Mozilla is exiting the fediverse by shutting down its Mozilla.social Mastodon server on December 17. Moving forward, the company will focus on Firefox and AI, aligning with its strategy under interim CEO Laura Chambers to scale back investments in non-core products. TechCrunch reports: Mozilla.social was a small instance, having only 270 active users at the time of Tuesday's announcement. By comparison, the most popular Mastodon instance, Mastodon.social, has over 247,500 monthly active users. Mozilla had telegraphed its plans to scale back on its fediverse investments earlier this year after the CEO stepped down. At the time, Mozilla board member Laura Chambers took over the job as the interim CEO of Mozilla Corporation through the end of 2024. Shortly after the change in leadership, Mozilla said it would refocus its product strategy around Firefox and AI and significantly scale back or even shutter other efforts. Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down.

The redirection of Mozilla's efforts came after its flagship product, the Firefox web browser, spent years losing market share. That left room for other competitors, like the startup Arc, to take hold in the alternative browser market. Months prior to this change in strategy, Mozilla had been touting the fediverse's potential, but under Chambers, the company said that a more "modest approach" to the fediverse would have allowed it to participate with "greater agility." In an internal memo, Mozilla signaled that going forward, a "much smaller team" would participate in the Mastodon ecosystem. However, it didn't say at the time that the Mozilla.social instance would shut down, adding that it would continue to bring small experiments to those who participated on its instance. Mozilla said it was a "hard decision."

"Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17," a post on Mastodon reads. Users can download their data or migrate their accounts at the respective links.

China will "gradually raise" its retirement age for the first time since the 1950s, as the country confronts an ageing population and a dwindling pension budget. From a report: The top legislative body on Friday approved proposals to raise the statutory retirement age from 50 to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs, and from 55 to 58 for females in white-collar jobs. Men will see an increase from 60 to 63. China's current retirement ages are among the lowest in the world.

According to the plan passed on Friday, the change will set in from 1 January 2025, with the respective retirement ages raised every few months over the next 15 years, said Chinese state media. Retiring before the statutory age will not be allowed, state news agency Xinhua reported, although people can extend their retirement by no more than three years. Starting 2030, employees will also have to make more contributions to the social security system in order to receive pensions. By 2039, they would have to clock 20 years of contributions to access their pensions.

Flappy Bird's original creator hasn't posted anything on social media since 2017. Until today.

"This morning, the game's creator Dong Nguyen posted a characteristically terse comment stating that he has nothing to do with the revival," reports TechCrunch, "and that he 'did not sell anything.' He added, 'I also don't support crypto'... The post makes it clear that Nguyen is not involved with the new project, and that he doesn't seem particularly happy about it." As for Nguyen's reference to crypto, while the foundation's current PR materials don't mention anything crypto-related, Varun Biniwale did some digging around hidden pages on the Flappy Bird Foundation website and found a reference to Flappy Bird flying "higher than ever on Solana as it soars into Web 3.0," though it's not clear whether that refers to upcoming features or abandoned plans.
More from Fortune: Exactly what is going to happen with this zombified version of Flappy Bird is unclear, but digging through data and files has revealed things like different birds, loot boxes, and the idea that this is some sort of crypto play by the company involved. From a page on their website about the new Flappy Bird... "[D]evelopers and creators can build, play and earn from the legendary Flappy Bird IP."
Fortune concludes "it's crypto, it's NFTs and everyone is so annoyed by this almost every tweet of the resurrected Twitter account has even been 'Community Noted' revealing its crypto ties and snapping up of Nguyen's trademark."

PC Gamer adds that the Foundation acquired the Flappy Bird trademark from Gametech Holdings LLC. "And here there's a slight whiff of skullduggery." Dong Nguyen originally applied for the trademark in 2014, alongside a little drawing of the logo. This application then seemed to sit in limbo for many years, eventually being opposed by a Delaware-based company called Gametech. As this was going on, the U.S. patent office granted a trademark registration for Flappy Bird in 2018 (four years after the game was removed from sale) to another Delaware company called Mobile Media Matters. While I can't be exact on the link between Mobile Media Matters and Gametech, both companies' legal filings give the same Delaware address.

