4chan was reportedly hacked Monday night, with rival imageboard Soyjack Party claiming responsibility and sharing screenshots suggesting deep access to 4chan's databases and admin tools. Ars Technica reports: Security researcher Kevin Beaumont described the hack as "a pretty comprehensive own" that included "SQL databases, source, and shell access." 404Media reports that the site used an outdated version of PHP that could have been used to gain access, including the phpMyAdmin tool, a common attack vector that is frequently patched for security vulnerabilities. Ars staffers pointed to the presence of long-deprecated and removed functions like mysql_real_escape_string in the screenshots as possible signs of an old, unpatched PHP version. In other words, there's a possibility that the hackers have gained pretty deep access to all of 4chan's data, including site source code and user data.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has issued a stark ultimatum to European allies, telling them to choose between US and Chinese communications technology. In an interview with Financial Times, Carr urged "allied western democracies" to "focus on the real long-term bogey: the rise of the Chinese Communist party." The warning comes as European governments question Starlink's reliability after Washington threatened to switch off its services in Ukraine.

UK telecoms BT and Virgin Media O2 are currently trialing Starlink's satellite internet technology but haven't signed full agreements. "If you're concerned about Starlink, just wait for the CCP's version, then you'll be really worried," said Carr. Carr claimed Europe is "caught" between Washington and Beijing, with a "great divide" emerging between "CCP-aligned countries and others" in AI and satellite technology. He also accused the European Commission of "protectionism" and an "anti-American" attitude while suggesting Nokia and Ericsson should relocate manufacturing to the US to avoid Trump's import tariffs.

Skype is shutting down after two decades on May 5th, notes the Washington Post.

But the bigger problem for retired attorney Karen Griffin is that Microsoft won't refund the money they paid into a Skype account for cheap international phone calls: "They're no longer offering this service that I prepaid for, and now they're not giving me my money back," Griffin said. "There's a lot of people out there who are going to lose money...."

To its credit, Microsoft gave Skype users a couple months' warning about the shutdown coming May 5. People can transfer Skype contacts and chat history to the company's Microsoft Teams chat-and-calling app or to other companies' services. (While Microsoft sells Teams to organizations, there's a free version for personal use.) But Microsoft didn't explain well what will happen to money that people like Griffin have parked in Skype accounts, in some cases for years.... Unless you bought Skype credits very recently, Microsoft said it won't refund money in Skype accounts. The company says it will add an option for Skype account holders to keep using their funds for phone calls online or in Teams.

Griffin doesn't love what Microsoft is doing. She prefers a cash refund or a credit applied to her Microsoft Office subscription, for which she pays about $110 a year. Amit Fulay, vice president of product for Skype and Teams, said it's not possible to shift funds from a Skype account to Office subscriptions. And he nixed refunds because Microsoft will still offer basic call services for former Skype customers. "Refunds make more sense if you took away something," Fulay said. "We're not." Microsoft declined to say how much money Skype users collectively have sitting in accounts that they might never use.

Stacey Higginbotham, a policy specialist with Consumer Reports' technology advocacy team, said Griffin is making a reasonable request for a rich company like Microsoft that's shutting down an internet service. "The best way: Give people their money back. The second-best way, give people a credit to all of your services," Higginbotham said.

Military chiefs at Nato have been warned of global internet blackouts following a string of suspected Russian attacks on subsea cables. From a report: Telecoms companies including Vodafone, O2 owner Telefonica and Orange have written to UK, EU and Nato officials warning that a rise in sabotage incidents was putting critical services at risk. In an open letter, they wrote: "The repercussions of damage to subsea cables extend far beyond Europe, potentially affecting global internet and power infrastructure, international communications, financial transactions and critical services worldwide."

It comes after a spike in incidents relating to fibre optic cables on seabeds that carry huge volumes of data, voice and internet traffic between countries. More than 500 cables carry around 95pc of all international data, while their remote location makes them difficult and costly to monitor. At least 11 subsea cables have been damaged in the Baltic Sea since October 2023 and similar outages have been reported in the North Sea.

