Mamdani, a democratic socialist and state assemblymember, will make history as the first Muslim and South Asian person — as well as the youngest in over a century — to serve as New York City mayor.

(Image credit: Michael M. Santiago)

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has publicly released an app that Sheriff Offices, police departments, and other local or regional law enforcement can use to scan someone’s face as part of immigration enforcement, 404 Media has learned.

The news follows Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of another internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) app called Mobile Fortify that uses facial recognition to nearly instantly bring up someone’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation. The new local law enforcement-focused app, called Mobile Identify, crystallizes one of the exact criticisms of DHS’s facial recognition app from privacy and surveillance experts: that this sort of powerful technology would trickle down to local enforcement, some of which have a history of making anti-immigrant comments or supporting inhumane treatment of detainees.

Handing “this powerful tech to police is like asking a 16-year old who just failed their drivers exams to pick a dozen classmates to hand car keys to,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, told 404 Media. “These careless and cavalier uses of facial recognition are going to lead to U.S. citizens and lawful residents being grabbed off the street and placed in ICE detention.”

Rockstar Games fired dozens of employees involved in unionizing efforts last week, in a move that the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) described as a clear act of union busting. Unsurprisingly, Rockstar denies the claim, arguing that they were fired for “misconduct.”

According to a spokesperson for the IWGB, the company fired between 30 and 40 employees across offices in the UK and Canada last Thursday. All of the employees were apparently either members of the union or were attempting to organize. They were all part of a private Discord server aimed at labor organization.

In a statement provided to Bloomberg, IWGB president Alex Marshal said, “Rockstar has just carried out one of the most blatant and ruthless acts of union busting in the history of the games industry. This flagrant contempt for the law and for the lives of the workers who bring in their billions is an insult to their fans and the global industry.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Take-Two alleged that the firings were for “gross misconduct, and for no other reason,” and that they “fully support Rockstar’s ambitions and approach,” which is corpo speak for “despite the fact we exclusively targeted workers who were attempting to organize union efforts, we believe that UK/Canadian labor law is weak enough that we’ll get away with it.”

This is the most ruthless act of union busting in the history of the UK games industry. Yesterday, @rockstargames.com unfairly fired over 30 employees for union activity.

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We won’t back down, and we’re not scared – we will fight for every member to be reinstated.

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— IWGB Game Workers Union (@gameworkers.co.uk) October 31, 2025 at 4:01 PM

According to a UK government website, an employer is “not allowed to dismiss you or choose you for redundancy because you: are or want to be a union member or took part” or “wanted to take part in union activities.” Unfortunately, like many parts of the world, union membership in the UK has been decreasing for decades, going from 80% in 1979 to just 23.3% by 2022. Meanwhile, Canada has had a more modest, but still apparent, decline from 37.6% in 1981 to 30.4% in 2023.

That said, these last few years have seen a major push in the video game industry towards unionizing. This summer, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft team organized to become one of the biggest video game unions in the US. In general, Activision Blizzard has become a hotbed for union activity; Raven Software formed one of the first major game unions back in 2022, followed by Blizzard Albany, Blizzard’s Story and Franchise Development team, and more. Meanwhile, other studios that were acquired by Microsoft, like Zenimax Online Studios and Arkane, have also unionized.

The uptick in union activity can likely be explained by a combination of longstanding exploitative and crunch conditions in the video game industry, combined with the recent onset of mass layoffs that have seen record-high firings for several years in a row. Rockstar, in particular, has been at the center of several controversies around crunch, from an open letter made by Rockstar employee family members accusing the company of forcing 12-hour work days for 6 days a week back in 2010, to a flippant comment by lead writer Dan Houser about his team working near 100-hour work weeks.

