will no longer promote the organization."
Nichols later deleted the message, the coward.
A lot of the mob seems to have come from there. Figures.
The Discord mob also called Hubbard "privileged" and said he "burned his good faith with the video gaming community."
For offering them a gift to the world that could not have existed otherwise.
But through all the noise, there was the signal of reason.
Game preservationist Chris Chapman wrote:
"There's no world in which they could ever get hundreds of thousands of pages translated by hand.
Error-prone searchability is more useful to more people than none at all.
You're piling on the free-time project of one guy who hasn't even woken up yet. Take a minute."
Author and Journalist Felipe Pepe wrote:
"Brother, I published a free game book with 650 pages
and saw five different crowd-sourced translation teams give up
because it was too much text and too time-consuming.
Famitsu alone is over 1900 issues, each with a hundred plus pages.
That's one magazine from one country.
Human translation would be ideal, but it's impossible."
Lots of organizations like Project Gutenberg have been using non-AI OCR and translation tools in the past,
with results that are far from accurate or sometimes even readable.
But, no mob screeching about those.
AI does a much better job, although far from perfect,
and the mob bunches their panties about how the imperfections make it all horrible
and Hubbard should be ashamed of himself.
The apology, and the promise not to use Patreon dollars for AI,
just isn't enough for the mob, of course. One of them wrote:
"I encourage anyone currently supporting Gaming Alexandria on Patreon
to pull their funding until they completely back away from ever using any kind of genAI ever again.
This is an unacceptable response that doesn't seem to understand that any usage of it is unacceptable."
You see how these extremists are? They don't actually care how well it works.
It could be perfect, and they'd still be against it. That's just an excuse.
Also, this is one more example of why the last thing you should do is apologize to these people!
Because they don't take it as an apology.
They take it as an admission of guilt, and use it as fuel to crank up their hate.
They didn't behave the way they did because Hubbard did anything wrong.
They did it because they just hate it to hate it.
I was actually heartened by most of the comments in the Ars Technica article.
Although you had a few of the haters (and a few defending actual Luddism),
mostly they were thoughtful and rational.
Which is another reason you shouldn't apologize to those who hate:
they don't represent what people actually think.
They're just bullies. Never give bullies what they want!
I'm Brother Ezekiel, and I know how naughty thou hast been!
So naughty, thou needst a VPN!
Hide thy iniquity from prying eyes, and make sure the liturgical authorities remain ignorant.
Take thy browser to vpn.bogosity.tv to get BoxPN.
At $6.36 a month, a price only the most penurious would balk at,
thou shalt have unlimited high-speed connections to servers all over the globe.
And they don't log connections. Thy privacy is assured.
That should please you sinners!
Just remember: the Lord sees all!
When travelling, make it look like thou art still home.
At home, ensure the elders at your ISP don't take out their
judgement with traffic-shaping and DMCA notices!
Up to 5 devices can connect at once, almost one for every deadly sin!
Keep thy sins private. Go to vpn.bogosity.tv.
Oh, more Stupid Copyright Tricks, and not only is this from a repeat offender,
it's another example of one of the big problems I've been pointing out with the DMCA since Day One.
With the DMCA, anyone can just make a copyright claim
and get a video or webpage or whatever stricken and taken down for ten business days.
You don't even have to prove who you are!
True, you do this under penalty of perjury,
but even after millions of false DMCA claims since the law passed,
no one has been able to find a single example of even one of them being so much as charged with perjury.
But while all they have to do is just assert the copyright is theirs,
to make a counterclaim you have to give your personal information, including your real name and address—
and that gets forwarded to the person who made the claim!
It's either that, or your content stays down forever.
So it's a great way for dishonest people to get someone's personal details and dox them.
Dishonest people like the Jehovah's Witnesses. The EFF has had to step in once again
to help people being bullied and abused by false DMCA takedowns
issued by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.
They've been issuing takedown notices to anyone critical of them,
in order to force them to turn over their personal details.
In this case, they're defending the operator of a website called JWS Library,
run by a member of the church who became curious about the church's published statements. Quote:
"They created research tools to analyze those documents and ultimately created a website, JWS Library,
allowing others to use those tools and verify their findings through an archive
that included documents suppressed by the church.
Doe and others discovered prophecies that failed to come true,
erasure of a leader's disgrace, increased calls for obedience and donations,
and other insights about the Jehovah's Witnesses' practices."
Watch Tower then sent DMCA notices to Google and Cloudflare to get his site taken down and uncover his identity.
But as the EFF explains:
"The problem for Watch Tower is that Doe's research and commentary
are clear fair uses allowed under copyright law.
The First Amendment does not permit the unmasking of anonymous speakers based on such weak claims.
Indeed, the First Amendment protects anonymous speakers precisely because some would be deterred from speaking
if they faced retribution for doing so."
Watch Tower knows this, of course.
They're not doing this because they have a genuine conflict.
They're abusing the DMCA as a surveillance tool.
Which, again, as I've pointed out from the beginning, isn't really abuse—
because that's what was intended right from the start.
Why else would that asymmetry have been deliberately written in the law to begin with?
