Newspaper presidential endorsements may not actually matter that much, but billionaire media owners blocking editorial teams from publishing their endorsements out of concern over potential retaliation from a future Donald Trump presidency should matter a lot.
If people were legitimately worried about the “weaponization of government” and the idea that companies might silence speech over threats from the White House, what has happened over the past few days should raise alarm bells. But somehow I doubt we’ll be seeing the folks who were screaming bloody murder over the nothingburger that was the Murthy lawsuit saying a word of concern about billionaire media owners stifling the speech of their editorial boards to curry favor with Donald Trump.
In 2017, the Washington Post changed its official slogan to “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The phrase was apparently a favorite of Bob Woodward, who was one of the main reporters who broke the Watergate story decades ago. Lots of people criticized the slogan at the time (and have continued to do so since then), but no more so than today, as Jeff Bezos apparently stepped in to block the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris for President.
An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to the same two people.
This comes just days after a similar situation with the LA Times, whose billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, similarly blocked the editorial board from publishing its planned endorsement of Harris. Soon-Shiong tried to “clarify” by claiming he had asked the team to instead publish something looking at the pros and cons of each candidate. However, as members of the editorial board noted in response, that’s what you’d expect the newsroom to do. The editorial board is literally supposed to express its opinion.
In the wake of that decision, at least three members of the LA Times editorial board have resigned. Mariel Garza quit almost immediately, and Robert Greene and Karin Klein followed a day later. As of this writing, it appears at least one person, editor-at-large Robert Kagan, has resigned from the Washington Post.
Marty Baron, who had been the Executive Editor of the Washington Post when it chose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as a slogan, called Bezos’ decision out as “cowardice” and warned that Trump would see this as a victory of his intimidation techniques, and it would embolden him:
The thing is, for all the talk over the past decade or so about “free speech” and “the weaponization of government,” this sure looks like these two billionaires suppressing speech from their organizations over fear of how Trump will react, should he be elected.
During his last term, Donald Trump famously targeted Amazon in retaliation for coverage he didn’t like from the Washington Post. His anger at WaPo coverage caused him to ask the Postmaster General to double Amazon’s postage rates. Trump also told his Secretary of Defense James Mattis to “screw Amazon” and to kill a $10 billion cloud computing deal the Pentagon had lined up.
For all the (misleading) talk about the Biden administration putting pressure on tech companies, what Trump did there seemed like legitimate First Amendment violations. He punished Amazon for speech he didn’t like. It’s funny how all the “weaponization of the government” people never made a peep about any of that.
As for Soon-Shiong, it’s been said that he angled for a cabinet-level “health care czar” position in the last Trump administration, so perhaps he’s hoping to increase his chances this time around.
In both cases, though, this sure looks like Trump’s past retaliations and direct promises of future retaliation against all who have challenged him are having a very clear censorial impact. In the last few months Trump has been pretty explicit that, should he win, he intends to punish media properties that reported on him in ways he dislikes. These are all reasons why anyone who believes in free speech should be speaking out about the dangers of Donald Trump towards our most cherished First Amendment rights.
Especially those in the media.
Bezos and Soon-Shiong are acting like cowards. Rather than standing up and doing what’s right, they’re pre-caving, before the election has even happened. It’s weak and pathetic, and Trump will see it (accurately) to mean that he can continue to walk all over them, and continue to get the media to pull punches by threatening retaliation.
If democracy dies in darkness, it’s because Bezos and Soon-Shiong helped turn off the light they were carrying.
The type of semiconductive nanocrystals known as quantum dots are both expanding the forefront of pure science and also hard at work in practical applications including lasers, quantum QLED televisions and displays, solar cells, medical devices, and other electronics.
A new technique for growing these microscopic crystals, published this week in Science, has not only found a new, more efficient way to build a useful type of quantum dot, but also opened up a whole group of novel chemical materials for future researchers’ exploration.
[…]
by replacing the organic solvents typically used to create nanocrystals with molten salt — literally superheated sodium chloride of the type sprinkled on baked potatoes.
“Sodium chloride is not a liquid in your mind, but assume you heat it to such a crazy temperature that it becomes a liquid. It looks like liquid. It has similar viscosity as water. It’s colorless. The only problem was that nobody ever considered these liquids as media for colloidal synthesis,”
[…]
much of the previous research on quantum dots, including the Nobel work, was around dots grown using combinations of elements from the second and sixth groups on the periodic table, Rabani said. These are called “II-VI” (two-six) materials.
More promising materials for quantum dots can be found elsewhere on the periodic table.
Materials found in the third and fifth groups of the periodic table (III-V materials) are used in the most efficient solar cells, brightest LEDs, most powerful semiconductor lasers, and fastest electronic devices. They would potentially make great quantum dots, but, with few exceptions, it was impossible to use them to grow nanocrystals in solution. The temperatures required to make these materials were too high for any known organic solvent.
Molten salt can handle the heat, making these previously inaccessible materials accessible.
[…]
One of the reasons researchers synthesizing nanocrystals overlooked molten salt was because of its strong polarity, said UChicago graduate student Zirui Zhou, second author of the new paper.
Salt’s positively charged ions and negatively charged ions have a strong pull toward each other. Small things like nanocrystals have small surface charges, so researchers assumed the charge would be too weak to push back as salt’s ions pull in. Any growing crystals would be crushed before they could form a stable material.
Or so previous researchers thought.
“It’s a surprising observation,” Zhou said. “This is very contradictory to what scientists traditionally think about these systems.”
