Lotta folk have sent me this, and I want to make one thing absolutely clear: I have never been under any illusions that the meat themed substance that constitutes the McRib has anything to do with pork rib.

But the lawsuit alleged that fans of the sandwich assume they’re biting into pork rib meat, but the McRib does not really contain any.

Despite its name and distinctive shape — its meat patty has been deliberately crafted to resemble a rack of pork ribs—the McRib does not contain any actual pork rib meat at all,” the lawsuit said. “Instead, its meat patty is reconstructed using ground-up portions of lower-grade pork products such as, inter alia, pork shoulder, heart, tripe, and scalded stomach.”

The lawsuit said actual pork rib meat cuts — spareribs and baby back ribs — are premium cuts of pork that are more valuable than lower-quality cuts. Despite not containing any rib meat, the McRib is among the most expensive single-item options offered on the menu at McDonald’s, the lawsuit said.

“The name ‘McRib’ is a deliberate sleight of hand. By including the word “Rib” in the name of the sandwich, McDonald’s knowingly markets the sandwich in a way that deceives reasonable consumers, who reasonably (but mistakenly) believe that a product named the ‘McRib’ will include at least some meaningful quantity of actual pork rib meat, which commands a premium price on the market,” the lawsuit said. “McDonald’s does this despite knowing that the sandwich in fact does not contain any meaningful quantity of actual pork rib meat — indeed, none at all.”

See also Friend of the Blog Erin Petrey’s discussion of what bourbons best pair with the McRib

The post Think Smaller. Think More Legs. appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Collecting fallen (or "shed") elk antlers is a popular pastime in elk-heavy places like Montana, but it's usually a pretty low-tech, on-the-ground affair. That's why last year's story about a US Black Hawk helicopter descending from the skies to harvest shed elk antlers on a ranch was such an odd one.

Was it really possible that US military personnel were using multimillion-dollar government aircraft to land on private property in the Crazy Mountains—yes, that's their actual name—just to grab some antlers valued at a few hundred bucks?

Antler hunt

In May 2025, Montana rancher Linda McMullen received a call from a neighbor. "He said, 'Linda, there’s a green Army helicopter landed on your place, picking up elk antlers,’” McMullen told The New York Times last year. “I said, ‘Are you joking?’ He said, ‘I’m looking at them with binoculars.’”

The local sheriff, who said he was "still trying to figure all this out" at the time, added that this was "the first helicopter I've heard of" regarding shed antler collection.

The Adjutant General for the Montana National Guard, J. Peter Hronek, quickly issued a statement on Facebook "regarding unauthorized use of military aircraft."

In it, Hronek said that he was "aware of an alleged incident involving a Montana Army National Guard helicopter landing on private property without authorization" and that "an internal investigation is underway, and appropriate adverse and/or administrative action will take place if the allegations are determined to be true." The Black Hawk was apparently on a training flight at the time.

The three servicemen on the chopper were eventually charged in Sweet Grass County Court with trespassing. They all pleaded not guilty. This week, pilot Deni Draper changed his plea to "no contest," allowing sentencing to go forward without a trial (but without actually admitting guilt).

According to local reporting, prosecutors had evidence that "no trespassing signs were posted on McMullen's property" and that "Draper admitted to Montana game warden Austin Kassner that he piloted the helicopter and decided to land it." In addition to the neighbor's testimony, "helicopter tire indentations and exhaust marks in the grass" were present at the site of the alleged landing.

The judge has accepted the change of plea and hit Draper with a $500 fine—the maximum penalty. So long as Draper stays out of trouble for the next six months, he will avoid further fines and jail time.

As for the antlers themselves, they are currently held by Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks but could go back to McMullen once cases against the other two servicemembers are resolved.

Update: According to a report this week in the Livingston Enterprise, this is not the first time Montana National Guard aircraft have stopped to take antlers.

“By way of a thorough inquiry, we can confirm isolated incidents of collecting antlers (with a military aircraft) have occurred previously,” Lt. Col. Thomas Figarelle of the Montana National Guard told the paper.

Figarelle added that the Guard has now explicitly banned this kind of activity. “(The Montana Army National Guard) issued clear directives no antler collecting of any type is authorized," he added. "This is misuse of government property inconsistent with our standards. We are not going to tolerate it.”

