>To qualify, candidates had to be on enough state ballots to reach 270 electoral votes, or enough to win. They also had to receive at least 15% in four separate national polls, among those specified by the network. > >Kennedy had reached that threshold in three polls, but was on the ballot in only 10 states, short of the 270 electoral votes, according to NBC News. The Kennedy campaign had said that it had enough signatures in 23 states, with 310 electoral votes. But those signatures still need to be verified by state elections officials.

>Kennedy will have more time to qualify for the next presidential debate, scheduled for Sept. 10. ABC News is hosting that debate with similar criteria to CNN’s guidelines.

>The last independent candidate to participate in a general election debate was Ross Perot, who took part in the 1992 debates along with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Perot ran again in 1996 but did not qualify to the debates that cycle.

> A user on the online forum 4chan has leaked a massive 270GB of data belonging to The New York Times. This leak includes the source code for the newspaper’s digital operations.

>Here are some other findings we can confirm: > >* The leak does have the original source code of the game Wordle, which the NY Times acquired in 2022. >* The leak includes a dated WordPress database of 1,500 NY Times Education site users. The database contains names and surnames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. You should expect it to be added to HIBP shortly. >* Several folders contain internal communications from NY Times Slack channels. >* Times uses various machine learning algorithms and NLP techniques/scripts for its services. >* Many exposed authentication methods exist, including authentication URLs and their respective passwords, secret keys, and API tokens. The majority are well protected, but plenty of such secrets need immediate attention. We have also seen private user keys used for authentication. >* There are a lot of details about internal NY Times architecture from a software development point of view. > >So far, it is difficult to say whether the NY Times will need to reset the passwords for everyone who is a member of its site. > >It’s worth pointing out that this leak appears to involve data from The New York Times’s IT/infrastructure/website organization rather than the news organization composed of reporters. In media companies, these two entities are largely separate. The IT/infrastructure team handles the technical aspects of the website and digital operations, while the news organization manages reporting and editorial content.

>Club Penguin fans hacked a Disney Confluence server to steal information about their favorite game but wound up walking away with 2.5 GB of internal corporate data, BleepingComputer has learned. > >Club Penguin was a multiplayer online game (MMO) from 2005 to 2018, featuring a virtual world where players could engage in games, activities, and chat with other players. The game was originally created by New Horizon Interactive, which Disney later purchased. > >While Club Penguin was officially shut down in 2017, and its successor, Club Penguin Island, in 2018, the game continues to live on in private servers run by fans and independent developers. Though Disney pushed back on a more prominent 'Club Penguin Rewritten' remake, causing its operators to be arrested, private servers continue to this day with thousands of players. > >This week, an anonymous person uploaded a link to "Internal Club Penguin PDFs" on the 4Chan message board with the simple statement, "I no longer need these :)." > >The link goes to a 415 MB archive containing 137 PDFs that contain old internal information about Club Penguin, including emails, design schematics, documentation, and character sheets. All of this data is seven years old, if not older, making it only interesting to fans of the game. > >BleepingComputer has since learned that Club Penguin data is only a small part of a much larger data set stolen from Disney's Confluence server, which stores documentation for various business, software, and IT projects used internally by Disney. > >According to an anonymous source, Disney's Confluence servers were breached using previously exposed credentials. > >The source says that the threat actors were initially looking for Club Penguin data; they wound up downloading 2.5 GB of data about Disney's corporate strategies, advertising plans, Disney+, internal developer tools, business projects, and internal infrastructure. > >"Lot more files here including internal api endpoints and credentials for things like S3 buckets," an anonymous source told BleepingComputer. > >The data, seen by BleepingComputer, includes documentation on a wide variety of initiatives and projects, as well as information on internal developer tools named Helios and Communicore, which have not previously been disclosed publicly. > >CommuniCore is a "high-performance asynchronous messaging library, aimed at use in distributed applications." > >Helios is a show authoring and playback tool that allows Disney producers and authors to create interactive non-linear "experiences" using real world inputs from sensors in Disney's parks. > >Strewn across the documents are links to internal websites used by Disney developers, which could be valuable for threat actors who wish to target the company. > >While the Club Penguin data is fairly old, the rest of the data circulating on Discord is far newer, with information from 2024. > >BleepingComputer was told that the original Club Penguin PDFs shared on 4Chan were stolen weeks ago. However, the Disney corporate data appears to have been downloaded much sooner, as they contain the following text, "Document generated by Confluence on Jun 01, 2024 21:59." > >BleepingComputer contacted Disney multiple times with information and questions about the breach but has yet to receive a reply.

