ODESSA, Texas — When the pandemic started, Michelle Villegas was in 6th grade. Now she's finishing up middle school, but not without some unpleasant memories from remote middle school.

"The tests would just, it would just load and load and load. Like I hated seeing that circle was just, it was in my nightmares, the circle!" she said.

The nightmarish loading circle is something that so many families across the nation can relate to as the pandemic exposed a weak link in rural America’s access to the internet. Michelle's mom says her heart broke watching her daughter struggle just to simply join a class.

"It was stressful, it was overwhelming, it was frustrating," she said.

The Villegas live on the outskirts of Odessa, Texas – a boom or bust oil town that’s one of many spots on the map without access to reliable internet.

According to the FCC, 6% of the country’s population lacks internet access. Narrowing in on rural communities, one in four lacks access – that’s 14.5 million people.

"I couldn't get on and I would call my mom crying because I was like, mom, I'm going to fail this. Like, my grades are so low because I can't do this," Michelle recounted.

Scott Muri is the superintendent in Ector County, where Odessa is located. When the pandemic hit and they had to move to remote learning over the course of a weekend, they found that 39% of their student body lived in areas with inadequate internet or no internet at all.

"Many of our kids do not live in an area of our community, that even if they had the money, they could access the internet, it's simply didn't exist," said Muri.

With that large of a percentage of students that couldn’t log on for remote school, they had to think of solutions. So they decided to shoot their shot and contacted SpaceX to be a part of their Starlink internet access pilot project and the multi-billion dollar company said yes.

"This big dad started to cry because he understood as a parent, what that a simple little dish was going to mean for his children because he had watched his kids struggle mightily to connect with their teachers," he said.

What Ector County has is a unique public-private partnership. However, federal dollars will trickle into tackling this same issue nationwide. $45 billion dollars from the infrastructure bill is going toward equitable broadband access.

"I think we need to appreciate broadband as a utility. You know, it is not a special thing that only certain people have. It is not something that you earn through wealth. It is something that is a right and a privilege and an opportunity for every American," he said.

Next year, Michelle is entering high school and both her and her mom are relieved to have reliable service because it will help put her on an equal playing field for the rest of her education.

"Everything is technology now. And if you don't have a good internet source, you're not going to be caught up with everything that's happening now. Like you're going to be left in the past," said Michelle.

It’s almost time to send the kids back to school, and that means Facebook will soon be flooded with those cute back-to-school pictures.

But what information should you exclude from those pictures? And how much information is too much?

We spoke to experts who say any information we put out there gets stored somewhere, even if our accounts are set to private.

“We love seeing them from our friends and family, but we're certainly creating a digital footprint every time we do that,” said Heather Starr Fiedler, professor of social media at Point Park University. "We're still creating this digital log of information that can be used for lots of different reasons by lots of different people."

Starr Fiedler says to stay away from posting any identifying information like your child’s full name, the school they attend, their teacher’s name or classroom number.

You should also avoid photos of your child wearing their school uniform, especially if the school’s logo is on it.

Make sure your street sign, house number or your child’s bus number is not in the photo as well.

"Those are the things that I think are the most dangerous that we want to try to avoid," Starr Fiedler added.

In addition to scammers, in the most extreme cases, you could be putting your child in harm's way by unknowingly offering up sensitive information to child predators.

“Child predators online are looking to build profiles for people to build relationships, and they can use that information at a later date to form a trusting relationship,” said Scott Argio, assistant special agent in charge at the FBI’s Pittsburgh office.

Argio says privacy settings can help, but there is one thing to keep in mind.

“The main thing about posting things on social media is, you're posting it for the world to see," Argio said.

Starr Fiedler says parents should also be cautious of putting any information out there that would help someone document you or your child’s habits.

Like hints about when your kids get picked up, dropped off or start their after-school activities.

“That's telling them we're not with our children right now. We're somewhere else," she said.

Starr Fiedler adds that once your child has their own social media accounts, make sure you have those important conversations about safety and privacy.

Twitter has been sued over Elon Musk's plan to lay off around half of the company's staff, after purchasing the social network for around $44 billion dollars.

Bloomberg News reported that a class-action lawsuit was filed in San Francisco federal court.

The outlet reported that a similar lawsuit by Tesla workers was labeled as "trivial" by the billionaire.

The lawyer that filed the suit against Twitter Inc. said it was being done "pre-emptively," just as the mass layoffs were set to move forward.

The lawyer said she is "pleased" that she found out Twitter employees will continue to be paid until Jan. 4, Bloomberg reported.

Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan said Friday Musk "is making an effort to comply" with the legal matter.

Liss-Riordan said in the suit that Twitter is violating federal and California statutes.

U.S. federal authorities say they seized over $3.36 billion in Bitcoin during an investigation into fraud on the Silk Road dark web marketplace.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) said about 50,676 in Bitcoin was seized last November, and was valued at the time at more than $3.36 billion.

It was, at the time, the largest cryptocurrency seizure in DOJ history.

As Axios reported, the move signals the federal government's growing interest in recovering cryptocurrency payments linked to cybercrimes.

The Silk Road was in operation between 2011 and 2013 and worked as a dark web marketplace, but collapsed after operator Ross Ulbricht was arrested.

Ulbricht, 31-years-old at the time, was given five sentences, including two for life, in 2015. They would be served concurrently with no chance of parole, the Guardian reported.

Justice Samuel Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court asked this week what may be, to millions of average internet users, the most relatable question to come out of a pair of high-stakes oral arguments about the future of social media.

"Would Google collapse, and the internet be destroyed," Alito asked a Google attorney on Tuesday, "if YouTube and therefore Google were potentially liable" for the content its users posted?

Alito's question aimed to cut through the jargon and theatrics of a nearly three-hour debate over whether YouTube can be sued for algorithmically recommending videos created by the terrorist group ISIS.

His question sought to explore what might really happen in a world where the Court rolls back a 27-year-old liability shield, allowing tech platforms to be sued over how they host and display videos, forum posts, and other user-generated content. The Google case, as well as a related case argued the next day involving Twitter, are viewed as pivotal because the outcome could have ramifications for websites large and small — and, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh observed, "the digital economy, with all sorts of effects on workers and consumers, retirement plans and what have you."

The litigation could have vast implications for everything from online restaurant reviews to likes and retweets to the coding of new applications.

Though the justices this week seemed broadly hesitant to overturn or significantly narrow those legal protections, the possibility remains that the Court may limit immunity for websites in ways that could reshape what users see in their apps and browsers — or, in Google's words, "upend the internet."

Nearly 30 years of protections

Passed in 1996, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act sought to foster the growth of the early internet. Faced with a technological revolution it wanted to nurture, Congress created a special form of legal immunity for websites so they could develop uninhibited by lawsuits that might suffocate the ecosystem before it had a chance to flourish. In the time since, companies ranging from AOL to Twitter have invoked Section 230 to nip user-content lawsuits in the bud, arguing, usually successfully, that they are not responsible for the content their users create.

For decades, courts have interpreted Section 230 to give broad protections to websites. The legislation's original authors have repeatedly said their intent was to give websites the benefit of the doubt and to encourage innovation in content moderation.

But as large online platforms have become more central to the country's political and economic affairs, policymakers have come to doubt whether that shield is still worth keeping intact, at least in its current form. Democrats say the law has given websites a free pass to overlook hate speech and misinformation; Republicans say it lets them suppress right-wing viewpoints. The Supreme Court isn't the only one reviewing Section 230; Congress and the White House have also proposed changes to the law, though legislation to update Section 230 has consistently stalled.

Understanding how the internet may work differently without Section 230 — or if the law is significantly narrowed — starts with one, simple concept: Shrinking the liability shield means exposing websites and internet users to more lawsuits.

A lack of oversight or a legal cudgel?

Virtually all of the potential consequences for the internet, both good and bad, flow from that single idea. How many suits should websites and their users have to face?

For skeptics of the tech industry, and critics of social media platforms, more lawsuits would imply more opportunities to hold tech companies accountable. As in the Google and Twitter cases, websites might see more allegations that they aided and abetted terrorism because they hosted terrorist content. But it wouldn't end there, according to Chief Justice John Roberts.

"I suspect there would be many, many times more defamation suits, discrimination suits... infliction of emotional distress, antitrust actions," Roberts said Tuesday, ticking off a list of possible claims that might be brought.

Roberts' remark underscores the enormous role Section 230 has played in deflecting litigation from the tech industry — or, as its opponents might say, shielding it from proper oversight. Allowing the courts to scrutinize the tech industry more would bring it in line with other industries, some have argued.

"The massive social media industry has grown up largely shielded from the courts and the normal development of a body of law. It is highly irregular for a global industry that wields staggering influence to be protected from judicial inquiry," wrote the Anti-Defamation League in a Supreme Court brief.

For a moment, Justice Elena Kagan seemed to agree on Tuesday.

