"Salon reports amateur-hour mistakes in the attempted rollout of FRANK, a social media site envisioned by Mike Lindell of MyPillow," writes Slashdot reader Tom239. "A Drupal expert described the code as 'not even student work.'" From the report: Speaking to Salon on Thursday afternoon about Lindell's site, one "Acquia Certified Drupal Grand Master," who oversees a technology firm that employs numerous other "grandmasters," said that Lindell's site was set up for failure from its inception, noting that its developers -- whom Lindell compared to Navy SEALs -- had failed to carry out basic "Drupal 101" tasks. One coder who spoke to Salon in great detail explained the potential shortcomings of the pillow maven's program code and the patchy work done by his developer team. "Drupal can power high powerful websites, sites with lots of traffic," the expert said, adding that it isn't the right software to build a social media site with, since it's not designed to handle a large amount of user-generated content. "Lindell's website was basically trying to make soup for scratch for everybody," said the expert, who claimed more than 25 years of experience in the IT field.

"In my professional opinion, it will be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for Lindell to accomplish his vision with Drupal and his own servers," the expert told Salon. "Despite how much I love it, Drupal simply isn't the right tool for the number of users with the features that he wants to provide. It would take a massive effort of 12 to 18 months to build out the needed hosting setup and application architecture, and this would come with an enormous degree of risk. The idea that he could do this in just a couple of months is patently absurd, and I think the results speak for themselves."

"When I was looking at the code, in the browser, they basically launched the site while it was still in development mode," one expert told Salon, citing the fact that developers had failed to check a box to aggregate files on the platform as the first red flag he ran across. "Their files were not aggregated, and by the way, that's a check box in Drupal -- you literally check a box and click save, My jaw dropped when I saw that. I was like, 'They did not try to launch this thing without aggregation turned on!'" The second major red flag another Drupal expert found was that Lindell's site was spitting out coded error messages to users, which leaves the platform vulnerable to attacks. "This is a shit show," the expert said, calling this an "obvious" issue that coders learn how to prevent in "Drupal 101."
Elsewhere it was reported that Lindell's supposed free-speech haven will not allow swearing, pornography, or the use of 'god's name in vain'.

Chris Poole, who founded controversial online community 4chan before joining Google in 2016, has left the search giant after jumping among several groups within the company, CNBC has learned. From the report: Poole's last official day at Google was April 13th, according to an internal repository viewed by CNBC, which described his last role as a product manager. Oftentimes, employee shares attached to hiring vest at the five-year mark, though it's unclear if that's a reason for Poole's departure now. Poole, who goes by the moniker "Moot," founded 4chan in 2003 at age 15. It grew into one of the most influential and controversial online communities to date. Rolling Stone famously called him a boy-genius and the "Mark Zuckerberg of the online underground." [...]

Poole revealed in 2016 that he'd joined Google as a continuation of his work, and in a now-removed post, stated he'd use his "experience from a dozen years of building online communities" and "grow in ways one simply cannot on their own." He joined as product manager in the photos and streams unit, which oversaw social networking efforts under VP Bradley Horowitz at the time. That sparked speculation that the company hired him to help it revamp its social media ambitions, some of which aimed to compete with Facebook. Poole jumped between several different roles during his five years. At one point, he reportedly became a partner at Google's in-house start-up incubator, Area 120, which was just getting off the ground in 2016. He then became a product manager in Google's Maps division, according to Crunchbase.

Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public. Wired reports: A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher -- who said he went public after Facebook said it didn't think the weakness he found was "important" enough to be fixed -- fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next. "As you can see from the output log here, I'm getting a significant amount of results from them," the researcher said as the video showed the tool crunching the address list. "I've spent maybe $10 to buy 200-odd Facebook accounts. And within three minutes, I have managed to do this for 6,000 [email] accounts."

The researcher [...] said that Facebook Email Search exploited a front-end vulnerability that he reported to Facebook recently but that "they [Facebook] do not consider to be important enough to be patched." Earlier this year, Facebook had a similar vulnerability that was ultimately fixed. "This is essentially the exact same vulnerability," the researcher says. "And for some reason, despite me demonstrating this to Facebook and making them aware of it, they have told me directly that they will not be taking action against it."

In a statement, Facebook said: "It appears that we erroneously closed out this bug bounty report before routing to the appropriate team. We appreciate the researcher sharing the information and are taking initial actions to mitigate this issue while we follow up to better understand their findings." A Facebook representative didn't respond to a question asking if the company told the researcher it didn't consider the vulnerability important enough to warrant a fix. The representative said Facebook engineers believe they have mitigated the leak by disabling the technique shown in the video.

