The term for England footballers’ wives and girlfriends first exploded in 2006 in Germany. The new generation watching the Euros are turning the old stereotypes on their heads
When England take to the pitch for their first game on Sunday night in Germany, eyes will be trained not just on the players but on the team sitting in the stands, cheering on the squad – the wives and girlfriends of the players, the so-called Wags.
The acronym Wags first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph in 2002 – apparently coined by the staff of a Dubai hotel where the players’ wives and girlfriends stayed. Still a relatively new phenomenon, it exploded like a glitterbomb on to the resort of Baden-Baden, where the England squad were based during the World Cup in Germany in 2006.
Customers keep filming employees behind the counter, in a bid to ensure their burritos are big enough
When Atulya Dora-Laskey clocks in to her job making tacos, burritos and salad bowls on the line at a Chipotle in Lansing, Michigan, she knows there’s a chance a customer will whip out a camera to film her assembling their lunch. If it does happen, “it’s immediately anxiety-inducing for my co-workers and me,” she said. She finds it “very stressful and dehumanizing” to be filmed at work.
These incidents of filming began last month, after rumors circulated on TikTok and Reddit alleging that Chipotle lineworkers skimped customers on the chain’s infamously large portion sizes – unless customers filmed workers making their order.
The social media star on performing to silent audiences, turning spite into success and still having to prove herself as a ‘proper’ comedian
Can you recall a gig so bad, it’s now funny? I was once booked for an outdoor, family friendly village fete where none of the comedians had been warned that the jokes would have to be child-appropriate. In the early days of your comedy career, you only have five minutes of jokes so we didn’t have tamer ones we could swap in. The section of field directly in front of the stage had been roped off for the dog show later in the day (the main event), meaning anyone wanting to watch the comedy would have to watch from about 10 metres away with a whole load of nothing between us. Only five people stood behind the rope to watch, including an adult in a full Peppa Pig costume who heckled throughout. I performed five minutes to silence, before the next act got their microphone disconnected and the comedy cancelled after saying the C word.
What is your upcoming show, (Role) Model, about? It’s about 55 minutes long … 57 with a good audience. I want it to feel like an incredibly fun conversation with your toxic best friend. But I guess it’s also a show about what it’s like to go viral overnight, or even worse, going viral for dancing with your parents. I’m trying to work out who I want to be versus what other people want me to be, and asking why are both impossible.
Since he was elected as the town’s MP, the Workers party leader has grown his huge online audience, but now faces a tough election battle with Labour
George Galloway was in full flow as he addressed tens of thousands of viewers online one evening in late March.
In a five-minute monologue, the newly elected Rochdale MP dismissed what he described as the “official narrative” of the murders of the US president John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and senator Robert F Kennedy. They were, he said, “a pack of lies”.
High profile TikTok accounts, including CNN, Sony, and—er—Paris Hilton have been targeted in a recent attack.
CNN was the first account takeover that made the news, with Semafor reporting that the account was down for several days after the incident.
According to Forbes, the attack happens without the account owner needing to click on or open anything—known as a zero-click attack. All they need to do is open a Direct Message (DM). The account is then taken over and the user loses access.
Malwarebytes’ Pieter Arntz explained how this sort of attack could happen:
“If they don’t need to click on anything, this could well be a vulnerability in the way content is loaded when opening a DM. We’ve seen similar vulnerabilities before in Chromium browser, for example when fabricated images are loaded.”
TikTok says it has now fixed the issue and is working to get the accounts back to their rightful owners. Spokesperson Alex Haurek told Forbes:
“Our security team is aware of a potential exploit targeting a number of brand and celebrity accounts. We have taken measures to stop this attack and prevent it from happening in the future. “
Haurek didn’t say whether the attackers were still targeting accounts.
Securing your TikTok account
This attack is eye-catching because it’s technically unusual, and was used against people who naturally attract headlines. However, it’s a flash in the pan and the vulnerability was quickly patched.
Meanwhile, there’s a thriving underground market in social logins fuelled with much more successful, but much more mundane forms of attack. To reduce your risk of those, make sure you do these things:
Use a strong password to secure your account, and make sure you’ve not used it elsewhere. You can use a password manager to remember your passwords.
Check what devices are logged into your account. TikTok Device Management allows you to view what devices are logged into your account, remove them if needed, and get notified if there is suspicious activity on your account.
Be careful what you click on. If you receive a link from someone and you don’t know what it is, don’t click on it. Check via a different communication channel about what the link is. In this case, it appears that someone only had to open a DM in order to get their account taken over so watch out for DMs you’re not expecting.
