In June, Google announced that it's bringing the features of Meet into the Duo app -- and that transformation begins today. Google isn't technically getting rid of either app; Duo's getting rebranded as Meet with the features from both apps, and Meet's staying Meet. From a report: Yes, it sounds pretty confusing, but by the end of this process, there will be just two apps: "Meet Original" (the standard Meet app that will eventually get phased out) and the new Meet that combines both Meet and Duo. The combined app will let you conduct both group and one-on-one calls as well as hold meetings.

The Indian government is withdrawing its long-awaited Personal Data Protection Bill that drew scrutiny from several privacy advocates and tech giants who feared the legislation could restrict how they managed sensitive information while giving government broad powers to access it. From a report: The move comes as a surprise as lawmakers had indicated recently that the bill, unveiled in 2019, could see the "light of the day" soon. New Delhi received dozen of amendments and recommendations from a Joint Committee of Parliament that "identified many issues that were relevant but beyond the scope of a modern digital privacy law," said India's Junior IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar. The government will now work on a "comprehensive legal framework" and present a new bill, he added.

The Personal Data Protection Bill sought to empower Indian citizens with rights relating to their data. India, the world's second largest internet market, has seen an explosion of personal data in the past decade as hundreds of citizens came online for the first time and started consuming scores of apps. But there has been uncertainty on how much power the individuals, private companies and government agencies have over it.

Using monthly vehicle registration data, Axios is tracking the transition to electric vehicles in the United States. What they found is that a handful of states are driving nearly all the country's electric car adoption. From the report: California -- no surprise -- leads the U.S. in electric vehicle ownership, accounting for 39% of all EVs registered nationwide. Look more closely at the numbers, however, and it turns out EVs represent less than 2% of all vehicles on the road in the Golden State. [...] 4.6% of the new vehicles registered in the U.S. this past May were electric, according to the [S&P Global Mobility's] most recent data. That's more than double EVs' share of monthly registrations in May 2021 (1.9%). EVs still account for only about 0.6% of all registered vehicles in the U.S. Take California's EVs away, and it's just 0.4%.

As of April 1, Florida has the second-highest share of the country's EVs, at 6.7%. Then comes Texas (5.4%), Washington (4.4%), and New York (3.6%). Yet, EVs account for only 1% or less of all vehicles within each of these states. Besides California, the states or areas with the highest share of EVs within their own borders: Hawaii (1.3%), and the District of Columbia (1.2%). "Tesla's brand loyalty more than doubled in the month of May and was higher than any brand in the industry, including Toyota and Ford," S&P Global Mobility analyst Tom Libby tells Axios, noting that the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6 are growing in popularity.

"We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's coming," says Libby.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and their collaborators have used DNA to overcome a nearly insurmountable obstacle to engineer materials that would revolutionize electronics. One possible outcome of such engineered materials could be superconductors, which have zero electrical resistance, allowing electrons to flow unimpeded. That means that they don't lose energy and don't create heat, unlike current means of electrical transmission. Development of a superconductor that could be used widely at room temperature -- instead of at extremely high or low temperatures, as is now possible -- could lead to hyper-fast computers, shrink the size of electronic devices, allow high-speed trains to float on magnets and slash energy use, among other benefits.

One such superconductor was first proposed more than 50 years ago by Stanford physicist William A. Little. [...] One possible way to realize Little's idea for a superconductor is to modify lattices of carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders of carbon so tiny they must be measured in nanometers -- billionths of a meter. But there was a huge challenge: controlling chemical reactions along the nanotubes so that the lattice could be assembled as precisely as needed and function as intended.

