Facebook said Thursday that since 2020, all its operations have been fully supported by renewable energy, hitting a goal the social media giant set in 2018 to combat climate change. From a report: The social network made the announcement ahead of Earth Day, an annual event on April 22 that focuses on environmental protection. The milestone shows what tech firms are doing to offset the harmful impacts they have on the environment as they make new devices and power data centers amid a growing appetite for tech products. For years, environmental groups such as Greenpeace have been putting increasing pressure on businesses like Facebook to become more eco-friendly.

Facebook also said its operations reached "net zero emissions," which the company says means "removing the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere as we emit." These emissions contribute to some pollution and a warmer climate, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. The social network said in the last three years, it cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions by 94%, surpassing its 75% reduction goal. Some of the emissions Facebook reduced came from its data centers, offices and other buildings the company leases.

Chamber of Progress, a new tech industry group funded by giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google, is announcing its support for a corporate tax increase like the one President Joe Biden proposed to fund his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. From a report: The move sets Chamber of Progress, a new center-left group, apart from other business organizations that have opposed Biden's tax hike, like the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the group's endorsement does not reflect the individual views of each company that funds it, it does send a signal that the tech industry is open to higher tax rates and supports greater infrastructure investment. Chamber of Progress launched late last month and is an industry coalition focused on a range of economic, social and consumer issues, including creating a social safety net and tackling income inequality. Biden proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% to help fund his American Jobs Plan, which includes infrastructure proposals that span the entire economy. The plan includes money to expand broadband availability, which is key to the success of internet businesses, and other priorities the tech industry has emphasized, like clean energy.

Google today announced that it is moving FeedBurner to a new infrastructure but also deprecating its email subscription service. From a report: If you're an internet user of a certain age, chances are you used Google's FeedBurner to manage the RSS feeds of your personal blogs and early podcasts at some point. During the Web 2.0 era, it was the de facto standard for feed management and analytics, after all. Founded in 2004, with Dick Costolo as one of its co-founders (before he became Twitter's CEO in 2010), it was acquired by Google in 2007. Ever since, FeedBurner lingered in an odd kind of limbo. While Google had no qualms shutting down popular services like Google Reader in favor of its ill-fated social experiments like Google+, FeedBurner just kept burning feeds day in and day out, even as Google slowly deprecated some parts of the service, most notably its advertising integrations. [...] But in July, it is also shutting down some non-core features that don't directly involve feed management, most importantly the FeedBurner email subscription service that allowed you to get emailed alerts when a feed updates. Feed owners will be able to download their email subscriber lists (and will be able to do so after July, too).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Good news, disabled Australians! You'll soon be getting an app that will implement a welfare compliance regime designed by the people who brought you robo-debt. But don't worry, it'll have blockchain. No, this isn't good news at all. What makes it worse is that it's clear the government wants to extend technology-driven compliance to all Australians, with an emphasis on cracking down on your mistakes, not theirs. Kathryn Campbell, Secretary of the Department of Social Services, says the long-term plan is to have one app for all Commonwealth government services. "One to rule the world," she said last month, apparently oblivious to how evil that sounds.

Senators are already worried that the disability app, intended to be used by participants in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to claim expenses against their support plan, will go the way of COVIDSafe: Millions of dollars spent on technology that doesn't really do the job. The intention was to fix a poor web experience, and allow claims to be made from a mobile device. But instead of simply creating a better website, in 2018, the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) joined forces with CSIRO's Data61 and the Commonwealth Bank to trial blockchain-based smart money that would magically know whether the expense was legitimate or not. According to the CEO of the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), Martin Hoffman, that pilot app has been "very popular and well-received," and the feedback has been "extremely positive." The app will be "fully available in the coming months, first on Google Play and then Apple's app store," he said. "Given the horrendously complex NDIS environment, defective processes and vulnerable people, there needs to be considerable caution in the application of blockchain technology," wrote former NDIS Technology Authority chief Marie Johnson in a submission [PDF] to the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS. "Blockchain in itself -- as with other technology innovations -- does not address fundamental design and human rights issues. Ethics is paramount. The involvement of the Commonwealth Bank itself raises further ethics issues, given the value of participant data; the size of the market; and the yet to be realized emarket honey pot of data, funds and services."