>Oral-B released the Guide for $230 in August 2020 but bricked the ability to set up or reconfigure Alexa on the product this February. > >The Guide toothbrush's charging base was able to connect to the Internet and work like an Alexa speaker that you could speak to and from which Alexa could respond. Owners could “ask to play music, hear the news, check weather, control smart home devices, and even order more brush heads by saying, ‘Alexa, order Oral-B brush head replacements,'” per Procter & Gamble's 2020 announcement.

> On February 15, Oral-B bricked the Guide's ability to set up Alexa by discontinuing the Oral-B Connect app required to complete the process. Guide owners can still use the Oral-B App for other features; however, the ability to use the charging base like an Alexa smart speaker—a big draw in the product’s announcement and advertising—is seriously limited. > >The device should still work with Alexa if users set it up before Oral-B shuttered Connect, but setting up a new Wi-Fi connection or reestablishing a lost one doesn't work without Connect.

>Recently, music-streaming app company Spotify similarly announced that it’s discontinuing its first and only hardware this December. Spotify's Car Thing originally cost $90 when released to the general public in February 2022. Even companies dedicated to smart home products entirely can meet an abrupt demise, and if a company suffers from poor communication skills, customers can be left in the dark.

>Meanwhile, Oral-B is pushing its latest toothbrush to capitalize on the latest AI tech trend. Without real detail, Oral-B claims its new $400 toothbrush has "AI position detection that tracks where you brush across all 3 surfaces of your teeth.” Like many, I'm skeptical about the toothbrush’s incorporation of actual AI; notably, P&G declined to comment to The Washington Post on what, exactly, makes the toothbrush "AI."

https://archive.is/Jzmep

> Pope Francis paved the way for the canonization of the first saint of the millennial generation on Thursday, attributing a second miracle to a 15-year-old Italian computer whiz who died of leukemia in 2006. > >Carlo Acutis, born on May 3, 1991, in London and then moved with his Italian parents to Milan as a child, was the youngest contemporary person to be beatified by Francis in Assisi in 2020.

> Acutis, who died of acute leukemia on Oct. 12, 2006, was put on the road to sainthood after Pope Francis approved the first miracle attributed to him: The healing of a 7-year-old Brazilian boy from a rare pancreatic disorder after coming into contact with an Acutis’ relic, a piece of one of his T-shirts. > > According to Vatican News, the second miracle recognized on Thursday is related to a woman from Costa Rica, who in July 2022 made a pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb in Assisi to pray for the healing of her daughter, who had suffered severe head trauma after falling from her bicycle. The young woman started showing signs of recovery immediately after her mother’s plea.

so the vatican has all of this kids clothes preserved as relics and they cut off pieces of his t-shirts so they can mail them to cancer patients. just imagining like, spongebob, batman, metallica t-shirts being guarded as holy relics in rome for centuries to come.

> "Basically, fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die." > > That's how notable Valve leaker "Gabe Follower" describes Deadlock, a Valve game that is seemingly in playtesting at the moment, for which a few screenshots have leaked out. > > The game has been known as "Neon Prime" and "Citadel" at prior points. It's a "Competitive third-person hero-based shooter," with six-on-six battles across a map with four "lanes." That allows for some of the "Tower defense mechanics" mentioned by Gabe Follower, along with "fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite." The maps reference a "modern steampunk European city (little bit like Half-Life)," after "bad feedback" about a sci-fi theme pushed the development team toward fantasy.

> This new iPhone model is said to be “significantly thinner” than current iPhone models, and may align with a discontinuation of the iPhone Plus line. Though according to The Information, it is expected to be more expensive than the Pro Max model.

!

