Elon Musk just tweeted a picture of himself laughing — along with a caption he'd apparently added himself.

"They said I couldn't buy Twitter. Then they wouldn't disclose bot info. Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court. Now they have to disclose bot info in court."

In fact, tonight The Register cited one of the documents Twitter filed in court after Musk's lawyer argued Twitter had "failed or refused" to provide info on spam accounts. But so far it's just a letter Musk's lawyer wrote to the court on Friday, explaining in more detail why Musk wants to call off the acquisition: One segment of the document claims that Musk and his team sought "a variety of board materials, including a working, bottom-up financial model for 2022, a budget for 2022, an updated draft plan or budget, and a working copy of Goldman Sachs' valuation model underlying its fairness opinion."

"Twitter has provided only a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs' final Board presentation."

Other disclosures, the document states, "come with strings attached, use limitations or other artificial formatting features, which has rendered some of the information minimally useful to Mr. Musk and his advisors.

"For example, when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer 'APIs' first explicitly requested by Mr. Musk in the May 25 Letter, those APIs contained a rate limit lower than what Twitter provides to its largest enterprise customers. Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk with the same level of access as some of its customers after we explained that throttling the rate limit prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct in any reasonable period of time.

"Additionally, those APIs contained an artificial 'cap' on the number of queries that Mr. Musk and his team can run regardless of the rate limit — an issue that initially prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from completing an analysis of the data in any reasonable period of time," the document states.

Musk and his team raised the issue of query limits on June 29, but Twitter did not change the limit until July 6 — after Musk asked for its removal a second time.... Musk felt Twitter was in breach of the merger agreement. So he pulled the plug, leaving open the questions of why Twitter might have provided only limited access to its APIs, or why it could not offer more access given it operates at significant scale.
In fact, it's one of three reasons for ending the acquisition that Musk's lawyer makes in the letter. Materially-relevant figures on spam accounts were reason number one. ("Twitter has not provided information that Mr. Musk has requested for nearly two months notwithstanding his repeated, detailed clarifications intended to simplify Twitter's identification, collection, and disclosure of the most relevant information sought in Mr. Musk's original requests.")

But there's more... Musk's lawyer also argues Twitter is in breach of the merger agreement because of "materially inaccurate representations" — specifically their figures on monetizable daily active users. While Musk's analysis "remains ongoing, all indications suggest that several of Twitter's public disclosures...are either false or materially misleading." While Twitter has claimed they have a reasoned process for calculating monetizable daily active users (and the percentage of spam accounts), Musk's lawyer argues that instead the process "appears to be arbitrary and ad hoc," rendering Twitter's statements "false and misleading." And thus, "Mr. Musk has the right to seek rescission of the Merger Agreement in the event these material representations are determined to be false."

But finally Musk's lawyer provides a third reason for ending the acquisition. Twitter was required to "seek and obtain consent before deviating from its obligation to conduct its business in the ordinary course and 'preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organization.'" The lawyer's letter argues that didn't happen: Twitter's conduct in firing two key, high-ranking employees, its Revenue Product Lead and the General Manager of Consumer, as well as announcing on July 7 that it was laying off a third of its talent acquisition team, implicates the ordinary course provision. Twitter has also instituted a general hiring freeze which extends even to reconsideration of outstanding job offers. Moreover, three executives have resigned from Twitter since the Merger Agreement was signed: the Head of Data Science, the Vice President of Twitter Service, and a Vice President of Product Management for Health, Conversation, and Growth.
But Twitter hadn't received "consent for changes in the conduct of its business, including for the specific changes listed above," according to Musk's lawyer, which "therefore constitute a material breach of Section 6.1 of the Merger Agreement."

The number of users on Wish has plummeted, and its stock price has dropped. Former employees point to an emphasis on short-term growth over customer service. From a report: There were unbelievable bargains on "bestdeeal9," a store hosted on the e-commerce platform Wish, including a $2,700 smart TV being sold for $1 and a gaming computer advertised for $1.30. But none of the offers were real, and Wish knew it. The company, an online novelty emporium that had more than $2 billion in sales last year by dangling hard-to-believe discounts, created "bestdeeal9" as an experiment. Listings that had been removed for violating Wish policies were reposted on "bestdeeal9" and used in part to track whether shoppers complained when their orders never arrived. Employees working on the project repeatedly pushed executives to take down the store, arguing that it was both illegal and unethical, according to three employees familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss company matters. More than 213,000 people made purchases from the store, according to an internal document reviewed by The New York Times, though the document did not say how many received their items.

