The North American Aerospace Defense Command is a US/Canada organization protecting the air sovereignty of the two nations.

But every year on December 24th, they also tell you where Santa is. From NORADSanta.org: The modern tradition of tracking Santa began in 1955 when a young child accidentally dialed the unlisted phone number of the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center upon seeing an newspaper advertisement telling kids to call Santa. The Director of Operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, answered the phone and instructed his staff to check the radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole.... Each year since, NORAD has dutifully reported Santa's location on Dec. 24 to millions of children and families across the globe. NORAD receives calls from around the world on Dec. 24 asking for Santa's location. Children, families and fans also keep track of Santa's location on the NORAD Tracks Santa® website and our social media platforms.
The page lists the NORAD technologies involved in tracking Santa — including 47 radar installations and geo-synchronous satellites with infrared heat sensors. ("Rudolph's nose gives off an infrared signature similar to a missile launch...")

And this year NORAD also produced a special video highlighting the various military fleets protecting Santa. ("He may know when you're sleeping, he may know when you're awake... " it tells viewers. "But for 67 years now, when he takes flight, we'll know.")

More from NORADSanta.org: Canadian NORAD fighter pilots, flying the CF-18, take off out of Newfoundland and welcome Santa to North America. Then at numerous locations in Canada other CF-18 fighter pilots escort Santa. While in the United States, American NORAD fighter pilots in either the F-15s, F16s or F-22s get the thrill of flying with Santa and the famous Reindeer...

Q: How can Santa travel the world within 24 hours?

A: NORAD intelligence reports indicate that Santa does not experience time the way we do. His trip seems to take 24 hours to us, but to Santa it might last days, weeks or even months. Santa would not want to rush the important job of delivering presents to children and spreading joy to everyone, so the only logical conclusion is that Santa somehow functions within his own time-space continuum....

How does Santa get down chimneys?

Although NORAD has different hypotheses and theories as to how Santa actually gets down the chimneys, we don't have definitive information to explain the magical phenomenon.

Do your planes ever intercept Santa?

Over the past 65 years, our fighter jets (F-16s, F-15s, F-22s and CF-18s) have intercepted Santa many, many times. When the jets intercept Santa, they tip their wings to say, "Hello Santa! NORAD is tracking you again this year!" Santa always waves. He loves to see the pilots...!

How many people support this effort, and are they active duty military personnel?

More than 1,250 Canadian and American uniformed personnel and DOD civilians volunteer their time on December 24th to answer the thousands of phone calls and emails that flood in from around the world. In addition to the support provided by our corporate contributors to make this program possible, NORAD has two lead project officers who manage the program.

How much money is spent on this project?

The NORAD Tracks Santa program is made possible by volunteers and through the generous support of corporate licensees who bear virtually all of the costs.
Corporate contributors include Microsoft (with separate contributions from Microsoft's search engine Bing and from Microsoft Azure), AWS (and Amazon's Alexa), Verizon, and HP.

NORADSanta.org also boasts extra features like an "arcade" of online games, a jukebox of Christmas tunes, and a library of online books about Santa. And the site even provides some technical data on the weight of Santa's sleigh — although the unit of measurement used is gumdrops.

Under the bipartisan spending bill that passed both chambers of Congress as of Friday, TikTok will be banned from government devices, underscoring the growing concern about the popular video-sharing app owned by China's ByteDance. From a report: The bill, which still has to be signed into law by President Joe Biden, also calls on e-commerce platforms to do more vetting to help deter counterfeit goods from being sold online, and forces companies pursuing large mergers to pay more to file with federal antitrust agencies.

Congress failed to pass many of the most aggressive bills targeting tech, including antitrust legislation that would require app stores developed by Apple and Google to give developers more payment options, and a measure mandating new guardrails to protect kids online. And though Congress made more headway this year than in the past toward a compromise bill on national privacy standards, there remains only a patchwork of state laws determining how consumer data is protected. Center-left tech industry group Chamber of Progress cheered the exclusion of several antitrust bills that would have targeted its backers, which include Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta.

