The Decentralized Engineering Corporation (DEC) has raised $9 million in seed funding to create a decentralized ridesharing service on Solana -- a concept that's been theorized by Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin and attempted by various startups over the years. Decrypt reports: DEC announced today that it has raised $9 million in seed funding to build out The Rideshare Protocol, or TRIP, which is designed to power ridesharing apps from a variety of future companies. They'll all share the same core technology to connect drivers with riders, and DEC is building Teleport as the first application to prove out the framework. The seed round was co-led by Foundation Capital and Road Capital, with participation from Thursday Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, 305 Ventures, and Common Metal. Individual strategic investors include Uber's third-ever employee, engineer Ryan McKillen, as well as social media influencer Jake Paul, Flexport founder Ryan Petersen, and Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero.

Paul Bohm, CEO of DEC and founder of Teleport, told Decrypt that ridesharing giant Uber "essentially runs a monopoly -- it's very centralized." Uber provides the platform that connects drivers to riders and takes a significant cut of the fee, commanding an estimated 72% of the U.S. ride-sharing market as of June, per data from Bloomberg. TRIP is designed as a decentralized protocol that various app makers can plug into as a marketplace that connects drivers and passengers, all without a centralized force at the heart. Bohm believes this will spur both cooperation and competition, encouraging participants to buck the model of giants like Uber and Lyft while also pushing companies to innovate to create the best app around a shared marketplace. A token will be used for decentralized governance of the protocol too, Bohm said.

Teleport is designed to look and act much like an Uber or Lyft app for seamless onboarding of riders and drivers alike with no crypto required. Riders can pay with either a credit card or the USDC stablecoin, while drivers are paid via USDC or a direct payment to a standard bank account. "We keep it very, very close," Bohm said of the app experience. "We don't want any extra steps on either the driver or rider side. But the difference is, you're no longer part of a monopoly." DEC will use the seed funding to fuel its rollout in the months ahead, with Teleport and TRIP holding demonstrations during Solana's Breakpoint conference in Lisbon in November and Art Basel Miami in December.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A group of New Zealand Uber drivers have won a landmark case against the global ridesharing company, forcing it to treat them as employees, not contractors, and entitling them to a suite of worker rights and protections. New Zealand's employment court ruled on Tuesday that the drivers were employees, not independent contractors. While the ruling applies specifically to the case of four drivers, the court noted that it may have wider implications for drivers across the country. The court "does not have jurisdiction to make broader declarations of employment status" so all Uber drivers "do not, as a result of this judgment, instantly become employees," chief judge Christina Inglis wrote. She continued, however: "It may well have broader impact, particularly where, as here, there is apparent uniformity in the way in which the companies operate, and the framework under which drivers are engaged."

Employment status is the bedrock on which most of New Zealand's minimum employment rights rest. It is "the gate through which a worker must pass" before they can access legal minimum entitlements including the minimum wage, six minimum hours of work, rest and meal breaks, holidays, parental leave, domestic violence leave, bereavement leave, ability to pursue a personal grievance, and access to union membership and collective bargaining. A spokesperson for Uber said the company was "disappointed" and would be appealing against the decision. They said it was "too soon to speculate" on whether New Zealand's drivers having employee status would affect the company's operations in the country more broadly.

The Federal Trade Commission plans to take the rare step of bringing individual sanctions against the CEO of alcohol delivery company Drizly for data privacy abuses, following allegations that the company's security failures under his watch exposed the personal information of about 2.5 million customers. From a report: The proposed order will follow Drizly CEO James Cory Rellas to future businesses, requiring him to implement a security program at any companies he runs that collect information from more than 25,000 people. The order will also apply to the company itself, which is now a subsidiary of the ride-hailing service Uber. Under the terms of the FTC action, Rellas and Drizly will have to destroy unnecessary data, implement new data controls and train employees about cybersecurity.

In singling out Rellas, the FTC signaled it could use a wider range of tools to address data privacy abuses under the leadership of chair Lina Khan, who was widely expected to bring tougher oversight of the tech industry. The inclusion of Rellas follows a push from Democrats to more aggressively penalize individual executives involved in major data privacy breaches. Democrats on the commission previously criticized the agency's record-setting settlement with Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal because it did not name Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Torontonians now have another way to get cannabis without having to wait too long for it to show up, as Uber Eats is offering deliveries in the city starting today. Uber Eats has teamed up with cannabis marketplace Leafly to offer residents swift weed delivery from local, licensed retailers. Uber Eats claims this is a world first for a "a major third-party delivery platform." Users in Ontario have been available to order weed through the app since last November, but until now items were only available for pickup.

