This stupid state. These stupid legislators. This goddamn constituency.

This is my current home state. And it is painful to be here.

Kristi Noem is now the head of the DHS, presumably because she never asked what this country could do for her, but instead asked “what can I do for Donald Trump?” She kept asking this question even though no one was really expecting an answer during the Biden administration. Then she allowed her constituents to be ravaged by floods because she’s already spent too much money sending South Dakota National Guard troops to Texas to “defend the border.”

The state legislature contains a vast Republican majority, as it has for years. But rather than limiting themselves to turning South Dakota into the world’s foremost inland offshore banking site, they’re now just following their (Dear) leaders. Performative cruelty is the name of the game. And the latest move is to criminalize the act of being a librarian, as Joshua Haiar reports for the last truly independent source of local journalism, South Dakota Searchlight.

In a move that one lawmaker said would lead to “locking up librarians,” South Dakota legislators advanced a bill 38-32 on Thursday at the Capitol in Pierre that would remove legal protections for libraries and other institutions if children view books that meet the legal definition of “harmful to minors.”

The bill would repeal an exemption shielding libraries, schools, universities, museums and their employees from prosecution under laws regulating obscenity and dissemination of material harmful to children. Without the exemption, people who work for those entities could be subjected to prosecutions resulting in a year of jail time and a $2,000 fine.

Librarians have normally been given a pass here because no librarian actively stocks what most people would consider to be pornographic material. But now there are plenty of politicians and special interest groups pretending content that has been carried by libraries for years is now “obscene” simply because they don’t like the content. These efforts almost exclusively target LGBTQ+ content, with legislators pretending any depiction of alternative sexuality is de facto porn.

Rep. Bethany Soye is one of those people. She’s a Republican representing the state’s largest city, Sioux Falls. She was also instrumental in the passing of an age-verification bill that would subject any website to legal action and fines if even a single pornographic image is hosted by it.

Other Republicans are more logical than Rep. Soye. While Soye claims this just prevents librarians from lending porn to kids (something that never happens), Republic lawmaker Drew Petersen says the wording of bill allows prosecutors to target librarians for doing nothing more than being helpful librarians. And another Republican lawmaker stated this law does nothing at all to make South Dakota great again.

“If a librarian accidentally allowed a student to take an anatomy book home or an encyclopedia with a picture of a naked human being, they could potentially be charged with a year in jail,” Peterson said. “That’s why I am voting no.”

Rep. Will Mortenson, R-Fort Pierre, also opposed the measure.

“We’re locking up librarians,” Mortenson said. “Folks, we’re not growing the state. We’re not helping our people. We’re locking up librarians in this bill.”

Soye, of course, had her own take on the issue, one that’s just as incoherent as you’d expect from someone who thinks it’s a good idea to criminalize an entire internet just because some kid might stumble across some porn somewhere.

In her closing arguments, Soye rejected claims that the bill criminalizes librarians.

“Just because there’s a penalty for something, does that mean you’re criminalizing someone?” she asked.

HOLY FUCK, SOYE! THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THAT MEANS! When you create a criminal penalty for an act that previously had no criminal penalty, you are — BY FUCKING DEFINITION — criminalizing that act. Calling this response idiotic is an insult to idiots everywhere. This is, by far, one of the worst defenses of anything ever — so terrible I’m on the verge of going full Godwin on it. This is incredibly dumb shit being said by someone who’s so far up their own bigotry they can’t even recognize their own blatant contradictions.

It’s not a law yet. Unfortunately, it’s headed to the state senate, which is just as heavily stocked with Republicans and just as willing to violate constitutional rights so long as it makes the frothiest of their fellow lawmakers and constituents momentarily happy.

The 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) continues to quietly help fund a number of extremely popular community-owned, open access fiber deployments that are challenging entrenched U.S. monopoly power, and driving super cheap, community-owned and operated fiber networks into long neglected towns.

New York State, for example, just leveraged ARPA funds to give a $26 million grant to Oswego County. Oswego County is going to use that money to build an open access fiber network. That means multiple ISPs can come in and compete over shared infrastructure owned by the county. Our Copia report showcased how this model can help disrupt monopoly power and lower broadband costs for users.

The anchor tenant on Oswego County’s new network, Empire Access, will provide locals with 500 Megabit per second (Mbps) service for $50 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $65 a month; and symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month.

That’s not great news for regional New York State monopolies Charter and Verizon, who’ve grown fat and comfortable charging much higher prices for much slower access. The lack of real competition between the two giants for decades has resulted in high prices, slow speeds, spotty coverage, inconsistent upgrades, repair delays, and substandard customer service.

Charter, you might recall, was almost kicked out the state for lying to regulators about its merger with Time Warner Cable. Verizon similarly has long been under fire for cheaping out on uniform fiber upgrades despite untold millions in taxpayer subsidies.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, Carver County officials say they’ve also been leveraging ARPA funds to deploy affordable gigabit fiber to every county resident. Their model is slightly different: The city has used grant money to build dark fiber, which they then lease to a company called MetroNet as part of a public-private partnership. MetroNet is offering locals gigabit fiber for prices way less than regional monopolies:

“Metronet currently offers four tiers of service with varying promotions, which currently include symmetrical 150 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber for $35 a month; symmetrical 500 Mbps for $45 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) for $50 a month; symmetrical 2 Gbps for $70 a month; and symmetrical 5 Gbps for $110 a month.”

