theodp writes: Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers were 'blindsided' after access to popular classroom software was yanked due to CPS's interpretation of Illinois' Student Online Personal Protection Act (SOPPA), the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Sneha Dey writes, "Among the software products that violate the law, CPS now says, are programs like Code.org, which is widely used in computer science classes, and Adobe applications used for artistic design and newspaper page layouts. That left has many high school newspapers unable to produce their print editions. Also off limits is Scratch, software to create interactive stores, animations and games. CPS had partnered with the Scratch Foundation to hold family coding nights, among other events."

The Blueprint's Karen Buecking has more on how the new student data protection law has upended the computer science curriculum at CPS, noting that CPS teachers received an email from tech-backed Code.org explaining the situation: "We've already signed student data protection agreements with over 150 districts across the state to comply with the new law," said the Code.org representative. "The bad news is CPS's agreement and application process contains onerous requirements unrelated to student privacy that make it prohibitive for organizations like Code.org to agree to CPS's requirements as written."

Facebook plans to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system this month, deleting the face scan data of more than one billion users and effectively eliminating a feature that has fueled privacy concerns, government investigations, a class-action lawsuit and regulatory woes. From a report: Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta, Facebook's newly named parent company, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the social network was making the change because of "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." He added that the company still saw the software as a powerful tool, but "every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance." The decision shutters a feature that was introduced in December 2010 so that Facebook users could save time.

The facial-recognition software automatically identified people who appeared in users' digital photo albums and suggested users "tag" them all with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Facebook now has built one of the largest repositories of digital photos in the world, partly thanks to this software. Facial-recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests. Some cities and states have banned or limited the technology to prevent potential abuse.

Yahoo has officially exited China, shutting down all of its services in the communist country as of Monday, Nov. 1. From a report: "In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo's suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. "Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open internet. We thank our users for their support," the rep added. Yahoo's exit from China coincided with the enactment of the country's Personal Information Protection Law, a privacy law that went into effect Nov. 1 that imposes new data-collection restrictions on tech companies, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Amazon plans to launch its first prototype broadband satellites in Q4 2022, which would be nearly four years after SpaceX launched its first prototype Starlink satellites. Ars Technica reports: "This morning, we filed an experimental license application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch, deploy, and operate two prototype satellites for Project Kuiper," Amazon said in a blog post. "These satellites -- KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 -- are an important step in the development process. They allow us to test the communications and networking technology that will be used in our final satellite design, and help us validate launch operations and mission management procedures that will be used when deploying our full constellation."

Amazon said it will launch the satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on ABL Space Systems' RS1 rocket, as part of a multilaunch deal the companies announced today. Amazon's prototype satellites will operate at an altitude of 590 km. "While operating under the experimental license, the KuiperSats will communicate with TT&C [telemetry, tracking, and control] Earth stations in South America, the Asia-Pacific region, and McCulloch, Texas, as well as with customer terminal units and a single gateway Earth station located in McCulloch, Texas," Amazon told the FCC.

Ahead of a key city council vote on a $28.5 million water pact with Google, the city of The Dalles filed suit in state court Friday in an effort to keep the tech giant's water use a secret. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports: The city is seeking to overturn a ruling earlier this month from Wasco County's district attorney, who found Google's water use is a public record and ordered The Dalles to provide that information to The Oregonian/OregonLive. The city sued the news organization Friday, asking a judge to intervene.

Google is contemplating two new server farms on the site of a former aluminum smelter in The Dalles, where it already has an enormous campus of data centers on its property along the Columbia River. Google says it needs more water to cool its data centers, but neither the company nor the city will say how much more -- only that The Dalles can't meet Google's needs without expanding its water system. The deal calls for Google to pay for the upgrade. Even so, the proposed water pact has attracted scrutiny and skepticism in The Dalles, a riverfront city of about 15,000 approximately 80 miles east of Portland.

