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The U.S. Government is currently considering a ban on certain Chinese social media apps, including the massively popular TikTok. And it’s totally not because the President got trolled by a bunch of teenagers who conspired to falsely RSVP to his comeback rally over the app. In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham early Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated the United States was “very seriously” looking into banning the app, saying “With respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you the United States will get this one right too… I don’t want to get out in front of the President, but it’s something we’re looking at,” adding that American users of the app should only download TikTok if “you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”

According to CNN, while TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based startup ByteDance, the company has an American CEO and claims that data centers are located outside of China and therefore not subjected to Chinese law, and actively stores U.S. user data in the United States. In a statement following Pompeo’s remarks, a spokesperson restated that the company has “no higher priority than promoting a safe and secure app experience for our users.” Adding that the company has “never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked.”

The issue at stake

The ban consideration comes amid heightened tensions between the United States and China, as President Trump makes anti-Chinese sentiment a key part of his reelection campaign. The app and 58 others were recently banned in India as relations between the country and China have escalated, and now faces a loss of as much as $6 billion, according to Forbes. Another dent in revenue brought on by a potential U.S. ban might post massive problems for the app, which was downloaded an unprecedented 315 million times in the first three months of this year, according to analytics company Sensor Tower, and that doesn’t even account for the number of people who joined the app for the first time at the start of the country-wide lockdown in March.

What makes TikTok particularly concerning?

Social media apps collecting your data isn’t anything new. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat all collect your location data, internet address, browsing history, and can identify the type of device you’re using. TikTok can collect your phone and social-network contacts, GPS position, age, phone number, and any user-generated content you post, according to the Wall Street Journal, and tracks your watching habits to get a better understanding of how to personalize individual user experiences.

However, Chinese apps, in particular, tend to collect more data than they actually need, according to senior technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, Jon Callas. This puts TikTok at a larger concern than American based apps as lawmakers and U.S. officials worry about the Chinese government’s mass data collection on American citizens.

Can This Actually Happen?

Absolutely. In his interview with Laura Ingraham, Pompeo pointed to precedent for such a ban in the FCC’s decision to designate the Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE as national security threats. According to the Wall Street Journal, the app has already been banned within the U.S. Military, and the House recently passed a bill that bans TSA officials from using the app. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission also slapped TikTok with a $6 million fine over the data collection practices of minors using Musical.ly, which was acquired by TikTok in 2017.

TikTok certainly wouldn’t be the first app under Chinese ownership to raise national security concerns. According to Tech Crunch, the popular dating app Grindr — which was acquired by the Chinese-based company Beijing Kunlun in 2016 — came under similar scrutiny after it was reported that while under Chinese ownership, engineers in Beijing were allowed to access the personal data of U.S. users, which included private messages and HIV status. When the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States told Beijing Kunlun that ownership of Grinder constitutes a national security threat, the Chinese company sold its 98% stake in the app.

TikTok is currently actively under a national security review by the federal government so if the app is revealed to be dangerously invasive, our days with the platform will be numbered.

Nashville rockers Bully are gearing up for the release of their third studio, Sugaregg, later this summer. After ushering in a new era with the disorienting single “Where To Start,” Bully returns with “Every Tradition.”

According to vocalist Alicia Bognanno, Sugaregg was written during a chaotic period. Bognanno brought her personal experiences to her songwriting and find clarity through music. “‘Every Tradition’ is one of the most literal songs on the record, forcing myself throughout the writing process to cut out the bullsh*t and put down on paper exactly what was going through my mind, silencing the paranoia of the different ways it could be received,” Bognanno said in a statement. “Some songs just call for that sort of process and ‘Every Tradition’ was one of them.”

Bully’s video accompanying “Every Tradition” speaks to this sense of earnestness. Bognanno shot the video alone in her home with the help of director Alan Del Rio Ortiz on FaceTime. The singer described her video’s shooting process in a statement:

“After we tested out this method (me shooting alone at my house and sending the footage to Alan to edit and put everything together) with ‘Where To Start’ I liked it so much I wanted to do it again and trusted Alan to turn my mess into a well put together music video. Surprisingly I was a lot more comfortable on my own as opposed to having a crew of people there like there has been for past music videos. I also have a newfound appreciation for any cinematographer because god damn it’s a lot of work.”

Watch Bully’s “Every Tradition” video above.

Sugaregg is out 8/21 via Sub Pop. Pre-order it here.

