Meta has been fined €405 million ($402 million) by the Irish Data Protection Commission for its handling of children’s privacy settings on Instagram, which violated Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As Politico reports, it’s the second-largest fine to come out of Europe’s GDPR laws, and the third (and largest) fine levied against Meta by the regulator.
The fine stems from the photo sharing app’s privacy settings on accounts run by children. The DPC had been investigating Instagram over children’s use of business accounts, which made personal data like email addresses and phone numbers publicly visible. The investigation also covered Instagram’s policy of defaulting all new accounts, including teens, to be publicly viewable.
“This inquiry focused on old settings that we updated over a year ago, and we’ve since released many new features to help keep teens safe and their information private," a Meta spokesperson told Politico in a statement. "Anyone under 18 automatically has their account set to private when they join Instagram, so only people they know can see what they post, and adults can’t message teens who don’t follow them. We engaged fully with the DPC throughout their inquiry, and we’re carefully reviewing their final decision.”
The fine, which Meta could still appeal, comes as Instagram has faced intense scrutiny over its handling of child safety issues. The company halted work on an Instagram Kids app last year following a whistleblower’s claims that meta ignored its own research indicating the app can have a negative impact on some teens’ mental health. Since then, the app has added more safety features, including changing default settings on teen accounts to private.
Interfacing Dual Axis Joystick Module with Arduino
When thinking about the best way to control games, drones, robots, etc, the first control mechanism that comes to our mind will be a joystick. Even though the working principle behind these are very basic, they provide excellent control and degree of resolution in many fields. The application of the Joystick is limitless. We can find joysticks in various products from game controllers to advanced UAV navigation systems, in their various forms.
It’s been a while since an iPhone launch genuinely felt like an event, since each new model is only marginally more polished than its predecessor. Not so, says the rumor mill for the iPhone 14, promised to be a ground-up redesign with major changes and new features. The headline tweaks include vastly improved cameras, a punch-hole to replace the notch and an always-on display. But if there’s a sting in this particular tail, it’s the rumor that Apple will save all of these goodies for the Pro model, stiffing the iPhone 14 with last year’s A15 chip.
NASA’s new Space Launch System has suffered yet another high-profile setback as a fuel leak blocked a planned test launch for Artemis 1. The agency conceded it wasn’t possible to launch before the window closes on September 6th. It’s likely the next attempt to get this thing into the air will be in October, but with a planned SpaceX launch due on October 3rd, SLS’ test firing will have to wait until October 17th at the very earliest.
The Internal Revenue Service has admitted it exposed the details of 120,000 US taxpayers through its website. The issue centered around the filing of Form 990-T, which deals with unrelated income from a variety of sources. Both private individuals and non-profit organizations are required to complete the document, but only the latter is meant to be publicly available. Sadly, a coding error meant 120,000 individual records, which included income data, was on the public register for some time. Affected individuals will be hearing from the IRS in the next few weeks, but the body has already said social security numbers were not shared.
Advertising IDs have, once again, been used as a way to track individuals.
For years, civil rights groups have warned that law enforcement agencies could co-opt the advertising industry’s sophisticated surveillance tools. Fog Reveal, a system police bodies have used to pinpoint people’s locations, is the realization of these dire warnings. The low-cost tool harnesses Advertising ID, a unique identifier smartphones have to help target relevant ads based on a user’s location and browsing history. Of more concern is the data does not require a warrant and can track a person’s movements for up to three years.
Isn’t it wonderful you no longer have to choose between a beefy gaming PC or an overpriced, underpowered laptop as your dorm room daily driver? These days, you can get great performance on low-cost hardware, solving your price vs. power dilemmas once and for all. If you’re still on the hunt for a machine to get you through college, you should give our expert guide a once-over.
We’ve always understood that while the iPhone is popular and successful, the sheer volume of Android alternatives means it would never become the majority phone platform in the US. Turns out, the received wisdom might be wrong. Analytics firm Counterpoint Research found iPhones now make up the majority of the US smartphone market. Android still remains the worldwide champ, with more than 70 percent of the global share, but it’s a dramatic shift in the US, and a trend analysts believe could be repeated in many more countries over time.
