Quote:KADOKAWA CORPORATION (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Chief Executive Officer: Takeshi Natsuno;
hereinafter “KADOKAWA”) expresses deep apologies for the significant inconvenience and trouble caused to its
readers, users, writers, creators, business partners, shareholders, investors and other stakeholders by the
system failure currently affecting the KADOKAWA Group.
On Saturday, June 8, the servers located in the KADOKAWA Group’s data center experienced a significant
cyberattack including ransomware, targeting Niconico and the related services.
KADOKAWA is currently considering solutions and workarounds quickly on a company-wide basis in order to
normalize its systems and business activities. The current status of the key businesses affected by the system
failure, workarounds, and the progress of the investigation of information leakage are as follows.
It seems the corporation has been hacked!
I'm leaving here what they stated concerning the online services they normally provide.
Quote:Web Services business:
○ All Niconico family services are still suspended. Users remain unable to log into external
services through their Niconico account.
○ Meanwhile, KADOKAWA has started providing provisional services to users, including Niconico
Video (Re: tmp), Niconico Live Streaming (Re: tmp), and Niconico Commons (Re: tmp).
Additionally, it has resumed existing services, such as the Niconico Manga smartphone version
and NicoFT. KADOKAWA plans to restart an existing service, Niconico Channel Plus on Friday,
June 28.
○ KADOKAWA will gradually restart its services as they become available.
As you might have noticed by now, it revolves around Niconico and not Komodo Plaza. Anyway, they have also included their opinion on the hack as well.
Quote:3. The status of the investigation into a potential information leakage
KADOKAWA is investigating the possibility for information leakage with the support of external professional
organizations.
KADOKAWA does not retain any credit card information of the Group’s customers, including Niconico service
users, in its system, and therefore, no credit card information will have been leaked.
More accurate information based on the investigation results is expected to be available in July. KADOKAWA
will announce the information as soon as it is obtained.
They have ruled out that hackers could get access to credit cards, which sounds good so far. Yet, that doesn't include some extra data like physical addresses.
Quote:A Russia-linked hacking group claimed responsibility for a recent cyberattack that crippled major Japanese video streaming website niconico, posting a statement on the dark web Thursday.
It was not immediately clear whether the statement by the group purporting to be BlackSuit ransomware gang was true or not.
The hackers threatened that they have gained access to "very personal information regarding Japanese citizens" and "everything will go public" on Monday unless Kadokawa Corp., the parent company of niconico operator Dwango Co., pays a ransom.
Kadokawa, a major Japanese publisher, declined to comment on the latest development.
On June 8, servers located in Kadokawa group's data center experienced a significant cyberattack, including ransomware, targeting niconico and related services, according to the company.
Kadokawa has been investigating information leakage following the incident, but it has explained that it does not retain any credit card information of its group's customers, including niconico service users, in its system and no such breach has taken place.
Users can share videos ranging from music to animals on niconico and they can also watch the live streaming of government officials' press conferences.
So it seems that Niconico is pretty much like a mix of YouTube streaming, normal videos and shorts.
Quote:Google is up to its regular election tricks, according to the Media Research Center. An MRC investigation found that when searching for a candidates name with “presidential race 2024,” Joe Biden’s campaign website is the top result, while Donald Trump’s campaign website doesn’t appear on the first page.
The MRC reports that as the 2024 presidential race heats up, concerns are growing about the role of technology giants in shaping public opinion and access to information. A recent investigation MRC has uncovered what they claim to be evidence of bias in Google’s search results, potentially impacting the visibility of presidential candidates’ campaign websites.
The MRC’s research, conducted just days before tonight’s highly anticipated presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, revealed stark differences in how Google presents search results for various candidates. When searching for a candidate’s name along with “presidential race 2024,” researchers found that President Biden’s campaign website appeared as the top result, while former President Trump’s website was notably absent from the first page of results.
This discrepancy has led to accusations of election interference. MRC President Brent Bozell stated, “Google is blatantly interfering in the 2024 election.” The organization’s findings suggest that the issue extends beyond just these two candidates, with pro-life candidates seemingly receiving less favorable treatment in search rankings.
The study involved two sets of search queries. The first set focused on individual candidates, while the second examined results for party-specific searches. In both cases, researchers noted significant disparities in how different candidates’ websites were ranked.
For the party-specific searches, the results were equally concerning to the MRC. A search for “republican party presidential campaign websites” placed Trump’s campaign site at the 39th position out of 40 results, while a similar search for Democratic candidates prominently featured Biden’s website at the top.
No kidding! It takes its time to finally find an allegedly official website of the Trump Campaign. One of the first entries only sends you to an archived version of Trump's old campaign website.
