Roblox announced it'll be rolling out virtual billboards with video advertisements that will be displayed in its virtual worlds. Reuters reports: Users will now see billboards featuring content from brands such as e.l.f beauty, Walmart and Warner Bros Discovery, just as they would in real life. That would give advertisers access to Roblox's nearly 72 million daily active users -- half of whom are Gen-Z customers, a population group prized by marketers and businesses.

The company in November began testing the video ads -- that will be served to users who are 13 years and older -- as part of its efforts to reduce reliance on revenue generated from its in-game currency "Robux", which players can use to buy outfits, vehicles and other features inside the company's digital worlds. It charges a fee on all purchases done on its platform, which hosts millions of videogames that are built by its users -- who get a share of any related revenue.

That practice will extend to the ads, with creators of the virtual worlds who opt to show the billboards getting a portion of the revenue Roblox makes from them. Roblox is hoping its large Gen-Z user base will give it an edge in the competitive ad market, where it would have to wrestle for marketing dollars with tech giants such as Google and Meta and smaller players such as Snap.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told employees Wednesday that it is blocking access to ChatGPT on agency-issued laptops to "protect our data from security threats associated with use of ChatGPT," 404 Media reported Wednesday. From the report: "NARA will block access to commercial ChatGPT on NARANet [an internal network] and on NARA issued laptops, tablets, desktop computers, and mobile phones beginning May 6, 2024," an email sent to all employees, and seen by 404 Media, reads. "NARA is taking this action to protect our data from security threats associated with use of ChatGPT."

The move is particularly notable considering that this directive is coming from, well, the National Archives, whose job is to keep an accurate historical record. The email explaining the ban says the agency is particularly concerned with internal government data being incorporated into ChatGPT and leaking through its services. "ChatGPT, in particular, actively incorporates information that is input by its users in other responses, with no limitations. Like other federal agencies, NARA has determined that ChatGPT's unrestricted approach to reusing input data poses an unacceptable risk to NARA data security," the email reads. The email goes on to explain that "If sensitive, non-public NARA data is entered into ChatGPT, our data will become part of the living data set without the ability to have it removed or purged."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who has said his "biological age" is roughly a decade younger than his actual one, has put forward his largely unlined face as a spokesman for the longevity movement. The 54-year-old has built his brand on the idea that aging is a treatable disease. The notion has proven so seductive that legions of acolytes follow his online postings about his research and the cocktails of supplements he consumes to stave off the inevitable. His social-media accounts are a platform for assertions that his work is pushing nearer to a fountain of youth. He claimed last year that a gene therapy invented in his Harvard lab and being developed by a company he co-founded, Life Biosciences, had reversed aging and restored vision in monkeys. "Next up: age reversal in humans," he wrote on X and Instagram.

On Feb. 29, in the eyes of many other scientists working to unlock the mysteries of aging, he went too far. Another company he co-founded, Animal Biosciences, quoted him in a press release saying that a supplement it had developed had reversed aging in dogs. Scientists who study aging can't even agree on what it means to "reverse" aging, much less how to measure it. The response was swift and harsh. The Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, a group of about 60 scientists that Sinclair co-founded and led, was hit with a cascade of resignations by members outraged by his claims. One scientist who quit referred to Sinclair on X as a "snake oil salesman." Days later, in a tense video meeting, the academy's five other board members pressed Sinclair to resign as president. He contended that the press release contained an inaccurate quote, according to people who were in the meeting, but he later stepped down.

Sinclair's work is published regularly in top-tier scientific journals and has brought attention to an emerging field vying for credibility and funding. He has parlayed his research into hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in various companies, more than 50 patents and prominence as a longevity influencer. Along the way, his claims -- especially in his social-media posts, interviews and his book -- have drawn criticism from scientists who have accused him of hyping his research and extolling unproven products, including some from companies in which he had a financial interest. "My lab's ideas and findings are typically ahead of the curve, which is why some peers might feel the research is overstated at the time," Sinclair said to The Wall Street Journal in an email. "I stand behind my track record as a trusted scientist in one of the most competitive professions of all." He said he doesn't engage with social-media critics, including those calling him a snake oil salesman, and that many such comments are "nothing more than mischaracterizations."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Sunday, word began to spread on social media about a new mystery chatbot named "gpt2-chatbot" that appeared in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Some people speculate that it may be a secret test version of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 large language model (LLM). The paid version of ChatGPT is currently powered by GPT-4 Turbo. Currently, the new model is only available for use through the Chatbot Arena website, although in a limited way. In the site's "side-by-side" arena mode where users can purposely select the model, gpt2-chatbot has a rate limit of eight queries per day -- dramatically limiting people's ability to test it in detail. [...] On Monday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly dropped a hint by tweeting, "i do have a soft spot for gpt2." [...]

