A Court Debates Whether a Climate Lawsuit Threatens National Security
The judge asked lawyers how a suit by Charleston, S.C., claiming oil companies misled people about climate risks, might be affected by a Trump executive order blasting cases like these.
Biden Is ‘Optimistic’ About Cancer Treatment in First Remarks Since Diagnosis
The former president said on Friday that he was taking a single pill daily to treat aggressive prostate cancer.
There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness
Are millennials’ fears of failing their children outweighing their desire to have them?
US Sanctions Cloud Provider 'Funnull' As Top Source of 'Pig Butchering' Scams
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as "pig butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers. "Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024," reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses."
The Treasury Department said Funnull's operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans. Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out. The scammers often insist that investors pay additional "taxes" on their crypto "earnings" before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams.
KrebsOnSecurity's January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus. Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks
The president has grown increasingly angry at court rulings blocking parts of his agenda, including by judges he appointed.
A Golden Key and a Black Eye: Elon Musk Exits Washington
Mr. Musk, who says he will devote more time to his private companies, never came close to achieving his goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget.
Instagram Isn't Just For Square Photos Anymore
Instagram now supports 3:4 aspect ratio photos, allowing users to upload images that "appear just exactly as you shot it." Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the update in a Threads post, noting that "almost every phone camera defaults to" that format. The Verge reports: An image from Instagram's broadcast channel shows how the change makes a difference. You can already post images with a rectangular aspect ratio of 4:5, but with 3:4, your photo won't be cropped at the ends. 3:4 photos are supported with single-photo uploads and with carousels, according to the channel. If you want, you can still post photos with a square or 4:5 aspect ratio.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Did Elon Musk Get a Black Eye?
The list of possible suspects seemed long.
Microsoft Tests Notepad Text Formatting In Windows 11
BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Microsoft just can't leave well enough alone. The company is now injecting formatting features into Notepad, a program that has long been appreciated for one thing -- its simplicity. You see, starting with version 11.2504.50.0, this update is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev Channels, and it adds bold text, italics, hyperlinks, lists, and even headers. Sadly, this isn't a joke. Notepad is actually being turned into a watered-down word processor, complete with a formatting toolbar and Markdown support. Users can even toggle between styled content and raw Markdown syntax. And while Microsoft is giving you the option to disable formatting or strip it all out, it's clear the direction of the app is changing.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Businessman Accused of Orchestrating Attacks on Journalists
The journalists, who worked at New Hampshire Public Radio, had investigated claims of sexual misconduct against him.
Trump Bids Farewell to Musk
Also, ISIS claimed responsibility for attacks in Syria. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.
Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI To Predict Where Users Live
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you've left a comment on a YouTube video, a new website claims it might be able to find every comment you've ever left on any video you've ever watched. Then an AI can build a profile of the commenter and guess where you live, what languages you speak, and what your politics might be. The service is called YouTube-Tools and is just the latest in a suite of web-based tools that started life as a site to investigate League of Legends usernames. Now it uses a modified large language model created by the company Mistral to generate a background report on YouTube commenters based on their conversations. Its developer claims it's meant to be used by the cops, but anyone can sign up. It costs about $20 a month to use and all you need to get started is a credit card and an email address.
The tool presents a significant privacy risk, and shows that people may not be as anonymous in the YouTube comments sections as they may think. The site's report is ready in seconds and provides enough data for an AI to flag identifying details about a commenter. The tool could be a boon for harassers attempting to build profiles of their targets, and 404 Media has seen evidence that harassment-focused communities have used the developers' other tools. YouTube-Tools also appears to be a violation of YouTube's privacy policies, and raises questions about what YouTube is doing to stop the scraping and repurposing of peoples' data like this. "Public search engines may scrape data only in accordance with YouTube's robots.txt file or with YouTube's prior written permission," it says.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
CDC Issues New Advice on Covid Vaccines for Children That Contradicted RFK Jr.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday that the vaccine would no longer appear on the childhood immunization schedule. C.D.C.’s update counters his policy.
Amazon Purges Billions of Product Listings in Cost-Cutting Drive
Amazon has quietly removed billions of product listings through a confidential initiative called "Bend the Curve," according to Business Insider. The project planned to eliminate at least 24 billion ASINs -- unique product identifiers -- from Amazon's marketplace, reducing the total from a projected 74 billion to under 50 billion by December 2024. The purge targets "unproductive selection" including poor-selling items, listings without actual inventory, and product pages inactive for over two years.