Tarek Fahmy, then the senior vice president of engineering in charge of the project, ended it in 2020 after it operated for several months, the employees said. Mr. Fahmy, who has since left Wish, did not respond to requests for comment. Wish declined to comment on "bestdeeal9." Several employees said "bestdeeal9" is indicative of the kind of practices -- giving priority to short-term growth over customer service -- that initially turned Wish into an advertising and retail behemoth but have now left it desperately trying to right itself. Since its founding in 2010, Wish had many of the hallmarks of a classic Silicon Valley success story: started by a young coder and his college friend, rumored to have turned down a $10 billion acquisition offer from Amazon and described by Recode as an app "that could be the next Walmart." It developed a reputation as the dollar store of the internet, shipping odd gimcracks and thingamajigs directly from vendors in China. It blitzed shoppers with viral online ads for $1 plastic tongue clamps, $3 "leather face diapers" for cats and a $2 handful of worms.

[...] Peter Szulczewski, the company's former chief executive, once compared Wish's success to Donald J. Trump's 2016 election victory, explaining that both the company and the candidate had appealed to "the invisible half" of Americans who were routinely overlooked by political pundits and Silicon Valley elites. But Wish squandered its early promise, according to interviews with nine former employees. Deceptive experiments like "bestdeeal9" drove customers away, as did low product standards and unreliable shipping. When the rising cost of ads forced it to scale back its marketing, the company struggled to attract new shoppers. Wish is now scrambling to turn itself around. The company declined to make its newly hired crop of executives available but said in a statement that "over the past six months, Wish has undergone a massive transformation." The company said: "We have already seen significant traction and remain committed to executing against our priorities and building a long-term platform for growth."

nickwinlund77 shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study led by University of Arizona researchers may have solved two mysteries that have long puzzled paleo-climate experts: Where did the ice sheets that rang in the last ice age more than 100,000 years ago come from, and how could they grow so quickly? Understanding what drives Earth's glacial -- interglacial cycles -- the periodic advance and retreat of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere -- is no easy feat, and researchers have devoted substantial effort to explaining the expansion and shrinking of large ice masses over thousands of years. The new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, proposes an explanation for the rapid expansion of the ice sheets that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere during the most recent ice age, and the findings could also apply to other glacial periods throughout Earth's history.

About 100,000 years ago, when mammoths roamed the Earth, the Northern Hemisphere climate plummeted into a deep freeze that allowed massive ice sheets to form. Over a period of about 10,000 years, local mountain glaciers grew and formed large ice sheets covering much of today's Canada, Siberia and northern Europe. While it has been widely accepted that periodic "wobbling" in the Earth's orbit around the sun triggered cooling in the Northern Hemisphere summer that caused the onset of widespread glaciation, scientists have struggled to explain the extensive ice sheets covering much of Scandinavia and northern Europe, where temperatures are much more mild. [...] "Using both climate model simulations and marine sediment analysis, we show that ice forming in northern Canada can obstruct ocean gateways and divert water transport from the Arctic into the North Atlantic," [said Lofverstrom, an assistant professor of geosciences and head of the UArizona Earth System Dynamics Lab], "and that in turn leads to a weakened ocean circulation and cold conditions off the coast of Scandinavia, which is sufficient to start growing ice in that region."

"These findings are supported by marine sediment records from the North Atlantic, which show evidence of glaciers in northern Canada several thousand years before the European side," said Diane Thompson, assistant professor in the UArizona Department of Geosciences. "The sediment records also show compelling evidence of a weakened deep ocean circulation before the glaciers form in Scandinavia, similar to our modeling results." Together, the experiments suggest that the formation of marine ice in northern Canada may be a necessary precursor to glaciation in Scandinavia, the authors write. [...] "It is possible that the mechanisms we identified here apply to every glacial period, not just the most recent one," [Lofverstrom] said. "It may even help explain more short-lived cold periods such as the Younger Dryas cold reversal (12,900 to 11,700 years ago) that punctuated the general warming at the end of the last ice age."

Today I learned Turkey's Scientific and Technological Research Council has a subsidiary developing a GNU/Linux distro called Pardus, "redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey."

And this week the Free Software Foundation published a post from the proud project leader of Pardus, explaining exactly why open source was chosen in the district of Eyüpsultan (on the European side of Istanbul) and how they got it implemented: After the municipal elections held in 2014, the new administration realized (through internal financial analysis reports) that a large amount of money was being spent on licensing proprietary software. Looking to cut costs, management asked for a study to be carried out for solutions. As the Eyüpsultan municipality's IT department, we recommended to replace Microsoft Windows with Pardus GNU/Linux instead. We described our preference to transition to free software as "the desire to be independent from a company as well as the savings to be gained from cutting hefty license fees."

