Longtime Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat writes: Chuck Norris, known for his roles in action films and as Texas Ranger Cordell Walker on the TV show "Walker, Texas Ranger," passed away on March 19, leaving behind a legacy of inspiring millions around the world. He was 86.

He became Internet phenomenon after "Chuck Norris Facts" went viral online with such wildly hyperbolic statements as, "Chuck Norris had a staring contest with the sun -- and won," and, "When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn't push himself up, he pushes the Earth down."

His death was announced by his family through his official Instagram account, but no further details were immediately available. He was hospitalized earlier that day in Hawaii after experiencing a medical emergency, the family said.

Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account." TechCrunch reports: Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said.

The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."

Cloudflare is appealing a 14.2 million-euro fine from Italy for refusing to comply with its "Piracy Shield" law, which requires blocking access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service within 30 minutes. The company argues the system lacks oversight, risks widespread overblocking, and could undermine core Internet infrastructure. Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: Piracy Shield is "a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broader Internet," Cloudflare said in a blog post this week. "After Cloudflare resisted registering for Piracy Shield and challenged it in court, the Italian communications regulator, AGCOM, fined Cloudflare... We appealed that fine on March 8, and we continue to challenge the legality of Piracy Shield itself." Cloudflare called the fine of 14.2 million euros ($16.4 million) "staggering." AGCOM issued the penalty in January 2026, saying Cloudflare flouted requirements to disable DNS resolution of domain names and routing of traffic to IP addresses reported by copyright holders.

Cloudflare had previously resisted a blocking order it received in February 2025, arguing that it would require installing a filter on DNS requests that would raise latency and negatively affect DNS resolution for sites that aren't subject to the dispute over piracy. Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said that censoring the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would force the firm "not just to censor the content in Italy but globally."

Piracy Shield was designed to combat pirated streams of live sports events, requiring network operators to block domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes of receiving a copyright notification. Cloudflare said the fine should have been capped at 140,000 euros ($161,000), or 2 percent of its Italian earnings, but that "AGCOM calculated the fine based on our global revenue, resulting in a penalty nearly 100 times higher than the legal limit."

Despite its complaints about the size of the fine, Cloudflare said the principles at stake "are even larger" than the financial penalty. "Piracy Shield is an unsupervised electronic portal through which an unidentified set of Italian media companies can submit websites and IP addresses that online service providers registered with Piracy Shield are then required to block within 30 minutes," Cloudflare said. Cloudflare is pushing for the law to be struck down, arguing that it is "incompatible with EU law, most notably the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires that any content restriction be proportionate and subject to strict procedural safeguards."

In addition to appealing the fine, Cloudflare says it will continue to challenge Piracy Shield in Italian courts, engage with EU officials, and seek full access to AGCOM's Piracy Shield records.

Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues that most commercial SaaS could inevitably become OpenSource, not out of ideology but economics. The author points to Proxmox replacing VMware at enterprise scale and startups like Holosign replicating DocuSign at $19/month flat as evidence. The catch, the article claims, is that maintainers who refuse to embrace AI tools risk being forked, or simply replicated from scratch, by those who do.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to existing job categories and job tasks. But the papers ignore some of the most impactful and most common uses of AI today: AI porn and AI slop.

Anthropic's paper, called "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence," essentially attempts to find 1:1 correlations between tasks that people do today at their jobs and things people are using Claude for. The researchers also try to predict if a job's tasks "are theoretically possible with AI," which resulted in this chart, which has gone somewhat viral and was included in a newsletter by MSNOW's Phillip Bump and threaded about by tech journalist Christopher Mims. (Because everything is terrible, the research is now also feeding into a gambling website where you can see the apparent odds of having your job replaced by AI.) In his thread, Mims makes the case that the "theoretical capability" of AI to do different jobs in different sectors is totally made up, and that this chart basically means nothing. Mims makes a good and fair observation: The nature of the many, many studies that attempt to predict which people are going to lose their jobs to AI are all flawed because the inputs must be guessed, to some degree.