"Every other industry has to internalize the costs of its conduct," she said. "Why is it that the tech industry gets a pass? A little bit unclear."

Threats to comment sections, Craigslist, even Wikipedia

Exactly how the internet may change if the Supreme Court rules against the tech industry depends heavily on the specifics of that hypothetical ruling, and how expansive or narrowly tailored it is.

But in general, exposing online platforms to greater liability creates incentives for those sites to avoid being sued, which is how you would get potentially dramatic changes to the basic look and feel of the internet, according to the tech industry, digital rights groups and legal scholars of Section 230.

Websites would face a terrible choice in that scenario, they have argued. One option would be to preemptively remove any and all content that anyone, anywhere could even remotely allege is objectionable, no matter how minor — reducing the range of allowed speech on social media.

Another option would be to stop moderating content altogether, to avoid claims that a site knew or should have known that a piece of objectionable material was on its platform. Not moderating, and thus not knowing about libelous content, was enough to insulate the online portal CompuServe from liability in an important 1991 case that helped give rise to Section 230.

The sheer volume of lawsuits could crush website owners or internet users that can't afford to fight court battles on multiple fronts, leading to the kind of business ripple effects Kavanaugh raised. That could include personal blogs with comment sections, or e-commerce sites that host product reviews. And the surviving websites would alter their behavior to avoid suffering the same fate.

Without a specific scenario to consider, it's hard to grasp how all this would play out in practice. Helpfully, multiple online platforms have described to the Court ways in which they might change their operations.

Wikipedia has not explicitly said it could go under. But in a Supreme Court brief, it said it owes its existence to Section 230 and could be forced to compromise on its non-profit educational mission if it became liable for the writings of its millions of volunteer editors.

If websites became liable for their automated recommendations, it could affect newsfeed-style content ranking, automated friend and post suggestions, search auto-complete and other methods by which websites display information to users, other companies have said.

In that interpretation of the law, Craigslist said in a Supreme Court brief it could be forced to stop letting users browse by geographic region or by categories such as "bikes," "boats" or "books," instead having to provide an "undifferentiated morass of information."

If Yelp could be sued by anyone who felt a user restaurant review was misleading, it argued, it would be incentivized to stop presenting the most helpful recommendations and could even be helpless in the face of platform manipulation; business owners acting in bad faith could flood the site with fraudulent reviews in an effort to boost themselves, but at the cost of Yelp's utility to users.

And Microsoft has said that if Section 230 no longer protects algorithms, it would jeopardize its ability to suggest new job openings to users of LinkedIn, or to connect software developers to interesting and useful software projects on the online code repository GitHub.

Even a 'like' could trigger a lawsuit

Liability could also extend to individual internet users. A Supreme Court ruling restricting immunity for recommendations could mean any decision to like, upvote, retweet or share content could be identified as a "recommendation" and trigger a viable lawsuit, Reddit and a number of volunteer Reddit moderators wrote in a brief.

That potential nightmare scenario was affirmed in Tuesday's oral argument, when Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Eric Schnapper, an attorney going up against Google, to explore the implications of his legal theory. Schnapper represented the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American student killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris; the Gonzalez family has alleged that Google should be held liable under a U.S. antiterrorism law for its YouTube recommendations of ISIS content.

"If you go on Twitter, and you're using Twitter, and you retweet, or you 'like' or you say 'check this out,'" Barrett said, "on your theory, I'm not protected by Section 230."

"That's content you've created," Schnapper agreed.

The sweeping, seemingly unbounded theory of liability advanced by Schnapper seemed to make many justices, particularly the Court's conservatives, nervous.

Both liberals and conservatives on the Court struggled to identify a limiting principle that could allow the Court to ratchet back the scope of Section 230 without also raising legal risks for innocuous internet use.

Kagan told Schnapper that even if she didn't necessarily buy his opponent Google's "'sky is falling' stuff... boy, there is a lot of uncertainty about going the way you would have us go, in part, just because of the difficulty of drawing lines in this area."

A shipment of Starlink user terminals — small antennas that allow customers to access SpaceX's satellite-based internet service — arrived in Ukraine Monday, providing a backstop for Ukrainians who may see their traditional service interrupted amid the Russian invasion.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced Saturday that he had activated Starlink internet service in Ukraine as the country suffered power outages and gaps in internet service due to Russia's invasion. Musk also promised at the time that more were "en route."

The support from SpaceX arrived after Ukraine's vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is also Ukraine's minister of digital transformation, tweeted a plea to Musk over the weekend: "while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand."