[Edward H. Egelman, Ph.D., of UVA's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics] and his collaborators found an answer in the very building blocks of life. They took DNA, the genetic material that tells living cells how to operate, and used it to guide a chemical reaction that would overcome the great barrier to Little's superconductor. In short, they used chemistry to perform astonishingly precise structural engineering -- construction at the level of individual molecules. The result was a lattice of carbon nanotubes assembled as needed for Little's room-temperature superconductor. [...] The lattice they built has not been tested for superconductivity, for now, but it offers proof of principle and has great potential for the future, the researchers say. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has hit a major graphics milestone, adding support for a more modern Vulkan 3D APIa. Ars Technica reports: Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced the Pi 4's Vulkan 1.2 conformance on Monday. Support isn't available yet in downloadable Pi-friendly operating systems but should be coming soon. For most people using their Pi as a server, a DIY controller, or a light desktop, Vulkan 1.2 conformance won't be noticeable. Desktop graphics on the standard Raspberry Pi OS are powered by OpenGL, the older graphics API that Vulkan is meant to replace. There is one group that benefits, says Upton: games and other 3D Android applications. Android uses Vulkan as its low-overhead graphics API.

As with most Raspberry Pi advancements, there could be unforeseen opportunities unleashed by this seemingly tiny change. Vulkan 1.2 support gives developers the same 3D-graphics interface (if not anywhere near the same power) as 2019 NVIDIA graphics cards, 2020 Intel chips with integrated graphics, and dozens of other devices. With a Vulkan 1.0 driver installed, developer Iago Toral was able in 2020 to get the original Quake trilogy mostly running on a Pi 4, with not-too-shabby frame rates.

France, Italy and Spain are stepping up pressure on the European Commission to come up with legislation that ensures Big Tech firms partly finance telecoms infrastructure in the bloc, a document showed on Monday. This was the first time the three governments have expressed their joint position on the issue. Reuters reports: EU regulators said in May they were analyzing the question of whether tech giants Alphabet's Google, Meta and Netflix should shoulder some of the costs of upgrading telecoms networks. In a joint paper, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, the three governments said the six largest content providers accounted for 55% of internet traffic.

"This generates specific costs for European telecom operators in terms of capacity, at a time they are already hugely investing in the most costly parts of the networks with 5G and Fiber-To-The-Home," the document said. It urged that European telecom networks and large online content providers pay fair shares of network costs. "We call for a legislative proposal ... ensuring all market players contribute to digital infrastructure costs," the document said.

Facebook's parent company Meta and major US hospitals violated medical privacy laws with a tracking tool that sends health information to Facebook, two proposed class-action lawsuits allege. From a report: The lawsuits, filed in the Northern District of California in June and July, focus on the Meta Pixel tracking tool. The tool can be installed on websites to provide analytics on Facebook and Instagram ads. It also collects information about how people click around and input information into those websites.

An investigation by The Markup in early June found that 33 of the top 100 hospitals in the United States use the Meta Pixel on their websites. At seven hospitals, it was installed on password-protected patient portals. The investigation found that the tool was sending information about patient health conditions, doctor appointments, and medication allergies to Facebook.

With the 2022 Flash Memory Summit taking place this week, not only is there a slew of solid-state storage announcements in the pipe over the coming days, but the show is also increasingly a popular venue for discussing I/O and interconnect developments as well. Kicking things off on that front, on Monday the OpenCAPI and CXL consortiums issued a joint announcement that the two groups will be joining forces, with the OpenCAPI standard and the consortium's assets being transferred to the CXL consortium. From a report: With this integration, CXL is set to become the dominant CPU-to-device interconnect standard, as virtually all major manufacturers are now backing the standard, and competing standards have bowed out of the race and been absorbed by CXL. Pre-dating CXL by a few years, OpenCAPI was one of the earlier standards for a cache-coherent CPU interconnect. The standard, backed by AMD, Xilinx, and IBM, among others, was an extension of IBM's existing Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology, opening it up to the rest of the industry and placing its control under an industry consortium. In the last six years, OpenCAPI has seen a modest amount of use, most notably being implemented in IBM's POWER9 processor family. Like similar CPU-to-device interconnect standards, OpenCAPI was essentially an application extension on top of existing high speed I/O standards, adding things like cache-coherency and faster (lower latency) access modes so that CPUs and accelerators could work together more closely despite their physical disaggregation.