Halloween Kills, the sequel to 2018’s Halloween (not to be confused with 1978’s Halloween or 2007’s Halloween), was scheduled to come out on October 16, 2020, emphasis on the “was.” Universal has pushed Halloween Kills, as well as Halloween Ends, back one year — the new dates are October 15, 2021, and October 14, 2022. Also delayed: Candyman (new date: October 16) and The Forever Purge (July 9, 2021).

The announcement was made by director David Gordon Green and horror maestro John Carpenter, who wrote, “We write this to you heartbroken over the fact that the delay of our film is even a discussion, but if there’s one thing that a career in the film industry has prepared us for, it is the unexpected. Over the past few weeks, our film family has looked at the forecast of theatrical exhibition with obvious concern. We have discussed and struggled with how best to present Halloween Kills to the loyal fans around the world, as well as the new audience we hope to invite to this experience.” They continued:

It was a wild and vibrant production. We lined up a cast of legacy characters like Laurie and Tommy, Lindsey, Lonnie, Marion, Brackett, and The Shape, then alongside some new faces, we aggressively made the second chapter of our Halloween trilogy.

It unfolded into an experience that was a creative playground and we feel confident that our misfit pleasures will be seen as an unexpected entry into this franchise.

If we release it in October of this year as planned, we have to face the reality that the film would be consumed in a compromised theatrical experience. After weighing our options, we have chosen to push the film’s theatrical release by one year… We’re going to have time to complete the film with the quality that fans deserve. And preparation on Halloween Ends has begun as well. It is an honor to be working with these characters and spending time in Haddonfield. We look forward to sharing our next chapters with you.

On the bright side, at least there’s a teaser trailer, which you can watch above. Laurie’s “let him burn” is an extremely 2020 mood.

Back in May, Portugal’s NOS Alive Festival announced they would be canceling their 2020 iteration due to the pandemic. Instead, they focused their energy on making next year’s event one to remember. Staying true to their word, NOS Alive has announced the first wave of 2021 headliners.

NOS Alive 2021 will be held from July 7 to 10 in Lisbon’s Passeio Marítimo de Algés. So far, the festival has shared a handful of acts they have confirmed for the upcoming event. Headliners include veteran rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers along with Angel Olsen, Alt-J, Two Door Cinema Club, Caribou, Fontaines DC, Alec Benjamin, Moses Sumney, Parcels, Caribou, Hobo Johnson And The Lovemakers, and more.

This year’s NOS Alive festival was supposed to see many big-name artists like Charli XCX, Anderson .Paak, Haim, Kendrick Lamar, Jorja Smith, and others. In a statement announcing this summer’s cancelation, festival organizers wrote: “We are feeling positive and committed about working towards making the 2021 edition the best one ever. Staying true to our signature that we want to maintain: the best line-up always!”

NOS Alive tickets are on sale now starting at $78 for single-day passes. Get them here.

Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Earlier this week, on 50 Cent‘s birthday, T.I. challenged his fellow rap mogul to a hits battle on Verzuz, the head-to-head music showcase that has been entertaining music fans on Instagram Live for the past several months of the trash fire of 2020. In his challenge, T.I. included plenty of his characteristic trash talk as he goaded 50 with reminders of his release day L to Kanye West in 2007 and declarations that T.I.’s catalog of hits would demolish 50’s. While 50’s original response was as flippant as it was dismissive, it appears he’s reached his boiling point — such as it is.

Rather than responding directly, 50 instead resorted once again to social media trolling, this time posting video to his accounts of T.I.’s “Crime Stoppers” PSA. In the PSA, T.I. relates his nickname, Tip, to the anonymous “tip line” whose purpose is for citizens to provide information to law enforcement for prevention or investigation of local crime. 50 capped the video with a clip of his verse from G-Unit’s T.O.S.: Terminate On Sight cut “You So Tough,” which obliquely references T.I.’s 2007 arrest for gun possession and gently implies that T.I. snitched to avoid a longer sentence.

“What’s today’s mathematics? Sh*t ain’t addin’ up
Get knocked with 10 machine guns, only get 12 months”

Of course, none of that really has anything to do with whose discography is better, but for better or worse, this is who 50 Cent is now. He’s more interested in promoting his other endeavors, like executive producing Pop’s Smoke’s posthumous album, than he is playing his hits for a streaming audience for free. While he has said he’d battle opponents like Snoop Dogg on Verzuz, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see such a thing anytime soon.

See 50 Cent’s latest response to T.I.’s Verzuz challenge above.

