Fans of low-budget, unhinged trans parodies of comic book movies are in luck this week as The People’s Joker finally becomes available to stream online.
The infamous independent fan film inspired by the titular DC Comics character is now available to watch from the comfort of your own home almost three years after it was controversially banned.
Clown-clad comedian, director, writer, and actress, Vera Drew, announced in a wonderfully chaotic Instagram video on Wednesday (21 January) that the film is now available to watch on streaming platforms Tubi and MUBI.
“You can watch Vera Drew’s critically acclaimed, legally precarious, Gotham award-winning hit film, The People’s Joker, wherever you get your -ubis,” Drew told viewers in the clip.
The film, which features the work of over 200 artists, follows the journey of an “unfunny aspiring clown”, played by Drew, who has spent years numbing herself with a fictional inhalant dubbed “Smylex” after showing signs as a child that she might be transgender.
Eventually, she overcomes the fears and anxieties of living her truth and quite literally transforms into “Joker the Harlequin”, a criminal comedian defying Gotham’s anti-comedy laws.
It was infamously pulled from the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) following legal pressure from DC Comics and its parent company Warner Bros over the film’s prolific use of copyrighted content.
The move prompted widespread backlash from fans who called for the TIFF organisers to show the self-described “illegal comic book movie”.
A movement calling to “Free The People’s Joker” eventually grew into an international phenomenon among cinephiles who demanded the film be available to watch.
It finally received its first official viewing in July 2023 at the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles. It then made its physical Blu-ray and VHS debut in 2024 and eventually premiered in the UK and Ireland in February 2025.
Following its physical release, the movie was added to review site Rotten Tomatoes, where it quickly achieved a 96 per cent approval rating among critics.
Richard Brody, reviewing the film for The New Yorker, called it the “best superhero movie I’ve ever seen” for its “deep” and “personal” themes.
Writing for PinkNews, Amelia Hansford wrote that the film’s “aesthetically fractured” scenes are sporadic, but that, if taken together, “speak to a deeper feeling that’s been bubbling under the surface”.
Alongside its streaming debut, Drew also revealed an array of new merchandise inspired by the film, currently available on the US clothing site Yeyo. The available items also include purchasable behind the scenes clips.
The People’s Joker is available to stream on MUBI in the UK and both MUBI and Tubi in North America.
Share your story! Do you have an important, exciting or uplifting story to tell? Email us at news@pinknews.co.uk
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Young! Fire! is a story-driven visual novel game heading for Linux, Mac, and Windows PC. All thanks to the unstoppable creativity of DRUZI&ISY. That now has a Steam... Continue reading
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This guide will show you how to assemble and use the Qwiic Hub, which for many will simply be a case of connecting wires, however the board has a number of features and options which we wanted to point out here, including mounting, cuttable traces and soldering options.
In the package, you will find the following two items:
You may also need (not included):
As you likely already know, the board has five Qwiic ports, all of which are connected to each other.
You can use any of the ports to connect your microcontroller or devices, however we laid these out to have an obvious single microcontroller port, and four sensor/device ports:
The board provides a set of pads that connect to the same I2C and power lines as the five Qwiic connectors - think of it as another Qwiic connector, without the Qwiic! These are handy for adding non-Qwiic devices to your Qwiic-based project.
They're also great for using as a breadboard Qwiic interface, if you solder the included header strip to the underside of the board:
You can even solder a 4-way 2.54mm terminal block if a screw terminal connection would be useful for your specific project:
When soldering wires directly to the board, we suggest using our underside pads. They're a lot easier to rework later on vs soldering into the pad holes.
There's a small blue LED on the board, which lights up as soon as the board is connected to a powered microcontroller.
This can be disabled by cutting the highlighted trace section - and can be soldered back together if you change your mind:
The board features M2.5 mounting holes, because they're a good balance between compact and 'non-fiddly', and the popularity of the Raspberry Pi has made them widely available.
We offer M2.5 nylon standoffs in the store, along with M2.5 nylon screws. Any packs designed for Raspberry Pi will work too.
Time to grab your stash of Qwiic devices and make your next great project, with the Qwiic Hub making that a lot easier, tidier, and giving you more ways to play.
We love seeing where people have used our products, so we'd really appreciate any reviews with images to inspire others...and us!
Enjoy!
There was a time when wise older people warned you to check your tire pressure regularly. We never did, and would eventually wind up with a flat or, worse, a blowout. These days, your car will probably warn you when your tires are low. That’s because of a class of devices known as tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS).