If you're in the city and feel the need to take the edge off, you can select the cannabis category or search for one of the retailers (Hidden Leaf Cannabis, Minerva Cannabis and Shivaa's Rose are the first three to sign up). You'll receive a warning that you need to be of legal age, which is 19 in Ontario, to view the products. After you place an order and the retailer confirms it, one of the retailer's own licensed "budtenders" will deliver your items. As is the case with alcohol orders, the delivery person will verify your age and level of sobriety before handing over the goods.

Uber is launching a dedicated advertising arm in a push to cash in on a captive audience and tap the higher-margin revenue stream. From a report: The new division encompasses ad offerings on Uber's ride-hailing and food-delivery apps. On Uber Eats, for example, brands will be able to pay for sponsored listings, prominent placing on the homepage or checkout, and featured menu items. Uber also rolled out Journey Ads, a new service that runs advertisements for ride-share users while they wait for their driver and during their trip. More than 40 brands have partnered with Uber to run Journey Ads, including NBCUniversal and Heineken NV, Uber said in a statement on Wednesday. The move expands Uber's prior efforts to monetize an audience of 122 million monthly active users.

According to the New York Times, former chief security officer of Uber, Joe Sullivan, has been found guilty of hiding a 2016 data breach from authorities and obstructing an investigation by the FTC into the company's security practices. The breach affected more than 57 million Uber riders and drivers. From the report: Mr. Sullivan was deposed by the F.T.C. as it investigated a 2014 breach of Uber's online systems. Ten days after the deposition, he received an email from a hacker who claimed to have found another security vulnerability in its systems. Mr. Sullivan learned that the hacker and an accomplice had downloaded the personal data of about 600,000 Uber drivers and additional personal information associated with 57 million riders and drivers, according to court testimony and documents. The hackers pressured Uber to pay them at least $100,000. Mr. Sullivan's team referred them to Uber's bug bounty program, a way of paying "white hat" researchers to report security vulnerabilities. The program capped payouts at $10,000, according to court testimony and documents. Mr. Sullivan and his team paid the hackers $100,000 and had them sign a nondisclosure agreement.

During his testimony, one of the hackers, Vasile Mereacre, said he was trying to extort money from Uber. Uber did not publicly disclose the incident or inform the F.T.C. until a new chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, joined in the company in 2017. The two hackers pleaded guilty to the hack in October 2019. States typically require companies to disclose breaches if hackers download personal data and a certain number of users are affected. There is no federal law requiring companies or executives to reveal breaches to regulators. Federal prosecutors argued that Mr. Sullivan knew that revealing the new hack would extend the F.T.C. investigation and hurt his reputation and that he concealed the hack from the F.T.C. Mr. Sullivan did not reveal the 2016 hack to Uber's general counsel, according to court testimonies and documents. He did discuss the breach with another Uber lawyer, Craig Clark.

Mr. Sullivan did not reveal the 2016 hack to Uber's general counsel, according to court testimonies and documents. He did discuss the breach with another Uber lawyer, Craig Clark. Like Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Clark was fired by Mr. Khosrowshahi after the new Uber chief executive learned about the details of the breach. Mr. Clark was given immunity by federal prosecutors in exchange for testifying against Mr. Sullivan. Mr. Clark testified that Mr. Sullivan told the Uber security team that they needed to keep the breach secret and that Mr. Sullivan changed the nondisclosure agreement signed by the hackers to make it falsely seem that the hack was white-hat research. Mr. Sullivan said he would discuss the breach with Uber's "A Team" of top executives, according to Mr. Clark's testimony. He shared the matter with only one member of the A Team: then chief executive Travis Kalanick. Mr. Kalanick approved the $100,000 payment to the hackers, according to court documents. The case is "believed to be the first time a company executive faced criminal prosecution over a hack," notes the report.

