While countries like Russia and China have been making headlines for years with their disinformation and propaganda campaigns on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it turns out that the US and other Western countries may have been playing the same game. A recent report (pdf) from social network analysis firm Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory has uncovered a series of operations, some covert and some less so, that aimed to “promote pro-Western narratives” in countries like Russia, China, Afghanistan, and Iran (via Gizmodo).

According to the report, Twitter and Meta removed a group of accounts from their platforms earlier this month, citing their platform manipulation and coordinated inauthentic behavior rules. Analyzing the accounts’ activity, researchers found that the accounts have been carrying out campaigns to criticize or support foreign governments (sometimes the same governments, in what feels like an attempt to sow division) and offer takes on culture and politics for years. The report says this was sometimes done by sharing links to news sites backed by the US government and military.

Images: Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory

The data analyzed came from 146 Twitter accounts (which tweeted 299,566 times), 39 Facebook profiles, and 26 Instagram accounts, along with 16 Facebook pages and two Facebook groups. Some of the accounts were meant to appear like real people and used AI-generated profile pictures. Meta and Twitter didn’t specifically name any organizations or people behind the campaigns but said their analysis led them to believe they originated in the US and Great Britain.

For anyone who’s ever been within 15 feet of a history book, the news that the US is using covert action to push its interests in other countries won’t come as a surprise. It is, however, interesting that these operations were uncovered just as social media companies are gearing up to deal with a wave of foreign interference and misinformation in our own elections.

The report also comes right on the heels of a bombshell whistleblower report from Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, which accused the company of lax security practices and misrepresenting the number of bots on its platform (something the US government is investigating and that Twitter has strongly denied).

Notably, the report didn’t uncover any sophisticated hacking techniques that took advantage of weak security. Speaking to Gizmodo, Internet Observatory staffer Shelby Grossman said that “there was not anything technically interesting about this network,” contrary to how we might imagine the US operating. “You’d think, ‘Oh, this influence operation originated in the US, surely it’s going to be special,’ but that really wasn’t the case,” she said.

The full report is a fascinating read, if you have the time, breaking down how the accounts posted and diving deep into what kind of content they shared. Spoiler alert: there were memes, hashtag campaigns, petitions, and — what else — fake news.

It also reveals a somewhat damning tidbit when talking about the reach and impact of these campaigns; according to the report, “the vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers.” What’s more, the two accounts with the most followers explicitly said they were tied to the US military. I’ll try not to think about how much all this cost when I’m paying my taxes next year.

After rolling out its Email Protection service in private beta last year, DuckDuckGo has announced that it’s finally available to all users. Email Protection is a forwarding service that assigns you a free “@duck.com” email address and intercepts email trackers before they hit your personal inbox.

If you need a refresher on exactly what DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service does, it lets you use either a personal or private “duck” address to shield your real email address from companies. Before the email hits your inbox, DuckDuckGo strips it of the trackers that snoop on your location when opening an email, when you opened it, and the device you used. It also breaks down how many trackers it removed, as well as which companies they were attached to.

Personal addresses assign a name of your choice to your duck address, like emma@duck.com. Meanwhile, private addresses take things a bit further — each time you start filling out an email field, DuckDuckGo generates a random address, which might look something like avtzqdr@duck.com. Using a new private address each time you fill out an online form should make it even more difficult for companies to track you. You can also deactivate each private address individually in case one’s receiving a lot of spam.

Image: DuckDuckGo

Now that DuckDuckGo has opened the beta to everyone, it’s adding a few new features as well. This includes link tracking protection, which removes any trackers embedded in the links added to emails (including those added to images). It’s also rolling out a smarter encryption feature that converts any links using an unencrypted “http://” connection to a secure “https://” link. A URL using HTTPS prevents hackers — or your internet service provider (ISP) — from seeing how you interact with a website.

Additionally, DuckDuckGo now lets you reply from your duck address, whether you’re using a private or personal one. This can help conceal your email address when replying to a company or person who you might not want to know your personal address or identity. But because the email is actually getting sent from your personal email client, like Gmail, DuckDuckGo says it “can’t guarantee the email will not include your forwarding address or any other personal identifier.”