Fedorov shared a photo of the Starlink terminals as they arrived in Ukraine and tweeted his thanks to Musk.

"You are most welcome," the SpaceX CEO replied.

Starlink is a satellite-based internet constellation intended to blanket the planet in high-speed broadband and could potentially bring connectivity to billions of people who still lack reliable internet access. Satellite-based internet has long provided a crucial backstop to land-based internet service, as it can remain active even when infrastructure on the ground is ravaged by war or natural disasters. It can also reach areas where ground-based infrastructure has yet to be installed. However, satellite internet traditionally had a reputation for spotty and slow connections.

Starlink, however, makes use of satellites that operate in low-Earth orbit — roughly 340 miles high, in SpaceX's case — to provide continuous coverage, allowing for much faster upload and download speeds. Starlink, which SpaceX has worked to rapidly deploy over the past couple of years, had about 145,000 users in 25 countries as of January.

SpaceX has already launched about 2,000 Starlink satellites and aims to launch thousands more to continue blanketing the planet in internet connectivity.

The Twitter exchange between Musk and Fedorov took place as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his country's deterrence forces, which includes nuclear arms, to be placed on high alert. Ukrainian Deputy Interior Minister Evgeny Yenin said talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations will take place Monday morning.

There have been "intermittent" power outages in Ukraine, but the internet is still "generally available," a senior U.S. defense official told reporters Saturday.

The Starlink system was recently used in Tonga, in the South Pacific Ocean, to provide internet service to connect remote villages following the eruption of an underwater volcano in January, according to SpaceX. The eruption was likely the biggest recorded anywhere on the planet in more than 30 years, CNN reported.

In recent years, the Olympic games have become a target for cyber espionage, surveillance and other financially-motivated attacks. 

The NTT Corporation, which provided network security for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, said there were more than 450 million cyberattacks launched during the 16 days of competition.

That's 2.5 times more than the number of attacks on the 2012 London Olympics.

Beijing won’t be much different.

A report from cybersecurity analysis firm Recorded Future found ransomware groups may try to encrypt machines used at the games, in part because it could lead to a significant profit, given that teams or officials might need to pay ransom to regain access to those systems as soon as possible. 

But experts think the biggest threat is possible cyber espionage and surveillance of athletes and visitors by the Chinese government.

The United States, Team Great Britain, Australia, Germany and Netherlands all urged their athletes and visitors to leave their personal phones and laptops back at home out of fear that they will be monitored by the government at the games and thereafter. 

"China's national security laws create a really different environment for privacy than what people are used to when they're in other countries, where privacy legislation places significant constraints on the government's ability to collect and use data," Robert Potter, CEO and co-founder of Internet 2.0 said.

"The identifiers for your phone are automatically collected, so that information is gone the moment you hit a mobile phone tower in China."

Potter's cybersecurity company Internet 2.0 examined some of the software being provided by official sponsors to the game and found that the Virtual Private Network service offered to athletes, which lets users hide and protect their internet traffic from being accessed by third parties, collected a "significant amount of user data" beyond what was needed to run the app. 

Newsy's research showed the camera and photo libraries were required to be accessed by the app, and they just didn't seem to be a particularly good reason or justifiable reason to think that that was normal for a VPN application.  

A separate report from Citizen Lab found serious privacy issues with the MY2022 Olympics app, which is required to be used by all attendees at the Beijing games.

For example, it contained an encryption flaw that could expose passport details and medical information of users. 

Both the IOC and Beijing Olympic Committee have rejected claims that there are security concerns with the MY2022 Olympics App. 

Experts told Newsy the only sure-fire way that visitors to the Olympics can protect themselves is by using new devices and accounts only while inside China in order to protect their personal information, then throw the devices away after the games are over.

China is committed to having open and accessible internet available to athletes that are within the "COVID bubble," but there is a line between open internet access and unmonitored internet access — and China is making no guarantees around the latter. 

This story was first reported by Tyler Adkisson at Newsy.

Facebook and Google are both forcing some users to switch to two-factor authentication in 2022.

The technology requires people to log in using a password and a secure code sent to their phone or email address. Critics say the decision poses too much of a burden for the average user. Cybersecurity experts insist it’s the least we can do.

“Passwords are breakable. Passwords can be stolen. Passwords can be guessed,” said Dr. Vahid Behzadan, a professor of computer science at the University of New Haven. “By adding two-factor authentication, we are making a successful compromise a little more difficult for the attacker.”