But I believe most of these studies are flawed in a deeper way: They do not take into account how people are actually using AI, though Anthropic claims that that is exactly what it is doing. "We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily," the researchers write. This is based in part on the "Anthropic Economic Index," which was introduced in an extremely long paper published in January that tries to catalog all the high-minded uses of AI in specific work-related contexts. These uses include "Complete humanities and social science academic assignments across multiple disciplines," "Draft and revise professional workplace correspondence and business communications," and "Build, debug, and customize web applications and websites." Not included in any of Anthropic's research are extremely popular uses of AI such as "create AI porn" and "create AI slop and spam." These uses are destroying discoverability on the internet, cause cascading societal and economic harms. "Anthropic's research continues a time-honored tradition by AI companies who want to highlight the 'good' uses of AI that show up in their marketing materials while ignoring the world-destroying applications that people actually use it for," argues Koebler. "Meanwhile, as we have repeatedly shown, huge parts of social media websites and Google search results have been overtaken by AI slop. Chatbots themselves have killed traffic to lots of websites that were once able to rely on ad revenue to employ people, so on and so forth..."

"This is all to say that these studies about the economic impacts of AI are ignoring a hugely important piece of context: AI is eating and breaking the internet and social media," writes Koebler, in closing. "We are moving from a many-to-many publishing environment that created untold millions of jobs and businesses towards a system where AI tools can easily overwhelm human-created websites, businesses, art, writing, videos, and human activity on the internet. What's happening may be too chaotic, messy, and unpleasant for AI companies to want to reckon with, but to ignore it entirely is malpractice."

In 2024 Anthropic was sued over claims it infringed copyrights when training LLMs.

But as they try to settle, they may have a problem. The Free Software Foundation announced Friday that Anthropic's training data apparently even included the book "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" — for which the Free Software Foundation holds a copyright. It was published by O'Reilly and by the FSF under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL). This is a free license allowing use of the work for any purpose without payment.

Obviously, the right thing to do is protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM, together with the complete model, training configuration settings, and the accompanying software source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom.

We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation.
"The FSF doesn't usually sue for copyright infringement," reads the headline on the FSF's announcement, "but when we do, we settle for freedom."

"A few developers found a way, for now, to turn a few of these increasingly mediocre Amazon Show devices into friendly, useful, open computers," writes the co-founder of the gaming/tech news site Aftermath. For under $50 each, he bought some used versions of the devices and tested their instructions, partly to escape the full-screen ads Amazon began showing late last year, and also to overwrite Amazon's locked down Android fork "Fire OS" (and "a similarly neutered version of Linux called Vega OS") Customers who bought these devices and used them for several years were not used to them showing full screen ads, and now they do. People were justifiably pissed. So what do you do when an already evil device gets shittier...? I wiped Fire OS from the device and used ADB sideload to directly load two packages on the device: LineageOS and MindTheGapps. MindTheGapps lets you turn the device into something resembling a traditional Android device, for both good and bad.... It took a few times of wiping the device, but after a few tries it finally worked as intended... I immediately installed the Home Assistant app...

Not only can the hacked Echo Show 8 control my entire smart home, it now plays back my entire local music library as well as any internet radio channels like The Lot Radio and NTS. It can also synchronize with any additional Echo Show running LineageOS in my house using the SendSpin protocol... I would gladly take it any day of the week over most of the devices these companies offer, especially Amazon. It may not be as intuitive as out-of-the-box smart home products, but I don't need my devices to be intuitive, I need them to behave. I had finally found a smart display that wasn't a cop...

The hardware is old and creaky, and after the hack it can only use 1GB of the 2GB of ram. And yet it still manages to feel snappier than the stock hardware. "The amount of telemetry, ads, and general bloat Amazon shoves down our throats definitely doesn't help performance," [XDA Devs Forum user] Rortiz2 told me. "That's actually another reason why we did LineageOS, it kind of gives the device a second life. Even though it's still a bit buggy, it feels way better to use than the stock firmware...." If you want a smart speaker with a display that just runs a stripped-down version of Android that you have full control over, you're going to have a hard time finding it outside of these three specific models unless you cobble something together yourself. It is a deceptively simple thing to desire — the kiosk computer from science fiction that isn't a narc — yet few companies really offer it.
"It should be against the law to not give an end user the ability to consensually load whatever OS or program they want on their device..." the article concludes, arguing that "If we budge on the inalienable right to modify our hardware then we forsake a key part about what makes computers special."