The incidents have fuelled fears of sabotage by hostile actors, with more than 50 Russian ships observed in areas of high cable density in the Baltic Sea. The UK is monitoring the Russian spy ship Yantar amid concerns that it is mapping critical underwater infrastructure. Concerns have also been raised about Chinese sabotage following a number of incidents around Taiwan.

Razer's upcoming Blade 16 and other laptops are no longer available for preorder or purchase on its US site. From a report: The configurator for preordering its new Blade 16 laptop was available as recently as April 1st, according to the Internet Archive -- one day before the Trump administration announced sweeping US tariffs on China, Taiwan, and others that make laptop components.

When asked recently if tariffs might affect Razer's prices or availability, its Public Relations Manager, Andy Johnston, told The Verge, "We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs." Razer may not be openly talking about the impact of tariffs, but Framework halted sales of its entry-level Laptop 13 in the US on April 7th, and Micron reportedly confirmed surcharges for its memory chips will apply once the tariffs take effect after midnight tonight.

On Bluesky, the joke's on you if you don't get the joke. The social network has become a "refuge" for those fleeing X and Threads, but its growing pains include a serious case of humor-impairment. When Amy Brown jokingly posted she was "screaming, crying, and throwing up" about price differences between Ohio and California Walgreens, literal-minded users scolded her for exaggerating. Brown, a former Wendy's social media manager who got banned from X after impersonating Elon Musk, puts it simply: "We're both speaking English, but I'm speaking internet."

This clash stems from Bluesky's oddly mixed population: irony-steeped Twitter refugees mingling with earnest Facebook transplants and MSNBC viewers who took the plunge after seeing the platform mentioned on shows like Morning Joe. "It's riff collapse," says cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky, describing how her obviously absurd Oscar post triggered sincere movie recommendations.

The internet's physical mass remains contested among scientists, with estimates ranging from a strawberry to something almost unimaginably small. In 2006, Harvard physicist Russell Seitz calculated the internet weighed roughly 50 grams based on server energy, a figure that would now equate to potato-weight given internet growth.

Christopher White, president of NEC Laboratories America, has dismissed this calculation as "just wrong." White suggests a more accurate method that accounts for the energy needed to encode all internet data in one place, yielding approximately 53 quadrillionths of a gram at room temperature. Alternatively, if the internet's projected 175 zettabytes of data were stored in DNA -- a storage medium scientists are actively exploring -- it would weigh 960,947 grams, equivalent to 10.6 American males. Though scientists debate measurement methods, White asserts the web's true complexity makes it "essentially unknowable."

"Gen Z is rediscovering Tumblr — a chaotic, cozy corner of the internet untouched by algorithmic gloss and influencer overload..." writes Fast Company, "embracing the platform as a refuge from an internet saturated with influencers and algorithm fatigue." Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users and accounts for 60% of new sign-ups, according to data shared with Business Insider's Amanda Hoover, who recently reported on the platform's resurgence. User numbers spiked in January during the near-ban of TikTok and jumped again last year when Brazil temporarily banned X. In response, Tumblr users launched dedicated communities to archive and share their favorite TikToks...

To keep up with the momentum, Tumblr introduced Reddit-style Communities in December, letting users connect over shared interests like photography and video games. In January, it debuted Tumblr TV — a TikTok-like feature that serves as both a GIF search engine and a short-form video platform. But perhaps Tumblr's greatest strength is that it isn't TikTok or Facebook. Currently the 10th most popular social platform in the U.S., according to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr is dwarfed by giants like Instagram and X. For its users, though, that's part of the appeal.
First launched in 2007, Tumblr peaked at over 100 million users in 2014, according to the article. Trends like Occupy Wall Street had been born on Tumblr, notes Business Insider, calling the blogging platform "Gen Z's safe space... as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers." Tumblr was also "one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013... then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale.

"That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z..." "Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021... Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier.

More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them. The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr...

And Tumblr still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working, you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14... Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, [says Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr]. "We've had ups and downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place that we've been in 18 years," he says... And following media companies (including Business Insider) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to train on Tumblr posts.

"The social internet is fractured," the article argues. ("Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than influence....")

But in a world where megaplatforms "flatten our online experiences and reward content that fits a mold," the article suggests, "smaller communities can enrich them."