DuckDuckGo has also rolled out a new self-service dashboard that lets you change your forwarding address, as well as make any other changes to your duck accounts. You can try out the beta for yourself by using the DuckDuckGo extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, or you can access it through the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser for iOS, Android, and Mac (which is still in beta).

“The biggest threats to email privacy are trackers in emails and the profiling that happens via your email address,” Omid Majdi, the product lead at DuckDuckGo, said in a statement to The Verge. “DuckDuckGo Email Protection addresses both of these issues and does so in a simple way — same inbox, more privacy — and we’re thrilled to be making the beta open to all.”

Radio juggernaut iHeartMedia is launching its own dedicated space in Fortnite to host events and concerts. The virtual park, which has been given the rather obnoxious name of iHeartLand, is being developed using the game’s creative mode and will feature several different areas.

The park includes a main stage called State Farm Park (in collaboration with, you guessed it, insurance company State Farm), mini-games, and a digital “headquarters” for iHeartMedia. The mini-games could change as the park evolves, but the handful that will be featured on launch day include car racing, an obstacle course, and a building game.

The headquarters itself includes a virtual broadcast recording studio and a replica of the tunnel seen on iHeart’s real headquarters in New York City. There’s no mention of what the recording studio will be used for, but perhaps iHeartMedia presenters will drop into the digital space to record event commentary.

The State Farm Park stage features a massive screen for watching performances, a red carpet where you can snap selfies, and a lawn area with vendors selling emotes and virtual fireworks in exchange for gold (which you earn by playing mini-games). The gold currency is unique to iHeartLand, but it’s not clear if the emotes are exclusive or available elsewhere in Fortnite.

It’s also worth noting that, despite the Fortnite creative mode being used to build iHeartLand, this is an independently created experience and is not sponsored, endorsed, or administered by Epic Games.

Twenty events are currently planned for the virtual world over the next 12 months, the first of which will be a prerecorded performance from Charlie Puth, showing on September 9th. The concert will feature new music from Puth’s upcoming album, and players can win gold by participating in a trivia game hosted by Puth. A separate album release party will also be screened in iHeartLand on October 7th.

Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images

An important distinction from other virtual concerts, such as the performances from artists like Ariana Grande and Travis Scott in Fortnite, is that Puth will not feature as a digital avatar. Instead, the show has been prerecorded for a 2D screening on the State Farm Park stage.

iHeartLand is part of the media giant’s investments in Web3 and serves as an attempt to market itself to younger audiences. We’ve seen a number of successful marketing stunts in recent years using Fortnite as a platform for metaverse entertainment, with Ariana Grande’s own Fortnite concert being attended by 27.7 million unique users and 12.3 million concurrent access players.

Those stats might excite the iHeartMedia marketing team, but most of the notable metaverse performances have included big names doing well-publicized shows with virtual avatars. The obvious question here is: will the younger market care as much about watching a prerecorded concert in iHeartLand?

Both iHeartMedia and State Farm are seemingly ready to adapt should the current iteration of iHeartLand flop. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter iHeartMedia’s chief marketing officer Gayle Troberman said that “iHeartLand and State Farm Park may evolve differently and dramatically” based on what players “love and what they love less.”

In the summer of 2017, I was stuck between high school and college and stuck between two versions of myself. There was the high school version of me, someone with a laser focus on traditional academic success, and the college version of myself, a mystery that burst with the potential to do and create outside of the box that I had formed around myself.

It started with a simple DM — something along the lines of “this seems fun; you should join it also!” When I clicked the link, I saw a dizzying array of character designs laid out in tidy rows, filling the homepage of the site. It was overwhelming, not just because so many people had joined this site but also because they had shared so many stories and characters. The characters were technicolor and sparkling, with lengthy backstories included with their pictures. There was so much passion, and I was being invited to join them.

Art Fight is a fairly simple concept. For the month of July, artists register on the site and are divided into teams. Once registered and sorted, they upload examples of their art along with personal characters and stories of their own that they would be interested in other people drawing. Then, the games begin.