The FBI is recommending the use of ad blockers, warning in an alert this week that cybercriminals are using online ads in search results to steal or extort money from victims. TechCrunch reports: In a pre-holiday public service announcement, the FBI said that cybercriminals are buying ads to impersonate legitimate brands, like cryptocurrency exchanges. Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with "minimum distinction" between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware. One of the FBI's recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands. Ad blockers don't just remove the enormous bloat from websites, like auto-playing video and splashy ads that take up half the page, which make your computer fans run like jet engines. Ad blockers are also good for privacy, because they prevent the tracking code within ads from loading. That means the ad companies, like Google and Facebook, cannot track you as you browse the web, or learn which websites you visit, or infer what things you might be interested in based on your web history. "Of course, you can switch your ad blocker off any time you want, and even allow or deny ads for entire websites," adds the report.

"Ads are still an important part of what keeps the internet largely free and accessible, including TechCrunch (and Slashdot!), even as subscriptions and paywalls are increasingly becoming the norm."

schwit1 shares a report from Futurism: Your robot vacuums are watching you -- and the resulting imagery of your most private moments can, horrifically, get leaked online. As the MIT Technology Review reports, the aptly-named company iRobot, behind the uber-popular Roomba vacuums, confirmed that gig workers outside of the US broke a non-disclosure agreement when sharing intimate photos, including one of a woman on the toilet, to social media.

The images in question, some of which MIT Tech shared -- though thankfully not the bathroom one -- were snapped by the vacuums for the purpose of data annotation, the process in which humans confirm or deny whether AI has accurately labeled things correctly. While the data annotation process is integral to Roomba-style vacuums and other AI-enabled robotics, most people are unaware of the process, though iRobot claimed in its responses to MIT Tech that the leaked images came from development robots that had a bright green label that said "video recording in process."

A raft of lawsuits from the games industry seeks to crack down on cheating in some popular online games, arguing that making cheats for games and even using them might be illegal. From a report: Cheating is a scourge of many online games, inspiring increasingly bold legal counteroffensives by some of the companies who make them. Those lawsuits are largely aimed against makers of cheat software, but they don't let players who use the cheats fully off the hook.Cheat-makers "induce and enable individual Destiny 2 players to create an unauthorized and infringing derivative work each time they deploy the cheat software," states one lawsuit from Sony-owned Bungie Studios that's still winding its way through the courts.

The kinds of cheats in play aren't the ones old-school gamers might have applied by inputting a developer-programmed invincibility code. Rather, they involve premium cheats that let players see through walls to get an advantage in multiplayer combat games such as Destiny 2 or Call of Duty. Game companies, many of which are banning tens and hundreds of thousands of accounts, say cheating scares off honest players and is costly to fight. Bungie estimated in one suit that it spends "roughly $1,250,000 per year on its anti-cheating measures," not including legal costs.

A Japanese billionaire picked his crewmates for the first-ever artist-centered mission. Space.com reports: Yusaku Maezawa, who made his fortune as an online fashion retailer, announced the eight people who would be flying with him on the dearMoon mission, which aims to use a SpaceX Starship to fly around the moon as soon as next year. "I hope each and every one will recognize the responsibility that comes with leaving the Earth, travelling to the moon and back," Maezawa says in the video in Japanese, with a translation provided in-video.