Again, this kind of stuff doesn’t get much attention from a press that declares infrastructure too boring to cover. But this kind of stuff is quietly transformative all the same. It’s also not clear to me why Senate Democrats aren’t competently messaging the impact ARPA funds are having on affordable broadband. Or local community centers, local road improvements, or affordable housing.

Many states try to “address the digital divide” by throwing more and more money into the laps of giant regional telecom monopolies with a long history of subsidy abuse. Many other states are trying to “fix broadband access” by throwing money at Elon Musk’s Starlink, ignoring the LEO satellite platform’s capacity constraints, high prices, erratic leadership, and problematic environmental impact.

But some states (most notably Vermont, Maine, California, and New York) are trying a different tack: they’re investing heavily in community-owned open access infrastructure, and treating broadband more like an essential utility (where maximizing shareholder profits isn’t the top priority). They’re leveraging an historic infusion of federal funds to put local communities in charge of their own connectivity fate.

Entrenched telecom monopolies, which have worked tirelessly over decades to dismantle broadband competition and state and federal oversight, have worked tirelessly to demonize and undermine community broadband access. But in a decade it should be interesting to see what the data says about the differing approaches.

Keep in mind that states are also poised to receive more than $42.5 billion in additional broadband grants courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill. That program has significantly more restrictions than ARPA, and there’s every indication that the Trump administration will do its best to redirect as much of that money as possible away from community owned endeavors and toward companies that kiss Trump’s ass.

After 14 years of trying and failing to gain a smartphone foothold, Amazon has announced it will discontinue its app store. Anyone who has content in Amazon's store will be able to access it for now, but all bets are off beginning on August 20, 2025. As part of the pull-back, the company is also discontinuing the Amazon Coins digital currency.

The Amazon Appstore made waves when it launched in 2011, offering an alternative to what at the time was known as the Android Market. Amazon even scored some early exclusives and gave away a plethora of premium content and Coins to anyone willing to do the legwork of installing the storefront on their Android phone.

That level of attention didn't last, though, and the Appstore today has hardly evolved from its humble beginnings, lacking most of the content and features people have come to expect from a mobile app store. If you want to check out the store on your phone before it goes away, you'll have to sideload the client by downloading an APK from Amazon. This process isn't hard, but it proved to be a significant barrier to entry for getting people into the Amazon ecosystem.

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An asteroid discovered late last year is continuing to stir public interest as its odds of striking planet Earth less than eight years from now continue to increase.

Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA's most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent. Now that's not particularly high, but it's also not zero.

Naturally the prospect of a large ball of rock tens of meters across striking the planet is a little worrisome. This is large enough to cause localized devastation near its impact site, likely on the order of the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia.

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Suing Elon Musk and DOGE has finally led to at least one thing: the White House now finally defining Musk’s role in government. On Monday night, in the New Mexico v. Musk, it claimed him as a “an employee of the White House Office” with only “the ability to advise the President, or communicate the President’s directives.”

This filing, with is accompanying declaration, was made to tell the court that Musk “’has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself’—including personnel decisions at individual agencies.” (Nor does DOGE have such authority.) It came up because in Monday’s hearing about the TRO New Mexico and over a dozen more states had sought to, among other things, restrain Musk and DOGE from causing the firing of any more personnel. The DOJ is now trying to claim that neither Musk nor DOGE were ever responsible for any personnel firing decisions.

But it’s a strategy that seems too cute by half and one that potentially creates more issues for Musk and DOGE than it purports to solve. Because the filing serves as a big neon sign saying that Musk had little authority.

So then what the hell was he doing demanding that anyone from DOGE get access to the nation’s most sensitive computer systems?

It certainly looks like it was access “without authorization” that the CFAA punishes because there was no authorization that this particular status as a White House employee could endow him with to entitle him, or his delegates, to the access they took. Nor, apparently, did it. From the declaration:

“Mr. Musk is an employee of the White House Office. He holds that position as a non-career Special Government Employee (“SGE”). In that job, Mr. Musk is a Senior Advisor to the President. […] In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

Perhaps the DOJ is hoping that “communicate the President’s directives” gave Musk the power to demand the access, as if his authorization somehow flowed from the President. But the President didn’t have the authority to demand the agency access Musk and DOGE took because, as other litigation is pointing out, such access was limited by statute.

The DOJ is also trying to dance around the Constitution by claiming that DOGE is mere “component of the Executive Office of the President.” But Musk and DOGE have been doing more than just advising the White House. Although disclaimed now, the firings, contract breaches, and payment freezes seem to have been at their hands. But even if they were only the byproduct of “recommendations” Musk and DOGE had made they were recommendations made in the shadow of their unauthorized access to these sensitive computer systems and all their data—access which they have also used to directly interfere with agency operations, at times even by having direct access to their code.

There is nothing advisory about any of those activities. The very real problem the country is facing is that Musk and DOGE are asserting a coercive power to seize access to these systems, which has then fueled their destruction. And what this case is asserting is that constitutionally they should have had no such power to do any of it.