Cable companies are being downgraded by Wall Street analysts in response to weak broadband growth coming out of the pandemic. From a report: Cable companies have managed to stay afloat amid the cord-cutting crisis thanks to their booming broadband businesses. But some analysts see that safety net beginning to fade. Jonathan Chaplin, managing partner at New Street Research, wrote in two notes to clients that the firm has lowered its broadband subscriber estimates for the second time this year for both Charter and Comcast. "We have limited conviction in a quick recovery, given limited visibility all around," he wrote regarding Charter. "We are hoping for a turnaround later in the quarter but have low conviction," he wrote regarding Comcast. Comcast's stock slid last week after it reported flat broadband subscriber additions for the second quarter of 2022. The telecom giant was still able to increase broadband revenues, but its growth has been slowed by increased competition and more users relying on mobile hotspots and fixed wireless plans. Charter lost broadband subscribers for the first time last quarter. Executives cited customers rolling off the government's broadband subsidy program as a major contributor to its customer loss. "Excluding that headwind, we organically grew 38,000 internet customers in the quarter," Charter chief financial officer Jessica Fischer told investors.

Indonesia has lifted its ban on Steam and Yahoo now that both companies complied with the country's restrictive laws that regulate online activity. From a report: The Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information (Kominfo) announced the news in a translated update on Twitter, noting that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 are back online as well. Last week, Indonesia blocked access to Steam, PayPal, Yahoo, Epic Games, and Origin after the companies failed to meet a deadline to register with the country's database. This requirement is bundled with a broader law, called MR5, that Indonesia first introduced in 2020. The law gives the Indonesian government the authority to order platforms to take down content considered illegal as well as request the data of specific users. In 2021, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the policy "invasive of human rights." Although PayPal has yet to comply, Indonesia unblocked access to the service for five days starting July 31st to give users a chance to withdraw money and make payments. According to the Indonesian news outlet Antara News, PayPal reportedly plans on registering with the country's database soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: You wouldn't steal a car, right? So why are you pirating? With this 2004 message, the movie industry hoped to turn illegal downloaders into paying customers. This campaign eventually turned into a meme and it's not the only anti-piracy advert to miss the mark. A new research paper identifies several behavioral insights that explain common mistakes made in these campaigns. [...] The general assumption of many people is that, by adding more arguments, the message will be more compelling. That's called the 'more-is-better' heuristic but behavioral research has shown that the opposite is often true. When many arguments are presented together, the stronger ones may actually be diluted by weaker ones. So, referencing malware, fines, low quality, Internet disconnections, and losses to the industry, all while associating piracy with organized crime, is not the best idea. The reduced impact of stronger and weaker arguments is also one of the reasons why the "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" campaign didn't work as planned, the researchers suggest.

Anti-piracy campaigns can also focus too much on dry numbers without putting these into context. While these statistics are vital to the industry, the average pirate will simply gloss over them. This 'mistake' can also be explained by behavioral psychology, which has shown that people identify more with a problem or victim if they feel some kind of personal connection. That's often missing from anti-piracy messages. It's worth noting that not all personal messaging is effective either. The paper mentions an Indian anti-piracy campaign where famous Bollywood actors urged people not to download films illegally, equating piracy to theft. However, the Indian public probably has little sympathy for the potential "losses" incurred by these multi-millionaire actors. In fact, the anti-piracy campaign may be seen as an extra motivation to pirate. "All videos starred well-known actors, whose net worth is estimated to be $22-$400 million dollars, in a country where the annual per capita income is a bit less than $2,000." "This can offer to pirates a moral justification: they only steal the rich to 'feed the poor', a form of 'Robin Hood effect' that makes even more sense with some cultural or sport-related goods," the researchers add.

Piracy is a widespread and global phenomenon. This makes it particularly problematic for copyright holders but emphasizing this issue in anti-piracy messages isn't a good idea. This is the third mistake that's highlighted in the article. By pointing out that people are supposed to get content legally while at the same time showing that many people don't, people might actually be encouraged to pirate. Behavioral research has shown that people often prefer to follow the descriptive norm (what people do) rather than the injunctive one (what the law prescribes). "Informing directly or indirectly individuals that many people pirate is counterproductive and encourages piracy by driving the targeted individuals to behave similarly. These messages provide to the would-be pirates the needed rationalization by emphasizing that 'everyone is doing it'," the researchers write.