In fact, you can find Marianne Williamson's website way before you finally hit Trump's!
On the other hand, Biden's website shows up second on a Google search.
Quote:Police in northern Sweden said Thursday they were looking into the unexplained deaths of three men who had died within a short period after working at an electric vehicle battery plant in the Arctic. They want to find out whether the deaths are linked, whether a crime has been committed, or if they are a string of accidental workplace fatalities.
The deaths have puzzled Swedish media which have reported about the three people who died after working at Northvolt’s plant in Skelleftea, some 620 kilometers (385 miles) north of Stockholm. Two of them died in January and February, while a third one passed away last year. Two were working at the plant and the third one was a cleaning person.
Local newspaper, Norran, said that a 33-year-old cleaner was found dead in his bed in January, the day after his evening shift. A month later, a 19-year-old employee was also found dead in his bed hours after late-night work. Last year, a man in his 60s was found dead on his balcony after having worked at the plant, the newspaper said.
Police investigator Johan Stabbfors told The Associated Press that an investigation has been opened, noting “there is some kind of indication that there has been some type of exposure in one of the cases.” He did not elaborate.
Stabbfors said that police had to “be open to the fact that there can be other circumstances” responsible for the deaths.
“But for now, we have nothing,” he said of the probe that was opened last week.
New Jersey Guy is a Sore Loser... & Very Dangerous
Quote:A 20-year-old man from New Jersey allegedly flew to Florida to physically assault his online gaming rival, in a case of an online deathmatch entering the real world. Perplexed by the case, Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper commented, “This is a weird one. Some things make you say hmm.”
CBS12 reports that Edward Kang, a 20-year-old man from New Jersey, was arrested on Sunday after after authories say he traveled across the country to attack a fellow player of the online multiplayer game ArcheAge. The incident, which took place in Fernandina Beach, Florida, has shocked local authorities and raised concerns about the escalation of online disputes into real-world violence.
Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper, visibly perplexed by the case, stated during a Monday briefing, “This is a weird one. Some things make you say hmm.” The sheriff’s office revealed that Kang had meticulously planned his attack, booking a flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to Jacksonville International Airport and reserving a hotel room in Florida.
According to authorities, Kang’s journey began when he became enraged at the victim during an online gaming session. Under the guise of visiting a friend, he informed his mother of his travel plans and proceeded to Florida. Upon arrival, Kang checked into his hotel around 2:00 a.m. on Friday and, in a chilling move, visited an Ace Hardware store the following day to purchase a hammer and flashlight.
The attack unfolded in the early hours of Sunday morning when Kang, dressed entirely in black and wearing gloves and a mask, allegedly broke into the victim’s home. Sheriff Leeper reported that Kang assaulted the victim with the hammer, causing severe head wounds. The victim’s stepfather, awakened by screams for help, discovered the struggle and, together with the victim, managed to restrain Kang until law enforcement arrived.
Fortunately, despite the severity of the attack, the victim’s injuries were deemed non-life-threatening. Kang was subsequently booked into the Nassau County Jail on charges of burglary and attempted murder.
Quote:Elon Musk’s X platform, formerly Twitter, appears to have recently suspended a slew of accounts, causing popular conservative X accounts to experience a large loss in followers. Despite many claiming this purge is aimed at the bot accounts plaguing the platform, multiple complaints of legitimate accounts being suspended have also surfaced.
While it remains unclear why accounts were suspended, many conservatives took to X/Twitter to comment that they have noticed their follower count drop by large numbers. Moreover, the suspended accounts do not appear to have been entirely bots, but also actual users of the social media platform.
“Anyone else lose followers last night? I lost 5,000.” the popular conservative X account Catturd wrote.
[X Post]
“I lost a few thousand. I’m guessing it was a bot purge,” the editor-in-chief Vigilant News Network commented.
“Lost a little over 6k,” the popular X account Clown World wrote.
“Yep, I noticed that I lost followers last night,” the popular X account known as General replied.
Quote:Social media companies like Facebook are free to continue censoring conservatives according to a divided Supreme Court, over a vigorous conservative dissent.
“During the 2020 election season and the COVID–19 pandemic, social-media platforms frequently removed, demoted, or fact checked posts containing allegedly false or misleading information,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett began for the majority. “At the same time, federal officials, concerned about the spread of “misinformation” on social media, communicated extensively with the platforms about their content-moderation efforts.”
Barrett recounted the facts of various officials in the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the surgeon general, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“Though the platforms restricted the plaintiffs’ content, the plaintiffs maintain that the Federal Government was behind it,” Barrett explained. “Acting on that belief, the plaintiffs sued dozens of Executive Branch officials and agencies, alleging that they pressured the platforms to censor the plaintiffs’ speech in violation of the First Amendment.”