TikTok is facing a legal challenge from former children's commissioner for England Anne Longfield over how it collects and uses children's data. The BBC reports: The claim is being filed on behalf of millions of children in the UK and EU who have used the hugely popular video-sharing app. If successful, the children affected could each be owed thousands of pounds. TikTok said the case was without merit and it would fight it.

Lawyers will allege that TikTok takes children's personal information, including phone numbers, videos, exact location and biometric data, without sufficient warning, transparency or the necessary consent required by law, and without children or parents knowing what is being done with that information. The claim is being launched on behalf of all children who have used TikTok since 25 May 2018, regardless of whether they have an account or their privacy settings. Children not wishing to be represented can opt out. "TikTok is a hugely popular social media platform that has helped children keep in touch with their friends during an incredibly difficult year," says Ms. Longfield. "However, behind the fun songs, dance challenges and lip-sync trends lies something far more sinister."

She alleges the firm is "a data collection service that is thinly veiled as a social network" which has "deliberately and successfully deceived parents." She added that those parents have a "right to know" what private information is being collected via TikTok's "shadowy data collection practices."

In response, TikTok said: "Privacy and safety are top priorities for TikTok and we have robust policies, processes and technologies in place to help protect all users, and our teenage users in particular. We believe the claims lack merit and intend to vigorously defend the action."

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans' social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News. From the report: The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as "inflammatory" postings and then sharing that information across government agencies. "Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021," says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as "law enforcement sensitive" and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers. "Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts."

The CEOs of Uber and Just Eat Takeaway on Wednesday became engaged in a public spat after Uber announced it is planning to launch in Germany -- a market that is currently dominated by Just Eat Takeaway. From a report: Uber Eats will launch in Berlin in the next few weeks and potentially expand into other German cities in the coming months. The news was first reported by The Financial Times and confirmed to CNBC. Just Eat Takeaway CEO Jitse Groen accused Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi of trying to "depress" his firm's share price on Twitter on Wednesday. Shares of Just Eat Takeaway closed down almost 3%. Khosrowshahi responded: "Advice: pay a little less attention to your short term stock price and more attention to your Tech and Ops." Shortly thereafter, Groen replied: "If I may ... start paying taxes, minimum wage and social security premiums before giving a founder advice on how he should run his business."

A sweeping proposed piece of legislation with support from both Democrats and Republicans will ban law enforcement agencies from buying data from controversial firm Clearview AI, as well as force agencies to obtain a warrant before sourcing location data from brokers. From a report: The news presents significant action against two of the main avenues of law enforcement surveillance uncovered in recent years: the widespread proliferation of facial recognition technology using images scraped from social media, and the warrantless supply chain of location data from ordinary smartphone apps, through middlemen, and eventually to agencies. "The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act is, in my view, a critically important bill that will prevent agencies from circumventing core constitutional protections by purchasing access to data they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain," Kate Ruane, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Motherboard in a phone call. The ACLU and a host of civil, digital, and race activism groups have endorsed the bill, according to the office of Senator Ron Wyden, which has spearheaded the legislation. "I think it is a clear and good step for Congress to take, and I hope that the bill moves forward quickly,' Ruane added.

According to the United Kingdom's Security Service, known as MI5, hostile states are creating fake LinkedIn profiles to trick users into spilling secrets. The BBC reports: At least 10,000 UK nationals have been approached by fake profiles linked to hostile states, on the professional social network LinkedIn, over the past five years, according to MI5. "Malicious profiles" are being used on "an industrial scale," the security agency's chief, Ken McCallum, said. A campaign has been launched to educate government workers about the threat. The effort -- Think Before You Link -- warns foreign spies are targeting those with access to sensitive information. One concern is the victims' colleagues, in turn, become more willing to accept follow-up requests - because it looks as if they share a mutual acquaintance.

MI5 did not specifically name LinkedIn but BBC News has learned the Microsoft-owned service is indeed the platform involved. The 10,000-plus figure includes staff in virtually every government departments as well as key industries, who might be offered speaking or business and travel opportunities that could lead to attempts to recruit them to provide confidential information. And it is thought a large number of those approached engaged initially with the profiles that contacted them online.