Netflix's League of Legends-based animated series Arcane has won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program, becoming the first streaming series to win in that category. It beat out some much better known competition, including Bob's Burgers, Rick and Morty, The Simpsons and What If...? hosted by the late Chadwick Boseman. "It’s a big deal for us as we come from video games. It’s been amazing to see the world embrace our characters and our stories," said Arcane co-creator Christian Linke.
The series stars Ella Purnell (Jinx), Hailee Steinfeld (Vi) and Katie Leung (Caitlyn). It was picked up for a second season by Netflix last winter, suggesting that the streamer was willing to embrace high-budget game-based productions. The first season boasted nearly 34.2 million viewing hours in its first week on Netflix's top 10 chart, putting it second in views at that time. It also received very positive reviews from both critics and audiences.
Honored doesn’t even begin to describe how we feel about winning the #Emmy for 𝑶𝒖𝒕𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒎.
Riot Games had already worked closely with Arcane animation studio Fortiche, but acquired a significant, non-controlling stake earlier in March. The companies worked together to introduce Jinx to League of Legends in 2013, and plan to join forces on "other to-be-announced" projects on top of Arcane, though no details have been released yet.
Meanwhile, What If...? didn't leave the Creative Arts Emmys empty-handed, as Boseman received a posthumous award for his voiceover work across the first season. "What a beautifully aligned moment it really is that one of the last things he would work on would not only be revisiting a character that was so important to him... but also that it be an exploration of something new, diving into a new potential future," said his wife Taylor Simone Ledward in accepting the award.
The two-episode premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power drew 25 million viewers around the world in 24 hours, making it the biggest debut in Prime Video's history, Amazon said in a press release. "It is somehow fitting that Tolkien’s stories — among the most popular of all time, and what many consider to be the true origin of the fantasy genre — have led us to this proud moment," said Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke.
There was a lot on the line for the series, with a reported $465 million budget for the first season and heavy competition from HBO's rival House of Dragons series. The latter also recently debuted to the highest ratings in HBO's history with 9.986 million viewers across its linear HBO and streaming HBO Max platforms.
Amazon also took the unusual step of delaying reviews for The Rings of Power by 72 hours to filter out trolls, Variety reported. It appeared to have been "review bombed" on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, where it received a 37 percent rating from users but an 84 percent mark from critics. The series has faced trolling over its decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves and other characters.
The studio plans to evaluate each review to determine whether it's legitimate or created by a bot or troll. Amazon first introduced the practice when the baseball series A League of Their Own debuted on August 12th. That strategy appears to have worked, with the latter earning a 4.3 out of 5 star rating on Prime Video, compared to a 94 percent Rotten Tomatoes critic rating (however, that also closely lines up with the 85 percent audience score on RT).
Over its long history, LG has never been shy about jumping on some unusual bandwagons. So it should come as no surprise that the South Korean electronics giant is getting into NFTs. Starting today, if you live in the US and own a webOS 5.0 or later TV, you’ll have access to the company’s new LG Art Lab platform. It’s a marketplace for buying and selling non-fungible tokens available directly through your TV’s home screen. It’s based on the Hedera network and uses LG’s new Wallypto mobile wallet for storing digital assets. There’s even a countdown feature that will remind you when NFT drops are about to occur.
The timing of the addition is curious, to say the least. Judging by daily trading volume on OpenSea, the public has lost interest in non-fungible tokens. On August 28th, the marketplace processed $5 million worth of NFT transactions, a 99 percent drop from the record high of $405.75 million it saw just a few months earlier on May 1st, 2022. Over that same timeframe, the floor price of some of the most highly sought-after NFT collections has also declined. At the start of May, a Bored Ape Yacht Club token would have set you back at least 153.7 Eth (or about $434,000 with the value of Ethereum at the time). By August 28th, you could buy one for as little as 73 Eth or a little over $105,000.
Of course, this is LG we’re talking about. It’s the same company that gave us phones like the Wing and V10 and stayed in the mobile market for far longer than any analyst would have said was a smart idea. How long it plans to pursue NFTs is hard to say, but there’s probably a C2 owner somewhere out there excited to show off their Bored Apes and fancy OLED TV at the same time.
DNS and internet security provider Cloudflare has blocked Kiwi Farms, an infamous forum known for its online and real-world harassment campaigns. CEO Matthew Prince announced the company’s decision on Saturday after it initially resisted calls to stop protecting the website.
