Negotiations between CFIUS and TikTok have dragged on as officials wrapped their arms around complex technical questions about the app. They edged closer to a detailed agreement in recent months, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Under the draft terms, TikTok would make changes to three main areas, the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

First, TikTok would store its American data solely on servers in the United States, probably run by Oracle, instead of on its own servers in Singapore and Virginia, two of the people said. Second, Oracle is expected to monitor TikTok’s powerful algorithms that determine the content that the app recommends, in response to concerns that the Chinese government could use its feed as a way to influence the American public, they said. Lastly, TikTok would create a board of security experts, reporting to the government, to oversee its U.S. operations, three people with knowledge said.

BuzzFeed earlier reported TikTok’s plan to store its data with Oracle; Axios earlier reported that Oracle had started monitoring TikTok’s algorithms.

TikTok is represented in the negotiations by the law firms Covington Burling and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher Flom, people familiar with the matter said. Among the government officials negotiating a deal are Adam Hickey, a Justice Department national security lawyer, two people with knowledge of the talks said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/technology/tiktok-national-security-china.html

Never underestimate the interest in ogling a cute guy on a big screen.

Harry Styles, the white-hot musician, sex symbol and fledgling movie star, powered the critically drubbed and controversy-entangled “Don’t Worry Darling” to a solid $19.2 million in estimated ticket sales at North American cinemas over the weekend. That No. 1 total was propped up by more than $3 million in preview screenings from earlier in the week.

Women made up 66 percent of the audience, according to Warner Bros., the studio behind the $35 million film, with an unusually large 52 percent of ticket buyers under the age of 25.

“Don’t Worry Darling,” an R-rated romantic mystery co-starring Florence Pugh and directed by Olivia Wilde, who also acted in it, received a B-minus grade from moviegoers in CinemaScore exit polls. It played in 4,113 theaters in the United States and Canada.

The film collected an additional $10.8 million overseas, in 61 markets.

Reviews were mostly negative, and Wilde and her film generated a torrent of unfavorable prerelease publicity, with Wilde getting into a public tit for tat with Shia LaBeouf, who was originally hired for the role that Styles ended up playing; Pugh seeming to actively resist promoting the film, leading to reports of a rift between herself and Wilde. In August, Pugh voiced discomfort about an emphasis on sex in “Don’t Worry Darling” marketing materials. (“Reduced to your sex scenes” is how she put it, speaking to Harper’s Bazaar. “It’s not why I’m in this industry.”)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/25/movies/dont-worry-darling-box-office.html

In the nine days after the queen’s death, the digital fund-raising totals for Ms. Demings slipped about 60 percent compared with the last nine days of August, said Christian Slater, a campaign spokesman.

Laura Carlson, digital director for the Democratic Governors Association, said in an interview on Friday that the group’s fund-raising fell from the first to the second week of September, which was a departure from past totals.

“One of the factors that kept kind of coming up was the queen’s funeral,” she said. “It definitely hurt our projections.”

In the United States, more than 11 million people watched the queen’s funeral on broadcast and cable television networks on Monday, according to Nielsen, the research firm known for its television rating figures. The total did not include those who used streaming services.

“It’s also kind of a spectacle in the way that political news isn’t,” Deborah L. Jaramillo, an associate professor of film and television at Boston University, said in an interview on Friday.

Professor Jaramillo, who is working on a book about how death is portrayed on television, said that nonstop coverage of the queen’s funeral was less costly for cable news networks and underscored their tendency to cover highly visual events.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/us/politics/queen-democratic-donations.html

To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.

“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.

Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.

Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/magazine/dont-worry-darling-olivia-wilde.html

A month after Florida passed legislation that prohibits classroom discussion or instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, which the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed into law in March, the volume of tweets falsely linking gay and transgender individuals to pedophilia soared, for example.

Language claiming that gay people and transgender people were “grooming” children for abuse increased 406 percent on Twitter in April, according to a study by the Human Rights Campaign and the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The narrative was spread most widely by 10 far-right figures, including midterm candidates such as Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, according to the report. Their tweets on “grooming” misinformation were viewed an estimated 48 million times, the report said.

In May, Ms. Boebert tweeted: “A North Carolina preschool is using LGBT flag flashcards with a pregnant man to teach kids colors. We went from Reading Rainbow to Randy Rainbow in a few decades, but don’t dare say the Left is grooming our kids!” The tweet was shared nearly 2,000 times and liked nearly 10,000 times.

Ms. Boebert and Ms. Taylor Greene did not respond to requests for comment.

On Facebook and Instagram, 59 ads also promoted the narrative that the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and allies were “grooming” children, the report found. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, accepted up to $24,987 for the ads, which were served to users over 2.1 million times, according to the report.

Meta said it had removed several of the ads mentioned in the report.

“The repeated pushing of ‘groomer’ narratives has resulted in a wider anti-L.G.B.T. moral panic that has been influencing state and federal legislation and is likely to be a significant midterm issue,” said David Thiel, the chief technical officer at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which studies online extremism and disinformation.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/midterm-elections-misinformation.html