OpenAI's fingerprints seem to be all over the new bot. "I think it may well be an OpenAI stealth preview of something," AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. But what "gpt2" is exactly, he doesn't know. After surveying online speculation, it seems that no one apart from its creator knows precisely what the model is, either. Willison has uncovered the system prompt for the AI model, which claims it is based on GPT-4 and made by OpenAI. But as Willison noted in a tweet, that's no guarantee of provenance because "the goal of a system prompt is to influence the model to behave in certain ways, not to give it truthful information about itself."

Large swathes of Asia are sweltering through a heatwave that has topped temperature records from Myanmar to the Philippines and forced millions of children to stay home from school. From a report: In India, record temperatures have triggered a deadly heatwave and concerns about voter turnout in the nation's marathon election. Extreme heat has also forced Bangladesh to close all schools across the country. Extreme temperatures have also been recorded in Myanmar and Thailand, while huge areas of the Philippines are suffering from a drought. Experts say climate change has made heatwaves more frequent, longer and more intense, while the El Nino weather phenomenon is also driving this year's exceptionally warm weather.

Approximate voter turnout data after polls closed on April 26 in India -- when stage two of the nation's seven-stage general election took place -- put voter turnout at 61 per cent. This was lower than the 65 per cent in the first phase, and 68 per cent in the second phase five years ago. Among the states that headed to the polls last week was Kerala in the south, where media reports on April 29 said that at least two people -- a 90-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man -- were suspected to have died of heatstroke. Temperatures in Kerala soared to 41.9 deg C, nearly 5.5 deg C above normal temperatures. At least two people have also died in India's eastern state of Odisha, where temperatures hit 44.9 deg C on April 28 -- the highest recorded in April. In neighbouring Bangladesh, students will continue to stay home this week, after schools across the country were ordered shut on April 29. A two-judge bench of the country's High Court passed an order directing all primary and secondary schools and madrasahs (Islamic schools) nationwide to remain closed till May 5, affecting an estimated 32 million students.

Jules Roscoe reports via 404 Media: Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has "ruwiki" in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws. The new articles exclude mentions of "foreign agents," the Russian government's designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. [...]

Wikimedia RU, the Russian-language chapter of the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, was forced to shut down in late 2023 amid political pressure due to the Ukraine war. Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now runs Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with "reliability and neutrality." Medeyko first announced the project to copy and censor the 1.9 million Russian-language Wikipedia articles in June. The goal, he said at the time, was to edit them so that the information would be "trustworthy" as a source for all Russian users. Independent outlet Bumaga reported in August that around 110 articles about the war in Ukraine were missing in full, while others were severely edited. Ruviki also excludes articles about reports of torture in prisons and scandals of Russian government representatives. [...]

Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was "straight out of a 1984 novel." Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell's 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel's main propaganda outlet concerned with governing "truth" in the country.

Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference in May, Google has decided to lay off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others. "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers." TechCrunch reports: The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we're told. [...] Though Google didn't detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.

On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn't eliminate its Python team; it replaced that team with another group based in Munich -- at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters in a post on Mastodon last Thursday.

The United Kingdom has become the first country in the world to ban default guessable usernames and passwords from these IoT devices. Unique passwords installed by default are still permitted. From a report: The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 (PSTI) introduces new minimum-security standards for manufacturers, and demands that these companies are open with consumers about how long their products will receive security updates for.

Manufacturing and design practices mean many IoT products introduce additional risks to the home and business networks they're connected to. In one often-cited case described by cybersecurity company Darktrace, hackers were allegedly able to steal data from a casino's otherwise well-protected computer network after breaking in through an internet-connected temperature sensor in a fish tank. Under the PSTI, weak or easily guessable default passwords such as "admin" or "12345" are explicitly banned, and manufacturers are also required to publish contact details so users can report bugs.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world's biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India into one of the most important sources of clean energy anywhere on the planet is so overwhelming that the man in charge can't keep up. "I don't even do the math any more," Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview last week.

Adani is executive director of Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL). He's also the nephew of Gautam Adani, Asia's second richest man, whose $100 billion fortune stems from the Adani Group, India's biggest coal importer and a leading miner of the dirty fuel. Founded in 1988, the conglomerate has businesses in fields ranging from ports and thermal power plants to media and cements. Its clean energy unit AGEL is building the sprawling solar and wind power plant in the western Indian state of Gujarat at a cost of about $20 billion.