This wasn't just foreseeable; it was foreseen.
The one time Watch Tower actually went to court over it,
against a critic using the pseudonym Kevin McFree, things didn't go well.
A judge started actually questioning what they were doing, and Watch Tower dropped the case like a hot potato.
The shameful thing is, this is a very different Jehovah's Witnesses from what we've seen in decades past.
They fought for the right to go door-to-door without the government compelling their speech.
They fought the requirement that school children say the pledge of allegiance.
They fought against the government forcing speech on a car's license plate
that had nothing to do with the tag number.
They've been one of the biggest voices for the First Amendment in the country's history.
Unless, of course, you start to criticize them. Funny how that works.
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In fact, I just got a pair of progressives with high index aspherical lenses
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Once again, that's firmoo.bogosity.tv.
And now it's time to prefabricate this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
Back in the 13 October 2024 podcast, we gave it to Apple for their takedown of the Musi app,
in which they engaged in hysterics, calling it piracy,
and removing it from their app store basically because YouTube screeched loudly about it.
Abuse of App stores is an ongoing and continuing problem.
But this week, we have to switch it up and give it to Musi!
Well, at least you can't accuse us of being biased!
The fact is, at the end of the day Apple has the choice over what it does and does not allow in its app store.
While there may be good arguments to make about the contractual relationship
Apple might have violated with actions like this,
the Musi lawyers for some reason chose not to make any of those.
In fact, it's hard to imagine how they could have screwed it up any harder.
The main problem is that the Apple Developer Program License Agreement clearly says, quote:
"Either party may terminate the DPLA for its convenience, for any reason or no reason,
effective 30 days after providing the other party with written notice of its intent to terminate,"
and that Apple Apple "may, in its sole discretion, reject an Application for distribution for any reason."
"Apple reserves the right to cease marketing, offering,
and allowing purchase by Custom App Distribution Customers
and download by End-Users of the Custom Applications at any time, with or without cause,
by providing notice of termination to You."
Judge Eumi K. Lee of the Northern District of California ruled:
"In sum, these provisions establish that the DPLA is mutually terminable by either party,
and applications may be removed from the App Store by either party,
upon satisfying the relevant notice requirements.
The DPLA also establishes a non-exclusive dispute process
that a developer must follow in response to complaints.
Musi fails to plausibly allege that Apple breached the DPLA by removing the Musi app from the App Store."
"The plain language of the DPLA governs because it is clear and explicit:
Apple may cease marketing, offering, and allowing download by end-users of the Musi app at any time,
with or without cause, by providing notice of termination.
Based on this language, Apple had the right to cease offering the Musi app
without cause if Apple provided notice to Musi.
The complaint alleges, and Musi does not dispute, that Apple gave Musi the required notice.
Therefore, Apple's decision to remove the Musi app from the App Store did not breach the DPLA."
Musi tried to argue that the language limited Apple's removal rights, even though the clause says, quote:
"Without limiting the generality of this Section."
When the clause you're relying on to be limiting specifically says without limiting,
well, that's just a dumb move on your part!
While there is an implied covenant of good faith, you can't use that to contradict express terms of the contract.
Apple had an express right to remove the app. Full stop.
The court wasn't going to imply an obligation that directly contradicts what the parties wrote down.
Musi was given a chance to make an amended complaint,
and they were given two full months of expedited discovery to try to build a better complaint.
And they still couldn't state a viable claim.
They could only reference vague "additional details" without actually identifying any.
The FAC reads more like a conspiracy theory,
with allegations of collusion between Apple and "music industry players" that they couldn't even name. Quote:
"Musi's failure to identify any such fact in its briefing or argument supports dismissal without leave to amend.
Musi already had the deposition testimony and documents from Apple when it amended the complaint.
Indeed, the Court further extended Musi's deadline to amend the complaint after discovery concluded
so Musi could use Apple documents and witness testimony to amend the complaint, which Musi did.
For all these reasons, dismissal is without leave to amend."
This is not how you take your second bite at the apple, so to speak.
In fact, it was so bad that Apple asked for and got Rule 11 sanctions, which are rare.
Maybe it's wrong to blame Musi, really, it's more the fault of their lawyers at Winston & Strawn, but, eh.
Paragraph 1 of the FAC says that Apple "admitted" that it relied on false evidence to justify the removal.
You have to be really careful with the word "admitted."
What actually happened is that Apple acknowledged receiving an email. That's it.
Quote: "Musi's complaint is not the paradigm of candor.
The Court finds that the first allegation— that Apple 'admitted' that it relied on false evidence—
is so factually baseless that it violates Rule 11."
Rule 11 basically says that any representations to a court must not be presented for any improper purpose,
that it's warranted by existing law, has evidentiary support,
and is reasonable based on belief or lack of information.
Ironically, Rule 11 is exactly the sort of requirement Musi accused Apple of violating!
Quote: "Musi's amended complaint went beyond alleging a tenuous and convoluted theory of liability.
Musi presented its theory as undisputed fact by alleging that Apple endorsed it through an admission.
It was particularly misleading to make such an incriminating allegation
because Musi took two months of expedited discovery before filing the amended complaint.
