A "fun" issue my professional communities are dealing with recently is where to hold conferences, if non-US people can't safely enter the US, and foreigners in the US can't safely leave it. There is no good answer, and the equilibrium is having fewer foreigners AND conferences in the US.

Besides the effects on the tech industry, right now there are H-1B holders—people—who built a life in the US. If they are traveling, they have 17 hours to get back to the US, or the life they built will be shattered and taken from them. Can you imagine constantly living with this uncertainty?

Looks the Crimson was yet again the first to print some big news: the NIH has restored funding to Harvard, sending over $46 million today. Fighting works. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Here is an in-depth privacy and security guide by @fightforthefuture.org that goes beyond the basics, answering questions about VPNs and how to run an anonymous blog. There are also quick references but I recommend reading the 43-page PDF. www.turnoffyourphone.org

I like this. Since under RFK Jr, Covid shots are now for people with underlying conditions that put them at risk, Michigan’s chief medical executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian states that not having the most recent Covid shot constitutes such an underlying condition. www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside...

The defining lesson of this first year of Trump authoritarianism is that kowtowing & capitulating yields zero permanent benefit and only emboldens the admin to come after you more. This critical lesson was first documented in the landmark political science treatise “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”

BREAKING: Immigration court orders Mario Guevara can be deported immediately. This is a gross miscarriage of justice. If Mario is deported, that sets dangerous precedent -- targeting reporters for their coverage & free speech. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

We brought together attorneys general from across the country to tell trans students: We see you. You belong here. And we will fight for you. As this school year kicks off, know that you are not alone, and we will work to make sure all schools are safe for every student.

The ACIP vote was tied 6-6 for requiring everyone to get a prescription for the COVID19 vaccine. The chair broke the tie by voting NO. Prescriptions will NOT be required.

This is a good critique. The one thing I'd add is that all the years' worth of full-time jobs spent on x-risk is time that was *not* spent working on identifying & avoiding AI's near-time risks affecting real humans in the here & now. Huge opportunity cost that *also* plays into the grifters' hands.

Not enough people are paying attention to a major target for Brendan Carr and the Trump admin’s crackdown on free speech: social media. It’s under bipartisan attack, even though it’s a crucial forum for reaching the public and fighting back. spitfirenews.com/p/is-anyone-...

We will see what happens next and you can’t put anything past the second trump admin BUT, fwiw, Ayman Soliman’s lawyer sees these developments in and out of court today as nothing but an unequivocal victory in this months long standoff and battle with Team Trump

Thanks so much, @pemalevy.bsky.social and @motherjones.com, for the time and care you all took with this important story.

7. We’ve seen this playbook before. The U.S. government has a long record of turning the FBI against civil rights movements. COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI program from 1956 to 1971, targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and countless others in an effort to disrupt the civil rights movement.

1. Republicans are attempting to get the FBI to label trans advocacy as domestic terrorism. Project 2025's parent org is pushing it. It would not label all trans people as terrorists, but it would open the door for heavy surveillance and disruption. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Sometime in the '90s, the San Jose Mercury News ran a short-form fiction column (now impossible to find) about a tech startup. A character founded a company & called it Macrohard, saying "it's better than being small and soft," a quip my teen brain found so hilarious that I recall it 30 years later.

It is 2005 in SF. Monday is Death Guild at DNA Lounge. We all love "Hackers." You can build robots and make them fight each other. It is 2025 in SF. Monday is Death Guild at DNA Lounge. We all love "Hackers." You can build robots and make them fight each other. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/t...

OMG - the judge in Florida just sua sponte struck the complaint in the Trump v NYT case for -wait for it - violating Rule 8. Lawyers, tell the folks at home how hard it is to get the complaint struck outright for something like that in fed eral court. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

we wrote about this WH tactic recently. they’re asking journalists for expert source names and then using them to look up political donations in FEC records to try to discredit those sources as biased. www.npr.org/2025/08/18/n...

Update: ACLU of Northern California and EFF have sent San Francisco a letter reiterating that the sharing driver locations with out-of-state entities is illegal. It also demands proof they’ve come into compliance. Read it here: www.eff.org/files/2025/0...

A Boom of One’s Own.

I can tell this site needs more sports knowers because everyone's been yelling about canceling Disney+ and Hulu all day and I literally haven't seen anyone yelling about canceling the new ESPN app, which was just rolled out and the success of which is existential for ESPN.

Incredibly timely news, journalist/researcher friends: @righttobe.bsky.social just launched Expert Voices Together - a FREE service that helps journalists and researchers who are being intimidated/harassed! Check it out at expertvoicestogether.org !