“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, they have reacted by being more threatening,” Prince told The Washington Post. “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.” On the company’s blog, Prince said that Cloudflare saw an increase in targeted threats “unlike we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before.”
Kiwi Farms was founded in 2013 by former 8chan administrator Joshua Moon. In the decade since it went online, at least three suicides have been linked to harassment campaigns that originated on the forum. In recent weeks, Kiwi Farms has gained widespread notoriety across both sides of the US political spectrum. After she was the target of multiple swatting attacks that originated on the website, trans Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti began a campaign to shut down Kiwi Farms. She used the hashtag DropKiwifarms to urge Cloudflare and other critical internet infrastructure providers to stop serving the website.
“There are countless people suffering because of this website,” Sorrenti told The Post on Saturday, moments after police arrived at her home in the wake of another swatting attempt. “Kiwi Farms isn’t about free speech, it’s about hate speech. The majority of the content on the site is threads used for targeted harassment against political targets.”
Separately, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called for the forum’s shutdown after a user claiming affiliation with Kiwi Farms sent police to her home. “That website needs to be taken down,” Greene told Newsmax during an interview. “There should be no business or any kind of service where you can target your enemy."
Earlier in the week, it appeared Cloudflare would not take action against Kiwi Farms. The company published a blog post on Wednesday detailing its policies on abusive content. Without directly mentioning the forum, Prince and another executive argued that withholding security services from websites the company and public find reprehensible would ultimately harm oppressed and marginalized voices.
On Saturday, Prince described Cloudflare’s decision to block Kiwi Farms as a “dangerous one that we are not comfortable with.” He told The Post he would have preferred to take action in response to a court order but added it was an easier call than when Cloudflare decided to drop the Daily Stormer and 8chan. As of the writing of this story, Kiwi Farms is still online after moving to DDoS-guard and a Russian domain.
NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System likely won’t fly in September. After a fuel leak forced the agency to scrub its second attempt to launch Artemis 1, there had been some hope the mission could get underway before its current launch window ended on September 6th. That won’t be the case.
"We will not be launching in this launch period," Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems development, told a room full of journalists after the events of Saturday morning. “This was not a manageable leak,” Artemis Mission Manager Michael Sarafin added, referring to the “quick disconnect” fitting that gave NASA so much trouble yesterday. Ground crew at Kennedy Space Center attempted to troubleshoot the issue three times before recommending a “no go” for Saturday’s launch.
According to Sarafin, the leak began after one of the fuel lines to Artemis 1’s core booster went through a brief and “inadvertent” overpressurization. An “errant” manual command from Mission Control triggered the incident. As of Saturday, Sarafin said it was too early to know if that was the cause of the fuel leak, but there was enough flammable hydrogen gas near the rocket that it would not have been safe to launch. "We want to be deliberate and careful about drawing conclusions here, because correlation does not equal causation," he added.
Whatever caused the leak, NASA now needs to replace the non-metallic gasket that was supposed to prevent hydrogen from escaping at the quick disconnect. The agency has two options as to how to proceed. It could either replace the gasket at Launch Pad 39B or the KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
Doing the work on the pad would allow NASA to test the system at cryogenic temperatures. That would give the agency a better idea of how the rocket will behave once it’s ready to launch again. However, NASA would need to build an enclosure around the SLS. At the VAB, meanwhile, the building would act as the enclosure but would limit testing to ambient temperatures only.
In the end, the SLS will likely end up at the VAB no matter what since NASA needs to test the batteries in the vehicle’s flight termination system every 20 days. The system allows the Space Force to destroy the rocket if it flies off course or something else goes awry during flight. NASA can only conduct that testing in the VAB, and the Space Force recently gave the agency a five-day extension on the usual deadline.
All told, Artemis 1’s next earliest launch window opens on September 16th and then closes on October 4th. That opening includes a potential conflict with another mission. Space X’s Crew-5 flight is scheduled to lift off on October 3rd from Kennedy Space Center. Therefore, NASA is more likely to aim for the subsequent window that opens on October 17th and runs until the end of the month. We’ll know more next week when NASA holds another press conference, but NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was adamant the agency wouldn’t attempt to launch Artemis 1 until it feels the SLS is ready to fly. “We do not launch until we think it’s right,” he said. "I look at this as part of our space program, of which safety is at the top of our list.”
