Which of course is the occasional French film reaching an American arthouse cinema, as if those even exist anymore outside of a few college towns and a couple of New York neighborhoods.

President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Monday he will be imposing a 100% tariff “on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States.”

Trump did not specify when or how the tariff could be enacted.

If Trump follows through with his threat, it would mark the first time he’s essentially imposed a tariff on a service rather than a raw good.

The president initially threatened a 100% tariff on foreign-produced movies in May, arguing that other countries offer tax incentives that have drawn filmmakers abroad. In his post on Monday, he singled out California, saying the state “has been particularly hard hit!”

Hollywood was completely caught off guard when Trump first previewed the tariff in May. “On first blush, it’s shocking and would represent a virtually complete halt of production,” one industry insider told CNN at the time. “But in reality, he has no jurisdiction to do this and it’s too complex to enforce.”

I mean, maybe that’s true, or maybe he doesn’t give a shit or maybe America is made up of morons who worship power.

Or maybe Trump is just outraged that Romanian film directors would dare make fun of the reality that Kentuckians are troglodyte apes, a fact known globally.

The post Scumbag Don Finally Solves the Greatest Problem Facing the United States appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren't in there enough, so now we're into the silly season with Microsoft's announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft's LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000's Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF ... THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on "help the users get stuff done". Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they're asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it's a truthful answer or not.

Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don't want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel's share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they've been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as "Macbook Air killers", largely because they're playing catch-up with Apple's M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.

Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.

First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they've released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there's on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There's a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can't read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.

Microsoft Recall is not that.

"Hey, wouldn't it be great if we could use AI in Windows to help our users see everything they've ever done on their computer?" Is a great pitch, and Recall kinda-sorta achieves this. But the implementation is soemthing rather different. Recall takes snapshots of all the windows on a Windows computer's screen (except the DRM'd media, because the MPAA must have their kilo of flesh) and saves them locally. The local part is good: the term for software that takes regular screenshots and saves them in the cloud is "part of a remote access trojan". It then OCRs any text in the images, and I believe also transcribes any speech, and saves the resulting output in an unencrypted SQLite database stored in:

C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\CoreAIPlatform.00\UKP{GUID}

And there are tools already out there to slurp through the database and see what's in it, such as TotalRecall.

Surprise! It turns out that the unencrypted database and the stored images may contain your user credentials and passwords. And other stuff. Got a porn habit? Congratulations, anyone with access to your user account can see what you've been seeing. Use a password manager like 1Password? Sorry, your 1Password passwords are probably visible via Recall, now.

Now, "unencrypted" is relative; the database is stored on a filesystem which should be encrypted using Microsoft's BitLocker. But anyone with credentials for your Microsoft account can decrypt it and poke around. Indeed, anyone with access to your PC, unlocked, has your entire world at their fingertips.

But this is an utter privacy shit-show. Victims of domestic abuse are at risk of their abuser trawling their PC for any signs that they're looking for help. Anyone who's fallen for a scam that gave criminals access to their PC is also completely at risk.

Worse: even if you don't use Recall, if you send an email or instant message to someone else who does then it will be OCRd and indexed via Recall: and preserved for posterity.
Now imagine the shit-show when this goes corporate.

And it turns out that Microsoft is pushing this feature into the latest update of Windows 11 for all compatible hardware and making it impossible to remove or disable, because that tactic has worked so well for them in the past at driving the uptake of new technologies that Microsoft wanted its ~~customers~~ victims to start using. Like, oh, Microsoft Internet Explorer back in 2001, and remember how well that worked out for them.

Suddenly every PC becomes a target for Discovery during legal proceedings. Lawyers can subpoena your Recall database and search it, no longer being limited to email but being able to search for terms that came up in Teams or Slack or Signal messages, and potentially verbally via Zoom or Skype if speech-to-text is included in Recall data.

It's a shit-show for any organization that handles medical records or has a duty of legal confidentiality; indeed, for any business that has to comply with GDPR (how does Recall handle the Right to be Forgotten? In a word: badly), or HIPAA in the US. This misfeature contravenes privacy law throughout the EU (and in the UK), and in healthcare organizations everywhere which has a medical right to privacy. About the only people whose privacy it doesn't infringe are the Hollywood studios and Netflix, which tells you something about the state of things.

Recall is already attracting the attention of data protection regulators; I suspect in its current form it's going to be dead on arrival, and those CoPilot+ PCs due to launch on June 18th are going to get a hurried overhaul. It's also going to be interesting to see what Apple does, or more importantly doesn't announce at WWDC next week, which is being trailed as the year when Apple goes all-in on AI.

More to the point, though, Windows Recall blows a hole under the waterline of Microsoft's trustworthiness. Microsoft "got serious" about security earlier this decade, around the time Steve Balmer stepped down as CEO, and managed to recover somwhat from having a reputation for taking a slapdash approach to its users data. But they've been going backwards since 2020, with dick moves like disabling auto-save to local files in Microsoft Word (your autosave data only autosaves to OneDrive), slurping all incoming email for accounts accessed via Microsoft Outlook into Microsoft's own cloud for AI training purposes (ask the Department of Justice how they feel about Microsoft potentially having access to the correspondence for all their investigations in progress), and now this. Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it's really hard to regain it.

Some commentators are snarking that Microsoft really really wants to make 2025 the year of Linux on the Desktop, and it's kind of hard to refute them right now.

Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.

Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan Am, F.W. Woolworth, Fotomat booths, Borders bookshops, and Pier 1. Americans were watching Happy Days, M*A*S*H and Charlie’s Angels on television; their British cousins were watching George and Mildred, The Goodies, and Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If you turned on the radio, “Hotel California” by The Eagles was alternating with “Dancing Queen” by Abba (and, if we want to be completely honest, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce). Most cars still ran on leaded gasoline, most phones were still rotary dial, and the Internet was a wonky idea that was still a few weeks from a working prototype.

