Shortly after Discord announced that all users will soon be defaulted to teen experiences until their ages are verified, the messaging platform faced immediate backlash .

One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recently exposed 70,000 Discord users' government IDs .

Attempting to reassure users, Discord claimed that most users wouldn't have to show ID, instead relying on video selfies using AI to estimate ages, which raised separate privacy concerns. In the future, perhaps behavioral signals would override the need for age checks for most users, Discord suggested, seemingly downplaying the risk that sensitive data would be improperly stored.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a "Pledge America Campaign" that Carr established to support President Trump's "Salute to America 250" project.

Carr said in a press release that "I am inviting broadcasters to pledge to air programming in their local markets in support of this historic national, non-partisan celebration." The press release said Carr is asking broadcasters to "air patriotic, pro-America programming in support of America’s 250th birthday."

Carr gave what he called examples of content that broadcasters can run if they take the pledge. His examples include "starting each broadcast day with the 'Star Spangled Banner' or Pledge of Allegiance"; airing "PSAs, short segments, or full specials specifically promoting civic education, inspiring local stories, and American history"; running "segments during regular news programming that highlight local sites that are significant to American and regional history, such as National Park Service sites"; airing "music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin"; and providing daily “Today in American History” announcements highlighting significant events from US history.

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Meta announced today that it will divorce its Horizon Worlds social and gaming service—once promoted as the company's first major step into the metaverse—from its Quest VR headset platform and digital store.

The company says it is now "shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile." The announcement is also filled with statements like "we're doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem" that are attempting to head off any suggestion that Meta is retreating from the mixed reality space.

This is far from the first signal that big changes are happening with Meta's mixed reality strategy. CNBC reported that Meta has lost $80 billion on investments in Reality Labs, the company's mixed reality division. More than 1,000 Reality Labs employees were laid off in January, but don't misread that as a total closure; more than 15,000 people were working in that part of the organization before the layoffs.

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Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, is now also the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an unusual arrangement that has drawn swift criticism from researchers and public health experts.

Bhattacharya's new role comes amid a leadership shakeup in the Department of Health and Human Services under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also marks the third leader for the beleaguered public health agency under Kennedy.

Susan Monarez, a microbiologist and long-time federal health official, held the position of acting director before becoming the first Senate-confirmed CDC director at the end of July. But she was in the role just shy of a month before Kennedy ousted her for—according to Monarez—refusing to rubber-stamp changes to vaccine recommendations made by Kennedy's hand-picked advisors, who are overwhelmingly anti-vaccine themselves.

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The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

"There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today , and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it," stated an update today on Wikipedia's Archive.today discussion. "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3 ). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable."

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For a long time now, PC gamers have been used to the Final Fantasy series treating their platform as somewhat secondary to the game's core console versions. There are some signs that may be starting to change, though, as director Naoki Hamaguchi has confirmed that the PC is now the "lead platform" for development of the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy.

In a recent interview with Automaton , Hamaguchi clarified that the team takes the relatively common practice of creating visual assets for its multiplatform games by targeting "high-end environments first," then performing a "reduction" for less powerful platforms. These days, that means "our 3D assets are created at the highest quality level based on PC as the foundation," he said. Players have already noticed this graphical difference in the PC version of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth , Hamaguchi said, and "our philosophy will not change for the third installment."

While PC gaming is only "gradually expanding in Japan," Hamaguchi said the rapid growth in international PC gamers has led the company to "develop assets with the broad PC market in mind."

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Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia.

A recent study has re-dated the skulls to about 1.77 million years old, which makes them the oldest hominin remains found so far in East Asia. Their age means that Homo erectus (an extinct common ancestor of our species, Neanderthals, and Denisovans) must have spread across the continent much earlier and much faster than we’d previously given them credit for. It also sheds new light on who was making stone tools at some even older archaeological sites in China.

Homo erectus spread like wildfire

Yunxian is an important—and occasionally contentious—archaeological site on the banks of central China’s Han River. Along with hundreds of stone tools and animal bones, the layers of river sediment have yielded three nearly complete hominin skulls (only two of which have been described in a publication so far). Shantou University paleoanthropologist Hua Tu and his colleagues measured the ratio of two isotopes, aluminum-26 and beryllium-10, in grains of quartz from the sediment layer that once held the skulls. The results suggest that Homo erectus lived and died along the Han River 1.77 million years ago. That's just 130,000 years after the species first appeared in Africa.

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With HBO's critically acclaimed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gearing up for its season finale on Sunday, it's time to check in on that other Game of Thrones spinoff: the far darker House of the Dragon , which now has a suitably ominous teaser for its upcoming third season.

(Spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

The series is set nearly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when dragons were still a fixture of Westeros, and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen’s reign. The primary source material is Fire and Blood , a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. As book readers know, those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along.

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For my money, the 2004 Game Boy Advance re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are still the best versions of the original Pokémon games. They fixed most of the bugs and balance issues present in the originals—partly by also including the rosters from Gold / Silver and Ruby / Sapphire —but they're more faithful to the original gameplay, battling and catching mechanics, and graphics than the 2018 Let's Go, Pikachu/Eevee! adaptations for the Switch.

Someone at Nintendo apparently agrees, as the company announced today that it's re-releasing those games for the original Switch (and, by extension, the Switch 2, though no Switch 2-specific features were announced). The games will be available after a planned Pokémon Presents stream at 9 am Eastern/6 am Pacific on February 27.

Subscribers to the Switch Online + Expansion Pack are in for a disappointment, though. Instead of releasing FireRed and LeafGreen as part of the Switch Online Game Boy Advance collection, Nintendo will release both titles as standalone purchases that will run you $20 apiece. This means that players without a subscription will be able to buy and play the games. But given how few GBA games are available for the Switch Online service and how infrequently new ones are released, it does rankle to see otherwise unmodified ports of a prominent game bypass subscribers entirely.

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