We are blind: ' Afghanistan faces nationwide internet blackout as Taliban blocks online access

 

Afghanistan experienced a near-total shutdown of internet services Tuesday, along with widespread disruptions to mobile networks, according to local reports.

The Taliban government has not issued an official explanation, but observers say the blackout is likely deliberate and linked to the Islamist group’s declared campaign against what it calls “immoral activities” online — primarily referring to access to pornography.

 

The monitoring group NetBlocks reported a “total internet blackout” in Afghanistan, saying connectivity had been dropping gradually since Monday night and now stood at less than 1% of normal levels in a country where access is already limited. The group said mobile disruptions stem from reliance on the same internet backbone that was cut.

 

Afghan broadcaster ToloNews warned viewers of possible outages and said the Taliban is allowing only 2G networks to operate, while more advanced 3G and 4G services remain down. Cloudflare Radar, another monitoring service, said the disruption was most severe in Kabul, Herat and Kandahar.

 

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OpenAI Launches Video Generator App to Rival TikTok and YouTube

 

Company’s new social media app allows users to create short videos with audio from text prompts and insert themselves into AI-generated scenes

By Keach Hagey and Gareth Vipers

Updated Sept. 30, 2025 3:08 pm ET

OpenAI is squaring up to TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Meta Platforms with a new social-media app for its AI video generator that allows users to create high-definition video clips with audio from text prompts.

Users can upload short clips of themselves and insert them into Sora-generated worlds, describing the idea, style and scene they want to see. They can also connect with other users, watching and commenting on their content.

The new version, Sora 2, will feature a swipe-and-scroll navigation similar to that of platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, setting out OpenAI’s stall as Silicon Valley steps up its focus on AI video generation. The company plans initially to release the app through Apple’s App Store in the U.S. and Canada on an invite-only basis.

OpenAI faces stiff competition from Google, which recently connected its Veo 3 AI video generator to its popular YouTube platform, allowing users to incorporate the technology in short-form videos. Social-media and video-sharing apps are competing fiercely for user engagement.

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Subscribe. Sora 2 will include a vertical feed and algorithm-driven recommendations that give priority to content that users might connect with, the company said Tuesday. Sora was first released in December, allowing users to create high-definition video clips from text prompts.

Technology and social-media companies are betting that new AI features will increase engagement and the popularity of their apps and services.

OpenAI’s new app joins a crowded field. TikTok’s AI Alive feature lets users turn pictures into videos with prompts, and users can upload AI-generated content. Meta last week rolled out a new feed of short-form AI-created videos in its AI app.

In an attempt to prevent doomscrolling, OpenAI said the new app won’t allow users under the age of 18 to have the infinite scroll function by default and will nudge adult users toward creating content if it perceives they have been passively viewing for too long. Content will be marked as AI generated when it is moved off platform so that its provenance is clear.

AI companies have taken an aggressive approach to how their fast-evolving tools use creative works both for training and in response to user prompts.

The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, News Corp, has a content deal with OpenAI.

The new version of Sora can create videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear, the Journal reported Monday.

“I think they are certainly opening themselves up to lawsuits in particular cases,” said Mark Lemley, professor at Stanford Law School, who represented the AI company Anthropic in its recent copyright case. Anthropic agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright-infringement lawsuit over its use of pirated books to train large-language models.

Write to Keach Hagey at Keach.Hagey@wsj.com and Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com 

Reuters: Morocco's youth protests turn violent on fourth day

 

By Ahmed Eljechtimi
October 1, 20251:49 AM GMT+1Updated 25 mins ago

 Members of the security forces stand guard as they prevent a protest demanding reforms in education and health from taking place, in Rabat, Morocco, September 29, 2025. REUTERS/Ahmed El Jechtimi

RABAT, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Youth-led protests demanding better education and healthcare in Morocco escalated into violent clashes with security forces on Tuesday evening, marking the fourth consecutive day of demonstrations across several cities. The protests were organised online by a loosely formed, anonymous youth group calling itself "GenZ 212," using platforms including TikTok, Instagram and the gaming application Discord.

In the southern cities of Tiznit, Inzegane, and Ait Amira, as well as the eastern city of Oujda, and Temara near the capital Rabat, hundreds of young protesters hurled stones at security forces attempting to disperse the gatherings, according to local media reports and witness accounts.
In Ait Amira, 560 km (350 miles) south of Rabat, demonstrators overturned and damaged several law enforcement vehicles and burned down a bank, footage shared by local media outlets showed.

In Inzegane, videos circulating on social media showed masked protesters setting fire to a bank, while others clashed with police who deployed water cannons.
Advertisement. Some cars were torched, and a group of protesters attempted to storm into a main supermarket, according to witnesses and videos shared online.
Further south in Tiznit, dozens of protesters threw stones at law enforcement officers as they tried to break up the rally, witnesses told Reuters.
Protesters briefly chanted slogans, including “The people want an end to corruption,” they said.

In Oujda, a protester suffered serious injuries after he was hit by a security forces' car, state news agency MAP reported. In Rabat, police arrested dozens of young people as they attempted to begin chanting slogans in a densely populated neighbourhood, a Reuters witness reported. The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) said 37 youths were on bail, pending an investigation. Hakim Saikuk, head of the AMDH section in Rabat, condemned the arrests as unconstitutional.