If you are like us, you see some piece of tech like this, and you immediately guess how it probably works. In this case, the obvious guess is sometimes, but not always, correct. There are two different styles that are common, and only one works in the most obvious way.
We’d guess that the tire would have a little pressure sensor attached to it that would then wirelessly transmit data. In fact, some do work this way, and that’s known as dTPMS where the “d” stands for direct.
Of course, such a system needs power, and that’s usually in the form of batteries, although there are some that get power wirelessly using an RFID-like system. Anything wireless has to be able to penetrate the steel and rubber in the tire, of course.
But this isn’t always how dTPMS systems worked. In days of old, they used a finicky system involving a coil and a pressure-sensitive diaphragm — more on that later.
This is cheap and requires no batteries in the tire. However, it isn’t without its problems. It is purely a relative measurement. In practice, you have to inflate your tires, tell the system to calibrate, and then drive around for half an hour or more to let it learn how your tires react to different roads, speeds, and driving styles.
Changes in temperature, like the first cold snap of winter, are notorious for causing these sensors to read flat. If the weather changes and you suddenly have four flat tires, that’s probably what happened. The tires really do lose some pressure as temperatures drop, but because all four change together, the indirect system can’t tell which one is at fault, if any.
The first passenger vehicle to offer TPMS was the 1986 Porsche 959. Two sensors made from a diaphragm and a coil are mounted between the wheel and the wheel’s hub. The sensors were on opposite sides of the tire. With sufficient pressure on the diaphragm, an electrical contact was made, changing the coil value, and a stationary coil would detect the sensor as it passed. If the pressure drops, the electrical contact opens, and the coil no longer sees the normal two pulses per rotation. The technique was similar to a grid dip meter measuring an LC resonant circuit. The diaphragm switch would change the LC circuit’s frequency, and the sensing coil could detect that.
If one or two pulses were absent despite the ABS system noting wheel rotation, the car would report low tire pressure. There were some cases of centrifugal force opening the diaphragms at high speed, causing false positives, but for the most part, the system worked. This isn’t exactly iTPMS, but it isn’t quite dTPMS either. The diaphragm does measure pressure in a binary way, but it doesn’t send pressure data in the way a normal dTPMS system does.
Of course, as you can see in the video, the 959 was decidedly a luxury car. It would be 1991 before the US-made Corvette acquired TPMS. The Renault Laguna II in 2000 was the first high-volume car to have similar sensors.
In many places, laws were put in place to require TPMS in vehicles. It was also critical for cars that used “run flat” tires. The theory is that you might not notice your run flat tires were actually flat, and while they are, as their name implies, made to run flat, they also require you to limit speed and distance when they are flat.
Old cars or other vehicles that don’t have TPMS can still add it. There are systems that can measure tire pressure and report to a smartphone app. These are, of course, a type of dTPMS.
Of course, there are always problems. An iTPMS system isn’t really reading the tire pressure, so it can easily get out of calibration. Direct systems need battery changing, which usually means removing the tire, and a good bit of work — watch the video below. That means there is a big tradeoff between sending data with enough power to go through the tire and burning through batteries too fast.
Another issue with dTPMS is that you are broadcasting. That means you have to reject interference from other cars that may also transmit. Because of this, most sensors have a unique ID. This raises privacy concerns, too, since you are sending a uniquely identifiable code.
Of course, your car is probably also beaming Bluetooth signals and who knows what else. Not to even mention what the phone in your car is screaming to the ether. So, in practice, TPMS attacks are probably not a big problem for anyone with normal levels of paranoia.
An iTPMS sensor won’t work on a tire that isn’t moving, so monitoring your spare tire is out. Even dTPMS sensors often stop transmitting when they are not moving to save battery, and that also makes it difficult to monitor the spare tire.
Sometimes, when you think of the “obvious” way something works, you are wrong. In this case, you are half right. TPMS reduces tire wear, prevents accidents that might happen during tire failure, and even saves fuel.
Thanks to this technology, you don’t have to remember to check your tire pressure before a trip. You should, however, probably check the tread.
You can roll your own TPMS. Or just listen in with an SDR. If biking is more your style, no problem.
Lunars vibrant zodiac-themed party game releases on both Linux and Windows PC. This is thanks to the ongoing creative talents of developer Anubis Arts. In addition, you can... Continue reading
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A series of anti-LGBTQ+ riders attached to several large spending bills in Congress were removed from the bill to fund the Departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services, the latest draft of which was published yesterday. Democrats are claiming credit for having successfully worked to remove them.
