"Internet provider Starlink is reviving the old concept of soft data caps with the introduction of a 'Fair Use policy,'" writes Slashdot reader thegarbz. "Users who consume more than 1TB of data per month will find their connections deteriorated." The Verge reports: Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of "Priority Access" data that tracks what you're using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you'll be moved to "Basic Access" data, or deprioritized data during heavy network congestion, for the rest of your billing cycle. If you want to buy more Priority Access data, you can, at the cost of 25 cents per GB, and any data used between 11PM and 7AM doesn't count towards your Priority Access tally. "This announcement comes off the back of a recent article by ArsTechnica, showing that Starlink's median download speed has dropped to 62Mbps in Q2 of 2022 as the network struggles under the load of increased subscriber numbers," adds thegarbz.

A new survey on the Xbox Insider Hub suggests Microsoft is looking to expand on its energy saving features for Xbox consoles and potentially PC games too. Jez Corden writes via Windows Central: A recent questionnaire I came across in the Xbox Insider app on Windows PC detailed a potential list of new features Microsoft is exploring for games across consoles and PC. These new features pertain specifically to opting-in to reduce frame rates, resolution, and so on, with the goal of limiting energy consumption. Of course, surveys don't necessarily mean that these sorts of features will make it into a final product, but Microsoft's commitments to net zero carbon use have seen the firm increase its investments in this space.

The survey asks users about their current feelings with regard to energy consumption, potentially polling users on how the energy crisis is affecting their willingness to spend. The survey asks users if they would be interested in features that reduce power consumption in games, both while the games are running and while they're inactive, specifically to save energy and thus money. Microsoft also asks users how they would prefer these features to be branded, with terms like "eco-saving" and "energy-saving," and even asks if these sorts of features would affect users' purchase decisions per game.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to supportUkraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine's president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda. The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence. The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future. It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead ofTuesday's midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration's extensive military assistance to Ukraine.

"It's clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine," said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company. The campaign -- using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka -- have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today. It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort. The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content. The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran.

These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said. "The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks," said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. "But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims." Some characteristics of an inauthentic user to look out for include: no profile picture, no identifying biographical details, and posts exclusively on political issues that often include false or misleading posts and little engagement. They may also link to obscure websites like electiontruth.net, which Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.

Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week, WSJ reported over the weekend, citing people familiar with the matter, in what could be the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry's rapid growth during the pandemic. From the report: The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said.

The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company's 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company's staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment.

Manual transmissions are "the ultimate driver-car connection," argues the chief marketing manager for Nissan's Z sports car, "where you really feel like a part of the vehicle and can control it in ways you wouldn't be able to with an automatic." He tells ABC News that "As long as there are still new internal combustion engine vehicles on the market, there will be an interest in manual transmissions."

Ah, but isn't that just another way of saying that "It's inevitable EVs are going to take over and people are getting misty-eyed that the manual won't be around forever." That what Bob Sorokanich, editor-in-chief of Jalopnik, tells ABC: "That's why people are flocking to these specialty cars. Young people are interested in the opportunity to experience them as internal combustion engines come to a close...."

The car community has been decrying the death of the manual transmission for nearly two decades, said Henry Catchpole, a longtime automotive journalist who now hosts videos for Hagerty. As more automakers allocate resources to building electric vehicles, drivers are choosing engagement over pure performance, he argued. "People are reassessing what they want and are going back to analog cars. It's a big story in the industry," he told ABC News. "There's a shift in terms of how we look at performance cars. We don't wax lyrical about paddle shifters as we do about manual gearboxes. Drivers are enjoying the manual again...."

Catchpole said the unrelenting pressure on automakers to keep the manual alive has benefited an industry that's rapidly closing the door on gas-powered vehicles. "Some people see manuals as a chore but they're not. They bring more color to life," he said. "Porsche listened to enthusiasts and brought back the manual in the GT3. I hope other manufacturers will listen too."
"Porsche, Acura, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Honda, and even Ford continue to make models which have manual transmissions," writes Slashdot reader quonset.

"In some cases it is the only option."

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen has a question: What makes a decent social web site? If you don't like the original form of the subjective question, how about something like "What is the best social site you know of?" or "What criteria would you use to recognize a good social site?" or even "How could a good social media website even survive...?"
Their original submission lists their own criteria for a good social site:

• Efficient to use (without wasting your time)

• Has educational value, "perhaps measured by questions like 'How frequently has this website justified changing my mind about something?'"

• The size and permeability of filter bubbles formed by people using the site

But if you have different priorities for a social site -- what are they? Share your own best thoughts in the comments.

What makes a good social media site?

"THIS WEBSITE HAS BEEN SEIZED," declares the home page of three different domains, attributing the seizure to the America's Federal Bureau of Investigation "in accordance with a warrant."

