A federal prosecutor in Virginia whose monthslong mortgage fraud investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James has not resulted in criminal charges resigned Friday under pressure from the Trump administration.
Erik Siebert confirmed his departure in an email to colleagues, reviewed by The Associated Press, in which he praised them as the “finest and most exceptional” of Justice Department employees but made no mention of the political turmoil that preceded his resignation.
The replacement of Siebert as U.S. attorney for the prestigious Eastern District of Virginia office comes amid a push by Trump administration officials to indict James, a perceived adversary of the president who has successfully sued him for fraud. President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that he wanted Siebert “out” and multiple people familiar with the matter later told the AP that Siebert had informed his colleagues of his plan to resign from the position.
Strana la vita, a volte mi ami, mi cerchi, fai di tutto per avermi, poi... ti dimentichi di me e sembra come se mi riponessi in un cassetto. Ma io ti avverto, non cercarmi più o cercami meno, ti assicuro... E' per il tuo bene!
Un risveglio improvviso nel cuore della notte, l'impossibilità quasi di poter respirare e pensi. E' arrivata la mia ora! Ma vanno così le cose o c'è ben altro ancora da dire?
For anyone curious how Meta could possibly get worse -- excellent news.
Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.
The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads”, Mark Zuckerberg’s rival to Elon Musk’s X, were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names.
The children’s images were used by Meta after their parents had posted them on Instagram to mark their return to school. The parents were unaware that Meta’s settings permitted it to do this. One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. Another said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”.
Meta is a disgusting company and Zuckerberg is an embarrassment for humanity.
That being said, the parents of those kids are stupid fucking idiots who should feel ashamed for exposing their own kids on such a shithole of social media.
The Fisheries Minister is again claiming Maui's dolphins are not real.
Shane Jones has made the claim numerous times, including in 2020, where he claimed t
The suspension triggered strong responses across social media and beyond. Hashtags like #CancelDisneyPlus and #CancelHulu trended as users shared screenshots of their canceled subscriptions.
With cancellations surging, many subscribers reported technical issues. On Reddit’s r/Fauxmoi, one post read, “The page to cancel your Hulu/Disney+ subscription keeps crashing.”
Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit after Kimmel suspension
The suspension triggered strong responses across social media and beyond. Hashtags like #CancelDisneyPlus and #CancelHulu trended as users shared screenshots of their canceled subscriptions.
With cancellations surging, many subscribers reported technical issues. On Reddit’s r/Fauxmoi, one post read, “The page to cancel your Hulu/Disney+ subscription keeps crashing.”
I'm ready to bet that only a 0.something% of customers will actually cancel, there will be a barely visible bump in Disney's KPI this month, and in a month half of them will subscribe again to watch the latest Avengers vs Star Wars: the Invasion of the Ducks.
It's not about caring but about effectiveness. Even if I'm one of those suckers that "vote with his wallet", I know that it's naive to think that cancelling a subscription will move the needle for corporations like Disney.
Consider also the collateral damages of a hypothetical successful anti-Disney campaign: layoffs, drop in the stock market with impacts on pension funds, projects cancelled with third parties (so more layoffs and drops in the stock market), ...
The right protest here (IMHO) is against Trump, MAGA, and especially who voted for them. That may be more effective and with less collateral damages than trying to bankrupt Disney by cancelling Disney+ from the couch.
You know what's even more realistic? Reality, the one where megacorps are funding a new wave of nazifascism around the world, just so they won't get regulated.
The suspension triggered strong responses across social media and beyond. Hashtags like #CancelDisneyPlus and #CancelHulu trended as users shared screenshots of their canceled subscriptions.
With cancellations surging, many subscribers reported technical issues. On Reddit’s r/Fauxmoi, one post read, “The page to cancel your Hulu/Disney+ subscription keeps crashing.”
