The writer and comedian Megan Koester got her first writing job, reviewing Internet pornography, from a Craigslist ad she responded to more than 15 years ago. Several years after that, she used the listings website to find the rent-controlled apartment where she still lives today. When she wanted to buy property, she scrolled through Craigslist and found a parcel of land in the Mojave Desert. She built a dwelling on it (never mind that she’d later discover it was unpermitted) and furnished it entirely with finds from Craigslist’s free section, right down to the laminate flooring, which had previously been used by a production company.

“There’s so many elements of my life that are suffused with Craigslist,” says Koester, 42, whose Instagram account is dedicated, at least in part, to cataloging screenshots of what she has dubbed “harrowing images” from the site’s free section; on the day we speak, she’s wearing a cashmere sweater that cost her nothing, besides the faith it took to respond to an ad with no pictures. “I’m ride or die.”

Koester is one of untold numbers of Craigslist aficionados, many of them in their thirties and forties, who not only still use the old-school classifieds site but also consider it an essential, if anachronistic, part of their everyday lives. It’s a place where anonymity is still possible, where money doesn’t have to be exchanged, and where strangers can make meaningful connections—for romantic pursuits, straightforward transactions, and even to cast unusual creative projects, including experimental TV shows like The Rehearsal on HBO and Amazon Freevee’s Jury Duty. Unlike flashier online marketplaces such as DePop and its parent company, Etsy, or Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist doesn’t use algorithms to track users’ moves and predict what they want to see next. It doesn’t offer public profiles, rating systems, or “likes” and “shares” to dole out like social currency; as a result, Craigslist effectively disincentivizes clout-chasing and virality-seeking—behaviors that are often rewarded on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. It’s a utopian vision of a much earlier, far more earnest Internet.

“The real freaks come out on Craigslist,” says Koester. “There's a purity to it.” Even still, the site is a little tamer than it used to be: Craigslist shut down its “casual encounters” ads and took its personals section offline in 2018, after Congress passed legislation that would’ve put the company on the hook for listings from potential sex traffickers. The “missed connections” section, however, remains active.

The site is what Jessa Lingel, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has called the “ungentrified” Internet. If that’s the case, then online gentrification has only accelerated in recent years, thanks in part to the proliferation of AI. Even Wikipedia and Reddit, visually basic sites created in the early aughts and with an emphasis similar to Craigslist’s on fostering communities, have both incorporated their own versions of AI tools.

Some might argue that Craigslist, by contrast, is outdated; an article published in this magazine more than 15 years ago called it “underdeveloped” and “unpredictable.” But to the site’s most devoted adherents, that’s precisely its appeal.

“ I think Craigslist is having a revival,” says Kat Toledo, an actor and comedian who regularly uses the site to hire cohosts for her LA-based stand-up show, Besitos. “When something is structured so simply and really does serve the community, and it doesn't ask for much? That’s what survives.”

Toledo started using Craigslist in the 2000s and never stopped. Over the years, she has turned to the site to find romance, housing, and even her current job as an assistant to a forensic psychologist. She’s worked there full-time for nearly two years, defying Craigslist’s reputation as a supplier of potentially sketchy one-off gigs. The stigma of the website, sometimes synonymous with scammers and, in more than one instance, murderers, can be hard to shake. “If I'm not doing a good job,” Toledo says she jokes to her employer, “just remember you found me on Craigslist.”

But for Toledo, the site’s “random factor”—the way it facilitates connection with all kinds of people she might not otherwise interact with—is also what makes it so exciting. Respondents to her ads seeking paid cohosts tend to be “people who almost have nothing to lose, but in a good way, and everything to gain,” she says. There was the born-again Christian who performed a reenactment of her religious awakening and the poet who insisted on doing Toledo’s makeup; others, like the commercial actor who started crying on the phone beforehand, never made it to the stage.

