Today I got a DMCA notice from Github to take down code for a Chrome extension I forked. Only problem is that the code has always been under the GPL for years. Apparently the original dev now wants money for his extension. Guess he's now regretting his GPL decision.

The URL to the original repository now links to the company's website.

GitHub - bjoern-tantau/xcloud-keyboard-mouse: Chrome extension for controlling Xbox Cloud Gaming (Project xCloud) using a keyboard and mouse

Chrome extension for controlling Xbox Cloud Gaming (Project xCloud) using a keyboard and mouse - bjoern-tantau/xcloud-keyboard-mouse

^GitHub

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-trump-mark-carney-davos-72f0ab78

President Trump’s faith in his ability to wring concessions by taking maximalist positions was on full display this week. So were the costs, as he splintered NATO and then undercut his credibility by climbing down from his threats.

Even by President Trump’s own mercurial standards, his whipsawing over the past few weeks on Greenland — insisting on the largest land acquisition in American history and then dropping it without explanation, threatening allies and then reversing himself — was a remarkable and revealing exercise in a new era of American coercive diplomacy.

Mr. Trump began, as always, with a maximalist demand. This time, it was that a small European power, an ally that had shed blood for the United States in Afghanistan and beyond, turn over a vast and icy territory for the sake of U.S. national security. The president was clearly testing the boundaries of the Atlantic alliance, arguing that handing over the land was a small price for lesser powers to pay for continued American protection.

. . .

But this week Mr. Trump also discovered the limits of his coercive powers. After he threatened a wave of new tariffs, markets fell abruptly, which always seizes his attention. Allies objected, this time openly. And by the time the president returned to Washington on Thursday night, it was clear that he had left considerable damage to the Western alliance in his wake.

MBFC\
Archive

New York Times - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact Check

LEFT-CENTER BIAS These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias.  They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal cau…

^{Media Bias Fact Check}

Heip! Tein PieFediin fiidin, jossa on koottuna suomalaisille kiinnostavaksi olettamiani yhteisöjä. PieFed-käyttäjät voivat toki lisätä sen itselleen ihan instanssilla riippumatta menemällä esim. piefed.social/feed/add_remote ja tökkäämällä sinne tuon fiidin osoitteen.

Lemmyn kautta selaavat voivat hyödyntää tuota lähinnä "vieraina". Jos Lemmy-käyttäjä haluaa päästä kommentoimaan tai vaikkapa antamaan ylä- tai alaääniä, tarvitsee tökätä viestin oikeasta laidasta sitä kolmelta pisteeltä näyttävää nappia ja valita "view original". Eli näin:

...ja valitsemalla aukeavasta valikosta sitten hiiren oikealla napilla "View original" ja valitsemalla "Tallenna linkki". Eli tätä oikealla hiiren korvalla:

Sitten pitää vielä mennä Lemmy-instanssinsa hakuun ja tökätä tuo leikepöydällä nyt oleva linkki hakuun, jolloin pääsee samaiseen julkaisuun itse käsiksi.

Ei toki maailman helpointa, mutta on tuo fiidi siis hyödyllinen myös Lemmy-käyttäjille, vaikkei Lemmy itse noita fiidejä vielä tuekaan! (feed on siis sama asia kuin Redditin multireddit, jos se on jollekulle tuttu konsepti)

(ja hei, tällä hetkellä olen PieFedin ainoa suomentaja... Keksikää tuolle "fiidille" parempi käännös kuin tässä nyt hädissäni käyttämäni "fiidi" 😁)

https://piefed.europe.pub/f/suomi

Sharing and discussing the brilliant new political ad from the UK's Green Party with leader Zack Polanski, and taking a look at how far the Greens have come in just a few short months since his victory as leader.

Political ad:

TEL AVIV, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Israel wants to restrict the number of Palestinians entering Gaza through the border crossing with Egypt to ensure that more are allowed out than in, three sources briefed on the matter said ahead of the border's expected opening next week.

The head of a transitional Palestinian committee backed by the U.S. to temporarily administer Gaza, Ali Shaath, announced on Thursday that the Rafah Border Crossing - effectively the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the more than 2 million people who live there - would open next week.

Israeli officials have spoken in the past about encouraging Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza, although they deny intending to transfer the population out by force. Palestinians are highly sensitive to any suggestion that Gazans could be expelled, or that those who leave temporarily could be barred from returning.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-aims-ensure-more-palestinians-are-let-out-gaza-than-back-2026-01-23/

TEL AVIV, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Israel wants to restrict the number of Palestinians entering Gaza through the border crossing with Egypt to ensure that more are allowed out than in, three sources briefed on the matter said ahead of the border's expected opening next week.