_The Thorn Birds_ was on top of everyone’s bestseller list. The first Apple II home computer had just gone on sale. The Sex Pistols were in the studio wrapping up _Never Mind The Bollocks_; they would tour on it for just three months and then break up, and within another year Sid Vicious would be dead of a heroin overdose. Barack Obama was a high school junior living with his grandparents in Honolulu, Hawaii: his grades were okay, but he spent most of his time hanging with his pot-smoking friends in the “Choom Gang”.  Boris Johnson was tucked away at the elite Ashdown House boarding school while his parents marriage was slowly collapsing: although he was only thirteen, he had already adopted his signature hair style.  Elvis had just died on the toilet a few weeks ago.  It was the summer of Star Wars.

And Voyager 1 was blasting off for a tour of the Solar System.


There’s no way to pack the whole story of Voyager 1 into a single blog post.  Here’s the TLDR: Voyager was the first spacecraft to fly past Jupiter, and the first to take close-up photos of Jupiter’s moons.  It flew on past Saturn, and examined Saturn’s moon Titan, the only moon with an atmosphere.  And then it flew onwards, on and on, for another forty years.  It officially left the Solar System and entered interstellar space in 2012.  It just kept going, further and further into the infinite emptiness.  

(You know about the Golden Record?  Come on, everybody knows about the Golden Record.  It’s kind of hokey and cheesy and also kind of amazing and great.)

Voyager has grown old.  It was never designed for this!  Its original mission was supposed to last a bit over three years.  Voyager has turned out to be much tougher than anyone ever imagined, but time gets us all.  Its power source is a generator full of radioactive isotopes, and those are gradually decaying into inert lead.  Year by year, the energy declines, the power levels  relentlessly fall.  Year by year, NASA has been switching off Voyager’s instruments to conserve that dwindling flicker.  They turned off its internal heater a few years ago, and they thought that might be the end.  But those 1970s engineers built to last, and the circuitry and the valves kept working even as the temperature dropped down, down, colder than dry ice, colder than liquid nitrogen, falling towards absolute zero.  

(Voyager stored its internal data on a digital tape recorder.  Yes, a tape recorder, storing information on magnetic tape.  It wasn’t designed to function at a hundred degrees below zero.  It wasn’t designed to work for decades, winding and rewinding, endlessly re-writing data.  But it did.)

Voyager kept going, and kept going, until it was over 15 billion kilometers away.  At the speed of light, the Moon is one and a half seconds away.  The Sun is about 8 minutes away.  Voyager is twenty-two hours away.  Send a radio signal to it at lunch on Monday, and you’ll get a response back Wednesday morning.

* * *

I could go on at great length about Voyager — the discoveries it has made, how amazing it has all been, the Deep Space Network that has maintained contact over the decades, the ever shrinking crew of aging technicians keeping it alive on a shoestring budget. But I’ll restrict myself to just this:  the Pale Blue Dot.





In 1990, just before Voyager’s camera shut down forever, the probe turned around and looked backwards.  It zoomed in and took a picture of Earth.  But by that time, it was so far away that Earth was just a single pale blue pixel.  Look at the right-most band of light.  A little past halfway down — see that speck?  It’s not a defect.  It’s not something on your screen.  That’s the Earth.

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” — Carl Sagan

Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo.  It’s still going.  It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever. 

* * *

Here’s a bit of trivia: Voyager 1 currently holds the record for most distant active spacecraft.  It’s not even close.  The only other contender is Voyager’s little sister, Voyager 2, which had a different mission profile and so lags billions of kilometers behind their older sibling.

Here’s another bit of trivia:  if you’re reading this in 2024?  It’s very unlikely that you will live to see that record broken.  There are only two other spacecraft outside the Solar System — Voyager 2 and New Horizons.  Both of them are going to die before they get as far as Voyager 1.  And nobody — not NASA, not the Chinese, not the EU — is currently planning to launch another spacecraft to those distances.  In theory we could.  In practice, we have other priorities.

* * *

We thought we knew how Voyager would end.  The power would gradually, inevitably, run down.  The instruments would shut off, one by one.  The signal would get fainter.  Eventually either the last instrument would fail for lack of power, or the signal would be lost.

We didn’t expect that it would go mad.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data.  A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were.  And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

(This is a problem NASA long since solved.  These days, every space probe that launches, leaves a perfect duplicate back on Earth.  Remember in “The Martian”, how they had another copy of Pathfinder sitting under a tarp in a warehouse?  That’s accurate.  It’s been standard practice for 30 years.  But back in 1977, nobody had thought of that yet.)

Voyager Mission Control used to be a couple of big rooms full of busy people, computers, giant screens.  Now it’s a single room in a small office building in the San Gabriel Valley, in between a dog training school and a McDonalds.  The Mission Control team is a handful of people, none of them young, several well past retirement age. 

And they’re trying to fix the problem.  But right now, it doesn’t look good.  You can’t just download a new OS from 15 billion kilometers away.  (For starters, there isn’t the bandwidth.)  They would have to figure out the problem, figure out if a workaround is possible, and then apply it… all with a round-trip time of 45 hours for every communication with a probe that is flying away from us at a million miles a day.  They’re trying, but nobody likes their odds.

So at some point — not tomorrow, not next week, but at some point in the next few months — they’ll probably have to admit defeat.  And then they’ll declare Voyager 1 officially over, dead and done, the end of a long song.

And that’s all.