San Francisco's local newscast ABC7 runs a consumer advocacy segment called "7 on Your Side". They received a disturbing call for help from Dave Dornlas, treasurer of a nonprofit supporting a local library: GoFundMe has taken upon itself to create "nonprofit pages" for 1.4 million 501C-3 organizations using public IRS data along with information from trusted partners like the PayPal Giving Fund. "The fact that they would just on their own build pages for nonprofits that they've never spoken to is a problem," [Dornlas] said. "I'm a believer in opt-in, not opt-out...." Dornlas says he struggled to find anyone to contact from GoFundMe about this... Dave's other frustration is tied to the company's optional tipping feature on the platform. "GoFundMe also solicits a tip of 14.5%. In other words, 'We're doing this and we're great people. Give us 14.5% to do this' — which doesn't have to happen," Dornlas said. "That's what bothers me." When 7 On Your Side checked, the optional tip was actually set for 16.5%. The consumer is required to move the bar to adjust accordingly... The tip would be in addition to the 2.2% transaction fee GoFundMe charges nonprofits, plus $0.30 per donation. That fee goes up to 2.9% for individual fundraisers. Now both GoFundMe pages of Dornlas's nonprofits have been removed from the site. Any organization can do so, by clicking "unpublish" on the platform. But GoFundMe's move drew strong criticism from the Center for Nonprofit Excellence (a Kentucky-based membership organization with over 500 members). GoFundMe's move, they say, creates "confusion for donors and supporters who are unsure of the legitimacy of the fundraising pages. In some cases, GoFundMe included incorrect information, outdated logos, and other inaccuracies that compromise and misrepresent nonprofits' brand, mission, strategy, and message." And GoFundMe's processing fees and tips "ultimately result in fewer resources for nonprofits than if donors contributed directly through the organization." But there's more... GoFundMe has initiated SEO optimization as the default for the donation pages to improve their visibility when individuals search forinformation about nonprofits online. This could result in GoFundMe'spages ranking higher than the nonprofit's own website, pulling away potential donors and supporters... Without adequate safeguards in place, nonprofits report serious issues, ranging from unauthorized individuals claiming donations and the inability to remove pages without first agreeing to GoFundMe's terms and conditions or sharing sensitive banking information. The Center for Nonprofit Excellence has now joined with the National Council of Nonprofits — America's largest network of nonprofits, with over 25,000 members — to officially urge GoFundMe to immediately rectify the situation. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Arrogant-Bastard for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's been hard for me to understand why Atlas exists," writes MIT Technology Review. " Who is this browser for, exactly? Who is its customer? And the answer I have come to there is that Atlas is for OpenAI. The real customer, the true end user of Atlas, is not the person browsing websites, it is the company collecting data about what and how that person is browsing." New York Magazine's "Intelligencer" column argues OpenAI wants ChatGPT in your browser because "That's where people who use computers, particularly for work, spend all their time, and through which vast quantities of valuable information flow in and out. Also, if you're a company hoping to train your models to replicate a bunch of white-collar work, millions of browser sessions would be a pretty valuable source of data." Unfortunately, warns Fast Company, ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity Comet, and other AI browses "include some major security, privacy, and usability trade-offs... Most of the time, I don't want to use them and am wary of doing so..." Worst of all, these browsers are security minefields. A web page that looks benign to humans can includehidden instructions for AI agents, tricking them into stealing info from other sites... "If you're signed into sensitive accounts like your bank or your email provider in your browser, simply summarizing a Reddit postcould result in an attacker being able to steal money or your private data,"Brave's security researchers wrotelast week.No one has figured out how to solve this problem. If you can look past the security nightmares, the actual browsing features are substandard. Neither ChatGPT Atlas nor Perplexity Comet support vertical tabs — a must-have feature for me — and they have no tab search tool or way to look up recently-closed pages. Atlas also doesn't support saving sites as web apps, selecting multiple tabs (for instance, to close all at once with Cmd+W), or customizing the appearance. Compared to all the fancy new AI features, the web browsing part can feel like an afterthought. Regular web search can also be a hassle, even though you'll probably need it sometimes. When I typed "Sichuan Chili" into ChatGPT Atlas, it produced a lengthy description of the Chinese peppers, not the nearby restaurant whose website and number I was looking for.... Meanwhile, the standard AI annoyances still apply in the browser. Getting Perplexity to fill my grocery cart felt like a triumph, but on other occasions the AI has run into inexplicable walls and only ended up wasting more time. There may be other costs to using these browsers as well. AI still has usage limits, and so all this eventually becomes a ploy to bump more people into paid tiers. Beyond that,Atlas is constantly analyzing the pages you visit to build a "memory" of who you are and what you're into. Do not be surprised if this translates to deeply targeted ads as OpenAI startslooking at ways to monetize free users. For now, I'm only using AI browsers in small doses when I think they can solve a specific problem. Even then, I'm not going sign them into my email, bank accounts, or any other accounts for which a security breach would be catastrophic. It's too bad, because email and calendars are areas where AI agents could be truly useful, but the security risks are too great (andwell-documented). The article notes that in August Vivaldi announced that "We're taking a stand, choosing humans over hype" with their browser: We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you, until more rigorous ways to do those things are available. Vivaldi is the haven for people who still want to explore. We will continue building a browser for curious minds, power users, researchers, and anyone who values autonomy. If AI contributes to that goal without stealing intellectual property, compromising privacy or the open web, we will use it. If it turns people into passive consumers, we will not... We're fighting for a better web.

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Dropout—the comedy company/streaming service that grew out of the collapse of CollegeHumor about five years back—has posted a pretty major milestone, per Variety. In a new interview with company CEO Sam Reich, the streamer revealed that it’s now passed the 1 million paid subscribers mark.