Nearly a quarter of Harvard Business School's 2024 M.B.A. graduates remained jobless three months after graduation, highlighting deepening employment challenges at elite U.S. business schools. The unemployment rate for Harvard M.B.A.s rose to 23% from 20% a year earlier, more than double the 10% rate in 2022.

Major employers including McKinsey, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have scaled back M.B.A. recruitment, with McKinsey cutting its hires at University of Chicago's Booth School to 33 from 71. "We're not immune to the difficulties of the job market," said Kristen Fitzpatrick, who oversees career development at Harvard Business School. "Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. You have to have the skills." Columbia Business School was the only top program to improve its placement rate in 2024. Median starting salaries for employed M.B.A.s remain around $175,000.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinTelegraph: Social media platform Meta has confirmed that its fact-checking feature on Facebook, Instagram and Threads will only be removed in the US for now, according to a Jan. 13 letter sent to Brazil's government. "Meta has already clarified that, at this time, it is terminating its independent Fact-Checking Program only in the United States, where we will test and refine the community notes [feature] before expanding to other countries," Meta told Brazil's Attorney General of the Union (AGU) in a Portuguese-translated letter.

Meta's letter followed a 72-hour deadline Brazil's AGU set for Meta to clarify to whom the removal of the third-party fact verification feature would apply. [...] Brazil has expressed dissatisfaction with Meta's removal of its fact check feature, Brazil Attorney-General Jorge Messias said on Jan. 10. "Brazil has rigorous legislation to protect children and adolescents, vulnerable populations, and the business environment, and we will not allow these networks to transform the environment into digital carnage or barbarity." Last Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram -- a move he described as an attempt to restore free expression on its platforms. He likened his company's fact-checking process to a George Orwell novel, saying it "something out of 1984" and let to a broad belief that Meta fact-checkers "were too biased."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The number of deaths in the U.S. is expected to exceed the number of births by 2033, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) annual 30-year projection of the U.S. population released on Monday. That estimation comes seven years earlier than what the CBO estimated in its 30-year population outlook released last year. At that time, in January 2024, the CBO projected deaths to outpace births by 2040. The CBO's 2025 report projected lower population growth over the next three decades than it did in its 2024 demographic outlook.

The CBO's population estimate for 2025 is 350 million, a slight increase from the 346 million it predicted for 2025 last year. But its projection for 2054 -- 372 million people -- has decreased since last year, when the CBO projected the population would be 383 million in 2054. The rate of growth projected over the next three decades -- 0.2 percent -- is significantly slower than the rate seen in the prior five decades, from 1975 to 2024, when the population grew at 0.9 percent. The growth rate over the next three decades is also expected to slow. From 2025 to 2035, the population is expected to grow an average of 0.4 percent a year. From 2036 to 2055, however, the growth rate is projected to be 0.1 percent. The CBO attributes this projected slow rate of growth to a variety of factors, including lower fertility, an aging population and lower immigration.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.

To gauge research quality, we count papers, citations, and calculate impact factors. The higher the scores, the better. Academic performance is often expressed in numbers. Why? Quantification reduces complexity, makes academia manageable, allows easy comparisons among scholars and institutions, and provides administrators with a feeling of grip on reality. Besides, numbers seem objective and fair, which is why we use them to allocate status, tenure, attention, and funding to those who score well on these indicators.

The result of this? Quantity is often valued over quality. In The Quantified Society I coin the term "indicatorism": a blind focus on enhancing indicators in spreadsheets, while losing sight of what really matters. It seems we're sometimes busier with "scoring" and "producing" than with "understanding." As a result, some started gaming the system. The rector of one of the world's oldest universities, for one, set up citation cartels to boost his citation scores, while others reportedly buy(!) bogus citations. Even top-ranked institutions seem to play the indicator game by submitting false data to improve their position on university rankings!