You score points in Art Fight by drawing another team’s requests, called an “attack” in the lingo of the game. The more complex the request, the higher the score, and at the end of the month, the team with the most points gets a special badge on the site showing they’ve won. There’s no reward beyond the badge, and nobody is too strict about the teams. Individuals can change teams multiple times over the course of the month. The real incentive isn’t winning but, rather, drawing for others and being drawn in turn.

I was an amateur artist at the time and had spent very little time creating a social media profile and promoting my art. But even then, it was exciting to know I could draw for others and know they would be excited to draw back. Something about this space was welcoming to people of all skill levels and meant that I wasn’t lost in the digital noise.

In the following years, the time that I spent on Art Fight waxed and waned based on the business of my own summers. But each year, I made sure to draw at least one piece for it, taking the lovingly rendered illustration that another artist had made of their character and granting it life in my own art style. It remained a constant, this act of creating for someone else that I likely did not know.

The other constant was the range of other artists that used the platform. Some were students or hobby artists, drawing in the free time that they had on weekends or after work. Others were professional artists, pulling together attacks as breaks from their own work. What remained true was the range of people that Art Fight encompassed, with individuals from almost any walk of life with an interest in character design and storytelling coming together to share their creations.

Back in the summer of 2017, I hadn’t realized quite how special that was. Wedged in among my career aspirations and life goals, my art often feels pushed to the background, something that can’t be properly pursued unless it has a “purpose” (usually involving money). Having a space where that creation is encouraged and given a community, for any skill level and with few caveats, still feels exhilarating.

For the artists I know, sharing online can be a mixed blessing. Platforms offer reach but they can feel actively hostile, putting artists at the whims of algorithms and mainstream attention. There are few platforms actively devoted to art and even fewer constructed to make artists feel more comfortable. The result can feel alienating, forcing creators to post constantly to stay relevant rather than follow their own inspiration.

Art Fight, for me, is a balm to that. Even for a hobbyist artist like me, there is something exciting about individuals making art for each other without the caveats of platforms or the frantic scramble to be seen. It is a challenge that asks only for what you want to give to it rather than what the platform wants. For that reason, the month of July is a sanctuary — a place to create on my terms with the knowledge that it will still be seen by others and maybe be special to some of them.

Camille Butera is a Master of Science student at Oxford University and a recent graduate of Smith College. Outside of that, you can find her drawing and catching up on TV shows about five years after everyone else.

Discord is overhauling its Android app in the coming weeks so that new features and updates arrive at the same time as iOS and desktop. If you’re a Discord Android user, you’re probably used to seeing new features not appear for months after they were announced on iOS, and we saw that most recently with the Server Profiles feature being available on iOS way before Android.

“Historically, work on the Android implementation of new features would often be delayed until desktop and iOS were completed, resulting in some features that launched first on one platform before eventually arriving on another one,” explains the Discord product team in a blog post.

Discord is switching to React Native for its Android app, which will allow the company to roll out new features across every platform simultaneously. It also means that the design of Discord on Android will more closely resemble what you’re used to seeing on desktop or even iOS.

React Native is widely used across many popular mobile apps, including Instagram, Microsoft Outlook, Shopify, Tesla, Pinterest, and many more. Discord has been using React Native for its iOS app since it was open sourced by Meta in 2015, allowing the company to build its iOS app from the core of its React app.

The move to React Native on Android will also make Discord features and design more consistent across Android, iOS, and desktop. While the Discord Android app will still keep some specific customizations, things like font sizes will be aligned between Android and iOS.

“Android users will also enjoy the benefits of faster app update release cycles,” explains Discord. “React Native allows us to streamline and consolidate our processes, which helps our engineers work more efficiently and push out updates more frequently, especially now that the team won’t be spending as much time maintaining different codebases for different devices.”

Discord has already started rolling out its updated Android app, so Android users should start to feel the benefit of this underlying codebase change over the coming weeks. And hopefully, it should mean we’ll never see another “coming soon to Android” message for future Discord features.