Dr. Behzadan said one of the biggest hurdles in cyber security is apathy from the general public.

“Many do not take security seriously,” he said. “Sharing passwords, writing passwords on a Post-it note and putting it on your desk, or choosing predictable, easy-to-guess passwords.”

Nearly 2 in 5 Americans shared one of their passwords with someone in 2021, according to a survey published in October. A different survey found that half of Americans believed their passwords are secure.

In a May post on the Google blog, the company’s director of product management, identity, and user security called passwords “the single biggest threat to your online security.” He said the company hopes to eliminate passwords altogether in the future.

“The internet is still suffering from that lack of foresight,” said Dr. Behzadan. “Internet protocols that were designed in the 80s are still in use, and they're still a major cause for concern in terms of cybersecurity.”

In the meantime, Google recommends using a password generator to create strong, unique passwords for every account. The company offers a password manager in its Chrome app so users don’t have to memorize everything. Similar products are available through Apple and Microsoft.

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, limiting service at many key and popular sites.The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press.Amazon said in a post an hour after the outage began that it had identified the root cause and was “actively working towards recovery.” It did not disclose more about the cause.The outage also affected Amazon’s ability to provide updates, it said.The outage began midmorning on the U.S. East Coast, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Inc, a network intelligence firm. “AWS is the biggest cloud provider and us-east-1 is their biggest data center, so any disruption there has big impacts to many popular websites and other internet services,” he said.Madory said he did not believe the outage was anything nefarious. He said a recent cluster of outages at providers that host major websites reflects how the networking industry has evolved. “More and more these outages end up being the product of automation and centralization of administration,” he said. “This ends up leading to outages that are hard to completely avoid due to operational complexity, but are very impactful when they happen.”Kentik was seeing a 26% drop in traffic to Netflix, among major web-based services affected by the outage, Madory said. According to Down Detector, a clearinghouse for user reports on outages, Delta and Southwest have been affected, but not American, United, Alaska or JetBlue.People trying to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, and Disney+ have reported issues. The McDonald’s app is also down.Check back for updates on this story.

ANAHEIM, Calif. —

"This has to stop," a Disneyland fan said.

There had been a stream of troubling comments for the past few days in the "Vintage Disneyland" Facebook group. People were getting offended and others were starting to speak out.

It started innocently, with people sharing memories of the park with the phrase “My Disneyland had …” My Disneyland had the Welch’s Grape Juice stand. My Disneyland let you fly through the Matterhorn on the Skyway.

But the internet being the internet, things took a dark turn, fast. "My Disneyland didn’t let wokeness ruin rides" was a common theme, quickly becoming a pile-on of grievances, from removing the scene on Pirates of the Caribbean where women were sold into sex slavery to changing culturally insensitive scenes on Jungle Cruise that stereotyped Indigenous tribes. Don’t even get them started on what’s on deck for Splash Mountain.

"The whole 'My Disneyland' thing was just mind-boggling," Bill Cotter said. As one of the admins of the 114,000 member group, it’s his shared responsibility to filter out the worst of the posts and comments. "I actually posted a picture of my car on Main Street that my Disneyland had better parking," he added.

Cotter is now retired from theme parks, but spent years working at Disneyland, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios. When he was a cast member (what Disneyland calls its employees), on the days Disneyland was closed, you were allowed to drive your car in the park if you had a certain level of seniority.

"I came back later and, my God, the hatred that was flying back and forth," Cotter said. "Like, 'my Disneyland didn’t have whale-sized people stuffing food in their face.' What are you talking about? Body shaming is not acceptable. Why did you feel you had to make that comment? And then it just went downhill from there. Some of the comments were truly terrible. 'My Disneyland didn’t have a pedophile president in the White House.' What the hell? That just went really south."

The members who participate in that kind of thread can get so toxic that even just speaking out in a mild way against the negativity — by saying something as innocuous as "this has to stop" — is to risk having thousands of people pile on their criticisms, starting with why the problematic comment wasn’t a problem in the first place and ending, quite often, with personal attacks on that person and their family that can extend outside the group and sometimes into real life.

But it’s not just isolated to this one Disneyland Facebook group.

There is a serious issue with toxicity in Disney social media as a whole, and it has increased so much over the past few years that the topic has become a growing area of academic study.

"It’s become quite fascinating to me to look at the toxicity in a fandom that a lot of people would think is just very happy, and everyone’s always on the same page with things, when they’re obviously not," said Rebecca Williams, senior lecturer in communication, culture and media studies at the University of South Wales in the United Kingdom. She focuses extensively on participatory cultures and fandoms, especially Disney fans, publishing the book “Theme Park Fandom” last year.

