In 2018 police arrested "the Golden State Killer" — now a 72-year-old man who had committed 13 murders between 1974 and 1986, the New York Times remembers: What made the investigation possible was GEDmatch, a low-frills, online gathering place for people to upload DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, in hopes of connecting with unknown relatives. The authorities' decision to mine the genealogical enthusiasts' data for investigative leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. But the practice has continued, and has since been used in hundreds of cases.
But now using similar techniques, a wellness coach born in Mississippi (through a Facebook group called DNA Detectives) has helped over 200 strangers identify their unknown parents, the Times reports.

And she's recently donated more than $100,000 to a genetics lab called Othram — to fund the sequencing of DNA to solve cold cases back in her home state. "These families have waited so long for answers," she told the New York Times, which calls her "part of a growing cohort of amateur DNA detectives..." [Othram] created a site called DNASolves to tell the stories of horrific crimes and tragic John and Jane Does — with catchy names like "Christmas tree lady" and "angel baby" — to encourage people to fund budget-crunched police departments, so that they can hire Othram. A competitor, Parabon NanoLabs, had created a similar site called JusticeDrive, which has raised around $30,000.

In addition to money, Othram encouraged supporters to donate their DNA, a request that some critics called unseemly, saying donors should contribute to databases easily available to all investigators. "Some people are too nervous to put their DNA in a general database," said Mr. Mittelman, who declined to say how large his database is. "Ours is purpose-built for law enforcement."
Another group raising money for genetic investigations are the producers of true-crime podcasts — and their listeners. According to the article, the podcast-producing company Audiochuck has donated roughly $800,000 to organizations doing investigative genealogical research (including Othram), though the majority went to a nonprofit started by the host of the "Crime Junkie" podcast. (And that nonprofit raised another $250,000, some through crowdfunding.)

"Why just listen to a murder podcast when you can help police comb through genealogical databases for the second cousins of suspected killers and their unidentified victims?" the Times asks? So far donors around the country have given at least a million dollars to the cause. They could usher in a world where few crimes go unsolved — but only if society is willing to accept, and fund, DNA dragnets.... A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League has given Othram $45,000, resulting in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and in 1989.... [T]he perpetrators were dead....

Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, expressed concern about "the public picking and choosing between cases," saying investigative priorities could be determined by who can donate the most. Ms. Ram said the "largest share" of cases solved so far with the method "tend to involve white female victims...."

Ms. Ram is also concerned about the constitutional privacy issues raised by the searches, particularly for those people who haven't taken DNA tests or uploaded their results to the public internet. Even if you resolve never to put your DNA on a site accessible to law enforcement authorities, you share DNA with many other people so could still be discoverable. All it takes is your sibling, aunt or even a distant cousin deciding differently.

Science magazine explores how actual scientists feel about Twitter: "I like that there's a low bar to entry [on Twitter] — I can put something out and see how other scientists are thinking of a problem, people who have a different skill set than mine," says biostatistician Natalie Dean of Emory University, whose Twitter account has some 138,000 followers. But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter — some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards....

[A]s the pandemic exploded and researchers sought to pump out information to each other and an eager public, many saw advantages to Twitter. Its vast reach became a draw: more than 200 million active daily users, including an estimated one-quarter of U.S. adults, according to the Pew Research Center. This allows scientists to use a single platform to share research findings with both peers and the public and to foster open discussions... One result is that the platform has carried posts about a majority of the total COVID-19 literature — about 51% of journal articles on pandemic research had been mentioned in at least one tweet through May 2021, according to a report by the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). That exceeds the number cited in scholarly articles or mentioned in several other communications venues, including news stories, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, blogs, and policy documents. And it's well above the level before the pandemic, when studies found that just 10% to 30% of papers on any scientific topic got a mention on Twitter....

But an emerging body of research about tweeting suggests that, overall, scientists often struggle to be heard on social media. One study, for example, found tweets containing links to scholarly papers typically get little engagement. Of 1.1 million such tweets about papers published before the pandemic, half drew no clicks, and an additional 22% attracted just one or two, according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
An information scientist at the University of Ottawa tells the magazine that "We are really not at the point where we want to get, which is, ideally, seeing the impact of research on the greater good of society."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story...