Riding along with Maezawa will be:
- Steve Aoki, D.J., producer and electronic dance music artist with several Billboard-charting studio albums;
- Tim Dodd, YouTube creator of the "Everyday Astronaut" channel (Dodd has interviewed SpaceX founder Elon Musk multiple times on camera);
- Yemi A.D., artist and choreographer known for his work with JAD Dance Company and with Ye (formerly Kanye West);
- Karim Iliya, photographer whose publications include National Geographic Magazine;
- Rhiannon Adam, a photographer who has been supported by the BBC/Royal Geographical Society and won multiple awards, according to their website;
- Brendan Hall, filmmaker on projects such as the two-hour documentary "Blood Sugar Rising" about diabetes in the United States, according to the Internet Movie Database;
- Dev Joshi, an "Indian television actor known for portraying the role of Baal Veer in Sony Sab's Baal Veer and Baalveer Returns," according to the Internet Movie Database;
- T.O.P., a South Korean rapper known as the lead for the boy band Big Bang;
- Two backup members: dancer Miyu, and snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington.

Each member of the dearMoon crew was briefly quoted in a video from the dearMoon YouTube channel, and the announcement was confirmed on Dodd's and Maezawa's Twitter feeds.

"Protesters clash with police as unrest rocks cities across China," reads CNN's headline. The Guardian calls it "the biggest wave of civil disobedience on the mainland since Xi Jinping assumed power a decade ago," noting one crowd numbered over 1,000 protesters. "Crowdsourced lists on social media claim protests have been documented at as many as 50 Chinese universities over the weekend."

Looking back over the last 10 years, CNN's correspondent in China calls it "an unprecedented level of public dissent". During lockdowns people struggled to get emergency care, food, and necessities, but CNN's correspondent warns now "what we're seeing is this tipping point across the country, after years of suffering and deaths." "What we're seeing is people past their breaking point — it's years of pent-up anger. This is three years of draconian lockdowns that have cost people's lives, their livelihoods — but the trigger for this wave of protests was a deadly fire at Xinjiang that killed at least 10 people. Videos of the scene indicated that Covid restrictions prevented victims from getting help.

"But these protesters — not just angry about Covid lockdowns. They're also targetting their anger towards the supreme leader himself."

[CNN shows what they call "extraordinary" footage of people in Shanghai calling on Jinping to step down.]

"Over and over again. Those chants go on for quite some time. They're also calling for the Communist party to step down. I can't overstate just how shocking it is to hear this, this crowd in Shanghai — China's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city. And that chanting happening in a central, upscale part of the city, to be directly calling out for Xi Jinping to resign — I mean, this is virtually unheard of. In China it is extremely dangerous to publicly criticize the party, especially Xi himself. You risk prison time, or even worse.

"Some protesters also chanted they don't want dictatorship, they want freedom and democracy. Witnesses told CNN as well that rows of police officers were making arrests, forcefully pushing protesters into police cars — but the next day on Sunday, hundreds of Shanghai residents returned, to continue protesting, despite heavy police presence and roadblocks. Videos also showed some protesters violently dragged away, and now that area has been mostly cordoned off.
New videos now "showed hundreds of people at an intersection shouting 'Release the people!' in a demand for the police to free detained demonstrators," reports CNN, in an article shared by Slashdot reader LionKimbro: By Sunday evening, mass demonstrations had spread to Beijing, Chengdu, Guangzhou and Wuhan, where thousands of residents called for not only an end to Covid restrictions, but more remarkably, political freedoms. In Beijing, hundreds of mostly young people demonstrated in the commercial heart of the city well into the small hours of Monday.... People chanted slogans against zero-Covid, voiced support for the detained protesters in Shanghai, and called for greater civil liberties. "We want freedom! We want freedom!" the crowd chanted under an overpass. Speaking to CNN's Selina Wang at the protest, a demonstrator said he was shocked by the turnout....

In the southwestern metropolis of Chengdu, large crowds demonstrated along the bustling river banks in a popular food and shopping district, according to a protester interviewed by CNN and videos circulating online.... "Opposition to dictatorship!" the crowd chanted. "We don't want lifelong rulers. We don't want emperors!" they shouted in a thinly veiled reference to Xi, who last month began a norm-shattering third term in office.