Meta publicly released information on 21 billion Facebook friendships as part of a research project looking at economic inequality in the United States, the company announced today. Along with new insights into the intersection of money and friendships in America, the partnership between Meta and the researchers gives us another look at who Facebook is willing to share data with -- and why. The Verge reports: The research team wanted to understand why people in some places in the US were more likely to move between economic brackets than in others. Using the information from Meta, along with other data, a research team built a dataset for a pair of studies on economic mobility, published Monday in the journal Nature. One study found that people who grow up in areas where there are more friendships between high- and low-income people are more likely to move out of poverty and up the economic ladder. "Growing up in a community connected across class lines improves kids' outcomes and gives them a better shot at rising out of poverty," Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist and lead researcher on the study, told The New York Times.

Many places, though, don't allow for much interaction between high- and low-income people, the second of the two studies found. And even when a neighborhood does allow for that kind of interaction, people are still more likely to befriend people in similar economic brackets. [...] [T]he full dataset, which covers 21 billion Facebook friendships, is available through Facebook's Data for Good program. People can search the public-facing website and see the economic connectedness of various communities, including their own. Researchers can download the data for additional studies. [...] The new studies offer valuable insight into economic mobility in the US, and the data could help researchers understand how people in the US build relationships.

The system for getting donated kidneys, livers and hearts to desperately ill patients relies on out-of-date technology that has crashed for hours at a time and has never been audited by federal officials for security weaknesses or other serious flaws, according to a confidential government review obtained by The Washington Post. From the report: The mechanics of the entire transplant system must be overhauled, the review concluded, citing aged software, periodic system failures, mistakes in programming and over-reliance on manual input of data. In its review, completed 18 months ago, the White House's U.S. Digital Service recommended that the government "break up the current monopoly" that the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit agency that operates the transplant system, has held for 36 years. It pushed for separating the contract for technology that powers the network from UNOS's policy responsibilities, such as deciding how to weigh considerations for transplant eligibility.

About 106,000 people are on the waiting list for organs, the vast majority of them seeking kidneys, according to UNOS. An average of 22 people die each day waiting for organs. In 2021, 41,354 organs were transplanted, a record. UNOS is overseen by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), but that agency has little authority to regulate transplant activity. Its attempts to reform the transplant system have been rejected by UNOS, the report found. Yet HRSA continues to pay UNOS about $6.5 million annually toward its annual operating costs of about $64 million, most of which comes from patient fees. "In order to properly and equitably support the critical needs of these patients, the ecosystem needs to be vastly restructured," a team of engineers from the Digital Service wrote in the Jan. 5, 2021, report for HRSA, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Google is launching a new effort called "Simplicity Sprint" in an effort to improve efficiency and improve employee focus during an uncertain economic environment. From a report: The Alphabet company had its regular all-hands meeting last Wednesday, and the tone was somewhat urgent as employees expressed concern over layoffs and CEO Sundar Pichai asked employees for input, according to attendees and related internal documentation viewed by CNBC. Google's productivity as a company isn't where it needs to be even with the head count it has, Pichai told employees in the meeting. "I wanted to give some additional context following our earnings results, and ask for your help as well," Pichai opened, referring to the company's second-quarter earnings report Tuesday. "It's clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead." He added, "There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have." He asked employees to help "create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity."

The chief executive officer of Pearson, one of the world's largest textbook publishers, said he hopes technology like non-fungible tokens and the blockchain could help the company take a cut from secondhand sales of its materials as more books go online. From a report: The print editions of Pearson's titles -- such as "Fundamentals of Nursing," which sells new for $70.88 -- can be resold several times to other students without making the London-based education group any money. As more textbooks move to digital, CEO Andy Bird wants to change that. "In the analogue world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale," he told reporters following the London-based company's interim results on Monday, talking about technological opportunities for the company. "The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market, and technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life," by tracking the material's unique identifier on the ledger from "owner A to owner B to owner C," said Bird, a former Disney executive.

