Josh Kovensky, reporting for TPM:

In a withering 46-page opinion on Wednesday, D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg laid out how he came to believe that the Trump administration was acting in bad faith during its Alien Enemies Act removals.

Boasberg set the stage for potential contempt prosecutions in the order. He also detailed what he came to see as the Trump administration’s scheme to shield its plan to use rarely invoked wartime powers to remove more than 100 Venezuelans to a Salvadoran detention facility, depriving them of due process and the courts of the ability to review what was taking place.

Below are five points on Boasberg’s opinion.

I’d never heard of Boasberg until recently, but he has a rather distinctive surname. Turns out he’s also the judge presiding over the FTC v. Meta antitrust case that’s in court this week. Busy man.

Update: Turns out he’s also the judge in the lawsuit “alleging Trump officials violated federal record-keeping laws by using a Signal group chat to discuss looming military action against Yemen’s Houthis.”

Dennis McLellan, writing for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):

Over the decades, according to his website, Martindale either hosted or produced 21 game shows, including “Words and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.” “That’s a lot of shows,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with the New York Daily News. “It either means everybody wants me to do their show or I can’t hold a job.”

Martindale was best known for hosting “Tic-Tac-Dough,” the revival of a late 1950s show, which aired on CBS for less than two months in 1978 but continued in syndication until 1986.

Unlike tic-tac-toe, in which two players simply try to get three Xs or three Os in a row in a nine-box grid, “Tic-Tac-Dough” required contestants to select a subject category in each of the nine boxes, everything from geography to song titles. Each correct answer earned the players their X or O in the chosen box.

“Tic-Tac-Dough” achieved its highest ratings in 1980 during the 88-game, 46-show run of Lt. Thom McKee, a handsome young Navy fighter pilot whose winning streak earned him $312,700 in cash and prizes and a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

It’s funny what you remember from childhood. I was only seven then, but I remember McKee’s winning streak. He was like the proto Ken Jennings. There was some kind of gimmick on the show where if you won ten games in a row — which almost never happened — you also won a car as a bonus. So McKee won eight cars. As I recall it — I was seven, so I could be wrong — all eight cars he won were exactly the same model, because that was the show’s current promotional partner. I remember thinking that was absurd, and my dad explaining to me that he could just sell them.

Anyway, in one of my programming classes in high school, we had to create a big final project. We had to work in pairs because there weren’t enough computers for every student in the class. My friend and I wrote a tic-tac-toe game in Applesoft BASIC. (To be honest, I wrote most of it, but he did the typing.) I remember three things about that game:

1. We used the number pad keyboard layout for entering moves, with each numeral corresponding to a square on the board, which I thought (and still think) was a pretty clever UI for tic-tac-toe:

   789
   456
   123
   

2. You could play two-player or against the computer, and while the computer was pretty good, it couldn’t play perfectly. I was very frustrated that while I could, of course, play perfect tic-tac-toe myself, I couldn’t figure out how to code an algorithm for unbeatable play in BASIC.

3. Our name for the game: Wink.

Wes Davis, The Verge:

During Meta’s antitrust trial today, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. Attorneys for both Apple and Snap called the errors “egregious,” with Apple’s representative indicating that it may not be able to trust Meta with its internal information in the future. Google’s attorney also blamed Meta for jeopardizing the search giant’s data with the mistake.

This is yet another one of those situations where the botched redactions were just objects layered atop the supposed-to-be-redacted material in a PDF file, leaving the original layer’s content intact but just visually occluded. In 2025 you either have to be really bad with computers to do this, or you did it this way on purpose. Perhaps we should apply Occam’s razor and presume it’s just Meta displaying their usual regard for privacy.

You can properly redact a PDF digitally, but botched digital redactions are so commonplace (and at times disastrous and/or humiliating) that when then Attorney General William Barr released the Mueller Report in 2019, the DOJ printed the unredacted original, did the redactions on paper, and then scanned it back in to create the redacted PDF.

Dana Mattioli, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also, here’s a News+ link):

Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known.

Imagine having 14 acknowledged children but your friends suspect the actual number is “much higher”. What a profound weirdo this guy is.

Cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong was covering disgraced crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall when Musk started liking and replying to her posts. Musk’s interactions ramped up as Fong posted more political content in support of Trump, and Musk followed her last summer.

That sort of attention from Musk on X, where he has 219 million followers, sent droves of followers to Fong, which was a financial boon. More engagement meant more earnings for her as part of a revenue-sharing program for creators on X.

During the height of her interactions with the billionaire owner, Fong earned $21,000 on the platform in a two-week period in November, according to a screenshot she posted. That was about when Musk sent her a direct message asking if she was interested in having his child, according to people familiar with the matter. The two had never met in person.

Fong didn’t move forward with Musk because she pictured having children in a more traditional nuclear family, but confided to a few friends about the approach — including St. Clair, whom she knew as another conservative social-media figure — and how she worried that turning him down could hurt her earnings.

Once Musk learned that Fong disclosed the request to others, he chided her for not using discretion, according to the people, and unfollowed her. That contributed to a fall in her engagement, and her earnings declined.

There’s arguably an insinuation here that something crooked happened to Fong’s Twitter/X earnings after she declined Musk’s offer, but there doesn’t have to be for it to be sick. It’s just gross that Musk’s M.O. is to hit up suddenly popular women and ask if they’d like to have his children, and to lavish money-earning public attention on them while courting them.

Jessica Lyons, reporting for The Register:

US government funding for the world’s CVE program — the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws — ends Wednesday.

The 25-year-old CVE program plays a huge role in vulnerability management. It is responsible overseeing the assignment and organizing of unique CVE ID numbers, such as CVE-2014-0160 and CVE-2017-5754, for specific vulnerabilities, in this case OpenSSL’s Heartbleed and Intel’s Meltdown, so that when referring to particular flaws and patches, everyone is agreed on exactly what we’re all talking about.

The good news: they were ready. Announcing the CVE Foundation:

Since its inception, the CVE Program has operated as a U.S. government-funded initiative, with oversight and management provided under contract. While this structure has supported the program’s growth, it has also raised longstanding concerns among members of the CVE Board about the sustainability and neutrality of a globally relied-upon resource being tied to a single government sponsor.

This concern has become urgent following an April 15, 2025 letter from MITRE notifying the CVE Board that the U.S. government does not intend to renew its contract for managing the program. While we had hoped this day would not come, we have been preparing for this possibility.

In response, a coalition of longtime, active CVE Board members have spent the past year developing a strategy to transition CVE to a dedicated, non-profit foundation. The new CVE Foundation will focus solely on continuing the mission of delivering high-quality vulnerability identification and maintaining the integrity and availability of CVE data for defenders worldwide.