“The new AirPods Pro will update a model that first went on sale in October 2019,” Gurman writes in his latest Power On newsletter. “I reported last year that new AirPods Pro would arrive in 2022, and now I’m told that Wednesday will be their big unveiling.”
Rumors about the AirPods Pro 2 have been percolating for a few years. Back in 2020, Gurman wrote that Apple had tested a prototype with a more compact design that eliminated the stems so closely associated with the company’s earbuds. At one point, Apple was also reportedly considering adding more fitness-related features.
More recently, the consensus has been that the new AirPods Pro won’t have a dramatically different design. Instead, they will include the company’s next-generation H1 processor for improved audio quality and battery life. The earbuds are also expected to support the company’s lossless audio format and come with a redesigned charging case that features more robust Find My capabilities.
Lethal Tides tells the story of pioneering oceanic researcher Mary Sears and her leading role in creating one of the most important intelligence gathering operations of World War II. Languishing in academic obscurity and roundly ignored by her male colleagues, Sears is selected for command by the godfather of climate change, Roger Revelle, and put in charge of the Oceanographic Unit of the Navy Hydrographic Office. She and her team of researchers are tasked with helping make the Navy's atoll-hopping campaign in the Pacific a reality through ocean current analysis, mapping for bioluminescence fields and deep-water crevasses that could reveal or conceal US subs from the enemy, and cartographing the shore and surf conditions of the Pacific Islands and Japan itself.
Four months into her job at the Oceanographic Unit, Sears had learned a lot about what the military needed from oceanographers. She had learned it from meeting with Roger Revelle and his cohorts on the Joint Chiefs Subcommittee on Oceanography where she listened to concerns about what the navy was lacking and took detailed notes. She had learned it from answering requests from every branch of the military for tidal data, wave forecasts, and currents to support tactical operations overseas. She had learned it from gathering all the known references on drift and drafting an urgently needed manual to help locate men lost at sea. The more she took in, the more she understood exactly how dire the lack of oceanographic intelligence was and how it could undermine military operations. And now she was going to have to do something about it.
Sears was no longer at Woods Hole, where she had been sidelined by her male colleagues who sailed on Atlantis and collected her specimens while she stayed onshore. For the first time in her life, she was in charge. It was now her responsibility to set up and direct the operations of an oceanographic intelligence unit researching vital questions that impacted the war. She had never been asked to set agendas, call meetings, or give people orders, much less make sure they carried them out, but she was going to have to do those things to get the military the information they needed to win the war. She was going to have to take the lead.
To assume the role of leader, Sears would need to push through her innate reserved tendencies and any thoughts racing around in her head that screamed you don’t belong here. Taking charge of a team of oceanographers did not come naturally to a bench scientist who worked alone all day staring into a microscope, especially if that scientist was a woman, but Sears had learned from watching Revelle. He had started as an academic in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, but when the navy made him a lieutenant he took on the persona of “the man in charge.”
When Revelle walked into the conference room of the Munitions Building—tall, broad shouldered, and uniformed—he was in complete control. He spoke in a booming, decisive voice. He had an answer for every question. He solved problems. Now, thanks to the overly confident Revelle, Sears was wearing the uniform too. She had stepped into his shoes at the Hydrographic Office. She was not going to let anyone think she couldn’t fill them.
During the first year of the war there had been a mad scramble in Washington to gather information about the countries where troops might be fighting, especially distant locales like New Guinea, Indochina, Formosa, and all the tiny islands dotting the sixty-four million square miles of the Pacific Ocean. World War II spilled across the globe into places most Americans had never heard of and where the military had never been. It was unlike any other war Americans had fought.
Getting to these places would be the easy part. The navy could navigate its way to just about any far-off target anywhere in the world, thanks to the nautical charts maintained by the Hydrographic Office, but what would it find when it got there? Were the beaches flat and wide or would they be narrow, steep, and difficult to land on? Was the terrain mountainous, volcanic, or swampy? Would high winds and waves impede a smooth landing? Would they land during the rainy season? Who were the native people and what language did they speak? Were there drivable roads once troops got across the beaches?
All these details mattered because going to war was more than hauling men, tanks, rifles, and ammunition to a designated site and attacking the enemy. The troops needed to come prepared for whatever they might find, which meant knowing everything they could about an area in advance.