It will be the world's biggest renewable park when it is finished in about five years, and should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes... [T]he park will cover more than 200 square miles and be the planet's largest power plant regardless of the energy source, AGEL said.
CNN adds that the company "plans to invest $100 billion into energy transition over the next decade, with 70% of the investments ear-marked for clean energy."

This year Dell moved to soldered RAM for its XPS 14 and 16, writes Digital Trends, which "makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair."

"This was a big change from the past, where the XPS 15 and 17 were both celebrated for their upgradability." Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swallow. Where soldered RAM was previously limited to just MacBooks and ultrabooks, it's now affecting most high-performance laptops for gaming as well. Even the fantastic ROG Zephyrus G14 moved to soldered memory this year.
After two months of research, the article's author acknowledges "there are tangible benefits to companies using soldered RAM, and all the people I spoke to while writing this agree that they outweigh the downsides, but how that applies to the end-user is a bit more complicated." If there's one thing and one thing only that soldered RAM is indisputably good for, it's saving space. [Haval Othman, a senior director of experience engineering at HP] explained the benefits, saying: "If battery life, mobility, form factor (thin and light), and power efficiency are my priority among other design choices, then my mind immediately goes to soldered RAM; because that's where soldered RAM can be beneficial and power-efficient, which will lead to longer battery life. Plus, it's going to give me more space on the motherboard, so I can design the product thinner and lighter. [...] If we want a thin product, the trade-off is soldering more of the devices onto the board."

This tracks. In a laptop, there's only so much space that can be used for components, and that free space grows smaller by the year to make ultrabooks possible. They're an industrywide trend that was first popularized by Apple, and the rest of the laptop manufacturing world quickly caught on. Each year, laptops are released thinner and lighter, and that means having to squeeze the components together in new, innovative ways... Soldering the memory down onto the motherboard means that it can be attached almost anywhere within the laptop instead of being slotted into a specific part of it. It effectively makes the laptop thinner by cutting back on the space that the RAM module takes up. The space saved by soldering memory can be used for other things, such as a bigger battery....

All three companies that I spoke to stress the form factor much more than any tangible cost benefits... Stuart Gill, director of global media relations, campaigns, and corporate content [said] "Both soldered and socketed RAM designs are now quite mature. As a result, we see no impact on the manufacturing process and, therefore, the cost to the consumer."
SO-DIMM chips also have "relatively limited bandwidth," according to HP's Othman, "while when you solder the memory chips onto the board, you can build it for a much wider bandwidth."

But the article ends by looking to the future. "The good news is that SO-DIMM memory might eventually be replaced by the CAMM2 standard." Recently approved by JEDEC, CAMM2 is said to be significantly thinner, and it'll be available both in soldered and non-soldered variants. Using CAMM2 will allow laptops to stack up to 128GB of RAM, and the frequencies are said to be going up, too. CAMM2 can also activate dual-channel memory with just a single module.

Japan's moon lander "has woken up again," reports the Register, "having survived three lunar nights." A post on social media from the lander's X account confirmed that once more, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had defied the odds and snapped a picture of the lunar surface using its navigation camera. SLIM was revived a few weeks ago, after a second lunar night. However, with telemetry showing that some of the electronics (temperature sensors) and battery cells were malfunctioning, the chances of the lander making it through a third lunar night seemed remote.

Yet against all odds, SLIM has stirred once more on the lunar surface despite lacking heaters to keep its electronics warm.

What happened after India banned TikTok? The move "mostly drew widespread support" notes the Associated Press, in a country "where protesters had been calling for a boycott of Chinese goods since the deadly confrontation in the remote Karakoram mountain border region." "There was a clamour leading up to this, and the popular narrative was how can we allow Chinese companies to do business in India when we're in the middle of a military standoff," said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital policy expert and founder of tech website MediaNama. Just months before the ban, India had also restricted investment from Chinese companies, Pahwa added. "TikTok wasn't a one-off case. Today, India has banned over 500 Chinese apps to date."

At the time, India had about 200 million TikTok users. And the company also employed thousands of Indians.

TikTok users and content creators, however, needed a place to go — and the ban provided a multi-billion dollar opportunity to snatch up a big market. Within months, Google rolled out YouTube Shorts and Instagram pushed out its Reels feature. Both mimicked the short-form video creation that TikTok had excelled at. "And they ended up capturing most of the market that TikTok had vacated," said Pahwa.
TikTok is also banned in Nepal and Somalia, according to Mashable, and the Associaterd Press adds that it's now also banned in Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan "and restricted in many countries in Europe."

