"Salon reports amateur-hour mistakes in the attempted rollout of FRANK, a social media site envisioned by Mike Lindell of MyPillow," writes Slashdot reader Tom239. "A Drupal expert described the code as 'not even student work.'" From the report: Speaking to Salon on Thursday afternoon about Lindell's site, one "Acquia Certified Drupal Grand Master," who oversees a technology firm that employs numerous other "grandmasters," said that Lindell's site was set up for failure from its inception, noting that its developers -- whom Lindell compared to Navy SEALs -- had failed to carry out basic "Drupal 101" tasks. One coder who spoke to Salon in great detail explained the potential shortcomings of the pillow maven's program code and the patchy work done by his developer team. "Drupal can power high powerful websites, sites with lots of traffic," the expert said, adding that it isn't the right software to build a social media site with, since it's not designed to handle a large amount of user-generated content. "Lindell's website was basically trying to make soup for scratch for everybody," said the expert, who claimed more than 25 years of experience in the IT field.

"In my professional opinion, it will be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for Lindell to accomplish his vision with Drupal and his own servers," the expert told Salon. "Despite how much I love it, Drupal simply isn't the right tool for the number of users with the features that he wants to provide. It would take a massive effort of 12 to 18 months to build out the needed hosting setup and application architecture, and this would come with an enormous degree of risk. The idea that he could do this in just a couple of months is patently absurd, and I think the results speak for themselves."

"When I was looking at the code, in the browser, they basically launched the site while it was still in development mode," one expert told Salon, citing the fact that developers had failed to check a box to aggregate files on the platform as the first red flag he ran across. "Their files were not aggregated, and by the way, that's a check box in Drupal -- you literally check a box and click save, My jaw dropped when I saw that. I was like, 'They did not try to launch this thing without aggregation turned on!'" The second major red flag another Drupal expert found was that Lindell's site was spitting out coded error messages to users, which leaves the platform vulnerable to attacks. "This is a shit show," the expert said, calling this an "obvious" issue that coders learn how to prevent in "Drupal 101."
Elsewhere it was reported that Lindell's supposed free-speech haven will not allow swearing, pornography, or the use of 'god's name in vain'.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A series of senior European MPs have been approached in recent days by individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls. Those tricked include Rihards Kols, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of Latvia's parliament, as well as MPs from Estonia and Lithuania. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, has also said he was targeted.

"Putin's Kremlin is so weak and frightened of the strength of @navalny they're conducting fake meetings to discredit the Navalny team," Tugendhat posted in a tweet, referring to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. "They got through to me today. They won't broadcast the bits where I call Putin a murderer and thief, so I'll put it here." Kols uploaded a photograph of Leonid Volkov, an ally of Navalny, and a screenshot of his doppelganger taken from the video call. Volkov said the two looked virtually identical. "Looks like my real face -- but how did they manage to put it on the Zoom call? Welcome to the deepfake era " he wrote.

Kols said he had been approached by email by a person claiming to be Volkov and had held a short video-conference call with him, where they discussed support for Russian political prisoners and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Only later did he realise he may have been the victim of a hi-tech prank, he said. "Quite a painful lesson, but perhaps we can also say thanks to this fake Volkov for this lesson for us and Lithuanian and Estonian colleagues," he wrote. "It is clear that the so-called truth decay or post-truth and post-fact era has the potential to seriously threaten the safety and stability of local and international countries, governments and societies." Volkov accused a Russian duo named Vovan and Lexus, who regularly target western officials, of being behind the call.

Earlier this week, Apple unveiled the refreshed 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with a notable change: The new iPad Pro models are powered by the M1 chip, the company's in-house chipset that also powers the current-generation MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini. Is the company planning to put macOS on the iPad in the future or merge iPads and Macbooks? No remains the answer. Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak, in an interview: "There's two conflicting stories people like to tell about the iPad and Mac. On the one hand, people say that they are in conflict with each other. That somebody has to decide whether they want a Mac, or they want an iPad. Or people say that we're merging them into one: that there's really this grand conspiracy we have, to eliminate the two categories and make them one. And the reality is neither is true. We're quite proud of the fact that we work really, really hard to create the best products in their respective category." Hardware chief John Ternus, in the same interview: "We're pushing to make the best Mac we can make; we're pushing to make the best iPad we can make."