The American monoculture -- the era when three television networks, seven movie studios, and a handful of record labels determined virtually everything the country watched and heard -- is collapsing under the weight of algorithmic recommendation engines and infinite streaming options. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for "Gone With the Wind" in 1939 when the U.S. population was 130 million; more than 100 million people watched the MAS*H finale in 1983.

Only three American productions grossed more than $1 billion in 2025, down from nine in 2019. "That broad experience has become a more difficult thing for us studio people to manufacture," said Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment. "The audience wants a much better value for their money."

YouTube became the most popular video platform on televisions not by having the hottest shows but by having something for everyone. The internet broke Hollywood's hold on distribution; anyone can now stream to the same devices Disney and Netflix use.

A couple months ago, YouTuber Benn Jordan "found vulnerabilities in some of Flock's license plate reader cameras," reports 404 Media's Jason Koebler. "He reached out to me to tell me he had learned that some of Flock's Condor cameras were left live-streaming to the open internet."

This led to a remarkable article where Koebler confirmed the breach by visiting a Flock surveillance camera mounted on a California traffic signal. ("On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me — without any password or login — to the open internet... Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed.") Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics. Unlike many of Flock's cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock's Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people's faces... The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon "GainSec" Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities in several other models of Flock's automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras.
Jordan appeared this week as a guest on Koebler's own YouTube channel, while Jordan released a video of his own about the experience. titled "We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds." (Thanks to Slashdot reader beadon for sharing the link.) But together Jordan and 404 Media also created another video three weeks ago titled "The Flock Camera Leak is Like Netflix for Stalkers" which includes footage he says was "completely accessible at the time Flock Safety was telling cities that the devices are secure after they're deployed."

The video decries cities "too lazy to conduct their own security audit or research the efficacy versus risk," but also calls weak security "an industry-wide problem." Jordan explains in the video how he "very easily found the administration interfaces for dozens of Flock safety cameras..." — but also what happened next: None of the data or video footage was encrypted. There was no username or password required. These were all completely public-facing, for the world to see.... Making any modification to the cameras is illegal, so I didn't do this. But I had the ability to delete any of the video footage or evidence by simply pressing a button. I could see the paths where all of the evidence files were located on the file system...

During and after the process of conducting that research and making that video, I was visited by the police and had what I believed to be private investigators outside my home photographing me and my property and bothering my neighbors. John Gaines or GainSec, the brains behind most of this research, lost employment within 48 hours of the video being released. And the sad reality is that I don't view these things as consequences or punishment for researching security vulnerabilities. I view these as consequences and punishment for doing it ethically and transparently.

I've been contacted by people on or communicating with civic councils who found my videos concerning, and they shared Flock Safety's response with me. The company claimed that the devices in my video did not reflect the security standards of the ones being publicly deployed. The CEO even posted on LinkedIn and boasted about Flock Safety's security policies. So, I formally and publicly offered to personally fund security research into Flock Safety's deployed ecosystem. But the law prevents me from touching their live devices. So, all I needed was their permission so I wouldn't get arrested. And I was even willing to let them supervise this research.

I got no response.
So instead, he read Flock's official response to a security/surveillance industry research group — while standing in front of one of their security cameras, streaming his reading to the public internet.

"Might as well. It's my tax dollars that paid for it."

" 'Flock is committed to continuously improving security...'"

Iran has imposed one of the longest nationwide internet shutdowns in its history, cutting more than 92 million people off from connectivity for over a week as mass anti-government protests continue. TechCrunch reports: As of this writing, Iranians have not been able to access the internet for more than 170 hours. The previous longest shutdowns in the country lasted around 163 hours in 2019, and 160 hours in 2025, according to Isik Mater, the director of research at NetBlocks, a web monitoring company that tracks internet disruptions.

Mater said that the current shutdown in Iran is the third longest on record, after the internet shutdown in Sudan in mid-2021 that lasted around 35 days, followed by the outage in Mauritania in July 2024, which lasted 22 days. "Iran's shutdowns remain among the most comprehensive and tightly enforced nationwide blackouts we've observed, particularly in terms of population affected," Mater told TechCrunch.