Subsequent to this there's been a legal disagreement between Gametech and Dong Nguyen, except Nguyen doesn't seem to have bothered representing himself or standing up for the trademark, which has ultimately led to it being classed as abandoned (a decade after he filed for it) and acquired by Gametech...

The Flappy Bird Foundation does have one ready-made comeback. As well as the rights to Flappy Bird it has acquired the rights to Piou Piou vs. Cactus, a mobile title that was the primary inspiration behind Flappy Bird, and employs the game's creator who goes by the handle, ahem, of Kek. "Today is a milestone not just in gaming but for me personally," says Kek. "It's so cool to see how influential Piou Piou has been for developers and hundreds of millions of gamers over the years. It's incredible to work alongside such a dedicated team of fans and creators who are truly passionate about changing the industry narrative and together bringing the original Flappy Bird back to life...." Way back in 2014, Kek said he'd contacted Nguyen about the resemblance, "and he told me he doesn't think he knew about my game when he made Flappy Bird. The games are very similar. And even if I did not invent the gameplay concept, the graphics are very close, and, of course, the concept."

The games are undeniably similar, but there are differences, and obviously the most important one is that, for whatever reason, Piou Piou didn't do much while Flappy Bird went stratospheric with a similar idea three years later.

Needless to say, the announcement and press release of the Flappy Bird Foundation does not mention Dong Nguyen once.

The New York Times looks at "a third-generation family firm" in Paraguay "with 280 workers that packages hot sauce, soy beans...and seven kinds of salt for sale in Paraguayan supermarkets."

Its mascot — on t-shirts, coffee cups, and "in heavy demand at Paraguayan weddings" — is a mouse named Mickey. 51-year-old Viviana Blasco — one of five siblings who run the business — told the Times that it all began back in 1935: Ms. Blasco's grandfather, Pascual, the son of Italian immigrants, saw an opportunity to spread some joy — and turn a profit. He opened a tiny shop selling fruit and homemade gelato. It was called Mickey... Pascual, she said, often vacationed in Buenos Aires — Argentina's cosmopolitan capital... "On one of his trips, he must have seen the famous mouse," Ms. Blasco said... A few years later, Pascual opened the Mickey Ice Cream Parlor, Café and Confectioners. By 1969, Mickey was selling rice, sugar and baking soda in packages now decorated with the eponymous mouse.
"Mickey resonates with Paraguayans' sense of nostalgia, said Euge Aquino, a TV chef and social media influencer who uses its ingredients to make comfort food like pastel mandi'o (yuca and beef empanadas)... Mickey's popularity, she said, also has a lot to do with the mascot handing out candy outside the factory gates every Christmas: a tradition dating back to 1983." By now, a "peaceful coexistence" reigns between Mickey and its United States doppelgänger, said Elba Rosa Britez, 72, the smaller company's lawyer. This truce was hard-won. In 1991, Disney filed a trademark violation claim with Paraguay's Ministry of Business and Industry that was rejected. The company then filed a lawsuit, but in 1995 a trademark tribunal ruled in Mickey's favor. There, one judge agreed that Paraguayans could easily confuse the Disney Mickey and the Paraguayan Mickey. But Disney didn't reckon on a "legal loophole," Ms Britez explained. The Mickey trademark had been registered in Paraguay since at least 1956 — and Pascual's descendants had since renewed it — without protest from the multinational. In 1998, Paraguay's Supreme Court issued its final ruling. Through decades of uninterrupted use, Mickey had acquired the right to be Mickey.