A new study finds that preteens with addictive patterns of social media, video games, or mobile phones use are more likely to experience worse mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
The new package of EU sanctions on Russia contains the first-ever ban on imports of liquefied natural gas. "This will make this phase out of Russian gas in Europe much faster," Commissioner Dan Jørgensen told Euronews.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Lol that's pretty much how it went for me. One day it pissed me off for the last time. Switched to Jellyfin and never looked back. Should have done it so much sooner.
Sharing and remote streaming, plain and simple. I have no problem setting up accounts for friends, but choosing your server is a pain for some. But the bigger problem is that the first thing anyone will say is: Don't expose Jellyfin to the Internet. That's a bit of a problem.
And they'll then say, "Oh it's not so bad just set up wireguard and..." This is the ramblings of a lunatic. I've been working with tech a long time. Tech is my job. It is my hobby. I do all of it from repairing my own hardware to administering servers to running my own home lab to doing open source development. Wireguard is not friendly. It is not something I'm going to set up at every friend and family member's house so I can share my library.
I've got a more secure but imperfect setup in sticking Jellyfin on the Internet behind a proxy that requires login. But this is not something most people are going to want to deal with. They want to stand up their server and then share it with people.
I would have done this, but set up ‘meshnet’ to make the remote computers look like they’re all on the same network, but nordvpn just pulled the plug on meshnet and are decommissioning it in December. Goodbye
Tailscale has this same functionality, and is free for something like 100 hosts. Uses wireguard as the backend tech. It also has apple tv and android clients, so you can setup the Tailscale app on an end client for a user, then setup the jellyfin client and they should be good to go. That client device will just "see" your jellyfin server as a local client on the same network, albeit a tailscale wirrguard overlay network.
I haven't actually deployed it as I don't share my media server currently, but I was investigating it a bit ago.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Very Give a Mouse a Cookie vibes when talking to someone explaining how Jellyfin is a drop in replacement for Plex when they're on step 6 of setting up remote access
One thing is prioritizing security. There's a number of known flaws, of varying severity, which is why most people would recommend not exposing Jellyfin to the Internet.
Perhaps they could set up a second project, a Jellyfin meta-library, whose whole goal is to be exposed to the Internet. You stand that up, give it access to other Jellyfin servers, and it handles the work similar to STUN of connecting you to media on those servers. This would make it so people could share easier.
The apps don't work well at all. If you're just desktop based, its fine. But Nvidia Shield app, firestick app, mobile app, all have issues with hardware transcoding, and also somehow doesn't handle subtitles properly. I have had both Plex and Jfin set up side by side multiple times, trying to test if I can make the swap. But JF just has too many bugs on their apps, which is what I use primarily, as do my users.
Sounds more like you had transcoding issues. Using the Jellyfin Android app and the Android TV app on my Chromecast.
Besides .ssa subtitles I usually never need to transcode. And usually the transcoding reason is me using an incomptaible audio/video source (TrueHD audio and HDR)
Oh so it's my fault somehow? Sorry but if I use the same library on Plex vs. JF and one works fine, the other doesn't. That's not my fault lol. It was set up to hardware transcode, and still didn't work for many files. Plex did. Same with subtitles. I watched the same file with Plex and JF side by side. Same directory. Subtitles worked with Plex, all fucked up with JF. JF also crashed all the time on my Nvidia Shield.
Listen... Some weeks ago I had trouble transcoding some anime files. Didnt really work amd had a low processing framerate using VAAPI. Switched to Intel hardware transcodig and suddenly it worked.
I don't know your setup or when exactly you tried out JF, but theres absolutely no need to be offended.
I had intel hardware transcoding turned on for both JF and Plex. Many files did not work on JF. I am offended and annoyed because people keep telling me it's my problem - when it's not. It's JF issues that are not solveable by me. I even went to the discord and talked to the devs, and they literally said "oh yea we don't have tons of focus on the mobile apps unfortunately", and acknowledged that my issue was a bug. Yet people continue to tell me "IT WORKS FOR ME SO YOU'RE DUMB."
