An investigation has uncovered a coordinated campaign to pay Russian TikTok influencers to post videos pushing pro-Kremlin narratives about the war in Ukraine. Vice News: Numerous campaigns have been coordinated in a secret Telegram channel that directs these influencers on what to say, where to capture videos, what hashtags to use, and when exactly to post the video. These campaigns were launched at the beginning of the invasion and have involved a number of the highest-profile influencers on TikTok, some of whom have over a million followers.

And even though TikTok has banned new uploads from users located inside Russia, the campaigns have not stopped. The Telegram channel is run by an anonymous administrator who recruits social media influencers and told VICE News he was a journalist. The administrator lays out the requirements, such as minimum views required and the date and time the video needs to be posted. He also asks potential recruits to say how much money they demand per post. It remains unknown who is paying for the campaigns.

Twitter is rolling out a change that, frustratingly, makes it a bit more difficult to see your chronological feed. From a report: The design change, which lets you swipe between your Home (algorithmically served) and Latest (reverse chronological) timelines, was announced Thursday. To set it up, you tap the sparkle icon in the top right corner, and you'll see the option to pin your "Latest timeline," and if you select that, you'll see both "Home" and "Latest Tweets" tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you use pinned lists on the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS, and it's coming "soon" to Android and the web, Twitter says. To my great disappointment, however, I've found that after testing the feature, now I can't make the chronological feed the default. Instead, I can only have Home as my default or set up the two Home and Latest Tweets tabs and swap between them as needed.

Russian prosecutors have asked a court to ban Meta Platforms's Facebook and Instagram as "extremist," Interfax reported, the latest move in a growing crackdown on social networks. From a report: Authorities blocked access to Facebook last week under a new media law, but the "extremist" designation, if approved by a court, would effectively criminalize all of Meta's operations in Russia. The company's Instagram app would also be blocked. The move comes amid increasing tension between Moscow and U.S. tech companies. Earlier Friday, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, called on prosecutors to investigate Meta after Reuters reported that the company had temporarily eased internal restrictions on calling for violence against Russian soldiers due to the invasion of Ukraine. Russia has already banned certain social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, while tech companies have demonetized Russian state-sponsored media and blocked them in Europe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Consumer Reports wants the Federal Communications Commission to take a closer look at whether Internet service providers are complying with a US law that prohibits them from charging hardware rental fees when customers use their own equipment. In a filing submitted to the FCC this week, Consumer Reports said it asked members about their Internet bills and got over 350 responses, with some suggesting violations of either the letter or spirit of the law. "Some contain allegations that the law is being violated, whereas others state the new statute is being respected. Many more stories suggest that ISPs dissuade consumers from using their own equipment, typically by refusing to troubleshoot any service disruptions if consumers opt not to rent the ISP's devices. Such practices result in de facto situations where consumers feel pressured or forced to rent equipment that they would prefer to own instead," Consumer Reports told the FCC.

Consumer Reports' filing came in response to the FCC asking for public comment on the implementation of the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which took effect in December 2020. In addition to price-transparency rules for TV service, the law prohibited TV and broadband providers from charging rental or lease fees when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." All the comments collected by Consumer Reports are available here. The FCC filing includes examples of complaints about AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter Spectrum, Frontier, Windstream, and Cox, though the complaints weren't all about rental fees.

In its call for public input, the FCC asked for comment on "the extent to which (if at all) subject entities continue to assess charges for equipment that are expressly prohibited by the statute." [...] Consumer Reports said its questions for members were "designed to measure whether or not ISPs were in compliance... and also to solicit consumer opinion on whether or not it was difficult to use consumer-owned equipment versus renting those devices from the provider. Notably, neither of the two cable industry trade associations mentioned this issue in any detail in their comments filed last month at the Commission." Consumer Reports said that some of the responses "suggest the statute is not being complied with as vigorously as Congress intended... These allegations merit further investigation by the Commission." Consumer Reports offered to share contact information for the customers with the FCC so it can investigate further.

Google is updating the default "Messages" app to include a number of new features, such as the ability to handle iMessage "Tapbacks." TechCrunch reports: Other coming updates include nudges to remind you to reply to messages you missed, separate tabs for business and personal messages, reminders about birthdays you may want to celebrate, support for sharper videos via a Google Photos integration and an expanded set of emoji mashups, among other things. After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction -- like love, laughter, confusion or excitement -- will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it's the bottom right.) This feature is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow. [...] Android's interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the "heart" reaction on Android becomes the "face with the heart eyes" emoji. And the iMessage's exclamation mark reaction becomes the "face with the open mouth" emoji.

Google is also integrating Google Photos into the Message app to improve the video sharing experience. While the modern RCS standard allows people with Android devices to share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn't support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too. This addition aims to push Apple to adopt the industry standard by shaming the company over video quality.