And in the mean time, "There are so many devices that could be put to use rotting in e-waste facilities and thrift stores..."

sdinfoserv writes: After running a Reddit clone for a couple of months, the Digg beta shut down again. The website is a splash memo from CEO Justin Mezzell, blaming the latest "Hard Reset" on bots. "Building on the internet in 2026 is different," writes Mezzell. "We learned that the hard way. Today we're sharing difficult news: we've made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team..."

The decision was made after struggling to gain traction and an overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority," says Mezzell. "Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."

"We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."

Despite the setback, Digg plans to rebuild with a smaller team, with founder Kevin Rose returning to work full-time on a new direction for the platform. "Starting the first week of April, Kevin will be putting his focus back on the company he built twenty+ years ago," writes Mezzell. "He'll continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus."

Slashback: The Rise of Digg.com

GFiber (a.k.a. Google Fiber) and Astound Broadband announced that they plan to merge into a deal backed by infrastructure investor Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners. The resulting company will be majority owned by Stonepeak, with Alphabet becoming a "significant minority shareholder." Light Reading reports: Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners teamed with Patriot Media to acquire Astound in November 2020 for $8.1 billion. Stonepeak is Astound's largest investor. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. The combined business will be led by the existing GFiber executive team. GFiber is currently led by CEO Dinni Jain. Jain, a former Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications exec, took the helm of what was then called Google Fiber in 2018.

"This agreement advances GFiber's mission of redefining internet connectivity and represents a major step toward its goal of operational and financial independence," the companies said. "GFiber will have the external capital and strategic focus needed to accelerate its next phase of growth, expanding its customer-first approach and pioneering fiber technology across the country." GFiber's combination with Astound represents "a strategic opportunity to scale our customer-focused approach to connect more households to a truly different type of internet service," Jain said in a statement.

AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said.

The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite connectivity to extend coverage across urban, suburban and rural areas. [...] AT&T is also working with satellite partner AST SpaceMobile to expand connectivity to remote regions where traditional network infrastructure is difficult to deploy. The company said it would continue spending on the FirstNet network built for first responders and bolster investment in network security and artificial intelligence-driven threat detection.

Axios reports that Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral, Reddit-like social network designed for AI agents. Humans are welcome, but only to observe. Axios reports: The deal brings Moltbook's creators -- Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr -- into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Meta did not disclose Moltbook's purchase price. The deal is expected to close mid-March, Meta says, with the pair starting at MSL on March 16. When it launched in late January, Moltbook was labeled the "most interesting place on the internet" by open-source developer and writer Simon Willison. "Browsing around Moltbook is so much fun. A lot of it is the expected science fiction slop, with agents pondering consciousness and identity. There's also a ton of genuinely useful information, especially on m/todayilearned."

In an internal post seen by Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah said existing Moltbook customers can temporarily continue using the platform. "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." He added: "Their team has unlocked new ways for agents to interact, share content, and coordinate complex tasks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.

The new hotness in AI-based assistants -- OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) -- has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted. If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your entire digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.

Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic's Claude and Microsoft's Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn't just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it's designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done. "The testimonials are remarkable," the AI security firm Snyk observed. "Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who've set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they're away from their desks." You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. [...] Last month, Meta AI safety director Summer Yue said OpenClaw unexpectedly started mass-deleting messages in her email inbox, despite instructions to confirm those actions first. She wrote: "Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw 'confirm before acting' and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn't stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb."

Krebs also noted the many misconfigured OpenClaw installations users had set up, leaving their administrative dashboards publicly accessible online. According to pentester Jamieson O'Reilly, "a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online." When those exposed interfaces are accessed, attackers can retrieve the agent's configuration and sensitive credentials. O'Reilly warned attackers could access "every credential the agent uses -- from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys."

"You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen," O'Reilly added. And because you control the agent's perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they're displayed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned. In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) -- the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT -- successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted. The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a "fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online".

In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a "Dolores park." In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence. While this example was fictional, the paper's authors highlighted scenarios in which governments use AI to surveil dissidents and activists posting anonymously, or hackers are able to launch "highly personalized" scams.