The riders – which would have banned all federal funding from supporting gender-affirming care at any age, banned colleges and universities from letting trans people participate in sports or other activities, and banned K-12 schools from taking measures to support trans kids like letting them use the restroom of their gender – were attached to the $224 billion Fiscal Year 2026 Labor, HHS, Education and Related Agencies funding bill late last year.
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Independent journalist Erin Reed reports that the riders (or provisions in a funding bill unrelated to funding agencies) have been removed from the latest draft, which must be passed by January 30 to keep the government fully funded.
“The bills are strikingly clean,” Reed wrote. “Now, the package has been released—and for the moment, transgender people can breathe again.”
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Congressional Democrats are claiming credit for removing those provisions.
“Rep. McBride works closely with her colleagues every day to defend the rights of all her constituents, including LGBTQ people across Delaware,” a spokesperson for out Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE) told Reed. “She was proud to work relentlessly with her colleagues in ensuring these funding bills did not include anti-LGBTQ provisions. It takes strong allies in leadership and on committees to rein in the worst excesses of this Republican trifecta, Rep. McBride remains grateful to Ranking Members [Rep. Rosa] DeLauro, [Sen. Patty] Murray, and Democratic leadership for prioritizing the removal of these harmful riders.”
“This latest funding package continues Congress’s forceful rejection of extreme cuts to federal programs proposed by [the president],” said House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) in a statement. “Where the White House attempted to eliminate entire programs, we chose to increase their funding. Where the Administration proposed slashing resources, we chose to sustain funding at current levels.”
According to DeLauro’s summary of the bill, it will also increase funding for the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program and more than double funding for HHS’s minority HIV/AIDS Initiative.
Bills to fund the Departments of Homeland Security; Defense; Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development were also released yesterday. The bills altogether represent $1.2 trillion in federal funding.
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RuPaul’s Drag Race‘s Carmen Carrera has teased that she could be set to make history with the next season of The Real Housewives of Miami.
Carrera, who first appeared on season three of Drag Race, featured briefly on RHOM‘s seventh season. She was listed as a friend of Kiki Barth when the cast went to the 2024 National LGBTQ+ Task Force Gala in an episode shown last year.
She has since been heavily rumoured to be a more permanent member of the cast, or at least one of the “Friends Of” cast members.
The model spoke to Pride at the annual Out100 celebration in December where she was asked about returning for RHOM‘s upcoming season.
“We’re getting ready to film soon,” Carrera said. “So, you might see some more of me out there! It’s all happening. I don’t want to say too much, but we’ll see what happens. It would be nice,” she added.
If Carrera was added to the RHOM cast, it would make her the first trans woman to become a full-time Real Housewives cast member.
Carmen has entered the chat. Catch the rest of this conversation WEDNESDAY on #RHOM! pic.twitter.com/2AhQDjOaDA
— Bravo (@BravoTV) July 21, 2025
The Drag Race legend and model was rumoured to have been involved with RHOM when it was rebooted in 2021, having been seen at multiple cast events. But she explained to Pride her schedule had kept her from appearing as much as she could have.
“My schedule was so busy while they were filming. I was supposed to be there for the very first episode, but I had other things to do,” she said. Continuing, she shared: “By the time I actually filmed with the ladies, there was so much drama going on, so I was out of loop, but I was just happy to be there.”
Carrera also spoke to the current political and social climate around the trans community. Sharing an uplifting message for trans people she said: “Honestly, the trans experience is so unique. I’m owning my truth and not caring what anyone else thinks.
“I’m in my 40s now and it’s all about being fabulous! You know who you are. It’s just about feeling empowered. We’ve always been here. We’re always going to be here.”
Carrera was one of the first trans contestants to appear on Drag Race, coming out after season three in 2011. She later criticised the reality series for its uses of transphobic slurs which were removed from future seasons.
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
The post This Drag Race legend might be about to become the first trans Real Housewife appeared first on PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news.
Two decades after founding Vision Cathedral of Atlanta, Bishop O.C. Allen III says the church’s work is more urgent than ever. The LGBTQ-affirming Black Pentecostal congregation, which first gathered in his living room and now fills a sprawling sanctuary every Sunday, has become both a spiritual home and a civic hub at a time when queer and trans people are facing escalating political attacks across the South and the nation at large.Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) says 72.7 million accounts registered with Under Armour were affected by an alleged ransomware attack in November.…
During a nearly two-hour stint at the podium in the White House Briefing Room, Donald Trump claimed a bystander who was present during the killing of Renee Nicole Good was a “professional agitator” because her yelling was too good.