Google has been making unauthorized pages for restaurants and using them to take a cut of fees from delivery orders through sites like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, according to a lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) filed by Left Field Holdings, a Florida franchisee of Lime Fresh Mexican restaurants, said Google has been creating illegitimate digital "storefronts" for restaurants and deceiving users into thinking that the restaurants approved them. The lawsuit says Google takes a cut from the delivery sites for orders made through the storefronts, and in some cases delivery sites pay Google to divert users to them.

Left Field said restaurants are charged up to 30% of each order in fees by delivery sites, and therefore see "little (if any)" profits from them. Google never received permission to sell the restaurants' food, designed the storefronts to look like they were restaurant-appproved, and placed a large "Order Online" button under restaurant search results to lure users to its storefronts, according to Left Field. [...] The lawsuit accuses Google of deceiving customers and violating federal trademark law starting in 2019. It asks for an undisclosed amount of money damages on behalf of Left Field and similarly affected restaurant owners and a ban on Google's alleged misuse of their trade names. In response to the lawsuit, a Google spokesperson said that the "Order Online" feature is meant to "connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from," and that it lets restaurants "indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website."

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers' viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law. Variety reports: A class action law firm, Bursor & Fisher, filed the suit in federal court in New York on behalf of two HBO Max subscribers, Angel McDaniel and Constance Simon. The suit alleges that HBO provides Facebook with customer lists, which allows Facebook to match customers' viewing habits with their Facebook profiles. The suit alleges that HBO never receives consent from subscribers to do this, thereby violating the Video Privacy Protection Act. The act was passed in 1988, after a reporter obtained Robert Bork's rental history from a video store.

The lawsuit argues that HBO knows that Facebook can combine such data because HBO is a major advertiser on Facebook, and it in fact uses that information to retarget Facebook ads to its own subscribers. HBO Max has a privacy policy on its website, in which it discloses that it and its partners use cookies to deliver personalized ads, among other purposes. But the VPPA requires that subscribers give separate consent to share their video viewing history. "In other words," the lawsuit states, "a standard privacy policy will not suffice."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: DuckDuckGo is now down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation in response to the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, but some critics say the change amounts to censorship. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced the down-ranking on Twitter. "Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create," he wrote in the tweet, which included the hashtag StandWithUkraine. "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation," he added. Weinberg didn't elaborate on the decision, or how the down-ranking will work. [...] Weinberg was quick to defend the decision, saying it was necessary to provide relevant search results over disinformation. Not everyone is a fan of the decision. "So you are censoring your users? DDG now decides what is or isn't misinformation? This decision should be left to the user," wrote one user on Twitter.

"You've got that magic 'disinformation finder' eh?" wrote another user. "You're just sure you're going to only downrank things that are wrong?"

Others referenced DuckDuckGo's commitment to "unbiased search."

Social media posts debunking purported Ukrainian disinformation are themselves fake. That doesn't stop them from being featured on Russian state TV. ProPublica: Researchers at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica identified more than a dozen videos that purport to debunk apparently nonexistent Ukrainian fakes. The videos have racked up more than 1 million views across pro-Russian channels on the messaging app Telegram, and have garnered thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. A screenshot from one of the fake debunking videos was broadcast on Russian state TV, while another was spread by an official Russian government Twitter account.

The goal of the videos is to inject a sense of doubt among Russian-language audiences as they encounter real images of wrecked Russian military vehicles and the destruction caused by missile and artillery strikes in Ukraine, according to Patrick Warren, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub. "The reason that it's so effective is because you don't actually have to convince someone that it's true. It's sufficient to make people uncertain as to what they should trust," said Warren, who has conducted extensive research into Russian internet trolling and disinformation campaigns. "In a sense they are convincing the viewer that it would be possible for a Ukrainian propaganda bureau to do this sort of thing."

Russia has created its own trusted TLS certificate authority (CA) to solve website access problems that have been piling up after sanctions prevent certificate renewals. From a report: The sanctions imposed by western companies and governments are preventing Russian sites from renewing existing TLS certificates, causing browsers to block access to sites with expired certificates. [...] The Russian state has envisioned a solution in a domestic certificate authority for the independent issuing and renewal of TLS certificates. "It will replace the foreign security certificate if it is revoked or expires. The Ministry of Digital Development will provide a free domestic analogue.

The service is provided to legal entities -- site owners upon request within 5 working days," explains the Russian public services portal, Gosuslugi (translated). However, for new Certificate Authorities (CA) to be trusted by web browsers, they first needed to be vetted by various companies, which can take a long time. Currently, the only web browsers that recognize Russia's new CA as trustworthy are the Russia-based Yandex browser and Atom products, so Russian users are told to use these instead of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.