Williams first started noticing a larger-than-expected reaction to what she thought were relatively benign opinions about Disney when she was doing her own planning for a family trip to Walt Disney World.

"It was the first time I'd really seen a sense that a lot of the locals thought of tourists as being foolish or as not really knowing the right thing to do or the right place to go. And I'd never really thought about that before," Williams said. "I'd always thought quite nicely that everyone who liked Disney was going to be friendly and nice."

Since then, in her observation, the criticism has grown from passing criticism to deeper attacks that have become more pointed and personal. Blame the pandemic, sure, but there’s more happening than just that — and the trends in Disney social media reflect what’s happening in society more broadly.

"I think the pandemic has made people generally more angry about the little things," Williams said, but she saw the real emergence of this kind of discourse around the 2016 election. "I think people on social media started to become more divided anyway, and some of that spilled over," she said. "They’d never really been that vocal about their politics before on the Disney sites or on Twitter accounts."

Look on Twitter any day, especially on posts under the #DisTwitter threads, and you’ll see people attacking each other in vicious ways. Sometimes it’s about how "wokeness" is ruining the Disney experience — as Jonathan VanBoskerck famously opined in the Orlando Sentinel earlier this year. He received massive backlash as well, when he said, "Disney cares more about politics than happy guests."

But sometimes fans attack for seemingly innocuous things like Williams mentioned, such as restaurant preference, or for daring to prefer a park that others think is inferior. "Epcot fanboys" are regularly raked across the coals for loving a park with fewer rides than other Disney World parks and that has been under construction for several pre- and mid-pandemic years.

"These kinds of conflicts usually end up turning on ideas about who are the real fans and what does real fandom look like or mean," said Benjamin Woo, associate professor of communication and media study at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Woo, the author of "Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture," sees this kind of flare-up as a way of comparing who’s the better or more deserving fan.

"One of the reasons why online spaces have provoked, or made visible, or accelerated these kinds of conflicts is that it’s much easier to find and see people who are enjoying the thing that you enjoy in a way that’s different than you enjoy it, or who are criticizing those things," Woo told SFGATE.

"That discoverability of online fan activity means that you're kind of confronted by different conceptions of what it means to be a Disney fan or a Marvel fan or a gamer or whatever in a way that you might not have been if your fandom was limited by your own immediately available peers in your school or your city," he added. "I think the central dynamic here is you're just being confronted with these different conceptions of what it means to be a fan or how you are quote unquote 'supposed to think about or enjoy the thing.'"

Fans have spent years building up huge knowledge bases of little-known Disney history, or of learning every corner of the Disney movie universe, or creating their own version of the best way to do the parks. Then they share that information online. People disagree — or worse, go on a personal attack.

Insert whatever insult you want there, because it’s already been said, many times, to many people. They’re throwing their money away. They’re wasting their lives. They’re "creepy" Disney adults who refuse to grow up. They’re any version of fan the attacker doesn’t see as worthy.

"It doesn’t explain the particular vitriol in which some of [those opinions] get expressed," Woo said, "but I think that is a really important piece of understanding" that kind of behavior.

Academics studying the phenomenon can see any number of examples themselves. "On Facebook, I’m in groups for Disney cruises, and it’s amazing how somebody will ask the most innocent question and just get destroyed," said Dan Wann, professor of psychology at Murray State University in Kentucky. "I'm like, man, some people don't have near the magic you should probably have."

Wann studies the psychology of sports fandom, how groups of people interact over their love of sports and how they react when their team is losing. What he sees is that fandom is a deeply ingrained form of self-identification.

"Fans take this stuff personal, right? If you are a diehard Disney fan, or a diehard Giants fan, or a diehard ‘Star Wars’ fan, or a diehard fill-in-the-blank fan, it's a part of their identity," he said. "It is literally a part of who they are."

Some people choose a long-term commitment to Disney because their family likes to go, or because it’s a way to stay connected to the past. But there are also long-term financial commitments that people make to the company, through investments or through purchasing membership in Disney Vacation Club, which is essentially a timeshare at Disney hotels with a contract that can last up to 50 years. So, Wann points out, you’ve got good reasons for wanting things to stay positive at the parks.