It’s difficult to quantify just how many people actively use Craigslist and how often they click through its listings. The for-profit company is privately owned and doesn’t share data about its users. (Craigslist also didn’t respond to a request for comment.) But according to the Internet data company similarweb, Craigslist draws more than 105 million monthly users, making it the 40th most popular website in the United States—not too shabby for a company that doesn’t spend any money on advertising or marketing. And though Craigslist’s revenue has reportedly plummeted over the past half-dozen years, based on an estimate from an industry analytics firm, it remains enormously profitable. (The company generates revenue by charging a modest fee to publish ads for gigs, certain types of goods, and in some cities, apartments.)

“It’s not a perfect platform by any means, but it does show that you can make a lot of money through an online endeavor that just treats users like they have some autonomy and grants everybody a degree of privacy,” says Lingel. A longtime Craigslist user, she began researching the site after wondering, “Why do all these web 2.0 companies insist that the only way for them to succeed and make money is off the back of user data? There must be other examples out there.”

In her book, Lingel traces the history of the site, which began in 1995 as an email list for a couple hundred San Francisco Bay Area locals to share events, tech news, and job openings. By the end of the decade, engineer Craig Newmark’s humble experiment had evolved into a full-fledged company with an office, a domain name, and a handful of hires. In true Craigslist fashion, Newmark even recruited the company’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, from an ad he posted to the site, initially seeking a programmer.

The two have gone to great lengths to wrest the company away from corporate interests. When they suspected a looming takeover attempt from eBay, which had purchased a minority stake in Craigslist from a former employee in 2004, Newmark and Buckmaster spent roughly a decade battling the tech behemoth in court. The litigation ended in 2015, with Craigslist buying back its shares and regaining control.

“ They are in lockstep about their early ’90s Internet values,” says Lingel, who credits Newmark and Buckmaster with Craigslist’s long-held aesthetic and ethos: simplicity, privacy, and accessibility. “As long as they're the major shareholders, that will stay that way.”

Craigslist’s refusal to “sell out,” as Koester puts it, is all the more reason to use it. “Not only is there a purity to the fan base or the user base, there’s a purity to the leadership that they’re uncorruptible basically,” says Koester. “I’m gonna keep looking at Craigslist until I die.” She pauses, then shudders: “Or, until Craig dies, I guess.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins unveiled the delayed 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for America Wednesday, which is already drawing criticism for its ties to the meat and dairy industry.

Headlining with the advice to "eat real food," the new guidelines, which are updated every five years, are in a brisk, citation-free 10-page document. Overall, the new guidelines: lambaste added sugars and highly processed foods (though it doesn't clearly define them); ditch previous limits on alcohol while directing Americans to just drink "less"; beef up recommendations for protein, including red meat; and appear to embrace saturated fats while not actually changing the 2020–2025 recommendation for how much you should eat—which was and continues to be no more than 10 percent of total daily calories.

"We are ending the war on saturated fats," Kennedy said triumphantly in a White House press briefing Wednesday, despite the lack of a change. He went on to proclaim that "today, our government declares war on added sugar," though that too is questionable.

This is war?

While the new guidelines say "no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended," it offers the suggestion that "one meal should contain no more than 10 grams of added sugars." There are four calories in one gram of sugar, so the recommendation means no more than 40 calories from sugar per meal. For three meals a day, that's a max of 120 calories from sugar a day, which on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, would be about 6 percent of total calories. The previous recommendation in the 2020–2025 guidelines was to have less than 10 percent of total calories per day from added sugars.

Earning some praise from outside experts, including the American Medical Association, the new guidelines are the first iteration to directly address highly processed foods. While emphasizing "whole, nutrient-dense foods," it aims for a "dramatic reduction in highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives."

While the guidelines don't provide a clear definition of what constitutes highly processed foods or how consumers can identify them, they do offer some broad examples at various points, including store-bought "chips, cookies, and candy," and "white bread, ready-to-eat or packaged breakfast options, flour tortillas, and crackers."

New triangle

In an effort to steer Americans to healthy choices, the new guidance unveils a new(ish) visual aid—a food pyramid that is upside-down, thus resembling a funnel.

