ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols marks Reddit's 20 years of being "the front page of the internet," recalling its evolution from a scrappy startup into a cultural powerhouse that shaped online discourse, meme culture, and the way millions consume news and entertainment. Slashdot is also given a subtle nod in the opening line of the article. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: In 2005, if you were into social networks focused on links, you probably used Digg or Slashdot. However, two guys, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, recent graduates from the University of Virginia, wanted to create a hub where users could find, share, and discuss the internet's most interesting content. Little did they know where this idea would take them. After all, their concept was nothing new. Still, after Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator and seed capital firm, had shot down their first idea -- a mobile food-ordering app -- they pitched what would become Reddit to Graham, and he gave it his blessing. Drawing inspiration from sites like Delicious, a now-defunct social bookmarking service, and Slashdot, Huffman and Ohanian envisioned Reddit as a platform that would combine the best aspects of both: a place for sharing timely, ephemeral news and fostering vibrant community discussions of not just technology, but any topic users cared about. Their guiding mission was to build "the front page of the internet," a simple, user-driven site where anyone could submit content, and the community, not algorithms or editors, would decide what was most important through voting and discussion. They deliberately prioritized user participation and conversation over flashy features or heavy editorial control. What set Reddit apart from its early rivals was its framework. Instead of one large all-in-one interface, the site borrowed the idea from pre-internet online networks, such as CompuServe, of smaller sub-networks devoted to a particular topic. These user-created communities, "subreddits," quickly set it apart from other social platforms. As Laurence Sangarde-Brown, co-founder of TechTree, wrote: "This design allows users to delve into focused discussions, ask questions, and exchange ideas on a scale unmatched by other platforms." That approach was not enough, though, to kick-start Reddit. The founders had to "fake it until they made it." They seeded the site with fake accounts to make it appear more active. Their efforts paid off, as real users soon flocked to the platform. Another crucial early change was when Reddit merged with Aaron Swartz's Infogami and introduced commenting. This move was vital for laying the groundwork for the site's interactive, community-driven experience. [...] So, where does Reddit go from here? We'll see. Reddit's legacy is one of transformation: from a scrappy startup to a global hub for conversation, collaboration, and sometimes controversy. As it celebrates 20 years, Reddit remains a testament to how important online communities can be in a world increasingly filled with AI slop. Still, Huffman believes Reddit's true value is coming. In a recent Reddit post, he wrote: "Reddit works because it's human. It's one of the few places online where real people share real opinions. That authenticity is what gives Reddit its value. If we lose trust in that, we lose what makes RedditReddit. Our focus is, and always will be, on keeping Reddit a trusted place for human conversation." Huffman concluded: "The last 20 years have proven how powerful online communities can be — and as we look ahead, I'm even more excited for what the next 20 will bring."

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A joint investigation found that at least five popular VPN apps on the App Store and Google Play have ties to Qihoo 360, a Chinese company with military links. Apple has since removed two of the apps but has not confirmed the status of the remaining three, which 9to5Mac notes have "racked up more than a million downloads." The five apps in question are Turbo VPN, VPN Proxy Master, Thunder VPN, Snap VPN, and Signal Secure VPN (not associated with the Signal messaging app). The Financial Times reports: At least five free virtual private networks (VPNs) available through the US tech groups' app stores have links to Shanghai-listed Qihoo 360, according to a new report by research group Tech Transparency Project, as well as additional findings by the Financial Times. Qihoo, formally known as 360 Security Technology, was sanctioned by the US in 2020 for alleged Chinese military links. The US Department of Defense later added Qihoo to a list of Chinese military-affiliated companies [...] In recent recruitment listings, Guangzhou Lianchuang says its apps operate in more than 220 countries and that it has 10mn daily users. It is currently hiring for a position whose responsibilities include "monitoring and analyzing platform data." The right candidate will be "well-versed in American culture," the posting says.

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BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams: Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached. "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site. The text "HIBP" refers to is the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service created by Troy Hunt, with whom threat actors commonly share stolen data to be added to the service. Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive's authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named "ia_users.sql." The database contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data. Hunt says there are 31 million unique email addresses in the database, with many subscribed to the HIBP data breach notification service. The data will soon be added to HIBP, allowing users to enter their email and confirm if their data was exposed in this breach.