The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday that it has deleted malware planted on more than 4,200 computers by a group of criminal hackers who were backed by the People's Republic of China. From a report: The malware, known as "PlugX," affected thousands of computers around the globe and was used to infect and steal information, the department said. Investigators said the malware was installed by a band of hackers who are known by the names "Mustang Panda" and "Twill Typhoon."

More than 150 Nobel and World Food prize laureates have signed an open letter calling for "moonshot" efforts to ramp up food production before an impending world hunger catastrophe. From a report: The coalition of some of the world's greatest living thinkers called for urgent action to prioritise research and technology to solve the "tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand." Big bang physicist Robert Woodrow Wilson; Nobel laureate chemist Jennifer Doudna; the Dalai Lama; economist Joseph E Stiglitz; Nasa scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig; Ethiopian-American geneticist Gebisa Ejeta; Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank; Wole Soyinka, Nobel prize for literature winner; and black holes Nobel physicist Sir Roger Penrose were among the signatories in the appeal coordinated by Cary Fowler, joint 2024 World Food prize laureate and US special envoy for global food security.

Citing challenges including the climate crisis, war and market pressures, the coalition called for "planet-friendly" efforts leading to substantial leaps in food production to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050. The plea was for financial and political backing, said agricultural scientist Geoffrey Hawtin, the British co-recipient of last year's World Food prize. [...] The world was "not even close" to meeting future needs, the letter said, predicting humanity faced an "even more food insecure, unstable world" by mid-century unless support for innovation was ramped up internationally.

Five wildfires in Los Angeles have already burned more than 10,000 structures, threatening to upend California's fragile balance between climate risk and home insurance. The Palisades Fire has damaged or destroyed more than 5,000 buildings in an area that liability experts had previously identified as one of three particularly vulnerable regions in the state.

JPMorgan Chase estimates insured damages could reach $20 billion, positioning this as likely the costliest wildfire in U.S. history. The crisis comes as California's insurance market struggles, with seven of the 12 biggest home insurers having limited their coverage in the state over the past two years. The state-backed insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, now faces exposure of up to $458 billion, while holding only $200 million in surplus cash reserves and $2.5 billion in reinsurance. Gusts of up to 100 miles per hour have fanned the flames, with more than 57,000 structures in severe danger and more than 150,000 people under evacuation.

U.K. public sector and critical infrastructure organizations could be banned from making ransom payments under new proposals from the U.K. government. From a report: The U.K.'s Home Office launched a consultation on Tuesday that proposes a "targeted ban" on ransomware payments. Under the proposal, public sector bodies -- including local councils, schools, and NHS trusts -- would be banned from making payments to ransomware hackers, which the government says would "strike at the heart of the cybercriminal business model."

This government proposal comes after a wave of cyberattacks targeting the U.K. public sector. The NHS last year declared a "critical" incident following a cyberattack on pathology lab provider Synnovis, which led to a massive data breach of sensitive patient data and months of disruption, including canceled operations and the diversion of emergency patients. According to new data seen by Bloomberg, the cyberattack on Synnovis resulted in harm to dozens of patients, leading to long-term or permanent damage to their health in at least two cases.

Employee engagement in the U.S. fell to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, Gallup reported Tuesday, with only 31% of employees engaged. This matches the figure last seen in 2014. The percentage of actively disengaged employees, at 17%, also reflects 2014 levels. Gallup: The percentage of engaged employees has declined by two percentage points since 2023, highlighting a growing trend of employee detachment from organizations, particularly among workers younger than 35.

These are among the findings of Gallup's most recent annual update of U.S. employee engagement. Though engagement increased slightly midyear, it declined through the rest of 2024, finishing the year at its decade low. In Gallup's trend dating back to 2000, employee engagement peaked in 2020, at 36%, following a decade of steady growth, but it has generally trended downward since then.

