Reddit, the self-declared 'front page of the internet,' says it is now valued at more than $10 billion after raising an additional $410 million in funding, with the final round expected to grow to up to $700 million. The Verge reports: "We are still planning on going public, but we don't have a firm timeline there yet," Reddit's co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times in an interview. "All good companies should go public when they can." The company previously raised $250 million in funding earlier this year for a valuation of $6 billion. But Huffman told the Times the company was approached with this recent financing round by Fidelity Investments and were made "an offer that we couldn't refuse." Reddit makes most its money from advertising on the site, and although it's a minnow compared to the likes of Facebook and Google, it's growing its business quickly. The company says it made $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021, up 192 percent compared to the same period last year. Though for context, Google made $61.9 billion in this year's second quarter, mostly from YouTube and Search advertising. Reddit now has roughly 52 million daily users (compared to 1.85 billion daily Facebook users) and more than 100,000 active sub-reddits. Earlier this year, the company said it planned to double its staff count by the end of 2021 to around 1,400 employees.

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Scientists analyse the chemistry in a woolly mammoth tusk to work out how far it travelled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: A large homeless encampment is growing on the site Apple earmarked for its North San Jose campus, two years after Apple made waves with a $2.5 billion pledge to combat the Bay Area's affordable housing and homelessness crisis. What started as a few RVs parked on the side of Component Drive has grown over the past year into a sprawling camp of dozens of people, a maze of broken-down vehicles and a massive amount of trash scattered across the vacant, Apple-owned property. People with nowhere else to go live there in tents, RVs and wooden structures they built themselves. At least two children call the camp home. Apple is trying to figure out what to do, but it's a tough situation. Clearing the camp likely will be difficult both logistically -- it's more challenging to remove structures and vehicles that don't run than tents -- and ethically -- there are few places for the displaced residents to go. Apple is "in talks with the city on a solution," company spokeswoman Chloe Sanchez Sweet wrote in an email, without providing additional details. The vacant land off Component Drive figured into Apple's $2.5 billion commitment. Apple originally bought the land in a push to acquire real estate in North San Jose for a new tech campus, but so far, the company hasn't done much to develop it. In 2019, the tech company promised to make $300 million of land it owns in San Jose available for new affordable housing -- including a portion of the Component Drive property. But it's unclear when anything might be built.

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Fortune 500 company Accenture has fell victim to a ransomware attack but said today the incident did not impact its operations and has already restored affected systems from backups. From a report: News of the attack became public earlier this morning when the company's name was listed on the dark web blog of the LockBit ransomware cartel. The LockBit gang claimed it gained access to the company's network and was preparing to leak files stolen from Accenture's servers at 17:30:00 GMT. In an emailed statement, Accenture not only confirmed the attack but also greatly played down its impact. But while Accenture said the incident was quickly contained, this didn't stop the hackers from threatening to leak files they stole from the company's internal network.

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Hollywood is embracing deepfakes, and we all can be a part of it: Warner Bros. has tapped synthetic media startup D-ID to promote its new movie "Reminiscence." From a report: A new website allows anyone to upload a photo, which D-ID's AI then turns into a moving deepfake video sequence in a short video clip promoting the film. I tried it and was impressed by the way D-ID's algorithms estimated facial movements just from a single photo. D-ID actually started out as a privacy-focused startup, aiming to develop technology that protects consumers against facial recognition. Along the way, the startup's founders realized that the same technology could be used to optimize deepfakes. "We built a very strong face engine," D-ID CEO Gil Perry told me. This allowed the company to reduce the amount of training data for its AI. Many competing solutions need multiple video clips, or at least a large amount of photos, to train an AI for creating deepfake videos. D-ID's tech instead works with just a single photo, which is ideal for marketing campaigns like the one launched by Warner Bros.

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Amazon.com withdrew a set of staff guidelines that claimed ownership rights to video games made by employees after work hours and dictated how they could distribute them, according to a company email. Bloomberg: The longstanding policies within Amazon Game Studios had drawn criticism on social media over the last month after a Google engineer posted about them. Some game developers described the rules as "draconian." The old policies mandated that employees of the games division who were moonlighting on projects would need to use Amazon products, such as Amazon Web Services, and sell their games on Amazon digital stores. It also gave the company "a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license" to intellectual property rights of any games developed by its employees.

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Microsoft is improving some of the built-in apps available in Windows 11. From a report: Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel can now test new updates to the Snipping Tool, Calculator, Mail, and Calendar apps. Some of the updates are minor, but all are designed to match the new visual style in Windows 11. Microsoft is replacing the classic Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch apps in Windows 11 with a new Snipping Tool app that combines the best features of both apps. The Win + Shift + S keyboard shortcut will be the main way to take a screenshot in Windows 11, and it will activate the snipping menu with various options for selecting what content to screenshot.

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Websites and apps featuring pirated movies and TV shows make about $1.3 billion from advertising each year, including from major companies like Amazon.com, according to a study. From a report: The piracy operations are also a key source of malware, and some ads placed on the sites contain links that hackers use to steal personal information or conduct ransomware attacks, according to the online safety nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance and the anti-piracy firm White Bullet Solutions. While law enforcement officials have sought to stop some of the online criminality, the groups identified at least 84,000 illicit entertainment sites. The study underscores just how tough a problem piracy is for both Hollywood studios and companies that distribute digital ads. The situation has been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left more people watching films and television shows over the web, where criminals have a greater chance of successfully targeting victims. "Piracy causes direct harm to creators and others who lose income when their content is stolen," the authors of the report wrote. "And major brands face reputational risks when their advertising appears on illicit websites."