In Casablanca, 24 protesters who blocked a highway on Sunday were under judicial investigation, according to the public prosecutor. The government coalition issued a statement on Tuesday expressing willingness to engage in dialogue with youth "within institutions and public spaces to find realistic solutions". It also praised what it called "the balanced reaction of security authorities in line with relevant legal procedures". The interior ministry was not immediately available to comment on the incidents.

A cobardia, o anonimato e a sua definição (VIII)

 

 "A verdade do cobarde reside no que ele só diz quando

 ninguém pode provar que é ele."

 

Imigrantes são voto decisivo em algumas autarquias

 

Trump Makes It Very Clear They’re Going To Turn TikTok Into A Right Wing Propaganda Machine

 

After years of hyperventilation about TikTok’s impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, TikTok is likely being sold to a bunch of Trump’s billionaire technofascist buddies who don’t believe in privacy and want to use TikTok to spread right wing propaganda. Bang up job all around, especially to all the befuddled Democrats whose hysteria about the app helped Trump seal the deal.

TikTok’s new owners will include Rupert Murdoch (responsible for creating Fox News, the most effective mass media right wing propaganda platform ever) and Trump bestie Larry Ellison, who is in the process of turning CBS News into basically the same thing via his nepo baby son and Bari Weiss.

Normally you’d want to be a little subtle about the plan to turn TikTok into a pro-Trump and pro-Netanyahu propaganda machine to avoid scaring off customers, but that’s not Trump’s style. So last week he basically just blurted out the whole plan, then insisted he was just “joking”:

“Trump signed an executive order to “save” TikTok, while supposedly joking that he’d like to censor influencers by tweaking the algorithm so that content is “100 percent MAGA.”

“Everyone is going to be treated fairly,” the president added—seemingly covering his tracks as critics warn that TikTok under US ownership could soon carry a right-wing bias, perhaps going the way of Twitter after Elon Musk took over and rebranded it as X.”

From Twitter and the Washington Post to CBS News, the right wing billionaire tendency to buy up major media properties and convert them into right wing propaganda and bullshit machines has not been subtle. Yet, as the framing of this Ars piece makes clear, the press still seems somewhat confused as to whether TikTok will be any sort of reliable source of information (spoiler: it won’t) under far right wing billionaire ownership.

TikTok under Bytedance ownership certainly raised privacy, propaganda, and national security concerns. But under Bytedance the platform at least tried to behave so it could continue operating in the U.S. With Trump having dismantled all our privacy, NatSec, and fraud regulators, the new U.S. ownership of TikTok will see arguably fewer regulatory constraints on their worst impulses than ever.

Murdoch clearly wants a modern media extension of his existing Fox News empire given his core audience is dying off. Ellison, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu and his industrialized mass murder of children, clearly wants to leverage TikTok as a new media extension for whatever fresh hell he and Bari Weiss are building over at CBS. I’d expect ample authoritarian apologia.

To be clear the deal hasn’t been fully finalized yet. It’s still not clear if the deal will meet the legal requirements of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, especially given there seems to be some ongoing debate over who’ll exactly own the underlying algorithm. There will likely be some opportunities for activists and lawyers to throw sand in the gears.

But make no mistake: if this deal goes through TikTok will absolutely be headed the way of Twitter under Elon Musk. They’ll likely try to leave things much the same for a 6-12 months to pretend that’s not going to be the case, but I suspect that, ultimately, its use for right wing propaganda will be obvious.

Creating an internet full of wall-to-wall racist and corporatist right wing agitprop was always the end game of MAGA’s bogus “Conservative censorship” and “we support antitrust reform now” claims, it was never remotely subtle, and you can’t say you weren’t warned, repeatedly.

You’d like to think that the conversion of TikTok into a far right wing safe space will cause a mass exodus of ethical people off of the platform, but as we’ve seen with Twitter (especially when it comes to journalists’ continued use of a website owned by an overt white supremacist) that’s clearly not really something you can truly rely on.

You’d also like to think that the hijacking of TikTok will create the opportunity for innovators to create a better, more ethical short-form video platform not owned by assholes actively cheering on the destruction of foundational democracy. Here too, time will tell.

Their goal is obvious but as some are quick to point out: their success is far from guaranteed. Remember what happened with Rupert Murdoch and MySpace? AT&T’s attempted domination of video? These sorts of domination plays, especially in mass modern media, never quite go the way rich brunchlords planned, and it’s not like Oracle executives have any sort of serious experience with consumer-facing product success, much less any understanding of modern media.

That said, you’d need to define “success.” The billionaire right wing architects of this new modern era right wing propaganda bullhorn (that may soon be comprised of Fox, CNN, Sinclair, TikTok, Twitter, and countless other media properties) have no limit of money to burn on profit-losing propaganda ventures in a country that just took a hatchet to any remaining financial or consumer protection regulators.

They may never have the competency to actually execute, but given the already extremely shaky status of journalism, the media, and informed consensus, I think emphatic alarmism remains the right response to the grand, unsubtle mass media plans of our shittiest billionaires.

A trip to a "British" supermarket (and a view of multicultural influence...)

 

Pakistanis are 3 % of UK population and 33 % of birth defects

 

 

In some British Pakistani families, marriage within the family or extended kinship group has been practised for generations and first cousin couples can trace numerous additional blood ties in their family history. They may therefore share more than 12.5 per cent of their genetic material and have a higher risk for recessive problems in their children than if they were first cousins without any additional connections by blood. This is the most likely explanation for the observation that, in some sections of the British Pakistani population, the risk of death or serious disability in children may be as high as 10 per cent.