Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent. From a report: Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that". But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge. Shoebridge: "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it? Claybaugh: "Correct." Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

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For decades, there wasn't a better, more reliably nasty talk-show guest than Mr. Warmth himself, Don Rickles. His whole act, whether on a Las Vegas stage or a talk show, was predicated on the notion that he could (and would) say anything about anyone, no matter their gender, race, or religion, and it would somehow manage to be hilarious even though it was also scabrously offensive. Since his passing in 2017, there has been a splintering of talk shows across broadcast and cable, and only one guest has ably and consistently taken Rickles' torch: Martin Short. 

Although Short has had a career rejuvenation thanks to the funny, whip-smart series Only Murders In The Building, which is in the middle of its fourth season, the actor has been a mainstay on late-night shows since the '80s, with some of his best jabs airing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Conan. In spirit, Short's snide remarks to O’Brien are similar to what Rickles said to Johnny Carson, mocking, among other things, the host's pale skin. “You make Mike Pence look like a character in Black Panther,” he once chided, his secret weapon (that thousand-watt smile and grin belying all of the scathing one-liners) always at the ready. (If anything, Short’s spritely air only made his knocks on O’Brien that much funnier.)

Some of the punchlines that Short unleashes on late-night TV are not unlike the ones his Only Murders character Oliver throws at Steve Martin's Charles, many of which boil down to, yes, Martin's paleness. And as was the case with Rickles, the iffier the subject, the funnier the joke, although Short is averse to going to the well of racially tinged zingers. Instead, Short gets creatively personal. He was one of Conan’s final TBS interviews, and on that occasion, he calmly asked, “Who’s your last guest? I assume it’s Jay Leno?” before acting aggrieved that he may have offended the gasping crowd. (O’Brien, unsurprisingly, laughed heartily at the reference and quickly slipped into his well-worn, high-pitched impression of Leno, complete with head waggle.)  

Really, the key difference between Rickles and Short is the latter's sneaky little smile, which can be so disarming as to make audiences all the more shocked when he roasts a host like O’Brien or Stephen Colbert. And some of that surprise could be generational. Whereas audiences of the Johnny Carson era knew immediately what was about to happen when Don Rickles stalked out onstage (that he'd invariably lay into Carson, Ed McMahon, whichever guest was on the couch, or anyone, really), younger crowds can sometimes be a bit more baffled by Short’s nonstop jabbing. In one of Short’s appearances on Conan, he noted that one commenter on YouTube took offense to his roasts, not realizing that O’Brien is an incredibly receptive audience and a real-life friend who's very much enjoying the jokes.

One of the network-TV bright spots this past summer was when Short took over as guest host for a week on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Though he appeared as himself for most of the run, he gave the last night over to his talk-show persona, the outlandish parody of a Hollywood-junket journalist, Jiminy Glick. (In an interview with GQ, Short said The Kids In The Hall's Dave Foley remarked that Glick's celebrity put-downs allowed Short to be “actually as mean as [he is] in real life.”) For Kimmel, Glick sat with Bill Hader, who spent most of the interview laughing so hard that he cried, with non-sequitur questions about Willie Mays’ recent passing and the word “lisp” breaking his fellow SNL alum. 

Short also pulls the curtain back a bit more than Rickles. In that aforementioned YouTube bit on Conan, he admitted that he was reading comments in the middle of the night because he’s “needy and desperate.” Which is all to say that part of  what makes Short’s roasts more palatable to a modern audience is that he is more than willing to turn the target on himself. During his live shows with Martin, one of which was filmed for Netflix's Steve Martin And Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget For The Rest Of Your Life, he does drop bombs (“Working with Steve is like the movie Deliverance: It’s all fun and games until the banjo comes out”), but he's also able to laugh at his own career. In one one of the pair's standard back-and-forths, he asked Martin what the he'd be doing if he wasn’t a comic legend. The response? “Probably what you’re doing.”

In a way, Short feels like an essential talk-show throwback, as he brings a type of insults-spiked energy and old-Hollywood fascination that has begun to feel sadly out of step. If you find yourself in a YouTube rabbit hole of classic late-night clips, you may stumble upon some of the Carson-era stalwarts like Rickles and the late-great Bob Newhart (the two of whom were best friends, as fate would have it) telling old war stories about their days in the business to Conan, Colbert, Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon. Similarly, Short has been pulling out his own Hollywood stories for years, as in a mid-2000s spot on Late Night With Conan O’Brien where he recounted a tale about infuriating Lucille Ball in the early 1980s (roughly around the same time that Short’s fellow SCTV writers playfully mocked Milton Berle while accepting an Emmy). What Short does so effectively on these talk shows is straddle the line between the old and the new, just as he and Martin do with co-star Selena Gomez on Only Murders.