"The way responsibilities are divided up is going to be impacted by this. What's documented is going to be impacted by this The way bug bounty programs are designed is going to be impacted by this," said Chinmayi Sharma, a scholar in residence at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law and a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Police in the UK have arrested a 17-year-old suspected hacker. Reports suggest the arrest is connected to the Rockstar Games hack that led to a major Grand Theft Auto VI leak. The individual may have been involved with an intrusion on Uber as well. From a report: According to journalist Matthew Keys' sources, the arrest is the result of an investigation involving the City of London Police, the UK's National Cyber Crime Unit and the FBI. Keys noted that the police and/or the FBI will reveal more details about the arrest later today. The City of London Police told Engadget it had "no further information to share at this stage."

The GTA VI leak is unquestionably one of the biggest in video game history. Last weekend, the hacker shared a trove of footage from a test build of the game, which is one of the most hotly anticipated titles around. Rockstar, which tends to keep a tight lid on its development process, confirmed on Monday that the leak was legitimate. It said the incident won't impact work on the game and that it will "properly introduce" fans to the next title in the blockbuster series once it's ready.

Uber said on Monday a hacker affiliated with the Lapsus$ hacking group was responsible for a cyber attack that forced the ride-hailing company to shut several internal communications temporarily last week. From a report: Uber said the attacker had not accessed any user accounts and the databases that store sensitive user information such as credit card numbers, bank account or trip details. "The attacker accessed several internal systems, and our investigation has focused on determining whether there was any material impact," Uber said, adding that investigation was still ongoing. The company said it was in close coordination with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice on the matter. Friday's cybersecurity incident had brought down Uber's internal communication system for a while and employees were restricted to use Salesforce-owned office messaging app Slack. Uber said the attacker logged in to a contractor's Uber account after they accepted a two-factor login approval request following multiple requests, giving the hacker access to several employee accounts and tools such as G-Suite and Slack.

A hacker published authentic, pre-release footage from development of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most anticipated video game from Take-Two Interactive Software. From a report: The cache of videos offers an extensive and unauthorized look at the making of one of biggest games in the industry. A leak of this scale is so rare that some people cast doubt on its authenticity when it emerged over the weekend, but people familiar with the game's development said the videos are real. The footage provides an early and unpolished view of plans for Grand Theft Auto VI, though the final version will look much more refined, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Take-Two issued requests for YouTube and other websites to remove the videos, citing a copyright claim, but not before they were widely disseminated. Rockstar Games, the Take-Two studio that makes Grand Theft Auto, confirmed the hack in a statement posted to Twitter on Monday. It blamed a "network intrusion" that allowed the hacker to download the content. Take-Two shares were down as much as 3.3% on Monday. The hacker posted dozens of never-before-seen videos from Grand Theft Auto VI on an online message board over the weekend. On the forum, the person suggested they were the same hacker who infiltrated Uber Technologies in a high-profile incident last week. The claim is unverified. The hacker indicated in a follow-up message about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game, "I am looking to negotiate a deal," and raised the prospect of publishing more internal information about the project.

Uber says there is "no evidence" that any of its users' private information was compromised in a breach of its internal computer systems discovered Thursday. From a report: All of the company's products, including its ride-hail and Uber Eats food delivery services, are currently "operational," and law enforcement has been notified, Uber said in a statement this afternoon. The hack, which was discovered Thursday, forced the company to take several of its internal systems offline, including Slack, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Uber is continuing to investigate how a hacker, who claims to be 18 years old, was able to gain administrator access to the company's internal tools. Those internal software tools were taken offline yesterday afternoon as "a precaution" and started to come back online earlier today, the company says.

Uber discovered its computer network had been breached on Thursday, leading the company to take several of its internal communications and engineering systems offline as it investigated the extent of the hack. From a report: The breach appeared to have compromised many of Uber's internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times. "They pretty much have full access to Uber," said Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs who corresponded with the person who claimed to be responsible for the breach. "This is a total compromise, from what it looks like."

An Uber spokesman said the company was investigating the breach and contacting law enforcement officials. Uber employees were instructed not to use the company's internal messaging service, Slack, and found that other internal systems were inaccessible, said two employees, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Shortly before the Slack system was taken offline on Thursday afternoon, Uber employees received a message that read, "I announce I am a hacker and Uber has suffered a data breach." The message went on to list several internal databases that the hacker claimed had been compromised. BleepingComputers adds: According Curry, the hacker also had access to the company's HackerOne bug bounty program, where they commented on all of the company's bug bounty tickets. Curry told BleepingComputer that he first learned of the breach after the attacker left the above comment on a vulnerability report he submitted to Uber two years ago. Uber runs a HackerOne bug bounty program that allows security researchers to privately disclose vulnerabilities in their systems and apps in exchange for a monetary bug bounty reward. These vulnerability reports are meant to be kept confidential until a fix can be released to prevent attackers from exploiting them in attacks.