Each point change in engagement represents approximately 1.6 million full- or part-time employees in the U.S. The declines since 2020 equate to about 8 million fewer engaged employees, including 3.2 million fewer compared to 2023. Among the 12 engagement elements that Gallup measures, those that saw the most significant declines in 2024 (by three points or more in "strongly agree" ratings) include:
Clarity of expectations. Just 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work, down 10 points from a high of 56% in March 2020.
Feeling someone at work cares about them as a person. Currently, 39% of employees feel strongly that someone cares about them, a drop from 47% in March 2020.
Someone encouraging their development. Only 30% strongly agree that someone at work encourages their development, down from 36% in March 2020.

People of all ages come to work seeking role clarity, strong relationships and opportunities for development, but managers, combined, are progressively failing to meet these basic needs. However, managers themselves are faring no better than those they manage, with only 31% engaged.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The Supreme Court on Monday said it will not consider whether to quash lawsuits brought by Honolulu seeking billions of dollars from oil and gas companies for the damage caused by the effects of climate change, clearing the way for the cases to move forward. The legal battle pursued in Hawaii state court is similar to others filed against the nation's largest energy companies by state and local governments in their courts. The suits claim that the oil and gas industry engaged in a deceptive campaign and misled the public about the dangers of their fossil fuel products and the environmental impacts.

A group of 15 energy companies asked the Supreme Court to review a decision from the Hawaii Supreme Court that allowed a lawsuit brought by the city and county of Honolulu, as well as its Board of Water Supply, to proceed. The suit was brought in Hawaii state court in March 2020, and Honolulu raised (PDF) several claims under state law, including creating a public nuisance and failure to warn the public of the risks posed by their fossil fuel products. The city accused the oil and gas industry of contributing to global climate change, leading to flooding, erosion and more frequent and intense extreme weather events. These changes, they said, have led to property damage and a drop in tax revenue as a result of less tourism.

The energy companies unsuccessfully sought to have the case moved to federal court, arguing that the claims raised by Honolulu under state law were overridden by federal law and the Clean Air Act. A state trial court denied their efforts to dismiss the case. The oil and gas industry has argued that greenhouse-gas emissions "flow from billions of daily choices, over more than a century, by governments, companies and individuals about what types of fuels to use, and how to use them." Honolulu, the companies said, was seeking damages for the "cumulative effect of worldwide emissions leading to global climate change." The Hawaii Supreme Court ultimately allowed (PDF) the lawsuit to proceed. The state's highest court determined that the Clean Air Act displaced federal common law governing suits seeking damages for interstate pollution. It also rejected the oil companies' argument that Honolulu was seeking to regulate emissions through its lawsuit, finding that the city instead wanted to challenge the promotion and sale of fossil fuel products "without warning and abetted by a sophisticated disinformation campaign."

"Plaintiffs' state tort law claims do not seek to regulate emissions, and there is thus no 'actual conflict' between Hawaii tort law and the [Clean Air Act]," the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled. "These claims potentially regulate marketing conduct while the CAA regulates pollution." The oil companies asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the ruling from the Hawaii high court and urged it to stop Honolulu's lawsuit from going forward. Regulation of interstate pollution is a federal area governed by federal law, lawyers for the energy industry argued. [...] The Supreme Court in June asked the Biden administration to weigh in on the cases and whether it should step into the dispute. In a filing submitted to the Supreme Court before the transfer of presidential power, the Biden administration urged the justices to turn away the appeals, in part because it said it is too soon for them to intervene.

The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Broadcom has lost another sizable customer for its VMware platform: Austrian cloud provider Anexia has moved 12,000 VMs, some of them rented by major European businesses, to an open-source system based on the KVM hypervisor. Anexia was founded in 2006, is based in Austria, and provides cloud services from over 100 locations around the world by placing equipment in third party datacenters. Clients include remote access and control vendor TeamViewer, and airline Lufthansa -- plus plenty more outfits that need reliable hosting and service to match.

CEO Alexander Windbichler told The Register that after Broadcom acquired VMware, increased licensing costs, and made big changes to its partner program, Anexia remained eligible to operate a VMware-powered cloud. But Windbichler felt he couldn't afford to continue, because Broadcom offered new terms that saw the cost of VMware licenses rise sharply. The CEO preferred not to enumerate the increase precisely however The Register understands it exceeded 500 percent. Whatever the actual figure, Windbichler said the cost increase "Would have been existential for us."