The move at least explains a puzzling trend: Over the past year, Kennedy and other Trump administration officials have repeatedly made reference to the food pyramid—though only to mock and scorn it, often with inaccuracies.

“The dietary guidelines that we inherited from the Biden administration were 453 pages long," Kennedy said in August, referring to the 2020–2025 guidelines, which are 164 pages long. "They were driven by the same commercial impulses that put Froot Loops at the top of the food pyramid."

On Wednesday's unveiling of the new guidelines, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary lamented that, "for decades, we've been fed a corrupt food pyramid."

Not only were Froot Loops never listed on a food pyramid, no food pyramid has been included in federal dietary guidelines for over a decade, raising the question of why the administration was repeatedly attacking a defunct polyhedron. The original food pyramid was introduced in 1992, significantly revised in 2005, and ditched entirely in 2011. Since then, the guidelines have used MyPlate as a visual aid, intended to provide a simplistic depiction of the foods people should eat, in their recommended proportions, on a plate.

Inconsistent imagery

The resurrection of a pyramid in its upside-down form clarifies the administration's geometric obsession. In the new funnel version, though, the food groups are a jumbled spectrum, rather than stacked or divided, leaving proportions up to guesswork. The wide top of the funnel includes a large slab of red meat, a wedge of cheese, a whole roasted bird, broccoli, carrots, and a bag of frozen peas. As it tapers downward, it includes whole milk and unsweetened yogurt, "healthy fats" including olive oil and a stick of butter, as well as fruits and nuts, and then ends with whole grains.

(The written guidance identifies "healthy fats" as olive oil, but also "butter or beef tallow." Beef tallow is a fat Kennedy has personally endorsed, but is probably harder to easily depict in a drawing.)

The visual guidance seems to create some conflict with the guidelines' written recommendation to limit saturated fat to 10 percent of total calories, given that red meat and whole-fat dairy contain high amounts of saturated fat.

In a response, the American Heart Association said it was "concerned" about the guidelines, noting that saturated fats, along with salt, are the "primary drivers of cardiovascular disease." The guidance also suggests that people can eat more than the recommended 2,300 mg limit of sodium a day if they work out to, they said, "offset sweat losses" (no citation included).

Pending scientific evidence suggesting otherwise, the AHA's stance is for people to reduce sugar and sodium and to "prioritize plant-based proteins, seafood and lean meats and to limit high-fat animal products including red meat, butter, lard and tallow, which are linked to increased cardiovascular risk."

Boozy breakfast?

Another change in the guidelines that is conspicuously missing scientific backing is a rollback of recommendations to limit alcohol. Gone from the federal guidance is the previous hard limit of no more than two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women. Instead, the guidance encourages Americans to simply drink "less."

When a reporter asked about this in the press briefing Wednesday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, responded, saying, "alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together."

"In the best-case scenario, I don't think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize," Oz said. "And there's probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way." While he emphasized small amounts, he went on to note that in "blue zones," areas where people seem to live long lives, alcohol is part of diets.

"So, there is alcohol on these dietary guidelines, but the implication is don't have it for breakfast."

Conflicts of interest

While the guidelines seem favorable for the alcohol industry, overall, the meat and dairy industry are the clear winners, topping the funnel. Documents released alongside the dietary guidelines identify nine experts who helped craft the final document. Of the nine, at least four have had ties to the meat and dairy industry in the past three years. Those include the National Cattleman's Beef Association, the National Pork Board, the National Dairy Council, and the California Dairy Research Foundation. Two also had links to General Mills, and one was linked to pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, maker of weight-loss drug Wegovy among many other medications. The clear conflicts of interest have already drawn criticism from outside nutrition experts.

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In 2002, Bryan Fleming helped to create pcTattletale, software for monitoring phone and computer usage. Fleming's tool would record everything done on the target device, and the videos would be uploaded to a server where they could be viewed by the pcTattletale subscriber.