The head of a transitional Palestinian committee backed by the U.S. to temporarily administer Gaza, Ali Shaath, announced on Thursday that the Rafah Border Crossing - effectively the sole route in or out of Gaza for nearly all of the more than 2 million people who live there - would open next week.

Israeli officials have spoken in the past about encouraging Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza, although they deny intending to transfer the population out by force. Palestinians are highly sensitive to any suggestion that Gazans could be expelled, or that those who leave temporarily could be barred from returning.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-aims-ensure-more-palestinians-are-let-out-gaza-than-back-2026-01-23/

The first step of taking on social media companies is to develop much more comprehensive rules that platforms must conform to. Ideally, that process would be done collaboratively with likeminded countries cooperating on a set of enforceable standards that apply across markets like Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, Brazil, and beyond to make it harder for tech companies to wield their leverage against an individual country going it alone. Those rules should be comprehensive, looking at all aspects of platform design and operation. They could include reining in dark patterns that manipulate users, limiting if not outlawing aspects of algorithmic amplification of content, implementing high standards of moderation and larger penalties for breaches, and enforcement mechanisms that allow swift action when rules are violated, leaving the door open to blocking platforms that do not comply — as Brazil did to X in 2024.

The goal of these standards would be to limit the harmful effects of social media platforms, but that will naturally force them to change how they look and operate to conform with those restrictions. Social media companies have long argued that they are platforms, not publishers, to try to avoid accountability and their obligations to their users’ wellbeing. But when they develop complex algorithmic systems that elevate particular content in front of the eyes of their users — including, but not limited to, news content — and even incentivize the creation of certain kinds of content, that is clearly not the case. The standards they abide by must be raised, regardless of the protests that will come from tech billionaires and their allies in the US government.

Reining them in is just the first step. Paired with that must be a serious, well-financed effort to develop alternative means of digital communication that rethink the social media model from the ground up, built on entirely different foundations than the private, profit-hungry platforms that now shape online discourse. This should be approached from many different angles, with the recognition that some of the projects may fail, but that’s acceptable because experimentation in a short timeframe is necessary.

X shows why stricter tech regulation is necessary

We need comprehensive rules on social media far more than age limits

^{Paris Marx (Disconnect)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.bestiver.se/post/879557

Comments

cross-posted from: infosec.pub/post/40955228

But the Daily Beast has discovered that information about many hundreds of ICE staff is accessible to anyone who signs up to the recruitment website.

The site—which the Beast is not naming to avoid identifying any ICE officials—is targeted at recruiters and HR specialists. It uses AI to pull data from across the internet—including LinkedIn and other websites, and social media—about employees from various large organizations.

ICE workers listed on the site include senior managers in the technical, operations, and legal departments, as well as details of on-the-ground agents and office-based deportation officers. Analysis by the Beast suggests that many still appear to be employed by ICE.

The website lists their names, job titles, locations, experience, as well as sensitive work and personal emails and telephone numbers, plus links to their LinkedIn and other social media accounts.

Humiliation for DHS as 1,000+ ICE Staffers Out Themselves Online

Kristi Noem says she is furious about “doxxing” threats to ICE employees—yet the Beast found hundreds have identified themselves online.

^{Tom Latchem (The Daily Beast)}

Jan 20, 2026 at 09:25 AM EST

Members of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America have been cultivating ties with officials of the Chinese Communist Party and agreeing to take pro-China positions, according to extensive minutes of internal meetings seen by Newsweek.

The minutes of the DSA meetings show participants discussing contacts with officials from China’s ruling party in the name of "anti-imperialism," with some members saying the organization should avoid topics that are sensitive for Beijing, such as China's threats to invade Taiwan, its security crackdown in Hong Kong and abuses of the Uyghur Muslim minority. They also discuss visits to China. Chinese officials did not take part in the meetings themselves but met with members in China and encouraged the DSA to set up exchanges, according to the minutes.

"China wants to interface with the DSA," one New York-based political activist told a meeting on October 8 last year of the China Working Group of the DSA's International Committee, which helps set policy and advises leaders. "If we develop a killer two-week itinerary, hire locals, and develop further connections with the CPC [Communist Party of China], then we're golden," says the person, whose name is redacted.

The DSA International Committee and Mamdani’s New York City Hall did not respond to requests for comment. Mamdani was not recorded as being present at any of the meetings minuted. Although Mamdani has been a longstanding member of the Democratic Socialists, he has distanced himself from elements of the group’s national platform. He has also not made extensive public comments on China.
Getty Images. Newsweek/Illustration

Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral election last year highlighted the rise of the Democratic Socialists as a political force and particularly in New York, where China has long sought to influence the leadership of a city with one of the largest Chinese populations outside China. It has used lobbying and campaign donations from dozens of local groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party, on which Newsweek has reported extensively.