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Italy fined Cloudflare 14.2 million euros for refusing to block access to pirate sites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service, the country's communications regulatory agency, AGCOM, announced yesterday. Cloudflare said it will fight the penalty and threatened to remove all of its servers from Italian cities.

AGCOM issued the fine under Italy's controversial Piracy Shield law, saying that Cloudflare was required to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders. The law provides for fines up to 2 percent of a company's annual turnover, and the agency said it applied a fine equal to 1 percent.

The fine relates to a blocking order issued to Cloudflare in February 2025. Cloudflare argued that installing a filter applying to the roughly 200 billion daily requests to its DNS system would significantly increase latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren't subject to the dispute over piracy.

AGCOM rejected Cloudflare's arguments. The agency said the required blocking would impose no risk on legitimate websites because the targeted IP addresses were all uniquely intended for copyright infringement.

In a September 2025 report on Piracy Shield, researchers said they found "hundreds of legitimate websites unknowingly affected by blocking, unknown operators experiencing service disruption, and illegal streamers continuing to evade enforcement by exploiting the abundance of address space online, leaving behind unusable and polluted address ranges." This is "a conservative lower-bound estimate," the report said.

The Piracy Shield law was adopted in 2024. "To effectively tackle live sports piracy, its broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes," TorrentFreak wrote in an article today about the Cloudflare fine.

Cloudflare to fight fine, may withhold services

Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote today that Cloudflare already "had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme" and will "fight the unjust fine."

"Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet," Prince wrote. He continued:

The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online.

Prince said he will discuss the matter with US government officials next week and that Cloudflare is "happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines." In addition to challenging the fine, Prince said Cloudflare is "considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country."

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes," Prince wrote.

Google also in Piracy Shield crosshairs

AGCOM said today that in the past two years, the Piracy Shield law disabled over 65,000 domain names and about 14,000 IP addresses. Italian authorities also previously ordered Google to block pirate sites at the DNS level.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a trade group that represents tech companies including Cloudflare and Google, has criticized the Piracy Shield law. "Italian authorities have included virtual private networks (VPN) and public DNS resolvers in the Piracy Shield, which are services fundamental to the protection of free expression and not appropriate tools for blocking," the CCIA said in a January 2025 letter to European Commission officials.

The CCIA added that "the Piracy Shield raises a significant number of concerns which can inadvertently affect legitimate online services, primarily due to the potential for overblocking." The letter said that in October 2024, "Google Drive was mistakenly blocked by the Piracy Shield system, causing a three-hour blackout for all Italian users, while 13.5 percent of users were still blocked at the IP level, and 3 percent were blocked at the DNS level after 12 hours."

The Italian system "aims to automate the blocking process by allowing rights holders to submit IP addresses directly through the platform, following which ISPs have to implement a block," the CCIA said. "Verification procedures between submission and blocking are not clear, and indeed seem to be lacking. Additionally, there is a total lack of redress mechanisms for affected parties, in case a wrong domain or IP address is submitted and blocked."

30-minute blocking prevents "careful verification"

The 30-minute blocking window "leaves extremely limited time for careful verification by ISPs that the submitted destination is indeed being used for piracy purposes," the CCIA said. The trade group also questioned the piracy-reporting system's ties to the organization that runs Italy's top football league.

"Additionally, the fact that the Piracy Shield platform was developed for AGCOM by a company affiliated with Lega Serie A, which is one of the very few entities authorized to report, raises serious questions about the potential conflict of interest exacerbating the lack of transparency issue," the letter said.

A trade group for Italian ISPs has argued that the law requires "filtering and tasks that collide with individual freedoms" and is contrary to European legislation that classifies broadband network services as mere conduits that are exempt from liability.

"On the contrary, in Italy criminal liability has been expressly established for ISPs," Dalia Coffetti, head of regulatory and EU affairs at the Association of Italian Internet Providers, wrote in April 2025. Coffetti argued, "There are better tools to fight piracy, including criminal Law, cooperation between States, and digital solutions that downgrade the quality of the signal broadcast via illegal streaming websites or IPtv. European ISPs are ready to play their part in the battle against piracy, but the solution certainly does not lie in filtering and blocking IP addresses."

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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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The cliff honey that Himalayan tribes used for its medicinal properties has come to be called mad honey, thanks to its consumption by thrill-seekers to get a high, unaware of the health complications it could lead to.