In the southern city of Guangzhou, hundreds gathered on a public square in Haizhu district — the epicenter of the city's ongoing Covid outbreak that has been locked down for weeks. "We don't want lockdowns, we want freedom! Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of arts, freedom of movement, personal freedoms. Give me back my freedom!" The crowd shouted.

Across China, protests have also broken out on university campuses — which are particularly politically sensitive to the Communist Party, given the history of the student-led Tiananmen Square protests in 1989....

In one video, a university official could be heard warning the students: "You will pay for what you did today."

"You too, and so will the country," a student shouted in reply.
The campus protests continued on Sunday, CNN reports, with a crowd of hundreds of students at Tsinghua University, another top university in Beijing.

"Videos and images circulating on social media show students holding up sheets of white paper and shouting: 'Democracy and rule of law! Freedom of expression!'"

"People just seem to really enjoy coming together to pretend fake things are real," writes the Guardian.

"Thousands of Tumblr users have been making posters, soundtracks, drawings and fan fiction for a 1973 Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro — but it never existed." Released in 1973, the little-seen Scorsese flick starred Robert De Niro as Goncharov, "a former discotheque owner who comes to Naples after the fall of the Soviet Union" with the goal of becoming a mob boss. Harvey Keitel plays the eye-patched Andrey (or Andrei) "The Banker" Daddano; Gene Hackman plays Valery Michailov; Al Pacino appears as Mario Ambrosini and Cybill Shepherd plays Goncharov's wife, Katya. Apparently, it was really good and was added to the Criterion Collection.

And you've never heard of it because it doesn't actually exist....

A few years ago, a Tumblr user posted a photo of some "knockoff boots" they had ordered online that had a very strange tag on the tongue: "The greatest mafia movie ever made. Martin Scorsese presents GONCHAROV. Domenico Proccacci production. A film by Matteo JWHJ0715. About the Naples Mafia." This mostly went ignored until 2020, when another Tumblr user reblogged a comment made on the original post, reading: "this idiot hasn't seen goncharov...."

The internet works in mysterious ways; earlier this month, Tumblr user beelzeebub made a fake poster for the film, tens of thousands of people were suddenly sharing it and lo: a new Scorsese film was born... [L]ike all of the best jokes, people have really committed to the bit. There's the film's poster, which has the tagline "greatest mafia movie (n)ever made". A music teacher in Indiana composed a theme song for Goncharov, inspired by The Godfather. There is also a cash-in video game, with an accompanying soundtrack, and a fake VHS.

"Academics" wrote essays analysing the film, which were published in (fake) film journals. A representative for the movie reviewing platform Letterboxd even told the New York Times that they had had to remove multiple reviews for the film that had been submitted by users.

China's top gaming industry association declared that the problem of children's video gaming addiction has been "resolved," the clearest signal so far that Beijing will ease its curbs on the approval of new titles. From a report: China's Game Industry Group Committee, which is affiliated with the government's gaming regulatory body, released a report on Tuesday that found 70 per cent of minors played less than three hours of games a week. "Minors' gaming addiction has been basically resolved," the body wrote in a report co-authored by Beijing-based research body CNG. Any easing of China's crackdown on online video games would be a boon for industry leaders Tencent and NetEase, which have borne the brunt of the restrictions.

Beijing sent a shockwave through the gaming industry in August 2021 when it restricted children to only playing online games for one hour on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The move came after state media highlighted the mental and physical health toll gaming addiction was having on China's youth, labelling online games a form of "spiritual opium." The time spent by children on Chinese internet giant Tencent's games has plummeted since the regulation change and was down 92 per cent in the third quarter compared with the same period last year. During an earnings call with investors last week, Tencent said it had become "fully compliant" with Chinese regulations on gaming for minors and expected "more licenses will be forthcoming in the future."