Bolt Mobility, the Miami-based micromobility startup co-founded by Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, appears to have vanished without a trace from several of its U.S. markets. From a report: In some cases, the departure has been abrupt, leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails and lots of questions. Bolt has stopped operating in at least five U.S. cities, including Portland, Oregon, Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski in Vermont and Richmond, California, according to city officials. City representatives also said they were unable to reach anyone at Bolt, including its CEO Ignacio Tzoumas. TechCrunch has made multiple attempts to reach Bolt and those who have backed the company. Emails to Bolt's communications department, several employees and investors went unanswered. Even the customer service line doesn't appear to be staffed. The PR agency that was representing Bolt in March of this year told TechCrunch it is no longer working with the company. Bolt halted its service in Portland on July 1. The company's failure to provide the city with updated insurance and pay some outstanding fees, Portland subsequently suspended Bolt's permit to operate there, according to a city spokesperson.

Just five weeks before his death in 2001, Douglas Adams made a mind-boggling pronouncement. "We are participating in a 3.5 billion-year program to turn dumb matter into smart matter..." He gave the keynote address for an embedded systems conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center... Adams dazzled the audience with a vision of a world where information devices are ultimately "as plentiful as chairs...." When the devices of the world were networked together, they could create a "soft earth" — a shared software model of the world assembled from all the bits of data. Communicating in real time, the soft earth would be alive and developing — and with the right instruments, humankind could just as easily tap into a soft solar system.
It's 21 years later, in a world where the long-time global software company Bohemia Interactive Simulations claims to be "at the forefront of simulation training solutions for defense and civilian organizations." And writing in VentureBeat, their chief commercial officer argues that "We do not yet have a shared imagination for the metaverse and the technology required to build it," complaining that big-tech companies "want to keep users reliant on their tech within a closed, commercialized ecosystem." I envision an open virtual world that supports thousands of simultaneous players and offers valuable, immersive use cases.

The scope of this vision requires an open cloud architecture with native support for cloud scalability. By prioritizing cloud development and clear goal-setting, military organizations have taken significant leaps toward building an actual realization of this metaverse. In terms of industry progress towards the cloud-supported, scalable metaverse, no organization has come further than the U.S. Army.

Their Synthetic Training Environment (STE) has been in development since 2017. The STE aims to replace all legacy simulation programs and integrate different systems into a single, connected system for combined arms and joint training. The STE fundamentally differs from traditional, server-based approaches. For example, it will host a 1:1 digital twin of the Earth on a cloud architecture that will stream high fidelity (photo-realistic) terrain data to connected simulations. New terrain management platforms such as Mantle ETM will ensure that all connected systems operate on exactly the same terrain data. For example, trainees in a tank simulator will see the same trees, bushes and buildings as the pilot in a connected flight simulator, facilitating combined arms operations.

Cloud scalability (that is, scaling with available computational power) will allow for a better real-world representation of essential details such as population density and terrain complexity that traditional servers could not support. The ambition of STE is to automatically pull from available data resources to render millions of simulated entities, such as AI-based vehicles or pedestrians, all at once.... [D]evelopers are creating a high-fidelity, digital twin of the entire planet.

Commercial metaverses created for entertainment or commercial uses may not require an accurate representation of the earth.... Still, the military metaverse could be a microcosm of what may soon be a large-scale, open-source digital world that is not controlled or dominated by a few commercial entities....

STE success will pave the way for any cloud-based, open-source worlds that come after it, and will help prove that the metaverse's value extends far beyond that of a marketing gimmick.

Engadget writes that "After Meta's revenue shrank for the first time in its history, the company has reportedly told publishers it will no longer pay for content to run in Facebook's News Tab, according to Axios."

Axios notes it's the end of three-year deals Facebook brokers in 2019 with news publishers. At the time, the company was ramping up its investment in news and hired journalists to help direct publisher traffic to its new tab for news. The deals were worth roughly $105 million in the U.S., sources told Axios. In addition to that, the company spent around $90 million on news videos for the company's video tab called "Watch."

"A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business it doesn't make sense to over-invest in areas that don't align with user preferences," a Facebook spokesperson told Axios.

The F-35 stealth-combat aircraft is the "crown jewel" of America's Air Force fight fleet, according to the defense news site Task & Purpose.