The initiative represents a shift for the company that built its reputation as "The Everything Store" through three decades of relentless catalog expansion. Bend the Curve forms part of CEO Andy Jassy's broader cost-cutting strategy, saving Amazon's retail division over $22 million in AWS server costs during 2024 by reducing the number of hosted product pages.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
United Chief Dismisses Budget Airline Model as 'Dead' and 'Crappy'
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has harsh words for budget carriers, calling their business model "dead."
"It's dead. Look, it's a crappy model. Sorry," he said when asked about the budget airline approach. Kirby argued that budget carriers like Southwest, Spirit, and Frontier built their operations around what he characterized as customer-hostile practices, saying "The model was, screw the customer ... Trick people, get them to buy, get them to come, and then charge them a whole bunch of fees that they aren't expecting."
He said he believes that these airlines struggle to retain customers once they reach sufficient scale to require repeat business.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Automattic Says It Will Start Contributing To WordPress Again After Pause
WordPress.com parent company Automattic is changing direction... again. From a report: In a blog post titled "Returning to Core" published Thursday evening, Automattic announced it will unpause its contributions to the WordPress project. This is despite having said only last month that the 6.8 WordPress release would be the final major release for all of 2025.
"After pausing our contributions to regroup, rethink, and plan strategically, we're ready to press play again and return fully to the WordPress project," the new blog post states. "Expect to find our contributions across all of the greatest hits -- WordPress Core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org. This return is a moment of excitement for us as it's about continuing the mission we've always believed in: democratizing publishing for everyone, everywhere," it reads.
Automattic says it's learned a lot from the pause in terms of the many ways WordPress is used, and that it's now committed to helping it "grow and thrive." The post also notes that WordPress today powers 43% of the web.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Smoke From Wildfires in Canada Wafts Into the Upper Midwest
States across the border issued air advisories about particulate pollution that are expected to last for several days.
ISPs Ask Justice Department To Sue States Over Low-Income Broadband Mandates After Court Losses
Major broadband lobby groups have asked the Trump administration to sue states that require internet service providers to offer low-cost plans to low-income residents, following their unsuccessful court challenges against such laws. The cable, telecom, and mobile industry associations filed the request this week with the Justice Department's new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, specifically targeting New York's law that mandates $15 and $20 monthly broadband options for eligible customers.
The industry groups suffered a significant legal defeat when the Supreme Court refused to hear their challenge to New York's affordability mandate in December 2024, after losing in federal appeals court. Now they face a potential wave of similar legislation, with California proposing $15 plans offering 100 Mbps speeds and ten other states considering comparable requirements.
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The Hottest New Vibe Coding Startup May Be a Sitting Duck For Hackers
Lovable, a Swedish startup that allows users to create websites and apps through natural language prompts, failed to address a critical security vulnerability for months after being notified, according to a new report. A study by Replit employees found that 170 of 1,645 Lovable-created applications exposed sensitive user information including names, email addresses, financial data, and API keys that could allow hackers to run up charges on customers' accounts.
The vulnerability, published this week in the National Vulnerabilities Database, stems from misconfigured Supabase databases that Lovable's AI-generated code connects to for storing user data. Despite being alerted to the problem in March, Lovable initially dismissed concerns and only later implemented a limited security scan that checks whether database access controls are enabled but cannot determine if they are properly configured.
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German Court Confirms Civil Liability for Corporate Climate Harms
An anonymous reader shares a report: In a landmark ruling advancing efforts to hold major polluters accountable for transnational climate-related harms, on May 28 a German court concluded that a corporation can be held liable under civil law for its proportional contribution to global climate change, Climate Rights International said today.
Filed in 2015, the case against German energy giant RWE AG challenged the corporation to pay for its proportional share of adaptation costs needed to protect the Andean city of Huaraz, Peru, from a flood from a glacial lake exacerbated by global warming. RWE AG, one of Europe's largest emitters, is estimated to be responsible for approximately 0.47% of global historical global greenhouse gas emissions.
"This groundbreaking ruling confirms that corporate emitters can no longer hide behind borders, politics, or scale to escape responsibility," said Lotte Leicht, Advocacy Director at Climate Rights International. "The court's message is clear: major carbon polluters can be held legally responsible for their role in driving the climate crisis and the resulting human rights and economic harms. If the reasoning of this decision is adopted by other courts, it could lay the foundation for ending the era of impunity for fossil fuel giants and other big greenhouse gas emitters."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.