Just look at them. (Thanks, Sean!) Read the rest

Reddit announced to users that the site had a "security incident."

"On June 19, we learned that between June 14 and June 18, an attacker compromised a few of our employees’ accounts with our cloud and source code hosting providers. Already having our primary access points for code and infrastructure behind strong authentication requiring two-factor authentication (2FA), we learned that SMS-based authentication is not nearly as secure as we would hope, and the main attack was via SMS intercept. We point this out to encourage everyone here to move to token-based 2FA."

Data accessed includes all Reddit data through 2007, including account credentials and email addresses, along with source code and employee workspace files.

We had a security incident. Here's what you need to know. [Reddit] Read the rest

A small but vital genre of homebrew portable computers is the "cyberspace deck," in which hackers create DIY, special-purpose computers inspired by the ICE-breaking console-cowboy decks of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive). Read the rest

Redditor cobalt_brightside posted this giant, novelty on/off switch lamp that has a hilarious, tiny, functional on/off switch to control the lamp. Read the rest

Reddit's management have posted a long explainer on the EU's extreme copyright proposal, which would snuff out sites like Reddit and make it impossible to start new ones. It's a great piece, and the discussion is pretty excellent, too. Read the rest

Join me, EFF attorney Kit Walsh and iFixit's Kyle Wiens -- along with special guests! -- in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session tomorrow (Thursday) from 11AM-3PM Pacific; we'll be talking about the upcoming Copyright Office hearings on creating exceptions to the DMCA to make room for independent repair and security research. We'll be live here at 11AM tomorrow! Pass it on. Read the rest

Reddit has shut down /r/deepfakes, the subreddit where people collaborate to produce incredibly disturbing faceswapped pornography that uses machine-learning to put the faces of famous people who aren't pornography performers onto the bodies of people having sex in pornographic videos. Read the rest

Late last year, a redditor called Deepfakes gained notoriety for the extremely convincing face-swap porn videos he was making, in which the faces of mainstream Hollywood actors and rockstars were convincingly overlaid on the bodies of performers in pornography. Read the rest

In /r/changemyview/, thousands of redditors gather to carry on an explicitly, rigorously civil discourse about the subjects that matter most to them: a submitter puts forward views on subjects ranging from the correct interpretation of old movies to the suitability of Donald Trump for president, and then invites the forum to present arguments to change their mind, awarding a Δ (delta) symbol to people whose arguments cause a shift in their beliefs. Read the rest

A paper published by Notre Dame researchers in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems reveals that Reddit users vote on things before reading the article.

73 percent of posts on Reddit are voted on by users that haven’t actually clicked through to view the content being rated. This is according to a newly released dataset consisting of all Reddit activity of 309 site users for a one year period. In the process, the researchers identified signs of “cognitive fatigue” in Reddit users most likely to vote on content. Online aggregation is then somewhat a function of mental exhaustion.

As of 2017, reddit sees 234 million unique monthly users, according to Alexa. It’s the fourth most trafficked website in the United States. In light of that, a 309 user sample seems pretty small. But it’s small because the Notre Dame dataset offers something a bit different than most other reddit datasets. Rather than relying on reddit’s own data collection methods (via its API or by crawling the website with software), Notre Dame computer science researcher Tim Weninger and colleagues were able to come up with their own independent data collection architecture, thus allowing them to ask different sorts of questions.

Redditor Endeavy created these Halloween-themed skull hotpockets, augmented by dribbles of red, oozing sauce; they used these cake pans to mold the crusts. Read the rest

Reddit embarked on a purge of violence-advocating content today, the targets generally being Nazis and their friends, but also at least one animal abuse subreddit and one targeting white people.

The newly banned and removed pages include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals and r/far_right.

Reddit's new policy says: "Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people."

Ever since I read Michael Pollan's advice to avoid any food whose packaging makes any nutritional claims, I've been a happy man -- but never so much so as I realize that this rule means I would never fall prey to the latest shitty scam from the Quaker oats people. Read the rest

r/The_Donald, before: "Fuck the travel ban, forced deportation. 1 week or 10 years in jail. GTFO." After: "Antifa? This smells like a false flag. Research this." Read the rest

Right-wing clones of mainstream social media are ten-a-penny. But now the left's getting in on the action, too. Behold Raddle, a "leftist alternative to Reddit" founded after some intra-left drama spiralled out of control (plus ca change) and ended with site-wide bans. [via Metafilter] Read the rest

Papa-to-be and Serena Williams' sweetie Alexis Ohanian shared his favorite post from Reddit, the site he co-founded, on Tuesday night's Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Nope, it's not the one that shows the dog that looks like William H. Macy (though that's impressive).

It's a heartwarming one about a man whose vehicle broke down and, well, watch the clip.

Previously: Reddit co-founder breaks down net neutrality for Snoop Dogg Read the rest

This beautiful photograph was shared by Redditor iam4real. Read the rest