A controversial bill in Colorado that would have undone some repair protections in the state has failed. The bill had been the target of right-to-repair advocates, who saw it as a bellwether for how tech companies might try to undo repair legislation more broadly in the US.

Colorado’s landmark 2024 repair law, the Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment, went into effect in January 2026 and ensured access to tools and documentation people needed to modify and fix digital electronics such as phones, computers, and Wi-Fi routers. The new bill, SB26-090, would have carved out an exception to those repair protections for “critical infrastructure,” a loosely defined term that repair advocates worried could be applied to just about any technology.

SB26-090 was introduced during a Colorado Senate hearing on April 2 and was supported by lobbying efforts from companies such as Cisco and IBM. It passed that hearing unanimously. The bill then passed in the Colorado Senate on April 16. On Monday evening, the bill was discussed in a long, delayed hearing in the Colorado House’s State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee. Dozens of supporters and detractors gave public comments. Finally, the bill was shot down in a 7-to-4 vote and classified as postponed indefinitely.

Danny Katz, executive director of the local nonprofit consumer advocacy group CoPIRG, says the battle was a group effort. Speaking against the bill were a cohort of repair advocates from organizations such as PIRG, Repair.org, iFixit, Consumer Reports, and local businesses and environmental groups like Blue Star Recyclers, Recycle Colorado, Environment Colorado, and GreenLatinos.

“While we were making progress at chipping away at the momentum for it, we had still been losing,” Katz wrote in an email to WIRED after the hearing. “So, we took nothing for granted, and I believe the incredible testimony from the broad range of cybersecurity experts, businesses, repair advocates, recyclers, and people who want the freedom to fix their stuff made a big difference.”

Supporters of the bill, backed by companies like Cisco, had pointed to the potential for cybersecurity risks as their motivation for altering the law’s language. If companies were required to make repair tools available to anyone, the theory goes, what’s to stop bad actors from using those tools to reverse engineer critical technology like Internet routers? Withholding those tools, they posited, would make them less available to hackers who could misuse them. Advocates of the bill said that companies should be allowed to keep their secrets if it ensured security, though that argument starts to fall apart with a little scrutiny.

At one point in the hearing, Democrat Chad Clifford, a Colorado state representative and the House committee’s vice chair who was also a prime sponsor of the bill, pointed to what appeared to be a reference to Cloudflare’s very public use of a wall of lava lamps to help randomize Internet encryption, citing that as an example of the need for sensitive systems to be inscrutable to be secure.

“I don’t know why anybody has to have lava lamps on a wall to keep the Chinese from getting into a network, but it’s what they came up with that worked,” Clifford said. “How they do that, I believe they should be able to keep it a secret, even in Colorado.”

The problem with that argument, as cybersecurity experts pointed out during the hearing, is that the vast majority of hacks are not carried out via replacement parts or by taking apart individual machines. They’re remote hacks, where the attacker makes changes in real time, and the people defending have to make changes on the fly without worrying about acquiring permission from the company that makes the equipment.

“There is no time,” cybersecurity expert and white hat hacker Billy Rios said during the hearing. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Besides the cybersecurity argument, the other point of contention was the economics of angering the big tech companies that have invested in the state.

“They’re not going to comply and give away the keys to their kingdom for the things that are securing billions of dollars of interest for their customers over the law that we passed,” Clifford said. “What they’re going to do is just not have commerce on those items here.”

That argument didn’t carry enough weight to change the vote in supporters’ favor. By the end of the hearing, it was clear that everyone was exhausted and not entirely clear on how exactly the new bill and amendments would pan out.

“What are we really trying to do here?” said Colorado Representative Naquetta Ricks in her no vote at the end of the hearing. “Are we protecting just one company, or are we looking at really critical infrastructure? I’m not convinced.”

Nathan Proctor, senior director of US PIRG’s Campaign for the Right to Repair, said he was relieved to see lawmakers understand that repair isn’t inherently dangerous. But he knows this isn’t over. He fully expects lobbyists to keep up the fight in Colorado and more broadly. He points to recent repair laws in other states like Iowa and to the increasing number of states considering repair legislation, readying up for the inevitable battles there, too.