Additionally, we spoke about how the four freedoms would improve things outside of the budget. For example, we told the administration that users, when using free software, can fully benefit from the rights they have over the programs running on their computers. We also informed everyone that, when the software they run is proprietary, it means that a company claims rights over the user, and that such a claim of ownership can place restrictions on users in how they may or may not use the software. We told them that this is unacceptable. Arguments such as these were among the deciding factors that influenced our transition to free software.

The plan was presented to the municipal administration and widely accepted.

The municipal administration approved the project, and in January, 2015, the Eyüpsultan municipality started using free software applications such as LibreOffice (e.g. Writer, Calc, Impress, etc.). Prior to the implementations, basic user training on LibreOffice software was provided to the personnel of the institution. Over time, users were gradually and steadily directed to free systems, and, notably, without receiving backlash from users.... Training was an important item in the transition to Pardus GNU/Linux.
Besides an online support forum, they've also set up a live call center to answer questions. "I think we may be the only distribution that helps with issues via a call center."

So how do they feel now about that transition, eight years later? Free software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major cost savings from licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with interoperability standards. Therefore, the transition of Eyüpsultan municipality to free software has resulted in benefits that were both strategic and practical. We believe, in the near future, more organizations will need to understand the philosophy of free software and the opportunities that free software provides.

The municipal budget has freed up money as a result of the moving from proprietary software to free software. The savings from the "proprietary software licenses" line of the budget was applied to the district in the form of new projects. The money goes now to, among other things, increasing the number of new parks and gardens, bicycle paths, and security cameras in the parks. Additionally, by increasing the number of classes we provide technical training, we started to provide classes in robotics and computation to young people. The Eyüpsultan municipality is now increasing the opportunities for students to further develop their personalities, abilities, goals, and self-discovery. It introduces young people to technology and encourages them to produce new technologies.
One final effect of using free software? It encourages others to do the same: As a result of this brave decision, many of the Istanbul district municipalities have started working to switch or have already made the switch to the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Institutions in other cities of the country have also expressed growing interest by asking questions about the Pardus operating system and free software.

The head of the UK government's digital transformation unit recently announced a change to the nation's government services site gov.uk: they've "removed jQuery as a dependency for all frontend apps, meaning 32 KB of minified and compressed JavaScript was removed" for everything from selecting elements to attaching event listeners....

Nearly 84% of mobile pages used jQuery in 2021, points out a new essay at Gov.UK — before explaining why they decided not to: jQuery was an instrumental tool in a time when we really needed a way to script interactivity in a way that smoothed over the differing implementations of stuff like event handling, selecting elements, animating elements, and so on.

The web is better because of jQuery — not just because it has such incredible utility, but because its ubiquity led to making what it provided part of the web platform itself. Nowadays, we can do just about anything jQuery can do in vanilla JavaScript... It really begs the question: Do we really need jQuery today? That's a question that GOV.UK has answered with a resounding "no"....

This is a big deal when it comes to the user experience, because GOV.UK provides services and information online for The United Kingdom at scale. Not everyone is tapping away on their 2022 MacBook Pro on a rip-roarin' broadband connection. GOV.UK has to be accessible to everyone, and that means keepin' it lean.... dependencies matter when it comes to performance. Don't shortchange your users if the web platform can easily do the job a framework can.

This level of commitment to the user experience from a institution that works at the scale GOV.UK does is commendable. I can only hope others follow in their footsteps.

An 18-year-old graduate student exploited a weakness in Indexed Finance's code and opened a legal conundrum that's still rocking the blockchain community. Then he disappeared. An excerpt from a report: On Oct. 14, in a house near Leeds, England, Laurence Day was sitting down to a dinner of fish and chips on his couch when his phone buzzed. The text was from a colleague who worked with him on Indexed Finance, a cryptocurrency platform that creates tokens representing baskets of other tokens -- like an index fund, but on the blockchain. The colleague had sent over a screenshot showing a recent trade, followed by a question mark. "If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might say, 'Nice-looking trade,'" Day says. But he knew enough to be alarmed: A user had bought up certain tokens at drastically deflated values, which shouldn't have been possible. Something was very wrong. Day jumped up, spilling his food on the floor, and ran into his bedroom to call Dillon Kellar, a co-founder of Indexed. Kellar was sitting in his mom's living room six time zones away near Austin, disassembling a DVD player so he could salvage one of its lasers. He picked up the phone to hear a breathless Day explaining that the platform had been attacked. "All I said was, 'What?'" Kellar recalls.

