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Kids Online Safety Act Advances to House Amid Concerns Over Free Speech and Civil Rights

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The bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, designed to protect minors from age-inappropriate online content, will head to the House floor for a vote. But critics say that the bill could also be used to curb civil rights.

The Kids Online Safety Act was first introduced to the Senate in 2022 under President Joe Biden. It would require online platforms to offer settings that control how minors use the sites and also limit the collection of their personal data. 

However, opponents of the bill say that the definition of “harmful content” could extend to legitimate sites, including those concerning mental health and transgender rights. The American Civil Liberties Union warns that the legislation could affect the First Amendment’s protections of free speech.

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“The overbroad language in KOSA and similar legislation risks censoring everything from jokes and hyperbole to useful information about sex ed and suicide prevention,” said the ACLU’s Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel.

The bill also directs federal agencies to study the feasibility of “creating a device- or operating system–level age verification system,” but it doesn’t require platforms to implement such a system.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee met on Thursday and advanced the legislation to the full House for consideration. However, lawmakers still need to set a specific calendar date for that floor vote.

The proposed legislation follows a global trend toward restricting the kinds of online material children have access to. Last year, the UK introduced its Online Safety Act, which requires platforms that host adult content or other age-inappropriate material to implement robust age-verification checks to prevent minors from accessing it.

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On March 28, Indonesia will bar children under 16 from accessing social media, following a similar ban in Australia

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iPhone 18 may get little more than a new color while iPhone Fold gets 3D printed hinge

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A new leak suggests that the hinge of the iPhone Fold will use “chip-level polymer printing 3D technology” and the iPhone 18 upgrades will be limited to color changes.

Silver foldable smartphone partially open, showing dual rear cameras with flash on one side and a tall display with colorful wavy abstract pattern and centered front camera cutout on the other
The iPhone Fold will allegedly feature a 3D-printed hinge.

With Apple’s first foldable expected to debut in late 2026, we’re now seeing more and more claims about its hardware. Following multiple rumors suggesting Liquid Metal would be used for the hinge of the iPhone Fold, another tipster has provided a new tidbit about the component.
To be more specific, a translated post from leaker Fixed Focus Digital on Weibo said that Apple is putting considerable effort into its foldable iPhone. This reportedly “involves chip-level high-molecular 3D printing technology, with further developments in the hinge design still to be revealed.”
Rumor Score: 🤔 Possible
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IBM Teams Up With Arm To Run Arm Workloads On IBM Z Mainframes

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IBM and Arm are teaming up to let Arm-based software run on IBM Z mainframes. Network World reports: The two companies plan to work on three things: building virtualization tools so Arm software can run on IBM platforms; making sure Arm applications meet the security and data residency rules that regulated industries must follow; and creating common technology layers so enterprises have more software options across both platforms, IBM said in a statement.

IBM has not said whether the virtualization work will happen at the hypervisor level, through its existing PR/SM partitioning technology, or via containers — a question enterprise architects will need answered before they can assess the collaboration’s practical value. IBM described the effort as serving enterprises that run regulated workloads and cannot simply move them to the cloud, the statement said. IBM mainframe customers have largely missed out on the efficiency and price-performance gains Arm has already delivered in the cloud. “Arm says close to half of all compute shipped to top hyperscalers in 2025 runs on Arm chips, with AWS, Google, and Microsoft deploying their own Arm silicon through Graviton, Axion, and Cobalt, respectively,” reports Network World.

That gap is precisely what IBM and Arm’s collaboration intends to address. “This is a mainframe adjacency play,” says Rachita Rao, senior analyst at Everest Group. “The intent is to extend IBM Z and LinuxONE environments by enabling Arm-compatible workloads to run closer to systems of record. While hyperscalers use Arm to lower their own internal power costs and pass savings to cloud-native tenants, IBM is targeting the sovereign and air-gapped market.”

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HP EliteBook 6 G2q promises endless 5G data and AI power, but hides significant limitations

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  • HP EliteBook 6 G2q delivers up to 85 TOPS for local AI tasks
  • Always-connected 5G experiences require specific hardware and preinstalled eSIM modules
  • Service works only on compatible commercial PCs running Windows 11

HP has unveiled the EliteBook 6 G2q, an ultraslim AI PC that relies on Snapdragon X2 Elite or X2 Plus processors to deliver up to 85 TOPS of NPU performance for local AI tasks.

This lightweight laptop, up to 15% thinner than its predecessor, claims to offer always-connected experiences through HP Go 5G service.