Trump opened the briefing by sharing photographs of immigrants in Minnesota who he said had been charged with crimes. He held up their photos on flyers that were headed in bold, “Minnesota Worst of Worst.”
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He then accused anti-ICE protestors of being paid before he brought up Good. He didn’t use her name, instead referring to her as “the woman.”
“When the woman was shot, and I felt terribly about that, and I understand both sides of it, but when she was shot, there was another woman that was screaming, ‘Shame, shame, shame, shame’… So loud, like a professional opera singer, she was so loud. And so professional,” he said.
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“She wasn’t a woman that was hurt like, ‘Oh, my heart’s injured.’ She was a professional. ‘Shame, shame!’ she’s screaming, ‘Shame, shame!’ I said, that’s not a normal person. That’s a professional. These are professional agitators and professional people that want to see our country do badly. But that’s not happening ’cause we have the hottest country anywhere in the world despite this stuff.”
Viral video footage from Good’s death shows ICE officer Jonathan Ross lethally shooting the 37-year-old queer mother of three as she tried to drive her car away from ICE agents telling her to “get out of the f**king car” so they could apprehend her. Ross could then be heard calling her a “f**king b**ch” before fleeing the scene.
But according to Trump, the real villain was the woman shouting “shame,” not the agent who shot Good three times in the face.
Trump often claims that liberal protestors are “professional agitators” to discredit them, not as a statement of fact. Last week, he accused Good, herself, of being one. He referred to her wife, Becca Good, as her “friend” and said that they were both “highly disrespectful of law enforcement.”
“They were harassing, they were following for days and for hours, and I think frankly, they were professional agitators. And I’d like to find out- We are going to find out who’s paying for it, with their brand-new signs and all their [inaudible],” Trump said. There is no reason to believe that the Goods were paid for anything related to what happened.
Trump also posted on Truth Social after the killing and called Good “very disorderly,” saying that she “viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” which contradicts multiple videos shot of the interaction.
After his comment on Good’s death at the press briefing, Trump went back to sharing photos of alleged immigrant criminals, claiming his administration is expelling thousands of dangerous people from Minneapolis. In reality, ICE agents have been violently snatching Hispanic people at will, regardless of citizenship status, criminal history, or anything else.
Last week, for example, ICE agents rammed the vehicle of Christina Rank, a teacher for special needs students at Concord Education Center Middle School, then broke her window to pull her out of the vehicle, and took her into custody (leaving her car unattended), according to Bring Me The News. Rank’s mother said she wasn’t allowed to speak with her daughter, nor was she told why she was apprehended — ICE released her twelve hours after her arrest.
Out Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) has compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Nazis. She is part of a small group of Congress members who plan to introduce an impeachment resolution against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who has called Good a “domestic terrorist.”
While DHS claims that ICE agents use aggressive tactics against people who stalk and obstruct their law enforcement activities, Craig said, “I don’t think any city in America, or any state in America has ever seen this type of lawless behavior by federal law enforcement.”
“Every American should be outraged. Every Minnesotan should be outraged, and at the same time, we should continue to peacefully protest what’s happening,” Craig told Cabrera. “I’ve never seen such an out-of-control agency.”
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Opinion Palantir CEO Alex Karp has an inimitable aptitude for sniffing out the politically sensitive topic about which, by his own admission, he should not be speaking, but which will also win him the most attention.…
Flufftopia: Fluffmazing Edition launches on Linux and Windows PC, bringing the cute little clicker game back with a coat of charm. All thanks to the nonstop creativity of... Continue reading
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Queer Eye, the inspirational Netflix show buoyed by positive, make-a-change energy, has once again become steeped in darkness and drama.
The tenth and final season of the life improvement reality series (which was rebooted in 2018; the original ran between 2003 and 2007 with different cast members) has arrived on Netflix. And with one final season comes one final, explosive dose of drama, something which has become an incongruent by-product of the show’s existence in recent years.
Ahead of the final season’s launch, the Fab Five – culture expert Karamo Brown, grooming expert Jonathan Van Ness, culinary guru Antoni Porowski, fashion superstar Tan France and interiors aficionado Jeremiah Brent – were due to take part in televised promotional interviews yesterday, 20 January.
Yet Brown, who has been a steadfast fixture of the Fab Five since season one, declined to take part. In an eye-wateringly awkward piece of television, CBS Mornings news anchor Gayle King read out a statement from Brown, in which he said he was protecting his “mental health and peace” by not appearing with his cast mates. An email from his assistant, also referenced by King, said he was “worried about being bullied” if he appeared, and that he had felt “mentally and emotionally abused for years”. On the advice of his therapist, he would not be promoting Queer Eye.
