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Dateline: Sydney, 27th March 2025.When it comes to financial inclusion, there is one category of living things that have so far been overlooked: animals. It may sound a little. far-fetched to give animals their own purses, and a means to spend the contents in such a way as to increase their change of survival, but this is the “interspecies money” concept being explored in a trial involving a family of 19 mountain gorillas in Rwanda (with the intention of extending across the whole country next year).Subscribe nowWallet of the Apes The gorillas are not using cryptocurrency (that would be silly) but instead are connected through a platform that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to determine the needs of the animals—for example, that a poacher’s snare needs to be removed—then recruits a nearby human to do the work and then issues payment once it task has been completed. So the gorilla is in the middle, between the budget holder and the care giver: not so much a P2P (person-to-person) payment system as a P2A2P (person-to-animal-to-person) system.(Incidentally, if you were wondering why I dismissed giving cryptocurrency to gorillas as silly, it’s not because I am concerned they will spend all of their money on bored ape NFTs, it’s because Rwandan mountain gorillas live in areas with poor mobile reception where an offline central bank digital currency might be a better choice.)with kind permission of Helen Holmes (CC-BY-ND 4.0)It is interesting to speculate where this might go though, especially in a more decentralised…Animal Hackers

How many views are your YouTube videos receiving?In order to truly know this, you have to understand how a view is counted on YouTube in the first place. On a traditional YouTube video, YouTube adds a view to your video’s view count if a viewer watches 30 seconds or more of your upload. However, when YouTube launched YouTube Shorts four-and-a-half years ago, it didn’t count views on shortform videos in the same way. Instead, YouTube would count a view on a YouTube Shorts video if a user watched for at least a few seconds. YouTube never provided an exact number of seconds, but it was clearly much shorter than the 30 second requirement for a YouTube video. SEE ALSO: YouTube turns 20 years old. Did you know it was originally a dating website? However, YouTube is now changing how it counts views for YouTube Shorts.As of March 31, 2025, YouTube will add a view to your YouTube Shorts view count at the moment your shortform video begins to play. There is no view time requirement anymore for a YouTube Shorts video. YouTube will basically count a view if a user just sees your video at all. And because YouTube Shorts content loops, YouTube will count a new view each time that video replays from the beginning too.According to YouTube, it’s making this change at creators’ requests as it more accurately reflects a more helpful metric for YouTube Shorts content strategies in particular. SEE ALSO: YouTube Shorts is getting a tool for adding…YouTube is changing what a view means for YouTube Shorts

For years, educators and parents have implored Instagram to address student bullying and harassment that often starts on the company’s platform and later shows up in the classroom. Now the platform, which is owned by Meta, is rolling out a program that allows educators to directly report safety issues like bullying directly to Instagram. The Schools Partnership program will launch with a pilot that’s open to all middle and high schools in the U.S. The International Society for Technology in Education, a nonprofit that focuses on edtech, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, helped develop the initiative. SEE ALSO: I’m quitting Instagram. You should too. When participating schools report content or accounts to Instagram that may violate the platform’s community standards, those reports are prioritized for review. Additionally, Instagram will provide status updates and notifications once the platform takes action. The program requires schools to have an Instagram account and provides them with a profile banner to indicate that they’re an official platform partner. Meta told Mashable that schools that have tested the program so far have typically designated a single administrator, like an assistant principal, to receive relevant safety reports and then share them with Instagram. Per Meta’s policy, official school accounts should be run by school officials, not by a parent-teacher organization volunteers. The process of reporting — and quickly resolving — Instagram-related harassment and bullying has been a key concern of educators and parents in recent years. In October 2022, the American Federation of Teachers,…Instagram working with schools to take action against bullying, gossip accounts