Their article concludes that "for the most part, content creators and users in the four years since the ban have moved on to other platforms." They quote one frequent TikTok user as saying they just switched to Instagram after the ban, and "It wasn't really a big deal."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Times of India: Several Apple customers were inexplicably locked out of their Apple ID accounts Friday evening in a major service disruption, forcing them to reset their passwords across all devices and services. According to user reports on social media, the widespread outage began around 8 p.m. ET. People complained that they were abruptly signed out of their Apple IDs on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices.

When attempting to sign back in with their existing passwords, they received an error message preventing access... To regain access, users had to go through Apple's account recovery process to reset their Apple ID passwords. However, many reported difficulties even completing the reset process initially due to high demand...

The outage affected iCloud services like iCloud Drive, iMessage, FaceTime, and the App Store. Third-party apps and services that integrate with Apple ID sign-in were also disrupted for those impacted.

"A former high school athletic director was arrested Thursday morning," reports CBS News, "after allegedly using artificial intelligence to impersonate the school principal in a recording..." One-time Pikesville High School employee Dazhon Darien is facing charges that include theft, stalking, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness. Investigators determined he faked principal Eric Eiswert's voice and circulated the audio on social media in January. Darien's nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clips he allegedly faked, according to the Baltimore County State's Attorney's Office.

Baltimore County detectives say Darien created the recording as retaliation against Eiswert, who had launched an investigation into the potential mishandling of school funds, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said on Thursday. Eiswert's voice, which police and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments toward Black students and the surrounding Jewish community. The audio was widely circulated on social media.
The article notes that after the faked recording circulated on social media the principal "was temporarily removed from the school, and waves of hate-filled messages circulated on social media, while the school received numerous phone calls."

The suspect had actually used the school's network multiple times to perform online searches for OpenAI tools, "which police linked to paid OpenAI accounts."

Reuters reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "is investigating a union's claims that Boeing retaliated against two employees who in 2022 insisted the planemaker re-evaluate prior engineering work on 777 and 787 jets."

The employees' union "said the two unidentified engineers were representatives of the FAA, which delegates some of its oversight authority and certification process to Boeing workers." The FAA noted on Tuesday that in 2022 it boosted oversight of planemakers by protecting aviation industry employees who perform agency functions from interference by their employers. A December 2021 Senate report found "FAA's certification process suffers from undue pressure on line engineers and production staff."

"Boeing can tell Congress and the media all it wants about how retaliation is strictly prohibited," said SPEEA Director of Strategic Development Rich Plunkett. "But our union is fighting retaliation cases on a regular basis, and, in this specific case, Boeing is trying to hide information that would shed light on what happened...."

Last week, Boeing quality engineer whistleblower Sam Salehpour, who raised questions about Boeing widebody jets, told senators he was told to "shut up" when he flagged safety concerns. He has said he was removed from the 787 program and transferred to the 777 jet due to his questions.
Boeing has "zero tolerance for retaliation," according a statement quoted by Reuters, in which the company says they "encourage our employees to speak up when they see an issue. After an extensive review of documentation and interviewing more than a dozen witnesses, our investigators found no evidence of retaliation or interference. We have determined the allegations are unsubstantiated."

The union's version of the story? "After nearly six months of debate, the two engineers, with backing from the FAA, prevailed. Boeing re-did the required analysis." The two engineers were still Boeing employees, however, and Boeing management was not pleased. When they came up for their next performance reviews, the two engineers received identical negative evaluations... Even after the manager of the two engineers admitted that he had rated them both poorly at the request of the 777 and 787 managers who had been forced to resubmit their work, Boeing refused to change the engineers' performance evaluations.

At this point, one of the engineers left in disgust; the other filed a formal "Speak Up" complaint with Boeing.

The head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency warned the country's leading research universities on Thursday that foreign states are targeting their institutions and imperilling national security. The Record: "We know that our universities are being actively targeted by hostile actors and need to guard against the threat posed to frontier research in the most sensitive sectors," said the deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, who also attended the briefing. The threat requires "further measures," said the deputy PM, who announced that the government was launching a consultation with the sector so it could "do more to support our universities and put the right security in place to protect their cutting-edge research."

The briefing was delivered by Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, alongside Dowden and the National Cyber Security Centre's interim chief executive, Felicity Oswald. It was made to the vice-chancellors of the Russell Group, a collective of the country's 24 leading universities. Among the range of measures being considered is having MI5, the domestic security agency, carry out security vetting on key researchers involved in a "small proportion of academic work, with a particular focus on research with potential dual uses in civilian and military life."