Valve shipped its $400 handheld gaming console, the Steam Deck, before all its promised features were ready -- but one of the biggest is now here. From a report: You can now install Windows 10 on a Steam Deck and actually expect it to work because Valve has just released the all-important GPU, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth drivers you'll need to download and play games. Importantly, you'll need to wipe a Steam Deck to do this, there's no dual-boot yet, and Valve says you can only install Windows 10 since the Steam Deck's current BIOS apparently doesn't include firmware TPM support (which Microsoft infamously requires for Windows 11). Speakers and headphone jack don't work yet as there are no audio drivers.

Microsoft appears to be adding a tabbed interface to the top of File Explorer, as Insiders testing the latest Windows 11 preview build have discovered the feature in a hidden state. From a report: First spotted by Windows Insider Rafael Rivera on Twitter, once enabled, tabs will appear along the top of the File Explorer app, allowing users to have multiple folders open in one window. Tabs in File Explorer has been a highly requested feature among the Windows community for years at this point. Microsoft almost delivered the feature via its canceled "Sets" UX, which saw the introduction of tabs in every app window, including File Explorer. But when Sets was killed off, so was the idea of tabs in File Explorer. But now, Tabs in File Explorer appears to be making a return, and it works exactly like you'd expect. This feature is yet to be officially announced by Microsoft, and since this is currently only in the Dev Channel, it's possible that Microsoft could cancel the feature before it ships, though we think that's unlikely.

Does the Nintendo's larger and more vivid Switch suffer from the image-burn in that has crippled several devices with such display? An unusual and unexpected comprehensive test hasoffered some answers. InputMag: After 3,600 hours of subjecting an OLED Switch to the the same image -- one that was ripped from The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild -- Wulff Den, a YouTuber who specializes in gaming videos, concluded that the device is finally, surprisingly, showing faint signs of burn-in. As reported by ArsTecnica, the damage is minor -- on a white screen, like the Switch's main menu, there was a faint "blue ghosting," that appeared following the six-month experiment. But as, Wulff Den himself points out, "It's still a little subtle. It's not anything that I would do an RMA request for." The experiment began as soon as the OLED Switch was released, when Wulff Den decided to find out whether users would have to worry about burn-in. The YouTuber left his OLED Switch on, displaying the same image and set to its full brightness, without any interruptions aside from the occasional check-in. After 1,800 hours, or three months, the project yielded negligible effects -- white pixels were slightly dimmer but Wullf Den noted he most likely wouldn't have noticed, if not for relentlessly monitoring the changes during his test.

gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: The Biden administration is restoring California's authority to set its own rules on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, pickups and SUVs, a move that rolls back a Trump-era decision and puts California at the forefront of combatting climate change in the U.S. The decision reinstates a Clean Air Act waiver that allows California to adopt stronger fuel economy standards than those of the federal government and set the precedent for the rest of the country on how to mitigate vehicle emissions. The state's past ability to control vehicle emissions led to some innovative strategies in the auto industry, such as catalytic converters, which convert toxic gases and pollutants in exhaust gas into less-toxic pollutants, as well as 'check engine' lights.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted California's tighter standards. Under the Clean Air Act, the state has the ability to receive permission from the federal government to set its own rules on tailpipe standards that help lower emissions from gas-powered vehicles. California established the first tailpipe emissions standards in the country in 1966. The Trump administration in 2019 revoked California's authority to regulate its own air quality, arguing that it wouldn't allow "political agendas in a single state" to set national policy. That decision was part of a broader rollback of Obama-era vehicle emissions standards and climate change regulations.

China exported nearly 500,000 electric cars in 2021 -- more than any other country in the world -- thanks to increasing sales in Europe and Southeast Asia by emerging cost-competitive automakers, Nikkei has learned. From the report: According to the General Administration of Customs of China, the number of passenger EVs exported in 2021 increased 2.6 times to 499,573 units. Meanwhile, Germany doubled its exports to about 230,000 units, while the U.S fell 30% to around 110,000 units, and Japan increased 24% to 27,400 units -- according to data compiled by the German Association of the Automotive Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization.

China accounts for 60% of global EV production, and is emerging as the world's factory for EVs having already secured the same position in digital product manufacturing. Exports to the EU grew in the wake of it announcing a policy to ban the sale of new hybrid and gasoline-powered vehicles in 2035. China's EV exports to Europe rose fivefold to 230,000 units, with the region absorbing half of China's total EV exports. Belgium imported 87,000 units and the U.K. 50,000 units. Of the almost 500,000 units exported, more than 100,000 appear to have originated from Tesla's Shanghai plant.