You can view the detailed "Making Money Smart: Empowering NDIS participants with Blockchain technologies" report here (PDF).

The European Union is poised to ban artificial intelligence systems used for mass surveillance or for ranking social behavior, while companies developing AI could face fines as high as 4% of global revenue if they fail to comply with new rules governing the software applications. From a report: The rules are part of legislation set to be proposed by the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, according to a draft of the proposal obtained by Bloomberg. The details could change before the commission unveils the measure, which is expected to be as soon as next week. The EU proposal is expected to include the following rules:

* AI systems used to manipulate human behavior, exploit information about individuals or groups of individuals, used to carry out social scoring or for indiscriminate surveillance would all be banned in the EU. Some public security exceptions would apply.
* Remote biometric identification systems used in public places, like facial recognition, would need special authorization from authorities.
* AI applications considered to be 'high-risk' would have to undergo inspections before deployment to ensure systems are trained on unbiased data sets, in a traceable way and with human oversight.
* High-risk AI would pertain to systems that could endanger people's safety, lives or fundamental rights, as well as the EU's democratic processes -- such as self-driving cars and remote surgery, among others.
* Some companies will be allowed to undertake assessments themselves, whereas others will be subject to checks by third-parties. Compliance certificates issued by assessment bodies will be valid for up to five years.
* Rules would apply equally to companies based in the EU or abroad.

An online tool lets customers pay to unmask the phone numbers of Facebook users that liked a specific Page, and the underlying dataset appears to be separate from the 500 million account database that made headlines last week, signifying another data breach or large scale scraping of Facebook users' data, Motherboard reports. From the report: Motherboard verified the tool, which comes in the form of a bot on the social network and messaging platform Telegram, outputs accurate phone numbers of Facebook users that aren't included in the dataset of 500 million users. The data also appears to be different to another Telegram bot outputting Facebook phone numbers that Motherboard first reported on in January. "Hello, can you tell me how you got my number?" one person included in the dataset asked Motherboard when reached for comment. "Omg, this is insane," they added. Another person returned Motherboard's call and, after confirming their name, said "If you have my number then yes it seems the data is accurate."

A description for the bot reads "The bot give [sic] out the phone numbers of users who have liked the Facebook page." To use the bot, customers need to first identify the unique identification code of the Facebook Page they want to get phone numbers from, be that a band, restaurant, or any other sort of Page. This is possible with at least one free to use website. From there, customers enter that code into the bot, which provides a cost of the data in U.S. dollars and the option to proceed with the purchase, according to Motherboard's tests. A Page with tens of thousands of likes from Facebook users can cost a few hundred dollars, the bot shows. The data for Motherboard's own Page would return 134,803 results and cost $539, for example.

Cory Doctorow, writing at Wired: When we talk about social media monopolies, we focus too much on network effects, and not enough on switching costs. Yes, it's true that all your friends are already stuck in a Big Tech silo that doesn't talk to any of the other Big Tech silos. It needn't be that way: interoperable platforms have existed since the first two Arpanet nodes came online. You can phone anyone with a phone number and email anyone with an email address.

The reason you can't talk to Facebook users without having a Facebook account isn't that it's technically impossible -- it's that Facebook forbids it. What's more, Facebook (and its Big Tech rivals) have the law on their side: the once-common practice of making new products that just work with existing ones (like third-party printer ink, or a Mac program that can read Microsoft Office files, or an emulator that can play old games) has been driven to the brink of extinction by Big Tech. They were fine with this kind of "competitive compatibility" when it benefited them, but now that they dominate the digital world, it's time for it to die.

To restore competitive compatibility, we would need reform to many laws: software copyright and patents, the anti-circumvention laws that protect digital rights management, and the cybersecurity laws that let companies criminalize violations of their terms of service.