Curry further shared that an Uber employee said the threat actor had access to all of the company's private vulnerability submissions on HackerOne. BleepingComputer was also told by a source that the attacker downloaded all vulnerability reports before they lost access to Uber's bug bounty program. This likely includes vulnerability reports that have not been fixed, presenting a severe security risk to Uber. HackerOne has since disabled the Uber bug bounty program, cutting off access to the disclosed vulnerabilities.

Autonomous tech developer Nuro is teaming up with Uber Eats in a long-awaited partnership that will see the company's latest robot take over the delivery of food to app users. Autoweek reports: The two companies signed a 10-year contract just a few days ago, paving the way for a wider rollout of Nuro's driverless delivery robots, which have been operating on a limited scale in several cities. The partnership will kick off slowly, with Nuro deploying its robots to Houston and Mountain View, California, as a start, before the service makes a wider debut in the Bay Area.

Perhaps more importantly, Nuro's delivery robots will allow Uber Eats to not have to pay a human driver, which is something that company has been working toward for years as part of its primary business as well. However, the lagging development of Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy, once widely expected to arrive around 2020, had stalled ambitions for Uber, which has struggled with profitability through normal operations with independent contractor drivers. Nuro delivery robots enjoyed renewed interest from business partners in the early months of the pandemic, but the company's technology is now being viewed as a cost saver for operators rather than a method of more sanitary delivery.

Of course, a limited rollout in two cities plus plans to launch in the Bay Area won't transform Uber Eats' business model overnight. This could take years even with an unlimited supply of Nuro delivery robots -- with regulatory approval still being the major impediment. That's because commercial driverless permits are granted on a state-by-state basis, in addition to city and county approvals, which were hard enough for Nuro to obtain in the Bay Area, where Level 4 robotaxis are being tested. Nuro will need to focus its efforts in those areas where traffic is suitable for its robots.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Peloton Executive Chairman and co-founder John Foley is stepping down from the fitness company as part of a leadership shake-up, extending the turbulence at a business trying to pull out of a deep slump. Foley, who helped start Peloton in 2012 and served as chief executive officer for 10 years, is resigning effective Monday, the company said in a statement. Foley took the executive chairman role in February when he handed the reins to CEO Barry McCarthy, a veteran of Spotify and Netflix.

Chief Legal Officer Hisao Kushi, another co-founder, is also headed for the exits. He'll be replaced in that role by Tammy Albarran, who Peloton recruited from Uber Technologies Inc. The chairman role, meanwhile, will be filled by Karen Boone, a former Restoration Hardware executive who currently serves as lead independent director. Peloton investors initially applauded the changes, sending the shares up as much as 5.3% to $11.64 in extended trading on Monday. But the rally soon evaporated, with the stock declining more than 2%. The reshuffling extends a year of upheaval at New York-based Peloton, which thrived in the early days of the pandemic but is now suffering from declining sales and mounting losses. Its shares are down about 90% over the past year, and the company has struggled to work through a glut of inventory.

Separately, Chief Commercial Officer Kevin Cornils is also leaving Peloton and won't be replaced. Some of Cornils's responsibilities will be assumed by Dion Sanders as he takes the role of chief emerging business officer, according to an internal memo from McCarthy reviewed by Bloomberg. Chief Content Officer Jen Cotter will assume control of apparel and accessories, showing that the company remains committed to that market. Albarran will take over Peloton's legal operations on Oct. 3. She helped oversee a corporate makeover at Uber, which set out to change its image in 2017 after its hard-charging style led to scandals and a strained relationship with drivers. Peloton looks to draw on the experience of Albarran and Boone to "help move the company forward into our next chapter of growth," McCarthy said.

United Airlines is moving deeper into the flying taxi business. Not only has the airline plowed $15 million into Eve Air Mobility, it ordered 200 flying taxis and has an option for another 200. United expects to start receiving Eve's four-seater electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle (eVTOL) as soon as 2026. From a report: The company says its investment was spurred by both its confidence in the urban air mobility market and Eve's working relationship with Embraer. According to United, Embrarer is "a trusted aircraft manufacturer with a proven track record of building and certifying aircraft over the company's 53-year history." Embrarer previously worked with Uber on a flying taxi project that the latter eventually ditched. Eve's flying taxi has conventional fixed wings, rotors and pushers with a design that United says favors safety, efficiency, reliability and certifiability. It's said to have a range of 60 miles and United added that the vehicle can "reduce noise levels by 90 percent compared to current conventional aircraft."