"We used to pay for VMware software one month in arrears," he said. "With Broadcom we had to pay a year in advance with a two-year contract." That arrangement, the CEO said, would have created extreme stress on company cashflow. "We would not be able to compete with the market," he said. "We had customers on contracts, and they would not pay for a price increase." Windbichler considered legal action, but felt the fight would have been slow and expensive. Anexia therefore resolved to migrate, a choice made easier by its ownership of another hosting business called Netcup that ran on a KVM-based platform.

Nvidia has hit back at the outgoing Biden administration's AI chip tech export restrictions designed to tighten America's stranglehold on supply chains and maintain market dominance. From a report: The White House today unveiled what it calls the Final Rule on Artificial Intelligence Diffusion from the Biden-Harris government, placing limits on the number of AI-focused chips that can be exported to most countries, but allowing exemptions for key allies and partners.

The intent is to work with AI companies and foreign governments to initiate critical security and trust standards as they build out their AI infrastructure, but the regulation also makes it clear that the focus of this policy is "to enhance US national security and economic strength," and "it is essential that ... the world's AI runs on American rails." Measures are intended to restrict the transfer to non-trusted countries of the weights for advanced "closed-weight" AI models, and set out security standards to protect the weights of such models. However GPU supremo Nvidia claims the proposed rules are so harmful that it has published a document strongly criticizing the decision.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, in his final interview before stepping down, warned that China poses the greatest long-term threat to U.S. national security, calling it "the defining threat of our generation." China's cyber program has stolen more American personal and corporate data than all other nations combined, Wray told CBS News. He said Chinese government hackers have infiltrated U.S. civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, transportation systems and telecommunications networks, positioning themselves to potentially cause widespread disruption.

"To lie in wait on those networks to be in a position to wreak havoc and can inflict real-world harm at a time and place of their choosing," Wray said. The FBI director, who is leaving his post nearly three years early after President-elect Donald Trump indicated he would make leadership changes, said China has likely accessed communications of some U.S. government personnel. He added that Beijing's pre-positioning on American civilian critical infrastructure has not received sufficient attention.

"The U.K is looking to build a homegrown challenger to OpenAI and drastically increase national computing infrastructure," reports CNBC, "as Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government sets its sights on becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence." The government is primarily seeking to expand data center capacity across the U.K. to boost developers of powerful AI models which rely on high-performance computing equipment hosted in remote locations to train and run their systems. A target of increasing "sovereign," or public sector, compute capacity in the U.K. by twentyfold by 2030 has been set... To further bolster Britain's computing infrastructure, the government also committed to setting up several AI "growth zones," where rules on planning permission will be relaxed in certain places to allow for the creation of new data centers. Meanwhile, an "AI Energy Council" formed of industry leaders from both energy and AI will be set up to explore the role of renewable and low-carbon sources of energy, like nuclear...

Britain plans to use the AI growth zones and a newly established National Data Library to connect public institutions — such as universities — to enhance the country's ability to create "sovereign" AI models which aren't reliant on Silicon Valley... Last month, the government announced a consultation on measures to regulate the use of copyrighted content to train AI models.

As an ecological disaster devastated two coastal California cities, more than 7,500 firefighters pushed back against the wildfires. 900 of them are inmates, reports NPR. That's about 12%: California is one of more than a dozen states that operates conservation camps, commonly known as fire camps, for incarcerated people to train to fight fires and respond to other disasters... There are now 35 such camps in California, all of which are minimum-security facilities... When they are not fighting fires, they also respond to floods and other disasters and emergencies. Otherwise, the crews do community service work in areas close to their camp, according to the state corrections department...