Wikipedia points out that America's two largest-circulation publications are the two magazine sent out to over 38 million members of massive non-profit AARP (originally the American Association of Retired Persons).

It's now starting its own social network to compete with Facebook (which according to a recent survey is being used by over 72 million Americans over the age of 50), Ars Technica reports: The nonprofit funded the creation of Senior Planet Community, a social media network that encourages users to join pre-existing groups around shared interests, including gardening, travel, fitness, food, and technology. In that way, it feels more like a pared-down version of Reddit or a small collection of forums....

Besides its focus on the 50-plus set, Senior Planet Community stands apart from Facebook in that it's not commercial. The site has no advertising or membership fees. Unless the cost to run the site grows substantially, that probably won't present much of a problem. AARP isn't saying how much it has put into Senior Planet Community, but the organization is famously well-capitalized, with $2.3 billion in net assets and $1.7 billion in revenue in 2020.

At present, the site is bare-bones when compared with Facebook. There's no mobile app yet, though OATS [the affiliate organization that built the social network] says it hopes to develop one. The site is mobile-friendly at least, and all the requisite features are there, including groups, photo sharing, @-mentions, notifications, and direct messaging. As with all social networks, a looming question is how Senior Planet Community will handle moderation. The site has a relatively extensive list of "house rules" that encourages users to "be courteous" and "cite your sources." Posts about politics aren't forbidden, but the rules say posts can't stray off-topic, and users can't "attack individuals, social, ethnic, or political groups and figures." Users can report posts they think violate the rules. Currently, the user base is relatively small, so policing it should be straightforward.

"The moderating team keeps an eye on all comments, posts, and updates added to the platform from the backend.... " Suzanne Myklebust, OATS's director of communications, told Ars.

Apple is paying six-figure "special retention grants" to a handful of hardware and software engineers. Protocol reports: The bonuses, anonymous sources told Bloomberg, are worth between $100,000 and more than $200,000 in restricted stock units that vest over several years, providing another incentive for engineers to stay at Apple... The bonuses show the level of insecurity that some of the top-paying companies in the industry feel in this tight market for tech talent. (Even Google employees are feeling unhappy with their compensation....) Apple and other tech giants are throwing more and more money at employees to retain them.

In the last few months, Alphabet has adopted a new cash bonus plan that allows employee bonuses "of nearly any size for nearly any reason," The Wall Street Journal reported last month, and Amazon has raised its cash-pay cap from $160,000 to $350,000, according to The New York Times.
Bloomberg points out Apple "has suffered some attrition in its chip design group," as Facebook's parent Meta Platforms "has stepped up recruiting of engineers — aiming to put them to work on the so-called metaverse," and the payouts also went to Apple employees working on virtual and augmented reality headsets. Inflation also has put pressure on employers to boost compensation. And Apple is preparing for a return to the office — a source of tension for some employees. By May, the company will require engineers and other corporate staff to work out of the office at least three days a week.
So the bonuses "are designed to keep the employees from leaving by vesting over several years," Bloomberg concludes, "and they could become more valuable over time if Apple's stock price continues to rise.

"The shares are up more than 40% over the past 12 months..."

CNN Business reports a deepfake video of Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fabricated to falsely depict him urging viewers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. But at the same time, "there was another widely circulated deepfake video depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin supposedly declaring peace in the Ukraine war."

Though both videos were "noticeably low resolution" (which they describe as a common tactic for hiding flaws), "experts still see them as dangerous." That's because they show the lighting speed with which high-tech disinformation can now spread around the globe. As they become increasingly common, deepfake videos make it harder to tell fact from fiction online, and all the more so during a war that is unfolding online and rife with misinformation. Even a bad deepfake risks muddying the waters further. "Once this line is eroded, truth itself will not exist," said Wael Abd-Almageed, a research associate professor at the University of Southern California and founding director of the school's Visual Intelligence and Multimedia Analytics Laboratory. "If you see anything and you cannot believe it anymore, then everything becomes false. It's not like everything will become true. It's just that we will lose confidence in anything and everything...."