For a show that exists to improve the lives of ordinary people – dubbed ‘heroes’ by the Fab Five – across America, it seems to have, on occasion, made the lives of its expert hosts a lot more challenging. From former interior design master Bobby Berk’s exit in 2023, to the shock Rolling Stone exposé in 2024, here’s a rundown of the drama that blew apart the Queer Eye’s twee facade.
Prior to Bobby Berk’s surprise exit in November 2023, the Queer Eye clan seemed to be one big happy family. Cracks appeared when Berk, the show’s interiors expert, departed the show after season eight “with a heavy heart”.
In early 2024, in an interview with Vanity Fair, Berk shed light on the reasons he left the show behind, explaining that he and his fellow Fab Five members had agreed they wouldn’t be signing a new contract to host the show beyond season eight. However, after Berk brought his decision to Netflix, the others appeared to change their minds.
“There were definitely emotions. But each one of us had our reasons why we did what we did,” he explained. “I can’t be mad – for a second I was.”
During his conversation with Vanity Fair, Bobby Berk made it clear that he and fellow Fab Five member Tan France had a contentious relationship. “Tan and I had a moment,” Berk said at the time.
“There was a situation, and that’s between Tan and I, and it has nothing to do with the show. It was something personal that had been brewing – and nothing romantic, just to clarify that,” he said, admitting to unfollowing Tan on Instagram prior to his exit from the show.
Fans noticed that France had returned the favour, seemingly unfollowing Berk on Instagram.
In February 2024, Nate & Jeremiah by Design star Jeremiah Brent was revealed by Netflix as Berk’s replacement. Brent was known to the other Fab Five members – but had never spoken to Berk – and he seemed like a fair fit for the role.
However, in March, Rolling Stone published accusations that Brent’s friend and fashion expert Tan France had used “mean-girl antics” to get rid of Berk and replace him with Brent.
In March 2024, Rolling Stone published a detailed investigation into the toxic antics allegedly taking place behind-the-scenes at Queer Eye. The report, which cited seven people who had worked on the show’s production, claimed that stylist Jonathan Van Ness was a “monster” with “rage issues” who was frequently a “nightmare” to work with.
One source was quoted as saying that, despite Van Ness’s warm and charming persona in front of the camera, they would also “explode at least once a week”.
“Jonathan’s a person who contains multitudes and who has the capacity to be very warm, very charismatic, and has the capacity to make you feel really special that they are paying attention to you,” the source said.
“But at least once a day, they would need to yell at somebody… It might be something small, but there’s always going to be somebody to point out and blame and make the villain of the day.”
The investigation also offered a new insight into possible reasons behind Berk’s departure, with one source claiming Berk didn’t wish to shoot scenes with Van Ness due to their on-set behaviour, and another claiming Berk had grown jaded with his scarce screen time, despite doing the bulk of the heavy lifting as the design expert.
Days after the Rolling Stone article was published, Tan France posted a video on Instagram attempting to clarify the facts. Specifically, he wanted it made clear that he had not used “mean-girl antics” to campaign for Brent to replace Berk.
In doing so, he claimed that Berk had actually been “fired” from the Netflix show.
“My former colleague getting fired had nothing to do with me trying to get my friend hired,” France said.
“Netflix and the production companies did a full-on casting. I didn’t put my friend up for the job. They ended up getting it because they were the best person for the job.
“Am I so happy that they have the job? Uh-huh. I really am. I think they’re going to be incredible on the show, but I didn’t get them hired by getting rid of somebody else,” he continued.
“From the horse’s mouth: I’m telling you, that that’s not at all how it went down. And that’s all I’ll say on the matter. If you need to dig deeper, if you still don’t believe me, so be it – but that’s it.”
For the remainder of 2024, the Queer Eye Fab Five appeared untangleable from Rolling Stone’s report on the backstage drama. The cast were asked about the alleged rift between them throughout the year, and answered with various degrees of ambiguity.
In May 2024, food and drink connoisseur Antoni Porowski addressed the alleged rift between the Fab Five, arguing that as they had all “been sharing a trailer since day one” on the show, there would of course be times where “we’re not gonna get along”.
“But at the end of the day, we’re a family,” he said. “We’re like a middle-aged boyband, you know what I mean? Through thick and thin, we’re in it together.”
In June 2024, Jonathan Van Ness appeared on Jessie and Lennie Ware’sTable Manners podcast, and addressed the investigation into their apparent “rage” on set. They stated that it wasn’t “really based in reality” but contained anecdotes that could be “taken out of context to make [them] look as bad as possible”.
