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Discord users who access the Discord app through iOS will now face restrictions on adult content that go beyond those for other platforms. The gaming-focused social networking app—which lets users create public or private servers to chat via text, image, voice, and video livestreaming— announced this week that "all users on the iOS platform (including those aged 18+) will be blocked from joining and accessing NSFW servers. iOS users aged 18+ will still be able to join and access NSFW communities on the desktop and web versions of Discord." That NSFW designation can be set by the server owner or by Discord itself, in keeping with community guidelines requiring the label on "adult content." Individual channels within a server can be designated as NSFW without imposing limits on the full server, but an entire server may be labeled as NSFW "if the community is organized around NSFW themes or if the majority of the server’s content is 18+," the company said. Discord has set up an … [Read more...] about iOS users—and only iOS users—face NSFW content ban on Discord app

Further Reading WireGuard VPN review: A new type of VPN offers serious advantages Mozilla, the open source company best known for the Firefox Web browser, made its VPN service generally available in the United States this month. The cross-platform VPN is based on Wireguard and delivered in partnership with well-known and especially techie-friendly VPN provider Mullvad . Mullvad itself was, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available VPN provider to offer Wireguard support back in 2017 . The Mozilla VPN service costs $4.95 per month and offers server endpoints in 30-plus countries. It currently has VPN clients available for Windows 10, Android, and iOS—but users of other operating systems, such as MacOS and Linux, are going to have to wait. Mozilla says that support for MacOS and Linux is coming soon—but unfortunately, even if you're an advanced user who understands Wireguard configs, you can't just roll your own connection now. The service authenticates … [Read more...] about We test Mozilla’s new Wireguard-based $5/mo VPN service

Facebook is allowing its oversight board to rule on moderation decisions relating to content that remains on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. Previously, the only rulings the board could issue were to restore content that moderators had removed. The Facebook Oversight Board was established last year in response to concerns that the social media company wielded too much unchecked power over what content appeared on its site. Current board members include several law professors, executives from think tanks and nongovernmental organizations, a former US federal circuit judge, and the former prime minister of Denmark. The board is managed by an independent organization that the company seeded with $130 million. To appeal a post, a person must have an active Facebook account and must have exhausted the company’s appeals process. At that point, the user can take their petition to the oversight board. In the six months since it was founded, the board has made eight decisions , … [Read more...] about Facebook users can now petition oversight board to remove content

According to historian and metal-detector enthusiast Jim Bailey, the handful of 17th-century Arabic coins unearthed at sites across New England could be remnants of an infamous pirate's last big score—or, to put it another way, money stolen from a ship full of religious pilgrims during a horrific mass murder at sea. "It's a new history of a nearly perfect crime," Bailey told the Associated Press. Bailey found a handful of Colonial-era coins and musket balls, along with a shoe buckle, buried beneath a fruit orchard in Middletown, Rhode Island in 2014. Amid the English and Colonial-issued coins, Bailey noticed something unusual: a coin as weathered and tarnished as the rest but engraved in Arabic. It turned out to be a Yemeni coin called a khamsiyat, minted in 1693. Over the next few years, archaeologists and metal-detector users in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and North Carolina found 16 more Yemeni coins at 17th-century sites. And in a 2017 paper in The Colonial … [Read more...] about 17th-century pirates might have stashed Middle Eastern coins in New England

Google has worked for years to position itself as a responsible steward of AI. Its research lab hires respected academics, publishes groundbreaking papers, and steers the agenda at the field’s biggest conferences. But now its reputation has been badly, perhaps irreversibly damaged, just as the company is struggling to put a politically palatable face on its empire of data. The company’s decision to fire Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell — two of its top AI ethics researchers, who happened to be examining the downsides of technology integral to Google’s search products — has triggered waves of protest. Academics have registered their discontent in various ways. Two backed out of a Google research workshop, a third turned down a $60,000 grant from the company, and a fourth pledged not to accept its funding in the future. Two engineers quit the company in protest of Gebru’s treatment and just last week, one of Google’s top AI employees, a research manager named Samy Bengio who … [Read more...] about Google is poisoning its reputation with AI researchers