Researchers at Texas A&M have come up with a novel way for touchscreens to feel more than just perfectly smooth by fooling a user's sense of touch through temperature changes. Gizmodo reports: In a recently published paper in the Science Robotics journal, they found that by regulating the temperature of the surface of a touchscreen, they can increase or decrease the amount of friction a finger feels like it's experiencing. The sensation of friction can be increased by as much as 50% by increasing a touchscreen's surface temperature from 23 degrees Celsius to 42 degrees Celsius, while the actual temperature changes are imperceptible to the user, assuming they're sticking to taps or quick swipe gestures on the screen.

The current prototypes don't facilitate temperature adjustments in fine detail, but the eventual goal is to be able to manipulate and quickly change the temperature on any region of a touchscreen so that as a finger is sliding across it the changes in friction that are felt fool the brain into thinking it's feeling physical buttons like keyboards, playback controls, even joysticks and action buttons for gaming.

Google appears to have built its own solution for running Windows games on Stadia. Google is planning to detail its Windows "emulator" for Linux next week at the company's Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15th. From a report: Reddit users have spotted a session at the summit that will detail "how to write a Windows emulator for Linux from scratch." The session will be led by Marcin Undak, on Google's Stadia porting platform team, and promises a "detailed overview of the technology behind Google's solution for running unmodified Windows games on Stadia." It appears that Google has built its own Windows emulator for Linux to help developers port games to the service without having to modify titles for Linux. If the emulator runs live on Stadia instead of just testing environments, this could open the door to a lot more games making their way to Stadia in the future

Russians are rapidly turning to internet services that cloak their location to help bypass restrictions on accessing foreign social media and news sites. From a report: Providers of virtual private networks, or VPNs, are recording a surge in usage from Russia after the Kremlin cracked down on Facebook and other services as part of a broader effort to silence dissent and limit information about its invasion of Ukraine. "In the past week, we saw traffic to our website from Russia increase by around 330% week over week," Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN, said in an email to Bloomberg on Wednesday. As of Tuesday, Russian interest in VPNs was more than eight times pre-invasion levels, according to data gathered by Top10VPN. Usage peaked at more than 10 times on March 5, the day after Facebook and Twitter were blocked by Russian authorities.

The Georgia state Senate voted 33-21 on Tuesday to pass a bill that seeks to prohibit social media platforms from removing or censoring content amid an outcry from conservatives that their political views are being discriminated against, even though a similar Texas law has been put on hold by a federal court. The Associated Press reports: Senate Bill 393 moves to the House for more debate. It declares that social media companies that have more than 20 million users in the United States are common carriers and that they can't block people from receiving certain messages based on viewpoints, location, race, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation or disability. "What we are stating here is you cannot be discriminated against for your viewpoint, your gender, your age or other things in this 21st century public square," said Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Cumming Republican who is sponsoring the bill. Dolezal said companies could still pull down lewd, obscene or offensive materials.

But the technology industry says the measure is illegal, in part because it would unconstitutionally make private companies host speech they don't agree with. They also argue that private owners should be able to do as they please with their own property. Dolezal has acknowledged that the state would be sued if it passed the law, but argues that a challenge could be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, breaking new and desirable ground. Researchers have not found widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, posts or materials.

The bill says social media companies must publish how it moderates content, targets content to specific users, and how it boosts the reach or hides specific content. It also says social media companies have to publish a report every six months on how often they were alerted to potentially illegal content and how many times they removed or downplayed content and suspended or removed users. Anyone who doesn't think a company is following the law could file a civil lawsuit, including a class action, in Georgia courts.

Lumen Technologies, an American company that operates one of the largest Internet backbones and carries a significant percentage of the world's Internet traffic, said today it will stop routing traffic for organizations based in Russia. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Lumen's decision comes just days after a similar exit by backbone provider Cogent, and amid a news media crackdown in Russia that has already left millions of Russians in the dark about what is really going on with their president's war in Ukraine. Monroe, La. based Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) initially said it would halt all new business with organizations based in Russia, leaving open the possibility of continuing to serve existing clients there. But on Tuesday the company said it could no longer justify that stance.

"Life has taken a turn in Russia and Lumen is unable to continue to operate in this market," Lumen said in a published statement. "The business services we provide are extremely small and very limited as is our physical presence. However, we are taking steps to immediately stop business in the region." "We decided to disconnect the network due to increased security risk inside Russia," the statement continues. "We have not yet experienced network disruptions but given the increasingly uncertain environment and the heightened risk of state action, we took this move to ensure the security of our and our customers' networks, as well as the ongoing integrity of the global Internet." According to Internet infrastructure monitoring firm Kentik, Lumen is the top international transit provider to Russia, with customers including Russian telecom giants Rostelecom and TTK, as well as all three major mobile operators (MTS, Megafon and VEON).