Listen... I never said it's a problem you caused. I literally said that I had a working setup, which suddenly stopped working as expected and I solved it by switching the hardware acceleration setting from VAAPI to QuickSync. This time it was an easy fix. But it was either an underlying issue with the way I set it up or a bug. Nonetheless it stopped working for no apparent reason.
How so? I have way less issues with jellyfin than I did with Plex. I think with jellyfin you just need to RTFM and find some plugins to expand the functionality if you need it
I spent hours trying to set up jellyfin to watch somewhere else in my home and despite doing all the guides I just couldn't get it to work. Plex is just so much easier. It has hiccups and the new update is horrible (still holding out on updating) but it still works 9/10 times for me
I feel you on that. The first time I set it up, it me forever. I finally figured out the issue was it was not picking up the right IP address for my server. Once I fixed that, and knew to look for that in the future, no issues. I tore my whole server down last weekend, and transferred all the drives to a different setup, rebuilt the server and have everything working, logged back in on all my devices in an hour tops. Everyones milage will very though
I recently tested Jellyfin again and still miss a lot of features I like with Plex. I am a former Emby user and I don’t see why Jellyfin got so popular. I really want it to succeed, though
You have a login screen with all users showing with their profile picture. For a while now. You can even make it look Netflix-like with Skin Manager plugin. And there's Quick Connect but it's for people already connected on another device.
Right. I understand now, I've not used Netflix in 7 years. Yeah you have the user login screen before entering the password. I guess there's a workaround by autodeleting cookies but you'd have to re-enter the password (and it's not doable easily by grandma)
And not secure. I do have a reverse proxy strapped before my Jellyfin but if that is circumvented due to bad regex design, your only line of defense is a 4 digit password on a jellyfin user.
Jellyfin is 100% free and open-source, it may miss some features but nothing behind a paywall. We made the choice of open-source over features (I can understand people going with plex, but I'm happy with jf)
All good and if you are one of the contributors, you earn all the respect. By now, Emby will have a hard time to keep up with the development speed of Jellyfin. I just miss a few very important QoL features. I truly believe it is only a matter of time until they are added.
That overhauled UI is buggy as shit, slow to do anything and is objectively worse as features that were already present were removed.
Feature removal might e been excused if the UI was simplified and fast and responsive. But slow and buggy UI to replace relatively well functioning UI angered almost all users. I'm had to force install an old version of plex client exactly to avoid the non-sense.
Ok, you’re gonna have to unpack that one for me! Plex was always messing things up with transcoding, and I hate the Jellyfin UI and always had trouble getting it working and keeping it working.
Tldr; they are an early example of open source enshittification before enshittification was even coined (iirc)
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don't know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that's why I'm generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn't even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don't have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it...yea. fuck em
Fair. And I agree with your stance. But I don’t feel like setting something else up again, especially if it’s a thing that has caused me problems in the past, like Jellyfin. I miss XBMC.
Likely a codec issue with your client player. The client couldn’t play the file (either video or audio) natively, so the server transcoded the file so it could.
Transcoding is a feature. I understand why you would rather it direct stream, but you’ve got to make sure the client can play the file natively.
The thing about the redesign that irks me the most is that browsing your own personal library is unnecessarily convoluted the way it’s now organized. It’s a big step backwards in terms of navigation.
Crap, I still haven't logged ba k in since they asked me to log out because of the security compromise. I'm gonna have to lose a day and figure out this whole jellyfin thing I guess.
Windows. Yeah I just couldn't get it after much forum diving and I really couldn't figure it out. When this computer dies I'm likely switching to Linux so maybe that'll help but until then, Plex without updating is the way to be.
I have Jellyfin in parallel now and I had to face the family during summer with questions like “why I cant do this with the app anymore “ “ why did you change it” sigh 😔 so I started to put energy on jelly because that was unacceptable way to rollout a botched change.
Probably like 2–3 years ago I switched from Plex to Emby because the Plex app on my TV was becoming bloated and slow.
Even back then my TV was hitting 5 years old and still working great. Why the hell should I be forced to scrap a perfectly good television just because some corpo wants to ship overly bloated apps with too many animations?