Reddit is joining the GIF party with its new partnership with Giphy, a massive online hub where internet users upload and share GIFs. The new partnership, which will begin rolling out today, July 13th, requires that moderators of existing subreddits opt in to enable the feature. New subreddits will automatically opt in for GIFs in the comments, leaving mods the choice to opt out.

Reddit users would typically post a link to a GIF on a third-party host rather than simply viewing it, but the new partnership will take away the extra step of clicking on a linked GIF to see the image or animation. Reddit had tested adding GIFs to Reddit comments previously, but they were only available to those who paid for a Powerups subscription. After seeing success with the feature over the last two years, it should now be available to all users.

GIFs are the latest upgrade Reddit has added to its comment sections. In April, Reddit started indexing comments in its searches, a move that it said could make it easier to find things outside of specific subreddits and was a top-requested feature by users. More recently, it started testing Collectible Avatars, its NFT profile picture sales scheme that avoids using the term “NFT.”

Canadian telecom giant Rogers Communications says it has restored connectivity to the “vast majority” of customers following a major outage that took down its internet, mobile, and home phone services on Friday. In an update posted to Twitter on Saturday morning, Rogers explained that some customers “may experience a delay in regaining full service” as it works to get everyone back online.

Tony Staffieri, the president and CEO of Rogers, wrote a message to customers Saturday afternoon, announcing that services “have been restored” and that its network and systems “are close to fully operational.” Staffieri attributes the outage to a “network system failure following a maintenance update” that caused an issue with the company’s routers.

“We disconnected the specific equipment and redirected traffic, which allowed our network and services to come back online over time as we managed traffic volumes returning to normal levels,” Staffieri adds.

This appears to confirm speculation from the experts at Cloudflare, a company that specializes in content delivery and DDoS mitigation. At the time of the outage, they believed that it may have been caused by an issue with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a system that controls the flow of traffic on the internet. BGP also played a role in an outage that brought down Facebook’s services last year.

The outage began as early as Friday at 5AM ET, lingering throughout the entirety of the day and well into the evening. At the time of the outage, internet disruption tracker NetBlocks found that it brought down about a quarter of Canada’s connectivity.

According to CBC, Rogers has about 9 million mobile customers and provides cable and internet to nearly 3 million people. In addition to affecting customers of Rogers’ mobile subsidiaries, Fido and Chatr, it also unplugged a range of essential services throughout the country, interfering with 911 calls, debit card transactions, ATMs, and government agencies including Canada’s passport offices and Revenue Agency.

A chart shared by NetBlocks, which shows real-time internet traffic data in Canada, indicates that Rogers started to restore connectivity around 12AM ET Saturday morning. Internet traffic data from Cloudflare exhibits a similar pattern, with internet traffic beginning to pick up again at midnight and rising to nearly normal levels.

Interac, one of the banking networks affected by the outage, has stated that its services are once again available. The company powers a large number of debit cards, ATMs, and electronic fund transfers throughout Canada, a service Interac recently announced reached over one billion transactions. Interac says it plans on “adding a supplier” to strengthen its “existing network redundancy” to help prevent its services from going offline in case of another outage.

Image: Cloudflare

“Once again, we sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused our customers and we will be proactively crediting all customers,” Rogers said. “You do not need to contact us for the credit as it will be automatically applied to your account.”

Update July 9th, 5:07PM ET: Updated to add information from Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri.

Canadian telecom Rogers is suffering a major outage affecting landline phones, cellular connections, and internet connectivity throughout Canada that started early this morning. Downdetector listed thousands of reports for the issues that flooded in as people started to get up around 5AM ET and couldn’t get online.

Rogers first addressed the outage in a tweet from its official support account just before 9AM ET and then went silent for a couple of hours. On Friday afternoon, the company tweeted that its technical teams are working to restore services “alongside our global technology partners, and are making progress.”

Late Friday evening, Rogers CEO & President Tony Staffieri posted a letter to Canadians on the company website.

Dear Canadians,

We know you count on Rogers to connect you to emergency services, make payments, serve your customers, connect with work and keep in touch with friends and family. We take that responsibility very seriously and today we let you down. We can and will do better.