> Nintendo has apparently had enough of X’s (Twitter’s) API fees. The Mario maker said on Wednesday that starting on June 10, direct integration from the Switch’s image album to Elon Musk’s Nazi-curious platform will no longer work. With Nintendo’s departure, all three major console makers have pulled the plug on native screen-sharing to X. > > X’s official gaming account posted a bizarre, downright Orwellian response that ignores its central role in the Mario maker’s exit. “Our partnership with Nintendo remains strong, and we are working together to ensure a smooth transition for all users,” @xGaming posted at the end of its nonchalantly misleading reply to Nintendo’s announcement. “We will continue collaborating with partners to bring new and exciting experiences to our global gaming community.” > > Ironically, X’s built-in reader context feature filled in the omitted subtext. “This is in direct response to X changing their API,” the user-generated context says. “Specifically, X is charging companies upwards of $40,000 or more per month to access its API. Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox already removed integration with X last year.” > > Wired first reported last year that access to the cheapest Enterprise API plan for The Dumpster Fire Formerly Known As Twitter starts at $42,000 monthly. Higher tiers can allegedly cost $125,000 and $210,000 per month. Microsoft led the charge when it said the Xbox was abandoning Musk’s API plan in April 2023, while Sony held its nose and stuck it out until November. > > The $42,000 (or more) monthly cost may not sound like much to these well-heeled mega-corporations, but apparently, even they have their limits. After all, quick screen-sharing to social channels is a marketing feature from a corporate perspective. If their accountants look at the analytics, weigh them against Musk’s fees and see it isn’t paying off, they’ll do what profit-driven entities do and reduce the overhead. But hey, at least X’s “partnership with Nintendo remains strong.” > >Of course, you can still post Switch screenshots to Musk’s hellscape; it just has extra steps now. You can send Switch album images to your phone wirelessly or transfer them to your PC using a USB cable, and then post them manually. Nintendo says integrated Facebook sharing is still enabled but warns that it could be discontinued later.

> To put a human face on the way technology changes jobs, visit a fried chicken spot called Sansan Chicken in New York City’s East Village. There, the cashier takes your order over Zoom, from over 8,000 miles away in the Philippines. Another worker in the kitchen slides your order through a small window when it’s ready. These workers are employed by a company called Happy Cashier, which contracts them out to a handful of NYC-based restaurants. The big draw of Happy Cashier is that it saves the restaurants money, as the average hourly wage of a cashier in the Philippines is about $1, based on Indeed’s data. Happy Cashier’s “virtual assistants” make $3 per hour, according to the New York Times. > >While video calling isn’t bleeding-edge tech, the Zoom cashier captures what often happens when an industry integrates new tech into its business model: Jobs don’t really disappear, they just shrink, along with their paycheck, and this degradation is presented as the natural outcome of automation and technological progress.

> We first heard of AdVon last year, after staff at Gannett noticed product reviews getting published on the website of USA Today with bylines that didn't seem to correspond to real people. The articles were stilted and formulaic, leading the writers' union to accuse them of being "shoddy AI." > > When Gannett blamed the strange articles on AdVon, we started digging. We soon found AdVon had been running a similar operation at the magazine Sports Illustrated, publishing product reviews using bylines of fake writers with fictional biographies and AI-generated profile pictures. The response was explosive: the magazine's union wrote that it was "horrified," while its publisher cut ties with AdVon and subsequently fired its CEO before losing the rights to Sports Illustrated entirely. > > We wanted to learn more. What kind of a company creates fake authors for a famous newspaper or magazine and operates them like sock puppets? Did AdVon have other clients? And was it being truthful that the reviews had been created by humans rather than AI? > > So we spent months investigating AdVon by interviewing its current and former workers, obtaining its internal documentation, and searching for more of its fake writers across the web. > > What we found should alarm anyone who cares about a trustworthy and ethical media industry. Basically, AdVon engages in what Google calls "site reputation abuse": it strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews — often for surprisingly prominent publications — intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like "best ab roller." The idea seems to be that these visitors will be fooled into thinking the recommendations were made by the publication's actual journalists and click one of the articles' affiliate links, kicking back a little money if they make a purchase. > > It's a practice that blurs the line between journalism and advertising to the breaking point, makes the web worse for everybody, and renders basic questions like "is this writer a real person?" fuzzier and fuzzier. > > And sources say yes, the content is frequently produced using AI. > > "It's completely AI-generated at this point," a different AdVon insider told us, explaining that staff essentially "generate an AI-written article and polish it."