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After a 7.1 tremor struck southwestern Japan on Thursday, the country's meteorological agency issued its first-ever alert for a possible "megaquake." It marks the first time the warning has been issued under new rules drawn up after a 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster killed almost 20,000 people. Phys.org reports: The JMA's "megaquake advisory" warns that "if a major earthquake were to occur in the future, strong shaking and large tsunamis would be generated." "The likelihood of a new major earthquake is higher than normal, but this is not an indication that a major earthquake will definitely occur during a specific period of time," it added. The advisory concerns the Nankai Trough "subduction zone" between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, where massive earthquakes have hit in the past. [...] Japan's government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 percent probability of striking within the next 30 years. In the worst-case scenario 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach $13 trillion with infrastructure wiped out. "The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary," geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter. And "while earthquake prediction is impossible, the occurrence of one earthquake usually does raise the likelihood of another", they explained. "A future great Nankai earthquake is surely the most long-anticipated earthquake in history -- it is the original definition of the 'Big One'."

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department over his alleged role in one of the largest U.S. government breaches of classified material. As a result, he will avoid imprisonment in the United States. CNN reports: Under the terms of the new agreement (PDF), Justice Department prosecutors will seek a 62-month sentence -- which is equal to the amount of time Assange has served in a high-security prison in London while he fought extradition to the US. The plea deal would credit that time served, allowing Assange to immediately return to Australia, his native country. The plea deal must still be approved by a federal judge. Assange had faced 18 counts from a 2019 indictment for his alleged role in the breach that carried a max of up to 175 years in prison, though he was unlikely to be sentenced to that time in full. Assange was being pursued by US authorities for publishing confidential military records supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and 2011. US officials alleged that Assange goaded Manning into obtaining thousands of pages of unfiltered US diplomatic cables that potentially endangered confidential sources, Iraq war-related significant activity reports and information related to Guantanamo Bay detainees.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Spotify, Epic Games, Deezer, Paddle, and several other developers and EU associations today sent a joint letter to the European Commission to complain about Apple's "proposed scheme for compliance" with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The 34 companies and associations do not believe Apple's plans "meet the law's requirements." Apple's changes "disregard both the spirit and letter of the law" and if left unchanged, will "make a mockery of the DMA," according to the letter. Several specific components of Apple's plan are highlighted, including the Core Technology Fee, the Notarization process, and the terms that developers must accept: - Apple's requirement to stay with the current App Store terms or opt in to new terms provides developers with "an unworkable choice" that adds complexity and confusion. The letter suggests that neither option is DMA compliant and would "consolidate Apple's stronghold over digital markets." - The Core Technology Fee and transaction fees will hamper competition and will prevent developers from agreeing to the "unjust terms." - Apple is using "unfounded privacy and security concerns" to limit user choice. The "scare screens" that Apple plans to show users will "mislead and degrade the user experience." - Apple is not allowing sideloading, and it is making the installation and use of new app stores "difficult, risky and financially unattractive for developers." The companies and associations are urging the European Union to take "swift, timely and decisive action against Apple." The way the European Commission responds to Apple's proposal "will serve as a litmus test of the DMA and whether it can deliver for Europe's citizens and economy." Further reading: Apple Backtracks on Removing EU Home Screen Web Apps in iOS 17.4