The exact ranking depends on how each organization measures a shutdown. Zach Rosson, a researcher who studies internet disruptions at the digital rights nonprofit Access Now, told TechCrunch that according to its data, the ongoing shutdown in Iran is on a path to crack the top 10 longest shutdowns in history. Further reading: Iran Shuts Down Musk's Starlink For First Time

Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms.

Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors.

After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier.

Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of purchases now happen digitally and cash represents under 1% of GDP compared to 22% in Japan.

The policy change stems from concerns about financial inclusion for elderly and poor populations who struggle with digital systems. Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food. European officials worry about dependence on American payment giants Visa and MasterCard. The EU now recommends citizens store enough cash to survive a week without electricity or internet access.

Thelasko shares a report from Forbes: We have not seen this before. Iran's digital blackout has now deployed military jammers, reportedly supplied by Russia, to shut down access to Starlink Internet. This is a game-changer for the Plan-B connectivity frequently used by protesters and anti-regime activists when ordinary access to the internet is stopped. "Despite reports that tens of thousands of Starlink units are operating inside Iran," says Iran Wire, "the blackout has also reached satellite connections." It is reported that about 30 percent of Starlink's uplink and downlink traffic was (initially) disrupted," quickly rising "to more than 80 percent" within hours. The Times of Israel reports "the deployment of (Starlink) receivers is now far greater in Iran" than during previous blackouts. "That's despite the government never authorizing Starlink to function, making the service illegal to possess and use." "While it's not clear how Starlink's service was being disrupted in Iran," The Times says, "some specialists say it could be the result of jamming of Starlink terminals that would overpower their ability to receive signals from the satellites."

Multiple reports suggest Russia's military technology may be responsible. Channel 4 News describes Russia's activities as a "technological race with Starlink," which it says "is known to deploy trucks which deploy radio noise to disrupt satellite signals."

Simon Migliano, Head of Research at Top10VPN.com, said "Iran's current nationwide blackout is a blunt instrument intended to crush dissent," and this comes at a stark cost to the country, underpinning the regime's desperation. "This 'kill switch' approach comes at a staggering price, draining $1.56 million from Iran's economy every single hour the internet is down." He added: "Iranian authorities have proven they are prepared to weaponize connectivity, even at a tremendous domestic cost. We are looking at losses already exceeding $130 million. If the 2019 shutdown is any indicator, the regime could maintain this digital siege for days, prioritizing control over their own economic stability."

22 years ago, developer and columnist John Gruber released Markdown, a simple plain-text formatting system designed to spare writers the headache of memorizing arcane HTML tags. As technologist Anil Dash writes in a long piece, Markdown has since embedded itself into nearly every corner of modern computing.

Aaron Swartz, then seventeen years old, served as the beta tester before its quiet March 2004 debut. Google eventually added Markdown support to Docs after more than a decade of user requests; Microsoft put it in Notepad; Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, and Apple Notes all support it now. Dash writes: The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their "frontier" models, require complex orchestration that's carefully scripted by people who've tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They've iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race.

And all of it -- all of it -- is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who's bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has threatened to withdraw free cybersecurity services from Italy's Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and potentially exit the country after Italy's telecommunications regulator fined the company approximately 14 million euros for failing to comply with anti-piracy blocking orders. The penalty equals 1% of Cloudflare's global annual revenue but exceeds twice what the company earned from Italy in 2024.

Prince called Italy's Autorita per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni a "quasi-judicial body" administering a "scheme to censor the Internet" on behalf of "a shadowy cabal of European media elites." The fine stems from Cloudflare's refusal to comply with Italy's Piracy Shield law, which requires internet service providers and DNS operators to block sites within 30 minutes of receiving blocking requests from copyright holders. Prince said Cloudflare may discontinue free services for Italian users, remove servers from Italian cities and cancel plans to build an Italian office.

Alphabet-owned Wing "is expanding its drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S.," reports Axios: [T]he future is already here if you live in Dallas — where some Walmart customers order delivery by Wing three times a week. By the end of 2026, some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent of the U.S. population, will be able to take advantage of the convenience, the companies claim... Once the items are picked and packed in a small cardboard basket, they are loaded onto a drone inside a fenced area in the Walmart parking lot. Drones fly autonomously to the designated address, with human pilots monitoring each flight from a central operations hub....