The days when people’s lives could be dominated by a particularly memorable talk-show spot have pretty much fallen by the wayside, partially because there are too many options from which to choose. But certain guests promise the closest we can get to old-school, late-night appointment television, and Short is the cream of that crop. If Primetime Glick, which ran on Comedy Central in the early aughts, was just too pure for this world, at least we can rest assured that Short will occasionally grace the couch and kill it for ten minutes every so often, gleefully savaging big names to their faces just like in the good ol' days.     

James Earl Jones, the illustrious actor and EGOT recipient with a winding list of credits as distinctive as his iconic voice, has died. Per Deadline, Jones’ reps confirmed that the actor died this morning at his home in Dutchess County, New York. He was 93 years old. 

Jones was born on January 17, 1931 in Arkabutla, Mississippi to Ruth and Robert Earl Jones. Soon after James Earl was born, Robert left the family to pursue a career in boxing and later, acting. When Ruth left to search for substantial work, James Earl moved to Michigan to live with his maternal grandparents. At only five years old, the transition was so traumatic that the young boy developed a severe stutter. Because of this, he refused to speak and remained functionally mute until high school. Jones credited his English teacher, who discovered his proficiency in poetry, for helping him find his voice.

Jones enrolled in the University of Michigan to study medicine. He also joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps, where he ultimately decided that becoming a doctor was not his true calling. He pivoted to theater by studying at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, intending to bide his time until his presumed deployment to Korea to fight in the war. The change would lead him to take a part-time job as a stagehand at the Ramsdell Theatre in Manistee, Michigan. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1955, he began acting and stage managing at the theater, earning his first of many Shakespearean roles, including starring turns in Othello and King Lear. Jones soon moved to New York, where he studied at the American Theatre Wing and worked as a janitor to support himself. 

After years of performing on stage and a handful of TV roles, Jones earned his first movie role in 1964 when he played  Lt. Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. He would play alongside Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alec Guinness in The Comedians. As his film career began to take off, he returned to the stage in 1967 as the star of Howard Sackler's Pulitzer-winning play The Great White Hope, where he portrayed boxer Jack Johnson. Jones’ performance earned him many high-profile fans, including Muhammed Ali, who identified deeply with the story of a boxer navigating the Jim Crow era to become the first Black heavyweight boxing champion. Two years later, Jones won the Tony Award for Best Actor In A Play. This would mark the beginning of his indelible stint on Broadway, with starring roles in The Iceman Cometh and the stage adaptation of  John Steinbeck's novella, Of Mice and Men.

In film, Jones’ deep, irreplicable voice inextricably linked him to some of the most immovable franchises in the industry. In 1977, the actor began his journey with Star Wars as the voice of Darth Vader. By choice, he would not be credited for his role until the series’ third installment, Return of the Jedi. (He was eventually credited for A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back in a 1997  “Special Edition” re-release.) His voice would define another pop culture figure in the 1994 animated Disney classic, The Lion King. Jones’ regal timbre was fit for Mufasa, King of the Pride Lands, betraying a wisdom that would guide the film despite his brief appearance. Jones reprised the role 25 years later in the live-action remake, starring Donald Glover. 

In TV, Jones made his mark in acclaimed works like Roots: The Next Generations and Under One Roof,  for which he was nominated for an Emmy for his role as Neb Langston. In 1990, he would lead the series Gabriel's Fire, which led him to an Emmy win. Jones often made for a delightful guest on many beloved series, including (but not limited to), 3rd Rock From The Sun, Will & Grace, and  Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. For The Simpsons, Jones narrated Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven for the show’s first installment of Treehouse Of Horror.  

Of course, Jones’ impact in film, stage, and television extends far beyond his voice. With over 180 screen credits alone, his commanding presence added a level of prestige to any moment and shaped characters that would remain relevant for generations. His final role was in 2021’s Coming 2 America, a sequel to the Eddie Murphy starrer Coming To America. Jones played Jaffe Joffer, King of Zamunda and Akeem’s (Murphy) overprotective father in both productions. Though many actors with a similarly impressive portfolio might attribute their fortune to maintaining a particular sense of taste, Jones considered himself a journeyman, simply collecting the roles that felt right to him in the moment, whether they included cell phone commercials or a chance to be a king. "Denzel Washington, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise: those guys have well-planned careers,” Jones told The Guardian in 2009. “I'm just on a journey. Wherever I run across a job, I say, 'OK, I'll do that.'"  For many, Jones stands as a symbol of perseverance, an example of how we are all far greater than our trauma. He is survived by his son, Flynn. 