“The fact of the matter is, unfixable stuff is everywhere,” Proctor wrote. “This is a widespread problem, and it requires a widespread response.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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In my misspent youth, I once worked a summer job as a waiter at Shoney's. It is an experience that I do not recommend. But it did teach me two valuable things: 1) How not to drown in a puddle of my own embarrassment when marching around the dining room with my fellow servers and singing a birthday song that began, "Happy, happy birthday, we're so glad you came"; and 2) That when the surly line cooks ran out of chicken fried steak, they would shout "86 the chicken fried steak!" through the pass.

To "86" something, in restaurant slang, is to say that it is out, finished, gone, through, not on the menu anymore. This is the only sense in which I have heard the term used in my entire life.

But according to Wikipedia, which naturally has an entry about the term, two further meanings do exist. "86" can also be applied to people a restaurant refuses to serve, and some slang dictionaries say it can refer to murder.

Which brings us to former FBI director James Comey, Instagram, and a picture of seashells.

86 the shells!

In 2025, Comey posted to Instagram an image of shells arranged in the shape of two numbers: "86 47."

James Comey's seashell post.

Trump, our 47th President, has long harbored a grudge against Comey, going back to Comey's investigation of Trump's possible Russian ties. Trump famously fired Comey in 2017—then, for good measure, fired his prosecutor daughter in 2025.

Trump has been clear for years about his desire to use the power of the federal government to make life more difficult for Comey, and federal officials in his second term have been willing to comply.

Fortunately, they have also been pretty stupid. Through a series of staggeringly incompetent actions, the administration already had its first Comey indictment tossed out in Virginia—a loss so epic that it got Trump's interim US attorney for Virginia booted, too.

Today, on completely new and unrelated charges, the Department of Justice has indicted Comey again, this time in North Carolina. The charge is nothing less than a threat to murder the president.

And it's all based on that single seashell image.

The new indictment says that Comey "did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out '86 47,' which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States."

You might expect more details in a case this serious and against such a high-ranking former official; there are none.

The DOJ held a 15-minute press conference in which three men in suits tried to make this all sound normal and natural.

Get in the clown car

A case this ridiculous, and about such a weighty matter, may be the bulbous red nose that completes the full-on beclownment of the Department of Justice under Trump. (The DOJ is currently run by one of Trump's personal lawyers.) Popular legal blog Above the Law, for instance, called today's move a "new low point for DOJ integrity."

As we have learned just in a single day, the federal government is willing to come after your broadcast licenses if you make a joke that Trump doesn't like... and your freedom if you make social media posts that Trump doesn't like. These are apparently the ways in which Trump is fulfilling his promise to halt government "censorship" of US citizens.

Trump himself is, of course, a famously peace-loving—sorry, "peace prize"-loving—man, most recently seen warning Iran that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" in a social media post so unhinged even the pope had to step in and tell him to knock it off.

But apparently, it's James Comey's restaurant-slang seashell Instagram image that's the real crime, the sort of thing stopping America from being truly great again.

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The Federal Communications Commission today opened an unusual review of ABC's broadcast licenses, one day after President Trump and the first lady called on ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel over a recent joke in which he said Melania Trump looked like an "expectant widow."

There are no TV station licenses for any company up for renewal until 2028, and the legal process for revoking licenses is so difficult that it's been described as nearly impossible. But the FCC today issued an order instructing ABC owner Disney to file early license renewal applications for all of its licensed TV stations by May 28.

"FCC rules provide that whenever the FCC regards an application for a renewal of a license as essential to the proper conduct of an investigation, the FCC has the authority to call the broadcaster’s licenses in for early renewal," the agency said. "Doing so both allows the FCC to conduct its ongoing investigation and enables the FCC to ensure that the broadcaster has been meeting its public interest obligations more broadly."