“I think a lot of people were looking for a reason to hate me or looking for a reason to be like, ‘See, I always knew that they were a fake c***,’” Van Ness added, describing the online reaction as “intensely hurtful”.
Asked about his relationship with Bobby Berk in December 2024, Jeremiah Brent confirmed that the pair had not spoken.
“I never met Bobby before the show, I haven’t spoken to him,” Brent said. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for what he did in the show.”
Ahead of season nine premiering in early 2025, Netflix unveiled new Queer Eye themed icons that fans could select as their avatar on the streaming service. Only the current Fab Five members – so Jeremiah Brent, not Bobby Berk – were available as options. In a swiftly-deleted comment under Netflix’s Instagram post about the icons, Berk wrote: “Wow… y’all really went and erased my icon instead of just adding Jeremiah? Damn, I’m done.”
In July 2025, Netflix announced that Queer Eye would be coming to an end with its tenth season, much to the devastation of the show’s loyal fans.
The day after the news was announced, former Fab Five star Bobby Berk announced his new HGTV show Junk or Jackpot? was coming out soon. Some Queer Eye fans thought the move had been planned, but Berk rebuked this. In an interview with US Weekly, he said Netflix could have given him a “heads up” about the end of the show.
“I have to say, I swear on my mother’s life, my show announcement date was set,” he told the publication. “No, this was planned. Show announcements don’t happen on a whim.
“I mean, [Netflix] could have easily given me a heads up on when that was going to be announced. I mean, I was on the show for [eight] seasons, but yeah, it’s fine.”
Queer Eye season nine, with Jeremiah Brent on board as the new interiors expert, came and went with little fanfare. Brent confirmed to PinkNews in April 2025 that a tenth season was to begin filming soon, which it did, and Netflix announced in July 2025 that it would be the show’s very last season.
Bar some wistful reflections on the Queer Eye chapter being closed for good, the lead up to season 10 appeared to be going forward without a hitch.
Yet Karamo Brown’s no-show bombshell during press day on 20 January seems to have revitalised once put to bed rumours that the Fab Five are actually the Fractured Five.
Curiously, Brown largely seemed to keep to himself during the fallout from the Rolling Stone investigation and Berk’s exit, with much of the controversy revolving instead around Van Ness, France and Berk.
Now, it’s clear that he too has been affected by tensions within the group. In addition to his shock claim of feeling “emotionally and mentally abused for years” – though he has not specified by who – it also appears that Brown has unfollowed all of his fellow original Fab Five members on Instagram. On the platform, Jeremiah Brent is the only member he now follows.
The tenth and final season of Queer Eye is now out on Netflix, and it’s bittersweet – and sour. Despite the events that occurred prior to the season’s release, the cast appear committed to focussing on the positives, much like they were when confronted by Gayle King on Brown’s absence.
“It’s not about how or even that it ended – the journey of it all was the part I’ll hold close to my heart,” Porowski wrote on Instagram on 21 January. “Thank you to each and every one of you who watched, laughed, cried, screamed, binged, and related to the stories we were lucky enough to be a part of for almost a decade.”
“Happy Final day of this Queer Eye journey, to my incredible cast mates, incredible heroes, incredible crew,” France wrote on Instagram.
“And you incredible audience who have made my wildest of wildest dreams come true the past 9 years of my life! I will love and miss you!”
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
The post Karamo Brown’s interview no-show is the latest chapter in the never-ending Queer Eye drama appeared first on PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news.
One half of Instagram favourites Lupin in London was subjected to homophobic abuse just for walking his cat in a public park.
Jerome and Jacques, who have been together for eight years, are proud daddies to Russian Blue, Lupin, also known as “London’s favourite therapy cat”, and their Bengal Rajah, whom the pair deem to be “London’s favourite leopard looking cat”.
The pair and their cats have amassed 140,000 loyal fans thanks to their feel-good content, which offers busy and often stressed Londoners much-needed free pet therapy.
“The aim of what we do is to bring joy to people,” Jacques said of their content.
However, on Sunday (18 January), Jerome was subjected to a vile encounter with someone who called him a homophobic slur simply because he was walking his cat in the park.
He captured the incident on camera and posted it on their Instagram account.
Speaking to PinkNews about the incident, which has been reported to the Met Police, Jerome said he and his partner had experienced “off” meetings with the culprit before, but it had never escalated this far.