Microsoft and video-game chat company Discord have ended takeover talks after Discord rejected a $12 billion bid, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a people familiar with the matter. From the report: Discord is now focused on a potential public listing in the long term, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Several other companies also tried to buy Discord in recent weeks, the people said. The identity of these companies couldn't immediately be learned. San Francisco-based Discord is best known for its free service that lets gamers communicate by video, voice and text. People stuck at home during the pandemic have increasingly used its technology for study groups, dance classes, book clubs and other virtual gatherings.

Facebook wants you to believe that the scraping of 533 million people's personal data from its platform, and the dumping of that data online by nefarious people, is something to be "normalised." The Register: A blundering Facebook public relations operative managed to send a journalist a copy of an internal document detailing the social network's strategy for containing the leaking of 533 million accounts -- and what the memo contained was infuriating though unsurprising. Belgian tech journalist Pieterjan van Leemputten asked the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company some questions about the theft and dumping online of account data earlier this month.

Miscreants had helped themselves to 70GB of names, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, and more from people's Facebook profiles, thanks to a security weakness in the platform. Having stolen the data in 2019, crims bought and sold it among themselves before one shared it via a Tor-hidden site in early April, inviting anyone to come and help themselves to it all. Yet when van Leemputten asked Facebook's mouthpieces to respond, what he got in return was quite unexpected. As he told The Register: "Facebook accidentally sent me an internal email where they literally state that they will frame the recent 533 million data leak as a 'broad industry issue' and that they want to normalize this." The memo added, "To do this, the team is proposing a follow-up post in the next several weeks that talks more broadly about our anti-scraping work and provides more transparency around the amount of work we're doing in this area."

Reddit unveiled its take on a Clubhouse-like social audio product on Monday, called Reddit Talk. The Verge reports: The company is billing Monday's announcement as a "sneak preview," since the feature isn't widely available yet. Moderators that want to try the feature out in their subreddit can add themselves to a waitlist for access. Based on Reddit's description and images shared by the company, Reddit Talk appears to look a lot like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and other social audio products. Talks will "live" within subreddits, according to Reddit.

During the initial tests, only subreddit moderators will be able to initiate a Talk, and Talk hosts will have the ability to invite, mute, and remove speakers. While only mods can kick off Talks in the beginning, anyone on iOS and Android can listen to one. Moderation has been an issue for Clubhouse, so it's notable that Reddit is starting small and giving access only to moderators first. At some point in the future, mods will be able to bring on trusted community members as co-hosts. The company says it is "testing ways" for hosts to customize how Talks look with emojis and different background colors, and users will be able to change their avatar, too. Earlier today, Facebook also announced that the company is working on a Clubhouse clone.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced that the company is building audio features where users can engage in real-time conversations with others, similar to the app Clubhouse, which gained a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles earlier this year. From a report: Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to invest a lot in audio features and build them out over the coming years. "We think that audio is of course also going to be a first-class medium, and there are all these different products to be built across this whole spectrum," Zuckerberg told Casey Newton on Monday on the Sidechannel Discord server. The new feature is called Live Audio Rooms, and the company expects it will be available to everyone on the Facebook app and Messenger this summer, the company said in a blog post. The company will start to test Live Audio Rooms within groups on Facebook. "You already have these communities that are organized around interests, and allowing people to come together and have rooms where they can talk, I think it'll be a very useful thing," he said. The feature comes with little surprise.

Apple has approved Parler's return to the iOS app store following improvements the social media company made to better detect and moderate hate speech and incitement, according to a letter the iPhone maker sent to Congress on Monday. From a report: The decision clears the way for Parler, an app popular with conservatives including some members of the far right, to be downloaded once again on Apple devices. The letter -- addressed to Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Ken Buck and obtained by CNN -- explained that since the app was removed from Apple's platform in January for violations of its policies, Parler "has proposed updates to its app and the app's content moderation practices." On April 14, Apple's app review team told Parler that its proposed changes were sufficient, the letter continued. Now, all Parler needs to do is to flip the switch. "Apple anticipates that the updated Parler app will become available immediately upon Parler releasing it," Apple's letter said. Parler, an alternative to Facebook and Twitter that bills itself as a haven for free speech, was removed from major tech platforms in early January following the US Capitol riots of Jan. 6.

Slashdot reader quonset reminds us that NASA's Mars helicopter "is officially 'go' for flight!," according to the Twitter feed of the Perserverance Rover, which notes that its cameras are ready to film the historic event.

"Watch with the team as they receive data and find out if they were successful," adds NASA's official feed. "Meet us in mission control April 19 at 6:15am ET (10:15am UTC): Data from the first flight will return to Earth a few hours following the autonomous flight. A livestream will begin at 6:15 a.m. EDT (3:15 a.m. PDT), as the helicopter team prepares to receive the data downlink in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Watch on NASA Television, the agency app, website, and social media platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.

