https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/18/fcc-brendan-carr-the-view-00572178

Scientists used AI to write coherent viral genomes, using them to synthesize bacteriophages capable of killing resistant strains of bacteria.

archive.today/Sy0LV

There are ethical concerns of AIs being used to design viruses that can harm humans. But Kerstin Göpfrich, a biophysicist and synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University in Germany, says that this problem — known as the dual-use dilemma — is not unique to AI, but is always a concern in biology. “I think in research in general you always have a dual-use dilemma. There’s nothing specific about AI, and you can always use progress for the better or for the worse,” she says.
The authors addressed biosafety concerns in the manuscript. They say that they excluded viruses that affect eukaryotes, including humans, from the Evo models’ training data. The ΦX174 phage and E. coli host systems they studied were also non-pathogenic and have ”a long history of safe use in molecular-biology research”, the researchers write in the study.

World’s first AI-designed viruses a step towards AI-generated life

^{Kavanagh, Katie}

On Wednesday, September 17, Disney’s chief executive Robert Iger, and television chief Dana Walden, exercised Disney’s ownership authority over American Broadcasting Company (ABC), to cancel ABC’s showJimmy Kimmel Live. This appeared to be a response to Trump-appointed FCC chair Brenden Carr expressing outrage about Kimmel during a podcast that same Wednesday. Carr threatened to exert FCC pressure on holders of local licenses for companies like Disney if they did not sufficiently police the content of their subsidiaries. What offended Carr, apparently, were Kimmel’s comments regarding the motives of Charlie Kirk’s suspected killer, specifically on his show, the night of Monday September 15. Kimmel’s supposed violation of FCC rules was his brief innuendo that Charlie Kirk’s killer might be MAGA:

We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

To claim forthrightly that Charlie Kirk’s killer was MAGA would technically have been unnuanced. But lacking nuance is not usually considered grounds for the FCC disproportionately targeting someone. And unnuanced innuendo is a nothing wrapped in a nothing. Yes, yes, in addition to obscure memes that might or might not be groyperish engraved on the bullet casings, and the apprehended suspect having been raised in a gun-toting GOP family, and high school interviewees saying he once supported Trump, we should also keep in mind the media-repeated reports from the Utah governor and Utah prosecutors. The GOP Utah governor has claimed that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, had become romantically involved with his allegedly male-to-female-transitioning roommate, and had also exhibited evidence of “leftist ideology.” The top prosecutor in the case has elaborated specifically that Robinson, “had become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans rights oriented.” Then, on Wednesday, prosecutors released a chat transcript strongly suggesting that (a) Tyler Robinson confessed the killing to his roommate, and (b) that Tyler disdained the MAGA views of his parents.

But so what? Maybe Jimmy Kimmel hadn’t been following the latest news reports that closely. Or maybe he took the recent prosecutorial feeds to the media with a grain of salt. Regardless, a short 40-word blast of innuendo, quietly bolstered by evidence from earlier media reports, is a very odd thing to read as an FCC violation. But in addition to the ominous outrageousness of abusing FCC authority in this way over this kind of triviality, there’s the nagging question of why the Trump-commanded FCC chair targeted this particular triviality.

Jimmy Kimmel, like other popular comedians on and off network TV, has attacked president Trump on numerous fronts. One anti-Trump Kimmel bit that lands particularly well is this one, from his show Thursday September 11:

The man who told a crowd of supporters that maybe ‘the Second Amendment people’ should do something — about Hillary Clinton; the man who said he ‘wouldn’t mind’ if someone shot through the fake news media; the man who unleashed a mob on the Capitol and said Liz Cheney should face ‘nine barrels shooting at her’ for supporting his opponent, blames the ‘radical left’ for their rhetoric.