Professional political trolling is still a thriving underground industry around the world, despite crackdowns from the biggest tech firms. From a report: Coordinated online disinformation efforts offer governments and political actors a fast, cheap way to get under rivals' skin. They also offer a paycheck to people who are eager for work, typically in developing countries. "It's a more sophisticated means of disinformation to weaken your advisories," said Todd Carroll, CISO and VP of Cyber Operations at CybelAngel. Facebook last week said it had uncovered a massive troll farm in Albania, linked to an Iranian militant group. The operation had the the hallmarks of a typical troll farm, which Facebook defines as "a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation." "The main thing we saw was strange signals centralized coordination between different fake accounts," said Ben Nimmo, Facebook's global influence operations threat intelligence lead. Like numerous troll farms uncovered over the past few years, there was one easy giveaway: content from the network targeted Iran, but was posted on social media during normal working hours on Central European Time.

In late March, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) readmitted its founder Richard M. Stallman (RMS) to its board, catching everyone by surprise. Now, weeks later, RMS "offers a defensive non-apology apology for the words and actions that led to his resignation from the FSF," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols via ZDNet. Slashdot reader destinyland shares an excerpt of his statement from the Free Software Foundation's official website: Looking back over his life starting as a teenager, Stallman writes: "I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were."

"Sometimes I lost my temper because I didn't have the social skills to avoid it," Stallman adds. "Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them. Please direct your criticism at me, not at the Free Software Foundation. Occasionally I learned something about relationships and social skills, so over the years I've found ways to get better at these situations. When people help me understand an aspect of what went wrong, and that shows me a way of treating people better, I teach myself to recognize when I should act that way. I keep making this effort, and over time, I improve. Some have described me as being 'tone-deaf,' and that is fair. With my difficulty in understanding social cues, that tends to happen."

This is just an excerpt. But through eight short paragraphs, Stallman seems to want to offer up a larger context for his badly-received defense of Professor Minsky on an MIT mailing list. (And Stallman adds later that "I condemn racism and sexism, including their systemic forms, so when people say I don't, that hurts too...") "I've learned something from this about how to be kind to people who have been hurt," writes Stallman. "In the future, that will help me be kind to people in other situations, which is what I hope to do." "RMS did not, however, address the many other issues which caused people to regret his return to a position of leadership," writes Vaughan-Nichols. Soon after the RMS post appeared on the FSF's front page, the board spoke on why they'd brought him back. The unsigned document states: The voting members of the Free Software Foundation, which include the board of directors, voted to appoint Richard Stallman to a board seat after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation.

We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocate of freedom in computing.

RMS acknowledges that he has made mistakes. He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF. While his personal style remains troubling for some, a majority of the board feel his behavior has moderated and believe that his thinking strengthens the work of the FSF in pursuit of its mission. We take full responsibility for how badly we handled the news of his election to a board seat. We had planned a flow of information that was not executed in a timely manner or delivered in the proper sequence. [...]

The New York Times explores whether Substack is just a company that makes it easy to charge for newsletters — or a new direct-to-consumer media that's part of a larger cultural shift? This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn't just transforming journalism. It's also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it's marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels. And Silicon Valley investors, eager to disrupt and angry at their portrayal in big media, have been gleefully backing it. Substack embodies this cultural shift, but it's riding the wave, not creating it...

A New York Times opinion writer, Charlie Warzel, is departing to start a publication on Substack called Galaxy Brain... The Times wouldn't comment on his move, but is among the media companies trying to develop its own answer to Substack and recently brought the columnist Paul Krugman's free Substack newsletter to the Times platform... [T]he biggest threat to Substack is unlikely to be the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9. While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit...

And it's easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them. Substack's model of taking 10 percent of its writers' subscriptions is "too greedy of a slice to take of anyone's business with very little in return," said Ghost's founder and chief executive, John O'Nolan, a tattooed, nomadic Irishman who is bivouacked in Hollywood, Fla. He said he believed subscription newsletter publishing was "destined to be commoditized."

But Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers. "The technology is designed to be decentralized, and there's no one institution or one corporation that can decide what is OK," he said.
The article also notes that Twitter recently bought the newsletter platform Revue, while Facebook "is developing ambitious plans for a rival that will provide a platform for local journalists, among other writers."