If the flight takes place April 19, a postflight briefing will be held at 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT)...

The public and media also may ask questions on social media during the livestream and briefing using #MarsHelicopter. Find the latest schedule updates here.

The Perseverance rover will provide support during flight operations, taking images, collecting environmental data, and hosting the base station that enables the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth.
Update: And it's a success! "We've been talking for so long about our Wright Brothers moment on Mars, and here it is," said NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager MiMi Aung. The Perserverance rover has already tweeted out a choppy video.

"Renting is terrible. Owning is worse. A third option is necessary," argues a recent article in the Atlantic, "a way to rent without making someone else rich."

It's written by Shane Phillips, who's the Housing Inititiative Project Manager at UCLA's Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies: Largely as a consequence of housing prices, Generation X held less than half as much wealth in 2019 as Baby Boomers of the same age did two decades earlier, and Millennials are on course to hold even less. Something has gone catastrophically wrong, and the problem won't be solved by doubling down on homeownership; we've seen where that leads. But our current model of renting — a lifetime of uncertainty only to make someone else rich — won't do the job either. We need something new, an innovation on par with the government's development of 30-year mortgages nearly a century ago. We need a housing option that combines the accessibility, flexibility, and limited risk of renting with some of the stability and wealth-generating potential of homeownership.
His suggested solutiion? A public-ownership rental option: The foundation of the program would be quite simple: public ownership of housing, acquired or built with government loans — though run by local for-profit or nonprofit property managers — and rented at market prices. No saving for a down payment (or being given one by family) and no qualifying for a mortgage. The only requirements for participation in the public-ownership option would be (1) move in, and (2) pay rent.

As the loans were paid down, the equity would accrue to the tenants, minus the cost of operating and maintaining the building, administrative costs, and so on. Unlike rent-to-own programs, however, this option would never require that the tenant take out a mortgage. A renter would never truly "own" her unit. But she would claim a stake in the public portfolio of properties and be able to draw on that asset, perhaps in the form of monthly payments after a few years of renting, or larger dividends later in life, much like Social Security. The benefit could be transferred to any publicly owned apartment, allowing tenants to build wealth without being locked in place. After 35 or 40 years, a tenant might no longer owe any rent at all...

Renting in a public-ownership building would be an option for the large number of middle-income individuals who lack the resources or the immediate desire to become homeowners.

"A true-crime podcast has been credited with providing valuable information in a missing person case from the 1990s after two men were arrested," reports Newsweek: Kristin Smart, 19, of Stockton, California, went missing in May 1996 after returning to her dorm at California Polytechnic State University campus in San Luis Obispo. The case received widespread attention from Chris Lambert's Your Own Backyard podcast dedicated to investigating Smart's disappearance, which he began in September 2019.

The last person who was thought to have seen Smart alive was Paul Flores, 44, who was also a freshman at the time, when he offered to walk Smart back to her dorm. Since Smart's disappearance, Flores has been a person of interest, suspect, and prime suspect. Now, District Attorney Dan Dow alleges that Flores killed her in his dorm room following an attempted rape. On Tuesday, April 13, Flores was arrested for her murder, and his father Ruben Flores, 80, was arrested as an accessory to murder for allegedly helping his son conceal Smart's body, which has never been found.

San Luis Obispo County Sheriff Ian Parkinson said that they arrested the father and son on Tuesday after a search at Ruben Flores' home using ground-penetrating radar and cadaver dogs last month resulted in new evidence linked to Smart's disappearance... Parkinson also credited the Your Own Backyard podcast with raising awareness of the case which resulted in "valuable information" after a key witness came forward.
The Associated Press calls it "the latest in a line of true-crime podcasts credited with producing results in court," noting investigations by the Up and Vanished podcast also "led a man to confess to killing a Georgia beauty queen."

And they list some of the "compelling clues" uncovered by the podcaster investigating Kristin Smart's disappearance: A former colleague of Paul Flores' mother, Susan Flores, told him Mrs. Flores came into work after Memorial Day weekend 1996 — when Smart went missing — saying she didn't sleep well because her husband had gotten a phone call in the middle of the night and left in his car. "The speculation has been all along that Paul called his dad in the middle of the night and his dad came up and helped him get rid of Kristin's body," Lambert said.