For now, Wing deliveries are free. "The goal is to expose folks to the wonders of drone delivery," explains Wing's chief business officer, Heather Rivera... Over time, she said Wing expects delivery fees to be comparable to other delivery options, but faster and more convenient. Service began recently in Atlanta and Charlotte, and it's coming soon to Los Angeles, Houston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Miami and other major U.S. cities to be announced later, according to the article. "By 2027, Walmart and Wing say they'll have a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations nationwide."

Walmart also announced a new deal today with Google's Gemini, allowing customers to purchase Walmart products from within Gemini. (Walmart announced a similar deal for ChatGPT in October.)

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls this "a defensive angle that Walmart does not quite say out loud." As AI models answer more questions directly, retailers risk losing customers before they ever hit a website. If Gemini recommends a product from someone else first, Walmart loses the sale before it starts. By planting itself inside the AI, Walmart keeps a seat at the table while the internet shifts under everyone's feet.

Google clearly benefits too. Gemini gets a more functional purpose than just telling you how to boil pasta or summarize recipes. Now it can carry someone from the moment they wonder what they need to the moment the order is placed. That makes the assistant stickier and a bit more practical than generic chat. Walmart's incoming CEO John Furner says the company wants to shape this new pattern instead of being dragged into it later. Sundar Pichai calls Walmart an early partner in what he sees as a broader wave of agent style commerce, where AI starts doing the errands people used to handle themselves.
The article concludes "This partnership serves as a snapshot of where retail seems to be heading..."

Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found also contained "old cords from unknown sources and mountains of papers that had been dumped from a former professor's file cabinet, including old drawings from his kids and saved plane ticket stubs." (Their report also includes a photo of the University of Utah team that found the tape — the University's Flux Research Group).

Professor Robert Ricci believes only 20 copies were ever produced of the version of Unix on that tape: At the time, in the 1970s, Ricci estimates there would have been maybe two or three of those computers — called a PDP-11, or programmed data processor — in Utah that could have run UNIX V4, including the one at the U. Having that technology is part of why he believes the U. got a copy of the rare software. The other part was the distinguished computing faculty at the school.

The new UNIX operating system would've been announced at conferences in the early 1970s, and a U. professor at the time named Martin Newell frequently attended those because of his own recognized work in the field, Ricci said. In another box, stuffed in under manila envelopes, [researcher Aleks] Maricq found a 1974 letter written to Newell from Ken Thompson at Bell Labs that said as soon as "a new batch comes from the printers, I will send you the system." Ricci and Maricq are unsure if the software was ever used. They reached out to Newell, who is now 72 and retired, as well as some of his former students. None of them recalled actually running it through the PDP-11...

The late Jay Lepreau also worked at the U.'s computing department and created the Flux Research Group that Ricci, Maricq and [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig are now part of. Lepreau overlapped just barely with Newell's tenure. In 1978, Lepreau and a team at the U. worked with a group at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they built their own clone of the UNIX operating system. They called it BSD, or Berkeley Standard Distribution. Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, worked with BSD, too, and it influenced his work.

Ultimately, it was Lepreau who saved the 9-track tape with the UNIX system on it in his U. office. And he's why the university still has it today. "He seems to have found it and decided it was worth keeping," Ricci said...

The U. will also get the tape back from the museum. Maricq said it will likely be displayed in the university's new engineering building that's set to open in January 2027. That's why, the research associate said, he was cleaning out the storage room to begin with — to try to prepare for the move. He was mostly just excited to see the floor again. "I thought we'd find some old stuff, but I didn't think it'd be anything like this," he said. And Maricq still has boxes to go through, including more believed to be from Lepreau's office.
Local news station KMYU captured the thoughts of some of the University researchers who found the tape: "When you see the very first beginnings of something, and you go from seed to sapling, that's what we saw here," [engineering research associate Jon] Duerig said. "We see this thing in the moment of flux. We see the signs of all the things changing — of all the things developing that we now see today."
Duerig also gave this comment to local news station KSL. "The coolest thing is that anybody, anywhere in the world can now access this, right? People can go on the internet archive and download the raw tape file and simulate running it," Duerig said. "People have posted browsable directory trees of the whole thing." One of the museum's directors said the tape's recovery marked a big day for the museum "One of the things that was pretty exciting to us is that just that there is this huge community of people around the world who were excited to jump on the opportunity to look at this piece of history," Ricci said. "And it was really cool that we were able to share that."