So when Trump’s FCC does a mafioso squeeze on the parent corporation of ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel’s show over a 40-word bit of innuendo about a murder suspect’s possible motives—rather than for everything else anti-Trump Kimmel has ever said—it’s weirdly focused. If the FCC wanted to engage in grotesquely tyrannical persecution of anti-Trump speech for an obviously invalid reason, they could have just demanded Kimmel’s cancelation for his whole corpus of work. Why does Trump’s FCC feel the need to specifically punish idle, insufficiently informed, speculation on the ideological motives of the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk?

My hot take: Team Trump’s goal, in this case, may not be to inhibit idle, insufficiently informed, speculation on these motives, but rather to increase it. Kimmel’s offhand monologue remark reflects a dumb trend in social media discourse in recent days—trying to suss out whether it’s right or wrong to viciously crack down on all “leftists” by putting hours of google searches into Robinson’s ideological background. But those hours would be better spent organizing to thwart the crackdown itself, which has no justification regardless of whatever Robinson’s idiosyncratic youthful wanderings in ideology were between video games. In other words (and to quote antifa rebel commander Admiral Ackbar), “”

Whatever Team Trump actually intends, I do think they would probably benefit strategically from filling social media spaces with pointlessly heated culture war back and forth on the Kirk killer’s motives. And it would be even better for Team Trump if these arguments could crowd out other, more public policy-relevant, matters of discussion. And I don’t just mean the Trump-implicating Epstein files revelations. Or the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry report acknowledging (with everyone else who knows and cares what genocide is) that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Or the anti-AI hunger strikes on two continents that remind us Gaza may be the canary in the coalmine. Though, yes, please keep up the buzz on these things-that-matter too.

The major reason the Trump Administration would gain from more furiously speculative buzz about murder motives is because talking about these motives implicitly grounds opposition to a Trump administration anti-leftist crackdown in claims that Tyler Robinson was not a leftist. And that is a very shaky, and indeed kind of stupid, foundation to rely on. I get why opponents of Nazi-like crackdowns might be baited into claiming, in outraged solidarity with Jimmy Kimmel, that “Jimmy was right!” and Tyler Robinson is pure MAGA. But by doing this they will imply, by their demonstrated concern with this issue, that their speculation on this point must be correct for the crackdown to be wrong.

Once that implication hangs heavily enough over the debate, and that rabbit hole debate looms larger than the “how do we best save the Republic?” debates we should be having, then the crackdown will get that much easier. All that needs to happen is for more evidence to come out that Tyler Robinson was indeed romantically involved with his transgender-transitioning roommate, and had indeed come to support trans rights and had rejected MAGA as a result. If the evidence for the alleged killer’s anti-MAGA, pro-trans rights views grows more airtight (e.g. Tyler’s defense team concedes to all the prosecution’s evidence on these matters as genuine), then Team Trump will have apparently “won” that public policy-irrelevant argument.

Yes, technically speaking, opposition to hatefully scapegoating trans people is not an exclusively “leftist” position per se (in much the same way that opposing endless quagmire wars is not an exclusively leftist position). Also, as a matter of courtroom persuasion, the “he was enraged by the victim’s hateful prejudice against the person he loves” angle might make a human jury feel a tug of empathy for Robinson. The prosecution seems to be trying to make everyone hate Robinson more than the average political assassin for having committed a crime of passion out of love. The attempt to humanize the defendant would usually be an odd prosecutorial strategy under different political circumstances. But this is all less important than the fact that cracking down on people collectively to punish them for the act of any individual is horrifically wrong, even if the individual and the group punished share some ideological features in common.

More generally, strategies on what to emphasize should keep in mind that Trump builds tyrannical power by playing with the public mood. Actual truth and law don’t matter to him, as they have never constrained him that much. If, in the court of public opinion, the killer gets demonstrably proven as anti-Trump, after masses of Trump-opposing social media influencers are on record passionately speculating that he wasn’t, that’s bad news. Trump knows how to ride that we-got-them vibe to trample even more extremely on the rights of all his “leftist” political enemies.