"I jumped for joy," Ms Britez said. Mickey's legal immunity in Paraguay, Ms. Blasco acknowledged, might not extend to selling its products abroad. "We've never tried."
"Some lining up to meet the mascot said Mickey's David-vs-Goliath triumph against Disney filled them with national pride..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft executives have been thinking lately about the end of the world. In a white paper published late last year, Brad Smith, the company's vice chair and president, and Melanie Nakagawa, its chief sustainability officer, described a "planetary crisis" that AI could help solve. Imagine an AI-assisted tool that helps reduce food waste, to name one example from the document, or some future technology that could "expedite decarbonization" by using AI to invent new designs for green tech.

But as Microsoft attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies. Hundreds of pages of internal documents I've obtained, plus interviews I've conducted over the past year with 15 current and former employees and executives, show that the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production -- all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions.

Although tech companies have long done business with the fossil-fuel industry, Microsoft's case is notable. It demonstrates how the AI boom contributes to one of the most pressing issues facing our planet today -- despite the fact that the technology is often lauded for its supposed potential to improve our world, as when Sam Altman testified to Congress that it could address issues such as "climate change and curing cancer." These deals also show how Microsoft can use the vagaries of AI to talk out of both sides of its mouth, courting the fossil-fuel industry while asserting its environmental bona fides. (Many of the documents I viewed have been submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a whistleblower complaint alleging that the company has omitted from public disclosures "the serious climate and environmental harms caused by the technology it provides to the fossil fuel industry," arguing that the information is of material and financial importance to investors.

Mobile video game phenomenon Flappy Bird is set to return 10 years after its creator pulled it offline. From a report: In 2014, Vietnam-based developer Dong Nguyen shocked the gaming world when he pulled viral hit Flappy Bird from the App Store and the Google Play Store at a time when it was making tens of thousands of dollars a day. He went on to say: "I can call Flappy Bird a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it."

Now, Flappy Bird is set to return, with an expanded version aiming for launch by the end of October across multiple platforms including web browsers, and an iOS and Android version planned for release in 2025. But this new Flappy Bird isn't from Nguyen, it's from 'The Flappy Bird Foundation,' which is described as "a new team of passionate fans committed to sharing the game with the world."
UPDATE (9/15/2024): The original creator of Flappy Bird returned to social media after a seven-year silence just to disavow the resurrected game -- and its possible ties to cryptocurrency. PC Gamer also digs into exactly how the Flappy Bird trademark was acquired.

Bluesky, the decentralized social networking startup, has introduced support for videos up to 60 seconds long in its latest update, version 1.91. The Verge reports: The videos will autoplay by default, but Bluesky says you can turn this feature off in the settings menu. You can also add subtitles to your videos, as well as apply labels for things like adult content. There are some limitations to Bluesky's video feature, as the platform will only allow up to 25 video uploads (or 10GB of video) per day.

To protect Bluesky from harmful content or spam, it will require users to verify their email addresses before posting a video. Bluesky may also take away someone's ability to post videos if they repeatedly violate its community guidelines. The platform will also run videos through Hive, an AI moderation solution, and Thorn, a nonprofit that fights child sexual abuse, to check for illegal content or media that needs a warning.

Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data of Australian adult users to train its AI models and provides no opt-out option, even though it allows people in the European Union to refuse consent. From a report: Meta's global privacy director Melinda Claybaugh was pressed at an inquiry as to whether the social media giant was hoovering up the data of all Australians in order to build its generative artificial intelligence tools, and initially rejected that claim. Labor senator Tony Sheldon asked whether Meta had used Australian posts from as far back as 2007 to feed its AI products, to which Ms Claybaugh responded "we have not done that".

But that was quickly challenged by Greens senator David Shoebridge.

Shoebridge: "The truth of the matter is that unless you have consciously set those posts to private since 2007, Meta has just decided that you will scrape all of the photos and all of the texts from every public post on Instagram or Facebook since 2007, unless there was a conscious decision to set them on private. That's the reality, isn't it?
Claybaugh: "Correct."