Duerig said while there weren't many comments or footnotes from the programmers of that time, they did discovery more unexpected content having to do with Bell Labs on the tape. "There were survey results of them actually asking survey questions of their employees at these operator centers," he said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Is there a trend? This week four different articles appeared on various tech-news sites with an author bragging about switching to Linux.

"Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop," quipped the Verge's senior reviews editor, who finally "got fed up and said screw it, I'm installing Linux."

They switched to CachyOS — just like this writer for the videogame magazine Escapist: I've had a fantastic time gaming on Linux. Valve's Windows-to-Linux translation layer, Proton, and even CachyOS' bundled fork have been working just fine. Of course, it's not perfect, and there's been a couple of instances where I've had to problem-solve something, but most of the time, any issues gaming on Linux have been fixed by swapping to another version of Proton. If you're deep in online games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Destiny 2, GTAV or Battlefield 6, it might not be the best option to switch. These games feature anti-cheats that look for versions of Windows or even the heart of the OS, the kernel, to verify the system isn't going to mess up someone's game....

CachyOS is thankfully pre-packed with Nvidia drivers, meaning I didn't have to dance around trying to find them.... Certain titles will perform worse than their counterparts, simply due to how the bods at Nvidia are handling the drivers for Linux. This said, I'm still not complaining when I'm pushing nearly 144fps or more in newer games. The performance hit is there, but it's nowhere near enough to stave off even an attempt to mess about with Linux.

Do you know how bizarre it is to say it's "nice to have a taskbar again"? I use macOS daily for a lot of my work, which uses a design baked back in the 1990s through NeXT. Seeing just a normal taskbar that doesn't try to advertise to me or crash because an update killed it for some reason is fantastic. That's how bad it is out there right now for Windows.
"I run Artix, by the way," joked a senior tech writer at Notebookcheck (adding "There. That's out of the way...") I dual-booted a Linux partition for a few weeks. After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation, I decided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the entire drive for Linux...

Artix differs from Arch in that it does not use SystemD as its init system. I won't go down the rabbit hole of init systems here, but suffice it to say that Artix boots lightning quick (less than 10 seconds from a cold power on) and is pretty light on system resources. However, it didn't come "fully assembled..." The biggest problem I ran into after installing Artix on the [MacBook] Air was the lack of wireless drivers, which meant that WiFi did not work out of the box. The resolution was simple: I needed to download the appropriate WiFi drivers (Broadcom drivers, to be exact) from Artix's main repository. This is a straightforward process handled by a single command in the Terminal, but it requires an internet connection... which my laptop did not have. Ultimately, I connected a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, plugged the laptop directly into my router, and installed the WiFi drivers that way. The whole process took about 10 minutes, but it was annoying nonetheless.

For the record, my desktop (an AMD Ryzen 7 6800H-based system) worked flawlessly out-of-the-box, even with my second monitor's uncommon resolution (1680x1050, vertical orientation). I did run into issues with installing some packages on both machines. Trying to install the KDE desktop environment (essentially a different GUI for the main OS) resulted in strange artifacts that put white text on white backgrounds in the menus, and every resolution I tried failed to correct this bug. After reverting to XFCE4 (the default desktop environment for my Artix install), the WiFi signal indicator in the taskbar disappeared. This led to me having to uninstall a network manager installed by KDE and re-linking the default network manager to the runit services startup folder. If that sentence sounds confusing, the process was much more so. It has been resolved, and I have a WiFi indicator that lets me select wireless networks again, but only after about 45 minutes of reading manuals and forum posts.

Other issues are inherent to Linux. Not all games on Steam that are deemed Linux compatible actually are. Civilization III Complete is a good example: launching the game results in the map turning completely black. (Running the game through an application called Lutris resolved this issue.) Not all the software I used on Windows is available in Linux, such as Greenshot for screenshots or uMark for watermarking photos in bulk. There are alternatives to these, but they don't have the same features or require me to relearn workflows... Linux is not a "one and done" silver bullet to solve all your computer issues. It is like any other operating system in that it will require users to learn its methods and quirks. Admittedly, it does require a little bit more technical knowledge to dive into the nitty-gritty of the OS and fully unlock its potential, but many distributions (such as Mint) are ready to go out of the box and may never require someone to open a command line...