Residents and nearby farmers are concerned about the city's water long-term water supply amid an ongoing drought. They complain they don't know enough about Google's actual water use. The city is now going to court to keep that information under wraps, arguing it's a Google "trade secret" exempt from disclosure under Oregon law. Regardless of how the city's suit plays out, the litigation won't be resolved before the city council votes on Google's water deal on the evening of Nov. 8. That means the public won't have access to that information, though city council members do. This new agreement "could boost property tax collections by several million dollars a year but still figure to save Google tens of millions of dollars over the 15-year life of the tax breaks," the report notes. "It doesn't appear Google can proceed without more water, however."

Tesla launched a pilot project in the Netherlands this week in which non-Tesla electric vehicles will be allowed to use its Supercharger network, representing the first time that the automaker is opening up its proprietary charging stations to EVs from other companies. The Verge reports: Tesla's Supercharger network is often held up as the best possible example of an EV charging network: fast, reliable, and plentiful. But Tesla's network is also exclusive to Tesla owners, meaning someone driving a Volkswagen or Ford EV wouldn't be able to use it. But that's now starting to change. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has, for years, talked about opening up his company's vast Supercharger network to other electric vehicles. And over this past summer, he started revealing key details about how it would actually work. Now the company is ready to start the process by announcing its first pilot project.

Initially, only 10 Supercharger stations in the Netherlands will be available to non-Tesla EVs. Vehicle owners will need to download the most recent version of Tesla's smartphone app (version 4.2.3 or higher) in order to access the stations. After downloading the app, customers will be prompted to select "Charge Your Non-Tesla" in order to find the closest participating Supercharger site. Tesla owners can still use the stations just as normal. "We will be closely monitoring each site for congestion and listening to customers about their experiences," the company said in a blog post. "It's always been our ambition to open the Supercharger network to Non-Tesla EVs and, by doing so, encourage more drivers to go electric," the company said. "This move directly supports our mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy."

Starlink, part of Elon Musk's SpaceX company, has formed a subsidiary in India and is preparing to apply for licenses from the local government, according to a top official. From a report: "Pleased to share that SpaceX now has a 100% owned subsidiary in India," Sanjay Bhargava, India director for Starlink, said in a LinkedIn post Monday. Starlink's local India unit is registered with the name Starlink Satellite Communications Private Limited. A local unit is required for an internet company to offer its services in India, where Starlink -- assuming that it gets the license -- plans to offer 200,000 active terminals in over 160,000 districts by December 2022, the company representatives said. That's an ambitious goal for the company, which as of August had shipped 100,000 user terminals in 14 countries.

Apple's long-rumored AR-VR headset may be arriving next year. According to a new report from notable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone-maker is aiming to put Wi-Fi 6 and 6E support into the device, which could arrive at some point towards the end of 2022. From a report: In a note to investors, spotted by MacRumors, Kuo writes that Meta (formerly Facebook), Sony and Apple will all have new virtual reality or augmented reality headsets of some kind next year, which will support the latest Wi-Fi standards. He expects that Meta's product will launch in the second half of the year, Apple's in the fourth quarter of 2022 and Sony's sometime in the second quarter. Last week during its Facebook Connect event Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a new, higher-end headset dubbed Project Cambria that the company says will arrive next year. Sony, meanwhile, has been teasing a successor to its PlayStation VR headset that is designed for the PlayStation 5. It too is aiming to launch its VR product in 2022. Kuo writes that using Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E will be a "basic requirement for head-mounted displays to improve the wireless experience," adding that "Wi-Fi 6 is significantly better than Wi-Fi 5 in transmission speed and power consumption."

All over the country, hardware from Huawei and ZTE keeps American telecom networks humming. In the coming months, many of those networks are going to start ripping it all out. From a report: On Friday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission officially kicked off the reimbursement program for replacing equipment from the two Chinese companies, both of which have been deemed a threat to national security. That means that telecoms can apply for subsidies to purge the hardware from their networks. A lot has been made of the geopolitical connotations of the technology blacklist, which includes Huawei and ZTE, but the physical logistics of overhauling the nation's connectivity infrastructure is just as complicated given how much banned equipment is currently in the wild.