The fact that they are now being used in an attempt to influence people during a war is especially pernicious, experts told CNN Business, simply because the confusion they sow can be dangerous. Siwei Lyu, director of the computer vision and machine learning lab at University at Albany, said under normal circumstances, deepfakes may not have much impact beyond drawing interest and getting traction online. "But in critical situations, during a war or a national disaster, when people really can't think very rationally and they only have a very truly short span of attention, and they see something like this, that's when it becomes a problem," he added.

Snuffing out misinformation in general has become more complex during the war in Ukraine. Russia's invasion of the country has been accompanied by a real-time deluge of information hitting social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Much of it is real, but some is fake or misleading. The visual nature of what's being shared — along with how emotional and visceral it often is — can make it hard to quickly tell what's real from what's fake. Nina Schick, author of "Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse," sees deepfakes like those of Zelensky and Putin as signs of the much larger disinformation problem online, which she thinks social media companies aren't doing enough to solve. She argued that responses from companies such as Facebook, which quickly said it had removed the Zelensky video, are often a "fig leaf."

"You're talking about one video," she said. The larger problem remains.

As deepfakes get better, researchers and companies are trying to keep up with tools to spot them....

A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol. PC Gamer reports: The destruction was highlighted by Mark Howlett on Twitter, and confirmed by the Ukrainian Software and Computer Museum account, which operates museums in Kharkiv and Kyiv. The owner of the Mariupul collection, Dmitry Cherepanov, is reportedly safe, though his collection of computers, consoles, and assorted tech from fifty years of computing has been wiped out. "There is neither my museum nor my house," writes Cherepanov on his Facebook page, it8bit.club.

The museum itself may be gone, but Cherepanov has been chronicling his collection of exhibits online for some time now, and though this is all that's left, it is still a resource worth checking out. There are a host of fascinating old machines, including the Commodore C64 [...]. As well as images and information about all the 120 computers and consoles in his collection, Cherepanov also hosts RetroBit Radio on the site, too. Cherepanov has set up a Paypal account for donations, the details of which you can find on his Facebook page.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: As Russia makes preparations to possibly disconnect from the global internet in a bid to control the narrative around the invasion of Ukraine, one secretive U.S. company is rushing to lay the final pieces of an unbreakable network that the Kremlin won't be able to take down. The company is Lantern, which says it has seen staggering growth inside Russia in the last four weeks for its app that allows users to bypass restrictions the Kremlin has put in place on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But now the company is building something even more robust, an internal peer-to-peer network that will allow dissenting voices to continue to upload and share content even if the Kremlin pulls the plug on the internet.

Within the next week, the network will be fully operational, allowing opposition voices to use the Lantern app to post content like videos from protests or updates on the war in Ukraine directly to the Lantern network. This would allow users to share it with other Lantern users without fear that the content will be removed or blocked. [...] Lantern was founded in California in 2010 with the goal of keeping "the world's information, speech, expression, and finance uncensored." The free version of the app has a data cap of 500MB, but the pro version, which costs $32 a year, has no data cap. It has become hugely popular in China because of its ability to stay one step ahead of the government's censorship efforts, spreading mainly via word-of-mouth as it's not available via the Google or Apple app stores inside China. n Russia, like all new markets it enters, Lantern removed the data cap for all users. Despite this, some users still paid for the pro version.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to one of the world's most far-reaching laws to address the power of the biggest tech companies (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), potentially reshaping app stores, online advertising, e-commerce, messaging services and other everyday digital tools. The New York Times reports: The law, called the Digital Markets Act, is the most sweeping piece of digital policy since the bloc put the world's toughest rules to protect people's online data into effect in 2018. The legislation is aimed at stopping the largest tech platforms from using their interlocking services and considerable resources to box in users and squash emerging rivals, creating room for new entrants and fostering more competition. [...] The Digital Markets Act will apply to so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors including a market value of more than 75 billion euros, or about $83 billion. The group includes Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. Specifics of the law read like a wish list for rivals of the biggest companies. Apple and Google, which make the operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone, would be required to loosen their grip. Apple will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps, a change the company has warned could harm security. The law will also let companies such as Spotify and Epic Games use payment methods other than Apple's in the App Store, which charges a 30 percent commission.

Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services so that it could offer competing products, a practice that is the subject of a separate E.U. antitrust investigation. The law will result in major changes for messaging apps. WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, could be required to offer a way for users of rival services like Signal or Telegram to send and receive messages to somebody using WhatsApp. Those rival services would have the option to make their products interoperable with WhatsApp. The largest sellers of online advertising, Meta and Google, will see new limits for offering targeted ads without consent. Such ads -- based on data collected from people as they move between YouTube and Google Search, or Instagram and Facebook -- are immensely lucrative for both companies.

[...] With these actions, Europe is cementing its leadership as the most assertive regulator of tech companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. European standards are often adopted worldwide, and the latest legislation further raises the bar by potentially bringing the companies under new era of oversight -- just like health care, transportation and banking industries. "Faced with big online platforms behaving like they were 'too big to care,' Europe has put its foot down," said Thierry Breton, one of the top digital officials in the European Commission. "We are putting an end to the so-called Wild West dominating our information space. A new framework that can become a reference for democracies worldwide." On Thursday, representatives from the European Parliament and European Council hammered out the last specifics of the law in Brussels. The agreement followed about 16 months of talks -- a speedy pace for the E.U. bureaucracy -- and sets the stage for a final vote in Parliament and among representatives from the 27 countries in the union. That approval is viewed as a formality.

Recruitment ad hits social media feeds of mobile phones located outside or inside the diplomatic compound. From a report: The FBI is trying a novel strategy to recruit Russian-speaking individuals upset about the country's invasion of Ukraine: aiming social media ads at cellphones located inside or just outside the Russian Embassy in Washington. The ads, which appear on Facebook, Twitter and Google, are carefully geographically targeted. A Washington Post reporter standing next to the embassy's stone walls on Wednesday morning received the ad in their Facebook feed. But the ads did not appear in the feed when the reporter stood on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue NW, in the District's Glover Park neighborhood.

The ads are designed to capitalize on any dissatisfaction or anger within Russian diplomatic or spy services -- or among Russian emigres to the United States -- over the invasion of Ukraine, an event that counterintelligence experts call a huge opportunity for the U.S. intelligence community to recruit new sources. The unlikely star of the campaign is Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose own words are used to encourage people working in or visiting the embassy to talk to the FBI. The ad quotes Putin at a meeting last month where he publicly chastised his intelligence chief, Sergey Naryshkin, correcting the spy boss's position on Russian policy toward the separatist eastern regions of Ukraine. Naryshkin, the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, stammered at the meeting and seemed unsure of what Putin wanted him to say.

A new report has found that Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behavior was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them. From a report: The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published. The group pulled the ads before they were posted or paid for, but the results confirmed that despite its promises to do better, Facebook's leaky controls still fail to detect hate speech and calls for violence on its platform. The army conducted what it called a clearance campaign in western Myanmar's Rakhine state in 2017 after an attack by a Rohingya insurgent group. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled into neighboring Bangladesh and security forces were accused of mass rapes, killings and torching thousands of homes.

On Feb. 1 of last year, Myanmar's military forcibly took control of the country, jailing democratically elected government officials. Rohingya refugees have condemned the military takeover and said it makes them more afraid to return to Myanmar. Experts say such ads have continued to appear and that despite its promises to do better and assurances that it has taken its role in the genocide seriously, Facebook still fails even the simplest of tests -- ensuring that paid ads that run on its site do not contain hate speech calling for the killing of Rohingya Muslims.

