Technology

Dozens of government websites have fallen victim to a PDF-based SEO scam, while others have been hijacked to sell sex toys.

Doordash announcement.

Rival tech giants DoorDash and Uber are suing New York City over laws requiring their apps to offer customers the chance to tip delivery workers at checkout — not after an order is placed — and set the default option to at least 10% of an order’s cost.

Reddit has filed a High Court challenge alleging that Australia's social media restrictions are being applied to the company inaccurately.

The company is currently complying with the legislation but has said the new law "has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors".

OpenAI.

• As part of this three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters.
• Agreement will make a selection of these fan-inspired Sora short form videos available to stream on Disney+.
• Alongside the licensing agreement, Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees.
• As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.

Original.

More than 45 queer and sex worker accounts have been removed across the UK, the Netherlands, and other countries in a coordinated wave of digital erasure. Meta is shutting down sex worker accounts, and the interconnected networks we belong to including queer collectives, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights organisations, and abortion access groups are being closed too. The digital spaces our communities built and depend on for organising, income, care, and safety are being systematically erased.

Relevant: Recent Censorship Cases.

Part 2.

We are building a comprehensive archive and analysis project examining published documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Our methodology involves systematically reviewing each available document with particular attention to small details and information that has received little or no public attention since the initial 2013 disclosures. Throughout this process, we will publish posts highlighting interesting previously unreported findings. The main project will hopefully be complete and made public in mid-to-late 2026.

Key Developer of the Military Registration Registry Hacked

This is what the website of the key developer of the Military Registration Registry, the company Mikord, looked like on Friday.

An anonymous group of hackers contacted us, taking responsibility for the hack. They had been inside the system for several months and handed over a huge amount of materials related to the Registry: technical and financial documentation, source code. We passed all the documents to the journalists of "Important Stories", a major investigation will be published soon. Then the documents will be made publicly available.

Thanks to the hack, the destruction of data and the entire infrastructure, the development of the Registry has been disrupted for at least several months. For a few more months, this machine (30 million records!) will not be used to send people to kill and die.

We remind you that the Registry is not yet operating at full capacity — for example, automatic restrictions for failing to appear for summons do not work: bans on traveling abroad, driving, obtaining loans.

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in this. The resistance is working. No to war

Source: Human Rights Organization, Go by the Forest Telegram post

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered diplomatic correspondence to stop using the Calibri font and return to the more traditional Times New Roman effective Wednesday, reversing a Biden administration shift to the less formal typeface that he called wasteful, confusing and unbefitting the dignity of U.S. government documents.

I'm gutted to hear this - I'm a big fan of Crucial memory and SSDs and all of my systems have at least one thing from them.

Micron will keep shipping Crucial products until the end of February 2026 and provide “continued warranty service and support.”

So only a few month left, plus however long they stay on retailers' shelves.