They pulled out their laptops and dug into the platform's code, with the help of a handful of acquaintances and Day's cat, Finney (named after Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney), who perched on his shoulder in support. Indexed was built on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger where transaction details are stored, which meant there was a record of the attack. It would take weeks to figure out precisely what had happened, but it appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Altogether, the person or people responsible had made off with $16 million worth of assets. Kellar and Day stanched the bleeding and repaired the code enough to prevent further attacks, then turned to face the public-relations nightmare. On the platform's Discord and Telegram channels, token-holders traded theories and recriminations, in some cases blaming the team and demanding compensation. Kellar apologized on Twitter to Indexed's hundreds of users and took responsibility for the vulnerability he'd failed to detect. "I f---ed up," he wrote. The question now was who'd launched the attack and whether they'd return the funds. Most crypto exploits are assumed to be inside jobs until proven otherwise. "The default is going to be, 'Who did this, and why is it the devs?'" Day says.

As he tried to sleep the morning after the attack, Day realized he hadn't heard from one particular collaborator. Weeks earlier, a coder going by the username "UmbralUpsilon" -- anonymity is standard in crypto communities -- had reached out to Day and Kellar on Discord, offering to create a bot that would make their platform more efficient. They agreed and sent over an initial fee. "We were hoping he might be a regular contributor," Kellar says. Given the extent of their chats, Day would have expected UmbralUpsilon to offer help or sympathy in the wake of the attack. Instead, nothing. Day pulled up their chat log and found that only his half of the conversation remained; UmbralUpsilon had deleted his messages and changed his username. "That got me out of bed like a shot," Day says.

Would you like an NFT with your Starbucks latte? The coffee giant this week announced its plans to enter the Web3 space with the launch of its own NFT collection later this year where the individual digital collectibles also provide their owners with access to exclusive content experiences and other benefits, it said. From a report: The company touted its plans to investors on its fiscal Q2 2022 earnings call by explaining how NFTs can help Starbucks extend its brand's concept of the "third place" -- meaning a place between home and work where people can feel a sense of belonging over coffee. "Emerging technologies associated with Web3, and specifically NFTs, now enable this aspiration and allow us to extend who Starbucks has always been at our core," Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer, Brady Brewer told investors on the call. "We are creating the digital third place. To achieve this, we will broaden our framework of what it means for people to be a member of the Starbucks community, adding new concepts such as ownership and community-based membership models that we see developing in the Web3 space," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Following in the footsteps of iOS 14, Google is rolling out an app privacy section to the Play Store on Tuesday. When you look up an app on the Play Store, alongside sections like "About this app" and "ratings and reviews," there will be a new section called "Data privacy & security," where developers can explain what data they collect. Note that while the section will be appearing for users starting today, it might not be filled out by developers. Google's deadline for developers to provide privacy information is July 20. Even then, all of this privacy information is provided by the developer and is essentially working on the honor system.

Here's how Google describes the process to developers: "You alone are responsible for making complete and accurate declarations in your app's store listing on Google Play. Google Play reviews apps across all policy requirements; however, we cannot make determinations on behalf of the developers of how they handle user data. Only you possess all the information required to complete the Data safety form. When Google becomes aware of a discrepancy between your app behavior and your declaration, we may take appropriate action, including enforcement action."

Once the section is up and running, developers will be expected to list what data they're collecting, why they're collecting it, and who they're sharing it with. The support page features a big list of data types for elements like "location," "personal info," "financial info," "web history," "contacts," and various file types. Developers are expected to list their data security practices, including explaining if data is encrypted in transit and if users can ask for data to be deleted. There's also a spot for "Google Play's Families Policy" compliance, which is mostly just a bunch of US COPPA and EU GDPR requirements. Google says developers can also indicate if their app has "been independently validated against a global security standard."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world. Early Saturday morning, after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to 6 percent of their annual turnover for noncompliance.

"The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. "It gives practical effect to the principle that what is illegal offline, should be illegal online. The greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms." [...] Although the legislation only applies to EU citizens, the effect of these laws will certainly be felt in other parts of the world, too. Global tech companies may decide it is more cost-effective to implement a single strategy to police content and take the EU's comparatively stringent regulations as their benchmark. Lawmakers in the US keen to rein in Big Tech with their own regulations have already begun looking to the EU's rules for inspiration.