The process that started last week allows telecoms to file expenses for wiping out the hardware. Whenever those funds are approved and sent, "the clock starts ticking," says John Nettles, president of Alabama-based Pine Belt Communications Inc. "You're expected to complete it within one year after receiving your first reimbursement." For the target recipients of the program, small and usually rural carriers with no more than 10 million customers, that means 2022 is going to be an insanely busy year. Without expansive subsidies, these telecoms have said they would not have been able to afford to comply with the government mandate, but now with federal reimbursements, they'll soon be under the gun to source enough labor and eligible replacement gear to meet the FCC's deadline. Nettles estimates it'll likely take a four-person crew a week to overhaul each of his 67 towers.

Twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a longstanding trend, but many employers said there's a new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste. From a report: At a retail business based in New York, managers were distressed to encounter young employees who wanted paid time off when coping with anxiety or period cramps. At a supplement company, a Gen Z worker questioned why she would be expected to clock in for a standard eight-hour day when she might get through her to-do list by the afternoon. At a biotech venture, entry-level staff members delegated tasks to the founder. And spanning sectors and start-ups, the youngest members of the work force have demanded what they see as a long overdue shift away from corporate neutrality toward a more open expression of values, whether through executives displaying their pronouns on Slack or putting out statements in support of the protests for Black Lives Matter. "These younger generations are cracking the code and they're like, 'Hey guys turns out we don't have to do it like these old people tell us we have to do it,'" said Colin Guinn, 41, co-founder of the robotics company Hangar Technology. "'We can actually do whatever we want and be just as successful.' And us old people are like, 'What is going on?'"

Twenty-somethings rolling their eyes at the habits of their elders is a trend as old as Xerox, Kodak and classic rock, but many employers said there's a new boldness in the way Gen Z dictates taste. And some members of Gen Z, defined as the 72 million people born between 1997 and 2012, or simply as anyone too young to remember Sept. 11, are quick to affirm this characterization. Ziad Ahmed, 22, founder and chief executive of the Gen Z marketing company JUV Consulting, which has lent its expertise to brands like JanSport, recalled speaking at a conference where a Gen Z woman, an entry-level employee, told him she didn't feel that her employer's marketing fully reflected her progressive values. "What is your advice for our company?" the young woman asked. "Make you a vice president," Mr. Ahmed told her. "Rather than an intern." Starting in the mid-aughts, the movement of millennials from college into the workplace prompted a flurry of advice columns about hiring members of the headstrong generation. "These young people tell you what time their yoga class is," warned a "60 Minutes" segment in 2007 called "The 'Millennials' Are Coming." Over time, those millennials became managers, and workplaces were reshaped in their image. There were #ThankGodIt'sMonday signs affixed to WeWork walls. There was the once-heralded rise of the SheEO.

"Internal documents show that Facebook has been actively hiring employees to build products that target children as young as 6 to expand its user base," reports NBC News — apparently within just the last six months.

"Our company is making a major investment..." begins an internal Facebook blog post seen by NBC. The blog post announces that the company was dedicating a team "to make safer, more private, experiences for youth..." It goes on to point out this marked a new direction for Facebook, since "For many of our products, we historically haven't designed for under 13."

Further down the post adds that "Our work prioritizes the best interests of the child..." Diagrams illustrate proposed new target age groups, ranging from kids 6 to 9 years old and tweens 10 to 12 years old — along with existing targets of early teens from 13 to 15 years old, late teens from 16 to 17 years old, and adults... Critics of the company say these documents are part of a long-standing pattern of Facebook attempting to attract younger users as early as possible.

"Facebook and Instagram have repeatedly shown that they simply can't be trusted when it comes to the well-being of children and teens," said James Steyer, the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization that researches the relationship between children and the digital world. "They need to focus on cleaning up their existing platforms instead of trying to hook more children to their addictive platforms at younger and younger ages...."