"When things go wrong with that part of their identity, their choice is either to pretend they don't care or to make it seem better. Well, they're not going to pretend they don’t care, right?" Wann said. "If you’re a Disney Vacation Club person, you don't get to say, ‘Well, I guess I'll just not care anymore.’ You care psychologically and financially."

"When things happen at Disneyland — for instance, you talk about a ride change or if prices go up or they take away annual passes — Disneyland fans go crazy because you’re taking something that they hold very dear to their heart," said Stephanie Williams-Turkowski, assistant professor in the department of mass communications at Stephen F. Austin State University, who wrote her dissertation about Disney fandom. "It's like if I came into your house and rearranged all your furniture without you knowing, that's how deep it hits them. So there can be toxicity about that. There’s also toxicity and negativity towards the things that don’t change."

She especially sees fighting in online Disney communities about which groups should and shouldn’t be represented at the parks, and what the "real" Disney fan is. "There are so many different facets of being a Disney fan and you don't have to fit that one description," she said. "That's where a lot of the negativity comes in — like, 'You don't look like the typical Disney fan. So why are you pretending to be one?'"

"It’s really phenomenal and disappointing, " Bill Cotter said.

Though there are several other admins in the Vintage Disneyland group, many of them choose not to identify themselves publicly, some even going so far as to use a pseudonym to avoid backlash for enforcing the rules of the group. Those rules include specifying that posts need to pertain to a certain time frame to be considered "vintage," but also include "be kind and courteous" and "no politics," which are less followed than you might think.

"Some of them are just scared to death of being attacked by people on a personal level," Cotter said. "They start calling you Hitler for being a dictator. So many things you couldn’t print."

“It bounces off you in the street, but I just don’t like it when it happens here, it’s a whole new level of hurt,” he added. Cotter has a particular visibility in the group. He has written several history books, including one on the 1964 World’s Fair when Disney debuted It’s a Small World and other now-iconic park rides. “What frustrates me is that you’re trying to say you want to go to the happiest place on Earth,” he said, “and people just feel absolutely compelled to bring the outside world into it.”

Cotter, too, sees a correlation in vitriol with the 2016 election. “You’ll post a picture of something like, ‘Here’s myself at age 3 standing next to Monstro the Whale,’ and somebody has to post, ‘He’s almost as bad as Donald Trump.’ Why did you feel you needed to do that?” he said. “Then somebody else will post a picture of a kid sleeping in a stroller and somebody goes, ‘Oh, look a baby picture of Joe Biden doing what he does best, sleeping.’ You just don’t need that crap.”

But it’s not just politics. People attack each other over their parenting at the parks, their ride preferences, even the clothes they choose to wear to Disneyland. Cotter also said he sees a significant amount of race-baiting and homophobia. “Some people are so anti-gay that anything that suggests somebody might be gay sends them into an absolute frenzy,” he noted.

On the morning we spoke, Cotter checked the admin activity log for the group. In less than two hours that day, three people had been declined from joining the group, two had been banned, and several more had insensitive comments deleted from posts. Remember, though, that’s out of more than 100,000 members, the majority of whom he described as “really decent people and having fun.”

In sports fandom, Dan Wann said, those people are called “dysfunctional fans,” who disregard other people’s feelings or go on the attack when something goes wrong with their team. It might be one in 20 people, he guessed. “The majority aren't that way, but it doesn't take very many to make it seem like a majority,” he said.

“They're the ones that love to call into sports talk radio and diss the local and away games and confront the opposing fans,” Wann said. “They were bullies as kids, or they’re highly aggressive and they drink a lot. I wonder if maybe you haven't come across people [who] are just dysfunctional Disney fans and they're not nice outside of Disney. Their job is to take away the magic.”

So why do people continue to engage when the most benign comments often get attacked? Probably for the same reason cast members continue to work at Disneyland when the park pays wages it’s hard to live on. In fact, 25,000 of them are suing Disneyland right now for a living wage, the majority of whom still work for the Mouse.

It all comes down to passion for the park, a deep and sometimes inexplicable attachment to a place that’s more than just a place. It represents peace of mind, escapism, being able to walk out of your life and walk into one where everything is in vivid color, music plays from the landscaping, and your every need is tended to, as long as you can pay for it.

“People just really want a communal bond over something, and trust in the community and people who are seeking out that community,” said Will Henderson, associate director for the Social Media Listening Center at Clemson University, who studies the social media habits of theme park fans. “Yes, there are certain users that you don't want to engage with, but I think the block button and the report button are not used enough.”