That's the thing - we just can't know. Sometimes a feature is just a feature, but with commercial software there's always more risk it's going to change under you for the wrong reasons when they find some way to monetise it.
Do you have any links? Plex Blog has nothing about this and all my stuff looks the same as it has for months now. (Although to be fair I use the Plex Preview app on Roku, so maybe I’ve just had what you’re all seeing now?)
This is why I have Plex, emby, and jellyfin running in tandem. Plex still makes my life easier than the other two in a lot of ways, but it's been slipping for years. Once I've finally had enough, jellyfin all the way.
I'm running jellyfin, can't recommend it enough. It's been catching up quite steadily to Plex and I still control everything. Can't complain about that.
Yeah I use plexamp a lot too and finamp is rough and reminds me of Android apps from 2012.
I also had weird quirks in the past where shows would crash and stop streaming or it would forget my position I stopped watching at, among other things.
And the hardest one is the manual labour I put in to make lists and fetch missing metadata that was actually accurate.
I was in a previous update wave, and it made me switch to Jellyfin too. I cast from my phone to my TV, and they did something that made subtitles basically impossible to load via Chromecast. Even trying to automatically burn in subtitles didn't work for this mode.
Also, while a "minor" nitpick, Chromecast used to show random movie/TV show posters when you connected and also show the media details when you selected something, now it just shows a big PLEX logo all the time unless playing something.
I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.
The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.
Most likely they're not logged in with a paid Plex account. When I head to the web version of the Plex app it's a shitshow until I login. Then I have all that shit disabled server side.
Set up ease is highly variable. I spent hours of videos and guides and fiddling and couldn't get it running on anything except the desktop it was installed on.
Setup is easy, but sometimes an episode I got plays with no subtitles even though they are there on the video when I watch it on my PC, already tried the subtitle extractor extension but it didn't seem to work.
Because it fucks up subtitles on their Nvidia Shield and firestick apps, and has issues with transcoding too. If you're purely using the desktop app, or browser then it's better. But Plex just works in every aspect. Subtitles, transcoding, sharing libraries. Have had no issues or weird bugs. Anytime I try JF I have to dive deep into resolving bugs, some of which are unsolvable by me.
I've been using Jellyfin on both the Fire Stick and Sheild for over 2 years and haven't encountered any issues with transcoding, subtitles, or anything else. You just launch the app and everything just works. And I've got a couple of very non technical remote users who have been using it flawlessly.
I've had absolutely zero issues on Chromecast, Roku and iOS/Android apps. Multiple of my friends who don't do tech stuff use my Jellyfin as a streaming service as well
ive never used Emby, and Kodi i havent used for quite some time, maybe almost 15 years. aside from it probably being quite different from when i used it it worked well at the time.
We're using Emby set up on a container with GPU passthrough. Used to be on a Synology, but that absolutely sucked for transcoding and now just hosts the library.
Does the job and does it well with a little extra setup for subtitles (extensions, API keys etc). Subs are a must as I can barely hear shit.
Apps work well, as does the web interface. Sometimes struggles with the highest quality files (hardware limitations rather than software), but 1080p is fine for our use.
Haven't needed to look into anything else, no dealbreakers yet.
I'm using Kodi and I love it. But it's a project if you want to setup lots of stuff. I recommend compiling from source for latest version, easier patching, etc.
I wouldn't recommend Kodi to people who aren't comfortable with tech stuff. Jellyfin is more basic and easy for people who only want movies/tv.
I've been using Emby for a few weeks now, and the only thing I dislike is having to pay to get subs. Not a dealbreaker though, just slightly anoying that I have to find them myself.
I have it set up right along Plex but find it nearly unusable because the search is atrociously slow. Like 1+ min to query my library. The day that gets fixed is the day I’ll start using it.
How big is your library? 1min is excessive but I also noticed jellyfins search getting slower with an increasing amount of shows and movies. There's projects like jellysearch which improve search noticeably.