This week after striking for over a month, videogame performers reached agreements with 80 games this week, reports the Associated Press. "SAG-AFTRA announced the agreements with the 80 individual video games on Thursday. Performers impacted by the work stoppage can now work on those projects. "The strike against other major video game publishers, including Disney and Warner Bros.' game companies and Electronic Arts Productions Inc., will continue." The interim agreement secures wage improvements, protections around "exploitative uses" of artificial intelligence and safety precautions that account for the strain of physical performances, as well as vocal stress. The tiered budget agreement aims to make working with union talent more feasible for independent game developers or smaller-budget projects while also providing performers the protections under the interim agreement. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator, said in a statement that companies signing the agreements are "helping to preserve the human art, ingenuity and creativity that fuels interactive storytelling." "These agreements signal that the video game companies in the collective bargaining group do not represent the will of the larger video game industry," Crabtree-Ireland continued. "The many companies that are happy to agree to our AI terms prove that these terms are not only reasonable, but feasible and sustainable for businesses." Deadline calls the agreement "a blow for major developers." As Deadline previously reported, AI is the one and only issue at the crux of this strike, as the union has managed to find common ground with the developers on every other provision. More specifically, the union has said that the sticking point in these negotiations is encompassing all performers in any AI provisions, without loopholes related to whether an actors' likeness is recognizable. In video games, similar to other forms of animated content, motion capture performers and voice actors are often performing as creatures or other non-human characters that make their voice and likeness unrecognizable.

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I’ve been videochatting with Mixæl Swan Laufer for about 30 minutes about an exciting discovery when he points out that to date, the best way he’s been able to bring attention to his organization is “the old school method of me performing a bunch of federal felonies on stage in front of a bunch of people.”

I stop him and ask: “In this case, what are the felonies?” 

“Well, the list is pretty long,” he said. 

Laufer is the chief spokesperson of Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do “right to repair for your body.” 

Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. 

In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves’ had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. 

Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it.

“Normally you have a virus, and your body fights it off or your body fights it to a standstill and you just have it forever, basically, and hope it remains dormant more or less,” Laufer said. “The holy grail for every virologist is to find a way to drain the viral reservoir, and Sovaldi does this. You take one pill of Sovaldi a day for 12 weeks and then you don’t have hepatitis C anymore.” 

The problem is that those pills are under patent, and they cost $1,000 per pill. 

“Literally, if you have $84,000 then hepatitis C is not your problem anymore,” Laufer said. “But given that there are other methodologies for managing hepatitis C that are not curing it and that are cheaper, insurance typically will not cover [Sovaldi]. And so we’ve got this incredible technology and it’s sitting on the shelf except for people who are ridiculously wealthy.”

So Four Thieves Vinegar Collective set out to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. Chemists at the collective thought the DIY version would cost about $300 for the entire course of medication, or about $3.57 per pill. But they were wrong. 

“It’s actually just a little under $70 (83 cents per pill), which just kind of blew my mind when they finally showed me the results,” Laufer said. “I was like, can we do the math here again?”   

I have been familiar with Four Thieves Vinegar Collective’s work since 2018, when I edited a (fantastic) feature about Laufer and the collective written by Daniel Oberhaus at Motherboard. At the time, Four Thieves had figured out how to make EpiPens and Daraprim—an HIV medication controlled at the time by “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli—for far below what they cost in the United States. Daniel began that article with a description of Laufer “throwing thousands of dollars worth of homemade medicine into a packed audience at Hackers on Planet Earth, a biennial conference in New York City.” 

Six years later, Laufer’s promotional tactics are largely the same. “It’s very vague,” he said when I asked him to list out the felonies he thought he’d be committing at DEF CON. “I’ll be on stage, handing out drugs that I made, that are under patent and not owned by me or licensed to me. When the moment comes, the list of things they can come after me with is very long because of how vaguely most of these laws are written.” 

Crucially, unlike other medical freedom organizations, Four Thieves isn’t suggesting people treat COVID with Ivermectin, isn’t shilling random supplements, and doesn’t have any sort of commercial arm at all. Instead, they are helping people to make their own, identical pirated versions of proven and tested pharmaceuticals by taking the precursor ingredients and performing the chemical reactions to make the medication themselves.

“We don’t invent anything, really,” Laufer said. “We take things that are on the shelf and hijack them. We like to take something established, and be like ‘This works, but you can’t get it.’ Well, here’s a way to get it.” 