And in a section on indie spirit, it adds as an aside that Bustle Digital Group "confirmed to me that it's reviving the legendary blog Gawker under a former Gawker writer, Leah Finnegan."

Google "has utilized a secret program to track bids on its ad-buying platform," writes the New York Post, "and has been accused of using the information to gain an unfair market advantage that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to a report." The initiative — dubbed "Project Bernanke" in an apparent reference to former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke — was detailed in court filings in an ongoing Texas-led antitrust suit, which were initially uploaded to an online docket with incomplete redactions, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday... Lawyers for the Lone Star State argue, however, that the program was tantamount to insider trading, particularly when combined with Google's complicated, multi-layered role in the online advertising marketplace.

The company operates simultaneously as the operator of a major ad exchange, a representative of both buyers and sellers on the exchange — and a buyer in its own right, according to the suit. By using Project Bernanke's inside information on what other ad buyers were willing to pay for space, Google could tailor its operations to beat out rivals and bid the bare minimum to secure ad inventory, the state reportedly alleges...

Separately, the filings reveal more details about Jedi Blue — an alleged hush-hush deal in which Google allegedly guaranteed that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of advertising deals in which the social media giant bid... Google also admitted that the deal required Facebook to spend $500 million or more in Google's Ad Manager or AdMob bids in the pact's fourth year, and that Facebook agreed to make efforts to win 10 percent of the auctions in which it competed, the WSJ said.

The arrangement appeared "to allow Facebook to bid and win more often in auctions," lawyers for Texas alleged in their filings.

"Using just your phone number, a remote attacker can easily deactivate WhatsApp on your phone and then stop you getting back in," reports a new article in Forbes. "Even two-factor authentication will not stop this..."

The attacker triggers a 12-hour freeze on new verification codes being sent to your phone — then simply reports that same phone number as a lost/stolen phone needing deactivation. There are apparently no follow-up questions, and "an automated process has been triggered, without your knowledge, and your account will now be deactivated," Forbes writes.

The phone can't be reactivated without one of those verification codes blocked by that 12-hour freeze (which the attacker can renew for another 12-hour window, until the next day WhatsApp blocks those reactivating codes indefinitely). "There is no sophistication to this attack — that's the real issue here and WhatsApp should address it immediately..." Forbes complains. This shouldn't happen. It shouldn't be possible. Not with a platform used by 2 billion people. Not this easily. When researchers, Luis Márquez Carpintero and Ernesto Canales Pereña, warned they could kill WhatsApp on my phone, blocking me from my own account using just my phone number, I was doubtful. But they were right...

Despite its vast user base, WhatsApp is creaking at the seams. Its architecture has fallen behind its rivals, missing key features such as multi-device access and fully encrypted backups. As the world's most popular messenger focuses on mandating new terms of service to enable Facebook's latest money-making schemes, these much-needed advancements remain "in development...."
Reached for comment, WhatsApp told Forbes that any victims of the attack should contact their support team — adding that such an attack would "violate our terms of service."

But Forbes adds "your other option would be to follow Mark Zuckerberg's reported example and start to use Signal..." Unfortunately, playing down the seriousness of security risks has become the in-house style at Facebook. Back in 2019, I reported on a vulnerability that allowed private user phone numbers to be pulled from Facebook databases at scale using automated bots. That hack was acknowledged by Facebook but dismissed as an "unlikely problem." Some 533 million users might now disagree.

Four times in recent weeks, the White House press secretary was relayed questions from someone that Mediate describes as "a gag persona for a former Secretary of State made of Legos."

The reporters believed they were helping a real reporter who was prohibited by Covid protocols from attending. Politico reports: That colleague, who goes by the name Kacey Montagu, doesn't exist — at least not as an actual reporter. Since late last year, Montagu has taken on the identity of a White House correspondent extraordinaire with a fictional outlet to boot: White House News, shortened in emails to WHN... In communications with confidants, Montagu has posed as a member of White House Correspondents Association, claiming to be a reporter for The Daily Mail, the British tabloid known for its gossipy coverage of celebrities and political figures. Montagu also communicates regularly with top White House reporters and has had several exchanges with White House officials.