While the minutes of the DSA meetings do not indicate any wrongdoing, they do raise new questions over the extent of Chinese influence within the group and more broadly in the United States. They are also an indicator of how China’s Communist Party seeks to build ties with influential political groupings in the United States. The DSA’s website describes the group’s New York chapter as “Zohran’s political home” and says his victory would not have been possible without it.

The DSA member who gave Newsweek access to the materials on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation said they were uncomfortable with the Communist Party links and what they said were efforts to avoid discussing controversial issues.

"The materials document a sustained pattern of ideological alignment, narrative filtering, and network overlap consistent with influence conducted at the discursive and organizational level," said the person, who is a member of the International Committee. “We value democracy and openness, and this directly contradicts that.”

Asked about contacts between the DSA, Mamdani's administration and the Chinese Communist Party, Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek: "Local exchanges and cooperation are the important component of China-U.S. relations, serving as the foundation, vitality, and source of strength for the relations between the two countries."

---

The dozens of internal documents go back to 2021. They include a detailed slideshow of an August 2025 visit to Guizhou and a trip by members to the Xinjiang region, apparently in 2023. The minutes show members of the China Working Group, led by Anlin Wang, discussing strategy and debating with members of like-minded groups such as Code Pink and the Britain-based Friends of Socialist China. Wang did not respond to a request for comment via the International Committee.

"Anti-imperialism should be at the forefront of everything we do in DSA," says one member at a meeting in May 2021.

In a meeting in June 2023, Wang comments: “I think one thing we would like to see is robust internationalism / anti-imperialism."

Also in June 2023, members praise what they say is a Code Pink tactic of avoiding discussion of politically sensitive Communist Party policies.

On June 12, 2023, the minutes show that Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans briefed the Democratic Socialists on her organization's "China Is Not Our Enemy" (CINOE) campaign and advised the group: "Stay out of the weeds. Focus on points that are easier to sell.” One of those is poverty alleviation programs in China, with the minutes showing the DSA group planning events to communicate that in the United States. Code Pink did not respond to a request for comment.

At a later meeting in June 2023 to discuss Code Pink's advice, a person says: "I like Jodie. They stick to the CINOE message and don't get stuck in the weeds. They don't get caught up in One China or Xinjiang or Hong Kong. It's good rhetorically. Makes me wonder if we should stay farther out of the weeds as well." The person's name was redacted by the source.

The minutes also show some members thought that reports of abuse of Uyghurs by the Communist Party in China's far-western Xinjiang region had been exaggerated and were part of a "propaganda campaign" by U.S. media.

"There are real problems with the Chinese government," one person said in a 2021 meeting, "but we are not going to stop what the Chinese are doing as DSA. We have to confront the propaganda campaign by U.S. media and even the left. For instance, one million Uyghurs being brutalized in Xinjiang is an exaggeration. It's not a genocide or Holocaust."

---

The documents include a slideshow from members’ trips to China. A photograph of a Uyghur woman is accompanied by the written comment: "Our visit to Xinjiang was very revealing! A young woman we met in the Bazaar spoke near-perfect English. She told us she learned it in a training school." What China refers to as vocational training schools have been described by United Nations human rights experts as a network of detention and brutalization camps.

An image of a mechanical harvester in cotton fields in Xinjiang is accompanied by the comment in parentheses: "No slaves!!" A note with a picture of the Id Kah Mosque in the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar says: "worshippers…come and go freely."

The minutes also show that during the August 2025 trip, to China's southwestern Guizhou province, DSA members and other U.S. left-wing group members were hosted by officials at the Communist Party School there. The Guizhou foreign affairs department helped manage the trip. The Party officials encouraged them to set up "official exchanges."

Photographs show members attending Party School seminars, and officials explained Guizhou's poverty alleviation scheme to the visitors including a development concept known as "Social Pairing" that matches eastern parts of China to the Uyghur west. According to Chinese officials, the policy "prioritizes safeguarding and improving people's well-being." Critics say it is a mechanism for surveillance and control.

The Guizhou Party School acknowledged receipt of an email from Newsweek seeking comment but did not reply further.

Members also discuss building ties with the Shanghai-based website China Academy and an affiliated outlet called Wave Media. Both have ties to a network of pro-Communist Party media.

But the minutes show that not everyone agreed on the approach to China.

One member—whose name was redacted—tried to push back against the consensus, voicing concern about the group not debating the rights of Chinese people: "Saying we can't talk about their rights until we defeat American imperialism doesn't work for me," the person says.

But that person was contradicted and described as unkind. "In the future let's try to have conversation that encourages debate," another person tells them. The objector apologized.