Shares of Zoom have tumbled about 90% from their pandemic peak in October 2020 as the former investor darling struggles to adjust to a post-COVID world. Reuters reports: The stock was down nearly 10% on Tuesday after the company cut its annual sales forecast and posted its slowest quarterly growth, prompting at least six brokerages to cut their price targets. The company, which became a household name during lockdowns due to the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, is trying to reinvent itself by focusing on businesses, with products such as cloud-calling service Zoom Phone and conference-hosting offering Zoom Rooms. Analysts, however, say any turnaround in the business is still a few quarters away as growth in its mainstay online unit slows and competition from Microsoft's Teams and Cisco's Webex and Salesforce's Slack gets intense.

"Zoom has a fundamental flaw -- it has needed to spend heavily to keep hold of market share. Spending to cling onto, rather than grow, market share is never a good place to be and was a sign of trouble ahead," Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said. The company's operating expenses surged 56% in the third quarter as it spent more on product development and marketing. Its adjusted operating margin shrank to 34.6% from 39.1% a year earlier.

There are ongoing issues apparently affecting the iCloud for Windows app, particularly in regards to photo and video storage. According to a number of online complaints from users, iCloud for Windows is corrupting certain videos. There are also reports of a more worrying problem: photos from strangers popping up in people's iCloud Photo library. 9to5Mac reports: MacRumors rounded up some of these complaints via complaints posted to their forums. According to an affected user, videos taken with the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro models aren't being properly synced with iCloud for Windows. When certain videos are recorded and the synced with iCloud for Windows, they then turn "black with scan lines, rendering the videos unwatchable."

While that problem is bad enough, some other users say they are seeing photos and even videos they do not recognize in their photo libraries. The speculation here is that these photos or videos could be from other people's iCloud libraries, though nothing has been confirmed yet. [...] These problems appear to be affecting the dedicated iCloud for Windows app itself, not the recently-launched iCloud Photos integration in Windows 11. The culprit seems to be the handoff of certain file types between the iPhone and iCloud rendering on Windows. The problem certainly appears to be a server-side issue on Apple's side, rather than something on Microsoft's side.

A new map of the universe displays for the first time the span of the entire known cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty. Phys.Org reports: Created by Johns Hopkins University astronomers with data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists. The interactive map, which depicts the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies, is available online, where it can also be downloaded for free.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope based in New Mexico. Night after night for years, the telescope aimed at slightly different locations to capture this unusually broad perspective. The map, which [map creator Brice Manard] assembled with the help of former Johns Hopkins computer science student Nikita Shtarkman, visualizes a slice of the universe, or about 200,000 galaxies -- each dot on the map is a galaxy and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is simply one of these dots, the one at the very bottom of the map.

The expansion of the universe contributes to make this map even more colorful. The farther an object, the redder it appears. The top of the map reveals the first flash of radiation emitted soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. "In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets," Manard says. "We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale." For those interested, Johns Hopkins University published a video about the map on YouTube.

Tuvalu says it plans to build a digital version of itself, replicating islands and landmarks and preserving its history and culture as rising sea levels threaten to submerge the tiny Pacific island nation. From a report: Tuvalu's Foreign Minister Simon Kofe told the COP27 climate summit it was time to look at alternative solutions for his country's survival and this included Tuvalu becoming the first digitised nation in the metaverse -- an online realm that uses augmented and virtual reality (VR) to help users interact.

"Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud," he said in the video that sees him standing on a digital replica of an islet threatened by rising sea levels. Kofe grabbed global attention at last year's COP26 when he addressed the conference standing knee-deep in the sea to illustrate how Tuvalu is on the front line of climate change. Tuvalu was having to act because countries globally were not doing enough to prevent climate change, he said.

Google is bringing its VPN access to desktop today. Google One subscribers on Premium plans (2TB or higher) can now download VPN apps for Windows and macOS, allowing users in 22 countries to mask their IPs on desktop and reduce online trackers. From a report: While Google is expanding its VPN service, it still comes with the same restrictions as Android and iOS. You'll only be able to use the service in one of the supported countries, and you won't be able to use Google's VPN freely to avoid geo-restrictions on live sports or other streaming video. Much like Apple's iCloud Plus VPN service, the Google One VPN won't let you assign an IP address from a different country manually. Instead, Google assigns you an IP in the region you're connecting from.