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Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan found that wasabi improves both short- and long-term memory. CBS News reports: Rui Nouchi, the study's lead researcher and an associate professor at the school's Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, told CBS News the results, while based on a limited sample of subjects without preexisting health conditions, exceeded their expectations. "We knew from earlier animal studies that wasabi conferred health benefits," he said in an interview from his office in northeast Japan. "But what really surprised us was the dramatic change. The improvement was really substantial." The main active component of Japanese wasabi is a biochemical called 6-MSITC, a known antioxidant and anti-inflammatory known to exist in only trace amounts elsewhere throughout the plant kingdom, Nouchi said. The double-blind, randomized study involved 72 healthy subjects, aged 60 to 80. Half of them took 100 milligrams of wasabi extract at bedtime, with the rest receiving a placebo. After three months, the treated group registered "significant" boosts in two aspects of cognition, working (short-term) memory, and the longer-lasting episodic memory, based on standardized assessments for language skills, concentration and ability to carry out simple tasks. No improvement was seen in other areas of cognition, such as inhibitory control (the ability to stay focused), executive function or processing speed. Subjects who received the wasabi treatment saw their episodic memory scores jump an average of 18%, Nouchi said, and scored on average 14% higher than the placebo group overall. The researchers theorized that 6-MSITC reduces inflammation and oxidant levels in the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for memory function, and boosts neural plasticity. Compared with the control group, the study said, subjects dosed with wasabi "showed improved verbal episodic memory performance as well as better performance in associating faces and names, which is often the major memory-related problem in older adults." But here's the rub: most of the "wasabi" you order at sushi restaurants is made of ordinary white horseradish, dyed green. "Genuine wasabi must be consumed fresh, with the stubbly rhizome, or stem of the plant, grated tableside just before eating," notes the report. "On the plus side, just a small dab offers the same benefits as the capsule supplements used in the Tohoku study, or 0.8 milligrams of 6-MSITC." The study has been published in the journal Nutrients.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The Electronic Frontier Foundation will award Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of the 'pirate' library Sci-Hub, for her efforts to provide access to scientific knowledge. According to EFF, Elbakyan's site is a vital resource for millions of students and researchers. Some medical professionals have even argued that the site helped to save lives. [...] "When I was working on my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not subscribed to anything," Alexandra told TorrentFreak years ago. Today, Sci-Hub continues to tear down academic paywalls but that comes at a cost. Sci-Hub has been sued several times and owes millions in damages to major publishers. In addition, Elbakyan also drew the attention of the FBI. Instead of throwing in the towel, Sci-Hub's founder continues to defend her ideals. They're a thorn in the side of major publishers, but on the other side of the debate, Elbakyan reaps praise. This week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that Sci-Hub's founder will receive an award for her accomplishments in advancing access to scientific knowledge. EFF's awards are presented to people who have taken a leading role in the fight for freedom and innovation online. The previous winners include Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. According to EFF, Elbakyan deserves the award as her life's work enables millions of people to access scientific knowledge that would otherwise exist beyond their financial reach. EFF also highlights that Elbakyan's work helps to challenge the current academic publishing system, where researchers are used as unpaid workhorses. "Sci-Hub is used by millions of students, researchers, medical professionals, journalists, inventors, and curious people all over the world, many of whom provide feedback saying they are grateful for this access to knowledge," said the EFF. "Some medical professionals have said Sci-Hub helps save human lives; some students have said they wouldn't be able to complete their education without Sci-Hub's help."

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The Internet Archive has taken the rather unusual step of sending a DMCA notice to protect the copyrights of book publishers and authors. The non-profit organization asked GitHub to remove a tool that can strip DRM from books in its library. The protective move is likely motivated by the ongoing legal troubles between the Archive and book publishers. TorrentFreak reports: The Internet Archive sent a takedown request to GitHub, requesting the developer platform to remove a tool that circumvents industry-standard technical protection mechanisms for digital libraries. This "DeGouRou" software effectively allows patrons to save DRM-free copies of the books they borrow. "This DMCA complaint is about a tool made available on github which purports to circumvent technical protections in violation of the copyright act section 1201," the notice reads. "I am reporting a Git which provides a tool specifically used to circumvent industry standard library TPMs which are used by Internet Archive, and other libraries, to permit patrons to borrow an encrypted book, read the encrypted book, and return an encrypted book." Interestingly, an IA representative states that they are "not authorized by the copyright owners" to submit this takedown notice. Instead, IA is acting on its duty to prevent the unauthorized downloading of copyright-protected books. It's quite unusual to see a party sending takedown notices without permission from the actual rightsholders. However, given the copyright liabilities IA faces, it makes sense that the organization is doing what it can to prevent more legal trouble. Permission or not, GitHub honored the takedown request. It removed all the DeGourou repositories that were flagged and took the code offline. [...] After GitHub removed the code, it soon popped up elsewhere.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Japan has extended its natural disaster preparations to vending machines, which will offer free food and drink in the event of a major earthquake or typhoon. Two machines have been installed in the western coastal city of Ako, located in a region that seismologists say is vulnerable to a powerful earthquake that is expected to hit the country's central and south-west pacific coast in the next few decades. The machines, which contain about 300 bottles and cans of soft drinks and 150 emergency food items, including nutritional supplements, have been installed near buildings that have been designated as evacuation shelters. They are designed to "unlock" and make their contents available free of charge in the event of a heavy rain warning, or an evacuation order after a quake of an upper five or higher on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of seven, according to the Mainichi Shimbun. Their contents must be paid for the rest of the time, the newspaper added. The manufacturer, Earth Corp, which has a factory in the city, says the machines are the first of their kind in Japan, one of the world's most seismically active countries, and where increasingly powerful typhoons have caused widespread flooding and landslides in recent years. "We would like to install [the machines] throughout the country," a company representative told the Mainichi. A city official said: "We expect that the stockpile will lead to the safety and security of our residents." Earlier this year, a vending machine with a radio that will automatically issue emergency broadcasts was set up in a park in Tokyo. "The radio will be activated by earthquakes registering 5 or higher on the Japanese intensity scale, and transmit evacuation and other vital information from a local community radio station," reports the Guardian.