Joe Sullivan, Uber's former chief of security, faces criminal charges for his handling of a 2016 security breach. His trial this week has divided the security industry. From a report: Joe Sullivan was a rock star in the information security world. One of the first federal prosecutors to work on cybercrime cases in the late 1990s, he jumped into the corporate security world in 2002, eventually taking on high-profile roles as chief of security at Facebook and Uber. When the security community made its annual summer pilgrimage to Las Vegas for two conferences, Mr. Sullivan was an easily recognizable figure: tall with shaggy hair, wearing sneakers and a hoodie. "Everyone knew him; I was in awe, frankly," said Renee Guttmann, who was the chief information security officer for Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup. "He was an industry leader." So it came as a shock to many in the community when Mr. Sullivan was fired by Uber in 2017, accused of mishandling a security incident the year before. Despite the scandal, Mr. Sullivan got a new job as chief of security at Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure company.

But the investigation into the incident at Uber continued, and in 2020, the same prosecutor's office where Mr. Sullivan had worked decades earlier charged him with two felonies, in what is believed to be the first time a company executive has faced potential criminal liability for an alleged data breach. Mr. Sullivan has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Mr. Sullivan stepped down from his job at Cloudflare in July, in preparation for his trial, which begins this week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Other chief security officers are following the case closely, worried about what it means for them. [...] At the very least, security executives are worried about being on the hook for potential legal bills. Charles Blauner, a retired CISO and cybersecurity adviser, said security chiefs had taken a strong interest in directors and officers insurance, which covers the legal costs of executives who are sued as a result of their work with a company. "A lot of sitting chief information security officers are going to their bosses and asking if they have D.&O. insurance and, if not, can I have it?" Mr. Blauner said. "They are saying, 'If I'm going to be held liable for something our company does, I want legal coverage.'" After being charged, Mr. Sullivan sued Uber to force it to pay his legal fees in the criminal case, and they reached a private settlement.

Google-owned navigation service Waze is shutting down its six-year-old carpooling service, citing shifting commuting patterns as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a report: Starting in September, the company will begin the process of winding down its carpooling service, which had been available in the US, Brazil, and Israel. Waze said it will explore other ways it can help serve the 150 million customers worldwide that use its navigation app. "While Waze was predominantly a commuting app pre-COVID, today the proportion of errands and travel drives have surpassed commutes," the company said in a statement provided to The Verge. "This means we have an opportunity to find even more impactful ways to bring together a global community to share real-time insights and help each other outsmart traffic -- this is what has always made Waze truly special." First launched in the Bay Area in 2016, Waze Carpool eventually expanded to all 50 states in the US as well as Brazil and Waze's country of origin, Israel. The service was different from carpooling services offered by Uber and Lyft insofar as it let nonprofessional drivers offer rides to people traveling on a similar route for a nominal fee. In 2018, the company launched its own standalone carpool app.

Communications giant Twilio has confirmed hackers accessed customer data after successfully tricking employees into handing over their corporate login credentials. From a report: The San Francisco-based company, which allows users to build voice and SMS capabilities -- such as two-factor authentication (2FA) -- into applications, said in a blog post published Monday that it became aware that someone gained "unauthorized access" to information related to some Twilio customer accounts on August 4. Twilio has more than 150,000 customers, including Facebook and Uber. According to the company, the as-yet-unidentified threat actor convinced multiple Twilio employees into handing over their credentials, which allowed access to the company's internal systems. The attack used SMS phishing messages that purported to come from Twilio's IT department, suggesting that the employees' password had expired or that their schedule had changed, and advised the target to log in using a spoofed web address that the attacker controls.

Sociologist Ashley Mears know the secret to making viral videos on Facebook. "It's like a magic trick," one creator explains. Literally.

"Many of the most successful people in the content-creation game on Facebook are magicians," Mears explains in a video. "I think that that's not such a surprise, because magicians are extremely skilled in manipulating people's attention, which is basically what the viral video economy does."