A 2018 Time investigation found that incarcerated firefighters are at a higher risk for serious injuries. They also are more than four times as likely to get cuts, bruises or broken bones compared to professional firefighters working the same fires, the report found. They were also more than eight times as likely to face injuries after inhaling smoke, ash and other debris compared with other firefighters, the report said.
"Two of the camps are for incarcerated women," reports the BBC. One of them — since released — remembers that "It felt like you were doing something that mattered instead of rotting away in a cell," according to the nonprofit new site CalMatters. They can also earn credits that help reduce their prison sentences, the BBC learned from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Friday one local California news report shared the perspective of formerly incarcerated Californian, Matthew Hahn (from a 2021 Washington Post column). "Yes, the decision to take part is largely made under duress, given the alternative. Yes, incarcerated firefighters are paid pennies for an invaluable task. And yes, it is difficult though not impossible for participants to become firefighters after leaving prison," Hahn said. "Despite this, fire camps remain the most humane places to do time in the California prison system."
From that 2021 Washington Post column: California prisons have, on average, three times the murder rate of the country overall and twice the rate of all American prisons. These figures don't take into account the sheer number of physical assaults that occur behind prison walls. Prison feels like a dangerous place because it is. Whether it's individual assaults or large-scale riots, the potential for violence is ever-present. Fire camp represents a reprieve from that risk. Sure, people can die in fire camp as well — at least three convict-firefighters have died working to contain fires in California since 2017 — but the threat doesn't weigh on the mind like the prospect of being murdered by a fellow prisoner. I will never forget the relief I felt the day I set foot in a fire camp in Los Angeles County, like an enormous burden had been lifted...

[When his 12-man crew was called to fight the Jesusita Fire], the fire had ignited one home's deck and was slowly burning its way to the structure. We cut the deck off the house, saving the home. I often fantasize about the owners returning to see it still standing, unaware and probably unconcerned that an incarcerated fire crew had saved it. There was satisfaction in knowing that our work was as valuable as that of any other firefighter working the blaze and that the gratitude expressed toward first responders included us.

There are other reasons for prisoners to choose fire camp if given the opportunity. They are often located in secluded natural settings, giving inmates the chance to live in an environment that doesn't remotely resemble a prison. There are no walls, and sometimes there aren't even fences. Gun towers are conspicuously absent, and the guards aren't even armed.... [C]onsider the guy pushing a broom in his cell block making the equivalent of one Top Ramen noodle packet per day, just so he can have the privilege of making a collect call to his mother. Or think of the man scrubbing the streaks out of the guards' toilets, making seven cents an hour, half of which goes to pay court fees and restitution, just so he can have those couple of hours outside his cage for the day...

So, while we may have faced the heat of a wildfire for a few bucks a day, and we may have saved a few homes and been happy doing so, understand that we were rational actors. We wanted to be there, where some of our dignity was returned to us.

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation as a nonprofit in 1985 with four other directors (including MIT computer science professor Gerald Jay Sussman). Sussman remains on the Board of directors, along with EFF co-founder John Gilmore and five others.

Friday the eight directors published a new article explaining how their goal and principles are protected by the nonprofit's governance structure: An obvious option, used by many organizations, was to let supporters sign up as members and have the members' votes control everything about the organization. We rejected that approach because it would have made the organization vulnerable to being taken over by people who disagreed with its mission... [A]ctivist organizations should be steady in their mission. Already in 1985, we could see that many of the people who appreciated the GNU Project's work (developing useful GNU software packages) did not support our goal and values. To look at software issues in terms of freedom was radical and many were reluctant to consider it... So we chose a structure whereby the FSF's governing body would appoint new people to itself... [T]he FSF voting members consist of all the present board members and some past board members. We have found that having some former board members remain as voting members helps stabilize the base of FSF governance.

The divergence between our values and those of most users was expressed differently after 1998, when the term "open source" was coined. It referred to a class of programs which were free/libre or pretty close, but it stood for the same old values of convenience and success, not the goal of freedom for the users of those programs. For them, "scratching your own itch" replaced liberating the community around us. People could become supporters of "open source" without any change in their ideas of right and wrong... It would have been almost inevitable for supporters of "open source" to join the FSF, then vote to convert it into an "open source" organization, if its structure allowed such a course. Fortunately, we had made sure it did not. So we were able to continue spreading the idea that software freedom is a freedom that everyone needs and everyone is entitled to, just like freedom of speech.