Team Trump would define “leftist” with increasingly absurd looseness as the crackdown accelerated, of course. The scope of the crackdown would be ultimately without reference to anything specific about Tyler Robinson’s life and views. Judging by the hints dropped and lawsuits filed by the crackdown enthusiasts so far, crackdown targets would include George Soros (“Jewrge” Soros), network TV, colleges and universities, scientists, the New York Times, whoever at the Wall Street Journal greenlit the publication of the birthday card to Epstein, and, for all we know, the actors in The Chosen.

When the mass protests hit the streets in response, I expect the absence of many of those who spent days arguing with bots over X that Tyler Robinson was definitely a MAGA groyper not a pro-trans rights liberal. Having been seduced into irrelevantly arguing about Tyler Robinson’s assassination motives, and then been proven wrong, they would feel too embarrassed and humiliated to show their faces. “Damn, I really thought he was MAGA,” many of them would text whisper to each other. “And, since it turns out he isn’t, I guess we just have no fulcrum from which to oppose a full-on tyrannical crackdown that eviscerates all previously-enjoyed constitutional protections.”

It might be helpful to pause at this point to remember under what precise circumstances it is relevant to speculate on possible motives for possible crimes. If some individual is suspected of killing some other individual, then investigating that person’s motives has relevance for only four things: (1) establishing motive to reduce doubt that the suspect is, indeed, the perpetrator, (2) addressing the possibility that a larger group of individuals was involved in the killing, (3) determining how to legally designate the crime, and (4) determining appropriate sentencing if the suspect is found guilty. In other words, discussions about the possible motive for one instance of killing are only relevant to matters involving how the state should perceive and interact with the suspect/s.

Discussing the motives underlying one act of killing is not relevant for determining the wisdom and legality of public policy targeting large swathes of people for holding a certain ideology, or having a certain identity. Discussion of criminal motives might gain slightly more public policy relevance if a disproportionate share of all killings over a recent period of time appear to have a common ideological motive. Even then, however, any probabilistic link between ideology and inclination to kill should never become an excuse to walk all over masses of people’s rights just because of their apparent ideology.

Yes, after September 11, 2001, a huge bipartisan share of the U.S. economy, government and mainstream society got bound up in doing precisely this kind of rights-trampling on the basis of ideology. It started with trampling on “Islamist” ideology, which spilled over naturally into trampling on Muslim, and generally brown, identity (Arun Kundnani’s The Muslims Are Coming! is a good primer on how this spillover worked).

Later, there were some much less oppressive—neither torturous nor mass-murderous—excesses in response to the disproportionate share of U.S. domestic terrorism being broadly “right wing.” These excesses heated up particularly after January 6, 2021, what with the violent attempted overthrow of a legitimate presidential election and all. Where these anti-rightist excesses occurred, though, they were ironically symbiotic with diminished institutional willingness to genuinely thwart billionaire-backed criminal activity (which increasingly leans hard right). The mild anti-rightist excesses freaked out “ordinary folks”-type right wingers, and many independents also. And, ironically or on purpose, the purveyors of these excesses failed pathetically at holding accountable the larger (wealthier, more powerful) criminal networks that actually enable right wing terror as well as the still ongoing rightist institutional assault on democracy and political rights. That mix of dumb persecution of the ordinary with broader capitulation to the powerful is part of the story of how Trump got back to power. And why he brought public health-crucifying madmen like RFK Jr. and Elon Musk to power with him.

Perhaps we want to remember these earlier excesses of ideology-scapegoating rights-trampling more fondly because more respectable non-Trump presidents engaged in them. But that didn’t make them right. Those rights-tramplings were evil and stupid then, and Trump’s borderline sardonic pantomime riff on that evil and stupidity is also evil and stupid.

Let’s try to resist the temptation to enable even more of this evil and stupidity. Let’s not get baited into debating a single suspected killer’s motivations against a backdrop of Trump threatening a Nazi-like crackdown on his political opponents over the issue. Let’s focus instead on why Nazi-like crackdowns are always wrong, apologize for any Nazi-like (or milder but still unhelpful) crackdowns we might have partisanly or bipartisanly legitimized in previous years. And then let’s try, from the firmest foundations we can find, to stop the ongoing one.