The person who shared the minutes said: "This isn't what I signed up for and I imagine it's not what a majority of members signed up for. There's no way you can be a part of the organization and promote the things they're doing.”

https://archive.is/xcbz9

Vance’s position is that even if they’re doing things by the book, they’re nonetheless here illegitimately. Period.

It's all about skin color, not immigration status.

Archived copies of the article
* web.archive.org
* ghostarchive.org
* archive.today

Trump’s ICE Goons Detained a 5-Year-Old. Then JD Vance Made It Worse.

Much of the media is treating the vice president’s Minneapolis visit as an attempt to lower the temperature. If anything, he raised it.

^{The New Republic}

Title.

I've been trying to find a copy that I can run on Steam Deck with no luck lately. Anyone have any good places to check?

Many thanks!

Seven House Democrats voted in favor of a $64.4 billion bill to advance a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending measure that includes about $10 billion for ICE. The votes came during a markup of the DHS appropriations bill, with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky casting the lone Republican vote against the funding, which passed 220-207 and will fund ICE and FEMA through September 30.

The seven Democrats who voted alongside the majority of Republicans to push forward the bill are Representatives

• Tom Suozzi (New York),
• Henry Cuellar (Texas),
• Don Davis (North Carolina),
• Laura Gillen (New York),
• Jared Golden (Maine),
• Vicente Gonzalez (Texas),
• Marie Glusenkamp Perez (Washington).

Democrats Who Voted for ICE Funding Face Fury, Primary Calls—’No Excuse’

Seven Democrats are facing criticism after voting to advance funding for ICE ahead of the 2026 elections.

^{Mandy Taheri (Newsweek)}

With Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to Gracie Mansion, a democratic socialist is now chief executive for the largest municipal bureaucracy in the United States, meaning that he oversees the daily activities of roughly 300,000 employees. Most of these employees are what the political scientist Michael Lipsky called “street-level bureaucrats”: the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.

It is this latter category of civil servants that will be tasked with turning the cumbersome machinery of city government in the direction indicated by Mamdani and his political appointees. Implementing a sewer socialist agenda in New York City will be, to a great extent, an enormously complicated technical exercise, carried out by a small army of trained technicians.

The Left Needs Bureaucrats - Dissent Magazine

After MAGA, the left will need to be ready with a theory of how to rebuild the federal administrative state—not as it was before Trump, but as something better.

^{Dissent Magazine}

The United States and China have both signed off on TikTok’s long-awaited divestment deal, clearing a major hurdle for the popular social media app’s future in the U.S., a White House official confirmed to Scripps News.

The approvals pave the way for the sale of TikTok’s American operations to close ahead of a Jan. 22 government deadline, bringing an end to several years of political, legal and national security uncertainty surrounding the platform used by roughly 170 million Americans.

The agreement restructures TikTok’s U.S. business into a new joint venture, majority owned by a group of Trump-backed investors, including American tech giant Oracle, private equity fund Silver Lake, and the United Arab Emirates firm MGX. It limits the ownership stake of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and adding new safeguards around data and governance.

US and China sign off on TikTok divestment deal, clearing path for American spinoff

The U.S. and China have both signed off on TikTok’s long-awaited divestment deal, clearing way for the popular social media app’s future in the U.S., a White House official confirmed to Scripps News.

^{Maura Barrett (News Channel 5 Nashville (WTVF))}

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has abruptly halted the termination of hundreds of disaster workers because of the massive winter storm.

In an email Thursday obtained by CNN, staff were told FEMA would stop dismissing workers whose contracts are expiring. Sources told CNN the looming winter storm was a major factor in the pause.

Roughly 300 disaster workers have been let go this month, with only a handful receiving contract extensions.

FEMA pauses termination of disaster workers ahead of winter storm

FEMA has paused layoffs of disaster workers, citing the massive winter storm, amid an agency overhaul that has already cut thousands of jobs.

^{Scripps News Group (News Channel 5 Nashville (WTVF))}

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who leads the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said a person’s right to refuse a vaccine outweighed concerns about illness or death from infectious diseases.

This approach means a lot of dead and paralyzed kids. You can eliminate a lot of infectious disease if everybody who can gets vaccinated. You can't when 10% of the population refuses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/health/milhoan-vaccines-optional-polio.html?unlocked_article_code=1.GlA.GSVy.gbKoG9oTOXe_

https://apnews.com/article/renee-fleming-kennedy-center-cancellations-9ed539d9e42c47d700196e72beb5ca26

As of today, the US is no longer a member of the World Health Organization—and it leaves the United Nations health agency with hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid bills, according to reporting by Stat News.

US officially out of WHO, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unpaid

US did not pay $278 million in 2024–2025 dues and millions more in promised funds.

^{Beth Mole (Ars Technica)}