Yeah, I have that set up too and searching on that is very quick and responsive. I still end up just using Plexamp because I like the automatic playlists and radios. I’m sure there are ways to add those into navidrome, but haven’t explored it very far
I've tried to use Jellyfin every year or two for the past six years to replace Plex, but it sadly just isn't there. It's not good in a lot of aspects, especially when it comes to full bitrate 4K HDR movies (100GB movie files), HDR tone mapping, and especially subtitles (which I always have on).
Also, I'm pretty sure on their GitHub page there's like a huge list of some significant or moderate security vulnerabilities that have been known for many years and are never going to get fixed due to breaking compatibility with some old devices if their fixed.
Wait, Jellyfin had HDR tone mapping before Plex didn't it?
In my case running them both side by side, Jellyfin is as least reliable and fast, which is a lot more important when I am thousands of miles away and just want to watch something.
I switched to Jellyfin and then to Kodi. Jellyfin was nice but I wanted Kodi's PVR, Youtube, Video Games, etc. It's been a project to setup everything but it's been pretty awesome.
I spent alot of time messing with the flatpak and apt versions before compiling from source. I recommend source because you get the lastest version and it's easier to install patches, etc.
I'm not sure I can switch. I have too many friends linked to my server and a decade-ish of watched data.
I know many people watch from TV apps and Chromecasts and I don't know if there's an app for every TV brand for jellyfin or emby or whatever.
People watch from all sorts of weird devices. I got push back when I forced SSL because at least one person had a TV so old that it didn't support doing SSL for Plex. It took me a week to drill it into their brain that I'm not going to change it back and to go buy literally anything to make it work (Chromecast type thing). I think their ended up buying a Roku.
This is just the brainpower that most of the people I share with, have. They just want easy. I do all the hard work in the background and their life is easy.
I can't imagine how many would have a fit if I forced them off Plex. Jellyfin looks cool and all, but it's unlikely I'll be able to move anytime soon.
I don't. There's just a nontrivial number of people I care about that use Plex that don't know enough about technology to handle something like jellyfin.
Losing years of watched data isn't great, but ultimately it's small potatoes.
A big part of the reason I wanted to set up Plex to begin with, was so that my friends and family didn't have to waste their time downloading the stuff that all of us want to watch.
They don't demand anything, I want them to be able to use it because I care about those people. If switching to jellyfin is too difficult for the non-techs I care about, then I'll keep rolling with Plex.
You can run Jellyfin side by side and slowly migrate everyone, starting from the most intelligent users (so you can catch anything that might be wrongly configured, etc.).
In the meantime, I hope that so many users are switching that we're going to get better native apps.
Why do you give a shit what other people do? It's just giving them a free way to waste time. If it's good for your server they are secondary. It's not like you are providing then anything they actual need.
I've only ever used jellyfin and I've loved the experience. For me it was easy to set up and put media on, simple to put on TV, has been utterly reliable and stress free to manage.
The only issues I've had has been tailscale sometimes being wonky or I personally did something dozy on the server machine that I had to fix.
That said, I get why people stick with Plex. Not everyone wants to or are capable of setting things up. For those that have been saying it's really easy, you don't know the other person or their confidence/skill sets, don't just assume, it makes you sound like a Linux bro.
OKLAHOMA CITY–Senator Dusty Deevers issued on Thursday the following statement on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a national leader in the fight for truth, faith, and freedom of speech:
“Charlie Kirk was a bold defender of truth, an unyielding advocate for free speech, and a tireless champion for America’s founding values. Most importantly to me, he was a faithful evangelist proclaiming Christ crucified to millions,” Deevers said. “Charlie inspired countless young people to stand courageously for liberty without apology. His passing is a tremendous loss not only to Oklahoma, but to our nation.”