[T]he issues I ran into on Linux were, for the most part, my fault. On Windows or macOS, most problems I run into are caused by a restriction or bug in the OS. Linux gives me the freedom to break my machine and fix it again, teaching me along the way. With Microsoft's refusal (either from pride or ignorance) to improve (or at least not crapify) Windows 11 despite loud user outrage, switching to Linux is becoming a popular option. It's one you should consider doing, and if you've been thinking about it for any length of time, it's time to dive in.
And tinkerer Kevin Wammer switched from MacOS to Linux, saying "Linux has come a long way" after more than 30 years — but "Windows still sucks..."

Craigslist, the 30-year-old classifieds site that looks virtually unchanged since the dial-up era, continues to draw more than 105 million monthly users and remains enormously profitable despite never spending a cent on advertising or marketing. The site ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to Internet data company Similarweb.

University of Pennsylvania associate professor Jessa Lingel called it the "ungentrified" Internet. Unlike Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, or DePop, Craigslist doesn't use algorithms to track users or predict what they want to see. There are no public profiles, no rating systems, no likes or shares. The site effectively disincentivizes the clout-chasing and virality-seeking that dominates platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

Craigslist began in 1995 as an email list for a few hundred San Francisco Bay Area locals sharing events and job openings. Engineer Craig Newmark even recruited CEO Jim Buckmaster through a site ad. The two spent roughly a decade battling eBay in court after the tech giant purchased a minority stake in 2004, ultimately buying back shares and regaining full control in 2015.

Paris Judicial Court ordered Google to block additional pirate sports-streaming domains at the DNS level, rejecting Google's argument that enforcement should target upstream providers like Cloudflare first. "The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League games," notes TorrentFreak. From the report: Most recently, Google was compelled to take action following a complaint from French broadcaster Canal+ and its subsidiaries regarding Champions League piracy.. Like previous blocking cases, the request is grounded in Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, which enables rightsholders to seek court orders against any entity that can help to stop 'serious and repeated' sports piracy. After reviewing the evidence and hearing arguments from both sides, the Paris Court granted the blocking request, ordering Google to block nineteen domain names, including antenashop.site, daddylive3.com, livetv860.me, streamysport.org and vavoo.to.

The latest blocking order covers the entire 2025/2026 Champions League series, which ends on May 30, 2026. It's a dynamic order too, which means that if these sites switch to new domains, as verified by ARCOM, these have to be blocked as well. Google objected to the blocking request. Among other things, it argued that several domains were linked to Cloudflare's CDN. Therefore, suspending the sites on the CDN level would be more effective, as that would render them inaccessible. Based on the subsidiarity principle, Google argued that blocking measures should only be ordered if attempts to block the pirate sites through more direct means have failed.

The court dismissed these arguments, noting that intermediaries cannot dictate the enforcement strategy or blocking order. Intermediaries cannot require "prior steps" against other technical intermediaries, especially given the "irremediable" character of live sports piracy. The judge found the block proportional because Google remains free to choose the technical method, even if the result is mandated. Internet providers, search engines, CDNs, and DNS resolvers can all be required to block, irrespective of what other measures were taken previously. Google further argued that the blocking measures were disproportionate because they were complex, costly, easily bypassed, and had effects beyond the borders of France.

The Paris court rejected these claims. It argued that Google failed to demonstrate that implementing these blocking measures would result in "important costs" or technical impossibilities. Additionally, the court recognized that there would still be options for people to bypass these blocking measures. However, the blocks are a necessary step to "completely cease" the infringing activities.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected.

"IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.

Vietnam will begin enforcing new online advertising rules in February 2026 that ban forced video ads longer than five seconds and must allow users to close ads with just one tap. "Furthermore, platforms must provide clear icons and instructions for users to report advertisements that violate the law, and allow them to opt out, turn off, or stop viewing inappropriate ads," reports a local news outlet (translated to English). "These reports must be received and processed promptly, and the results communicated to users as required." From the report: In cases where the entity posting the infringing advertisement cannot be identified or where specialized laws do not have specific regulations, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is the focal agency to receive notifications and send requests to block or remove the advertisement to organizations and businesses providing online advertising services in Vietnam.