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Amazon Imposes 3.5% Fuel Surcharge For Many Online Merchants

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon will start charging sellers who use its shipping services a 3.5% “fuel and logistics” surcharge later this month, joining the ranks of shipping companies raising prices as the war in Iran pushes oil prices higher. The fees take effect on April 17 for customers of the company’s Fulfillment by Amazon service — which is used by many of the independent sellers who list their products on Amazon’s retail sites — in the US and Canada. Items shipped by Amazon on behalf of merchants who sell on their own sites or at other retailers will carry the surcharge beginning May 2. “Elevated costs in fuel and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry,” Ashley Vanicek, an Amazon spokesperson, said on Thursday. “We have absorbed these increases so far, but similar to other major carriers, when costs remain elevated we implement temporary surcharges to partially recover these costs.”

Vanicek notes that the fee will apply to the sum Amazon charges to ship an item, not the product’s sale price.

Last month, USPS announced that it would impose its first-ever fuel surcharge on packages.

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Startup launched by former AWS energy team emerges with $7M to help solve data center power crunch

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Soma Energy’s co-founders, from left: CEO Ath Caramanolis, Chief Technology Officer Mario Souto and Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum. (Soma Energy Photos)

Soma Energy, a startup founded by former Amazon energy managers, emerged from stealth Thursday with $7 million in funding.

The Vancouver, B.C.-based company has built an AI platform serving power producers and data centers, helping both optimize their energy assets in real time to save money and extend their available power. The technology coordinates resources including wind, solar and batteries and the management of energy demands such as data center workloads.

CEO Ath Caramanolis said you can visualize an electrical system as a complex network of roads and highways on which electrons — instead of cars and trucks — are traveling.

“Our software is sort of a control plane that helps provide the self-driving for electrons on these highway systems,” Caramanolis said in a GeekWire interview.

More efficient routing of electron traffic can bring more power to bear for the grid’s competing needs.

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“There is low hanging fruit everywhere, and the opportunities for large energy users like data centers to better utilize the grid exist all across North America,” Caramanolis said.

Industries, utilities and elected officials worldwide are racing to expand energy supply as data centers and electrification of transportation, heating and other sectors drive surging demand. Data centers alone are expected to more than double their power draw — from 82 gigawatts in 2025 to 219 by 2029 — with most of that growth fueled by AI, according to McKinsey.

Amazon hired Caramanolis in 2018 to create the energy optimization team at AWS, which managed about 10 gigawatts of renewable energy across its global network of data centers. Seattle City Light, by comparison, has a generation capacity of about 2 gigawatts.

Caramanolis then recruited Mario Souto, Soma Energy’s co-founder and chief technology officer, to build the machine learning platform AWS used to optimize its renewable portfolio. The startup’s third co-founder, Chief AI Scientist Henrique Hoeltgebaum, is an expert in AI-driven forecasting and anomaly detection for energy systems.

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Soma Energy launched in February 2024 and has 18 employees. The startup has deployed 2 gigawatts of assets in the U.S. with customers including several independent power producers and five data center companies — among them H5 Data Centers, whose sites include a large facility in downtown Seattle.

“By coordinating existing resources, we were able to access capacity significantly sooner than expected, accelerating our time to power and removing a critical constraint on expansion,” said Josh Simms, CEO of H5 Data Centers, in a statement.

The seed round was led by Category Ventures, with participation from Haystack, Panache Ventures, RRE Ventures, TO.VC, Uncork Capital and Walter Kortschak. The investment will allow the team to hire new employees in engineering and commercial roles and expand its reach across North America.

“Having managed hyperscale power systems firsthand, the founders built Soma Energy as if they were the customer themselves,” said Villi Iltchev, partner at Category Ventures.  

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Dell’s five-second charging keyboard reveals a future where electric cars could recharge in minutes instead of hours

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  • Supercapacitors turn charging time from hours into mere seconds
  • Fast charging exposes the real limits of lithium-ion battery chemistry
  • Supercapacitor technology lacks sufficient energy capacity for practical electric vehicles

Dell has introduced a keyboard and mouse combo that charges in five seconds and delivers a full day of use.

The new Dell Pro 7 Rechargeable Compact Keyboard and Mouse relies on supercapacitor technology rather than traditional lithium-ion batteries.

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Anything Can Be A Router, If You Try Hard Enough

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If you’re an American and you use the Internet at home, it seems probable that routers are going to be in short supply. The US government recently mandated all such devices be home grown for security reasons, which would be fine were it not that the US has next-to-no consumer-grade router manufacturing industry.

So if you’re in the US and you need a router, what can you do? [Noah Bailey] is here from Canada to point out that almost anything (within reason) in computer terms can be made to perform as a router.