It’s hard to imagine Charlize Theron being of scared anything. But for her new movie The Old Guard, the Oscar winner had to face one of her biggest fears: horses. Cars driven by War Boys with a dude playing a flame-throwing guitar on the roof? No sweat. But horses? That’s a different story, because when Theron was 11 years old, she was thrown off a horse. “I was unconscious for a few hours, and I broke my collarbone,” she told Vogue in 2007. But The Old Guard required her to get back into the saddle, literally.

“For some reason on this film, I decided to finally address that fear,” she said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It was the thing I definitely gave the most time to, even though there was very little of it in the movie. I’m really grateful that I got to have that experience because it was a good one for me to get over. I love horses. I want my children to be around horses. But I always had this fear when I was on them that something could go terribly wrong at any instant. So it was like a metaphor for my life in a weird way, this movie. It was therapeutic for me.”

Now that Theron has faced her fear of horses, she can add another trick to her arsenal.

Am I secretly pitching a John Wick/Atomic Blonde crossover? Maybe…

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

As Converse builds out its stable of sponsored NBA and WNBA stars, the company signed Oklahoma City Thunder youngster Shai Gilgeous-Alexander to a footwear and apparel deal. The partnership will last multiple years, according to the company announcement.

Previously, Gilgeous-Alexander had been a Nike athlete, but in his eyes, Converse, a subsidiary of Nike, offers a more unique opportunity with its apparel options and the chance to get in with a new brand on the ground floor.

“They started the whole basketball sneaker thing,” Gilgeous-Alexander told Erik Horne of The Athletic. “For me, it’s building my own lane, and trying to get it back to that level of people looking at it and seeing it as that high of a basketball brand.”

Gilgeous-Alexander also said he was looking forward to the creativity of being involved with a growing team, signing with Converse while he’s young, and getting to experiment a bit.

“They proposed that they’d give me the opportunity to express myself and my personality on and off the court,” Gilgeous-Alexander told The Athletic. “That’s something that means a lot to me more than just basketball.

Though Gilgeous-Alexander of course thinks fondly of the legendary NBA stars like Julius Erving and Magic Johnson who donned Converse sneakers previously, he said the work of Kelly Oubre Jr. with the company in recent months attracted him. Converse has given Oubre the runway to express himself as part of their partnership, and the young Thunder star hopes to do the same.

He will join a team that includes Oubre, 2019 WNBA champion Natasha Cloud, and Draymond Green as Converse continues to build out its roster.

Pau Gasol did not take the floor for an NBA team during the 2019-20 campaign. While the veteran big man signed a deal to join the Portland Trail Blazers at the start of the year, he did not appear in any games and was waived back in November. His career isn’t over, though, according to a report by Varlas Nikos of EuroHoops.net.

Gasol, a native of Barcelona who started his professional career with his local club, is slated to return to Catalonia. Nikos reports that Gasol and his boyhood club are expecting to wrap up a deal later this summer that will have him suit up for Barcelona one last time, and per his report, the goal is for Gasol to have things come full-circle by suiting up with Spain’s national team during next summer’s Olympics.

If a deal happens, Pau would return to his roots as he was born in Barcelona and that’s where he made the first basketball steps. He started off in Barca’s junior selection and played for three years in the pros before moving on to a successful two-decade-long NBA career.

The ideal unfolding of Pau Gasol’s story would be that the Spaniard completes a full circle in his career with one year at Barca and then retire after one final Olympic run with the national team in Tokyo.

Ideally the arrangement between the two sides does not fall through despite things being “very close to happening,” because it would be really cool to see Gasol play for Barca one final time before he calls it a career. For his NBA career, the two-time champions suited up for five different franchise and averaged 17 points and 9.2 rebounds a night with six All-Star game selections.

I live in Washington, the state with the first official outbreak of COVID-19 in the U.S. While my family lives several hours from Seattle, it was alarming to be near the epicenter—especially early in the pandemic when we knew even less about the coronavirus than we know now.

As tracking websites went up and statistics started pouring in, things looked hairy for Washington. But not for long. We could have and should have shut everything down faster than we did, but Governor Inslee took the necessary steps to keep the virus from flying completely out of control. He’s consistently gotten heat from all sides, but in general he listened to the infectious disease experts and followed the lead of public health officials—which is exactly what government needs to do in a pandemic.

