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Submission + - Colorado's teen suicide prevention program funded by Bill Gates

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Colorado's Teen Suicide Prevention Program Is Funded By Bill Gates

“A new mental health and suicide prevention program being rolled out in high schools is revealed to have financial ties to Big Pharma and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The investigation shows how these programs, which include mandatory depression screenings for students, can create a pipeline for pharmaceutical treatments like SSRIs. This is done through a complex network of non-profits and foundations, obscuring the financial conflict of interest from parents.”

Submission + - What the Jaguar Land Rover cyberattack taught every manufacturer

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What the Jaguar Land Rover Cyberattack Taught Every Manufacturer

“In late August 2025, a cyberattack hit Jaguar Land Rover, the UK's second-largest carmaker by volume. Within days, the company had shut down its IT systems and stopped vehicle production entirely across its three British plants in Solihull, Wolverhampton, and Halewood. The lines did not restart for roughly five weeks.”

“The attack is now widely described as the most financially damaging cyber event in British history, with an estimated total hit to the UK economy of around £1.9 billion and consequences felt across roughly 5,000 associated businesses, from tier-one suppliers down to dealerships”

Submission + - 39 New Passkey Authentication Compromises + Bad UI = Passwords on Paper? (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by eqteam
eqteam writes: We all saw this coming: "There are now at least 39 publicly documented methods, attack paths, research techniques, and exploitation scenarios involving passkeys and the infrastructure around them. Many already have working proof of concept tools or published research showing exactly how the techniques can be executed. Some are already appearing in real world attack patterns."

According to the above-quoted (sponsored) Bleeping Computer article: "A modern passkey authentication ceremony crosses an extraordinary number of trust boundaries. It can involve the web application, browser, operating system, password manager, cloud synchronization service, mobile device, Bluetooth transport, account recovery system, enrollment process, help desk, and ultimately the human being approving the authentication.

Researchers are attacking almost every one of those layers. Published techniques now include assertion mining, assertion replay, circuit breaker attacks, assertion phishing, browser hooking, assertion capture, challenge injection, detour replay, user verification manipulation, and user presence manipulation."

Furthermore, intrepid users who enable Passkey authentication end up turning it off because they can't figure out how to make it work across devices (thanks to confusing implementations that aren't consistent across platforms and operating systems). Additionally, Passkey adoption is pretty slow, with only 872 websites implementing Passkey authentication per this research paper titled The State of Passkeys: Studying the Adoption and Security of Passkeys on the Web presented at the 2026 USENIX Security Symposium.

With 2FA being deprecated by many large orgs and biometric authentication options proving to look like Swiss cheese, what are we to do besides going back to writing down passwords on paper while we wait for the technology to get better?

Submission + - More Wisconsin Municipalities Cancel Flock Camera Contracts

Submitted by MAurelius
MAurelius writes: Apparently Flock Safety was collecting five years of data from various cities, anonymizing it, and repackaging the data for corporate promotional purposes and training. The municipalities and university in the story were unaware of Flock's retention of five years of their data. Those twelve today announced they are canceling their contracts with Flock Safety. https://www.jsonline.com/story...

Submission + - Musk wins court order to block use of "Twitter," but not "tweet" and bird logo (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Elon Musk’s X won a court order blocking Operation Bluebird from launching a new app taking over the Twitter name. Chief Judge Colm Connolly explained that Operation Bluebird was unlikely to prove that X had entirely abandoned the Twitter name. Therefore, X was likely to succeed on trademark infringement and dilution claims tied to the platform’s former name.

Most compellingly, X argued that it still uses the Twitter name in the current listing for the X app in Apple’s App Store. In the first sentence of that listing, written in the same size font as the rest of the text, a single clause clinched the early court win for X by stating, “Welcome to X (formerly known as Twitter).”

X was not as successful in its claims that it had not abandoned other Twitter marks, including uses of the term “tweet” and the bird logo.

Musk’s public claims that “soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds” and “we’re cutting the Twitter logo off the building with blow torches” provided “compelling evidence that X Corp. harbors an intent not to resume use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo,” the judge found. Therefore, Operation Bluebird is likely to prove that X abandoned those trademarks.

For Operation Bluebird, the goal is to launch a service to rival Musk’s that is member-owned, rather than billionaire-owned and controlled. For $20, users can join and get rid of X’s “trust problem,” the tweet.app site said.

Submission + - Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election (brennancenter.org)

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: The influence of wealthy donors and dark money was unprecedented. Much of it would have been illegal before the Supreme Court swept away long-established campaign finance rules. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision that swept away more than a century’s worth of campaign finance safeguards, turns 15 this month. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it the worst ruling of her time on the Court. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently expressed disapproval of the ruling, with at least 22 states and hundreds of cities voting to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Citizens United reshaped political campaigns in profound ways, giving corporations and billionaire-funded super PACs a central role in U.S. elections and making untraceable dark money a major force in politics. And yet it may only be now, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that we can begin to understand the full impact of the decision.

