Over the last two days users from the social media service Mastodon have started a campaign which has raised over $250,000 for VP Harris. User Heidi Li Feldman started the modest campaign on ActBlue two days ago, with a humble goal of one thousand dollars. She did it for the dual purpose of helping VP Harris, and raising awareness of the social media site.

She has blown by her original goal — and continues to have to move the goalposts, but in a good way...

From Heidi’s initial request:

I'm doing something I never thought I'd get to do again. I'm specifically fundraising for a woman to head the Democratic ticket and to be the next President of the United States. I want to do this with all of you here on #Mastodon, so I've created a fundraising page specifically for us: #MastodonForHarris.

We have the chance to save U.S. democracy and rule of law, to elect the first woman President of the United States, and to send TFG packing. By contributing to Kamala Harris's campaign via this portal, we can also encourage her to create a distinct presence on Mastodon, not mediated by Threads or any other social media provider.

Any amount donated will strengthen the #Mastodon platform as a venue for progressive political activism, as well as benefiting Kamala Harris.

Some companies are easy to quit. If I decide I don't like Coca-Cola anymore I can simply stop drinking Coke. Sure, the company makes more than just Coke, so I would need to do some research to figure out which products they do and don't make, but it's theoretically possible.

Quitting Google isn't like that. It makes many products, many of which you depend on to live your digital life. Leaving a company like that is like a divorce, according to an expert I talked to. "It's not easy, but you feel so much better at the other side," said Janet Vertesi, a sociology professor at Princeton who publishes work on human computer interaction. "Think of a friend who gets a divorce and is so happy to be out. That could be you. That's how it feels to leave Google."

She'd know. Vertesi researches NASA's robotic spacecraft teams and also publishes work on human computer interaction. In March 2012, after Google significantly changed its privacy policies, she decided to stop using Google entirely. Vertesi also runs The Opt Out Project, a website full of recommendations and tutorials for replacing "Big Tech" services with community-driven and DIY alternatives. She is, in other words, someone who has done the work, so I wanted to ask her for some advice about how someone should approach quitting Google.

Lifehacker has already published a comprehensive guide to quitting Google and a list of the best competitors to every Google product years ago, and that information stands up for the most part. But not using Google anymore isn't just a technical process—it's a massive project. Here's some advice on how to tackle it.

As a project, Mastodon has operated under the umbrella of Mastodon GmbH, a German company that benefited from non-profit status with the German government. Despite all indications that they were doing everything right, Mastodon GmbH recently had its non-profit status revoked, resulting in the team to seek an alternative.

In the announcement, CEO and founder Eugen Rochko had this to say:

Our day to day operations are largely unaffected by this event, since Patreon does not presuppose non-profit status, and Patreon income does not count as donations. We have in fact not had to issue a single donation receipt since 2021.

Mastodon remains one of the only popular social platforms that operates out of the European Union, and Eugen desires to keep things that way. With that being said, this could be an interesting opportunity for the project: a presence in the United States may reduce friction in hiring employees there.

Zach Edey and his Purdue teammates are not leaving anything to chance. In the first two rounds of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, the Boilermakers have blown the doors off two overmatched opponents as they attempt to erase memories of last year's upset loss to No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson. After thrashing Utah State on Sunday, Purdue is back in the Sweet 16.

Edey and Co. opened the tournament as the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Region, and hammered out a 78-50 win over Grambling. The All-American center was unstoppable in that contest, scoring 30 points and grabbing 21 rebounds. Purdue led 31-27 with 3:40 remaining in the half and decided to turn it on. The Boilermakers outscored the Tigers by 24 points the rest of the way.

A newly discovered vulnerability baked into Apple’s M-series of chips allows attackers to extract secret keys from Macs when they perform widely used cryptographic operations, academic researchers have revealed in a paper published Thursday.

The flaw—a side channel allowing end-to-end key extractions when Apple chips run implementations of widely used cryptographic protocols—can’t be patched directly because it stems from the microarchitectural design of the silicon itself. Instead, it can only be mitigated by building defenses into third-party cryptographic software that could drastically degrade M-series performance when executing cryptographic operations, particularly on the earlier M1 and M2 generations. The vulnerability can be exploited when the targeted cryptographic operation and the malicious application with normal user system privileges run on the same CPU cluster.