Don’t feel pressure. If someone is messaging you asking you to click on or send them something, think before you do it. Putting pressure on someone to perform an action quickly is a common tactic used by scammers. Trust your instincts.
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TikTok is now disputing a Reuters report that claims the short-video app is cloning its algorithm to potentially offer a different version of the app, which might degrade over time, just for US users.
Sources "with direct knowledge" of the project—granted anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year. They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.
As these sources reported, TikTok's tremendous undertaking could potentially help prepare its China-based owner ByteDance to appease US lawmakers who passed a law in April forcing TikTok to sell its US-based operations by January 19 or face a ban. But TikTok has maintained that the "qualified divestiture" required by the law would be impossible, and on Thursday, TikTok denied the accuracy of Reuters' report while reiterating its stance that a sale is not in the cards.
This leads us straight back to the original conversation about "Man or Bear," which has nothing to do with bears. (Sorry, bears!) "Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?" is just another way of asking, "Are you afraid of men?" It's the same question I've been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler. It's the same question that hovers over women all the time as we move through the world. And it's a question that's always been difficult for me to answer. from A Woman Who Left Society to Live With Bears Weighs in on "Man or Bear" by Laura Killingbeck [Bikepacking]
The US Senate has approved a bill that would effectively ban TikTok from the US unless Chinese owner ByteDance gives up its share of the immensely popular app.
Social video platform TikTok has experienced explosive growth since it first appeared in 2017, and is now said to have well over 1.5 billion users, with an estimated 170 million of them in the US.
Essentially, the bill says that TikTok has to find a new owner that is not based in a foreign adversarial country within the next 180 days or face a ban until it does comply. President Biden has committed to sign it into law as soon as it reaches his desk.
Since 2020, several governments and organizations have banned, or considered banning, TikTok from their staff’s devices, but a complete ban of an internet app would be a first in the US.
For a long time now, TikTok has been battling to convince politicians that it operates independently of ByteDance, which allegedly has deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For example, TikTok has repeatedly claimed the Chinese government has never demanded access to US data and that TikTok would not comply if it did.
While ByteDance denies any direct links to the Chinese Communist Party, a former executive at TikTok’s parent company claimed in court documents that the CCP had access to TikTok data, despite US storage of the data. The allegations came up in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed in May of 2023 in the San Francisco Superior Court.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in the US, says it opposes this bill, mainly because it is afraid that TikTok will not be the last app to face this type of ban.
TikTok also encouraged its users and creators to express their opposition to the bill. Last week, the social media company said the bill would:
“Trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans, devastate seven million businesses, and shutter a platform that contributes $24 billion to the US economy, annually.”
Chinese officials reportedly said the government would “firmly oppose” any forced sale of TikTok because it would “seriously undermine the confidence of investors from various countries, including China, to invest in the United States.”
Check your digital footprint
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A disappointing meal at a restaurant. An ugly breakup between two partners. A popular TV show that kills off a beloved, main character.
In a perfect world, these are irritations and moments of vulnerability. But online today, these same events can sometimes be the catalyst for hate. That disappointing meal can produce a frighteningly invasive Yelp review that exposes a restaurant owner’s home address for all to see. That ugly breakup can lead to an abusive ex posting a video of revenge porn. And even a movie or videogame can enrage some individuals into such a fury that they begin sending death threats to the actors and cast mates involved.
Online hate and harassment campaigns are well-known and widely studied. Sadly, they’re also becoming more frequent.
In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League revealed that 52% of American adults reported being harassed online at least some time in their life—the highest rate ever recorded by the organization and a dramatic climb from the 40% who responded similarly just one year earlier. When asking teens about recent harm, 51% said they’d suffered from online harassment in strictly the 12 months prior to taking the survey itself—a radical 15% increase from what teens said the year prior.
The proposed solutions, so far, have been difficult to implement.
Social media platforms often deflect blame—and are frequently shielded from legal liability—and many efforts to moderate and remove hateful content have either been slow or entirely absent in the past. Popular accounts with millions of followers will, without explicitly inciting violence, sometimes draw undue attention to everyday people. And the increasing need to have an online presence for teens—even classwork is done online now—makes it near impossible to simply “log off.”
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Tall Poppy CEO and co-founder Leigh Honeywell, about the evolution of online hate, personal defense strategies that mirror many of the best practices in cybersecurity, and the modern risks of accidentally becoming viral in a world with little privacy.
“It’s not just that your content can go viral, it’s that when your content goes viral, five people might be motivated enough to call in a fake bomb threat at your house.”
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