Bleeping Computer reports the domains were seized early Friday morning — and that the domains belong to the popular Z-Library online eBook repository. Z-Library is ranked in the top 10k most visited websites on the Internet, offering over 11 million books and 84 million articles for free via its website....

WHOIS information initially showed that the U.S. government seized the domains and switched their DNS servers to NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM and NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM, two DNS servers commonly used by the U.S and law enforcement in domain seizures. However, since then, the DNS servers for these domains have been switched to Njalla, an anonymizing hosting provider. It is unclear how Z-Library could transfer the domains to the new hosting provider....

While the court order for the seizure is unavailable at this time, the site's domains were likely seized because many of the files were uploaded without the license of the original authors. Complaints to copyright protection offices in the past have resulted in legal actions forcing the platform's registrar to seize the Z-Library domains in 2015 and further domain blockages and DMCA notices in the U.S. and France in 2021. The USTR (United States Trade Representative) has recently launched an investigation on the platform... As reported by TorrentFreak last week, TikTok decided to block hashtags related to Z-Library, reportedly responding to copyright holder's complaints.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for suggesting the story.

By Tuesday morning Mastodon had gained 123,562 new users since October 27 (the site told TechCrunch) and had 528,607 active users. But by Saturday the number of new users had nearly doubled, to 230,000, reports CNN — with 655,000 active users.

In fact, for every 363 active users on Twitter, there's now one on Mastodon, CNN's figures suggest (since Twitter has nearly "238 million daily active monetizable users"). Exploring the recent spike, they note that Mastodon "has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook." Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It's operated by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding... "It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been," said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon)....

A lot of Mastodon's features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there's a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users' posts, and so on.... There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users' accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find.
CNN also notes the problem with signing up for a Mastodon server: "some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it's not accepting more users."

Linux magazine explores how to breath fresh life into old Android devices: Every mobile device needs its own Android build because of numerous drivers that are not available in the source code. The need to maintain every version of Android for every mobile device means that many manufacturers eventually stop supporting updates. Often, smartphones or tablets that still work perfectly can no longer be used without worry because the manufacturer has simply ceased to offer bug fixes and security updates....

The LineageOS project, the successor to the CyanogenMod project, which was discontinued in 2016, proves that it is not impossible to keep these devices up-to-date. Unpaid volunteers at LineageOS do the work that many manufacturers do not want to do: They combine current Android releases with the required device-specific drivers.

The LineageOS project (Figure 1) provides Android systems with a fresh patch status every month for around 300 devices. The builds are released weekly, unless there is a problem during the build. The Devices page on the LineageOS Wiki provides the details of whether a LineageOS build is available for your smartphone or tablet....

I recommend the LineageOS project as the first port of call for anyone who wants to protect an older smartphone or tablet that is no longer maintained and doesn't receive Google security patches. The LineageOS derivatives LineageOS for MicroG and /e/OS make it even easier to enjoy a Google-free smartphone without too many restrictions.
The article also describes how to use TWRP to flash a manufacturer-independent recovery system (while also creating a restoreable backup of the existing system) as an alternative to LineageOS's own recovery tools.

And it even explains how to unlock the bootloader — although there may be other locks set up separately by the manufacturer. "Some manufacturers require you to register the device to unlock it, and then — after telling you that the warranty is now void — they hand over a code. Others refuse to unlock the device altogether."

Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for submitting the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country's cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities. The goal is to assess UK's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture. "These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact," the agency said. "The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK's exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time."

NCSC's scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231). The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet. "We're not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose," NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained. "We're beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we're doing (and why we're doing it)." The NCSC says it will "take steps to remove [any sensitive or personal data] and prevent it from being captured again in the future."

British organizations can opt out of having their servers scanned by emailing a list of IP addresses they want to be excluded at scanning@ncsc.gov.uk.

Google has announced an ambitious new project to develop a single AI language model that supports the world's "1,000 most spoken languages." The Verge reports: As a first step towards this goal, the company is unveiling an AI model trained on over 400 languages, which it describes as "the largest language coverage seen in a speech model today." [...] Google's "1,000 Languages Initiative" is not focusing on any particular functionality, but instead on creating a single system with huge breadth of knowledge across the world's languages.

Speaking to The Verge, Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google AI, said the company believes that creating a model of this size will make it easier to bring various AI functionalities to languages that are poorly represented in online spaces and AI training datasets (also known as "low-resource languages"). "By having a single model that is exposed to and trained on many different languages, we get much better performance on our low resource languages," says Ghahramani. "The way we get to 1,000 languages is not by building 1,000 different models. Languages are like organisms, they've evolved from one another and they have certain similarities. And we can find some pretty spectacular advances in what we call zero-shot learning when we incorporate data from a new language into our 1,000 language model and get the ability to translate [what it's learned] from a high-resource language to a low-resource language."

