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.

Sci-fi arena shooter Splitgate exploded in popularity after it hit consoles last summer, two years after it debuted on PC. It racked up more than 10 million downloads in the space of a month thanks to its blend of Halo and Portal gameplay. The fact it's free-to-play didn't hurt. However, developer 1047 Games is now winding down feature development, effectively putting the game into maintenance mode. Although Splitgate will move out of beta with its next update, that will be the game's "last major iteration," the studio said.

Splitgate became much more successful than 1047 expected. The studio attempted to turn a "college dorm dream project into a AAA game" that could compete with the biggest titles around. "But this also meant that as we've brought on top-tier talent from across the industry, we've spent a lot of our time trying to rework old content and systems that were originally built by a handful of people," 1047 wrote in a statement. "We are, in a way, bailing water while also trying to keep everyone who bought a ticket to board our ship happy, while also trying to turn our boat into a rocket ship."

The studio is now focused on its next project. It will again be a free-to-play shooter with portals and it's set in the same universe. 1047 will build the upcoming game from scratch in Unreal Engine 5.

Meanwhile, Splitgate, which has now been downloaded more than 18 million times, will stay online for the foreseeable future. As a thank you to players, 1047 will add a free battle pass with an infinite number of levels and new skins and characters when the final season starts on September 15th. 1047 will continue to make fixes and roll out smaller updates for Splitgate, but the game won't get any new features after the next big patch.

“After careful consideration and much deliberation the 1047 team has determined that in order to build the game that fans deserve — and to build it in a way that isn’t trying to retrofit our existing game — we are turning our attention away from iterative, smaller updates and going all-in to focus on a new game in the Splitgate universe which will present revolutionary, not just evolutionary, changes to the gameplay,” 1047 Games CEO and Splitgate creator Ian Proulx said in a statement. “Splitgate will remain online and supported for our dedicated community who have been the backbone of our studio from our earliest playtests on PC. Our community means everything to us and we can’t wait to share what’s next with them.”

Meanwhile, in an FAQ, 1047 acknowledged that players put time, effort and money into acquiring skins and other items. While it suggests that fans won't be able to carry those over to the next game, "we want to reward your efforts and time in Splitgate and we take that seriously. How we will do that is not decided at this time, but know that it is something we are focused on as we discuss the next game." It's also not clear whether the Splitcoin virtual currency will transfer over.

The Game of Thrones finale was never going to please everyone, but the consensus is that the final season had a lot of flaws. As such, it's totally understandable if you're reluctant to sign up to HBO Max just to catch the new spin-off show, House of the Dragon. You now won't have to pay anything to get a proper taste of the series and see if it might be for you, as HBO has dropped the first episode on YouTube for free.

The premiere sets the table for a story that's set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones (which is now streaming in 4K HDR on HBO Max). House of the Dragon focuses on House Targaryen, which means there are lots of people with white hair. Oh, and dragons.

While we can't embed the video here to an age restriction setting (this is very much not a family-friendly show), you can head over to YouTube to watch the episode. It's worth noting it appears to be geo-restricted to the US. Meanwhile, if you're looking for a different flavor of high-budget fantasy, the first episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just hit Amazon Prime.

As if multipledocumentaries, podcasts and books weren't enough to tell the tale of last year's GameStop stock squeeze, a feature film about the saga is in the works. Seth Rogen (aka Donkey Kong), Pete Davidson, Sebastian Stan and Paul Dano will star in Dumb Money, which starts filming this month, according to Variety.

Craig Gillespie (Pam & Tommy, Cruella) will direct the film, which is based on the nonfiction book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich. It will focus on the Redditors at the heart of the story. If you recall, a group of users banded together on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit to artificially send GameStop stock soaring. Hedge funds and short sellers felt the brunt of the squeeze, with at least one hedge fund closing shop as a result. The situation even caught the attention of Congress amid calls for stricter regulation of the stock market.

Meta is axing Facebook's Nextdoor-like product called Neighborhoods before it even becomes available to most users. The social network started offering it to select users in Canada back in 2020, touting it as a dedicated space where people can interact with their local communities. It expanded its tests last year and rolled out access to various communities across Canada and the US. Based on the screenshot of a post written by a Meta product manager and obtained by social media consultant Matt Navarra, the company is ending its test of Neighborhoods on October 1st. It will no longer be available after that date.

Groups revolving around local communities aren't new or rare on the website, but Neighborhoods spaces come with special features. They allow users to create separate profiles where they can limit their public information if they don't want people nearby to know too much about them. Users can also find groups for specific activities that are populated with locals through the Neighborhoods tab. 

The product manager didn't mention why Meta is shutting down Neighborhoods in their announcement. According to TechCrunch, though, the company said it originally invested in the project when it saw how popular Nextdoor was. However, it reportedly decided that the best thing to do for this particular area is to let people form their own local communities using the website's existing Groups feature.

Another possible explanation is that Meta is shutting down the project as part of its cost-cutting efforts. It also recently announced that it's closing the standalone Facebook Gaming app in what could be a move to help the company survive what Mark Zuckerberg calls "one of the worst downturns [it has seen] in recent history."

If there was ever a fundamental divide between Twitter’s leadership and its users, it was about the existence, or lack, of an edit button. The company has for most of its life been against the ability for users to amend tweets after they were published. That changes, more or less, from today, since Twitter has announced that it will indeed be rolling out an edit button to its users. As The New York Times reports, it marks the most fundamental shift in how the platform works since 2017, when it doubled the character limit of a message from 140 to 280 characters.