Tinder "is experimenting with a chatbot that claims to help users improve their flirting skills," notes Washington Post internet-culture reporter Tatum Hunter. The chatbot is available only to users in the United States on iPhones for a limited time, and powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o each character "kicks off an improvised conversation, and the user responds out loud with something flirty..."

"Three of them dumped me." You can win points for banter the app deems "charming" or "playful." You lose points if your back-and-forth seems "cheeky" or "quirky"... It asked me to talk out loud into my phone and win the romantic interest of various AI characters.

The first scenario involved a financial analyst named Charles, whom I've supposedly run into at the Tokyo airport after accidentally swapping our luggage. I tried my best to be polite to the finance guy who stole my suitcase, asking questions about his travel and agreeing to go to coffee. But the game had some critical feedback: I should try to connect more emotionally using humor or stories from my life. My next go had me at a Dallas wedding trying to flirt with Andrew, a data analyst who had supposedly stumbled into the venue, underdressed, because he'd been looking for a quiet spot to ... analyze data. This time I kept things playful, poking fun at Andrew for crashing a wedding. Andrew didn't like that. I'd "opted to disengage" by teasing this person instead of helping him blend in at the wedding, the app said. A failure on my part, apparently — and also a reminder why generative AI doesn't belong everywhere...

Going in, I was worried Tinder's AI characters would outperform the people I've met on dating apps and I'd fall down a rabbit hole of robot love. Instead, they behaved in a way typical for chatbots: Drifting toward biased norms and failing to capture the complexity of human emotions and interactions. The "Game Game" seemed to replicate the worst parts of flirting — the confusion, the unclear expectations, the uncomfortable power dynamics — without the good parts, like the spark of curiosity about another person. Tinder released the feature on April Fools' Day, likely as a bid for impressions and traffic. But its limitations overshadowed its novelty...

Hillary Paine, Tinder's vice president of product, growth and revenue, said in an email that AI will play a "big role in the future of dating and Tinder's evolution." She said the game is meant to be silly and that the company "leaned into the campiness." Gen Z is a socially anxious generation, Paine said, and this age group is willing to endure a little cringe if it leads to a "real connection."
The article suggests it's another example of companies "eager to incorporate this newish technology, often without considering whether it adds any value for users." But "As apps like Tinder and Bumble lose users amid 'dating app burnout,' the companies are turning to AI to win new growth." (The dating app Rizz "uses AI to autosuggest good lines to use," while Teaser "spins up a chatbot that's based on your personality, meant to talk and behave like you would during a flirty chat," and people "are forming relationships with AI companion bots by the millions.") And the companion-bot company Replika "boasts more than 30 million users..."

Over on Reddit's "selfhosted" subreddit for alternatives to popular services, long-time Slashdot reader Zoup described a pain point:

- Landlock is a Linux Security Module (LSM) that lets unprivileged processes restrict themselves.

- It's been in the kernel since 5.13, but the API is awkward to use directly.

- It always annoyed the hell out of me to run random binaries from the internet without any real control over what they can access.

So they've rolled their own solution, according to Thursday's submission to Slashdot: I just released Landrun, a Go-based CLI tool that wraps Linux Landlock (5.13+) to sandbox any process without root, containers, or seccomp. Think firejail, but minimal and kernel-native. Supports fine-grained file access (ro/rw/exec) and TCP port restrictions (6.7+). No daemons, no YAML, just flags.

Example (where --rox allows read-only access with execution to specified path):

# landrun --rox /usr touch /tmp/file
touch: cannot touch '/tmp/file': Permission denied
# landrun --rox /usr --rw /tmp touch /tmp/file
#

It's MIT-licensed, easy to audit, and now supports systemd services.

Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."

But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly." Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters.
Also on X, legendary game developer John Carmack remembered that Täht "did a great service for online gamers with his long campaign against bufferbloat in routers and access points. There is a very good chance your packets flow through some code he wrote." (Carmack also says he and Täht "corresponded for years".)

Long-time Slashdot reader TheBracket remembers him as "the driving force behind ">the Bufferbloat project and a contributor to FQ-CoDel, and CAKE in the Linux kernel."