As you know, we experienced a network outage across both wireless and wireline service that began early this morning.

We have made meaningful progress towards bringing our networks back online and many of our wireless customers are starting to see services return. We don’t yet have an ETA on when our networks will be fully restored but will we continue to share information with our customers as we restore full service.

We know going a full day without connectivity has real impacts on our customers, and all Canadians. On behalf of all of us here at Rogers, Rogers for Business, Fido, chatr and cityfone, I want to sincerely apologize for this service interruption and the impact it is having on people from coast to coast to coast.

As our teams continue working to resolve the situation, I want to make two commitments to you:

First, we are working to fully understand the root cause of this outage and we will make all the changes necessary to ensure that in the future we meet and exceed your expectations for our networks.

Second, we will make this right for our valued customers. We will proactively apply a credit to all our customers impacted by the outage and will share more details shortly.

I take full responsibility for ensuring we at Rogers earn back your full trust, and are once again there to connect you to what matters.

Sincerely,

Tony Staffieri

President and CEO

There is still no ETA for full restoration. In another tweet, the company promised that it would be “proactively crediting all customers,” and said that it had “every technical resource and partner” working on getting its network back up.

The CBC reported Friday evening that people are starting to see their home internet and wireless services return, while Cloudflare Radar data shows traffic is beginning to flow to and from the Rogers network again, although still not anywhere near the usual levels.

Image: Cloudflare

The data from Cloudflare, a content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company that helps many highly-trafficked sites manage their operations, shows communication between its load-sharing network and Rogers in Canada exhibiting its normal nightly pattern before dropping to essentially zero at around 3–4AM ET and registering a flat line ever since. At that same time, there was a massive spike in BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) announcements for the network that indicate changes in routing.

In a blog post published Friday afternoon, Cloudflare personnel speculated that the outage is the result of an internal error at Rogers, as opposed to a cyberattack or other cause. They cited that pattern of BGP announcements, noting that with the Rogers network now failing to announce its presence, the rest of the internet can’t find it. BGP is a fundamental part of the technology that helps move information from one place on the internet to another, and a problem with BGP routing information was the cause of a massive Facebook network outage last fall.

The outage has also disconnected Interac, the network Canadian banks use, disabling debit cards, ATMs, and the e-Transfer services that recently notched over 1 billion transactions in one year.

Passport offices and Canada’s tax-collecting Revenue Agency are among the government services that are unavailable today due to the outage. Both agencies also warned users the outage is cutting off multifactor authentication codes sent by voice or text message, so people who are logged out may not be able to log in at this time.

Even the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which regulates broadcasting and telecoms, says its phones aren’t working due to the outage.

Internet network disruption tracker NetBlocks shared real-time data showing Canada’s national connectivity dropped to just 75 percent of its normal levels.

A report by CBC News noted Rogers subsidiary Fido is having problems, too. The article says problems have affected card payment processing and ATMs across Canada. A CBC radio station in Kitchener, Ontario, is also offline, and some telephone services for Ottawa’s transit agency have been knocked out. Pictures from Toronto show people crammed into coffee shops or heading to the library to access Wi-Fi now that their other options are offline.

TekSavvy customer service has told customers the outage extends to “Ontario, Quebec and the Eastern Provinces,” with no ETA for resolution, while the CBC reports that Thunder Bay operator Tbaytel says the Rogers outage is nationwide.

Toronto police tweeted early in the morning after some people in the city experienced connection issues calling 911. “The Rogers Network is experiencing some technical difficulties,” said the Toronto Police Operations Twitter account. “We are working to resolve these issues.” In a follow-up tweet, the police confirmed their 911 center is operational and advised anyone who has to call to stay on the line if they connect and to retry calls if they don’t.

Update 9:52AM ET: Added Bank of Montreal information

Update 11:20AM ET: Noted ongoing outage, added information from Cloudflare Radar, TekSavvy, and Tbaytel

Update 11:33AM ET: Added statement from Rogers

Update 12:40PM ET: Added latest update from NetBlocks

Update 1:31PM ET: Added additional information about Interac banking network, — thanks, mbarriault.