A tenant who lived for a year at Susan Flores' home told him she heard a watch alarm every morning at 4:20 a.m. Smart had worked as a lifeguard at 5 a.m. at the Cal Poly pool, so it's possible she set her watch to wake up at that early hour.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this analysis from Just Security: Huawei's plans for 6G and beyond make U.S. concerns over 5G look paltry: Huawei is proposing a fundamental internet redesign, which it calls "New IP," designed to build "intrinsic security" into the web. Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut off an individual user's internet access at any time. In short, Huawei is looking to integrate China's "social credit," surveillance, and censorship regimes into the internet's architecture...

To avoid scrutiny of New IP's shortcomings, Huawei has circumvented international standards bodies where experts might challenge the technical shortcomings of the proposal. Instead, Huawei has worked through the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where Beijing holds more political sway...

Huawei dominance on New IP and 6G would not only create a less free, less interoperable internet, it would pave the way for authoritarian governments to gain expanded say over future changes to the internet for years to come.

Instagram for kids is a terrible idea, argues a columnist for the Observer. And yet: In March, Buzzfeed reported on Facebook's plans to develop a product for those too young to sign up to Instagram officially, as the platform requires users to be at least 13... Facebook says it will allow the company to focus on privacy and safety for children.

Last week, an international coalition of children's health advocates, brought together by the Boston-based, non-profit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, disagreed and wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg urging the company to drop its plans. "While collecting valuable family data and cultivating a new generation of Instagram users may be good for Facebook's bottom line, it will likely increase the use of Instagram by young children who are particularly vulnerable to the platform's manipulative and exploitative features," it said...

Maybe it is naive of me to expect that children will have any period of freedom from wondering "but how will it/I look?", but surely we should at least try to maintain that for as long as possible.

Aflorithmic, an AI-driven audio cloning startup, has created a digital version of Albert Einstein using AI voice cloning technology drawing on audio records of the famous scientist's actual voice. TechCrunch reports: Alforithmic says the "digital Einstein" is intended as a showcase for what will soon be possible with conversational social commerce. Which is a fancy way of saying deepfakes that make like historical figures will probably be trying to sell you pizza soon enough, as industry watchers have presciently warned. The startup also says it sees educational potential in bringing famous, long-deceased figures to interactive "life." Or, well, an artificial approximation of it -- the "life" being purely virtual and Digital Einstein's voice not being a pure tech-powered clone either; Alforithmic says it also worked with an actor to do voice modelling for the chatbot (because how else was it going to get Digital Einstein to be able to say words the real-deal would never even have dreamt of saying -- like, er, "blockchain"?). So there's a bit more than AI artifice going on here too.

In a blog post discussing how it recreated Einstein's voice the startup writes about progress it made on one challenging element associated with the chatbot version -- saying it was able to shrink the response time between turning around input text from the computational knowledge engine to its API being able to render a voiced response, down from an initial 12 seconds to less than three (which it dubs "near-real-time"). But it's still enough of a lag to ensure the bot can't escape from being a bit tedious. The report notes that the video engine powering the 3D character rendering components of this "digital human" version of Einstein is the work of another synthesized media company, UneeQ, which is hosting the interactive chatbot version on its website.

Facebook has reached a key environmental goal early: The social media company now purchases enough renewable energy to run all of its operations around the world, it announced this week. CBS News reports: Facebook joins a handful of tech companies that have committed to ambitious green energy goals, including Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Over the past few years, Facebook has cut its greenhouse gas emissions significantly. Since 2017, carbon emissions from the company's operations have fallen by 94%, surpassing its goals of reducing emissions by three-quarters, according to its sustainability report. Emissions were cut primarily by focusing on the massive data centers that power the servers running Facebook's services, as well as its office locations.

"Data centers for us are the primary sources of electricity consumption and the primary footprint we've been thinking about," said Urvi Parekh, the company's director of renewable energy. Cutting down emissions meant "making our data centers as efficient as possible and reducing the amount of electricity that's consumed" as well as purchasing enormous amounts of wind and solar power to run those centers. Last year, when most of its employees started working remotely, Facebook said it purchased enough clean energy to match the amount used by employees working at home. The company still emits some carbon from its construction activity and natural-gas use in some locations where it has no other energy options, Parekh said. Last year, that was the equivalent of 38,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (or about as much carbon as is emitted from 8,900 cars driving for one year). Facebook is offsetting those emissions by investing in reforestation and other carbon-removal projects, Parekh said. The company has set a new goal of reaching net-zero emissions across its entire supply chain by 2030.