The post came just one week before a coalition of 35 organizations and 64 individual experts, coordinated by Fairplay, formerly known as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a Boston-based nonprofit, raised concerns about privacy, screen time, mental health, self-esteem and commercial pressure in a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"These documents make clear that instead of working to make its existing platforms less harmful to teens, Facebook's priority was to ensnare younger children and create a pipeline of lifetime users of Facebook products," Fairplay's executive director Josh Golin told NBC News. "Despite Facebook's claims that their motivation for Instagram for Kids is to create a safer experience for preteens, it's clear the real reason is Facebook is fixated on kids to drive growth. Facebook products aren't safe for younger children, and a company that consistently puts profits ahead of young people's well-being has no business building platforms for kids."

"In a world of inequality, we are well accustomed to rich, powerful, connected people getting preferential treatment..." argues an opinion piece in the Washington Post.

"The notable exception is Wikipedia." There, VIPs have been shouting "Do you have any idea who you are dealing with?!" for years, only to be told either, not really, or, don't care, and then instructed...to take their objections to a Talk page where the community can weigh in...

One reason the project is different from other digital platforms for VIPs is the absence of a mechanism for "escalating the case to leadership," as one internal Facebook memo, recently published by the Wall Street Journal, euphemistically described the process of Facebook's giving special treatment... The closest approximation to a Wikipedia power player would be Jimmy Wales, the chairman emeritus of the foundation that supports Wikipedias in more than 250 languages and the face of the project for its 20 years of existence. But Wales is not actually in control of anything. When he gets personally involved in helping a petitioner, a crowd of editors track his movements to ensure that he not hold special influence. This tradition began way back in Wikipedia's history, when Wales insisted that the birth date on his own article, and his birth certificate, was wrong. The editors did not take his word for it...

With no bigwig to enlist, people who object to what appears on their article page try to navigate Wikipedia on their own, an often-treacherous experience. In the early days of Wikipedia, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins edited the article about him to correct an error. He confirmed in an email to an editor, Alienus, that "yes, the person who purported to be me is indeed me! But thank you very much for checking. I am bowled over by how good Wikipedia generally is." That same editor followed up, however, by questioning a change Dawkins had made to his article to reduce the number of journals he edits from four to two and to remove any mention of one, Episteme Journal. "Do you have any citations to support this change?" Dawkins was flabbergasted: "It is unreasonable to ask for a positive citation to demonstrate that I did NOT found a journal called Episteme. I am telling you that I never founded a journal called Episteme. I didn't even know that a journal called Episteme existed." Turned out an editor had made an error; the sentence was removed permanently.
The article — by Wikipedia editor Noam Cohen — opens with the story of John C. Eastman, a lawyer advising president Trump, and his argument with Wikipedia editors over his biography (an argument still archived on the biography's "Talk" page).

Eastman complains that their supporting references — which included the New York Times — were biased against him, and yet rather than allowing him to delete them "I had to ask permission from some unknown twentysomething."

To fund the Truth social network, former U.S. president Trump merged it with a special purpose acquisition company (or "SPAC"), reports the New York Times. "The result is that Mr. Trump — largely shut out of the mainstream financial industry because of his history of bankruptcies and loan defaults — secured nearly $300 million in funding for his new business."

But there may be a hitch: To get his deal done, Mr. Trump ventured into an unregulated and sometimes shadowy corner of Wall Street, working with an unlikely cast of characters: the former "Apprentice" contestants, a small Chinese investment firm and a little-known Miami banker named Patrick Orlando. Mr. Orlando had been discussing a deal with Mr. Trump since at least March, according to people familiar with the talks and a confidential investor presentation reviewed by The New York Times.