Update 2:13PM ET: Added information about CRTC, passport offices, and tax services outage.

Update 3:39PM ET: Added Cloudflare notes about BGP as a possible cause of the outage, as well as Rogers’ statement that it is “making progress” in fixing the issue.

Update 11:47PM ET: Added statement from Rogers CEO and note that services are coming back online, slowly.

Rogers has acknowledged a major outage in parts of Canada this morning, affecting cellular and internet connectivity. Downdetector has thousands of reports of issues with Rogers, and problems seem to have started at around 5AM ET. Another third-party service tracker is reporting Rogers outages across Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.

Rogers has not shared any specifics about the issue or its cause but addressed the outage in a tweet from its official support account just before 9AM ET, saying “We are aware of issues currently affecting our networks and our teams are fully engaged to resolve the issue as soon as possible. We will continue to keep you updated as we have more information to share.”

Toronto police tweeted that some people in the city have been experiencing connection issues calling 911 this morning. “The Rogers Network is experiencing some technical difficulties,” says the Toronto Police Operations Twitter account. “We are working to resolve these issues.” In a follow-up tweet, the police confirmed their 911 center is operational and advised anyone who has to call to stay on the line if they connect and to retry calls if they don’t.

A report by CBC News noted Rogers subsidiary Fido is having problems, too, as well as third-party customers like TekSavvy, which tweeted that its customer support phone lines are out. The article says problems have affected card payment processing and ATMs across Canada. A CBC radio station in Kitchener, Ontario, is also offline, and some telephone services for Ottawa’s transit agency have been knocked out.

On Twitter, the Bank of Montreal told customers the Rogers outage is “affecting all financial institutions, and causing interruptions in Interac services, BMO’s toll free numbers and the processing of transactions.”

Large areas of Canada are affected by the major ongoing outage; however, it’s still unclear exactly which areas are up or down. Internet network disruption tracker NetBlocks shared real-time data showing Canada’s national connectivity dropping to 75 percent normal levels.

Update July 8th, 9:05AM ET: Added information from NetBlocks and @RogersHelps.

Update July 8th, 9:52AM ET: Added Bank of Montreal information.

Brave Search has launched a new feature that gives you a way to create or apply custom filters that change the way its results are ranked. It’s called “Goggles,” and it could potentially help uncover sources you might not find right away on traditional search engines like Google.

Brave has some demos ready for users to try today, including ones that prioritize posts from smaller tech blogs and filter out posts from the 1,000 most-viewed sites on the web. There’s even a Goggle to exclude posts from Pinterest — because Brave clearly knows the frustration of trying to find an image and getting a Pinterest post with no source. Brave says these Goggles are just for demonstrative purposes, and developers can expand on or fork them. It will start deleting these Goggles once users start coming up with their own, but I’m hoping the Pinterest one sticks around.

While Brave says its engine, which is independent from entities like Google and Bing, “doesn’t have editorial biases,” that doesn’t change the fact that there are biases inherently present in all algorithms. Goggles are meant to mitigate this, essentially letting you have a hand in shaping what those biases are.

After trying the feature out for myself, I was impressed with how well it actually works. I searched for “AirPods Pro review” with the “Tech blogs” filter turned on, and a bunch of independent blogs popped up — The Verge was nowhere to be found. To compare, I searched the same thing on Google and saw that The Verge appeared on the first page of results.

But I was a little disappointed to find that creating your own Goggles isn’t as easy as I thought — here I was thinking that you could toggle on a bunch of filters or just enter your own keywords. Well, it turns out there’s some coding involved; developers can read up on the tool on GitHub. For now, I’ll just wait until someone comes up with a Goggle that lets me view only articles from satirical sources.

In addition to launching Goggles, Brave also announced that its search engine is out of beta and that it has already seen 2.5 billion searches within the past year. Brave is quickly becoming the Swiss army knife of search engines (at least in my opinion). It rolled out a new Discussions feature in April that started eliminating the need for users to append “Reddit” to the end of their searches — it now displays results from Reddit for relevant inquiries.