But Montagu never joined WHCA and The Daily Mail. There is no Kacey Montagu, except as a digital impersonation of a White House correspondent...

Montagu's activity is a remarkable illustration of how the online landscape, along with the age of pandemic-related virtual work, has opened up avenues for the mischievous-minded to infiltrate the top echelons of power. What's perhaps more remarkable is that he or she did it all without raising a solitary eyebrow... until Thursday.
Montagu had started a Twitter account showing the schedules of White House officials, which ultimately attracted a following by actual White House correspondents and even some minor government staffers, according to the article.

Acquaintances...believe Montagu's White House moonlighting began as something to boast about in the online global gaming platform called ROBLOX, where users jokingly call themselves "Legos." Within that platform is a role-playing group called nUSA, where people from across the world engage in a mock U.S. government exercise...

Another longtime member of the community in touch with Montagu said they suspected that they created the account "just for the memes" and never assumed things would progress this far.

Angel investor Balaji S. Srinivasan (also the former CTO of Coinbase) is now focused on 1729.com, which wants to give you money to do his bidding — or something like that. He's calling it "the first newsletter that pays you.

"It has a regular feed of paid tasks and tutorials with $1000+ in crypto prizes per day, and doubles as a vehicle for distributing a new book I've been writing called The Network State."

His latest post? "How to Start a New Country" (which envisions starting with a "cloud first" digital community): We recruit online for a group of people interested in founding a new virtual social network, a new city, and eventually a new country. We build the embryonic state as an open source project, we organize our internal economy around remote work, we cultivate in-person levels of civility, we simulate architecture in VR, and we create art and literature that reflects our values.

Over time we eventually crowdfund territory in the real world, but not necessarily contiguous territory. Because an under-appreciated fact is that the internet allows us to network enclaves. Put another way, a cloud community need not acquire all its territory in one place at one time. It can connect a thousand apartments, a hundred houses, and a dozen cul-de-sacs in different cities into a new kind of fractal polity with its capital in the cloud. Over time, community members migrate between these enclaves and crowdfund territory nearby, with every individual dwelling and group house presenting an independent opportunity for expansion...

[Cloud countries] are set up to be a scaled live action role-playing game (LARP), a feat of imagination practiced by large numbers of people at the same time. And the experience of cryptocurrencies over the last decade shows us just how powerful such a shared LARP can be...

The cloud country concept "just" requires stacking together many existing technologies, rather than inventing new ones like Mars-capable rockets or permanent-habitation seasteads. Yet at the same time it avoids the obvious pathways of election, revolution, and war — all of which are ugly and none of which provide much venue for individual initiative...

Could a sufficiently robust cloud country with, say, 1-10M committed digital citizens, provable cryptocurrency reserves, and physical holdings all over the earth similarly achieve societal recognition from the United Nations?
For the "do his bidding" part, the post promises that up to ten $100 prizes will be awarded to people who share constructive reviews on their sites/social media pages (including proposals for extensions).

Previously the site had offered $100 for the ten best hirelings "running a newsletter for technological progressives at your own domain, as a way to begin incentivizing the decentralization of media." (It cited a tweet that argues succinctly that "The NYT is telling anti-longevity stories for us. We must take control of our own story.") In general the site describes itself as "a newsletter for technological progressives. That means people who are into cryptocurrencies, startup cities, mathematics, transhumanism, space travel, reversing aging, and initially-crazy-seeming-but-technologically-feasible ideas." So the newsletter-creating task had envisioned them all "constantly pushing for technology in general and reversing aging in particular, writing like their lives depended on it. In other words, blog or die!"

Other rewards went to the first 10 people to complete three Elixir problems, the 100 people who posted the best inspiring proof-of-exercising photos, and 40 people who helped identify people and places "where the ascending world is surpassing the declining world."