That was well before his SPAC, Digital World Acquisition, made its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange last month. In doing so, Mr. Orlando's SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said... SPACs aren't supposed to have a merger planned at the time of their I.P.O. Lawyers and industry officials said that talks between Mr. Orlando and Mr. Trump or their associates consequently could draw scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Another issue is that Digital World's securities filings repeatedly stated that the company and its executives had not engaged in any "substantive discussions, directly or indirectly," with a target company — even though Mr. Orlando had been in discussions with Mr. Trump. Given the politically fraught nature of a deal with Mr. Trump, securities lawyers said that Digital World's lack of disclosure about those conversations could be considered an omission of "material information."
The Times adds that Trump had previously even discussed merging Trump Media with a smaller SPAC created with help from the same Shanghai-based investment bank — which "specialized in helping Chinese companies list on U.S. stock exchanges."

Something is slowing internet subscriber growth at Comcast and Charter, reports Bloomberg, "raising concerns about an end to what has been a huge growth business."

But why? Explanations ranging from a slowdown in consumer spending to competition from phone giants. Slashdot reader JoeyRox shared this report from Bloomberg: Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago. Analysts were expecting some slowdown in demand coming off 2020, a year when broadband sign-ups spiked as the pandemic shifted people to working and schooling from home. Still, with Charter echoing Comcast's gloomy picture from Thursday, suddenly there's a chill on the cable broadband front, which became the most prized segment of the business as consumers cut traditional TV service.

Charter's shortfall raises "questions about whether this is the beginning of the end of the cable broadband story," said Geetha Ranganathan, an industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence...

Both Charter and Comcast blamed a slower new home market for some of the slack in demand, leaving the companies to try and squeeze more business out of their saturated markets. Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up... New competition from phone companies certainly doesn't help. AT&T Inc. is expanding its network and added 289,000 new fiber internet customers last quarter. Meanwhile, T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are very excited about new wireless home broadband offers that aim directly at cable and outlying areas where cable could potentially expand.

Changes in TV viewing may also be a factor. For decades, cable companies sold TV and internet in discounted bundles. With rise of streaming video "the cable promos aren't as appealing for broadband only," Lopez said. Even as Comcast and Charter deploy new faster network technology to attract more lucrative customers, cable's share of the market is starting to shrink, according to Tammy Parker, a senior analyst with GlobalData.

"U.S. tech giant Google has paid Russia more than 32 million roubles ($455,079) in fines," reports Reuters, "for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, the company and a Russian lawmaker said after talks on Monday." Russia last week said it would seek to fine the U.S. tech giant a percentage of its annual Russian turnover later this month for repeatedly failing to delete banned content on its search engine and YouTube, in Moscow's strongest move yet to rein in foreign tech firms... Russia's state communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, on Monday said it has the technical capability to slow down the speed of YouTube, Interfax reported, but that administrative measures are currently sufficient.

In 2020, Google's compliance with requests to delete content was 96.2%, Pancini said, and in the first half of this year, it removed over 489,000 videos, but Russia said too much banned content still remained available.

The Tesla Oracle blog reports on a newly-released security feature "that enables Tesla owners to remotely view what's happening around their vehicles in real-time using their mobile phones..."

"While you have opened the live camera view of your parked Tesla car, you can talk back to the people in the vehicle's surroundings." The Tesla vehicle will change your voice, amplify and output it via an external speaker installed under the car. Teslas built since January 2019 have this speaker installed as part of the pedestrian warning system, a requirement by the NHTSA. In the last year's holiday software update package, Tesla introduced the Boombox feature using this external speak. Boombox lets Tesla owners add custom horn and pedestrian warning sounds to the vehicle.

Tesla owners will now be able to warn potential vandals more explicitly by giving them verbal warnings from a remote location...
In a tweet Wednesday, Elon Musk joked the feature was also "great for practical jokes."

new nukes "A sophisticated electronic sensor buried in hardened metal shells at the tip of a growing number of America's ballistic missiles reflects a significant achievement in weapons engineering that experts say could help pave the way for reductions in the size of the country's nuclear arsenal," reports the Washington Post, "but also might create new security perils." The wires, sensors, batteries and computing gear now being installed on hundreds of the most powerful U.S. warheads give them an enhanced ability to detonate with what the military considers exquisite timing over some of the world's most challenging targets, substantially increasing the probability that in the event of a major conflict, those targets would be destroyed in a radioactive rain of fire, heat and unearthly explosive pressures.