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming

No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.

^{Glenn Greenwald}

Over the past several years, federal law enforcement agencies have gotten increasingly creative in their surveillance techniques, hiding cameras in, among other things, streetlights, traffic cones, toolboxes and vacuum cleaners.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been especially forward-thinking in its placement of high-tech but unseen monitoring devices. In 2018, the DEA quietly installed automatic license plate readers in an unknown number of the ubiquitous radar speed signs that show approaching drivers how fast they’re going. It has only grown in the years since.

Now, according to federal procurement data reviewed by The Independent, the DEA – which has recently diverted agents from their usual drug-fighting mandate to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement in carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts – is outfitting agents, presumably undercover, with audio-video recorders camouflaged to look like everyday credit cards.

That DEA agent’s ‘credit card’ could be secretly eavesdropping on you

Exclusive: The Drug Enforcement Administration’s latest piece of covert surveillance gadgetry joins previous hidden cameras and listening devices in everything from streetlights to traffic cones to vacuum cleaners

^{Justin Rohrlich (The Independent)}

This isn’t anything that actually needed to be done. The federal government has plenty of options at its disposal if it thinks someone is providing material support for terrorism. It’s one of things that keeps the FBI loaded up with anti-terrorism dollars, thanks to its ability to radicalize people just so it can arrest them.

But it’s the expected forward movement by the Trump administration, which has empowered the State Department to engage in thought policing when deciding who’s allowed to enter this country, much less stay here for any length of time. The State Department, under diversity hire Marco Rubio, has already made it clear it will be searching applicants’ social media accounts for “anti-American sentiment” when considering visa requests.

Now, another useful idiot who wants to be noticed by President Trump has introduced a bill that will allow the administration to convert a false equivalent into actions that will limit travel options for US citizens. Matt Sledge has the details at The Intercept:

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stripped Turkish doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk’s of her visa based on what a court later found was nothing more than her opinion piece critical of Israel.

Now, a bill introduced by the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is ringing alarm bells for civil liberties advocates who say it would grant Rubio the power to revoke the passports of American citizens on similar grounds.

The provision, sponsored by Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., as part of a larger State Department reorganization, is set for a hearing Wednesday.

Here’s a bit of background on Rep. Brian Mast:

Mast is “a vocal supporter of Israel and Israelis”, reported The Times of Israel during his 2016 campaign. “If anyone was lobbing rockets into the US, guys like me would be sent to kill them, and Americans would applaud us,” he said.[18] In January 2015, Mast volunteered with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) through Sar-El, working at a base outside Tel Aviv packing medical kits and moving supplies.[18][80] Following the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, Mast wore his IDF uniform in Congress.[81][82]

On November 1, 2023, in arguing for a bill to reduce humanitarian funding to Gaza during the Gaza war, Mast compared Palestinian civilians to the civilians of Nazi Germany…

Given that, it makes sense that Rep. Mast would craft a bill that deliberately treats criticism of Israel as indistinguishable from “material support” for US-recognized terrorist group, Hamas. After all, that’s the same position so many people in the Trump administration take, following their leader down the path of false equivalence that takes the stance that it’s impossible to criticize Israel’s actions without explicitly supporting violent acts of terrorism by Hamas.

This bill doesn’t even limit itself to “material” support. While it does tip its hat to the numerous existing laws that strip those convicted of material support of travel privileges as well as anything else resulting from being imprisoned on felony charges, it also expands the government’s power by allowing the State Department to deny passports to US citizens based almost solely on things they’ve said:

The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”

“Material” support — when used by the government to lock up people it just doesn’t like — never has to be as “material” as that word tends to suggest. It can be almost anything, including engaging in pro-Palestinian protests because this administration has chosen to view anything remotely anti-Israel as, at the very least, antisemitic (triggering other civil rights laws). At worst, the government takes the stance that expressing support for Palestinians is the same thing as backing a foreign terrorist organization.