Limiters cap amount of electricity households can use, making many appliances unusable. From a report: Josie Gagne was stumbling in the dark, sobbing while on the phone with an Enmax customer assistant, as she tried to locate the tiny orange button under the utility meter that would restore heat inside. It was the shock that got her. The young single mother with two kids under two returned home one winter day last year to find a note on her door from Enmax. She'd fallen behind on bills; the home was now on a limiter, capping her electricity. The furnace was off and at that point, she had no idea what a limiter even was. "I'm freaking out. I'm crying, thinking 'What am I going to do?'" she said. "It's the middle of winter, it's still cold outside. How am I going to feed my children when my oven doesn't work?"

Rising utility bills have community advocates worried the number of Calgarians facing this scenario will increase, and many don't know what a load limiter is. It's often the first step before disconnection. Several Calgary residents flagged the issue while sharing their utility bill experiences with CBC Calgary through text messaging, and on Calgary Kindness, a mutual aid Facebook group. They've shared their personal stories with CBC journalists so others know what to expect. Contributors said they were scared their fridge would lose power and their groceries would rot. They relied on air fryers, barbecues or a hot plate to make it through. The extra fees -- $52 for the notice, $52 to remove the limiter -- only made it worse. Plus, the black mark on their files means they often can't get a contract with more favourable fixed rates. When the device is installed, a stove or anything else requiring 240 volts of electricity won't work.

apoc.famine shares a report from Ars Technica: Hundreds of thousands of sites use the OAuth protocol to let visitors login using their existing accounts with companies like Google, Facebook, or Apple. Instead of having to create an account on the new site, visitors can use an account that they already have -- and the magic of OAuth does the rest. The Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) technique capitalizes on this scheme. Instead of opening a genuine second browser window that's connected to the site facilitating the login or payment, BitB uses a series of HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) tricks to convincingly spoof the second window. The URL that appears there can show a valid address, complete with a padlock and HTTPS prefix. The layout and behavior of the window appear identical to the real thing.

While the method is convincing, it has a few weaknesses that should give savvy visitors a foolproof way to detect that something is amiss. Genuine OAuth or payment windows are in fact separate browser instances that are distinct from the primary page. That means a user can resize them and move them anywhere on the monitor, including outside the primary window. BitB windows, by contrast, aren't a separate browser instance at all. Instead, they're images rendered by custom HTML and CSS and contained in the primary window. That means the fake pages can't be resized, fully maximized or dragged outside the primary window. All users should protect their accounts with two-factor authentication. One other thing more experienced users can do is right click on the popup page and choose "inspect." If the window is a BitB spawn, its URL will be hardcoded into the HTML.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate.com: On March 1, after a week of horror in Ukraine, reports came out that Russia's censorship office had threatened to block Russian Wikipedia. A 32-year-old who asked to be called Alexander soon made a plan to download a local copy of Russian-language Wikipedia to keep with him in eastern Russia. "I did it just in case," he told me over Instagram Messenger before sharing that he and his wife are "working on moving to another country" with their two dogs, Prime and Shaggy. (Instagram has been blocked in Russia, but many continue to access it using virtual private networks. On Monday, the Russian government officially declared Facebook and Instagram "extremist organizations.")

Alexander wasn't the only Russian citizen to make a local copy of Wikipedia. Data suggests that after the threats of censorship, Russians started torrenting Wikipedia in droves. Currently, Russia is the country with the most Wikipedia downloads—by a landslide. Before the invasion, it rarely broke the top 10, but after the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, it has kept a solid hold on first place. The 29-gigabyte file that contains a downloadable Russian-language Wikipedia was downloaded a whopping 105,889 times during the first half of March, which is a more than 4,000 percent increase compared with the first half of January. According to Stephane Coillet-Matillon, who leads Kiwix, the organization that facilitates these downloads, Russian downloads now constitute 42 percent of all traffic on Kiwix servers, up from just 2 percent in 2021. "We had something similar back in 2017 when Turkey blocked Wikipedia," he said, "but this one is just another dimension." "Wikipedia routinely makes a dump of its databases available publicly, which Kiwix compresses into an archive so it can be more easily shared," adds Slate. "The entirety of English Wikipedia, from 'List of Informally Named Dinosaurs' to 'Floor' to 'Skunks as Pets' and everything in between, is 87 GB with pictures or 47 GB without. Russian-language Wikipedia is even smaller, continuing 1.8 million articles compared with English Wikipedia's 6.4 million."