“It took me a while to process it,” he said, adding: “It didn’t feel real, even when he said it. I almost blacked out and couldn’t really fathom what had happened.”
Jerome said he went straight home and watched the footage, which led to him being partly surprised, but also unsurprised, “because I know there’s that side to people, especially right now”.
“It was shocking. It shook me up. I didn’t feel like leaving the house the day after. I felt very emotional. It’s not okay,” he said.
The 33-year-old has sadly had prior experiences of this nature but said he’s proud that this time he stood up for himself and remembered to film the encounter.
“I don’t think anyone should have to go through that,” he said, adding: “I will not tolerate it anymore.”
“I want people who go through this to understand it’s not okay, to call it out for what it is, and to realise there is often intent behind these actions,” he said.
Last year, Home Office figures showed a marginal decrease in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes. However, the data did not show the full picture, as it excluded the Met Police.
It’s widely known that a significant amount of crime against the LGBTQ+ community goes unreported. In 2017, the government’s National LGBT+ Survey showed that a staggering 91 per cent of respondents did not report their most serious incident of anti-LGBT+ hate crime to the police.
A spokesperson for the Met Police told PinkNews: “We were made aware of a report of a hate crime incident on Monday, 19 January.
“The Met has a zero tolerance to hate crime, and an investigation has been launched into the circumstances. At this stage, no arrests have been made. Enquiries continue.”
Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.
The post ‘I was victim of homophobic abuse – just because I took my cat for a walk’ appeared first on PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux.
Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.
Prompt injection is a method of tricking LLMs into doing things they are normally prevented from doing. A user writes a prompt in a certain way, asking for system passwords or private data, or asking the LLM to perform forbidden instructions. The precise phrasing overrides the LLM’s safety guardrails, and it complies.
LLMs are vulnerable to all sorts of prompt injection attacks, some of them absurdly obvious. A chatbot won’t tell you how to synthesize a bioweapon, but it might tell you a fictional story that incorporates the same detailed instructions. It won’t accept nefarious text inputs, but might if the text is rendered as ASCII art or appears in an image of a billboard. Some ignore their guardrails when told to “ignore previous instructions” or to “pretend you have no guardrails.”
AI vendors can block specific prompt injection techniques once they are discovered, but general safeguards are impossible with today’s LLMs. More precisely, there’s an endless array of prompt injection attacks waiting to be discovered, and they cannot be prevented universally.
If we want LLMs that resist these attacks, we need new approaches. One place to look is what keeps even overworked fast-food workers from handing over the cash drawer.
Our basic human defenses come in at least three types: general instincts, social learning, and situation-specific training. These work together in a layered defense.
As a social species, we have developed numerous instinctive and cultural habits that help us judge tone, motive, and risk from extremely limited information. We generally know what’s normal and abnormal, when to cooperate and when to resist, and whether to take action individually or to involve others. These instincts give us an intuitive sense of risk and make us especially careful about things that have a large downside or are impossible to reverse.
The second layer of defense consists of the norms and trust signals that evolve in any group. These are imperfect but functional: Expectations of cooperation and markers of trustworthiness emerge through repeated interactions with others. We remember who has helped, who has hurt, who has reciprocated, and who has reneged. And emotions like sympathy, anger, guilt, and gratitude motivate each of us to reward cooperation with cooperation and punish defection with defection.
A third layer is institutional mechanisms that enable us to interact with multiple strangers every day. Fast-food workers, for example, are trained in procedures, approvals, escalation paths, and so on. Taken together, these defenses give humans a strong sense of context. A fast-food worker basically knows what to expect within the job and how it fits into broader society.
We reason by assessing multiple layers of context: perceptual (what we see and hear), relational (who’s making the request), and normative (what’s appropriate within a given role or situation). We constantly navigate these layers, weighing them against each other. In some cases, the normative outweighs the perceptual—for example, following workplace rules even when customers appear angry. Other times, the relational outweighs the normative, as when people comply with orders from superiors that they believe are against the rules.
Crucially, we also have an interruption reflex. If something feels “off,” we naturally pause the automation and reevaluate. Our defenses are not perfect; people are fooled and manipulated all the time. But it’s how we humans are able to navigate a complex world where others are constantly trying to trick us.
So let’s return to the drive-through window. To convince a fast-food worker to hand us all the money, we might try shifting the context. Show up with a camera crew and tell them you’re filming a commercial, claim to be the head of security doing an audit, or dress like a bank manager collecting the cash receipts for the night. But even these have only a slim chance of success. Most of us, most of the time, can smell a scam.