Guests will soon be able to filter their search results by the total cost of the stay before taxes, which will include additional compulsory charges such as cleaning fees. The Verge reports: The appearance of these fees separate from nightly rates has long been criticized for deceptively making accommodations appear more affordable. Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky shared the announcement on Twitter along with a video demonstrating how the planned "display total price" switch can be enabled to display the total cost of nightly rates and fees, with that price displaying on search results, map, price filter, and individual listing pages.

A full price breakdown of Airbnb's service fees, discounts, and taxes will also be made available, and the total price of accommodation will be prioritized over nightly rates in the Airbnb search algorithm. "The highest quality homes with the best total prices will rank higher in search results," says Chesky. "We started as an affordable alternative to hotels, and affordability is especially important today. During this difficult economic time, we need to help our Hosts provide great value to you." [...] The transparent pricing toggle is set to roll out sometime in December, alongside new pricing and discount tools for hosts to allow for more competitive rates. In other Airbnb-related news, the European Commission said Airbnb, along with other short-term home rental companies, will have to share data on the number of people using their platforms under proposed EU rules. "The new proposed rules will help to improve transparency on the identification and activity of short-term accommodation hosts, and on the rules they have to comply with, and will facilitate the registration of hosts," the Commission said in a statement.

"They will also tackle the current fragmentation in how online platforms share data and, ultimately, help prevent illegal listings. Overall, this will contribute to a more sustainable tourism ecosystem and support its digital transition," it said.

In 2004 NBC's news show "Dateline" began airing "To Catch a Predator" segments, in which a vigilante group posed online as minors to lure sex predators into in-person meetings — where they were then arrested by police.

The New Yorker looks at its cultural impact: Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it's "this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with," Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of "Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State," said. "It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven't fully grappled with." The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. "On the show, it's not the family, it's not priests or rabbis or other authority figures who pose a threat to children, it's this devious stranger," Renfro said. The show's influence helped spur the passage of the Adam Walsh Act, in 2006, which created publicly searchable databases of people convicted of certain sex crimes. (There's little evidence that sex-offender registries have been effective at reducing sexual offenses.)
But today, "amateur predator hunting has come back into style," the article notes, citing the proliferation of online groups. "Recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year."

And then the New Yorker interviewed a woman named Cam, who with her husband and her brother-in-law decided to form "the Permian Basin Predator Patrol" — broadcasting their sting operations and humiliations of potential perpetrators on YouTube: [S]oon after the channel started drawing attention, they were called to a meeting at the Odessa Police Department. According to Cam, officers made it clear that they disapproved of their activities. "We were told we can't be involved with them, and that we can't send them anything directly," she said. "One, we're endangering ourselves, and, two, we're giving them more work — that's what it seemed like they were saying."

"We are very mindful of not trying to entrap a suspect," Lieutenant Brad Cline, who works in the Odessa Police Department's Crimes Against Persons Unit, said. "Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well."
The article points out that "To Catch a Predator" was cancelled when Texas man Bill Conradt decided not to follow-up on his online messages — but "When a SWAT team burst into his house, trailed by a camera crew, Conradt shot himself."

So what did Cam's group do when the Odessa Police Department declined their help? The Permian Basin Predator Patrol continued to make videos. If she couldn't contribute to an arrest, Cam thought, at least she could get the word out to the public. She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with, even when they used fake names.... Sometimes she'd find a man's family on Facebook and send his mother screenshots of the obscene messages he'd sent, or call his employer. "I believe three of them have been let go from their jobs," she said.