Ms Claybaugh added that accounts of people under 18 were not scraped, but when asked by Senator Sheldon whether public photos of his own children on his account would be scraped, Ms Claybaugh acknowledged they would.

Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news.ÂIn its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71 per cent of adults obtained news online, compared with 70 per cent via TV -- a finding it described as "marking a generational shift in the balance of news media."

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75 per cent last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found. The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok.Â

After tonight's ABC presidential debate, Taylor Swift announced her support for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election after AI-generated images falsely depicted her endorsing Donald Trump. "Recently I was made aware that AI of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation," Swift wrote in an Instagram post. "It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." The Verge reports: Her post references an incident in late August, in which Trump shared a collection of images to Truth Social intended to show support for his presidential campaign. Some of the photos depict "Swifties for Trump," and another obviously AI-generated image shows Swift herself in an Uncle Sam-type image with text reading, "Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump." The former president captioned the post, "I accept!" [...]

This wasn't the first time AI images of Swift were circulated on social media. Earlier this year, nonconsensual sexualized images of her made using AI were shared on X. That incident prompted the White House to call for legislation to "deal" with the issue.

It's hard to get 42 states to agree on much. But a bipartisan group of attorneys general on Tuesday demanded that Congress require Surgeon General warning labels on social media apps to help curtail addiction and a mental health crisis among young adults. From a report: "As state Attorneys General, we sometimes disagree about important issues, but all of us share an abiding concern for the safety of the kids in our jurisdictions -- and algorithm-driven social media platforms threaten that safety," the 42 attorneys general said in a letter to Congress. States have taken legal action against a number of social media companies, including Meta and TikTok. But they argue more needs to be done in Washington to alert people to the dangers social media platforms present.

"In addition to the states' historic efforts, this ubiquitous problem requires federal action -- and a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, though not sufficient to address the full scope of the problem, would be one consequential step toward mitigating the risk of harm to youth," the attorneys general said. The letter echoed much of what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy outlined in a scathing New York Times op-ed in June, that drew a direct comparison between the apps -- TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and others -- to cancer causing cigarettes.

Murthy cited several studies, including a 2019 American Medical Association study published in JAMA that showed teens who spend three hours a day on social media double their risk of depression. Teens spend nearly five hours a day on social media apps, according to a Gallup poll.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Russia's communications watchdog Roskomnadzor plans to spend 59 billion rubles ($644 million) over the next five years to upgrade its internet traffic-filtering capabilities, the Russian edition of Forbes reported on Tuesday. The money will be used to upgrade hardware used to filter internet traffic, as well as block or slow down certain resources, Forbes reported, citing documents.

Russia passed a law in 2019 to enable the country to cut itself off entirely from the internet, in what it calls a campaign to maintain its digital sovereignty. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin forced out several foreign social media and internet companies, although many services remain accessible via virtual private networks, or VPNs. The system upgrades will allow Russian authorities to better restrict access to VPNs, according to the document. New equipment has been purchased yearly since 2020 as traffic volumes grow, Roskomnadzor's press service said, according to Forbes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Agence France-Presse: Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and "onto the footy fields." Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a "scourge." The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said. The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16. An age verification trial to test various approaches is being conducted over the coming months, the centre-left leader said. [...]

It is not even clear that the technology exists to reliably enforce such bans, said the University of Melbourne's associate professor in computing and information technology, Toby Murray. "The government is currently trialling age assurance technology. But we already know that present age verification methods are unreliable, too easy to circumvent, or risk user privacy," he said. But the prime minister said parents expected a response to online bullying and the access social media gave to harmful material. "These social media companies think they're above everyone," he told a radio interviewer. "Well, they have a social responsibility and at the moment, they're not exercising it. And we're determined to make sure that they do," he said.