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E3 2023 has been called off "after huge gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Ubisoft all said they wouldn't be participating in the event," reports The Verge. From the report: E3 2023 was scheduled for June 13th through 16th with a mix of industry-focused days and days that would be open to the public. But in the lead-up to June, there had been some worrying signs that things might be rocky for E3's revival. According to an email sent to employees and verified by IGN, E3 2023 "simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry." In an email to The Verge, Kyle Marsden-Kish, global VP of gaming at ReedPop, wrote: "This was a difficult decision because of all the effort we and our partners put toward making this event happen, but we had to do what's right for the industry and what's right for E3. We appreciate and understand that interested companies wouldn't have playable demos ready and that resourcing challenges made being at E3 this summer an obstacle they couldn't overcome. For those who did commit to E3 2023, we're sorry we can't put on the showcase you deserve and that you've come to expect from ReedPop's event experiences." Marsden-Kish suggested the convention could return in subsequent years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. industrial conglomerate 3M Co on Tuesday set a 2025 deadline to stop producing PFAS, the "forever chemicals" used in anything from cell phones to semiconductors that have been linked to cancers, heart problems and low birth weights. Perfluoralkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) do not break down quickly and have in recent years been found in dangerous concentrations in drinking water, soils and foods. Legal pressure over the damage caused by PFAS has increased. Last month, 3M and DuPont de Nemours Inc (DD.N) were among several companies sued by California's attorney general to recover clean-up costs. Shareholders have also called for production of the chemicals to stop. Investors managing $8 trillion in assets earlier this year wrote to 54 companies urging them to phase out their use. "3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move," Victoria Scholar, head of investment at abrdn's Interactive Investor, said of 3M's deadline. "3M said its annual sales of manufactured PFAS are about $1.3 billion with estimated earnings before interest, tax, depreciation (EBITDA) margins of about 16%," adds Reuters. "The sales figure works out at about 3.7% of 3M's 2021 group revenues of $35.4 billion. 3M expects related total pre-tax charges of about $1.3 billion to $2.3 billion over the course of its PFAS exit."

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Last.fm turned 20 years old over the weekend and users are still tracking their music playback hundreds of thousands of times a day. The Verge's Jacob Kastrenakes writes: Last.fm felt just a little bit revolutionary when it was first introduced in the early 2000s. The site's plug-ins -- which were originally created for a different service called Audioscrobbler -- tapped into your music player, took note of everything you listened to, and then displayed all kinds of statistics about your listening habits. Plus, it could recommend tracks and artists to you based on what other people with similar listening habits were interested in. "If this catches on, a system like this would be a really effective way to discover new artists and find people with similar tastes," the blogger Andy Baio wrote in February 2003 after first trying it out. This was very much a precursor to the algorithmic recommendation systems that are built into every music streaming service today. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal -- whatever it is you're listening to, they're all tracking your habits and using that to recommend new tracks to you. But on those services, your data is kept hidden behind the scenes. Using Last.fm was like having access to your year-end Spotify Wrapped but available every single day and always updating. Streaming services' automated recommendations have largely obviated the need for a platform like Last.fm (I certainly haven't scrobbled anything in more than a decade). But I poked around, and it turns out there are still corners of the internet building vibrant communities around its features. One of the big uses is on Discord, where third-party developers have built a service called .fmbot that integrates scrobbling data into the popular chat room app. Thom, a backend developer based in the Netherlands, says the bot has more than 400,000 total users, with 40,000 people engaging with the service each day. It's particularly popular in Discords based around specific musical artists or genres -- where people "want to compare their statistics to each other" -- and among servers for small friend groups, so they can "dive deeper into what everyone is listening to," he says. The bot pulls in fun stats that people can brag about: the date of when they first listened to a given song, just how many days' worth of music they consumed each year, or a list of their top albums. In 2008, we ran a story from Slashdot reader Rob Spengler about Last.fm's "mountain of data." Not only did he note how Last.fm was the "largest online radio outlet" at the time, surpassing Pandora and others, but he (hilariously, in hindsight) posed the question: "Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry?"