Dave spent years doing battle with Internet latency and bufferbloat, contributing to countless projects. In recent years, he's been working with Robert, Frank and myself at LibreQoS to provide CAKE at the ISP level, helping Starlink with their latency and bufferbloat, and assisting the OpenWrt project.
Eric Raymond remembered first meeting Täht in 2001 "near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder..."

Raymond said Täht "lived for the work he did" and "bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis." He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable... Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking...

In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.
Weeks before his death Täht was still active on X.com, retweeting LWN's article about "The AI scraperbot scourge", an announcement from Texas Instruments, and even a Slashdot headline.

Täht was also Slashdot reader #603,670, submitting stories about network latency, leaving comments about AI, and making announcements about the Bufferbloat project.

Is OpenAI's ChatGPT violating copyrights? The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023. But Ars Technica summarizes OpenAI's response. The New York Times (or NYT) "should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles... partly because of the newspaper's own reporting..."

OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet.

But on Friday, U.S. district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting. In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022... And OpenAI's other argument — that it was "common knowledge" that ChatGPT was trained on NYT articles in 2020 based on other reporting — also failed for similar reasons...

OpenAI may still be able to prove through discovery that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would have infringing outputs in 2020, Stein said. But at this early stage, dismissal is not appropriate, the judge concluded. The same logic follows in a related case from The Daily News, Stein ruled. Davida Brook, co-lead counsel for the NYT, suggested in a statement to Ars that the NYT counts Friday's ruling as a win. "We appreciate Judge Stein's careful consideration of these issues," Brook said. "As the opinion indicates, all of our copyright claims will continue against Microsoft and OpenAI for their widespread theft of millions of The Times's works, and we look forward to continuing to pursue them."

The New York Times is also arguing that OpenAI contributes to ChatGPT users' infringement of its articles, and OpenAI lost its bid to dismiss that claim, too. The NYT argued that by training AI models on NYT works and training ChatGPT to deliver certain outputs, without the NYT's consent, OpenAI should be liable for users who manipulate ChatGPT to regurgitate content in order to skirt the NYT's paywalls... At this stage, Stein said that the NYT has "plausibly" alleged contributory infringement, showing through more than 100 pages of examples of ChatGPT outputs and media reports showing that ChatGPT could regurgitate portions of paywalled news articles that OpenAI "possessed constructive, if not actual, knowledge of end-user infringement." Perhaps more troubling to OpenAI, the judge noted that "The Times even informed defendants 'that their tools infringed its copyrighted works,' supporting the inference that defendants possessed actual knowledge of infringement by end users."

Software engineer and longtime Slashdot reader, Dmitry Grinberg (dmitrygr), shares a recent project they've been working on: "an interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips": There was a time when one could order a kit and assemble a computer at home. It would do just about what a contemporary store-bought computer could do. That time is long gone. Modern computers are made of hundreds of huge complex chips with no public datasheets and many hundreds of watts of power supplied to them over complex power delivery topologies. It does not help that modern operating systems require gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of storage, and always-on internet connectivity to properly spy on you. But what if one tried to fit a modern computer into a kit that could be easily assembled at home? What if the kit only had three chips, each with only 8 pins? Can it be done? Yes. The system runs a custom MIPS emulator written in ARMv6 assembly and includes a custom bootloader that supports firmware updates via FAT16-formatted SD cards. Clever pin-sharing hacks allow all components (RAM, SD, serial I/O) to work despite the 6 usable I/O pins. Overclocked to up to 150MHz, the board boots into a full Linux shell in about a minute and performs at ~1.65MHz MIPS-equivalent speed.

It's not fast, writes Dmitry, but it's fully functional -- you can edit files, compile code, and even install Debian packages. A kit may be made available if a partner is found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

"This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection," the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. "Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations." There are two variations of fast flux described in the advisory: single flux and double flux. Single flux involves mapping a single domain to a rotating pool of IP addresses using DNS A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) records. This constant cycling makes it difficult for defenders to track or block the associated malicious servers since the addresses change frequently, yet the domain name remains consistent.

Double flux takes this a step further by also rotating the DNS name servers themselves. In addition to changing the IP addresses of the domain, it cycles through the name servers using NS (Name Server) and CNAME (Canonical Name) records. This adds an additional layer of obfuscation and resilience, complicating takedown efforts.