The piece is really a guide to setting up a Linux router, which he does on a small form factor PC and a hacked-together assembly of old laptop, PCI-express extender, and scrap network kit. In its most basic form a router doesn’t need the latest and greatest hardware, so there exists we’re guessing almost two decades of old PCs just waiting to be pressed into service. Perhaps it won’t help the non-technical Man In The Street much, but maybe it’ll inspire a few people to save themselves a hefty bill when they need to connect.

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You can read our coverage of the ban here.

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Windows 3.1 On A Modern AM5-Based PC Is Surprisingly Usable

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Although Windows 95 stole the show, Windows 3.0 was arguably the first version of Windows that more or less nailed the basic Windows UI concept, with the major 3.1 update being quite recognizable to a modern-day audience. Even better is that you can still install Win3.1 on a modern x86-compatible PC and get some massive improvements along the way, as [Omores] demonstrates in a recent video.

The only real gotcha here is that the AMD AM5 system with Asus Prime X670-P mainboard is one of those boards whose UEFI BIOS still has the ‘classic BIOS’ Compatibility Support Module (CSM) option. With that enabled, Win 3.1 installs without further fuss via a USB floppy drive from a stack of ‘backup’ floppies that someone made in the early 90s. [Omores] also tried it with CSMWrap, but with this USB to PS/2 emulation didn’t work.

Windows 3.1 supports ‘enhanced mode’ by default, which adds virtual memory and multi-tasking if you have an 80386 CPU or better. To fix crashing on boot and having to use ‘standard mode’ instead, the ahcifix.386 fix for the responsible SATA issue by [PluMGMK] should help, or a separate SATA expansion card.

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For the video driver the vbesvga.drv by [PluMGMK] was used, to support all VESA BIOS Extensions modes. This driver has improved massively since we last covered it and works great with an RTX 5060 Ti GPU. There’s now even DCI support to enable direct GPU VRAM access for e.g. video playback, with audio also working great with only a few driver-related gotchas.

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Meta Caves To The MPAA Over Instagram’s Use Of ‘PG-13,’ Ending A Dispute That Was Silly From The Start

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from the silly-times dept

Back in October, Meta announced that its new Instagram Teen Accounts would feature content moderation “guided by the PG-13 rating.” On its face, this made a certain kind of sense as a communication strategy: parents know what PG-13 means (or at least think they do), and Meta was clearly trying to borrow that cultural familiarity to signal that it was taking teen safety seriously.

The Motion Picture Association, however, was not amused. Within hours of the announcement, MPA Chairman Charles Rivkin fired off a statement. Then came a cease-and-desist letter. Then a Washington Post op-ed whining about the threat to its precious brand. The MPA was very protective of its trademark, and very unhappy that Meta was freeloading off the supposed credibility of its widely mocked rating system.

And now, this week, the two sides have announced a formal resolution in which Meta has agreed to “substantially reduce” its references to PG-13 and include a rather remarkable disclaimer:

“There are lots of differences between social media and movies. We didn’t work with the MPA when updating our content settings, and they’re not rating any content on Instagram, and they’re not endorsing or approving our content settings in any way. Rather, we drew inspiration from the MPA’s public guidelines, which are already familiar to parents. Our content moderation systems are not the same as a movie ratings board, so the experience may not be exactly the same.”

In Meta’s official response, you can practically hear the PR team gritting their teeth:

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“We’re pleased to have reached an agreement with the MPA. By taking inspiration from a framework families know, our goal was to help parents better understand our teen content policies. We rigorously reviewed those policies against 13+ movie ratings criteria and parent feedback, updated them, and applied them to Teen Accounts by default. While that’s not changing, we’ve taken the MPA’s feedback on how we talk about that work. We’ll keep working to support parents and provide age-appropriate experiences for teens,” said a Meta spokesperson.

Translation: we’re still doing the same thing, we’re just no longer allowed to call it what we were calling it.

There are several layers of nonsense worth unpacking here. First, there’s the MPA getting all high and mighty about its rating system. Let’s remember how the MPA’s film rating system came into existence in the first place: it was a voluntary self-regulation scheme created in the late 1960s specifically to head off government regulation after the government started making noises about the harm Hollywood was doing to children with the content it platformed. Sound familiar? The studios decided that if they rated their own content, maybe Congress would leave them alone. As the MPA explains in their own boilerplate:

For nearly 60 years, the MPA’s Classification and Rating Administration’s (CARA) voluntary film rating system has helped American parents make informed decisions about what movies their children can watch… CARA does not rate user-generated content. CARA-rated films are professionally produced and reviewed under a human-centered system, while user-generated posts on platforms like Instagram are not subject to the same rating process.