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Firefox 106 is now available for download, bringing various new features and enhancements, such as a new PDF editing feature and new way to organize recently closed tabs. 9to5Linux reports: Mozilla says that Firefox 106 finally brings the long-anticipated two-finger swipe horizontal gesture for navigating back and forward on a website without having to hold down the Alt key. [...] Firefox 106 also introduces annotation capabilities to the built-in PDF viewer so you can write text, draw, or add signatures on PDF files. You'll be able to change the size and color of the text tool, as well as the thickness, opacity, and color of the draw tool. Another interesting new feature of the Firefox 106 release is called Firefox View, which is implemented as a pinned tab, promising to help you get back to the content you've previously discovered by allowing you to switch seamlessly between your devices running Firefox. On top of all that, Firefox 106 also brings major WebRTC changes to improve Windows and Wayland screen sharing, RTP performance and reliability, statistics, and more. There are also the usual bug and security fixes to make Firefox more stable and reliable on your system.

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Longtime Slashdot reader and tech historian, Kay Savetz, shares a blog post about the Internet Archive's efforts to build a library of amateur radio broadcasts. Here's an excerpt from the report: Internet Archive has begun gathering content for the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), which will be a massive online library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early digital communications. The DLARC is funded by a significant grant from the Amateur Radio Digital Communications Foundation (ARDC) to create a digital library that documents, preserves, and provides open access to the history of this community. The library will be a free online resource that combines archived digitized print materials, born-digital content, websites, oral histories, personal collections, and other related records and publications. The goals of the DLARC are to document the history of amateur radio and to provide freely available educational resources for researchers, students, and the general public. [...] The DLARC project is looking for partners and contributors with troves of ham radio, amateur radio, and early digital communications related books, magazines, documents, catalogs, manuals, videos, software, personal archives, and other historical records collections, no matter how big or small. In addition to physical material to digitize, we are looking for podcasts, newsletters, video channels, and other digital content that can enrich the DLARC collections. Internet Archive will work directly with groups, publishers, clubs, individuals, and others to ensure the archiving and perpetual access of contributed collections, their physical preservation, their digitization, and their online availability and promotion for use in research, education, and historical documentation. All collections in this digital library will be universally accessible to any user and there will be a customized access and discovery portal with special features for research and educational uses.

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According to Phoronix, Google has released a new AOM-AV1 update -- version 3.5, that drastically improves encode times when streaming, rendering, or recording from the CPU. At its best, the update can improve encoding times by up to 34%. Tom's Hardware reports: It is a fantastic addition to AV1's capabilities, with the encoder becoming very popular among powerful video platforms such as YouTube. In addition, we are also seeing significant support for AV1 hardware acceleration on modern discrete GPUs now, such as Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs and, most importantly - Nvidia's RTX 40-series GPUs. Depending on the resolution, encoding times with the new update have improved by 20% to 30%. For example, at 1080P, encode times featuring 16 threads of processing are reduced by 18% to 34%. At 4K, render times improved by 18% to 20% with 32 threads. Google could do this by adding Frame Parallel Encoding to heavily multi-threaded configurations. Google has also added several other improvements contributing to AV1's performance uplifts in other areas - specifically in real-time encoding. In other words, CPU utilization in programs such as OBS has been reduced, primarily for systems packing 16 CPU threads. As a result, they are allowing users to use those CPU resources for other tasks or increase video quality even higher without any additional performance cost. If you are video editing and are rendering out a video in AV1, processing times will be vastly reduced if you have a CPU with 16 threads or more.