A slide at his talk reads “Isn’t this illegal? Yeah. Grow up.” 

“I am of the firm belief that we are hitting a watershed where economics and morality are coming to a head, like, ‘Look: intellectual property law is based off some ideas that came out of 1400s Venice. They’re not applicable and they’re being abused and people are dying every day because of it, and it’s not OK,’” Laufer told me.

Four Thieves’ work has resonated with me since I learned about it from Daniel’s article, in part because I have seen firsthand how patents owned by Big Pharma and the American healthcare industrial complex hurt and kill people in their cold machinations. In my early 20s, I watched my best friend have to forgo several different treatments for cystic fibrosis because she couldn’t afford them or because the medication was not available in the U.S. She died when she was 25. 

At the time, a miracle drug called Kalydeco had recently been approved for use on some patients with cystic fibrosis. It cost $311,000 per patient, per year. The article I wrote about my friend’s life and how it was difficult for me to not blame the American medical system was the most emotionally difficult I’ve ever written, and even now, years later, it is hard to talk about.

On the phone with Laufer, I told him about what happened to my friend. He started typing while I was talking to him. “K-A-L-Y-D-E-C-O,” I spelled out for him.

“What? This is a nothing molecule,” he said, pulling up the molecular structure of the drug on Wikipedia. “Look. You’ve got two benzine rings, an NH here, a second ring with an alcohol here, and then two ammonias coming off of it. I mean, that’s so fucked. Like, you can I could make that in a weekend.” 

For the next 15 minutes, Laufer showed me how someone would theoretically make a DIY version of Kalydeco using Four Thieves’ tools. The heart of what Four Thieves has built is called Chemhacktica, a forked version of an MIT-DARPA project called ASKOS that uses machine learning to map out chemical pathways for molecule synthesis, and to suggest potential chemical reactions that would yield the molecule that you want to make. Chemhacktica is a piece of software that allows users to input the desired molecule, and it will show “possible synthesis plans,” will suggest precursor materials and will search a database to see whether it is buyable, and will show what the potential chemical reactions might look like, among other features.

Another core piece of technology Four Thieves has created and open sourced is the Microlab, an “open source jacketed lab reactor made from off-the-shelf components you can buy online.” 

The Microlab is the lab equipment (called a controlled lab reactor or CLR) that you use to actually make medicine, using the suggested reaction pathways given by Chemhacktica. Costs for the materials to build this are between $300 and $500, depending on the features you want. Four Thieves has released detailed instructions about how to build and use the Microlab, as well as software that will make it run.

“A CLR is to organic chemistry what an espresso machine is to coffee. It is possible to make coffee over an open fire with nothing more than beans, water, and a tin can,” Four Thieves explains on its website. “But you will get a better, more consistent cup of coffee from an automatic machine that dispenses the right amount of water at the right temperature in such a way that ensures the water is in contact with the grounds for the right amount of time.”

The Microlab “won’t do every single step for you,” they say. But “the Microlab is designed to load a recipe for a chemical reaction, then automate the temperature control, reagent addition, and stirring that are needed. It is designed for small-molecule organic chemistry to make certain medicinal compounds in your own home or workshop.”

Four Thieves has also released the Apothecarium, a drag-and-drop recipe system that Laufer explains as “how you generate a file that the Microlab will run,” and which gives step-by-step instructions on how to make specific medications. 

Releasing the Microlab and its software is an iterative process that Four Thieves has been working on for years, and the latest version, called .6, was released just a few weeks ago.

“It’s a new version that is very well-documented, and easier to build, and simpler in its implementation,” Laufer said. “It does everything I was dreaming of, in a way, which is, I mean, you see me smiling. I’m just amazed at all the people I get to work with and what they do.”

On the call, Laufer inputs the Kalydeco molecule into Chemhacktica and waits for the program to run.

“All right, here’s your reaction,” he says, showing me the screen. Laufer explains that both precursors needed to make Kalydeco are available commercially, and that one costs $1 per gram and the other costs $28 per gram. He checks the daily dosage (roughly 300 mg per day), and Chemhacktica spits out a potential yield. He explains that, in back-of-the-envelope math, “me, a non-chemist doing a first pass,” Kalydeco could be made “in the range of $10 a day for raw materials.” When Kalydeco was first introduced, it cost roughly $820 per patient per day.

I tell Laufer more about my friend, and about how she sometimes couldn’t afford basic medications during periods when she lost her health insurance. I explained that some treatments she wanted to try were approved for use in other countries, but not in the United States. Laufer explains that, over the years, he’s learned about so many different medications for so many different types of diseases that are either very expensive or very hard to get. 