Steven Levy, writing for Wired: My first story for WIRED -- yep, 31 years ago -- looked at a group of "crypto rebels" who were trying to pry strong encryption technology from the government-classified world and send it into the mainstream. Naturally I attempted to speak to someone at the National Security Agency for comment and ideally get a window into its thinking. Unsurprisingly, that was a no-go, because the NSA was famous for its reticence. Eventually we agreed that I could fax (!) a list of questions. In return I got an unsigned response in unhelpful bureaucratese that didn't address my queries. Even that represented a loosening of what once was total blackout on anything having to do with this ultra-secretive intelligence agency. For decades after its post-World War II founding, the government revealed nothing, not even the name, of this agency and its activities. Those in the know referred to it as "No Such Agency."

In recent years, the widespread adoption of encryption technology and the vital need for cybersecurity has led to more openness. Its directors began to speak in public; in 2012, NSA director Keith Alexander actually keynoted Defcon. I'd spent the entire 1990s lobbying to visit the agency for my book Crypto; in 2013, I finally crossed the threshold of its iconic Fort Meade Headquarters for an on-the-record conversation with officials, including Alexander. NSA now has social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. And there is a form on the agency website for podcasters to request guest appearances by an actual NSA-ite.

So it shouldn't be a total shock that NSA is now doing its own podcast. You don't need to be an intelligence agency to know that pods are a unique way to tell stories and hold people's attention. The first two episodes of the seven-part season dropped this week. It's called No Such Podcast, earning some self-irony points from the get-go. In keeping with the openness vibe, the NSA granted me an interview with an official in charge of the project -- one of the de facto podcast producers, a title that apparently is still not an official NSA job posting. Since NSA still gotta NSA, I can't use this person's name. But my source did point out that in the podcast itself, both the hosts and the guests -- who are past and present agency officials -- speak under their actual identities.

Abstract of a paper by Clifford Asness of quant investor AQR Capital: Market efficiency is a central issue in asset pricing and investment management, but while the level of efficiency is often debated, changes in that level are relatively absent from the discussion. I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons. I offer three hypotheses for why this has occurred, arguing that technologies such as social media are likely the biggest culprit. Looking ahead, investors willing to take the other side of these inefficiencies should rationally be rewarded with higher expected returns, but also greater risks. I conclude with some ideas to make rational, diversifying strategies easier to stick with amid a less-efficient market.

Security engineer Bryan Hance co-founded the nonprofit Bike Index, back in 2013, reports the Los Angeles Times, "where cyclists can register their bikes and contact information, making it easier to reunite lost or stolen bikes with their owners." It now holds descriptions and serial numbers of about 1.3 million bikes worldwide.

"But in spring 2020, Hance was tipped to something new: Scores of high-end bikes that matched the descriptions of bikes reported stolen from locations across the Bay Area were turning up for sale on Facebook Marketplace and Instagram pages attached to someone in Mexico, thousands of miles away..." The Facebook page he first spotted disappeared, replaced by pages that were blocked to U.S. computers; Hance managed to get in anyway, thanks to creative use of a VPN. He started reaching out to the owners whose stolen bikes he suspected he was seeing for sale. "Can you tell me a little bit about how your bike was stolen," he would ask. Often, the methods were sophisticated and selective. Thieves would break into a bicycle room at an apartment complex with a specialized saw and leave minutes later with only the fanciest mountain bikes...

Over time, he spoke to more than a dozen [police] officers in jurisdictions across the Bay Area, including Alameda, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Marin, Napa and Sonoma counties... [H]ere was Hance, telling officers that he believed he had located a stolen bike, in Mexico. "That's gone," the officer would inform him. Or, one time, according to Hance: "We're not Interpol." Hance also tried to get Meta to do something. After all, he had identified what could be hundreds of stolen bikes being sold on its platforms, valued, he estimated, at well over $2 million. He said he got nowhere...