For one of his latest "tasks," Srinivasan wants you to read a long essay on quantum computing (and answer questions), with an optional series of "review emails". $10 in bitcoin will be awarded only to the first and last 50 readers/question-answerers, while another $100 in bitcoin will be awarded to the first and last 5 review-email readers who "persist for a month."

QAnon "was all but confirmed to be a hoax by the person who ran the hoax," writes Mashable, citing the finale of a six-episode documentary on HBO by Cullen Hoback.

"All of it leads back to the same place — that there are very few other people who could have and would have made the Q drops other than the person who ran the place where they were posted," notes Newsweek: Ahead of the first episode, Ron Watkins posted on encrypted messaging service Telegram stating: "I am not Q. I've never spoken privately with Q. I don't know who Q is." However, during the final episode, Hoback suggests that Ron Watkins slips up and inadvertently reveals that he posted as Q on 8kun
A BBC investigative reporter on disinformation tweeted that climactic moment from Cullens' documentary, adding "It was so good it made the whole six hours worth it."

Or as Mashable puts it, "Ron Watkins seems to admit he's Q, in the dumbest possible ending to QAnon," calling it "so anticlimactic it bordered on absurd." The previously camera-shy Watkins — who runs 8kun [formerly 8chan] alongside his father, Jim — has long been the key suspect for the identity of Q... But his accidental reveal, the slip of the mask is huge, if anticlimactic, news... It's wild and so...dumb...that this is how we all find out — because Watkins slipped up for a second.

It makes sense since Q had somewhat inexplicably tied its fortunes to posting only on 8chan/8kun. It's inexplicable unless, you know, the Watkins family was behind the ordeal.
Insider notes that Fredrick Brennan, the software developer who created 8chan and has since become a vocal critic, also believes Q is one of the Watkins' — a theory investigated last June by the Atlantic. And in a September investigation, ABC News reported on the likelihood that Watkins is Q, finding that he and his son, Ron, were the "two Americans most clearly associated" with Q drops. The theory was also popularized by a September "Reply All" podcast episode...

At the end of February 2020, Watkins registered the PAC, "Disarm the Deep State," with the Federal Elections Commission.
They also note that after the documentary aired on HBO, "the community reacted as many experts suspected it would: denial and accusations of 'fake news.'" Watkins had apparently gone to great lengths to suggest to Cullen that Q was instead former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. And last week, the BBC reporter points out, Watkins' father began suggesting a new theory: that Q was actually....documentary maker Cullen Hoback. But the BBC reporter adds: Based on the finale of #QIntotheStorm Q drops are over for good. Both Jim and Ron told Cullen Hoback Q would end after the election, and that's exactly what happened.

We already had proof of the end given there haven't been any drops since 8 December, but we can now be certain.
Hoback's tweet specifically says that "Both Ron and Jim, but especially Ron, told me multiple times over the years that they believed Q would cease at the election." And Hoback adds:

"Ron implied on more than one occasion it *might be* a marketing campaign."

New research from a team at the University of Southern California provides further evidence that Facebook's advertising system is discriminatory, showing that the algorithm used to target ads reproduced real-world gender disparities when showing job listings, even among equally qualified candidates. The Intercept reports: In fields from software engineering to sales to food delivery, the team ran sets of ads promoting real job openings at roughly equivalent companies requiring roughly the same skills, one for a company whose existing workforce was disproportionately male and one that was disproportionately female. Facebook showed more men the ads for the disproportionately male companies and more women the ads for the disproportionately female companies, even though the job qualifications were the same. The paper concludes that Facebook could very well be violating federal anti-discrimination laws. "We confirm that Facebook's ad delivery can result in skew of job ad delivery by gender beyond what can be legally justified by possible differences in qualifications," the team wrote.