The new technique can mean new building blocks for better, faster quantum and classical computers, but for many on the research team, the truly exciting part is opening up new materials for study.
Most of the world’s video games from close to 50 years of history are effectively, legally dead. A Video Games History Foundation study found you can’t buy nearly 90% of games from before 2010. Preservationists have been looking for ways to allow people to legally access gaming history, but the U.S. Copyright Office dealt them a heavy blow Friday. Feds declared that you or any researcher has no right to access old games under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.
Groups like the VGHF and the Software Preservation Network have been putting their weight behind an exemption to the DMCA surrounding video game access. The law says that you can’t remotely access old, defunct games that are still under copyright without a license, even though they’re not available for purchase. Current rules in the DMCA restrict libraries and repositories of old games to one person at a time, in person.
The foundation’s proposed exemption would have allowed more than one person at a time to access the content stored in museums, archives, and libraries. This would allow players to access a piece of video game history like they would if they checked out an ebook from a library. The VGHF and SPN argued that if the museum has several copies of a game in its possession, then it should be able to allow as many people to access the game as there are copies available.
In the Copyright Office’s decision dated Oct. 18 (found on Page 30), Director Shira Perlmutter agreed with multiple industry groups, including the Entertainment Software Association. She recommended the Library of Congress keep the same restrictions. Section 1201 of the DMCA restricts “unauthorized” access to copyrighted works, including games. However, it allows the Library of Congress to allow some classes of people to circumvent those restrictions.
In a statement, the VGHF said lobbying efforts from rightsholders “continue to hold back progress.” The group pointed to comments from a representative from the ESA. An attorney for the ESA told Ars Technica, “I don’t think there is at the moment any combinations of limitations that ESA members would support to provide remote access.”
Video game preservationists said these game repositories could provide full-screen popups of copyright notices to anybody who checked out a game. They would also restrict access to a time limit or force users to access via “technological controls,” like a purpose-built distribution of streaming platforms.
Industry groups argued that those museums didn’t have “appropriate safeguards” to prevent users from distributing the games once they had them in hand. They also argued that there’s a “substantial market” for older or classic games, and a new, free library to access games would “jeopardize” this market. Perlmutter agreed with the industry groups.
“While the Register appreciates that proponents have suggested broad safeguards that could deter recreational uses of video games in some cases, she believes that such requirements are not specific enough to conclude that they would prevent market harms,” she wrote.
Do libraries that lend books hurt the literary industry? In many cases, publishers see libraries as free advertising for their products. It creates word of mouth, and since libraries only have a limited number of copies, those who want a book to read for longer are incentivized to purchase one. The video game industry is so effective at shooting itself in the foot that it doesn’t even recognize when third-party preservationists are actively about to help them for no cost on the publishers’ part.
If there is such a substantial market for classic games, why are so many still unavailable for purchase? Players will inevitably turn to piracy or emulation if there’s no easy-to-access way of playing older games.
“The game industry’s absolutist position… forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods to access the vast majority of out-of-print video games that are otherwise unavailable,” the VGHF wrote.
The dawn of annoyingly massive satellites is upon us, shielding our views of the shimmering cosmos. Five of the largest communication satellites just unfolded in Earth orbit, and this is only the beginning of a Texas startup’s constellation of cellphone towers in space.
AST SpaceMobile announced today that its first five satellites, BlueBirds 1 to 5, unfolded to their full size in space. Each satellite unfurled the largest ever commercial communications array to be deployed in low Earth orbit, stretching across 693 square feet (64 square meters) when unfolded. That’s bad news for astronomers as the massive arrays outshine most objects in the night sky, obstructing observations of the universe around us.
Things are just getting started for AST SpaceMobile, however, as the company seeks to create the first space-based cellular broadband network directly accessible by cell phones. “The deployment of our first five BlueBird commercial satellites marks just the beginning of our journey,” Abel Avellan, founder and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, said in a statement. “Our team is already hard at work building the next generation of satellites, which will offer ten times the capacity of our current BlueBirds, further transforming mobile connectivity and delivering even greater benefits to our customers and partners worldwide.”
[…]
Unfortunately, now there’s five more of them. AST SpaceMobile launched its five BlueBird satellites on September 12, seeking to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites in low Earth orbit to provide nationwide coverage across the U.S.
The latest constellation is an indication of an increasingly worrying problem that’s suffocating Earth orbit, with the number of large satellites increasing five times over the past 12 years, according to a letter sent by a group of space experts to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
“Experts from top universities are warning we’re in a short window of time when we can prevent making a mess of space and our atmosphere rather than spend decades cleaning it up,” Lucas Gutterman, director of the U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s Designed to Last Campaign, said in the letter. “The new space race doesn’t need to create massive space waste.”
The letter calls on the FCC to follow the recommendations of the U.S. Government Accountability Office and stop excluding satellites from environmental reviews. AST SpaceMobile isn’t the only company trying to build cellular towers in space. SpaceX is building its own constellation of satellites, with more than 6,000 Starlink satellites currently in low Earth orbit. Amazon, OneWeb, and Lynk Global are other companies trying to get in on the action.
Those satellites, however, have a major impact that can’t be ignored. “Artificial satellites, even those invisible to the naked eye, can obstruct astronomical observations that help detect asteroids and understand our place in the universe,” Robert McMillan, an astronomy professor and founder of the Spacewatch Project at the University of Arizona, said in the letter.