"A key means for achieving this is the use of Wildcard DNS records," notes Ars. "These records define zones within the Domain Name System, which map domains to IP addresses. The wildcards cause DNS lookups for subdomains that do not exist, specifically by tying MX (mail exchange) records used to designate mail servers. The result is the assignment of an attacker IP to a subdomain such as malicious.example.com, even though it doesn't exist." Both methods typically rely on large botnets of compromised devices acting as proxies, making it challenging for defenders to trace or disrupt the malicious activity.

For the second time, President Trump has extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by 75 days. The TikTok deal "requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed," said Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform. The extension will "keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days."

"We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!)," Trump added. CNBC reports: ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government, the company told CNBC, adding that any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law. "An agreement has not been executed," a spokesperson for ByteDance said in a statement. "There are key matters to be resolved." Before Trump's decision, ByteDance faced an April 5 deadline to carry out a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok's U.S. business as required by a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024.

ByteDance's original deadline to sell TikTok was on Jan. 19, but Trump signed an executive order when he took office the next day that gave the company 75 more days to make a deal. Although the law would penalize internet service providers and app store owners like Apple and Google for hosting and providing services to TikTok in the U.S., Trump's executive order instructed the attorney general to not enforce it. "This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!," Trump said in the Truth Social post. "We do not want TikTok to 'go dark.' We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Walled Culture has been following closely Italy's poorly designed Piracy Shield system. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to order Italian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all of Google Drive for the entire country, and how malicious actors could similarly use that unchecked power to shut down critical national infrastructure. Since then, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), an international, not-for-profit association representing computer, communications, and Internet industry firms, has added its voice to the chorus of disapproval. In a letter (PDF) to the European Commission, it warned about the dangers of the Piracy Shield system to the EU economy [...]. It also raised an important new issue: the fact that Italy brought in this extreme legislation without notifying the European Commission under the so-called "TRIS" procedure, which allows others to comment on possible problems [...].

As well as Italy's failure to notify the Commission about its new legislation in advance, the CCIA believes that: this anti-piracy mechanism is in breach of several other EU laws. That includes the Open Internet Regulation which prohibits ISPs to block or slow internet traffic unless required by a legal order. The block subsequent to the Piracy Shield also contradicts the Digital Services Act (DSA) in several aspects, notably Article 9 requiring certain elements to be included in the orders to act against illegal content. More broadly, the Piracy Shield is not aligned with the Charter of Fundamental Rights nor the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU -- as it hinders freedom of expression, freedom to provide internet services, the principle of proportionality, and the right to an effective remedy and a fair trial.

Far from taking these criticisms to heart, or acknowledging that Piracy Shield has failed to convert people to paying subscribers, the Italian government has decided to double down, and to make Piracy Shield even worse. Massimiliano Capitanio, Commissioner at AGCOM, the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees, explained on LinkedIn how Piracy Shield was being extended in far-reaching ways (translation by Google Translate, original in Italian). [...] That is, Piracy Shield will apply to live content far beyond sports events, its original justification, and to streaming services. Even DNS and VPN providers will be required to block sites, a serious technical interference in the way the Internet operates, and a threat to people's privacy. Search engines, too, will be forced to de-index material. The only minor concession to ISPs is to unblock domain names and IP addresses that are no longer allegedly being used to disseminate unauthorized material. There are, of course, no concessions to ordinary Internet users affected by Piracy Shield blunders. In the future, Italy's Piracy Shield will add:
- 30-minute blackout orders not only for pirate sports events, but also for other live content;
- the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers;
- the obligation for search engines to de-index pirate sites;
- the procedures for unblocking domain names and IP addresses obscured by Piracy Shield that are no longer used to spread pirate content;
- the new procedure to combat piracy on the #linear and "on demand" television, for example to protect the #film and #serietv.