The demand apparently stems from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's opposition to Disney's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices, which he claims are a form of discrimination. Carr previously opened an investigation into the matter, and today's order said the FCC "has been investigating Disney’s ABC stations for possible violations of the Communications Act of 1934 and the FCC’s rules, including the agency’s prohibition on unlawful discrimination."

"While Disney’s ABC has purported to respond to two FCC Letters of Inquiry (LOIs) as part of this investigation, the FCC has determined that additional actions are appropriate at this time," the agency order said.

Kimmel's pretend roast

The license probe reportedly was sped up after the Kimmel joke. An NBC News article said that, while the proceeding ostensibly is about DEI, a source indicated that it was "fast-tracked after ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about first lady Melania Trump."

The uproar is over a Kimmel joke during a skit in which he pretended to deliver a roast at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. "Our first lady, Melania, is here... So beautiful, Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow," Kimmel said. Kimmel also suggested in his pretend roast that Trump and his wife were introduced to each other by Jeffrey Epstein.

ABC owns eight TV stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, and Fresno. The stations' licenses were originally scheduled for renewals between 2028 and 2031, a Disney spokesperson told Ars today.

"ABC and its stations have a long record of operating in full compliance with FCC rules and serving their local communities with trusted news, emergency information, and public‑interest programming," Disney said in a statement provided to Ars. "We are confident that record demonstrates our continued qualifications as licensees under the Communications Act and the First Amendment and are prepared to show that through the appropriate legal channels."

"Retribution for a joke Donald Trump didn’t like"

Anna Gomez, the only Democratic FCC commissioner, said in a statement today that the Disney review "is the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the First Amendment to date. As part of its ongoing campaign of censorship and control, the White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic, and this FCC has now answered that call. This is an unprecedented and politically motivated attempt to interfere with how broadcasters operate, and this unlawful overreach will fail. This should be a lesson to media companies that no amount of capitulation to this administration will buy them protection. The only choice is to stand up and stand firm in defense of the First Amendment.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that demanding an early license renewal "is an extremely rare escalation." Free Press co-CEO Jessica J. González said, “Carr will try to dress up this latest attack like a legitimate FCC procedure, but his motivations are clear. He is using his position of power to silence dissent at the president’s beck and call... The timing of this move suggests unconstitutional retribution for a joke Donald Trump didn’t like."

An ABC probe could examine DEI, Kimmel's comedy, and other shows. Carr threatened ABC station licenses in September 2025, alleging at the time that airing Kimmel's show might violate the rarely enforced news distortion policy. He later opened an equal-time rule investigation into ABC’s The View, even though the interview portions of talk shows have historically been exempt from the rule.

Carr's investigations into media generally haven't gone very far, but the probes cause trouble for news organizations even if they don't result in penalties. Carr has also used merger reviews to impose requirements related to DEI and news coverage, since large companies are willing to make concessions in exchange for transaction approvals.

Trump's fight against comedy

Trump skipped the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in previous years but attended this year's event on April 25. The dinner was cut short by gunshots in an apparent assassination attempt.

Kimmel's monologue and skit aired last week, before the dinner occurred. Kimmel said the event typically includes remarks from a comedian, but that this year's event had no comedian because "our president is a delicate snowflake." Kimmel introduced the skit by saying he had decided to "do some of the jokes a comedian might do if our president wasn't a trembling drama queen who's scared of comedy."

In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump linked the "expectant widow" joke to the shooting. "A day later a lunatic tried entering the ballroom of the White House Correspondents Dinner, loaded up with a shotgun, handgun, and many knives. He was there for a very obvious and sinister reason," Trump wrote. "I appreciate that so many people are incensed by Kimmel’s despicable call to violence, and normally would not be responsive to anything that he said but, this is something far beyond the pale. Jimmy Kimmel should be immediately fired by Disney and ABC."

Melania Trump called for Kimmel's firing in an X post. "His monologue about my family isn’t comedy... People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate. A coward, Kimmel hides behind ABC because he knows the network will keep running cover to protect him," the first lady wrote.