A Moscow court on Monday found Meta Platforms guilty of "extremist activity", but said its decision would not affect the WhatsApp messenger service, focusing its ire on the company's already banned Facebook and Instagram social networks. From a report: Moscow's Tverskoi District Court upheld a lawsuit filed by Russian state prosecutors on banning the activities of Meta on Russian territory, the court's press service said in a statement. The U.S. company's lawyer, Victoria Shagina, had said in court earlier on Monday that Meta was not carrying out extremist activities and stood against Russophobia, the Interfax news agency reported.

The New York Times reports that "After more than three weeks without being able to leave the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, 64 workers were able to be rotated out, the plant said on Sunday." Staff at the plant, which includes more than 200 technical personnel and guards, had not been able to rotate shifts since February 23, a day before Russian forces took control of the site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which serves as a nuclear watchdog for the United Nations. In a Facebook post, the plant said that to rotate the 64 workers, 46 volunteers were sent to the site to make sure operations at the plant could continue.

It was unclear whether the remaining workers would also have an opportunity to be rotated.

For weeks, the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the I.A.E.A., has expressed concern for the workers at the Chernobyl site, calling for the staff to be rotated for their safety and security. Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the I.A.E.A., said last week that he remained "gravely concerned about the extremely difficult circumstances for the Ukrainian staff there." The I.A.E.A. said on March 13 that workers were no longer doing repairs and maintenance, partly because of "physical and psychological fatigue...."

Workers at the site have faced a number of issues recently, including a power outage and limited communication. Ukrainian government officials said on March 9 that damage by Russian forces had "disconnected" the plant from outside electricity, leaving the site dependent on power from diesel generators and backup supplies. Power was restored a few days later, and the plant resumed normal operating conditions.
Earlier this month a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (from 1998 to 2007) argued in the Wall Street Journal that "An unappreciated motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv was positioning itself to break from its longtime Russian nuclear suppliers, as the U.S. was encroaching on Russia's largest nuclear export market...."

"The project was intended to allow Ukraine to store this fuel safely without shipping it back to Russia for reprocessing. The processing and storage facility was completed in 2020, and Holtec and SSE Chernobyl were loading the canisters to be stored when the war began on February 24..." By taking over Chernobyl, Russia gives itself control of the disposal of its spent fuel, which it can store in canisters at the site or ship to a reprocessing facility in Russia. Either way, this represents hundreds of millions of dollars for Rosatom, the Russian state-owned nuclear enterprise....

The timing is telling. In November 2021, Ukraine's leaders signed a deal with Westinghouse to start construction on what they hoped would be at least five nuclear units — the first tranche of a program that could more than double the number of plants in the country, with a potential total value approaching $100 billion. Ukraine clearly intended that Russia receive none of that business.

Spotify may be the latest service to adopt NFTs. According to the Financial Times, the company is "drawing up plans to add blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens to its streaming service, fueling excitement in the crypto and music industries about the potential of NFTs to boost artists' earnings." It comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg confirmed NFTs will soon be coming to Instagram. From the report: Two recent job ads show Spotify is recruiting people to work on early stage projects related to "Web3," a tech buzzword for a blockchain-powered network that some crypto enthusiasts hope will wrestle control back from the Big Tech platforms that dominate today's internet.

Spotify's recruitment in the sector appears to be at an exploratory stage. It pointed to Web3 in a recruitment notice for an engineer on its "experimental growth" team. "This small and full-stack team is responsible for driving growth through new technologies, like Web3," the ad said. A separate Spotify job listing, for a manager in its future-gazing "Innovation and Market Intelligence" group, shows the music streaming service is looking for a candidate with experience in "content, creator, media, web3, and emerging technology industries" to "help define Spotify Moonshots," a term for ambitious new projects. The report goes on to note that Spotify "was an early collaborator on Facebook's ill-fated cryptocurrency project, Diem."