Mears recently visited the "new creative elites," a group of creators regularly getting 100 million to 200 million views, which includes former jazz singer Anna Rothfuss and her magician boyfriend Justin Flom: Rothfuss and Flom are among the 180 video-makers (or "creators" in the industry's jargon) working with a Las Vegas magician called Rick Lax. They produce short videos timed to last the precise number of seconds that Facebook requires a clip to run to be eligible for an ad (this used to be three minutes but recently went down to one). Though the clips usually look like authentic user-generated material, all are scripted. Most fall into genres: diy, crafts, hazards, adultery and proposals. Lax manages his network like a cross between a Hollywood agent and a schoolteacher. He takes a slice of the ad revenue that creators earn. In exchange, he gives them online tutorials about how to make viral content: everything from how to hold the camera to which metrics matter to Facebook. He releases new instructions every time the algorithm changes substantially, and offers feedback on people's videos. He also posts his creators' videos on his own Facebook page, which has 14m followers....

A friend was making videos for Rick Lax, and invited Rothfuss to join in 2019. A year later she bought her first mansion. Entering the viral-content game involves a certain surrendering of artistic aspirations, but Rothfuss says she doesn't care. "I do not want to be famous," she says. "I love being low-key and flying under the radar, and just getting rich...."

Lax realised that appetite for these videos was insatiable: the only obstacle to earning more money was how many clips he could make in a day.... Lax wouldn't go into details of his profit-sharing arrangement but his creators are clearly flourishing. Many told me they felt like they were taking part in a 21st-century gold rush. "This doesn't happen to that many people," says Amy Boiss, a one-time Uber driver whose magician boyfriend introduced her to Lax's network. "To make more money than neurosurgeons...." Lax and his friends got rich without anyone knowing who they are....

It's perhaps no coincidence that the two most-viewed Facebook creators in 2021, Lax and Julius Dein, both started out as magicians (as did many of their affiliates). Their videos aren't magic performances as such, but they're informed by the art of magic. "Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people's perception," wrote a former Google employee (and amateur magician) in an essay published on Medium in 2017, "How technology hijacks your mind". Social-media companies, wrote the author, "influence what people do without them even realising it", just as magicians do: "Once you know how to push people's buttons you can play them like a piano."
Ironically, the creators end up driven by "the same dopamine rush they were exploiting in us," the article points out. "If you're looking at the data, you can actually see your earnings go up as people watch your work: making viral videos can be just as addictive as watching them."

One of the magicians in Lax's network even says point-blank that "It feels like a drug."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by Jody Serrano: In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it was near to impossible for me to watch videos, TV shows, or listen to music. Far from feeling limited, I felt like I was lucky, for I had access to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about anything I wanted to know -- which in those days was anime -- the majority of which was conveniently located on GeoCities. For all the zoomers scrunching up their brows, here's a primer. Back in the 1990s, before the birth of modern web hosting household names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn't exactly easy or cheap to publish a personal website. This all changed when GeoCities came on the scene in 1994.

The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today's Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. "HotSprings" was dedicated to health and fitness, while "Area 51" was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.

Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers -- named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on -- instead of neighborhoods. [...] We can, however, ask GeoCities' founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the '90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion," Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. "It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge." When asked to share his thoughts on the internet of today, Bohnett said: "... The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn't about what you had to eat and where you've traveled. [...] It wasn't anything about your face." He added: "So, what has surprised me is how far away we've gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It's so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. [...] I've been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we've seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok."

Bohnett went on to say that he thinks it's important to remember that "the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we're not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber?"

"We're still in that trajectory where there's going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities," added Bohnett. "I'm very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It's so exciting to see where we might go."

Microsoft says the Outlook email client will crash when opening and reading emails with tables such as Uber receipt emails. BleepingComputer reports: "When opening, replying, or forwarding some emails that include complex tables, Outlook stops responding," the company explains in a support document. To make matters worse, emails with the same table contents will also cause the Microsoft Word app to stop responding. While the known issue affects Microsoft 365 customers in the Current Channel Version 2206 Build 15330.20196 and higher, it can also trigger freezes in current Beta and Current Channel Preview builds. The Microsoft Word team has already developed a fix that will be released to Beta channel customers soon, after undergoing verification. Microsoft added that customers using Outlook versions in the Current Channel would receive the fix as part of this month's Patch Tuesday, on August 9, 2022. For those unable to wait for the fix, Microsoft has provided a workaround that requires users to revert to an older build.