The paper can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Facebook is adding additional labels to posts from Pages that appear in users' News Feeds in a bid to reduce confusion about their origin. These labels will include "public official," "fan page," and "satire page." The company says it's already started testing the deployment of these labels in the US, and will gradually add them to more posts. Facebook hasn't offered any explanation as to why it's adding these labels, but identifying satire seems particularly important. Take a look at the social shares for any news articles written by well-known satirical sites like The Onion or The Babylon Bee and you'll find plenty of people taking these stories at face value. In such a context these posts are essentially a type of misinformation, even if their creators did not intend this. Even high profile figures like former president Donald Trump have mistaken these stories for real reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Ants react to social isolation in a similar way as do humans and other social mammals. A study by an Israeli-German research team has revealed alterations to the social and hygienic behavior of ants that had been isolated from their group. The research team was particularly surprised by the fact that immune and stress genes were downregulated in the brains of the isolated ants. [...] While the effects of isolation have been extensively studied in social mammals such as humans and mice, less is known about how social insects respond in comparable situations -- even though they live in highly evolved social systems. Ants, for instance, live their entire lives as members of the same colony and are dependent on their colony mates. The worker ants relinquish their own reproductive potential and devote themselves to feeding the larvae, cleaning and defending the nest, and searching for food, while the queen does little more than just lay eggs.

The research team looked at the consequences of social isolation in the case of ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi. These ants inhabit cavities in acorns and sticks on the ground in European forests, forming colonies of a few dozen workers. Young workers engaged in brood care were taken singly from 14 colonies and kept in isolation for varying lengths of time, from one hour to a maximum of 28 days. The study was conducted between January and March 2019 and highlighted three particular aspects in which changes were observed. After the end of their isolation, the workers were less interested in their adult colony mates, but the length of time they spent in brood contact increased; they also spent less time grooming themselves. [...] While the study revealed significant changes in the behaviors of the isolated insects, its findings with regard to gene activity were even more striking: Many genes related to immune system function and stress response were downregulated. In other words, these genes were less active. "This finding is consistent with studies on other social animals that demonstrated a weakening of the immune system after isolation," said Professor Inon Scharf. The study has been published in the journal Molecular Ecology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: IOUpay, a fintech firm that went into overdrive on a social media-backed retail trading frenzy, has plummeted in the past two months. The stock is set for more declines as the firm's newly launched buy-now-pay-later services -- which allows customers to purchase goods and then pay for them in installments -- faces intensified competition in Southeast Asia from larger Australian rival Afterpay, say analysts. IOUpay had drawn comparisons to U.S. videogame retailer GameStop after surging 6,400% in the past year as it has been the subject of several discussion threads on Reddit. The Reddit-fueled day-trading crowd turned the first quarter of 2021 into one of the wildest periods of stock market frenzy in modern history. Despite a more than 40% slump since mid-February, IOUpay remains Asia's top-performing interactive media and services stock over the past year.

The wild ride by IOUpay, which lists Standard Chartered Plc and Citigroup as its clients, began in June after it was touted by investors on Reddit. Its shares continued gaining on a "buy now, pay later" deal with Malaysian online marketplace Easystore. That partnership inked in February sparked a more than 200% rally in its stock over a three-day period. "We may see the price subdued for a long period of time as retail investors get bored waiting and sell out to find something more exciting," said Carl Capolingua, an analyst at online brokerage ThinkMarkets Australia. "The question will be if they can get traction in the Asian markets they're targeting before the bigger players come in."

The Federal Trade Commission has urged a federal judge in DC to reject Facebook's request to dismiss the FTC's high-stakes antitrust lawsuit. In a 56-page legal brief, the FTC reiterated its arguments that Facebook's profits have come from years of anticompetitive conduct. From a report: "Facebook is one of the largest and most profitable companies in the history of the world," the FTC wrote. "Facebook reaps massive profits from its [social networking] monopoly, not by offering a superior or more innovative product because it has, for nearly a decade, taken anticompetitive actions to neutralize, hinder, or deter would-be competitors." The FTC's case against Facebook focuses on two blockbuster acquisitions that Facebook made early in the last decade. In 2012, Facebook paid $1 billion for the fast-growing startup Instagram. While Instagram the company was still tiny -- it had only about a dozen employees at the time of the acquisition -- it had millions of users and was growing rapidly. Mark Zuckerberg realized it could grow into a serious rival for Facebook, and the FTC alleges Zuckerberg bought the company to prevent that from happening.