In recent years, several influential "open source" organizations have come to be dominated by large companies. Large companies are accustomed to seeking indirect political power, and astroturf campaigns are one of their usual methods. It would be easy for companies to pay thousands of people to join the FSF if by doing so they could alter its goals and values. Once again, our defensive structure has protected us...

A recent source of disagreement with the free software movement's philosophy comes from those who would like to make software licenses forbid the use of programs for various practices they consider harmful. Such license restrictions would not achieve the goal of ending those practices and each restriction would split the free software community. Use restrictions are inimical to the free software community; whatever we think of the practices they try to forbid, we must oppose making software licenses restrict them. Software developers should not have the power to control what jobs people do with their computers by attaching license restrictions. And when some acts that can be done by using computing call for systematic prohibition, we must not allow companies that offer software or online services to decide which ones. Such restrictions, when they are necessary, must be laws, adopted democratically by legislatures...

What new political disagreements will exist in the free software community ten, twenty or thirty years from now? People may try to disconnect the FSF from its values for reasons we have not anticipated, but we can be confident that our structure will give us a base for standing firm. We recently asked our associate members to help us evaluate the current members of the FSF board of directors through a process that will help us preserve the basic structure that protects the FSF from pressure to change its values. A year ago we used this process to select new board members, and it worked very well.

Sincerely,

The Free Software Foundation Board of Directors

WordPress co-creator (and Automattic CEO) Matt Mullenweg "has deactivated the accounts of several WordPress.org community members," reports TechCrunch, "some of whom have been spearheading a push to create a new fork of the open source WordPress project." Joost de Valk — creator of WordPress-focused SEO tool Yoast (and former marketing and communications' lead for the WordPress Foundation) — last month published his "vision for a new WordPress era," alluding to a potential fork in the form of "federated and independent repositories." Karim Marucchi, CEO of enterprise web consulting firm Crowd Favorite, echoed these thoughts in a separate blog post. WP Engine indicated it was on standby to lend a corporate hand. Mullenweg, for his part, has publicly supported the notion of a new WordPress fork.
But when Automattic slashed its contributions to Wordpress.org, things heated up: This spurred de Valk to take to X.com on Friday to indicate that he was willing to lead on the next release of WordPress, with Marucchi adding that his "team stands ready." Collectively, de Valk and Marucchi contribute around 10 hours per week to various aspects of the WordPress open source project. However, in a sarcasm-laden blog post published this morning, Mullenweg said that to give their independent effort the "push it needs to get off the ground," he was deactivating their WordPress.org accounts. "I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort," Mullenweg wrote.

At the same time, Mullenweg also revealed he was deactivating the accounts of three other people, with little explanation given: Sé Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. Reed, it's worth noting, is president and CEO of a newly established non-profit called the WP Community Collective, which is setting out to serve as a "neutral home for collaboration, contribution, and resources" around WordPress and the broader open source ecosystem. Burns, a former contributor to the WordPress project, took to X this morning to express surprise at her deactivation, noting that she hadn't been involved in the project since 2020...

It's worth noting that deactivating a WordPress.org account prevents affected users from contributing through that channel, be it to the core project or any other plugins or themes they may be involved with.
Rand-Hendriksen posted on BlueSky: So why is he targeting Heather and me? Because we started talking about the need for proper governance, accountability, conflict of interest policies, and other things back in 2017. We both left the project in 2019, and apparently he still holds a grudge.
And while Mullenweg headlined his blog post "Joost/Karim Fork," Rand-Hendriksen wrote on BlueSky "there is no fork in the works as far as I know. He made that up, as he has done before. Heather and I have no involvement with any of this so I don't know why he grouped the five of us together like this. It smells like attempted harassment."