The final text of the DSA has yet to be released, but the European Parliament and European Commission have detailed a number of obligations it will contain [...]. Although the broad terms of the DSA have now been agreed upon by the member states of the EU, the legal language still needs to be finalized and the act officially voted into law. This last step is seen as a formality at this point, though. The rules will apply to all companies 15 months after the act is voted into law, or from January 1st, 2024, whichever is later. "Large online platforms like Facebook will have to make the working of their recommender algorithms (used for sorting content on the News Feed or suggesting TV shows on Netflix) transparent to users," notes The Verge. "Users should also be offered a recommender system 'not based on profiling.' In the case of Instagram, for example, this would mean a chronological feed (as it introduced recently)."

The tech giants will also be prohibited from using "dark patterns" -- confusing or deceptive UIs designed to steer users into making certain choices. A detailed list of obligations contained in the DSA can be found in the article.

Brave announced a new feature for its browser on Tuesday: De-AMP, which automatically jumps past any page rendered with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework and instead takes users straight to the original website. The Verge reports: "Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether," Brave said in a blog post. "And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP / Google code from being loaded and executed." Brave framed De-AMP as a privacy feature and didn't mince words about its stance toward Google's version of the web. "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," Brave's blog post said, before explaining that AMP gives Google even more knowledge of users' browsing habits, confuses users, and can often be slower than normal web pages. And it warned that the next version of AMP -- so far just called AMP 2.0 -- will be even worse.

Brave's stance is a particularly strong one, but the tide has turned hard against AMP over the last couple of years. Google originally created the framework in order to simplify and speed up mobile websites, and AMP is now managed by a group of open-source contributors. It was controversial from the very beginning and smelled to some like Google trying to exert even more control over the web. Over time, more companies and users grew concerned about that control and chafed at the idea that Google would prioritize AMP pages in search results. Plus, the rest of the internet eventually figured out how to make good mobile sites, which made AMP -- and similar projects like Facebook Instant Articles -- less important.

"Russian software developers are reporting that their GitHub accounts are being suspended without warning if they work for or previously worked for companies under U.S. sanctions, writes Bleeping Computer: According to Russian media outlets, the ban wave began on April 13 and didn't discriminate between companies and individuals. For example, the GitHub accounts of Sberbank Technology, Sberbank AI Lab, and the Alfa Bank Laboratory had their code repositories initially disabled and are now removed from the platform.... Personal accounts suspended on GitHub have their content wiped while all repositories become immediately out of reach, and the same applies to issues and pull requests.

Habr.com [a Russian collaborative blog about IT] reports that some Russian developers contacted GitHub about the suspension and received an email titled 'GitHub and Trade Controls' that explained their account was disabled due to US sanctions. This email contains a link to a GitHub page explaining the company's policies regarding sanctions and trade controls, which explains how a user can appeal their suspension. This appeal form requires the individual to certify that they do not use their GitHub account on behalf of a sanctioned entity. A developer posted to Twitter saying that he could remove the suspension after filling out the form and that it was due to his previous employer being sanctioned.
A GitHub blog post in March had promised to ensure the availability of open source services "to all, including developers in Russia." So Bleeping Computer contacted a GitHub spokesperson, who explained this weekend that while GitHub may be required to restrict some users to comply with U.S. laws, "We examine government sanctions thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what is required by law." According to this, the suspended private accounts are either affiliated, collaborating, or working with/for sanctioned entities. However, even those who previously worked for a sanctioned company appear to be suspended by mistake.

This means that Russian users, in general, can suddenly find their projects wiped and accounts suspended, even if those projects have nothing to do with the sanctioned entities.

If you are waiting for Windows 11 side-taskbar support before upgrading to the latest operating system, you may be waiting for a long time, according to a recent Microsoft Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. BleepingComputer reports: As first reported by Neowin, in a recent Microsoft Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, a user asked whether Microsoft would be bringing back the ability to move the sidebar to the sides. The response was not very promising, with Tali Roth, Microsoft's Head of Product, explaining that a small amount of Windows users use the feature and that it is unsure whether the feature will ever be brought back:

"When it comes to something like actually being able to move the taskbar to different locations on the screen, there's a number of challenges with that. When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to understand the environment is just huge. And when you look at the data, while we know there is a set of people that love it that way and, like, really appreciate it, we also recognize that this set of users is really small compared to the set of other folks that are asking for other features. So at the moment we are continuing to focus on things that I hear more pain around. It is one of those things that we are still continuing to look at, and we will keep looking to feedback, but at the moment we do not have a plan or a set date for when we would, or if we would, actually build the side taskbar." You can watch the entire discussion about this feature on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last June, the Department of Defense released a long-awaited and much-hyped document called "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," detailing the government's knowledge of UFOs and its programs trying to detect and catalog them. Many UFOlogists hoped that the "UFO report" would be a watershed moment in the field, showing that the government was taking UFOs seriously and, perhaps, explaining what the government thought they were. Unfortunately, the nine-page report was pretty underwhelming; for the most part it revealed things we already knew, and read primarily like a plea from the DoD for more funding. Tantalizingly, we were told that members of Congress received a classified briefing with more information that would likely never be released to the public.

John Greenewald, the government transparency virtuoso behind the Black Vault, however, has a gift for us today: A redacted version of the classified report, obtained by filing a mandatory declassification review. This version of the report is longer and much more interesting -- detailing, for example, the most "common shapes" of UFOs spotted by the military. Certain sections of the classified report, such as one called "And a Handful of UAP Appear to Demonstrate Advanced Technology," have far more detail on specific incidents that the Department of Defense cannot explain and that are not mentioned in the public report, including seemingly two different incidents witnessed by multiple pilots and officers in the Navy. A section called "UAP Probably Lack a Single Explanation" seemingly attempts to go into greater depth exploring what those explanations could be, and also has an extra redacted paragraph about what the DoD believes could be attributed to "Foreign Adversary Systems."

Most interestingly, redacted figures, images, and diagrams in the classified reports explain what the DoD believes to be the most "common shapes" of UFOs, as well as "less common/irregular shapes." These sections are completely omitted in the public report and are unfortunately redacted in the version of the report obtained by Greenewald. The classified report also explains that the FBI has investigated and will continue to investigate UFOs in an attempt to ascertain the causes of the phenomena; a redacted section seems to explain which instances it has investigated. "Given the national security implications associated with potential threats posed by UAP operating in close proximity to sensitive military activities, installations, critical infrastructure, or other national security sites, the FBI is positioned to use its investigative capabilities and authorities to support deliberate DoD and interagency efforts to determine attribution," the report reads.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Early in March, a bunch of Facebook users got a mysterious, spam-like email titled "Your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect" and telling them that they were required to turn on the Facebook Protect feature (which they could do by hitting a link in the email) by a certain date, or they would be locked out of their account. The program, according to Facebook, is a "security program for groups of people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials." It's meant to do things like ensure those accounts are monitored for hacking threats and that they are protected by two-factor authentication (2FA).

Unfortunately, the email that Facebook sent from the address security@facebookmail.com resembled a rather common form of spam, and so it's probable that many people ignored it. It actually wasn't spam. In fact, it was real. The first deadline to hit for many people was Thursday, March 17th. And now, they are locked out of their Facebook accounts -- and are having trouble with the process that Facebook has provided to get them back in. Those who did not activate Facebook Protect before their deadline are apparently getting a message explaining why they can't get into their accounts and offering to help them turn it on. However, it's not always working.

Does Apple have a "Pro" problem? "[Y]ears of Apple and competitors slapping the name onto wireless earbuds and slightly fancier phones have made it hard to tell what 'Pro' even means," argues The Verge's Mitchell Clark. It could be the reason behind Apple's recently-launched Mac "Studio." From the report: From the jump, Apple made it clear who the Mac Studio and Studio Display were for. It showed them being used by musicians, 3D artists, and developers in its presentation, and the message was clear: these are products for creative professionals or people who aspire to be creative professionals. You know, the same exact crowd it's targeted with MacBook Pro commercials for years. "My first thought was, 'Oh, I wonder when the iPhone Studio comes out,'" says Jonathan Balck, co-founder and managing director of ad agency Colossus, in an interview with The Verge. "Pro was exclusive, and it was about one way of doing things, but the whole culture is moving toward creativity," he adds while musing whether we could see Apple's Pro branding shift to become Studio branding instead.

[T]o me, the Mac Studio line is a clear successor to Apple's iMac Pro. Both computers are powered by monstrous CPUs and come standard with 10Gb Ethernet and a healthy crop of Thunderbolt and USB ports. I'm convinced that, had Apple released the new Studio even two years ago, it would've put "Pro" in the name. (Though, to play devil's advocate, I'm not as sure it would've done so for the Studio Display.) Some marketing experts tell me that the word "Pro" is starting to get long in the tooth, and not just from overuse. "The previous term Pro is, in my opinion, outdated and dry," says Keith Dorsey, founder and CEO of the creative marketing group and management company YoungGuns Entertainment. Balck agrees; "If you look at the word Pro, that is in many ways restrictive," he says in an interview, explaining that when you say a product is "professional," it evokes ideas like job interviews, portfolios, and standoffishness. Pro products, he says, come across as just for those who use creativity to get a paycheck.