[Hance] believed he'd figured out the identity of the seller in Jalisco, and was monitoring that person's personal social media accounts. In early 2021, he had spotted something that might break open the case: the name of a person who was sending the Jalisco seller photos of bikes that matched descriptions of those reported stolen by Bay Area cyclists. Hance theorized that person could be a fence who was collecting stolen bikes on this side of the border and sending photos to Jalisco so they could be posted for sale. Hance hunted through the Jalisco seller's Facebook friends until he found the name there: Victor Romero, of San Jose. More sleuthing revealed that a man by the name of Victor Romero ran an auto shop in San Jose, and, judging by his own Facebook photos, was an avid mountain biker. There was something else: Romero's auto shop in San Jose had distinctive orange shelves. One photo of a bike listed for sale on the Jalisco seller's site had similar orange shelves in the backdrop.

Hance contacted a San Francisco police detective who had seemed interested in what he was doing. Check out this guy's auto shop, he advised. San Francisco police raided Romero in the spring of 2021. They found more than $200,000 in cash, according to a federal indictment, along with screenshots from his phone they said showed Romero's proceeds from trafficking in stolen bikes. They also found a Kona Process 153 mountain bike valued at about $4,700 that had been reported stolen from an apartment garage in San Francisco, according to the indictment. It had been disassembled and packaged for shipment to Jalisco.

In January, a federal grand jury indicted Victoriano Romero on felony conspiracy charges for his alleged role in a scheme to purchase high-end stolen bicycles from thieves across the Bay Area and transport them to Mexico for resale.
But bikes continue to be stolen, and "The guy is still operating," Hance told the Los Angeles Times.

"We could do the whole thing again."

A schoolteacher using an interactive whiteboard is surprised by an alert. Their school is in "hard lockdown." They knew — instantly — something was about to happen, and "got everybody into a corner," they later told CNN. Classroom doors at the school are always locked, so they then "turned off the lights. And just kind of held everyone nice and tight, and just said, 'Wait for everything to happen, everything to pass.'"

The school was Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, where on Wednesday 11 students were shot and two killed. Two schoolteachers were also killed. But according to CNN, social studies teacher Stephen Kreyenbuhl "said the school's new alert system bought him critical time to prepare and protect his students before a shooter opened fire just down the hall..." The CrisisAlert system, designed by Centegix, includes a device the size of an ID badge. It's equipped with a button that, when pressed rapidly, can quietly notify administrators and local law enforcement to the exact location of an active emergency. The company works with school districts and law enforcement agencies to integrate the system into their current safety procedures and automate as much as possible. Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith told CNN Apalachee High School had the system for less than a week and had tested it for the first time only the day before the shooting... Brent Cobb, the company's CEO, told CNN in an interview earlier this year that their CrisisAlert technology was designed following the 2018 Parkland high school shooting in Florida to give teachers and administrators a fast and discreet way to call for help.... "[Y]ou need everyone to know immediately" that a crisis is taking place.

Once a lockdown is activated, the CrisisAlert system is designed to trigger a series of responses: Pre-recorded warnings sound over the intercom system to alert the entire campus to the lockdown, while on-site safety administrators, like school resource officers [a law-enforcement officer with arrest powers, usually armed], are notified of the location of the incident. Cobb told CNN in some school districts the system is also integrated with local law enforcement agencies and can automatically call 911 and send messages to officers of the exact location of the incident. This is what happened in Barrow County. The goal, he said, is to help decrease police response times, an issue that has come under scrutiny in recent years following the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where it took officers 77 minutes to adequately respond to a shooter.

In an exclusive interview with CNN Thursday, Smith scrolled through the series of alerts and the detailed map his officers received to guide them to where the shooting was happening... [Social studies teacher] Kreyenbuhl said he is grateful the district implemented a system that enabled him to protect his students. "I actually saw the lockdown initiate before I even heard the gunshots, so I had time to prepare," he said.... "It's insane the technology we have access to."

The Wall Street Journal writes that Telegram "has become the premier internet platform to buy everything from hacked data and weapons to illicit drugs and child sexual abuse material, according to current and former law-enforcement officials and cybercrime researchers..."