I had this exact same experience this morning. Same reporter as Heidi. This is *not* normal. I have spoken to the press on these issues for two decades. No government official has ever demanded to know my identity in order to give a comment on a story.

I guarantee you Brendan Carr knows exactly what the phrase "heckler's veto" means.

When people first hear about "jawboning" -- meaning government pressure to suppress speech through threats and other extra-legal measures, like what the FCC is doing now -- they always want to talk about "coercion" by the govt. I've always thought this is a red herring. Current events show why. 1/

I published this *two days* before l'affaire Kimmel began. www.techdirt.com/2025/09/15/t...

Sept. 18, 1925: Over 200 Ku Klux Klansmen are attacked by a mob throwing rocks and eggs as they pass through North Brookfield, Mass., after leaving a night rally. Two are thrown into a water trough. The police chief, trying to protect the Klansmen, has his gun and cuffs stolen.

Wrote a bit about how FCC Chair Brendan Carr won't stop his attacks until someone makes him. At this point, no one's really all that optimistic Congress or the courts will step up. More here: www.wired.com/story/brenda...

Just now, 11 state and city lawmakers were arrested by DHS police on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza after a hour of demanding access to the ICE lock up on the same floor. @thecity.nyc

I'm quoted:

Hey nerds! Want to talk about FOIA & then file a bunch of requests? Good! We're having a FOIAthon next week with @transjournalists.org — give and get request inspiration, hear from some Very Special Surprise Guests, open up government & raise some money for TJA! us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

🇺🇸US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) law enforcement arm Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has signed a contract worth $3m with Magnet Forensics, a company that makes a phone-hacking & unlocking device called Graykey, writes @lorenzofb.bsky.social. techcrunch.com/2025/09/18/i...

One week left until the Trust & Safety Research Conference hosted by @stanfordcyber.bsky.social! The final agenda is now available: fsi9-prod.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/...

In response to astute reader observations about my first post re: the FTC v. Aylo order, I now have a part 3, about the order's attempt to force Aylo to force its users to give up any privacy rights they have & thereby fix the giant 4A problem the order also creates: www.techdirt.com/2025/09/18/t...

9th Cir., en banc, holds that aliens in removal proceeding have a constitutional due process right to notice of their hearing that goes beyond the safeguards in the INA. cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/op...

oh my god they added a jobs page and it too is just as funny as the rest of the site

This was from banning trans girls from girls sports. Just so you understand the reality of what's going on here.

New Immigration Enforcement Dashboard Makes ICE Arrest Data Accessible to More People New dashboard makes Deportation Data Project data accessible through interactive visualizations, bridging the gap between complex datasets and public understanding. austinkocher.substack.com/p/new-immigr...

I find this extremely chilling: I spoke w a reporter this morning about Kimmel. (Reporter was / is great) They got back to me a short while ago to say they sought White House comment & WH demands to know first which experts they spoke with. I told reporter I'm happy to be quoted IN THE STORY but 1/x

From Wired a few weeks ago. A lot of the people who I was told for years were the adults in the room are being asked how they want to be remembered, and that answer is very clearly "cowards." www.wired.com/story/uncann...

San Franciscans are blessed with a wealth of good options to invest in (and 48 Hills). Take your cancellations and do something useful with them.

Fuck yeah, shadow government Dems are learning. Here, they seem to be adopting an approach to opposition that's common in parliamentary systems, whereby the opposition offers their own concrete alternatives to the incumbents

For the morning crew... I am very bad at asking for support for my work but if you're out there looking for media that isn't caving to nonsense and is calling it out... 👋

We’re appealing this unprecedented ruling against our client, Mahmoud Khalil. The Trump administration is trying to use every baseless avenue they can think of to punish and deport Mahmoud for his protected speech, but we won’t back down.

personally I care way more about this than jimmy kimmel but hopefully people who care about kimmel realize how it’s connected to mahmoud

I have never in my life covered an FCC official that gives less of a fuck about the public interest even first term FCC boss Ajit Pai, who was a complete revolving door hack, believed this sort of censorship crossed a line

In the wake of COVID-era platform pressure, @knightcolumbia.org had an excellent series on jawboning I found really helpful. Recommend it to all journalists these days: knightcolumbia.org/research/jaw...

Heard from a friend at Disney+ that there are multiple levels of freakout internally, both from internal dissatisfaction, concerns about subscription cancelations, and of course the big one: concern about a boycott spilling over into parks and cruises.

Thrilled and grateful to see this new work on encryption as a feminist tool against gender-based violence by @mallory.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy and @herahussain.bsky.social internet.exchangepoint.tech/why-feminist...