Some Android-powered TVs can expose the contents of users' email inboxes if an attacker has physical access to the TV. Google initially told the office of Senator Ron Wyden that the issue, which is a quirk of how software is installed on these TVs, was expected behavior, but after being contacted by 404 Media, Google now says it is addressing the issue. From the report: The attack is an edge case but one that still highlights how the use of Google accounts, even on products that aren't necessarily designed for browsing user data, can expose information in unusual ways, including TVs in businesses or ones that have been resold or given away.

"My office is mid-way through a review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers. As part of that inquiry, my staff discovered an alarming video in which a YouTuber demonstrated how with 15 minutes of unsupervised access to an Android TV set top box, a criminal could get access to private emails of the Gmail user who set up the TV," Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

404 Media: Apple has removed a number of AI image generation apps from the App Store after 404 Media found these apps advertised the ability to create nonconsensual nude images, a sign that app store operators are starting to take more action against these types of apps.

Overall, Apple removed three apps from the App Store, but only after we provided the company with links to the specific apps and their related ads, indicating the company was not able to find the apps that violated its policy itself.

Apple's action comes after we reported on Monday that Instagram advertises nonconsensual AI nude apps. By browsing Meta's Ad Library, which archives ads on its platform, when they ran, on what platforms, and who paid for them, we were able to find ads for five different apps, each with dozens of ads. Two of the ads were for web-based services, and three were for apps on the Apple App Store. Meta deleted the ads when we flagged them. Apple did not initially respond to a request for comment on that story, but reached out to me after it was published asking for more information. On Tuesday, Apple told us it removed the three apps on its App Store.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Baltimore police have arrested Dazhon Leslie Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School (PHS), for allegedly impersonating the school's principal using AI software to make it seem as if he made racist and antisemitic remarks. Darien, of Baltimore, Maryland, was subsequently charged with witness retaliation, stalking, theft, and disrupting school operations. He was detained late at night trying to board a flight at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport. Security personnel stopped him because the declared firearm he had with him was improperly packed and an ensuing background check revealed an open warrant for his arrest.

"On January 17, 2024, the Baltimore County Police Department became aware of a voice recording being circulated on social media," said Robert McCullough, Chief of Baltimore County Police, at a streamed press conference today. "It was alleged the voice captured on the audio file belong to Mr Eric Eiswert, the Principal at the Pikesville High School. We now have conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic. "The Baltimore County Police Department reached that determination after conducting an extensive investigation, which included bringing in a forensic analyst contracted with the FBI to review the recording. The results of the analysis indicated the recording contained traces of AI-generated content." McCullough said a second opinion from a forensic analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, also determined the recording was not authentic. "Based off of those findings and further investigation, it's been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology," he said.

According to the warrant issued for Darien's arrest, the audio file was shared through social media on January 17 after being sent via email to school teachers. The recording sounded as if Principal Eric Eiswert had made remarks inflammatory enough to prompt a police visit to advise on protective security measures for staff. [...] The clip, according to the warrant, led to the temporary removal of Eiswert from his position and "a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and numerous calls to the school," and significantly disrupted school operations. Police say it led to threats against Eiswert and concerns about his safety. Eiswert told investigators that he believes the audio clip was fake as "he never had the conversations in the recording." And he said he believed Darien was responsible due to his technical familiarity with AI and had a possible motive: Eiswert said there "had been conversations with Darien about his contract not being renewed next semester due to frequent work performance challenges." "It is clear that we are also entering a new deeply concerning frontier as we continue to embrace emerging technology and its potential for innovation and social good," said John Olszewski, Baltimore County Executive, during a press conference. "We must also remain vigilant against those who would have used it for malicious intent. That will require us to be more aware and more discerning about the audio we hear and the images we see. We will need to be careful in our judgment."

Jeff Lawson, the cofounder of cloud computing company Twilio, appears to have purchased the satirical news website The Onion from G/O Media. Business Insider reports: A trust linked to Lawson is behind a San Francisco-based company called Global Tetrahedron, which shares the name of a fictional evil megacorporation in a long-running Onion gag, business records show. G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller confirmed the sale of The Onion to Global Tetrahedron in an email Thursday to staff, first reported by New York Times journalist Katie Robertson.

"This company is made up of four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy based content," Spanfeller wrote. "The site's new owners have agreed to keep The Onion's entire staff intact and in Chicago, something we insisted be part of the deal." When asked about the purchase, Lawson replied: "What's The Onion?" Then, "What's a Tetrahedron?"