This might sound creepy, but it can also be legal when used by a parent monitoring their child or an employee monitoring their workers. These are exactly the use cases that were once outlined on pcTattletale's website, where the software was said to have "helped tens of thousands of parents stop their daughters from meeting up with pedophiles." Businesses can "track productivity, theft, lost hours, and more." Even "police departments use it for investigating."

But this week, nearly 25 years after launching pcTattletale, Fleming pled guilty in federal court to having knowingly built and marketed software to spy on other adults without their consent. In other words, pcTattletale was often used to spy on romantic partners without their knowledge—and Fleming helped people do it.

When you're sleeping

It's unclear when pcTattletale began marketing itself as a tool for catching cheaters, but Fleming's original business partner left the company in 2011, and Fleming ran things himself from his home in a northern Detroit suburb.

In 2021, Vice reported that pcTattletale was leaking the sensitive data it collected. The story quoted marketing materials about using the tool to catch a "cheating spouse," which required users to know their spouse's "pass-code and have access to the phone for about 5 minutes. The best time to do this is when they are sleeping." The company also provided instructions to hide icons that might reveal that pcTattletale was running on the victim's phone.

A look through archived versions of the pcTattletale site on the Wayback Machine shows that by 2022, pcTattletale had added numerous "cheating" links to its footers and featured multiple blog posts on ways to "catch your boyfriend cheating." These explicitly directed people to use the "unlock code to your boyfriend's phone" to install "the pcTattletale spy app" in order to "watch everything he does on his phone." One entry even noted that people being spied on in this way are unlikely to be happy about it, and users should "expect him to lash back at you over putting the spy app on his phone. It can really turn the tables."

Around this same time, federal investigators in California had launched an investigation into "stalkerware," and pcTattletale was among their targets. It also looked like a site where an arrest might not be too difficult, since Fleming operated out of the US and made no real attempts to hide his location. (Indeed, older versions of the pcTattletale website said explicitly that "Fleming Technologies" was based in Bruce Township, Michigan.) As a government investigator put it, "many of the other [stalkerware] websites under investigation involve targets who are believed to be overseas. For this reason, it is unrealistic to believe that the targets will soon be apprehended."

But Fleming was easy enough to find, and investigators soon obtained copies of his email account. It contained plenty of support requests in this vein: "Also if there is a way to NOT let user know you are taking screen shot that would be helpful too. My husband knows when there is screen shot being taken as it beeps. He is now suspicious of something being on his phone."

Despite being repeatedly told that people were using his product to spy on others without their consent, Fleming helped them with tech support.

A government investigator even opened up an affiliate marketing account for pcTattletale, and Fleming reached out to offer ready-made banner ads with text like “pcTattletale Cheating Husband? #1 catch a cheater spy tracker" and "pcTattletale Husband Cheating? Best Catch a Cheater Spy App."

Fleming noted in an email that pcTattletale was more successful when marketed at women, because "There are a lot more women wanting to catch their man then [sic] the other way around." Financial records showed that Fleming was selling around 1,200 pcTattletale subscriptions a year at anywhere from $99 to $300.

Based on all this, the government obtained a search warrant in late 2022 and raided the Bruce Township home where Fleming lived.

In 2024, TechCrunch reported that pcTattletale was hacked and much of its data was leaked. Apparently, hackers had gained access to the company's private keys for the Amazon Web Services account where most of the video data created by the app was stored. Fleming claimed at the time that his company was “out of business and completely done” after the breach.

The feds eventually charged Fleming with selling a product while "knowing or having reason to know" that the software was "primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications." This week in California, Fleming pled guilty to a single count and was released on his own recognizance while awaiting sentencing.

One piece of stalkerware is off the market; unfortunately, many others remain, and their owners and operators are often harder to find.

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I have a lot of folders. Over the years I’ve organized my feeds into categories like News, Tech, Cooking, and Comics. But when I’m scanning my feed list, they all look the same—just folder icons with text. I wanted a way to make certain folders stand out at a glance, especially the ones I check most often.