A sting by the Predator Catchers Indianapolis led to a man's conviction for child solicitation.... Although YouTube's predator hunters tend to portray themselves as the unequivocal good guys (Cam is an exception — most are men), their track record is more mixed.... The Ohio-based group Dads Against Predators has reportedly been banned from local grocery stores for causing disturbances. In 2018, a twenty-year-old in Connecticut hanged himself after a confrontation with a predator-hunter group. One video by the Permian Basin Predator Patrol ends with a man weeping, then running into traffic. (Cam said that she asked police to perform a welfare check on him, but she's not sure if it occurred.)

A Redditor says they've managed to get a hold of an old Netflix server for free, and has posted a detailed online look at the once mysterious hardware. The devices were part of Netflix's Open Connect Content Delivery Network (CDN), and can often be found embedded within major ISP networks to ensure your Netflix streams don't suck. From a report: Reddit user PoisonWaffle3 said the ISP he currently works for has been offloading old Netflix servers as they upgrade to more modern equipment. In a Reddit thread titled "So I got a Netflix cache server..." he posted a photo of the server, which is bright Netflix red, and explained how he was curious about what's inside the boxes given how little public information was available.

"All I could find online was overviews, installation/config guides for their proprietary software, etc.," he said. "No specs, no clue what was inside the red box." Dave Temkin, Netflix's former Vice President of Network Systems Infrastructure told Motherboard there's nothing too mysterious about what the servers can do, though they significantly help improve video streaming by shortening overall content transit time. "They're just an Intel FreeBSD box," he said. "We got Linux running on some of the generations of that box as well."

Netflix's Open Connect Content Delivery Network hardware caches popular Netflix content to reduce overall strain across broadband networks. Netflix lets major broadband ISPs embed a CDN server on the ISP network for free; the shorter transit time then helps improve video delivery, of benefit to broadband providers and Netflix alike. It took all of three screws for PoisonWaffle3 to get inside the mysterious red unit, at which point users discovered a "fairly standard" Supermicro board, a single Xeon E5 2650L v2 processor, 64GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10 gigabit ethernet card. They also found 36 7.2TB 7200RPM drives and six 500GB Micron solid state drives, for a grand total of 262 terabytes of storage.

Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times.

"Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today." Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech....

The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.

With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.

SpaceX has introduced Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it's installed in. From a report: "Starlink can deliver up to 350Mbps to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable Internet at the same time," the company said. "With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities." Starlink said the airplane service will use a "low-profile Aero Terminal" with "an electronically steered phased array antenna, which enables new levels of reliability, redundancy and performance."

It has a "simplified design" that "enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks," Starlink says. The service hardware also includes two wireless access points. There's a one-time hardware cost of $150,000, not including installation. "The installation can be performed by your current maintenance organization or Starlink can recommend experienced and qualified installers," Starlink says.

Drew DeVault, prolific FOSS blogger and hacker behind SourceHut, Sway, wlroots, and many other projects, writes in a blog post: I have relied on ffmpeg for many tasks and for many years. It has always been there to handle any little multimedia-related task I might put it to for personal use -- re-encoding audio files so they fit on my phone, taking clips from videos to share, muxing fonts into mkv files, capturing video from my webcam, live streaming hacking sessions on my own platform, or anything else I can imagine. It formed the foundation of MediaCrush back in the day, where we used it to optimize multimedia files for efficient viewing on the web, back when that was more difficult than "just transcode it to a webm."

ffmpeg is notable for being one of the first large-scale FOSS projects to completely eradicate proprietary software in its niche. Virtually all multimedia-related companies rely on ffmpeg to do their heavy lifting. It took a complex problem and solved it, with free software. The book is now closed on multimedia: ffmpeg is the solution to almost all of your problems. And if it's not, you're more likely to patch ffmpeg than to develop something new. The code is accessible and the community are experts in your problem domain.

ffmpeg is one of the foremost pillars of achievement in free software. It has touched the lives of every reader, whether they know it or not. If you've ever watched TV, or gone to a movie, or watched videos online, or listened to a podcast, odds are that ffmpeg was involved in making it possible. It is one of the most well-executed and important software projects of all time.