The negative outcomes of this bill aren’t imaginary. Even without this legislation, we’ve already seen this administration attempt to criminalize journalism just because reports showed Americans things the Trump administration would have preferred to keep hidden for as long as possible as it threw its considerable weight entirely behind an Israeli government that seemed to prefer genocide to compromise.

The provision particularly threatens journalists, [Freedom of the Press Foundation director Seth] Stern said. He noted that Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., in November 2023 demanded a Justice Department “national security investigation” of The Associated Press, CNN, New York Times, and Reuters over freelance photographers’ images of the October 7 attacks.

That this never amounted to anything has more to say about Joe Biden still being in office than it says about the DOJ’s ability to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The DOJ is now front-loaded with Trump-loving toadies, which means the only discretion it will ever exercise is deciding how much to redact from reports involving possible criminal acts by administration officials or trying to figure out how to lock up college professors for daring to deliver factual information to students.

The wording of the bill may lead people to believe this is just another solid anti-terrorism effort, but the people backing it and praising it make it clear it’s about something else entirely: punishing people for holding views that don’t align with King Trump and his pro-genocide statesmanship.

US and Israeli politicians amplify bogus claims of media complicity in Hamas attack

Sen. Tom Cotton called for a DOJ investigation based on a conservative website's speculation.

^{Mother Jones}

After years as a parent and homeowner, I sympathize more with my virtual citizens.

Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently

^{Kyle Orland (Ars Technica)}

Intel once considered buying Nvidia outright, but its fortunes have shifted.

Nvidia, Intel to co-develop “multiple generations” of chips as part of $5 billion deal

^{Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica)}

Intel once considered buying Nvidia outright, but its fortunes have shifted.

Nvidia, Intel to co-develop “multiple generations” of chips as part of $5 billion deal

^{Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica)}

We recently sat down with voice actor Blair Annison-Chisholm, the voice of Tujen and Huck, to talk about the past, present, and potential future Tujen Dating Simulator. Check out the interview below!

Video: Path of Exile 2: Talent Interview - Blair Annison-Chisholm

The Path of Exile 2 Boss Rush Event has been playable at several conventions this year, featuring a gauntlet of 15 bosses. Now, you can feature your favourite of these bosses as your desktop wallpaper! Check out the collection of high resolution wallpapers below.

We've put together versions of these wallpapers in 1920x1080, 2560x1040, and 3840x2160, all of which you can download here.

Diamora, Song of Death

Azarian, the Forsaken Son

Viper Napuatzi

Ignagduk, the Bog Witch

Xesht, We That Are One

Yama The White

Blackjaw, the Remnant

The Blind Beast

Xyclucian, the Chimera

Krutog, Lord of Kin

Tor Gul, the Defiler

Captain Hartlin

The Prisoner

Mighty Silverfist

Great White One

The Russian state media network RT was one of the first outlets to broadcast graphic footage of the assassination last week.

Russia and other foreign adversaries have pounced on the assassination of Charlie Kirk as an opportunity to spread propaganda aimed at aggravating U.S. political divisions and painting America as an unstable country on the decline, according to researchers.

Soon after the news broke about Kirk’s murder, Russian state media and pro-Kremlin voices on social media suggested that the United States was poised for a possible civil war and that dark conspiracies — possibly involving elements of a “deep state” — had played a role in the murder.

Chinese state media portrayed the attack as yet another example of a troubled society in decline, plagued by political disorder and gun violence. State media posted video of lawmakers arguing in Congress and highlighted U.S. experts discussing a climate of violence.

Russia tries to exploit divisions sparked by Kirk’s murder, researchers say

Russia, China and Iran all tried to take advantage of the assassination of Charlie Kirk to exacerbate divisions in the U.S.

^{Dan De Luce (NBC News)}

Republicans’ outlook on the direction of the country has soured dramatically, according to a new AP-NORC poll that was conducted shortly after last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The share of Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction has fallen sharply in recent months, according to the September survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Today, only about half in the GOP see the nation on the right course, down from 70% in June. The shift is even more glaring among Republican women and the party’s under-45 crowd.