Amazon and United Launch Alliance will launch 27 full-scale satellites on April 9 as part of Amazon's Project Kuiper, marking the company's first major step toward building a global satellite internet network to rival SpaceX's Starlink. GeekWire reports: ULA said the three-hour window for the Atlas V rocket's liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida is scheduled to open at noon ET (9 a.m. PT) that day. ULA is planning a live stream of launch coverage via its website starting about 20 minutes ahead of liftoff. Amazon said next week's mission -- known as Kuiper-1 or KA-1 (for Kuiper Atlas 1) -- will put 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers).

ULA launched two prototype Kuiper satellites into orbit for testing in October 2023, but KA-1 will mark Amazon's first full-scale launch of a batch of operational satellites designed to bring high-speed internet access to millions of people around the world. [...] According to Amazon, the Kuiper satellite design has gone through significant upgrades since the prototypes were launched in 2023. Amazon's primary manufacturing facility is in Kirkland, Wash., with some of the components produced at Project Kuiper's headquarters in nearby Redmond.

The mission profile for KA-1 calls for deploying the satellites safely in orbit and establishing ground-to-space contact. The satellites would then use their electric propulsion systems to settle into their assigned orbits at an altitude of 392 miles (630 kilometers), under the management of Project Kuiper's mission operations team in Redmond. Under the current terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon is due to launch 3,232 Kuiper satellites by 2029, with half of those satellites going into orbit by mid-2026.

NaNoWriMo, the nonprofit behind the annual novel-writing challenge, is shutting down after 20 years but will keep its websites online temporarily so users can retrieve their content. The Guardian reports: A 27-minute YouTube video posted the same day by the organization's interim executive director Kilby Blades explained that it had to close due to ongoing financial problems, which were compounded by reputational damage. In November 2023, several community members complained to the nonprofit's board, Blades said. They believed that staff had mishandled accusations made in May 2023 that a NaNoWriMo forum moderator was grooming children on a different website. The moderator was eventually removed, though this was for unrelated code of conduct violations and occurred "many weeks" after the initial complaints. In the wake of this, community members came forward with other complaints related to child safety on the NaNoWriMo sites.

The organization was also widely criticized last year over a statement on the use of artificial intelligence in creative writing. After stating that it did not support or explicitly condemn any approach to writing, including the use of AI, it said that the "categorical condemnation of artificial intelligence has classist and ableist undertones." It went on to say that "not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing," and that "not all brains have same abilities ... There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't 'see' the issues in their writing without help." "We hold no belief that people will stop writing 50,000 words in November," read Monday's email. "Many alternatives to NaNoWriMo popped up this year, and people did find each other. In so many ways, it's easier than it was when NaNoWriMo began in 1999 to find your writing tribe online."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow. Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."

Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release. KidFlix going dark was the result of the biggest child sexual exploitation operation in Europol's history, the agency said. Operation Stream, as it was dubbed, was supported by law enforcement in more than 35 countries, including the United States. Nearly 1,400 suspected consumers of CSAM have been identified among 1.8 million global KidFlix users, and 79 have been arrested so far. According to Europol, 39 child victims were protected as a result of the sting, and more than 3,000 devices were seized.

Police identified suspects through payment data after seizing the server. Despite cryptocurrencies offering a veneer of anonymity, cops were apparently able to use sophisticated methods to trace transactions to bank details. And in some cases cops defeated user attempts to hide their identities -- such as a man who made payments using his mother's name in Spain, a local news outlet, Todo Alicante, reported. It likely helped that most suspects were already known offenders, Europol noted. Arrests spanned the globe, including 16 in Spain, where one computer scientist was found with an "abundant" amount of CSAM and payment receipts, Todo Alicante reported. Police also arrested a "serial" child abuser in the US, CBS News reported.

The Chrome extension Honey has lost over 4 million users after a viral video exposed it for hijacking affiliate codes and misleading users about finding the best coupon deals. 9to5Google reports: As we reported in early January, Honey had lost around 3 million users immediately after the video went viral, but ended up gaining back around 1 million later on. Now, as of March 2025, Honey is down to 16 million users on Chrome, down from its peak of 20 million.

This drop comes after new Chrome policy has taken effect which prevents Honey, and extensions like it, from practices including taking over affiliate codes without disclosure or without benefit to the extension's users. Honey has since updated its extension listing with disclosure, and we found that the behavior shown in the December video no longer occurs.