About a million of the people who are members of the Reddit discussion group r/coronavirus joined in just the past week. The subreddit is getting some recognition now as a pretty reliably good source of community-moderated news and information about the COVID-19 pandemic. Read the rest

Yesterday, r/redditsecurity announced that it believes leaked internal secret documents about trade agreement discussions between the United States and the United Kingdom were posted to /r/worldpolitics by Russians:

Earlier this year Facebook discovered a Russian campaign on its platform, which was further analyzed by the Atlantic Council and dubbed “Secondary Infektion.” Suspect accounts on Reddit were recently reported to us, along with indicators from law enforcement, and we were able to confirm that they did indeed show a pattern of coordination. We were then able to use these accounts to identify additional suspect accounts that were part of the campaign on Reddit. This group provides us with important attribution for the recent posting of the leaked UK documents, as well as insights into how adversaries are adapting their tactics.

In late October, an account u/gregoratior posted the leaked documents and later reposted by an additional account u/ostermaxnn. Additionally, we were able to find a pocket of accounts participating in vote manipulation on the original post. All of these accounts have the same shared pattern as the original Secondary Infektion group detected, causing us to believe that this was indeed tied to the original group.

Image: CC0 Public Domain Read the rest

My 16-year-old introduced me to r/boomershumor, a subreddit dedicated the the kinds of cartoons boomers enjoy sending as attachments in emails (usually address to dozens of people because they don't know about the bcc: field). The jokes are usually about fear of technology, getting drunk on wine, decrepitude, creepy sex humor, “I hate my wife” jokes, and tiresome misogyny/homophobia/transphobia (the last two categories were identified by DonatellaNobody). Read the rest

Bernie Sanders remains one of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential elections, but you'd hardly know it from the media narrative, which consistently downplays, ignores or misstates Sanders' campaign platform and his achievements in favor of establishment candidates and even other trustbusters like Elizabeth Warren. Read the rest

r/The_Donald still exists at Reddit, but it's been pushed into the site's "quarantined" basement after a series of threats against police were posted there.

“Recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy,” a Reddit spokesperson said in a statement. “As a result, we have actioned individual users and quarantined the subreddit."

The new quarantine was brought on by anti-police threats posted on The_Donald. Some users had apparently encouraged violence against law enforcement, angry that officials in Oregon were trying to bring back GOP state senators who fled the state to avoid voting on a climate-change bill. In a note to The_Donald moderators, Reddit administrators said they had “observed this behavior in the form of encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon.”

Trump himself answered questions there in an AMA, apparently, "despite" its reptuation for abuse, bigotry and general grossness. At the time they were zipped into the plastic sheeting, the top item among the_donaldites was a rant about women's soccer. Read the rest

Change My View (previously) is a wonderful subreddit founded by a Scottish highschooler named Kal Turnbull as a forum where people can conduct honest inquiry and debate, where the house-rules ensure that there is an open-minded willingness to have your views changed, and where those changes are marked with a Δ (delta) symbol. Read the rest

Filmmakers turned a writing prompt from Reddit user WaFromWa into a stellar short film whose premise includes Santa as a deadly, covert super-assassin. Superb! (via JWZ) Read the rest

Frustratingly, this video has no data about the identity of the incredible genius featured therein. Who is she? Read the rest

Reddit has posted a punchy, impassioned warning about the likelihood that it will no longer be able to function if the EU's plan to mandate copyright filters and limit linking to news without permission goes through. Read the rest

Women-hating MRAs and Incels, Holocaust Deniers, 9/11 Truthers, and snuff video fetishists on Reddit got harder to find today. An update of Reddit's “quarantine” policy was announced on Thursday, and by Friday new content disclaimers appeared a number of the sketchier “subreddits,” including four with over 100,000 subscribers each. Read the rest

Redditor Ch8s3 created this custom game controller by creating a new case, seating the mainboard in it and soldering new LEDs on, then swapping out the buttons for dremeled-out shell-cases from a Luger 9MM, a Remington 20, and a 12 gauge Hornady 50 caliber. It's beautiful work. Read the rest

A guy named "Aaron" has been pitching Reddit moderators and other influential Redditors on their participation in a lucrative scam to inflate the popularity of posts about different cryptocurrencies, using massive farms of bots that post and upvote through a network of proxies that make them seem like they're distributed all over the world. Read the rest

Found this via Reddit. It is beautiful. Relax regarding the vertical video. Read the rest

Have you ever wanted to talk with the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the risks of talking in public about security issues, especially in connected Internet of Things devices? Today, you'll get your chance. Read the rest

Coffeeman 500's Useless Box - Multi Switch project is an open-source hardware project that's an ambitious variant on the beloved "Useless Machine" -- 2010, 2010 (Lego)), 2010 Political edition), 2011 (HOWTO), 2012 (politics), 2013 (fancy), 2013 (advanced) (vs human), 2016 (most useless), 2017 (vs twisty vase). Read the rest

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