Claiming that Apple admitted that it knowingly relied on false evidence
conveys that discovery yielded damning evidence—but it did not.
Moreover, this allegation appears in the first paragraph of the complaint,
and it materially misrepresents facts at the heart of this lawsuit.
An attorney, after conducting an objectively reasonable inquiry into the facts and law,
would not have found this allegation to be well-founded."
And that discovery included over 3500 documents!
If they couldn't find an actual admission in all of that, then where was it?
They certainly didn't impress the judge by arguing to be rewarded
their own attorneys' fees for answering the motion for sanctions!
Quote: "Musi audaciously requests an award of attorneys' fees for defending against Apple's motion for sanctions.
Musi's request is denied. Musi is not the prevailing party,
and Apple's motion has substantial merit for the reasons discussed above.
Although the Court did not find that every challenged allegation violates Rule 11,
all of Apple's arguments were reasonable.
Each allegation that Apple challenged was on the verge of baselessness."
It's really disappointing, if nothing else.
This could have been a really good case for getting license agreements to have the full force of contract law.
Musi's lawyers should have known this was an uphill battle from day one.
The whole "at any time, with or without cause" language is tough to get over.
While I'm hardly the biggest fan of antitrust, in some cases it can actually fill a lot of the holes in contract law.
In this case, it could have been employed as Epic Games did against Apple,
getting the court to say that, although Apple isn't a monopoly, Apple's blocking of Fortnite specifically
because they employed a payment method where Apple couldn't take a cut of it was a road too far.
They did have evidence of coordination with YouTube and the music industry, in particular Sony,
which is exactly the kind of gang-up bullying contract law doesn't protect you from but antitrust law does.
They could at least have put Apple on the back foot,
requiring them to show that they were a victim of pressure from the industry rather than a willing partner.
And with all of that discovery,
they should have pushed for communications showing the reasons why Apple removed the app,
as well as a pattern of kowtowing to the music industry and how they dealt with similarly-situated apps.
Musi had public sympathy on their side.
A small app developer being crushed under the sheer weight of the music industry
meant that a lot of people— including us—were rooting for them.
They chose the wrong legal vehicle, though.
And instead of changing vehicles when it broke down,
they insisted on slapping it with a bit of spray paint and calling it new.
This will always be the story of the case that could have been:
a trillion-dollar industry using a trillion-dollar tech company
to suppress a small app developer who did nothing wrong, legally or morally.
Instead, they filed a case against a contract that explicitly permitted the conduct they complained about,
committed the exact same sort of violation with Rule 11, and rode it all the way into sanctions.
Tell you what: I'll revoke Biggest Bogon Emitter for Musi and give it to Winston & Strawn instead
if Musi sues them for legal malpractice.
Until then, that makes Musi this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
And now let's prepoststructuralationalisticalify this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
And it's another one for The Guardian, for combining anti-nuclear bogosity with NIMBY fearmongering.
It all starts with the headline: "Miliband reveals plans that could mean nuclear power plants built near homes."
They attack Britain's Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband.
His office released a statement illustrating his plan to overhaul the country's nuclear system
to speed up building and cut costs. Quote:
"The core of the plan is a move towards smarter regulation: proportionate, focused on real risk,
rooted in evidence, and designed to effectively protect nature and biodiversity."
Whereupon The Guardian and a bunch of others screeched
"irresponsible deregulation" and "putting nature at risk."
That apparently includes a new £14.2 billion nuclear station as well as building SMRs.
Environmental lawyer (that really lets you know what to expect, doesn't it?) Alexa Fulver screeched:
"No ecologists or environmental specialists were invited to shape these proposals
into anything that resembles a 'win' for nature."
Yeah, there's a reason for that.
Quote: "This is irresponsible deregulation
at a time when the true human and national costs of nature degradation are becoming more fully understood."
What "nature degradation" do you think nuclear plants cause???
As opposed to what, chopping down trees to make solar farms?
Or interrupting weather cycles with windmills?
Quote: "This was a chance for the government to design resilience
into our industrial strategy and the government didn’t take it."
The only kind of resilience we can really have with energy is nuclear!
And you're far better off having a nuclear plant "closer to homes" than you are with an unreliable grid
that's constantly having to rely on volatile fossil fuel markets to compensate.
Instead of reporting on what the Secretary actually said and did,
they gave megaphones to crazy environmentalists who have been keeping us in the dark—literally—for far too long.
Just once again, keep this in mind whenever they and theirs mouth off
about "zero carbon" and "sustainability" and "global warming."
Because we have the solution for it. And you people always oppose it with everything you have.
So all of that makes The Guardian this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
Well, that wraps up this "More nuclear power!" edition of the Bogosity Podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it; if you did, please go to donate.bogosity.tv for several ways to support,
and discord.bogosity.tv to join the discussion.
Subscribe at the Discord, Patreon, or SubscribeStar and you can listen early and ad-free.
Thank you for listening. Remember, no podcast next week; we'll see you in two weeks.
Until then, here's a quote from James Lovelock:
"The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits,
so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power."
The Bogosity Podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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