We regret to inform you that the hustle bros are at it again — this time, they’ve brought mouth tape and banana peels.Over the weekend, the internet was captivated (read: deeply confused) by a resurfaced video from fitness influencer Ashton Hall, whose morning routine might be the most unhinged one to grace our feeds. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. We’re talking full performance art levels of routine here — a six-hour odyssey that begins at 3:50 a.m. and ends at 9:30 a.m. and includes such highlights as mouth taping, icy face dunks (with very conspicuous bottled water product placement), shirtless push-ups, meditating, weird poses by the balcony, and — we cannot stress this enough — four minutes of hovering over the pool. The video, originally posted on February 7, is labeled “Day 191 of the morning routine that changed my life.”Hall, who boasts over 8 million Instagram followers, is no stranger to the hustle-core lifestyle content mill. His feed is a never-ending scroll of shirtless workouts, aggressively aestheticized morning routines, and the kind of unwavering discipline that makes you want to take a nap out of protest.The reactions? Predictably savage. Social media has been lit up with memes, stitches, and general bewilderment. And it’s not just the randos on the internet — pro sports teams and even Mr. Beast are having fun with it. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might…Fitness influencers morning routine goes viral for all the wrong reasons

If you search social media for workout tips or healthy meal ideas, you’ll likely be bombarded with ads for supplements. “Bloom will boost your energy and make your skin glow,” “AG1 Athletic Greens will fill any gaps in your diet,” “Magnesium will improve your mood and your sleep,” “Lion’s mane will enhance your memory,” and somehow, all of them promise to increase cognitive function. Influencers are quick to assure us: “You can’t trust anyone when they talk about supplements, but you can trust me.”We’re trapped in an increasingly dangerous — and mind-bogglingly dull — supplement hell online, all thanks to politicians. And it’s probably going to get worse (sorry!). View this post on Instagram View this post on Instagram This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. The nutritional and dietary supplement industry has exploded in recent years, fueled partly by social media influencers and branded content. But with the Trump administration’s enthusiastic push for deregulation, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine and pro-supplement views, the rise of an alternative health movement, social media platforms moving away from fact-checkers, and a healthcare industry that continues to fail its most vulnerable, the fight against the supplement industry has reached a boiling point. There are plenty of reasons the supplement industry has become a multibillion-dollar powerhouse. Americans facing a dysfunctional medical system and soaring healthcare costs often turn to supplements as a solution, creating a clear pathway to the industry’s waiting arms. However, there are other legislative factors at…How influencers and politicians built an unregulated supplement empire

The New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft highlights an uncomfortable contradiction in how we view creativity and learning. While the Times accuses these companies of copyright infringement for training AI on their content, this ignores a fundamental truth: AI systems learn exactly as humans do, by absorbing, synthesizing and transforming existing knowledge into something new.  Consider how human creators work. No writer, artist or musician exists in a vacuum. For example, without ancient Greek mythology, we wouldn’t have DC’s pantheon of superheroes, including cinematic staples such as Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. These characters draw unmistakably clear inspiration from the likes of Zeus, Athena and Poseidon, respectively. Without the gods of Mount Olympus as inspiration, there would be no comic book heroes today to save the world (and the summer box office).  This pattern of learning, absorbing and transforming is precisely how large language models operate. They don’t plagiarize or reproduce; they learn patterns and relationships from vast amounts of information, just as humans do. When a novelist reads thousands of books throughout their lifetime, those works shape their writing style, vocabulary and narrative instincts. We don’t accuse them of copyright infringement because we understand that transforming influences into original expression is the essence of creativity.  Critics will argue that AI companies profit from others’ work without compensation. This argument misses a crucial distinction between reference and reproduction. When large language models generate text that bears stylistic similarities to works they trained on, it’s no different from a human author…Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? 

Dateline: Berlin, 19th March 2025.Remember the good old days when people used to rob banks for money? At least there was no contagion. Apart from anything else, thanks to fungibility, it wasn’t your money that was being stolen anyway, it was the banks’ money. Today though, smart criminals rob banks for identity, which is much more valuable.Subscribe nowSecurity? What Security?Your data is worth so much more than your money, financial institutions really should work much harder to protect it because the consequences of your data being copied are so much worse than the consequences of their money being stolen.Look at the example of Evolve Bank & Trust, where the theft of personal data and alleged images of identity credentials means that the impact of the attack will spread well beyond that bank’s customers and across the broader financial sector. The bank’s website reported that the data that hackers and copied and then released was Personal Identification Information (PII) including “name, Social Security Number, date of birth, account information and/or other personal information”. It doesn’t take much imagination to predict that the primary use of this information, apart from industrial scale phishing attacks, is that it will undoubtedly be used to create new bank accounts. Oh dear.If you are wondering, as I was, why it is that a bank would be storing pictures of driving licences and passports and so on, the answer is of course know-your-customer (KYC) regulations. The noted investor Paul Graham commented on this sort of thing saying…Now Appearing At Your Local Security Theatre: Know-Your-Customer