Overall, about one-quarter of Americans say things in the country are headed in the right direction, down from about 4 in 10 in June. Democrats and independents didn’t shift meaningfully.

https://apnews.com/article/poll-republicans-direction-country-kirk-violence-economy-66e5a964a807a5a1412ef0596f37ec39

A federal judge in Florida on Friday tossed President Donald Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times.

The lawsuit named a book and an article written by Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig that focuses on Trump’s finances and his pre-presidency starring role in television’s “The Apprentice.”

Trump said in the lawsuit that they “maliciously peddled the fact-free narrative” that television producer Mark Burnett turned Trump into a celebrity — “even though at and prior to the time of publications defendants knew that President Trump was already a mega-celebrity and an enormous success in business.”

https://apnews.com/live/donald-trump-news-updates-9-19-2025

US nears government shutdown after Democrats oppose Republican bill that ‘guts healthcare’

The US federal government drew closer to a shutdown on Friday, after Democrats opposed a Republican-backed measure that would extend funding for another two months, saying it did not include provisions to protect healthcare programs.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved the spending bill on a near party line vote, with only Maine Democrat Jared Golden breaking with his party to vote in favor. The Senate will consider the measure later in the day, but its chances of passage are slim, since it will need at least some Democratic support to clear the 60-vote threshold to overcome the filibuster.

Democrats’ rejection of the GOP’s proposal to keep the government open through 21 November sets up a showdown over spending that, if not resolved, could see federal departments and agencies close and workers furloughed at the end of September, when the current funding authorization expires.

House passes spending bill as Democrats protest healthcare cuts: ‘We don’t work for Trump’

^{Chris Stein (The Guardian)}

Calling it “decidedly improper and impermissible,” Judge Steven D. Merryday slammed the 85-page complaint and said it could not stand.

Access options:
* gift link — registration required
* archive.today

Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

“Charlie Kirk’s funeral Sunday will be a historic moment for conservatives,” Henry Olsen writes at the Washington Post. “Kirk’s widow, Erika, President Donald Trump and his allies will understandably want to use the event to call out a tide of left-wing intolerance and violence. But they need to strike the right tone — or they risk squandering Kirk’s legacy.”

Value, with legacies as with everything else, is subjective. Whether you’ve invested well, or squandered, a legacy comes down to what you’d prefer to accomplish with that legacy and whether you succeed or fail at it.

In a perfect world, Charlie Kirk’s supporters would focus on, and mine the legacy value of, his reputation as an advocate of free speech and debate. Whatever one thinks of the views he promoted and defended, there’s 24-karat gold in the notion that verbal argument is, in both moral and practical terms, better than physical violence as a means of resolving disputes.

We do not live in a perfect world.

In our imperfect world, prominent figures on the “MAGA” right — including but not limited to the president and vice-president of the United States — look at Charlie Kirk and see their very own Horst Wessel.

Like Kirk, Wessel was an accomplished advocate and public speaker for his political party: The National Socialist German Worker’s Party, aka the Nazis. Unlike Kirk, Wessel was also a violent “stormtrooper” who engaged in street violence against the Nazis’ opponents.

Like Kirk, Wessel was murdered at a fairly young age. Like Kirk (for the moment, anyway), the motives behind his murder were unclear.

Joseph Goebbels immediately and successfully began promoting Wessel as a martyr to the Nazi cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Adolf Hitler’s political opponents.

Goebbels’s MAGA equivalents are already hard at work promoting Kirk as a martyr to their cause and using his killing as a vector for attacks on Donald Trump’s political opponents.

For years, I’ve heard from some quarters that Trump is “literally Hitler.”

We’re about to find out whether, and if so to what extent, that’s true.

If he and his underlings continue with the Horst Wessel approach, and use Kirk’s funeral as an opportunity to call for more heads on more pikes in Kirk’s name, it’s almost certainly true.