Sure, there’s a trademark issue here, but let’s be real: no one thought Instagram was letting a panel of Hollywood parents rate the latest influencer videos.

Next, the PG-13 analogy never actually made much sense for social media. As we discussed on Ctrl-Alt-Speech back when this whole thing started, the context and scale are just completely different. At the time, I pointed out that a system designed to rate a 90-minute professionally produced film — reviewed in its entirety by a panel of parents — is a wholly different beast than moderating hundreds of millions of short-form posts generated by individuals (and AI) every single day.

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So, yes, calling the system “PG-13” was a marketing gimmick, meant to trade on a familiar brand while obscuring how differently social media actually works — but the idea that this somehow dilutes the MPA’s marks is still pretty silly.

Then there’s the rating system’s well-documented arbitrariness. The MPA’s ratings have been criticized for decades for their seemingly incoherent standards. On that same podcast, I noted that the rating system is famous for its selective prudishness — nudity gets you an R rating, but two hours of violence can skate by with a PG-13.

There was a whole documentary about this — This Film Is Not Yet Rated — that exposed just how subjective and inconsistent the whole process was. Meta was effectively borrowing credibility from a system that was itself created as a regulatory dodge, is famously inconsistent, and was designed for an entirely different medium. And the MPA’s response was essentially: “Hey, that’s our famously inconsistent regulatory dodge, and you can’t have it.”

The whole thing was silly. And now it’s been formally resolved with Meta agreeing to stop doing the thing it had already mostly stopped doing back in December. So even the resolution is anticlimactic.

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But there’s a more substantive point buried under all this trademark squabbling: the whole approach reflects a flawed assumption that one company can set a universal standard for every teen on the planet.

As I argued on the podcast, the deeper issue is that the whole framework is wrong for the medium. The MPA’s rating system was built to evaluate a single 90-minute film, reviewed in its entirety by a panel of parents. Applying that logic to hundreds of millions of short-form posts generated by people across wildly different cultural contexts — a kid in rural Kansas, a teenager in Berlin, a twelve-year-old in Lagos — was never going to produce anything coherent. Different kids, different families, different communities have different standards, and no single company should be setting a universal threshold for all of them. The smarter approach is giving parents and users real controls with customizable defaults, rather than having Zuckerberg (or a Hollywood trade association) decide what counts as age-appropriate for every teenager on the planet.

This whole dispute was silly from start to finish.

Filed Under: content moderation, movie ratings, pg-13, social media

Companies: meta, mpa

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Drift loses $280 million as hackers seize Security Council powers

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Drift loses $280 million as hackers seize Security Council powers

The Drift Protocol lost at least $280 million after a threat actor took control of its Security Council administrative powers in a planned, sophisticated operation.

The attacker leveraged durable nonce accounts and pre-signed transactions to delay execution and strike with accuracy at a chosen time, the platform explained.

Drift underlines that the hacker did not exploit any flaws in its programs or smart contracts, and no seed phrases have been compromised.

Drift Protocol is a DeFi trading platform built on the Solana blockchain that serves as a non-custodial exchange, giving users full control of their funds as they interact with on-chain markets.

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As of late 2024, the platform claimed to have 200,000 traders, supporting total trading volumes of more than $55 billion and a daily peak of $13 million.

According to Drift’s report, the heist was prepared between March 23 and 30, with the attacker setting up durable nonce accounts and obtaining 2/5 multisig approvals from Security Council members to meet the required threshold.

This enabled them to pre-sign malicious transactions that weren’t executed immediately.

On April 1st, the attacker performed a legitimate transaction and immediately executed the pre-signed malicious transactions, transferring admin control to themselves within minutes.

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Having gained admin control, they introduced a malicious asset, removed withdrawal limits, and eventually drained funds.

PeckShield
Source: PeckShield

Drift Protocol estimates the losses at about $280 million, while blockchain tracking account PeckShieldAlert has calculated them at $285 million.

When unusual activity on the protocol was detected, Drift issued a public warning to users, stating that started an investigation and urging them not to deposit any funds until further notice.

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As a result of the attack, borrow/lend deposits, vault deposits, and trading funds have been affected, and all protocol functions are now essentially frozen. Drift said DSOL is unaffected, and insurance fund assets are secured.

The platform is now working with security firms, cryptocurrency exchanges, and law enforcement authorities to trace and freeze the stolen funds.

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Drift promised to publish a detailed post-mortem report in the coming days.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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