Submission + - Anti-Trump Searches Appear Hidden on TikTok (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Searches for anti-Trump content are now appearing hidden on TikTok for many users after the app came back online in the U.S. TikTok users have taken to Twitter to share that when they search for topics negatively related to President Donald Trump, a message pops up saying "No results found" and that the phrases may violate the app's guidelines. One user said that when they tried to search "Donald Trump rigged election" on a U.S. account, they were met with blocked results. Meanwhile, the same phrase searched from a U.K. account prompted results. Another user shared video of them switching between a U.S. and U.K. VPN to back up the user's viral claims, which has since amassed more than 187,000 likes.
Crime

Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Pardoned (bbc.com) 339

Posted by BeauHD from the wow dept.
Slashdot readers jkister and databasecowgirl share the news of President Donald Trump issuing a pardon to Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht. An anonymous reader shares a report from the BBC: US President Donald Trump says he has signed a full and unconditional pardon for Ross Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road, the dark web marketplace where illegal drugs were sold. Ulbricht was convicted in 2015 in New York in a narcotics and money laundering conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison. Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had called Ulbricht's mother to inform her that he had granted a pardon to her son. Silk Road, which was shut down in 2013 after police arrested Ulbricht, sold illegal drugs using Bitcoin, as well as hacking equipment and stolen passports.

"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!" Ulbricht was found guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. During his trial, prosecutors said Ulbricht's website, hosted on the hidden "dark web", sold more than $200 million worth of drugs anonymously.

Submission + - Trump Pardons Silk Road Founder (nypost.com)

Submitted by databasecowgirl
databasecowgirl writes: President Trump announced Tuesday night that he had granted a âoefull and unconditionalâ pardon to Ross Ulbricht, founder of the notorious dark web site Silk Road.

Submission + - Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon’s ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon—which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug—but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I’m just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn’t mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky’s growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it’s going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.

Submission + - TikTok is censoring anti-Trump content (newsweek.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: After going dark for 12 hours in response to a U.S. law saying it must divest from Chinese ownership, TikTok came back on line when the new administration took office. However, once up and running, users found one unexpected change. Anti-Trump content is now being censored. Words, phrases, and videos which were readily accessible pre-blackout were now unavailable or being removed entirely.

A post on X, formerly Twitter, which has received 4.5 million views at the time of reporting, claims that "TikTok is now region locking Americans from looking up things like "fascism" and "Donald Trump rigged election"."

The post includes two screenshots of the TikTok app. The screenshot is of the search page, and in both the search term is "Donald Trump rigged election." The post states that: "On the left are results from a device in America, and on the right are results from one in the UK."

The post on the left shows a results page stating "No results found," while on the left it shows two videos of the President.

Another post from the account Dustin Genereux said that, "Censorship on TikTok is at an all time high with accounts being deleted, posts going back years being flagged, people losing access to the creator fund for saying anything Anti-Trump, MAGA, Elon, etc. But free speech and all that right?"
Earth

Great Barrier Reef Hit By Its Most Widespread Coral Bleaching, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 15

Posted by msmash from the catastrophic-developments dept.
More than 40% of individual corals monitored around a Great Barrier Reef island were killed last year in the most widespread coral bleaching outbreak to hit the reef system, a study has found. The Guardian: Scientists tracked 462 colonies of corals at One Tree Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef after heat stress began to turn the corals white in early 2024. Researchers said they encountered "catastrophic" scenes at the reef.

Only 92 coral colonies escaped bleaching entirely and by July, when the analysis for the study ended, 193 were dead and a further 113 were still showing signs of bleaching. Prof Maria Byrne, a marine biologist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, has been researching and visiting the island for 35 years.
Communications

Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC (theverge.com) 71

Posted by msmash from the beginning-of-a-new-era dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brendan Carr is now formally the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, giving him the power to set the agency's agenda and usher through a host of regulations with major implications for the tech and media industries as soon as he has a Republican majority. In a statement, Carr named a few areas of focus: "issues ranging from tech and media regulation to unleashing new opportunities for jobs and growth through agency actions on spectrum, infrastructure, and the space economy."

Carr's priorities might also be gleaned from a document you might have already heard about: Project 2025. That's because he authored the FCC chapter of the Heritage Foundation's wishlist for a Donald Trump presidency. In that chapter, Carr proposes actions including: limiting immunity for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content, requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas, and more, quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk's Starlink.

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