The new components — which determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast — are now being paired with other engineering enhancements that collectively increase what military planners refer to as the individual nuclear warheads' "hard-target kill capability." This gives them an improved ability to destroy Russian and Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles and command posts in hardened silos or mountain sanctuaries, or to obliterate military command and storage bunkers in North Korea, also considered a potential U.S. nuclear target.

The increased destructiveness of the warheads means that in some cases fewer weapons could be needed to ensure that all the objectives in the nation's nuclear targeting plans are fully met, opening a path to future shrinkage of the overall arsenal, current and former U.S. officials said in a number of interviews, in which some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive technology.

Production of the first of many high-yield nuclear warheads containing the gear, developed over the past decade at a cost of billions of dollars, was completed in July for installation on missiles aboard Navy submarines, the National Nuclear Security Administration announced.
The Post notes that the U.S. has now installed the technology on hundreds of submarine-based warheads, doubling their destructive power (according to estimates by a Georgetown professor).

The acting administrator of America's National Nuclear Security Administration called it "the culmination of over a decade of work."

Phoronix ran some fun performance tests this week. "Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions." First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system... The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including:

- Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
- Ubuntu 21.10
- Arch Linux (latest rolling)
- Fedora Workstation 35
- Clear Linux 35150

[...] Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro...

The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.
Out of 44 tests, here's a breakdown of how many first-place wins were scored by each OS:

• Clear Linux: 33 (75%)
• Fedora Workstation 35: 4 (9.1%)
• Windows 11 Pro: 3 (6.8%)
• Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS: 2 (4.5%)
• Arch Linux: 1 (2.3%)
• Ubuntu 21.10: 1 (2.3%)

The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post.

Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content."

And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg's "unique degree of control" over Facebook, he's ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as "a litany of societal harms caused by the company's relentless pursuit of growth." Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook...

For all Facebook's troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the "Rest of World," including India, France and Italy...

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits.

Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization... Starting in 2017, Facebook's algorithm gave emoji reactions like "angry" five times the weight as "likes," boosting these posts in its users' feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business. The company's data scientists eventually confirmed that "angry" reaction, along with "wow" and "haha," occurred more frequently on "toxic" content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less "disturbing" content and less "graphic violence," company data scientists found.
The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg "makes decisions that cause harm" and then also dismissed the findings as being "based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context..."

Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, "We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible."

She added that the company is "constantly making difficult decisions."

Mastodon has sent former President Donald Trump's company a formal notification that it's breaking the rules by using Mastodon's open-source code to build its social network, named Truth. The Verge reports: This news comes from a blog post by Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko, but others have previously pointed out that the organization behind Truth, the Trump Media and Technology Group (or TMTG), was violating Mastodon's software license by not providing the source code for the site built on top of it. Trump's group has 30 days from when the letter was sent to comply with the license or stop using the software, or it could lose the right to do so.

While Truth hasn't officially launched yet, internet users discovered that a test version basically had the same interface as Mastodon, and that some of the code for the site was unchanged from the other social network's code. By itself, that's actually the intended use of open-source software -- but as the Software Freedom Conservancy pointed out last week, apps or websites based on software that uses the AGPLv3 license have to in turn provide their own source code. According to the foundation that wrote AGPL, it's meant to make the community's software better: if you improve on something that someone else made, they should be able to benefit from your work like you did theirs.

As Mastodon and Rochko reiterated on Friday, though, TMTG hasn't done that -- it even went as far as to call its software "proprietary," and seemingly tried to hide the fact that it was based on Mastodon. Now that the Truth has been revealed, however, TMTG will either have to rebuild it without using Mastodon's code -- a tall order, as bootstrapping a social network site isn't particularly easy -- or release its source code and change the terms of service.