Kimmel defends "very light roast joke" about age gap

Kimmel discussed the controversy over his skit in last night's monologue. "There was no big reaction to it until this morning when I greeted the day facing yet another Twitter vomit storm and a call to fire me from our first lady, Melania Trump, saying I should be fired because of a joke I made five nights ago," Kimmel said.

Kimmel said he made "a very light roast joke about the fact that he's almost 80 and she's younger than I am. It was not by any stretch of the definition a call to assassination, and they know that. I have been very vocal for many years speaking out against gun violence."

Addressing the first lady, Kimmel said, "I agree that hateful and violent rhetoric is something we should reject, and I think a great place to start to dial that back would be to have a conversation with your husband about it."

Today's FCC announcement of the Disney probe came several hours after a group of former FCC chairs and commissioners asked a federal appeals court to compel the FCC to respond to a November 2025 petition to repeal the agency's 1960s-era news distortion policy.

"If the writ is granted, the FCC will be required to take a position on whether to repeal or uphold the news distortion policy, which FCC Chair Brendan Carr has abused to chill free speech in the press," said a press release announcing today's court filing. The filing was submitted by former FCC leaders from both major political parties along with the Radio Television Digital News Association, which represents broadcast journalists.

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Seems like kind of a big deal:

The United Arab Emirates will next month leave OPEC, a cartel of oil-producing countries, its government said on Tuesday, a decision that will weaken the group’s influence over global energy markets.

Emirati officials had long floated the idea of quitting the cartel, complaining that its quotas had unfairly curtailed its oil exports.

The government is now expected to increase its energy production to serve its own national interests. Before the war, the Emirates was producing about 3.6 million barrels of oil per day, according to the International Energy Agency — roughly 12 percent of OPEC’s overall production. OPEC countries supplied more than a quarter of the world’s oil before the war with Iran.

A coalition of the world’s largest oil exporters, OPEC was able to steer prices by setting quotas for those countries. But the organization’s power had slipped in recent years as U.S. oil production soared.

I don’t have a good sense for the immediate impact of this… obviously when you’re a consumer and not a producer weakening a cartel is on balance a good thing, although oil markets are so complex and I confess I can’t fully understand the downstream implications. Does seem to suggest a pretty significant political rift between UAE and KSA, though, and that’s undoubtedly related to the prosecution of the war.

The post OPEC Shakeup appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I’m not even the biggest fan of billionaire’s taxes, which can be a cousin of the slopulist idea that it’s possible to fund a generous welfare state by taxing only the very wealthy. But the lengths plutocrats who will not be materially affected by such a tax in any way will go to stop them remains embarrassing:

It was a holiday party at a crypto titan’s estate in Marin County, and Sergey Brin had a bone to pick with Gavin Newsom.

Mr. Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. Both men attended each other’s weddings. But now Mr. Brin pulled Mr. Newsom aside to a different part of the property for a serious talk.

Mr. Brin told Mr. Newsom that he could not stand the state’s proposed billionaire tax. They were soon joined by Mr. Brin’s girlfriend, Gerelyn Gilbert-Soto, a Trump-loving gut-health influencer. 

“Gut health influencer.” Please kill me.

Even as she tried to defuse the tension — joking that she would let Mr. Newsom’s bad policies slide because he was handsome — she argued that the measure would wreck California’s economy.

Mr. Newsom, who had never seemed inclined to support the tax, came out the next month and pledged to defeat it. He declined to comment on the interaction.

The December confrontation, which took place at a party thrown by the billionaire Chris Larsen and was recounted by three people briefed on it, reflected Mr. Brin’s new war footing. He is growing more politically agitated, more willing to spend his estimated $273 billion fortune on elections and evidently more receptive to Republican points of view.