We begin—and end—with standing,” she declared. “At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute.”
The majority held that the plaintiffs failed to show they had suffered legal injuries that were traceable to Facebook and the company formerly called Twitter, that resulted from Biden administration coercion, and that a court could fix by issuing an order.
...
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote a blistering dissenting opinion, joined by fellow conservative Clarence Thomas and also Neil Gorsuch, who leans libertarian.
“Victims of the campaign perceived by the lower courts brought this action to ensure that the Government did not continue to coerce social media platforms to suppress speech,” Alito began. “All these victims simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance.”
“If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years,” Alito declared. “Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts.”
“Our country’s response to the COVID–19 pandemic was and remains a matter of enormous medical, social, political, geopolitical, and economic importance, and our dedication to a free marketplace of ideas demands that dissenting views on such matters be allowed,” he announced. “I assume that a fair portion of what social media users had to say about COVID–19 and the pandemic was of little lasting value.”
US Surgeon General Talks About Tobacco-Like Warning for Social Media
Quote:The U.S. Surgeon General is urging Congress to issue a warning label, similar to those seen on cigarette packs, for social media platforms and their impacts on young people.
“It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Hallegere Murthy wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times.
“A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe,” Murthy added.
The surgeon general noted that while tacking a warning label onto social media platforms will not make them safe for young people, it would potentially change users’ behavior.
“Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior,” Murthy said.
Notably, issuing a tobacco-like warning label on social media platforms means that Congress would have to action.
“The measures should prevent platforms from collecting sensitive data from children and should restrict the use of features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use,” Murthy wrote.
The surgeon general also asked why society has failed to address the negative impacts social media has on young people.
“The moral test of any society is how well it protects its children,” Murthy asserted. “We have the expertise, resources and tools to make social media safe for our kids. Now is the time to summon the will to act. Our children’s well-being is at stake.”
We could say it's been pretty much influenced by the ongoing TikTok dispute.
Quote:Toys “R” Us has partnered with ad agency Native Foreign to create what they claim is the first-ever “brand film” utilizing OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora. The creepy result has largely been mocked on social media.
Ars Technica reports that the retail giant Toys “R” Us has taken a surprising step into the future of advertising by leveraging OpenAI’s text-to-video technology, Sora, to produce a unique commercial. Titled “The Origin of Toys ‘R’ Us,” the commercial aims to tell the story of the company’s founder, Charles Lazarus, through AI-generated video clips. This creative endeavor showcases the potential of Sora, which can create up to one-minute-long videos featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters, all generated from text instructions.
[X Post with Videoclip]
Kim Miller Olko, Toys “R” Us Studios President and executive producer of the project, expressed excitement about the collaboration, stating, “Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time, and we wanted to honor his legacy with a spot using the most cutting-edge technology available.”
The video depicts a child version of Lazarus, presumably generated by Sora, falling asleep and embarking on a journey through a dreamland of toys. During this adventure, the young Lazarus encounters Geoffrey, the iconic Toys “R” Us mascot, who presents him with a small red car – a symbolic gesture representing the birth of a retail empire.
While the use of AI in advertising is not entirely new, the Toys “R” Us commercial represents a significant leap forward in terms of complexity and ambition. However, the video is not without its telltale signs of AI generation. Keen observers have noted unnatural movements, strange visual artifacts, and irregularities in certain elements like eyeglasses – all hallmarks of current AI-generated imagery.
The reception of this AI-generated commercial has been mixed, with some praising its innovative approach while others criticize various aspects of its production and implications. Critics have raised concerns about the potential displacement of human creative jobs, the environmental impact of energy-intensive AI models, and the use of human-created artwork to train these AI systems.
Comedy writer Mike Drucker encapsulated several of these criticisms in a post on social media platform X, saying, “Love this commercial is like, ‘Toys R Us started with the dream of a little boy who wanted to share his imagination with the world. And to show how, we fired our artists and dried Lake Superior using a server farm to generate what that would look like in Stephen King’s nightmares.’”
"For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ," 1 Thessalonians 5:9
Maranatha!
The Internet might be either your friend or enemy. It just depends on whether or not she has a bad hair day.
News of the Cyber World
![[Image: SP1-Scripter.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-Scripter.png)
![[Image: SP1-Writer.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-Writer.png)
![[Image: SP1-Poet.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-Poet.png)
![[Image: SP1-PixelArtist.png]](https://www.save-point.org/images/userbars/SP1-PixelArtist.png)
![[Image: SP1-Reporter.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/GmxWbHyL/SP1-Reporter.png)