There was once a time when memes and internet-born jokes were a novelty enjoyed by relatively few people – the kind who would describe themselves as Extremely Online. Maybe you’d take pride in quoting a niche Vine that only a few select IRL friends will have seen and spent your evenings connecting with mutuals on Twitter or scrolling niche fandom accounts. Crucially, you had an understanding of internet culture that the average person probably didn’t. But in 2025, it’s very difficult to make that claim.Because while internet trends and buzzwords were once an inside joke, it’s now practically impossible to keep anything on social media a secret. This feels particularly pressing in the wake of BRAT summer, a concept which was cool for, approximately, five minutes and is now being referenced by Facebook mums as part of their daily vocabulary and was used in Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Similarly, seven or eight years ago, had Jools Lebron shared her “very demure” video on Vine, rather than on TikTok last year, it might have had potential to be a private gag between you and your other very online friend, rather than the concept for at least four fashion brands’ autumn campaigns. All of this to say, the idea that you can be more online than anyone else with an iPhone and an Instagram account is ostensibly extinct.  SEE ALSO: Jools Lebron, the creator of ‘very demure, very mindful,’ might not own its trademark Plus, many people who once made their internet…The age of being very online is over. Heres why.

One evening, Holly,* then 22, was sitting on the sofa with her boyfriend, Harvey, 22, in his family home, when he mentioned that his ex, Harmony, had an OnlyFans account. Holly joked that she was going to subscribe to Harmony’s page, and they both laughed. Holly, however, wasn’t joking. Back home, she found Harmony’s page and subscribed. She’d already looked at Harmony’s Instagram, flicking through old photos of her and Harvey at prom, in school uniform, on holiday together. But scrolling through her OnlyFans account felt like she’d unlocked something else, like she was “meeting a different character altogether.” SEE ALSO: How to protect your mental health while using dating apps “I would study photos of her boobs, bum, vagina, etc., and tally up where I stood in relation,” Holly told me. “I just wanted to see her nipples compared to mine.”In our digitally mediated worlds, we have our partners’ entire romantic histories at our fingertips. For the curious (or forensically-obsessed) among us, the proximity to all this information is intoxicating. We find ourselves lying in bed, alone, stroking our iPhones, scouring our partners’ ex-flings’ LinkedIn credentials, Substacks, and sepia-tinged selfies from 2011. Obsessing over a partner’s ex feels dirty and salacious, shameful and delicious. Like scratching an inflamed mosquito bite, the sensation is sweet and stinging, always leaving us wanting more. So why do we do it?A gendered problem?”A lot of information on this subject is really poor,” said psychotherapist Toby Ingham, who has written a book about “retroactive jealousy”…Why do we become obsessed with our partners exes?

UPDATE: Mar. 13, 2025, 3:15 p.m. EDT All sizes of Bluesky’s “A WORLD WITHOUT CAESARS” shirt sold out in less than 30 minutes. We’ve asked the company whether it’s planning a restock and will update this story if/when we hear back. Our original story follows. The T-shirt heard around the World Wide Web can now be yours.The social media platform Bluesky has begun selling a version of the shirt worn by its CEO Jay Graber at SXSW in Austin this week. Graber took the stage for a keynote session Monday in an oversized black tee bearing the phrase “Mundus sine caesaribus,” which is Latin for “a world without Caesars.” As Mashable’s Chance Townsend reported, it was a clear dig at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who infamously wore a similar shirt referencing a Roman ruler at the company’s developer conference last year. SEE ALSO: Bluesky CEO: imagine a ‘world without Caesars’ As of Thursday afternoon, Graber’s shirt is now available for purchase for $40 in sizes small through XL at worldwithoutcaesars.com. According to the website, “Any proceeds benefit the AT Protocol developer ecosystem, the open network that Bluesky is built upon.” Opens in a new window Credit: Bluesky “A WORLD WITHOUT CAESARS” shirt $40 at Bluesky Shop Now Graber’s shirt is a near copy of the one Zuckerberg donned for Meta Connect 2024 — same design, same typeface, but very different message. The Facebook founder’s original shirt read “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”), a spin on the Latin phrase…Blueskys CEO trolled Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW with a T-shirt. You can now buy it.