And it's also being used by identity thieves: There are thousands of channels and groups on Telegram that offer stolen identities that can be used to open bank and investment accounts. Some claim to offer already created bank accounts created with stolen details. A channel called Bank Store Online listed accounts at over 60 banks and cryptocurrency exchanges for sale, ranging from $80 for a personal account to $1,800 for a business one. Payments were charged in crypto... There are thousands of channels and groups on Telegram that offer stolen identities that can be used to open bank and investment accounts. Some claim to offer already created bank accounts created with stolen details. A channel called Bank Store Online listed accounts at over 60 banks and cryptocurrency exchanges for sale, ranging from $80 for a personal account to $1,800 for a business one. Payments were charged in crypto.

In Russia, where Durov launched Telegram in 2013, it is also the go-to platform where middlemen arrange deals that get around U.S. sanctions, such as smuggling in weapons parts, the Journal previously reported. Several groups advertise the sale of drones and Starlinks — small antennas to access the satellite internet network run by Elon Musk's SpaceX — to Russian combat units in Ukraine. In February, Musk tweeted that no Starlinks had been directly or indirectly sold to Russia, to the best of the company's knowledge. "It's ground zero for every illicit activity you can think of," said Evan Kohlmann, founder of Cloudburst Technologies, which monitors cybercrime on Telegram and elsewhere, and a frequent adviser to U.S. agencies.

"If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations..." writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But "We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there's a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence..." From 6.2 onwards, Plasma itself will show a system notification asking for a donation once per year, in December. The idea here is to get the message that KDE really does need your financial help in front of more eyeballs — especially eyeballs not currently looking at KDE's public-facing promotion efforts... [W]e tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings' Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification's header.

Ultimately the decision to do this came down to the following factors:

— We looked at FOSS peers like Thunderbird and Wikipedia which have similar things (and in Wikipedia's case, the message is vastly more intrusive and naggy). In both cases, it didn't drive everyone away and instead instead resulted in a massive increase in donations that the projects have been able to use to employ lots of people.

- KDE really needs something like this to help our finances grow sustainably in line with our userbase and adoption by vendors and distributors.
The blog post also answers the question: what are you going to do with all that money? This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively. But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer and the one that as your representative, I'd advocate for. It's basically the platform I ran on two years ago: extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more! I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers. I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness.

These have been dreams for a long time, and throughout KDE we've been slowly moving towards them over the years. With a lot more money, we can turbocharge the pace! If that stuff sounds good, you can start with a donation today.
A reaction from GamingOnLinux: I think it is fair for KDE to expose that they need funding and asking that from inside the UI would not hurt for a software that delivered so much for free (as in freedom and as in "gratis").
Linux magazine points out that other new features for 6.2 "include the ability to block apps from inhibiting sleep mode, a new 'fill' mode for wallpaper, an overhauled System Settings Accessibility page, and the usual slew of bug fixes."

Harvard's school of public policy is publishing a Misinformation Review for peer-reviewed, scholarly articles promising "reliable, unbiased research on the prevalence, diffusion, and impact of misinformation worldwide."

This week it reported that "Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI." They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of questionable GPT-fabricated scientific papers found in Google Scholar shows that many are about applied, often controversial topics susceptible to disinformation: the environment, health, and computing.

The resulting enhanced potential for malicious manipulation of society's evidence base, particularly in politically divisive domains, is a growing concern... [T]he abundance of fabricated "studies" seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.
"Our analysis shows that questionable and potentially manipulative GPT-fabricated papers permeate the research infrastructure and are likely to become a widespread phenomenon..." the article points out.

"Google Scholar's central position in the publicly accessible scholarly communication infrastructure, as well as its lack of standards, transparency, and accountability in terms of inclusion criteria, has potentially serious implications for public trust in science. This is likely to exacerbate the already-known potential to exploit Google Scholar for evidence hacking..."