“There are so many of these that fall into this unbelievable fucking category, where it would just take nothing to make it,” he said. “Everybody’s got a story like this, and it’s just so heartbreaking and it never gets easier … we do have happy stories, and they keep us going, but there’s a lot of heartbreakers.” 

At DEF CON, Laufer begins his talk by explaining that, a few years ago, he had a mystery illness that caused him to lose his hair and shed layers of his skin. Ultimately, he had a tumor removed.

“I don't know who needs to hear this but I'm scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what's wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what's wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can't have it because the infrastructure has failed and it's not available.”

“This is wrong,” he says. “And I hope to show you all some tools so that it doesn’t ever have to happen again … most medications, you can make a better, cheaper version of, yourself, at home.”

Throughout his talk, Laufer explains how Four Thieves was able to make cheaper versions of Daraprim, the epipen, and abortion medication. 

“Daraprim is still $750 per 50mg pill,” his presentation slides say. He holds up a full pill bottle of DIY Daraprim that he made for $80. “You want it? I’ll toss it out.” He tosses it into the audience. 

Then, Laufer explains how the collective was able to make sofosbuvir to treat Hepatitis C at an enormously cheaper price than Gilead, which makes Sovaldi. He pulls up a photo of Daniel O’Day, the CEO of Gilead, and says he has obtained O’Day’s phone number. He calls the number on stage. A woman answers.

“This is Dr. Mixæl Laufer. I’m calling from Four Thieves. He’s expecting my call,” he says. The woman goes to grab O’Day. O’Day answers the phone. “I don’t know how you got my number but please don’t call again.” He hangs up.

“Well, I tried,” Laufer tells the crowd. 

Later in the talk, he details how the team made sofosbuvir and pressed it into a small pill. He pulls some out, and hands them to members of the crowd. He shows the crowd testing Four Thieves did to show that the pills they made are, chemically, the same as Sovaldi. He takes out a pill, swallows it on stage, and pumps his fist. 

After his talk, I told Laufer that I got the sense that he actually wanted to talk to O’Day, and didn’t just want to yell at him. “I would have been interested to hear more of his perspective, because I am of the general impression that most people in most situations do what they do because they think it’s the right thing,” Laufer told me. “When you find someone doing something you think is really wrong, they’re usually dealing with a different set of assumptions and logical structure than you are. It’s not that there’s no logic. Usually people have thought it through and their manner of thought is different than yours.”

“If the science [of Big Pharma] didn’t work, I wouldn’t care what they fucking charged,” Laufer said. “The point is the science works and people can’t get it. There’s often this ‘good guy, bad guy, black-and-white disconnect that happens in the rhetoric. And I’m like, ‘No, pharmaceutical science is amazing. That’s the whole point.”

Laufer’s point is that the research that goes into making a new drug is hard, but that actually producing some of these medications after they’ve been invented is sometimes easy and inexpensive. Charging astronomical prices to people who are dying is immoral, and Four Thieves seeks to normalize the idea of making some types of medicine yourself. 

“Most people kind of cower,” he says at Def Con. “Chemistry seems hard. It seems like a specialized thing. Well, sure, if you’re doing research chemistry, that’s why there’s a PhD in it. Of course. But if you just need to operate it, similar to the difference between building a computer, and using a computer, it’s significantly easier.”

On the call, Laufer told me that, “for the first time, we are possibly at least within striking distance of our ultimate goal of being able to disband as an organization.”

“Our ultimate hope is to get to a point where we’re no longer necessary because the notion of DIY medicine, no matter anybody’s opinion of it is common enough that if it comes up in conversation, someone can say ‘Oh I’m just going to 3D print a replacement,’” he said. “Or, you know ‘there’s this migraine medication that I like, can’t get a prescription for, and it’s so expensive,’ and someone says ‘just try making that.’ I want to get to where that sort of exchange is common.”

“I can’t tell people that they should use what we make, because I don’t think that’s morally defensible,” he said. “We develop things that we think are a good idea, and the tools to make them. We leave them on the table and people can use them or not, but we’re never going to push it. I would much rather the world be like ‘We thought about this really carefully, and capitalism is here to stay.’ If people decide for themselves that ‘Look, the infrastructure does abuse us, but this is the system we like, and we like it better.’ If that’s the way it breaks, that’s the way it breaks.”

Back before we had TV shows running all year long, fall used to mark the beginning of a brand new TV season (it still does for some networks). So, with September on the horizon, this week's staff Q&A is a nod to that special time of year when new shows start cropping up like pumpkin patches: What's your favorite TV pilot of all time?

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