But Friday they were all grounded — "sidelined for an indeterminate amount of time as the service inspects most of its F-35 fighter jet ejection seats for faulty launch cartridges, service officials said..." The news marks the latest difficult headline for the beleaguered fighter, which U.S. military officials have placed at the forefront of their airpower strategy despite a long list of maintenance issues. Air Combat Command, the Air Force command which oversees the bulk of the service's fighter fleet, made the decision to ground its F-35s on Friday after other units of the Air Force and Navy grounded many of their aircraft due to concerns over faulty parts which could prevent the pilot ejection seat from launching out of the cockpit in an emergency. Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexi Worley said that the command started a 90-day inspection period of all cartridges on its F-35 ejection seats on July 19.

"Out of an abundance of caution, ACC units will execute a stand-down on July 29 to expedite the inspection process," Worley said. "Based on data gathered from those inspections, ACC will make a determination to resume operations."

Worley later added that the stand-down "will continue through the weekend, and a determination to safely resume normal operations is expected to be made early next week, pending analysis of the inspection data."

Many jet aircraft in the U.S. military are equipped with ejection seats made by the company Martin-Baker, which notified the Navy about potential defects earlier this month, according to Breaking Defense, which first reported the F-35 grounding story on Friday. The problem part is the cartridge actuated device, an explosive cartridge that helps launch the ejection seat out of an aircraft. Martin-Baker identified certain production lots of cartridge actuated devices as being defective and in need of replacement, the Air Force told Breaking Defense.

"While the aircraft are flyable, I don't think too many pilots would be willing to fly knowing they may not be able [to] eject," Michael Cisek, a senior associate at the aviation consulting firm AeroDynamic Advisory, told Breaking Defense....

America's allies may also be affected by the issue. On Wednesday, Breaking Defense reported that the Navy had informed foreign military sales customers about the issue and was working with them to resolve it.

"The Anonymous declaration of cyberwar was a top news story despite no evidence," writes cybersecurity specialist Jeremiah Fowler (an American who worked in Kyiv for the last 10 years — until fleeing in February to Poland). To investigate, Fowler performed a random sampling of 100 exposed Russian databases — and discovered that 92 of them had indeed been compromised. "Anti-Russian hackers used a similar script to the infamous 'MeowBot' that changed the name of folders and deleted the contents of the files. " (For example, renaming the folders to "putin_stop_this_war".)

And that was just the beginning, reports CNBC: Anonymous has claimed to have hacked over 2,500 Russian and Belarusian sites, said Fowler. In some instances, stolen data was leaked online, he said, in amounts so large it will take years to review. "The biggest development would be the overall massive number of records taken, encrypted or dumped online," said Fowler. Shmuel Gihon, a security researcher at the threat intelligence company Cyberint, agreed that amount of leaked data is "massive."

"We currently don't even know what to do with all this information, because it's something that we haven't expected to have in such a short period of time," he said....

The more immediate outcome of the hacks, Fowler and Gihon agreed, is that Russia's cybersecurity defenses have been revealed as being far weaker than previously thought.
Fowler's report argues that Anonymous has "rewritten the rules of how a crowdsourced modern cyberwar is conducted" — with the group also offering penetration testing to Ukraine, "finding vulnerabilities before Russia could exploit them." But in addition, Fowler writes, Anonymous's efforts have also "transformed into a larger operation that spread far beyond the Russian government, companies, or organizations, and included an information campaign aimed at Russian citizens."

Some examples: Hacking Printers — Russian censorship has blocked many inside the country from knowing the true scale of the war and Russian losses. Anonymous hacked printers across Russia and printed uncensored facts or anti-propaganda and pro-ukrainian messages. The group claims to have printed over 100,000 documents. This also includes barcode printers at grocery stores where prices were changed and product names were changed to anti-war or pro-Ukrainian slogans....

RoboDial, SMS, and Email Spam — Almost everyone on earth has received some form of spam in the form of a phone call, text, or email message. These usually try to sell a service or scam victims out of money. Now this same technology has been used to bypass Russian censorship and inform citizens of news and messages they are forbidden to learn on state sponsored propaganda channels. Anonymous affiliated Squad303 claimed to have sent over 100 million messages to Russian devices.