Tag Archives: internet

Vice News reports: As pointed out by Twitter user @dox_gay, hardcore porn is now embedded on the pages of the Huffington Post, New York magazine, The Washington Post, and a host of other websites. This is because a porn site called 5 Star Porn HD bought the domain for Vidme, a brief YouTube competitor founded in 2014 and shuttered in …

Vice News reports: In April 2020, Mark Herring’s heart stopped beating when armed police surrounded his house, responding to a bogus call of an alleged murder. The swatting incident—where people call in fake threats to the police so officers respond to someone’s address, potentially harming them—was all for the purpose of a scammer trying to gain control of Herring’s Twitter …

The Verge reports: Twitter is working on new upvote and downvote reactions for tweets to accompany the usual options to retweet and reply. Twitter confirmed it was testing the feature for a small group of users on iOS, and it’s already been spotted according to multiple tweets from users that are part of the test group. Twitter writes that iOS …

The Verge reports: Uber has more than doubled the number of cities where it delivers groceries, marking the first major expansion of the new service since its launch last year. The company’s on-demand and scheduled grocery delivery is now available in 400 cities, including key markets like New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Uber’s grocery delivery service got …

The Verge reports: Facebook plans to pay out $1 billion to creators over the next year and a half as part of an effort to court content makers to its many services. The money will be awarded to creators who use Facebook products in different ways: on Facebook, creators can get a cash bonus for running ads on their videos …

Axios reports: Outlets most dependent on controversy to stir up resentments have struggled to find a foothold in the Biden era, according to an Axios analysis of publishers’ readership and engagement trends. By the numbers: Web traffic, social media engagement and app user sessions suggest that while the entire news industry is experiencing a slump, right-wing outlets are seeing some …

The Verge reports: Following a recommendation from its Oversight Board, Facebook says it will update its community standards to be clearer about how it handles satirical content, the company said in a blog post. “We’ll add information to the Community Standards that makes it clear where we consider satire as part of our assessment of context-specific decisions,” according to the …

CNN Business reports: Airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms suffered website outages early Thursday after a key piece of internet infrastructure failed, sparking the second major interruption of the past 10 days. The outages come just over a week after countless websites and apps around the world went down for about an hour when Fastly, another major content delivery …

The Associated Press reports: Fastly, the company hit by a major outage that caused many of the world’s top websites to go offline briefly this week, blamed the problem on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed a setting. The issue lead caused outages for a number of highly-trafficked websites including The New York Times, Bloomberg News, …

CNN Business reports: Countless websites and apps around the world went down Tuesday after Fastly, a major content delivery network, reported a widespread failure. Fastly supports news sites and apps like CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times and many others. It also provides content delivery for Twitch, Pinterest, HBO Max, Hulu, Reddit, Spotify and other services. Other major internet …

The Verge reports: Twitter has officially announced Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service that offers access to new features like undoing tweets and viewing threads in an easier to digest “Reader Mode.” Starting Thursday, it will roll out first in Canada and Australia, where the subscription will cost $3.49 CAD or $4.49 AUD per month, respectively. A new undo send …

Via press release from Christian Newswire: A Christian tech startup has announced the launch of an internet filtering service designed to protect children from indoctrination into what it says is a “dangerous LGBTQ cult.” FreeFiltering.org will help parents block websites devoted to spreading pornography and other harmful ideas about human sexuality. The company’s founder, a father of three, became frustrated …

The Guardian reports: Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices. The proposal, called Amazon Sidewalk, involves the company’s devices being used as a …

The New York Times reports: The District of Columbia sued Amazon on Tuesday, accusing it of artificially raising prices for the products in its ubiquitous online marketplace and around the web by abusing its monopoly power, a sign that regulators in the United States are increasingly turning their attention to the company’s dominance across the economy. In the lawsuit, the …

Ars Technica reports: Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4, 2021, the Verizon-owned Yahoo announced this week. The 16-year-old question-and-answer service will enter read-only mode on April 20, preventing users from posting new questions or answering other users’ questions, Yahoo said.  The shutdown announcement prompted anger from people asking if Yahoo Answers is being “shut to silence conservatives” and …

The Hill reports: Amazon has surpassed Walmart as the top apparel retailer in the U.S, according to an analysis released by Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo estimated that Amazon’s apparel and footwear sales in the U.S. jumped by 15 percent in 2020, raking in $41 billion in sales, according to a report by CNBC. This placed the tech giant 20 to …

The Verge reports: Tinder and other Match Group-owned apps are going to let their users run background checks on possible dates. The company announced an investment in Garbo, a nonprofit that looks to allow people to run background checks with only their first name and phone number or full name. The investment, of which Match didn’t disclose the amount, will …

NBC News reports: Netflix has never made a big deal about password-sharing, but a new test suggests the company may be reconsidering. Netflix is trying out a new policy with some customers, prompting certain people to sign up for a separate account if they aren’t watching with the subscriber. The message reads: “If you don’t live with the owner of …

Bloomberg News reports: A group of hackers say they breached a massive trove of security-camera data collected by Silicon Valley startup Verkada Inc., gaining access to live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, companies, police departments, prisons and schools. Companies whose footage was exposed include carmaker Tesla Inc. and software provider Cloudflare Inc. In addition, hackers were able to …

Axios reports: Nearly every big news site saw its traffic decline in February, compared to a tumultuous January that included the Capitol insurrection and Biden’s inauguration. Publishers’ traffic was down across the board, and many major sites saw traffic dip more than 20%, according to data from traffic analytics company SimilarWeb. Politics consumption dropped most dramatically, tumbling 28%. News consumers …