If he and his underlings take a few deep breaths, examine their own motives and souls, and turn Kirk’s funeral into a celebration of free speech and open debate, it probably isn’t.

Either way, they’ll only have squandered Kirk’s legacy if they don’t manage to squeeze whatever they’re after out of that legacy.

As for the rest of us, we avoid squandering it by paying attention to how it’s used.

The post Charlie Kirk: the Value of a Legacy is Subjective appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.

FBI Readies New War on Trans People

“We’re looking at the entire spider web”

^{Ken Klippenstein}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/36374796

The abrupt programming decision quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America under the Trump administration.

archive.ph/8buhg

By John Koblin, Brooks Barnes, Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum
Sept. 18, 2025

Mr. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, and Dana Walden, his head of television, were also hearing from skittish advertisers and employees who had begun to receive threatening messages. When the team reviewed Mr. Kimmel’s planned remarks, they grew concerned that his monologue would only inflame the situation further.

So they made the call: “Jimmy Kimmel Live” would temporarily go dark.

That decision — the product of a spider’s web of interlocking political and financial pressures placed atop one of the country’s biggest corporations — quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America. Many Democrats, actors and comedians cried foul as right-wing activists celebrated. On a diplomatic trip in Britain, President Trump knocked Mr. Kimmel for “bad ratings” and proclaimed that ABC “should have fired him a long time ago.”

Peter Link

2025-09-19 14:33:11

Disney Pulled Jimmy Kimmel as Pressure Built on Multiple Fronts

The abrupt programming decision quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America under the Trump administration.

archive.ph/8buhg

By John Koblin, Brooks Barnes, Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum
Sept. 18, 2025

Mr. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, and Dana Walden, his head of television, were also hearing from skittish advertisers and employees who had begun to receive threatening messages. When the team reviewed Mr. Kimmel’s planned remarks, they grew concerned that his monologue would only inflame the situation further.

So they made the call: “Jimmy Kimmel Live” would temporarily go dark.

That decision — the product of a spider’s web of interlocking political and financial pressures placed atop one of the country’s biggest corporations — quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America. Many Democrats, actors and comedians cried foul as right-wing activists celebrated. On a diplomatic trip in Britain, President Trump knocked Mr. Kimmel for “bad ratings” and proclaimed that ABC “should have fired him a long time ago.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/business/media/disney-abc-jimmy-kimmel.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/36375325

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/36374796

The abrupt programming decision quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America under the Trump administration.

archive.ph/8buhg

By John Koblin, Brooks Barnes, Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum
Sept. 18, 2025

Mr. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, and Dana Walden, his head of television, were also hearing from skittish advertisers and employees who had begun to receive threatening messages. When the team reviewed Mr. Kimmel’s planned remarks, they grew concerned that his monologue would only inflame the situation further.

So they made the call: “Jimmy Kimmel Live” would temporarily go dark.

That decision — the product of a spider’s web of interlocking political and financial pressures placed atop one of the country’s biggest corporations — quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America. Many Democrats, actors and comedians cried foul as right-wing activists celebrated. On a diplomatic trip in Britain, President Trump knocked Mr. Kimmel for “bad ratings” and proclaimed that ABC “should have fired him a long time ago.”

Peter Link

2025-09-19 14:37:54

Disney Pulled Jimmy Kimmel as Pressure Built on Multiple Fronts

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/36374796

The abrupt programming decision quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America under the Trump administration.

archive.ph/8buhg

By John Koblin, Brooks Barnes, Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum
Sept. 18, 2025

Mr. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, and Dana Walden, his head of television, were also hearing from skittish advertisers and employees who had begun to receive threatening messages. When the team reviewed Mr. Kimmel’s planned remarks, they grew concerned that his monologue would only inflame the situation further.

So they made the call: “Jimmy Kimmel Live” would temporarily go dark.