In a statement, Twitter said that it was hoping that the presence of an edit button would make the act of tweeting a little less stressful. Unfortunately, the button isn’t yet ready to roll out to the platform’s several hundred million users just yet, and is currently still in testing by employees. Later this month, access will be granted to Twitter Blue users, who pay $5 per month to remove in-feed ads and undo a tweet that you might want to change before it’s seen by everyone. The company added that the test will be localized to a single country, and will expand worldwide slowly so that the company can make sure the feature is being used as intended.

One of the reasons that Twitter resisted an edit button for so long was the risk of bad actors abusing the system. For instance, you could amend a tweet that was widely retweeted or embedded in other sites, changing the meaning for something its boosters did not intend. That’s why there will be guardrails put in place — like the fact that edits can only be made 30 minutes after the initial publication. And edits will be labelled as such to ensure people know you’ve been tweaking your text — with the revision history also available for everyone to view. Still, it's one way to at least spare some of your blushes when you send a Tweet that's got on3 or twoo annoyeeng typizos. 

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp could soon have specialized features available only to users willing to pay for them. Meta is forming a new division called New Monetization Experiences that will be solely focused on paid features for the company’s app, according to a memo reported byThe Verge.

Wile Facebook and Instagram already have a number of paid features that cater to creators, like Stars, paid events and various subscription products, it sounds like the new division at Meta will be separate from those initiatives. (Of note, Meta had pledged not to take a cut of creator earnings until 2023.)

It’s not clear what type of paid features might come out of the effort, but Meta’s VP of monetization John Hegeman told The Verge the company is keeping a close eye on its industry peers. Twitter, Snapchat and Telegram have all recently launched monthly subscriptions that unlock exclusive features and other in-app perks for paid subscribers.

Paid features could help Meta find new sources of non-advertising revenue. The company’s multibillion-dollar advertising business has taken a significant hit of late due to iOS privacy changes and an economic downturn that’s also affected its competitors.

Meta has started notifying users of its standalone Facebook Gaming app that it will soon no longer be available. In an in-app notification (as shared by social media consultant Matt Navarra and other publications), the company has announced that both iOS and Android versions of the application will stop working on October 28th. Meta is also giving users the chance to download their search data and reminding them that Facebook Gaming isn't going away entirely. Users will merely have to go to the Gaming tab in the main Facebook app to watch their favorite creators' livestreams.

The company released the dedicated Gaming app in 2020 to better compete with Twitch and YouTube. Meta (still known as Facebook back then) designed the app to highlight content from streamers and to provide users with a group chat and other community features. It didn't say why it decided to shut down the standalone app, but it could be part of its cost-cutting efforts meant to help it weather what Mark Zuckerberg calls "one of the worst downturns [the company has seen] in recent history."

Over the past year, streaming tool providers such as StreamElements reported that Facebook Gaming comes only second to Twitch when it comes to hours watched on a game streaming platform. However, we examined data from CrowdTangle, Meta's analytics service, and found that the platform is flooded with spam and pirated content masquerading as gaming livestreams. Back then, a spokesperson told Engadget that Meta was "working to improve [its] tools to identify violating content" so that users can have "the best experience."

Twitter’s feature for tweeting only to close friends is now available to all its users. After nearly four months of testing, Twitter Circle is rolling out for everyone to help people feel “more comfortable tweeting and expressing themselves.”

Twitter Circle is a bit like Instagram’s “close friends” feature.. Meant to be a sort of middle-ground between a public and private account, users can designate some tweets to be viewable only to a smaller “circle” of up to 150 followers. The feature could help address a long-running issue for the company: that many Twitter users simply don’t feel comfortable tweeting that much, either for fear of harassment or simply the pressures associated with public-facing accounts.

Interestingly, Twitter says that its early tests of the feature have shown that users with Circle tweet more overall, and get more likes and replies when tweeting to a smaller group. The company notes that it also reduces the need for users to have a secondary account or switching their accounts back and forth between public and private.

Twitter Circle is the latest way Twitter has tried to create spaces for users to interact with smaller audiences without making their accounts completely private. The company has also experimented with a Facebook Groups-like feature, called Communities, and subscriber-only content for creators with Super Follows. But Twitter Circle, which users can access directly from the tweet composer, is an even more accessible way of controlling the audience for each tweet. That may seem at odds with the “town square” vision of Twitter vaunted by its would-be acquirer, but increased engagement could also help the company’s bottom line.

Meta has followed through on its threat promise to bring NFT (non-fungible token) support to Facebook. Users can now post digital collectibles that they have in their digital wallets across Facebook and Instagram. After they connect digital wallets to one app, they'll be able to access NFTs from both of them.

The company is making the move a few weeks after it expanded access to Instagram's NFT functions in dozens more countries. It started testing NFTs on Facebook earlier this summer. Meta is moving deeper into NFT territory even though the market for the digital tokens has nosedived in recent months. There are indications that Meta is working on a marketplace where people can buy and sell NFTs, but whether people will actually use it remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, here's Snoop Dogg and Eminem's MTV Video Music Awards performance, which featured animated versions of their NFTs. In terms of bleak visions of the near future, The Last of Us has nothing on this.