Month: May 2021

Enlarge (credit: Geographer / Wikimedia Commons)

The city of Fullerton, California, has agreed to pay $350,000 to settle a lawsuit it brought against two bloggers it accused of hacking the city’s Dropbox account.

Joshua Ferguson and David Curlee frequently made public record requests in the course of covering city government for a local blog, Friends for Fullerton’s Future. The city used Dropbox to fulfill large file requests, and in response to a June 6, 2019, request for records related to police misconduct, Ferguson and Curlee were sent a link to a Dropbox folder containing a password-protected zip file. 

But a city employee also sent them a link to a more general “Outbox” shared folder that contained potential records request documents that had not yet been reviewed by the city attorney. The folder wasn’t password protected or access restricted. At the time, there were 19 zip files in the outbox, five of which were not password protected. 

Enlarge (credit: Luis Alvarez)

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was possible to believe that the US public's skepticism of scientific information had some limits. Once a crisis hit a critical point—when things became a matter of life and death—people would come around, the thinking went.

Obviously, that hasn't been the case. The US public's skepticism toward science is extending toward one of its most important developments: vaccines. The COVID-19 vaccines offer both the prospect of a return to normal life and limits on the risk of dangerous coronavirus variants evolving—but only if enough people are vaccinated. And that "but" is looming larger as states are having to experiment with various inducements to get more people to take the vaccine.

Given this situation, any data that helps us understand why people might be hesitant to get vaccinated could be valuable. Some researchers have now found a hint that trust in science is more complicated than an individual belief. The societal consensus on trust in science matters, too.

Enlarge / Just some of the characters that don't star in games anymore, according to Roblox.

Roblox, the massively valued user-created gaming platform, has removed any mention of "games" from its user interface. It's a seemingly small semantic change that nonetheless could have some major implications in the ongoing Epic Games v. Apple trial.

The Verge notes that what was once the "Games" tab on the Roblox website is now listed as "Discover" (though the URL still retains the old roblox.com/games/ address). Individual games are now referred to as "experiences" across the website and the mobile Roblox apps, while the word "game" seems to have been scrubbed altogether.

"The term 'experiences' is consistent with how we’ve evolved our terminology to reflect our realization of the metaverse," a Roblox spokesperson told The Verge. "Roblox is an online community where people do things together in virtual worlds, and over the years, we began referring to these worlds as experiences, as they better represent the wide range of 3D immersive places—from obbys [obstacle courses] to virtual concerts—that people can enjoy together with their friends."