159-CVE January Patch Tuesday smashes single-month record
Brace yourselves… and consider reading your email in plaintext for now
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Our New FOIA Forum! 1/23, 1PM EST
It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Thursday, 23rd January at 1 PM Eastern. Add it to your calendar! So, what’s the FOIA Forum?…
Hacker Broke into ‘Path of Exile 2’ Admin Account, Hijacked Wave of Characters
A hacker compromised an administrative account on the website for popular game Path of Exile 2, which allowed them to reset the passwords on dozens of players’ accounts, according to comments from developer Grinding Gear Games (GGG) made during a podcast on Sunday. This access would have given the hacker the ability to steal powerful…
An Amazon Delivery Confirmation Photo Is the Last Time a Palisades Resident Saw Her Burnt Down House
Ali Riley, a professional soccer player for the Angel City Football Club, lost her home in Los Angeles’s Palisades Fire. The last image she saw of her house standing was an Amazon package delivery confirmation photo, sent after the neighborhood’s mandatory evacuation order. Friday morning, Riley posted a screenshot of an Amazon delivery confirmation photo….
CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music
Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music. “We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a…
Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed
Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately. Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is…
If Planet X Exists, It’s Running Out of Places to Hide
Welcome back to the Abstract! This week, it’s time to demand a new planet. Don’t we deserve it? Haven’t we been good? Fortunately, we may be on the cusp of finally discovering whether the solar system has, indeed, been hiding a massive world up its sleeve. Can you imagine the fight over naming this world,…
Behind the Blog: What Is Real?
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss weird fake furniture and shared reality (or the lack thereof). SAM: It has been such a busy week I forgot it’s Friday until I woke up this…
Meta Deletes Trans and Nonbinary Messenger Themes
Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned. Meta’s Messenger app allows users to change the color scheme and design of their chat…
‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes
Meta employees are furious with the company’s newly announced content moderation changes that will allow users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness,” according to internal conversations obtained by 404 Media and interviews with five current employees. The changes were part of a larger shift Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday to do far less content…