To honor Kirk’s memory and continue his mission, Senator Deevers encouraged the legislature to prepare to enthusiastically pass three measures recently introduced by Senator Shane Jett, R-Shawnee, in the 2026 session:
Senate Bill 1188 – Establishes Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day in Oklahoma, to include statewide programs and discussions promoting open dialogue and the protection of Constitutional rights. Senate Bill 1187 – Requires the creation of a Charlie Kirk Memorial on every public college and university campus in Oklahoma as a permanent symbol of the importance of free expression and open discourse, and of the evil of political violence. Senate Concurrent Resolution 13 – Officially recognizes and honors the life and work of Charlie Kirk, commending his dedication to proclaiming the gospel and preserving America’s heritage of liberty. “Charlie Kirk devoted himself to strengthening the next generation to stand strong in the truth. For that, he was cut down. We must honor and continue his legacy,” Deevers said. “I look forward to doing so come next session.”
@VladimirLimeMint Lenin was really sex-averse, even for his rather patriarchal upbringing. It led to some pretty bad takes by modern standards but he also may have been an OG ace icon.
Lenin: "Gay sex is counterrevolutionary!" Modern chud: "Fuck yeah!" Lenin: "Straight sex is also counterrevolutionary!" Chud: "Fuck y— wait what" Lenin: "If you aren't putting every ounce of your energy into physically building the revolution, what you are doing is counterrevolutionary!" Trotsky: "Also the concept of family is bourgeois, and parents should have little to nothing to do with childrearing!" Lenin: "... okay one tick there bud"
📍 Rio de Janeiro (RJ) 📌 Domingo - 14h - Copacabana - Posto 5
O congresso aprovou uma PEC que estende ainda mais o foro privilegiado dado a políticos eleitos e, agora, protege-os de qualquer investigação ou processos. A PEC, ainda por cima, está sendo usada como moeda de troca nos acordos do congresso para garantir a aprovação do PL da Anistia, o que significaria não punir os golpistas condenados pelo STF!
É preciso dar um recado claro: esse tipo de manobra deve ser repudiada intensamente pelo conjunto da classe trabalhadora! A garantia da condenação dos golpistas só será possível a partir da nossa força nas ruas!
Venha cerrar fileiras conosco na luta para enterrar os inimigos do povo e garantir um futuro que valha a pena viver!
The Defense Department has tightened cybersecurity requirements for its cloud services providers. The changes come after ProPublica revealed how Microsoft’s use of China-based engineers left sensitive government data vulnerable to hacking.
In another topic ([url=https://activitypub.space/topic/478b8e04-0562-47c1-a3a3-82e17b32f0aa/smithereen-0.11-is-out]#Smithereen 0.11 is out![/url]), [url=https://mastodon.social/@grishka]@grishka@mastodon.social[/url] says this:
[quote]I have this convent
> I have this convention where I return IDs for remote objects (obviously, how else would you authenticate them if not by fetching from the origin servers) but complete objects that are local, to save resources. IIRC I saw Mastodon do it for replies so just copied this behavior
It was in response to a discussion about conversation contexts — a resolvable collection of items that represents a conversation, thread, reply tree, etc.
Most implementors return a collection of object IDs, some return a collection of activities.
What about a mix of object IDs and full objects? That's interesting — it's the first I've heard of it.
My gut reaction is that it's messy... mixing types: strings for some items in the collection and complete objects for others.
... but I think at the end of the day, there are three things we need to acknowledge:
Most implementors end up converting ids to complete objects anyway by fetching from the remote resource (unless it is not needed)
Sending additional bytes over the wire is fairly inconsequential (unless I suppose you're sending many Mbits...)
Including the entire object saves on additional calls if the receiving party does not already know about the object.
You can trust the objects owned by the server you're requesting data from. (this is fe34)
Abrindo o código #13 – Novo Cadastro Nacional de Pontos e Pontões de Cultura
A próxima edição do Abrindo o Código será a #13, da ação de formação continuada promovida pela Rede Nacional de Produtoras Culturais Colaborativas.