Access to data is a problem when training across so many languages, though, and Google says that in order to support work on the 1,000-language model it will be funding the collection of data for low-resource languages, including audio recordings and written texts. The company says it has no direct plans on where to apply the functionality of this model -- only that it expects it will have a range of uses across Google's products, from Google Translate to YouTube captions and more. "One of the really interesting things about large language models and language research in general is that they can do lots and lots of different tasks," says Ghahramani. "The same language model can turn commands for a robot into code; it can solve maths problems; it can do translation. The really interesting things about language models is they're becoming repositories of a lot of knowledge, and by probing them in different ways you can get to different bits of useful functionality."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion -- called "The Commodordion" -- he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Akesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

So how does the Commodordion work? Akesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.

LinkedIn is rolling out new features to combat a surge in AI-generated bot accounts, writes Brian Krebs. "Many LinkedIn profiles now display a creation date, and the company is expanding its domain validation offering, which allows users to publicly confirm that they can reply to emails at the domain of their stated current employer." From the report: LinkedIn's new "About This Profile" section -- which is visible by clicking the "More" button at the top of a profile -- includes the year the account was created, the last time the profile information was updated, and an indication of how and whether an account has been verified.

LinkedIn also said it is adding a warning to some LinkedIn messages that include high-risk content, or that try to entice the user into taking the conversation to another platform (like WeChat). "We may warn you about messages that ask you to take the conversation to another platform because that can be a sign of a scam," the company said in a blog post. "These warnings will also give you the choice to report the content without letting the sender know."

The Indian government wants to develop a home-grown industry that can design and assemble drones and make the components that go into their manufacture. The BBC reports: "Drones can be significant creators of employment and economic growth due to their versatility, and ease of use, especially in India's remote areas," says Amber Dubey, former joint secretary at the Ministry of Civil Aviation. "Given its traditional strengths in innovation, information technology, frugal engineering and its huge domestic demand, India has the potential of becoming a global drone hub by 2030," he tells the BBC. Over the next three years Mr Dubey sees as much as 50 billion rupees $630 million invested in the sector.

[...] However, despite the excitement and investment around India's drone industry, even those in the sector advise caution. "India has set a goal of being a hub of drones by 2030, but I think we should be cautious because we at present don't not have an ecosystem and technology initiatives in place," says Rajiv Kumar Narang, from the Drone Federation of India. He says the industry needs a robust regulator that can oversee safety and help develop an air traffic control system for drones. That will be particularly important as the aircraft become larger, says Mr Narang. "Initiatives have to come from the government. A single entity or a nodal ministry has to take this forward if we want to reach a goal of being the hub by 2030," he says.

India also lacks the network of firms needed to make all the components that go into making a drone. At the moment many parts, including batteries, motors and flight controllers are imported. But the government is confident an incentive scheme will help boost domestic firms. "The components industry will take two to three years to build, since it traditionally works on low margin and high volumes," says Mr Dubey. Despite those reservations, firms are confident there will be demand for drones and people to fly them. Chirag Shara is the chief executive of Drone Destination, which has trained more than 800 pilots and instructors since the rules on drone use were first relaxed in August 2021. He estimates that India will need up to 500,000 certified pilots over the next five years.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, said Friday that he doesn't view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet. From a report: He has his own web decentralization project called Solid. "It's important to clarify in order to discuss the impacts of new technology," said Berners-Lee, speaking onstage at the Web Summit event in Lisbon.

"You have to understand what the terms mean that we're discussing actually mean, beyond the buzzwords. It's a real shame in fact that the actual Web3 name was taken by Ethereum folks for the stuff that they're doing with blockchain. In fact, Web3 is not the web at all," he said.

Apple has paused hiring for many jobs outside of research and development, an escalation of an existing plan to reduce budgets heading into next year, Bloomberg News reported this week, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From a report: The company took the step last month, ahead of a quarterly earnings report where it said that growth would slow in the holiday period. The pause generally doesn't apply to teams working on future devices and long-term initiatives, but it affects some corporate functions and standard hardware and software engineering roles, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the move isn't public.

Apple joins other tech giants in tapping the brakes on hiring, a response to sluggish consumer spending and higher interest rates. The iPhone maker has fared better than many tech peers this year, but it's still facing an industrywide slowdown for smartphones and computers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs with Apple Silicon that reportedly keeps a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally on your Mac and lets you "rewind" time to see it later. If you forget something you've "seen, said, or heard," Rewind wants to help you find it easily. Rewind AI claims its product stores all recording data locally on your machine and does not require cloud integration. Among its promises, Rewind will reportedly let you rewind Zoom meetings and pull information from them in a searchable form. In a video demo on Rewind.AI's site, the app opens when a user presses Command+Shift+Space. The search bar suggests typing "anything you've seen, said, or heard." It also shows a timeline at the bottom of the screen that represents previous actions in apps.