The reason Apple may need to, though, is because it led the industry in thoroughly overusing the word "Pro" to the point where it's lost all meaning. It's hard to pinpoint where exactly this started (though, in my mind, it was with the two-port MacBook Pro model), but now the word gets slapped on everything. Want to sell wireless earbuds for even more money? Those are Pro earbuds now. Want to have a regular and fancy version of your phone? No problem, call the nice one the Pro. [...] But Apple's new word, "studio," seems to come ready-made to excite the company's target audience.

Slashdot reader quonset shares this report from Reuters: Instagram users in Russia have been notified that the service will cease as of midnight on Sunday after its owner Meta Platforms said last week it would allow social media users in Ukraine to post messages such as "Death to the Russian invaders". An email message from the state communications regulator told users to move their photos and videos from Instagram before it was shut down, and encouraged them to switch to Russia's own "competitive internet platforms".

Meta, which also owns Facebook, said Friday that the temporary change in its hate speech policy applied only to Ukraine, in the wake of Russia's Feb. 24 invasion. The company said it would be wrong to prevent Ukrainians from "expressing their resistance and fury at the invading military forces"....

The message to Instagram users from the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, described the decision to allow calls for violence against Russians as a breach of international law. "We need to ensure the psychological health of citizens, especially children and adolescents, to protect them from harassment and insults online," it said, explaining the decision to close down the platform.
"The tears were flowing Sunday among Russia's airbrushed Instagram influencers, who begged their followers in farewell posts to join them on alternative social media platforms..." reports the Washington Post: On the platform, emotions ran high Sunday among Russians who were about to lose thousands of dollars they received to promote various products, as well as access to millions of followers amassed over the years. "I'm writing this post now and crying," Olga Buzova, a Russian reality television star, wrote, saying she hoped "it's all not true and we will remain here...."

The ban on Instagram is the latest example of how Russia's citizens are being isolated from the rest of the world as a result of Moscow's war against Ukraine. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on Feb. 24, his government has also pulled the plug on Russia's opposition-oriented radio and television networks, part of a broader effort to squelch domestic dissent in response to the war. Thousands of Russians have been arrested for attempting to protest the invasion.... But perhaps no move is more isolating than removing Russians from social media platforms that connect them directly to other users around the world. Instagram counted nearly 60 million users in Russia in 2021, according to the market data firm Statista, about 40 percent of the country's population. The platform is also a huge revenue source for its users, who rake in cash from sponsors by posting promotional content.
"We know that over 80 percent of people in Russia on Instagram follow an account from outside of Russia," Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video, according to the Post's article.

It adds that "It is unclear how many Russians will continue to be able to access Instagram using Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs."

The New York Times looks at Mindway AI, a company that predicts future problem gambling. Built using research at Aarhus University by its founder, Kim Mouridsen, the company uses psychologists to train A.I. algorithms in identifying behaviors associated with problem gambling. One significant challenge is that there is no sole indicator of whether someone is a problem gambler, said Rasmus Kjærgaard, Mindway's chief executive. And at most casinos, human detection of problem gambling focuses on just a few factors — mostly money spent and time played. Mindway's system takes into account 14 different risks. Those include money and time but also canceled bank withdrawals, shifts in the time of day the player is playing and erratic changes of wagers. Each factor is given a score from 1 to 100, and the A.I. then builds out a risk assessment of each player, improving itself with each hand of poker or spin of the roulette wheel. Players are scored from green (you're doing fine) to blood red (immediately step away from the game)....

The trickiest step, though, according to Brett Abarbanel, director of research at U.N.L.V.'s International Gaming Institute, is taking that data and explaining it to a player. "If my algorithm flags someone, and it thinks that they're a problem gambler, I'm not going to send them a note and say, 'Hey, great news, my algorithm has identified you as potentially a problem gambler. You should stop gambling right away!'" The response would be obvious, Dr. Abarbanel said, deploying a middle finger: "That's what will happen...."