System76 isn't the only one criticizing new age-verification laws. The blog 9to5Linux published an "informal" look at other discussions in various Linux communities. Earlier this week, Ubuntu developer Aaron Rainbolt proposed on the Ubuntu mailing list an optional D-Bus interface (org.freedesktop.AgeVerification1) that can be implemented by arbitrary applications as a distro sees fit, but Canonical responded that the company does not yet have a solution to announce for age declaration in Ubuntu. "Canonical is aware of the legislation and is reviewing it internally with legal counsel, but there are currently no concrete plans on how, or even whether, Ubuntu will change in response," said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. "The recent mailing list post is an informal conversation among Ubuntu community members, not an announcement. While the discussion contains potentially useful ideas, none have been adopted or committed to by Canonical."

Similar talks are underway in the Fedora and Linux Mint communities about this issue in case the California Digital Age Assurance Act law and similar laws from other states and countries are to be enforced. At the same time, other OS developers, like MidnightBSD, have decided to exclude California from desktop use entirely.
Slashdot contacted Hayley Tsukayama, Director of State Affairs at EFF, who says their organization "has long warned against age-gating the internet. Such mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet."

And there's another problem. "Many of these mandates imagine technology that does not currently exist." Such poorly thought-out mandates, in truth, cannot achieve the purported goal of age verification. Often, they are easy to circumvent and many also expose consumers to real data breach risk.

These burdens fall particularly heavily on developers who aren't at large, well-resourced companies, such as those developing open-source software. Not recognizing the diversity of software development when thinking about liability in these proposals effectively limits software choices — and at a time when computational power is being rapidly concentrated in the hands of the few. That harms users' and developers' right to free expression, their digital liberties, privacy, and ability to create and use open platforms...

Rather than creating age gates, a well-crafted privacy law that empowers all of us — young people and adults alike — to control how our data is collected and used would be a crucial step in the right direction.

darwinmac writes: Mozilla is working on a huge redesign for its Firefox browser, codenamed "Nova," which will bring pastel gradients, a refreshed new tab page, floating "island" UI elements, and more. "From the mockups, it appears Mozilla took some inspiration from Googles Material You (or at least, the dynamic color extraction part of it) because the browser color accent appears influenced by the wallpaper setting," reports Neowin. "Choosing a mint-green desktop background automatically shifts the top navigation bars to match that exact shade."

Mozilla has a habit of redesigning Firefox every few years. Before "Nova," there was the "Proton" redesign in 2021, the "Photon" redesign in 2017, and the "Australis" redesign in 2014. Nova is still in early development, so it might take a year or two before it appears in an official stable Firefox release. Neowin adds: "Not every redesign project ends well for Mozilla, though. You might remember 2012's Firefox Metro, an ambitious attempt to build a custom browser for Windows 8s touch-first interface. The team built it to operate both as a traditional desktop application and as a touch-optimized Metro app. The whole thing was scrapped in 2014 after two years in development due to a dismally low user adoption rate (a preview version of the software had been released a year earlier on the Aurora channel)."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI "hallucinations," or errors, to the resulting article. The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world's largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they're remedied by Wikipedia's open governance model. The issue centers around a program run by the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a nonprofit that was found to be "mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South" to translate English Wikipedia articles into other languages. Some translators began using tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT to speed up the process, but editors reviewing the work found numerous hallucinations, including factual errors, missing citations, and references to unrelated sources.

"Ultimately the editors decided to implement restrictions against OKA translators who make multiple errors, but not block OKA translation as a rule," reports 404 Media.

fjo3 shares a report from Reason Magazine: Effective January 1, 2027, providers of computer operating systems in California will be required to implement age verification. That's just part of a wave of state and national laws attempting to limit children's access to potentially risky content without considering the perils such laws themselves pose. Now, not a moment too soon, over 400 computer scientists have signed an open letter warning that the rush to protect children from online dangers threatens to introduce new risks including censorship, centralized power, and loss of privacy. They caution that age-verification requirements "might cause more harm than good." The group of computer scientists from around the world cautions that "those deciding which age-based controls need to exist, and those enforcing them gain a tremendous influence on what content is accessible to whom on the internet." They add that "this influence could be used to censor information and prevent users from accessing services."