The military searched their files for background materials. They found spotty reports scattered among files of government agencies but no comprehensive references that spanned the globe and nothing that left them with a sense of what to expect when they went to war. The years between World War I and World War II stretched across the lean budgets of the Depression years. The military had languished along with the rest of the country—training soldiers with Springfield rifles manufactured in 1903 and using borrowed cruise liners to transport troops. With Congress keeping the purse strings tight, there had been no money to spend gathering intel for wars that might pop up one day in some remote corner of the world. The file cabinets were all but empty. As one intelligence official summed it up, “We were caught so utterly unprepared.”
What would the armed forces do now to catch up in the midst of an ongoing war?
It was a problem that had vexed Roosevelt even before the war. To help remedy the intelligence gap, he had appointed General William Donovan in mid-1941 as coordinator of information, a role that morphed into the director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. But Donovan too was getting a late start, and his mission was focused on espionage and sabotage, not foreign terrain.
The logical source of information for the military was its own intelligence agencies. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Army Corps of Engineers, and G-2, the army’s intelligence unit, had all started spinning out their own internal intelligence reports, duplicating effort and expense. But like jealous siblings guarding their toys, the agencies kept their reports to themselves, which only hampered preparations in the long run. Furthermore, these groups had not anticipated the massive landscape this war would cover and there were still many gaps to fill.
“Who would have thought, when Germany marched on Poland, that we would suddenly have to range our inquiries from the cryolite mines of Ivigtut, Greenland, to the guayule plants of Yucatan, Mexico; or from the twilight settlements of Kiska to the coral beaches of Guadalcanal. Who even thought we should be required to know (or indeed suspected that we did not know) everything about the beaches of France and the tides and currents of the English Channel,” a CIA official later mused.
That was exactly the problem: there was no predicting just what information might be needed in a war of global proportions. Whether it was knowing where to collect an essential mineral or finding the latest tidal data, the need for information, beyond just estimating enemy troop strength or weaponry, was enormous. The military leaders trying to plan the war—where to send troops first and what operations to execute when they got there—were particularly hindered. Their information needs were unfolding in real time, and without a centralized forum for gathering, collating, analyzing, and disseminating information, the United States found itself at a disadvantage in war planning.
Roosevelt began to realize the extent of the problem when he started meeting with Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff in a series of war planning conferences. At the Arcadia Conference held two weeks after World War II began the British had the edge in strategic planning. They had operated under a system for almost two decades where the British Chiefs of Staff served as a supreme, unified command, reaping the benefits of cooperation between the Admiralty and the British Army. The United States had no such corresponding body.
Weeks after the first conference Roosevelt formed his own Joint Chiefs of Staff, a unified, high command in the United States composed of Admiral William D. Leahy, the president’s special military adviser; General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the army; Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of Naval Operations and commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet; and General Henry H. Arnold, deputy army chief of staff for air and chief of the Army Air Corps. This impressive array of leaders could draw up battle plans, but it would take time to turn themselves into a truly cooperative body.
At the next war planning conference, at Casablanca in January 1943, Roosevelt noticed yet another fault in the American war planning apparatus—the information gap between the British and the Americans. No matter what subject came up in any corner of the world, the British had prepared a detailed analysis on the area at issue and pulled those reports out of their briefcases. The Americans weren’t able to produce a single study that could match the quality of the British reports, a failing that frustrated and embarrassed the president.
The British had a two-year start on the Americans in this war and they had learned the hard way about the need to collect reliable topographic intelligence. During the German invasion of Norway in 1940 the Royal Air Force Bomber Command had been forced to rely on a 1912 edition of a Baedeker’s travel guide for tourists as the sole reference in planning a counterattack. In the same offensive, the Royal Navy had only scanty Admiralty charts to guide an attack on a major port, an intelligence deficiency that could have easily doomed the mission. The British had gotten away with one in their Norway mission, but they knew they had to do better.
So they had formed the Interservices Topographical Department to implement the pooling of topographical intelligence generated by the army, navy, and the Allies, and tasked it with preparing reports in advance of overseas military operations. This was where Churchill’s reports came from and why his aides could pull them out of their briefcases when the most sensitive joint operations were being planned. To be on an equal footing with the British, the Americans needed to be able to do the same, which meant they were going to have to find a way to rectify the lack of information and fast.operations were being planned. To be on an equal footing with the British, the Americans needed to be able to do the same, which meant they were going to have to find a way to rectify the lack of information and fast.
