Month: July 2021

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  This is the full slate of proposed new emoji for Unicode 14.0 [credit: Emojipedia ]

Today is World Emoji Day, a thing I never knew existed until two years ago when Ford publicized that it was trying to get a pickup truck added to the official set. Truth be told, I forgot all about World Emoji Day almost immediately, but I was reminded again this week when I saw the list of potential new additions being considered by the Unicode Consortium for inclusion into Unicode 14.

Some of these potential emoji would be useful for talking about the climate emergency—I'm thinking of the melting face and also the coral here. I'm sure we can all use a troll in our lives, too, while the saluting face will replace the trusty o7. And the low battery is bound to be popular. There are some new hands, gesturing, pointing, shaking, and even making love hearts to boot.

A couple of additions might upset some reactionaries on the Internet, however. Specifically, the pregnant man and his gender neutral equivalent, the pregnant person, have been proposed as inclusive additions since pregnancy is possible for some transgender and non-binary people. The world may also soon receive a gender neutral person with a crown option to go with the emoji man and woman wearing crowns.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If you’re a member of the US military who's gotten friendly Facebook messages from private-sector recruiters for months on end, suggesting a lucrative future in the aerospace or defense contractor industry, Facebook may have some bad news.

On Thursday, the social media giant revealed that it has tracked and at least partially disrupted a long-running Iranian hacking campaign that used Facebook accounts to pose as recruiters, reeling in US targets with convincing social engineering schemes before sending them malware-infected files or tricking them into submitting sensitive credentials to phishing sites. Facebook says that the hackers also pretended to work in the hospitality or medical industries, in journalism, or at NGOs or airlines, sometimes engaging their targets for months with profiles across several different social media platforms. And unlike some previous cases of Iranian state-sponsored social media catfishing that have focused on Iran's neighbors, this latest campaign appears to have largely targeted Americans, and to a lesser extent UK and European victims.

Facebook says it has removed "fewer than 200" fake profiles from its platforms as a result of the investigation and notified roughly the same number of Facebook users that hackers had targeted them.