As a result, we’ve spent the past several months watching Washington state drop from the #1 hotspot down to 23rd in the nation (as of today) for total coronavirus cases. In cases per million population, we’re faring even better at number 38. We have a few counties where outbreaks are pretty bad, and cases have slowly started to rise as the state has reopened—which was to be expected—but I’ve felt quite satisfied with how it’s been handled at the state level. The combination of strong state leadership and county-by-county reopenings has born statistically impressive results—especially considering the fact that we didn’t have the lead time that other states did to prepare for the outbreak.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way. We have the same anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-public health advice folks we see elsewhere. We have conspiracy theorists, COVID deniers, “masks are tyranny” protesters, and even a county sheriff who publicly refused to enforce the governor’s stay-at-home order. But Inslee has stood firmly on the side of public health regardless of who whines about it. While pandemic responses are always going to be imperfect and filled with uncertainty and inconsistency (that’s the nature of dealing with a novel virus), the comparative results speak for themselves.

We’ve seen other governors stand their ground under intense pressure from both constituents and the federal government as well. For example, Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was criticized by President Trump for her response, yet when her state became one of the epicenters, she took an aggressive and consistent stance, didn’t back down, and now Michigan’s numbers are significantly lower than states that have taken a lax approach. For instance, Michigan’s daily case increase is now a small fraction of what they are in Florida, where Governor DeSantis has moved aggressively toward reopening, focusing far more on economic recovery than limiting the spread of the virus.

Whitmer’s leadership hasn’t gone unnoticed, either. She’s made a name for herself—as has Michigan’s Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson—for standing strong in the face of criticism from the president. And she’s using the spotlight to call for a stronger federal response and for the government to lead by example.

“I’d like a national mask-up campaign,” she told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota. “I think that if everyone endorsed this, it’s a simple cost effective thing that we could do to really mitigate spread. But the symbols that come from the very top matter and it changes behavior. If we can take the politics out of mask wearing we can save a lot of lives and in doing so save the pain, the economic pain, that we are feeling across this country.”

National leadership is vital in a pandemic, and our national leadership on coronavirus has been…well, lacking. A pandemic response was always going to be a challenge in a large country with 50 diverse states, but when state borders are invisible lines that anyone can cross at any time, we need to all be on the same page about how to prevent the spread. While outbreaks require a local response, a state-by-state approach to figuring out when and how to apply or ease mitigation measures makes little sense. (And making states compete with one another for needed medical equipment is just downright bizarre. Seriously.)

No response is going to win praise from every person, but epidemiologists, virologists, and infectious disease experts have prepared their whole careers for this moment. Political leaders must listen to them, follow their lead, and mold responses around their advice—otherwise we end up right where we are, with 25% of the world’s COVID-19 cases and deaths, despite only being 5% of the world’s population.

Thankfully, some governors are taking their public health responsibility seriously. Here’s to the leaders who have stepped up and stood up in the face of resistance, allowing health professionals to guide the way and implementing protective policies accordingly, no matter how much or how loudly some people complain about it.

While the world at large continues to mourn the loss of drill vanguard Pop Smoke, his contemporary and collaborator Fivio Foreign has picked up the torch for the nascent subgenre. The Brooklyn newcomer recruits one of his hometown’s vets to provide a stunner of a verse over another drill banger for his latest single. Young M.A. may not be native to the drill scene, but her choppy, punchline-ridden flow is the perfect complement to Fivio’s on “Move Like A Boss.”

Produced by Non Native, Bordeaux, and Saint Cardona, “Move Like A Boss” features an archetypical drill beat with rumbling, dub-step-esque bass drops, scattered, warring snares, and ghostly choral vocals, occasionally punctuated with the sound of a gunshot. However, all those sinister-sounding theatrics are merely the backdrop to the real action: the menacing, nihilistic bars describing Brooklyn’s underground scene of violence and bravado.

“N****s will give you a dap then shoot at your back with the same hand,” Fivio barks on his verse. “I’m well in tune with the mayhem, but I still walked out a great man.” Meanwhile, M.A., just a couple of years removed from her own encounters with street life, isn’t about to endanger the bag. “I pray I don’t see an enemy,” she drawls. “Woo-sah, serenity.”

“Move Like A Boss” is reportedly the third single from Fivio’s upcoming debut album, tentatively titled “B.I.B.L.E.” He’s also fresh off his own run of high-profile co-signs, including Drake’s “Demons” on Dark Lane Demo Tapes, Lil Tjay’s “Zoo York” video, and his own “Big Drip” remix, which features Lil Baby and Quavo.

Watch Fivio Foreign’s “Move Like A Boss” video with Young M.A. above.