"Regulating the use of VPNs, or subjecting their use to age assurance controls, will decrease the capability of users to defend their privacy online. This will not only force regular users to leave a larger footprint on the network, but will leave a number of at-risk populations unprotected, such as journalists, activists, or domestic abuse victims." It continues: "We note that we do not believe that trying to regulate VPN use for non-compliant users would be any more effective than trying to forbid the use of end-to-end encrypted communication for criminals. Secure cryptography is widely available and can no longer be put back into a box."

"If minors or adults are deplatformed via age-related bans, they are likely to migrate to find similar services," warn the scientists. "Since the main platforms would all be regulated, it is likely that they would migrate to fringe sites that escape regulation." With data on everyone collected in order to restrict the activites of minors, data abuses and privacy risks increase. "This in itself increases privacy risks, with data being potentially abused by the provider itself or its subcontractors, or third parties that get access to it, e.g., after a data breach, like the 70K users that had their government ID photos leaked after appealing age assessment errors on Discord."

Instead of mandated age restrictions, the letter urges lawmakers to consider the dangers and suggest regulating social media algorithms instead. They also recommend "support for parents to locally prevent access to non-age-appropriate content or apps, without age-based control needing to be implemented by service providers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications, operator of the Spectrum cable brand, has obtained Federal Communications Commission permission to buy Cox and surpass Comcast as the country's largest home Internet service provider. Charter has 29.7 million residential and business Internet customers compared to Comcast's 31.26 million. Buying Cox will give Charter another 5.9 million Internet customers. The FCC approved the deal on Friday, but the companies still need Justice Department approval and sign-offs from states including California and New York.

Opponents of Charter's $34.5 billion acquisition told the FCC that eliminating Cox as an independent entity will make it easier for Charter and Comcast to raise prices. But the FCC dismissed those concerns on the grounds that Charter and Cox don't compete directly against each other in the vast majority of their territories.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's primary demand from companies seeking to merge has been to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies. In a press release (PDF), the Carr-led FCC said that "Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination," and that Charter's network-expansion plans will bring "faster broadband and lower prices" to rural areas. The merger was approved one day after Charter sent a letter to Carr outlining its actions to end DEI. Charter offers broadband and cable service in 41 states, while Cox does so in 18 states.

Over the weekend, Windows Latest noticed that Microsoft's official Copilot Discord server began automatically blocking the term "Microslop." As shown in a screenshot, any message containing the word is automatically prevented from posting, and users receive a moderation notice explaining that the message includes language deemed inappropriate under the server's rules. From the report: Windows Latest found that sending a message with the word "Microslop" inside the official Copilot Discord server immediately triggers an automated moderation response. The message does not appear publicly in the channel, and instead, only the sender sees the notice stating that the content is blocked by the server because it contains a phrase deemed inappropriate.

Of course, the internet rarely leaves things there. Shortly after Windows Latest posted about Copilot Discord server blocking Microslop on X, users began experimenting in the server with variations such as "Microsl0p" using a zero instead of the letter "o." Predictably, those versions slipped past the filter. Keyword moderation has always been something of a cat-and-mouse game, and this isn't any different.

What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included "Microslop" in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users.

CNN reports that images from Iran's capital "have shown cars jammed along Tehran's street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today's wave of attacks by the US and Israel." And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into "a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of ordinary levels," according to internet monitoring experts at NetBlocks.

CNN reports: Since Iran's brutal crackdown earlier this year, the regime has made progress to allow only a subset of people with security clearance to access the international web, experts said. After previous internet shutdowns, some platforms never returned. The Iranian government blocked Instagram after the internet shutdown and protests in 2022, and the popular messaging app Telegram following protests in 2018.
The International Atomic Energy Agency announced an hour ago that they're "closely monitoring developments" — keeping in contact with countries in the region and so far seeing "no evidence of any radiological impact." They're also urging "restraint to avoid any nuclear safety risks to people in the region."

UPDATE (1 PM PST): Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait "are shifting to remote learning starting Sunday until further notice following Iranâ(TM)s retaliatory strikes on Saturday," reports CNN.