Con artists are astute observers of human defenses. Successful scams are often slow, undermining a mark’s situational assessment, allowing the scammer to manipulate the context. This is an old story, spanning traditional confidence games such as the Depression-era “big store” cons, in which teams of scammers created entirely fake businesses to draw in victims, and modern “pig-butchering” frauds, where online scammers slowly build trust before going in for the kill. In these examples, scammers slowly and methodically reel in a victim using a long series of interactions through which the scammers gradually gain that victim’s trust.
Sometimes it even works at the drive-through. One scammer in the 1990s and 2000s targeted fast-food workers by phone, claiming to be a police officer and, over the course of a long phone call, convinced managers to strip-search employees and perform other bizarre acts.
Humans detect scams and tricks by assessing multiple layers of context. AI systems do not. Nicholas Little
LLMs behave as if they have a notion of context, but it’s different. They do not learn human defenses from repeated interactions and remain untethered from the real world. LLMs flatten multiple levels of context into text similarity. They see “tokens,” not hierarchies and intentions. LLMs don’t reason through context, they only reference it.
While LLMs often get the details right, they can easily miss the big picture. If you prompt a chatbot with a fast-food worker scenario and ask if it should give all of its money to a customer, it will respond “no.” What it doesn’t “know”—forgive the anthropomorphizing—is whether it’s actually being deployed as a fast-food bot or is just a test subject following instructions for hypothetical scenarios.
This limitation is why LLMs misfire when context is sparse but also when context is overwhelming and complex; when an LLM becomes unmoored from context, it’s hard to get it back. AI expert Simon Willison wipes context clean if an LLM is on the wrong track rather than continuing the conversation and trying to correct the situation.
There’s more. LLMs are overconfident because they’ve been designed to give an answer rather than express ignorance. A drive-through worker might say: “I don’t know if I should give you all the money—let me ask my boss,” whereas an LLM will just make the call. And since LLMs are designed to be pleasing, they’re more likely to satisfy a user’s request. Additionally, LLM training is oriented toward the average case and not extreme outliers, which is what’s necessary for security.
The result is that the current generation of LLMs is far more gullible than people. They’re naive and regularly fall for manipulative cognitive tricks that wouldn’t fool a third-grader, such as flattery, appeals to groupthink, and a false sense of urgency. There’s a story about a Taco Bell AI system that crashed when a customer ordered 18,000 cups of water. A human fast-food worker would just laugh at the customer.
Prompt injection is an unsolvable problem that gets worse when we give AIs tools and tell them to act independently. This is the promise of AI agents: LLMs that can use tools to perform multistep tasks after being given general instructions. Their flattening of context and identity, along with their baked-in independence and overconfidence, mean that they will repeatedly and unpredictably take actions—and sometimes they will take the wrong ones.
Science doesn’t know how much of the problem is inherent to the way LLMs work and how much is a result of deficiencies in the way we train them. The overconfidence and obsequiousness of LLMs are training choices. The lack of an interruption reflex is a deficiency in engineering. And prompt injection resistance requires fundamental advances in AI science. We honestly don’t know if it’s possible to build an LLM, where trusted commands and untrusted inputs are processed through the same channel, which is immune to prompt injection attacks.
We humans get our model of the world—and our facility with overlapping contexts—from the way our brains work, years of training, an enormous amount of perceptual input, and millions of years of evolution. Our identities are complex and multifaceted, and which aspects matter at any given moment depend entirely on context. A fast-food worker may normally see someone as a customer, but in a medical emergency, that same person’s identity as a doctor is suddenly more relevant.
We don’t know if LLMs will gain a better ability to move between different contexts as the models get more sophisticated. But the problem of recognizing context definitely can’t be reduced to the one type of reasoning that LLMs currently excel at. Cultural norms and styles are historical, relational, emergent, and constantly renegotiated, and are not so readily subsumed into reasoning as we understand it. Knowledge itself can be both logical and discursive.
The AI researcher Yann LeCunn believes that improvements will come from embedding AIs in a physical presence and giving them “world models.” Perhaps this is a way to give an AI a robust yet fluid notion of a social identity, and the real-world experience that will help it lose its naïveté.
Ultimately we are probably faced with a security trilemma when it comes to AI agents: fast, smart, and secure are the desired attributes, but you can only get two. At the drive-through, you want to prioritize fast and secure. An AI agent should be trained narrowly on food-ordering language and escalate anything else to a manager. Otherwise, every action becomes a coin flip. Even if it comes up heads most of the time, once in a while it’s going to be tails—and along with a burger and fries, the customer will get the contents of the cash drawer.
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