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Facebook could be forced to sell gif creation website Giphy after an investigation by the UK competition regulator found its takeover could harm competition among social media companies and the digital advertising market. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an in-depth investigation earlier this year into Facebook's acquisition of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, after identifying a number of concerns about the $400m deal which was struck last year. The CMA said in its provisional findings that "our initial view [is] that the only effective way to address the competition issues that we have identified is for Facebook to sell Giphy, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer." The watchdog found that Facebook's ownership of Giphy, which it aims to integrate with its Instagram social media site, could lead to it stopping supplying gifs to other social media sites. Or Facebook could demand more user data from Giphy's social media customers to continue to get access to its gifs, increasing the company's already "significant" market power. "Millions of people share gifs every day with friends, family and colleagues, and this number continues to grow," said Stuart McIntosh, chair of the independent inquiry group investigating the deal. "Giphy's takeover could see Facebook withdrawing gifs from competing platforms or requiring more user data in order to access them."

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Several users from Zambia have taken to Twitter informing the general public that WhatsApp has been restricted in the country amidst ongoing general elections holding today. From a report: The president and parliamentary elections culminate in a face-off between current President Edgar Lungu and opposition Hakainde Hichilema. Internet monitoring organization Netblocks further corroborated these reports adding that multiple internet providers in Zambia had restricted access to the American social messaging platform. Some of these networks include Zambian government-owned Zamtel, Airtel Zambia, Liquid Telecom, and MTN. Just this week, reports circulated that the Zambian government had threatened to shut down the internet if Zambians "failed to use the cyberspace during this year's election correctly." The reports say the government intended to go through with its plans from Thursday, the polling day, till Sunday, when vote counts are expected to have ended.

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Amazon plans to monitor the keyboard strokes and mouse movements of customer service employees in an attempt to stop rogue workers, imposters, or hackers accessing customers' data, according to a confidential Amazon document obtained by Motherboard. The document also includes several concrete instances where people managed to steal Amazon customer data. From the report: Although the document says Amazon has considered deploying a solution that captures all of a worker's keystrokes, the tool the company has seemingly leaned towards buying is not designed to record exactly what workers type or monitor their communications. Instead, the system generates a profile based on the employee's natural keyboard and mouse movements, and then continuously verifies whether it seems the same person is in control of the worker's account to catch hackers or imposters who may then steal data. The move highlights the sorts of tools companies may increasingly deploy as working from home or remotely continues during the ongoing pandemic, and the issues Amazon is already facing with the theft of customer data.

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Google has banned SafeGraph, a location data firm whose investors include a former head of Saudi intelligence, Motherboard reported Tuesday. From a report: The ban means that any apps working with SafeGraph had to remove the offending location gathering code from their apps. SafeGraph markets its data to government entities and a wide range of industries, but it also sells the data on the open market to essentially anyone. The news signals Google's continued crackdown on location data firms who sometimes, in violation of Google's policies, pay app developers to include their data harvesting code and then sell the collected data to companies or government agencies. "They are willing to sell extremely fine-grained data and anyone with a credit card can start buying it," Zach Edwards, a researcher who has closely followed the supply chain of various sources of data, told Motherboard in an email last year, when both he and Motherboard were separately investigating SafeGraph. SafeGraph collected at least some of its location data by having app developers embed the company's code, or software development kit (SDK), into their own apps. Those apps would then track the physical location of their users, which SafeGraph would repackage and then sell to other parties. Google confirmed to Motherboard it told app developers in early June they had seven days to remove SafeGraph's SDK from their apps. If they didn't do this, Google told Motherboard the apps may face enforcement. This can mean removal from the Play Store itself. Beyond its own data, SafeGraph also offers customers the chance to buy related data sets from other providers to enrich the location information, such as the names of property owners in the U.S.

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Self portrait, 1930.

Lionel Messi's financial package at French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain includes crypto tokens. From a report: Messi signed a two-year deal with PSG this week, with an option for a third, that will net him an annual salary of $41 million plus bonuses, and a reported $30 million signing-on fee. PSG said Thursday that Messi's "welcome package" includes the cryptocurrency "$PSG Fan Tokens." The development has triggered a rally in the crypto tokens that PSG first issued to its fans over a year ago. The $PSG token, created in Jan. 2020 with crypto platform Socios.com, was designed to help PSG build a new fan community. PSG claimed the move to pay the 34-year-old Argentine in crypto positions it as one of the "most innovative and avant-garde brands in sport globally." Cryptocurrencies and crypto tokens are incredibly volatile assets and their value can surge or tank overnight. Critics say that many of these crypto assets are useless in the real world and that regulators will clamp down on them in the coming years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from FedScoop: The Department of Defense has awarded a task order worth up to $979 million over a five-year period to Peraton to counter misinformation from U.S. adversaries. The contractor will provide services to U.S. Central Command and its mission partners with operational planning, implementation and assessment services. Peraton has undertaken such work for Central Command since 2016 under its counter-threat messaging support program, and according to the company, the latest contract represents a doubling of work already scheduled to be carried out under the program. Commenting on the contract, Tom Afferton, president of Peraton's cyber missions sector, said: "Since 2016, Peraton has executed campaigns to promote regional security and stability. Our ability to provide the U.S. government with insight, expertise, and influence helps ensure the safety of Americans, our allies, and the more than 550 million people under U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility, spanning three continents and 20 nations." The award comes after Peraton earlier this month won an IT infrastructure contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which could be worth up to $497 million over seven years. The Virginia company will provide infrastructure-as-a-managed service for storage and computing infrastructure facilities across the U.S. and globally. Announcing the award, Peraton said it will deliver an enterprise-scale solution that integrates on-premise infrastructure with the VA's enterprise cloud architecture.

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