Since starting in 2018, Mindway has contracted its services to seven Danish operators, two each in Germany and the Netherlands, one global operator and a U.S. sports-gambling operator, Mr. Kjærgaard said. The online gambling giants Flutter Entertainment and Entain have both partnered with Mindway as well, according to the companies' annual reports. Since this technology is so new and there's no regulatory body setting a standard, Mindway and similar companies are, for now, essentially on their own.

The Register reported this week on a group of software developers launching a group called Open Web Advocacy "to help online apps compete with native apps and to encourage or compel Apple to relax its iOS browser restrictions." The group (OWA), organized by UK-based developers Stuart Langridge, Bruce Lawson, and others, aims to promote a more open web by explaining subtle technical details to lawmakers and to help them understand anti-competitive aspects of web technology. Over the past few months, group members have been communicating with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) to convince the agency that Apple's iOS browser policy harms competition.

In conjunction with the debut of the group's website, the OWA plans to release a technical paper titled "Bringing Competition to Walled Gardens," that summarizes the group's position and aims to help regulators in the UK and elsewhere understand the consequences of web technology restrictions.

The group is looking for like-minded developers to take up its cause.... The primary concern raised by Langridge and Lawson is that Apple's iOS App Store Guidelines require every browser running on iPhones and iPads to be based on WebKit, the open source project overseen by Apple that serves as the rendering engine for the company's Safari browser.
"The OWA is now urging Apple users to contact regulators and legislators in other jurisdictions to galvanize support and force Apple to end its restrictions around WebKit," reports MacRumors, "although such a move could make sideloading apps from the web a real possibility, and that is something Apple appears equally reluctant to allow.

Reuters reported today that Apple has now written to U.S. lawmakers "to dispute assertions that its concerns about the dangers of sideloading apps into phones were overblown...." Reuters points out that the U.S. Congress "is currently considering a bill aimed at reining in app stores run by Apple and Alphabet's Google, which would require companies to allow sideloading. Apple has argued that such a practice would be a security risk as it keeps tight control of the apps in the store in order to keep users safe."

But OWA organizer Bruce Lawson tells the Register that as things stand now, "at the moment, every browser on iOS, whether it be badged Chrome, Firefox or Edge is actually just a branded skin of Safari, which lags behind [other browsers] because it has no competition on iOS."

And something funny happened when the Register contacted Apple for a comment about why they're against App Store rule changes: To our astonishment, after having queries ignored for months, an Apple spokesperson responded, asking whether the company could correspond off-the-record. We replied that we would be happy to communicate off-the-record and then never heard back.

Or if we did, we couldn't say.

Alphabet's Google Maps and the travel search platform Tripadvisor temporarily blocked users from posting new reviews to some listings in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the companies said. From a report: The suspensions were made in response to an influx of political statements posted as reviews to businesses and tourist destinations in the region, boosted by a campaign that saw pro-Ukraine activists using the travel platforms to try to communicate with Russians partially cut off from other media platforms. A social-media campaign promoted by the global hacker collective Anonymous encouraged followers to visit Google Maps, find a restaurant or other business in Russia and write a review explaining "what is happening in Ukraine." The group on Monday suggested users leverage the review sites to tell Russian readers to "Stand up to your dictator," among other directions. Other social-media accounts encouraged the posting of similar messages on Russian Tripadvisor pages.

theodp writes: Tech-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org is inviting kids to join the Coldplay Dance Party, explaining in a Medium post that "we've teamed up with award-winning band Coldplay to launch a global campaign that celebrates music and computer science." Teachers and students are encouraged to "share your creations for Code.org and Coldplay to see!" on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, although a footnote warns: "In most countries, use of social media is not permitted for underage students [Dance Party targets kindergarten thru high school students]. Do not post videos or photos of students without the permission of a parent or guardian." From the announcement: "Coldplay and Code.org believe in the power of computer science education for every student, in every classroom around the world. That's why we're teaming up to inspire students everywhere to code and dance [YouTube] -- let's celebrate the magic of computer science and music! Join the party by using Code.org's Dance Party activity to code your own choreography to Coldplay's "Higher Power." Get creative with classic moves, and have fun with new album-inspired visuals and dancer formations! Post or submit your creations for Coldplay and Code.org to see, and we'll share the best ones on social media [GitHub]. Plus, you'll get a chance to win tickets to see Coldplay on tour, or a chance for your classroom to video chat with the band." "This is a new creative way to continue introducing people to play with and dance around the practice of programming," Google AI Chief Jeff Dean tweeted to his 200K+ Twitter followers. "Since it launched in 2018 [in partnership with Amazon]," Code.org exclaimed in its Medium post, "Dance Party has engaged more than 5.7 million students!"