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With the Federal Emergency Management Agency reeling from major staffing and funding shortages amid the impact of Hurricane Helene, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) refused on Sunday to commit to reconvening the House before Election Day to aid recovery efforts. In response to a letter from President Biden urging congressional leaders back to replenish federal disaster loan funding, Johnson said during a Fox News Sunday interview that he’d only do so after the election—all but ensuring the funds will run out.

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David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, frequently posts videos on a website called Odysee. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also streams his podcast, “The Alex Jones Show,” on the site. It works a lot like YouTube and attracts millions of views each month.

Anti-hate groups say the site is a hotbed of extremism where users from around the world — including promoters of U.S.-designated terrorist group the Nordic Resistance Movement, Holocaust deniers and Proud Boys supporters — use Odysee’s data storage and financial features to spread their views and raise money. Users also take advantage of the forum’s near complete lack of content moderation. The site’s CEO said he’s dedicated to keeping the company “censorship resistant.”

The site also comes with strong New England ties. Odysee was created by a now-defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and began with seed money from a downtown Boston-based venture capital firm called Pillar VC, financed by a diverse constellation of local investors.

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Description: Panel 1: A man sits inside a house at a table or desk, looking at his laptop screen while participating in a video conference call with 9 or more participants. There is a window in the background with the sun in the sky. The man holds up his hand and tells the other participants on the call, "Excuse me everyone, sorry to interrupt . . ." Panel 2: The man looks away from the laptop screen towards the open window and the sky outside. He tells the video conference participants "I have the sunshine on the other line." Panel 3: The man leaves his seat, apparently abruptly, as the chair is knocked over, while the screen is still on and shows the video call participants. The man walks towards an open door, where a backpack sits at the doorway. He looks outside as he says over his shoulder "I have to take this call." Panel 4: The man is wordlessly walking over a hill, with grasses and bushes in the foreground and trees in the background, wearing the backpack, following the sun and not looking back.

Comic by Jeremyville.

When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.

By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.

There are lots of reasons to want to shut off your car’s data collection. The Mozilla Foundation has called modern cars “surveillance machines on wheels” and ranked them worse than any other product category last year, with all 25 car brands they reviewed failing to offer adequate privacy protections.

With sensors, microphones, and cameras, cars collect way more data than needed to operate the vehicle. They also share and sell that information to third parties, something many Americans don’t realize they’re opting into when they buy these cars. Companies are quick to flaunt their privacy policies, but those amount to pages upon pages of legalese that leave even professionals stumped about what exactly car companies collect and where that information might go.

So what can they collect?

“Pretty much everything,” said Misha Rykov, a research associate at the Mozilla Foundation, who worked on the car-privacy report. “Sex-life data, biometric data, demographic, race, sexual orientation, gender — everything.” . . .