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

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

Diamora, Song of Death

Azarian, the Forsaken Son

Viper Napuatzi

Ignagduk, the Bog Witch

Xesht, We That Are One

Yama The White

Blackjaw, the Remnant

The Blind Beast

Xyclucian, the Chimera

Krutog, Lord of Kin

Tor Gul, the Defiler

Captain Hartlin

The Prisoner

Mighty Silverfist

Great White One

“We’re looking at the entire spider web”

FBI Readies New War on Trans People

^{Ken Klippenstein}

The ShinyHunters extortion group claims to have stolen over 1.5 billion Salesforce records from 760 companies using compromised Salesloft Drift OAuth tokens.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/shinyhunters-claims-15-billion-salesforce-records-stolen-in-drift-hacks/

New York-based venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners is notifying thousands of individuals whose personal information was stolen in a ransomware attack.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/vc-giant-insight-partners-warns-thousands-after-ransomware-breach/

SonicWall warned customers today to reset credentials after their firewall configuration backup files were exposed in a security breach that impacted MySonicWall accounts.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sonicwall-warns-customers-to-reset-credentials-after-MySonicWall-breach/

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Dan De Luce (NBC News)}

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Chris Stein (The Guardian)}

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

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Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

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

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

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

We do not live in a perfect world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

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

FBI Readies New War on Trans People

“We’re looking at the entire spider web”

^{Ken Klippenstein}

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

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

Peter Link

2025-09-19 14:33:11

Disney Pulled Jimmy Kimmel as Pressure Built on Multiple Fronts

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

Peter Link

2025-09-19 14:37:54

Disney Pulled Jimmy Kimmel as Pressure Built on Multiple Fronts

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

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

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

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5511868-fcc-commissioner-anna-gomez-broadcasters-retaliation/

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

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

Peter Link

2025-09-19 14:33:11

Disney Pulled Jimmy Kimmel as Pressure Built on Multiple Fronts

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

archive.ph/8buhg

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

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

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

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

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

Also this image is in the header

Am I tweaking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{Adi Robertson (The Verge)}

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

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

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

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

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