That’s why I built custom icons for both folders and feeds. You can now personalize any folder or feed with an emoji, a preset icon in any color, or even upload your own image.

How it works

Right-click on any folder or feed in your feed list and select “Folder settings” or “Site settings”. You’ll see a new “Folder Icon” or “Feed Icon” tab where you can customize the icon.

There are three ways to set a custom icon:

Preset icons: Pick from over 240 icons (a mix of outline and filled styles) and colorize them with any of 84 colors organized by hue. Want a red heart for your favorites folder? A blue code bracket for programming feeds? It’s all there.

Emoji: Choose from 180 emojis organized by category. A basketball for sports feeds, a fork and knife for cooking, a newspaper for news—you get the idea.

Upload your own: Have a specific image in mind? Upload any image and it will be automatically resized to fit perfectly in your feed list.

Great for feeds without icons

Many feeds don’t have favicons, or they have generic RSS icons that all look the same. Custom feed icons let you give these feeds distinctive icons so you can spot them instantly. I’ve been using this to add icons to older blogs and newsletters that never bothered setting up a proper favicon.

Custom icons are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. Folders and feeds both support the same icon options of emoji, preset icons with colors, or uploaded images.

If you have feedback or ideas for additional icon options, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

Drunken traitor Aldrich Ames has died:

Aldrich Ames, the most murderous turncoat in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose betrayal in working for the Soviet Union went undetected for almost a decade, died on Monday. He was 84 and had been a federal prisoner, serving life without parole, since 1994.

The death was recorded in the federal Bureau of Prisons inmate database. A spokesman said he died at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md.

The son of an alcoholic C.I.A. officer, Mr. Ames failed upward through the agency ranks for 17 years until he attained a headquarters post of extraordinary sensitivity.

He became the chief of the counterintelligence branch of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division in September 1983. He had access to some of the nation’s deepest secrets: in particular, its clandestine liaisons with the Soviets, who worked in secret with American intelligence. These were a small cadre, barely a dozen all told, who were cultivated over the course of two decades and well-placed in Soviet government agencies and embassies around the world.

As the Cold War was cresting, Mr. Ames decided that he would change the course of history by upending a long-running game of nations, the contest of spy versus spy. He saw it as a charade. By his own account, he was fueled by a toxic cocktail of vodka, arrogance, delusions of grandeur and naked greed.

In April 1985, he took his first gamble. He hand-delivered an envelope addressed to the K.G.B. chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He offered a smattering of C.I.A. secrets, and he requested $50,000 in return. He identified himself by name and rank. The relationship was sealed over a long, boozy lunch at an elegant hotel near the White House.

Then he bet the house. Mr. Ames feared that one of the C.I.A.’s Russians might betray him, so he decided to betray them all. He knew he would be paid a fortune.

“I panicked,” he said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times, conducted from jail. “Only by suddenly giving them everyone” would he be protected — and he knew in return that he would be paid “as much money as I could ever use, if I chose to do that.”

Mr. Ames put together hundreds of secret documents in a six-pound stack — a who’s who of Soviets working for the C.I.A. and an encyclopedia of American intelligence operations behind the Iron Curtain. He stuffed them in his briefcase, walked out of headquarters and delivered them to a contact at the Soviet Embassy.

“I was delivering myself along with them,” he said in the 1994 interview. “I was saying, ‘Over to you, K.G.B. You guys take care of me now.’”

The K.G.B. took care of him — he was paid at least $2,705,000 — and it took care of its own turncoats. As many as 10 Soviet and Soviet-bloc spies were arrested, interrogated and executed for treason. One was imprisoned. At least two escaped, one step ahead of their pursuers. The network that had provided the United States with political, military, diplomatic and intelligence insights on Moscow was destroyed.

A movie about the Ames saga was released in 1998 and was by all accounts sub-mediocre; a more talented filmmaker really should try again to tell the story of the guy who got promoted to a position high enough to betray double agents although he was a constantly inebriated mediocrity who barely even pretended to work.

The post The spook who liked to get paid appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.