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Toyota sold its 200,000th plug-in electric vehicle in the US, triggering a slow phaseout of the federal EV tax credit over the next 15 months, according to Bloomberg. The automaker is the third manufacturer to pass this mark, following Tesla and General Motors. The Verge reports: The phaseout for Toyota is poorly timed, coming just weeks after the company's new electric SUV, the bZ4X, went on sale in the US. It's the latest bad piece of EV news to hit the automaker, coming just a few weeks after it was forced to recall the bZ4X over loose hub bolts that could cause the wheels to come off while driving. Toyota pledged to spend $17.6 billion to roll out 30 battery-electric models by 2030. The phaseout of the federal tax credits begins two quarters after an auto manufacturer sells 200,000 plug-in vehicles. Customers of Toyota cars that are eligible for the credit (like the bZ4X and the plug-in hybrid Prius Prime) will only be able to receive a maximum of $3,750 starting on October 1st. The maximum available credit will halve again on April 1st to $1,875, and it will completely phase out six months later in October 2023. A Toyota spokesperson confirmed the scheduled phase-out to The Verge.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Social media platform Mastodon, often seen as an alternative to Twitter, gained nearly 30,000 new users on the day that Elon Musk bought Twitter. On Tuesday a Mastodon domain became unresponsive. Eugen Rochko, Mastodon's CEO, later told Motherboard in an email that there were performance issues. "I'm sorry I couldn't have responded sooner," he wrote. "I was working all day on fixing performance issues on the Mastodon servers I operate due to the influx of new and returning users following Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk." Rochko added that Mastodon has seen an increase of 41,287 active users, including both returning users and new users. When breaking that figure down by just new users, 28,391 new people have joined Mastodon in the past day, Rochko said. Mastodon is a piece of open-source software that people can use as a base to create their own social networks. Although its appearance is similar to Twitter, it also differs from Twitter in the sense that Twitter is a single social network people sign up for. When it comes to the social network side of things, Mastodon holds more similarities with Discord, in that users have to find specific Mastodon instances to join. Those looking to create their own Mastodon instance also have to host it themselves, a step that may alienate many non-technical users. Donald Trump's social media site, Truth Social, is based on Mastodon and was recently called out by the company for failing to provide the source code for the site built on top of it. Two weeks later, the social media site quietly acknowledged Mastodon in a dedicated section labeled "open source." In regard to the matter, Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko said: "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free." Twitter did confirm some fluctuations in follower counts after Musk's deal was made official, although they said they were organic in nature.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A team of mechanical engineers at MIT recently developed an "Oreometer" to test the optimal way of separating the two halves of an Oreo cookie, so that the wafers and the creme filling inside remained unbroken. It was an exercise in rheology, or the study of how matter flows. (They called this particular experiment "Oreology.") The fluid in this case was the creme filling, a soft solid that the team classified as "mushy," meaning it's not very brittle (unlike a cracker) and is relatively soft (like bread). The team built their Oreometer to test how different types of Oreos separate, paying particular attention to the creme distribution across the two wafers once the cookie split. Their research is published today in Physics of Fluids. "Our favorite twist was rotating while pulling Oreos apart from one side, as a kind of peel-and-twist, which was the most reliable for getting a very clean break," said Crystal Owens, a mechanical engineer at MIT and the lead author of the new paper, in an email to Gizmodo. "Peeling is intuitively well-known to cause adhesive failure, like when you want to remove a sticker from a surface without tearing the sticker itself." [...] The researchers found that the creme would often stay on one side of the wafers ("Wafer 1") rather than the other, which they believe is a result of how the Oreos are manufactured. They tested regular Oreos as well as the Double and Mega Stuf varieties, which have more creme filling, and didn't report any apparent correlation between the amount of creme and how cleanly the cookie separated. The team made the Oreometer design open source, so anyone can build their own device and collect data on Oreo separation and shear. Fry would be proud.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Windows 11 may be the latest operating system from Microsoft, but [Wednesday was] about Windows 3.1. It's the birthday of the classic OS, marking 30 years since its launch on April 6, 1992. Windows 3.1 introduced several key components, many of which have digital descendants on Windows 11 and imitators on other operating systems. Windows 3.1 brought PCs the CTRL+C and CTRL+V shortcuts for copy and paste. It added TrueType fonts and came with screensavers and a media player as well. Gamers had two options for games that preinstalled games: Solitaire and Minesweeper. Selling over 3 million copies in the first three months it was on the market, Windows 3.1 was considered a success. It was more user-friendly than Windows 3.0 and introduced many people to the idea of a personal computer in their home. Sadly for those that miss the days of the MS-DOS and command line being king, Windows 3.1 reached its end of support in 2001. Further reading: Windows 3.1 Turns 30: Here's How It Made Windows Essential (How To Geek)

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