Nesta edição, Adriana Veloso e Thiago Skárnio irão apresentar o Mapas Culturais é uma plataforma de software livre desenvolvida para o mapeamento colaborativo e a gestão de políticas culturais, permitindo que gestores, agentes e o público em geral possam explorar, compartilhar e divulgar a cena cultural de seu território. Além dessa função de divulgação, a ferramenta também é amplamente utilizada por estados e municípios para gerenciar editais e seleções públicas. Sua arquitetura foi concebida em um modelo federativo, garantindo que diferentes instâncias governamentais possam adotar e adaptar o software livre à sua realidade, mantendo ao mesmo tempo a possibilidade de uma integração em nível nacional. A oficina oferecida irá guiar os participantes na utilização desta plataforma, mantida pelo Ministério da Cultura, e apresentar suas funcionalidades mais recentes. O encontro será uma oportunidade de mostrar as principais funcionalidades do novo Cadastro Nacional, como a atualização cadastral, as páginas dos Pontos e Pontões, além dos filtros e do mapa. Haverá também espaço para tirar dúvidas e debater estratégias de mapeamento.
Adriana Veloso é Doutora em Ciência Política pela Universidade de Brasília (2020). É mestre em Design de Interação pela Universidade de Brasília (2015), Especialista em Design de Interação pela PUC Minas (2013) e bacharel em Comunicação Social – Jornalismo – pelo Centro Universitário de Belo Horizonte (2008). Tem publicações acadêmicas, em jornais e revistas, além de artigos para web. Atua como pesquisadora nas áreas de cultura digital, educação e novas tecnologias, inovação aberta, software livre, produção audiovisual, usabilidade/ux e gestão de redes.
Thiago Skárnio é produtor multimídia e fundador da Alquimídia, uma associação dedicada ao fomento da Cultura Digital no Brasil, onde continua atuando. Paralelamente, coordena a @GaneshaPress, uma agência digital voltada para a comunicação para a Economia Criativa, e integra a Rede de Produtoras Culturais Colaborativas e a Rede Cultura Viva de Santa Catarina.
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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.
Siamo abituati a sentir parlare di continue vittorie nella lotta al cancro, ma se guardiamo i numeri nudi e crudi, qualcosa non torna. A fronte di milioni di diagnosi e centinaia di migliaia di decessi ogni anno, ci chiediamo: a cosa serve la ricerca se la mortalità non diminuisce? Il nostro articolo esplora le statistiche che nessuno vuole mostrare e si interroga sul ruolo delle Big Pharma, che spendono in marketing più che in ricerca. Una riflessione necessaria, al di là della narrativa ufficiale.
Eric Xu, Huawei's Deputy Chairman of the Board and Rotating Chairman, gave a keynote themed "Groundbreaking SuperPoD Interconnect: Leading a New Paradigm for AI Infrastructure".
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” positionper 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.
“Charlie Kirk’s funeral Sunday will be a historic moment for conservatives,” Henry Olsen writes at the Washington Post. “Kirk’s widow, Erika, President
Abraham Lincoln is often invoked in calls for civility and reconciliation across the partisan divide. But Lincoln himself understood that such reconciliation was impossible in his own time until justice had been served and slavery abolished.
I’ve been frustrated with most PDF scanner apps on iOS, they’re either full of ads or super expensive ($100–200/year). So I ended up building my own solution: ProScan PDF. No Ads, ever. Options for monthly, yearly, and lifetime (5 to 10 times cheaper than other competing apps), AI-powered OCR, merge, sign, lock, and organize PDFs, syncs with iCloud. I’m curious, for those of you who scan docs regularly (students, teachers, small business owners), what’s the #1 feature you wish scanning apps had but don’t? Would love to hear feedback, and if you want to try it out, it’s on the App Store.
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.
This change reveals the shifting economic needs of the U.K. and U.S. in the age of AI, as well as the rising prominence of technology and its leaders in Trump’s second administration.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
A cache of leaked documents from the Beijing-based company called GoLaxy lay out a chilling new approach to information warfare: an army of AI personas, engineered to look like us, think like us, and win our trust.
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 Trump administration asked a federal judge to allow it to revoke a key permit for SouthCoast Wind, a project that could power about 1.4 million homes in the region.
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.
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