Later Rand-Hendriksen claimed "this is not the first time he's accused critics of forking WordPress" and that he's "convinced any fork will fail... I think he thinks saying someone is forking WordPress is an epic burn that discredits them in the eyes of the community."

Friday America's consumer watchdog agency "proposed a rule to give virtual video game currencies protections similar to those of real-world bank accounts..." reports the Washington Post, "so players can receive refunds or compensation for unauthorized transactions, similar to how banks are required to respond to claims of fraudulent activity." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking public input on a rule interpretation to clarify which rights are protected and available to video game consumers under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. It would hold video game companies subject to violations of federal consumer financial law if they fail to address financial issues reported by customers. The public comment period lasts from Friday through March 31. In particular, the independent federal agency wants to hear from gamers about the types of transactions they make, any issues with in-game currencies, and stories about how companies helped or denied help.

The effort is in response to complaints to the bureau and the Federal Trade Commission about unauthorized transactions, scams, hacking attempts and account theft, outlined in an April bureau report that covered banking in video games and virtual worlds. The complaints said consumers "received limited recourse from gaming companies." Companies may ban or lock accounts or shut down a service, according to the report, but they don't generally guarantee refunds to people who lost property... The April report says the bureau and FTC received numerous complaints from players who contacted their banks regarding unauthorized charges on Roblox. "These complaints note that while they received refunds through their financial institutions, Roblox then terminated or locked their account," the report says.

As the ecological disaster continues, CNN reports the Palisades Fire near Malibu, California has burned at least 22,660 acres, left 100,000 peope under evacuation orders, left at least 11 people dead and "destroyed thousands of homes and other structures." From the last reports it was only 11% contained, and "flames are now spreading east in the Mandeville Canyon area, approaching Interstate 405, one of LA's busiest freeways."

But the Atlantic's assistant editor wrote Friday that "I have received 11 alerts. As far as I can tell, they were all sent in error." My home is not in a mandatory evacuation zone or even a warning zone. It is, or is supposed to be, safe. Yet my family's phones keep blaring with evacuation notices, as they move in and out of service....

Earlier today, Kevin McGowan, the director of Los Angeles County's emergency-management office, acknowledged at a press conference that officials knew alerts like these had gone out, acknowledged some of them were wrong, and still had no idea why, or how to keep it from happening again. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but shortly after this article was published, the office released a statement offering a preliminary assessment that the false alerts were sent "due to issues with telecommunications systems, likely due to the fires' impacts on cellular towers" and announcing that the county's emergency notifications would switch to being managed through California's state alert system...

The fifth, sixth, and seventh evacuation warnings came through at around 6 a.m. — on my phone.
At the same time a Los Angeles-area couple "spent two hours watching a live stream of flames closing in on their home," reports the Washington Post, and at one point "saw firefighters come through the house and extinguish flames in the backyard." At around 4:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the camera feeds gave out and the updates from their security system stopped. About four hours later, [Zibby] Owens's husband got an alert on his cellphone that the indoor sprinkler system had gone off and the fire alarm had been activated. They do not know the current status of their home, Owens said on Tuesday.

Real estate agent Shana Tavangarian Soboroff said in a phone interview Thursday that one set of clients had followed their Pacific Palisades home's ordeal this week in a foreboding play-by-play of text alerts from an ADT security system. The system first detected smoke, then motion, next that doors had been opened, and finally fire alerts before the system lost communication. Their home's destruction was later confirmed when someone returned to the neighborhood and recorded video, Tavangarian Soboroff said.
Soboroff also lost her home in the fire, the article adds. Burned to the ground are "the places where people raised their kids," Zibby Owens wrote in this update posted Friday. But "even if my one home, or 'structure' as newscasters call it, happens to be mostly OK, I've still lost something I loved more than anything. We've all lost it... [M]y heart and soul are aching across the country as I sit alone in my office and try to make sense of the devastation." [I]t isn't about our house.

It's about our life.