Advertisers, advertising service providers, and advertising transmission and distribution units are responsible for blocking and removing infringing advertisements within 24 hours of receiving a request from the competent authority. For advertisements that infringe on national security, the blocking and removal must be carried out immediately, no later than 24 hours.

In case of non-compliance, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, in coordination with the Ministry of Public Security, will apply technical measures to block infringing advertisements and services and handle the matter according to the law. Telecommunications companies and Internet service providers must also implement technical measures to block access to infringing advertisements within 24 hours of receiving a request.

Anna's Archive lost control of its primary .org domain after it was placed on registry-level serverHold -- "an action that's typically taken by the domain name registry," reports TorrentFreak. Despite mounting legal pressure and speculation tied to its Spotify backup, the site remains accessible via multiple alternative domains, underscoring the resilience of shadow libraries. From the report: A few hours ago, the site's original domain name suddenly became unreachable globally. The annas-archive.org domain status was changed to "serverHold," which is typically done by the domain registry. This status effectively means that the domain is suspended and under investigation. Similar action has previously been taken against other pirate sites.

It is rare to see a .org domain involved in domain name suspensions. The American non-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR), which oversees the .org domains, previously refused to suspend domain names voluntarily, including thepiratebay.org. The registry's cautionary stance suggests that the actions against annas-archive.org are backed by a court order.

PIR's marketing director, Kendal Rowe, informs TorrentFreak that "unfortunately, PIR is unable to comment on the situation at this time." It is possible that, in response to the 'DRM-circumventing' Spotify backup, rightsholders requested an injunction targeting the domain name. However, we have seen no evidence of that. In the WorldCat lawsuit, OCLC requested an injunction to force action from intermediaries, including domain registries, but as far as we know, that hasn't been granted yet.

A viral Reddit "whistleblower" post accusing a major food delivery app of systemic exploitation is "most likely AI-generated," reports the Verge. From the report: The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers "human assets," and exploits their "desperation" for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it's become increasingly clear that the post's text is probably AI-generated. Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it's easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing.

The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle. Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was generated or edited with Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows an Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering an employee name and photo, and the words "senior software engineer." It's odd that an engineer's badge would have the Uber Eats logo, and not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. That, in addition to slightly misaligned words and warped coloration at the edge of the green border, are reasons Gemini thinks it's inauthentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.) "Not only are the claims fake, but they're also dead wrong," Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats' Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, "This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don't trust everything you read on the internet."

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor's "appalling" allegations. "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post," Xu said in a post on X.

Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian: The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Neowin: Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it... [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"

If you are wondering, that link takes users to the Microsoft Product Activation Portal for online activation. Thus it appears that offline ways to activate Windows may no longer be available even though the official support documentation by the company may not reflect it yet.

Three decades after RFC 1883 promised to future-proof the internet by expanding the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion, IPv6 has yet to achieve the dominance its creators envisioned. Data from Google, APNIC and Cloudflare analyzed by The Register shows less than half of all internet users rely on IPv6 today.

"IPv6 was an extremely conservative protocol that changed as little as possible," APNIC chief scientist Geoff Huston told The Register. "It was a classic case of mis-design by committee." The protocol's lack of backward compatibility with IPv4 meant users had to choose one or run both in parallel. Network address translation, which allows thousands of devices to share a single public IPv4 address, gave operators an easier path forward. Huston adds: "These days the Domain Name Service (DNS) is the service selector, not the IP address," Huston told The Register. "The entire security framework of today's Internet is name based and the world of authentication and channel encryption is based on service names, not IP addresses."

"So folk use IPv6 these days based on cost: If the cost of obtaining more IPv4 addresses to fuel bigger NATs is too high, then they deploy IPv6. Not because it's better, but if they are confident that they can work around IPv6's weaknesses then in a largely name based world there is no real issue in using one addressing protocol or another as the transport underlay." But calling IPv6 a failure misses the point. "IPv4's continued viability is largely because IPv6 absorbed that growth pressure elsewhere -- particularly in mobile, broadband, and cloud environments," said John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. "In that sense, IPv6 succeeded where it was needed most." Huawei has sought 2.56 decillion IPv6 addresses and Starlink appears to have acquired 150 sextillion.