That decision — the product of a spider’s web of interlocking political and financial pressures placed atop one of the country’s biggest corporations — quickly morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America. Many Democrats, actors and comedians cried foul as right-wing activists celebrated. On a diplomatic trip in Britain, President Trump knocked Mr. Kimmel for “bad ratings” and proclaimed that ABC “should have fired him a long time ago.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/business/media/disney-abc-jimmy-kimmel.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/well/hepatitis-b-vaccine-rfk-jr.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE8.1j68.CMkY2ngNTJbm

Also this image is in the header

Am I tweaking?

At the end of June, the Supreme Court torched a two-decades-old precedent protecting the right to online anonymity. It declared that requiring age verification for adult websites posed a negligible speech burden and was permissible under the First Amendment, allowing such laws to proceed in nearly half of US states, including America’s second-most-populous state, Texas. While it’s easy to get behind the idea of keeping 13-year-olds off Pornhub in theory, the decision brushed off real concerns about throwing up barriers to legal speech.

In mid-August, the court went even further: it at least temporarily allowed Mississippi to extend this age verification to social media, which is to say, the vast majority of spaces where people communicate with each other in 2025. Numerous other states have similar designs on the internet. South Dakota and Wyoming have started enforcing their own laws that demand services with any sexual content verify ages, covering not only sites like Pornhub but Bluesky and other all-purpose web platforms that don’t outright ban porn. New York just proposed rules that could see age-verification rules implemented on social media within the next couple of years. Texas and Utah passed rules that will soon require app stores to verify users’ ages; a similar bill awaits California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature.

This is even more problematic. Civil liberties advocates have warned for years that there’s essentially no way to verify ages without eroding privacy or chilling speech to some extent. The response from politicians has largely been that the downsides are minimal and justified to keep children safe. Early chaotic results of the UK’s Online Safety Act — which requires age-gating for a variety of content — suggest otherwise.

And over the past week, things have gotten yet markedly worse. The US government — including immigration authorities, the military, and the Department of Justice — has barreled into the business of sniffing out people who made social media posts it finds objectionable and threatening them with the force of the law. They’re riling up a snitch state that will hunt down targets for them to prosecute or strip visas from, a process that could be made infinitely easier by inevitable Tea-style data leaks from social media sites.

While all this is happening, Donald Trump’s administration is directly coordinating the transfer of one of the biggest social media platforms to administration-friendly tech moguls. A monthslong negotiation process has produced a tentative deal to spin off TikTok from its Chinese parent company; the rumored buyers include Larry Ellison-owned Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, and the whole process has given Trump tremendous leverage over the service. That adds TikTok to the stable of businesses owned by heavily conservative-aligned figures, following X, owned by Elon Musk — who is currently doing his part to ferret out online undesirables too.

These businesses are highly unlikely to resist demands for information on users, even if verification laws are written with privacy protections built in — someone like Musk might well dox users without being asked. They’re also, incidentally, the ones with the most resources to comply with age verification laws or escape legal penalties for flouting them, while smaller services like Bluesky and Mastodon struggle. And increasingly, big platforms are the ones least sympathetic to vulnerable minority groups targeted by Trump.

The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it

Age verification laws intended for child safety could collide with a new censorship push by President Donald Trump.

^{Adi Robertson (The Verge)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/36145028

A nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights in digital spaces across West Asia and North Africa — is warning that Israeli-linked software secretly embedded in Samsung phones across the MENA region poses a serious surveillance threat.

According to SMEX, Samsung’s A and M series devices either come preloaded with the app “Aura” or install it automatically through system updates, without the user’s consent. The application reportedly collects a wide range of personal and device-specific data, including IP addresses, device fingerprints, hardware details, and network information.

​​In 2022, Samsung MENA partnered with Israeli tech company IronSource, integrating its Aura software into Galaxy A and M series phones across the region. The partnership was publicly marketed as a way to “enhance user experience” with AI-powered apps and content suggestions.

https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2025/06/212144/samsung-embeds-israeli-surveillance-app-on-phones-across-mena/