Our feelings. Our community. Our memories. Our beloved stores, restaurants, streets, sidewalks, neighbors. It's about the homes where we sat at friends' kitchen tables and played Uno, celebrated their birthdays, and truly connected.

It's all gone... [E]very single person I know and so many I don't who live in the Palisades have lost everything. Not just one or two friends. Everyone.

And then I saw video footage of our beloved village. The yogurt shop and Beach Street? Gone. Paliskates, our kids' favorite store? Gone. Burned to the ground.

Gelson's grocery store, where we just recently picked up the New York Post and groceries for the break? Gone...

The. Whole. Town.

How? How is it possible?

How could everyone have lost everything? Schools, homes, power, cell service, cars, everything. All their belongings...

All the schools, gone. It's unthinkable....

I've worked in the local library and watched the July 4 parade from streets that are now smoldering embers...

It is an unspeakable loss.
"Everyone I know in the Palisades has lost all of their possessions," the author writes, publishing what appear to be text messages from friends.

"It's gone."
"We lost everything."
"Nothing left."
"We lost it."

While CES wraps up this week, "Not all innovation is good innovation," warns Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's Director of Sustainability (heading their Right to Repair advocacy team). So this year the group held its fourth annual "anti-awards ceremony" to call out CES's "least repairable, least private, and least sustainable products..." (iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens mocked a $2,200 "smart ring" with a battery that only lasts for 500 charges. "Wanna open it up and change the battery? Well you can't! Trying to open it will completely destroy this device...") There's also a category for the worst in security — plus a special award titled "Who asked for this?" — and then a final inglorious prize declaring "the Overall Worst in Show..."

Thursday their "panel of dystopia experts" livestreamed to iFixit's feed of over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, with the video's description warning about manufacturers "hoping to convince us that they have invented the future. But will their vision make our lives better, or lead humanity down a dark and twisted path?" The video "is a fun and rollicking romp that tries to forestall a future clogged with power-hungry AI and data-collecting sensors," writes The New Stack — though noting one final irony.

"While the ceremony criticized these products, YouTube was displaying ads for them..."

UPDATE: Slashdot reached out to iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens, who says this teaches us all a lesson. "The gadget industry is insidious and has their tentacles everywhere."

"Of course they injected ads into our video. The beast can't stop feeding, and will keep growing until we knife it in the heart."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland summarizes the article: "We're seeing more and more of these things that have basically surveillance technology built into them," iFixit's Chamberlain told The Associated Press... Proving this point was EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, who gave a truly impassioned takedown for "smart" infant products that "end up traumatizing new parents with false reports that their baby has stopped breathing." But worst for privacy was the $1,200 "Revol" baby bassinet — equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor. The video also mocks Samsung's "AI Home" initiative which let you answer phone calls with your washing machine, oven, or refrigerator. (And LG's overpowered "smart" refrigerator won the "Overall Worst in Show" award.)

One of the scariest presentations came from Paul Roberts, founder of SecuRepairs, a group advocating both cybersecurity and the right to repair. Roberts notes that about 65% of the routers sold in the U.S. are from a Chinese company named TP-Link — both wifi routers and the wifi/ethernet routers sold for homes and small offices.Roberts reminded viewers that in October, Microsoft reported "thousands" of compromised routers — most of them manufactured by TP-Link — were found working together in a malicious network trying to crack passwords and penetrate "think tanks, government organizations, non-governmental organizations, law firms, defense industrial base, and others" in North America and in Europe. The U.S. Justice Department soon launched an investigation (as did the U.S. Commerce Department) into TP-Link's ties to China's government and military, according to a SecuRepairs blog post.

The reason? "As a China-based company, TP-Link is required by law to disclose flaws it discovers in its software to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology before making them public." Inevitably, this creates a window "to exploit the publicly undisclosed flaw... That fact, and the coincidence of TP-Link devices playing a role in state-sponsored hacking campaigns, raises the prospects of the U.S. government declaring a ban on the sale of TP-Link technology at some point in the next year."

TP-Link won the award for the worst in security.