Mr. Brin, 52, long showed little interest in politics. When he did, he embraced liberal causes: He donated to a campaign to defend same-sex marriage in California in 2008 and backed President Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. He called President Trump’s election in 2016 “deeply offensive” in leaked comments to Google employees and then joined a protest against Mr. Trump’s ban on immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries. In 2021, he quietly started a nonprofit group that has spent at least $88 million on climate and environmental policy.

But now, like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right.

With his outspokenly conservative girlfriend by his side, he has joined the ranks of tech executives courting Mr. Trump in his second term. Last May, he attended a fund-raiser featuring Vice President JD Vance and donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee. In September, he told the president at a White House dinner that he was “very grateful” for the administration’s support of tech companies. This March, he was named to a White House tech council and donated to a Republican candidate for governor of California who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement.

Mr. Brin is particularly rattled by the proposal for a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires, and has emerged as Silicon Valley’s leading combatant of the measure. To escape the tax, he moved before a Dec. 31 deadline to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe (he now spends every other week at Google’s California headquarters, alternating with Nevada, a person familiar with the arrangement said). And he has spent $57 million to try to undercut the measure, including $9 million more disclosed on Friday.

Brin’s net worth is north of $200 billion. The tax will not affect his descendants for generations let alone himself. But it’s enough for him to embrace fascism. It’s revolting.

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Aficionados of game console emulator history will almost certainly be familiar with ZSNES, an MS-DOS-based (and, later, Windows-based) emulator for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that originally launched back in 1997. Originally written in x86 assembly code, it was known best for its performance on low-end PCs and was capable of running some games at full speed on chips as slow as a 233 MHz Pentium II, though it usually did so at the expense of emulation accuracy.

ZSNES developed rapidly (alongside the contemporary, competing Snes9x project) throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s. Updates slowed after the original creators left the project, and new releases ceased entirely around 2007.

But a successor to ZSNES has arrived. The project's original creators (who go by the handles zsKnight and _Demo_) have returned 19 years later with a new follow-up project called "Super ZSNES," an SNES emulator that emphasizes audio-visual upgrades to those aging ’90s-era Super Nintendo games. The only more surprising emulator news would be if NESticle somehow rose from the dead.

Aside from the name, the developers, and an updated version of the falling-snow menu screen, Super ZSNES has nothing to do with the original project. The new emulator has been "re-written completely from scratch" with "no vibe coding." The emulator features "far more accurate CPU and Audio cores than the original ZSNES" and makes extensive use of GPU-based rendering instead of the mainly CPU-based emulation of the original and most other SNES emulators.

But the main selling point for Super ZSNES, and the reason for its existence alongside mature full-featured emulators like Snes9x and Higan/bsnes, is its new "super enhancement engine." These enhancement features go beyond typical image upscaling and screen filters, adding features like widescreen support and texture mapping that can optionally give supported games "a higher resolution look."

Super ZSNES can also replace the original audio samples with uncompressed versions ("restored" versions of SNES game soundtracks that claim to use uncompressed versions of the original audio samples are a whole thing), and can add actual 3D to games that use the Mode 7 effect rather than just upscaling it. These enhancements don't directly modify the ROM files, nor do they include data from ROMs, insulating the project from legal action.

An overview video by Modern Vintage Gamer shows many of these new updates in action, and they can definitely give old SNES games a dramatically different look and sound. They likely won't do much for the kinds of retro-game purists who spend their time looking for the perfect CRT filter, but they can give you something new to look at and listen to while you work on your 17th playthrough of Super Mario World.

These enhancements need to be created on a per-game basis, and the initial Super ZSNES release only includes enhancements for seven "popular games": F-Zero, Gradius 3, the first Mega Man X, Super Castlevania 4, Super Ghouls & Ghosts, Super Mario World, and Super Metroid. The creators plan to add support for more games in the future, and players will also be able to create their own enhancements for individual games using tools built into the emulator.

The initial Super ZSNES release supports Windows, Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, Linux, and Android, with an iOS release "coming soon." Future releases will include general bug fixes and performance optimizations, support for popular enhancement chips like the DSP-1 and SuperFX, "more types of enhancements," online netplay, and more.

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