Daniel Ek, Spotify's chief executive, told a company podcast back in 2019 that cryptocurrencies and blockchain could allow users of "a service like Spotify [...] to be able to pay artists directly," especially across international borders or in regions where few people have traditional bank accounts. "That can open up massive opportunities where all of a sudden, a user in Japan might pay a creator in Argentina. And that opens up huge opportunities for how we can further our mission."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Minnesota state lawmakers are trying to prohibit social media platforms from using algorithms to recommend content to anyone under age 18. The bill was approved Tuesday by the House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee in a 15-1 vote. The potential state law goes next to the House Judiciary Finance and Civil Law Committee, which has put it on the docket for a hearing on March 22. The algorithm ban applies to platforms with at least 1 million account holders and says those companies would be "prohibited from using a social media algorithm to target user-created content at an account holder under the age of 18." There are exemptions for content created by federal, state, or local governments and by public or private schools.

"This bill prohibits a social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok, and others, from using algorithms to target children with specific types of content," the bill summary says (PDF). "The bill would require anyone operating a social media platform with more than one million users to require that algorithm functions be turned off for accounts owned by anyone under the age of 18." Social media companies would be "liable for damages and a civil penalty of $1,000 for each violation." Tech-industry lobbyists say the bill would violate the First Amendment, prevent companies from recommending useful content, and require them to collect more data on the ages and locations of users. TechDirt's Mike Masnick slammed the bill in an article titled, "Minnesota pushing bill that says websites can no longer be useful for teenagers."

"I get that for computer illiterate people the word 'algorithm' is scary," Masnick wrote. "And that there's some ridiculous belief among people who don't know any better that recommendation algorithms are like mind control, but the point of an algorithm is... to recommend content. That is, to make a social media (or other kind of service) useful. Without it, you just get an undifferentiated mass of content, and that's not very useful."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Early in March, a bunch of Facebook users got a mysterious, spam-like email titled "Your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect" and telling them that they were required to turn on the Facebook Protect feature (which they could do by hitting a link in the email) by a certain date, or they would be locked out of their account. The program, according to Facebook, is a "security program for groups of people that are more likely to be targeted by malicious hackers, such as human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials." It's meant to do things like ensure those accounts are monitored for hacking threats and that they are protected by two-factor authentication (2FA).

Unfortunately, the email that Facebook sent from the address security@facebookmail.com resembled a rather common form of spam, and so it's probable that many people ignored it. It actually wasn't spam. In fact, it was real. The first deadline to hit for many people was Thursday, March 17th. And now, they are locked out of their Facebook accounts -- and are having trouble with the process that Facebook has provided to get them back in. Those who did not activate Facebook Protect before their deadline are apparently getting a message explaining why they can't get into their accounts and offering to help them turn it on. However, it's not always working.

Spotify is drawing up plans to add blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens to its streaming service, fuelling excitement in the crypto and music industries about the potential of NFTs to boost artists' earnings. Financial Times: Two recent job ads show Spotify is recruiting people to work on early stage projects related to "Web3," a tech buzzword for a blockchain-powered network that some crypto enthusiasts hope will wrestle control back from the Big Tech platforms that dominate today's internet. Spotify is the latest tech giant to venture into NFTs and head off potential competition from crypto start-ups. This week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed a Financial Times report earlier this year that Instagram would soon start to support NFTs. Other social media companies, including Twitter and Reddit, are also working to build new features for displaying or trading NFTs. NFTs use blockchain technology to certify ownership of digital assets. The vast majority of the $17.7bn worth of NFTs traded last year were for visual artworks, games and collectibles, according to market tracker Nonfungible.com.

Australia's competition watchdog filed a lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms on Friday, alleging the social media giant failed to prevent scammers using its platform to promote fake ads featuring well-known people. From a report: The advertisements, which endorsed investment in cryptocurrency or money-making schemes, could have misled Facebook users into believing they were promoted by famous Australians, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) said. The lawsuit filed in the Federal Court also alleges Facebook "aided and abetted or was knowingly concerned in false or misleading conduct and representations by the advertisers," the ACCC said in a statement.