After searching for "tps reports," the video depicts a grid view of every time Rewind has encountered the phrase "tps reports" as audio or text in any app, including Zoom chats, text messages, emails, Slack conversations, and Word documents. It describes filtering the results by app -- and the ability to copy and paste from these past instances if necessary. Founded by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek, Rewind AI is composed of a small remote team located in various cities around the US. Portions of the company previously created Scribe, a precursor to Rewind that received some press attention in 2021. In an introductory blog post, Rewind AI co-founder Dan Siroker writes, "What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing?" Rewind AI provides few details about the app's back-end technology but describes "mind-boggling compression" that can reportedly compress recording data up to 3,750 times "without a major loss of quality," giving an example of 10.5GB of data squeezed down to just 2.8MB.

According to a new report, almost half of Android-based mobile phones used by U.S. state and local government employees are running outdated versions of the operating system, exposing them to hundreds of vulnerabilities that can be leveraged for attacks. From a report: These statistics come from a report by cybersecurity firm Lookout, based on an analysis of 200 million devices and 175 million applications from 2021 to H2 2022. The report additionally warns of a rise in all threat metrics, including attempted phishing attacks against government employees, reliance on unmanaged mobile devices, and liability points in mission-critical networks. Outdated versions of mobile operating systems allow attackers to exploit vulnerabilities that can be used to breach targets, run code on the device, plant spyware, steal credentials, and more. For example, last week, Apple released iOS 16.1, fixing an actively exploited zero-day memory corruption flaw used by hackers against iPhone users to achieve arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges.

Lookout reports that ten months after iOS 15 had been made available to users, 5% of federal government employees and 30% of state and local government devices were running older versions of the operating system. The situation is much worse for Android, as ten months after the release of version 12, approximately 30% of federal devices and almost 50% of state and local government devices still needed to upgrade to the latest versions, thus remaining vulnerable to bugs that can be exploited in attacks. It should be noted that Android 13 is the latest version of the operating system, but it was released after the first half of 2022, from which this data was collected.

Stadiums around the world, including at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, are subjecting spectators to invasive biometric surveillance tech. From a report: This fall, more than 15,000 cameras will monitor soccer fans across eight stadiums and on the streets of Doha during the 2022 World Cup, an event expected to attract more than 1 million football fans from around the globe. "What you see here is the future of stadium operations," the organizers' chief technology officer, Niyas Abdulrahiman, proudly told AFP in August. "A new standard, a new trend in venue operations, this is our contribution from Qatar to the world of sport." Qatar's World Cup organizers are not alone in deploying biometric technology to monitor soccer fan activity. In recent years, soccer clubs and stadiums across Europe have been introducing these security and surveillance technologies.

In Denmark, Brondby Stadium has been using facial recognition for ticketing verification since 2019. In the Netherlands, NEC Nijmegen has used biometric technology to grant access to Goffert Stadium. France's FC Metz briefly experimented with a facial recognition device to identify fans banned from Saint-Symphorien Stadium. And the UK's Manchester City reportedly hired Texas-based firm Blink Identity in 2019 to deploy facial recognition systems at Etihad Stadium. In Spain, Atletico Osasuna uses facial recognition to monitor and control access to El Sadar Stadium, while Valencia CF signed a deal in June 2021 with biometrics company FacePhi to design and deploy facial-recognition technology at Mestalla Stadium in the upcoming season. The sport club then became a global ambassador for the company's technology. FacePhi's biometric onboarding technology was already used for a pilot project to enroll Valencia CF fans in an automated access control system that allowed them to get into the stadium using a QR code via the football club's mobile app. (A FacePhi spokesperson declined to provide details about the project but said "that we are not yet in the implementation phase with Valencia CF.")

Vietnam's information minister said on Friday authorities had tightened regulations to deal with "false" content on social media platforms so that it must be taken down within 24 hours instead of 48 hours previously. From a report: The new rules will enshrine Vietnam's position as one of the world's most stringently controlled regimes for social media firms and will strengthen the ruling Communist Party's hand as it cracks down on "anti-state" activity. Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung told parliament there was risk that "false news, if it is handled in a slow manner, will spread very widely." Reuters had previously reported government plans to bring in the new regulations, as well rules so that very sensitive information has to be taken down within three hours. Most governments do not have laws imposing the taking down of content on social media firms, but Vietnam's move comes amid intensifying crackdowns in some parts of the world on online content.