With Disneyland especially, there’s a protectiveness that comes with what people perceive as “Walt’s park,” the only one Disney personally oversaw the creation of. People will complain about changes at Walt Disney World, but when it comes to Disneyland, that discourse is on a totally different level. “We have three times the number of members in Vintage Disneyland than we do in Vintage Disney World, and we must have 10 times the problem,” Cotter said.

In addition to Disneyland being seen as the purest expression of Walt Disney’s personal vision, it’s also more of a local’s park, with a huge portion of its annual passholders within easy driving distance. “Disneyland people are more of a local group,” Cotter said. “Before they eliminated the passes, they had a group that went all the time and started getting very protective of their environment.”

Because so many people grew up frequenting Disneyland, that passion and protectiveness could be linked to their happiest childhood memories. “So many people go to these places first when they are kids with their families, it's almost like, ‘You're attacking the way I was brought up, you're attacking my family,’” Rebecca Williams said.

Hannah Sampson, a staff writer who covers travel at the Washington Post, started seeing the negativity online among Disney fans come to a boiling point when she first reported on changes to Splash Mountain in mid-2019. “When I wrote that story, people were commenting on the piece and saying things like, ‘PC police get a life, leave us alone,’” she said. Some of them were even defending “Song of the South,” the movie Splash Mountain is based on, which is so problematic that the New Yorker called out its racism in its coverage of the movie’s 1946 release.

“People were saying how much they loved ‘Song of the South’ and how it was really a great movie,” Sampson added, “when in actuality they're not even showing it because it [Disney] realized that it's so offensive and culturally unacceptable.”

A story she wrote about conservative backlash to what she called “Disney’s ‘woke’ moves” generated more than 4,300 reader comments (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for this Washington Post article). The discourse was exactly what you’d expect. One reader commented the story was “more fodder for the knuckle dragging right wing outrage machine,” while another responded with, “Diversity and inclusivity is a stupid replacement for competence. Losers of the world, arise!”

“If not seeing a depiction of a woman sold off at auction is going to ‘ruin’ your Disney experience,” wrote one commenter of the change to Pirates of the Caribbean, “then you deserve to have it ruined.”

Sampson sees the fight over changes to Disney as reflecting the broader national discourse around whether it’s better to remove, say, statues of Confederate generals. “There’s very much this broader mindset of there being difficult things in the past that some people want to remove, and others are saying, ‘No, this is our heritage. We shouldn’t be tearing it down,’” she said. “I definitely see that reflected in the discourse around the Jim Crow crows in ‘Dumbo,’ which can be seen as really offensive and racist, and are seen that way by many, and ‘Song of the South.’”

The political right blames the left for erasing the past when changing their beloved childhood rides like Jungle Cruise and Splash Mountain, and the political left blames the right for resistance to those changes delaying what they see as progress. But nobody gets blamed more than Disney CEO Bob Chapek.

Under Chapek’s leadership, the parks have ended free FastPasses, taken away significant guest perks like trams to and from parking garages and free airport transportation to and from Walt Disney World hotels, and replaced the beloved annual passholder program with one widely seen as inferior. To say people dislike those decisions is to put it mildly. But people forget that Chapek, when he talks about the company’s “more aggressive” financial strategy to raise profits, is, well, doing his job.

“He’s not even pretending to hide anything. He’s like, ‘We want your money,’” Rebecca Williams said. “But I think it’s interesting that he’s been singled out in this way.” She said she’s observed Josh D’Amaro, head of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, as being portrayed by the public as trying to do the right thing and do better by guests, but as being held back by Chapek. “We get this weird scapegoating of one person as bad and someone else isn’t,” she added. “It allows people to defend the company to put the blame on an individual when it clearly isn’t just his fault.”

“When you’re making the point about Disney constantly changing,” Hannah Sampson said, it’s easy to forget that “its main goal is entertainment and making money. It’s kind of funny [that] the attitude people have brought to this conversation is whether you should be replacing Walt’s original vision. You have to assume that he would have recognized the need to change things as the times changed and to reckon with things that were problematic from the start.”

Williams sees this focus on Chapek as the biggest Disney villain as a way of deflecting people’s complicated emotions about the company’s decisions — not just about removing parts of rides or taking away perks, but of allowing more inclusive dress codes for cast members, like letting anyone wear nail polish, not just cisgender women. Or, for the company charging more than $200 a day for a Park Hopper ticket and fighting in court to not have to pay its employees a living wage.

By placing your blame or hatred on Bob Chapek, Williams contends, you can overlook those other problems, or make them easier to contend with. “You can say, ‘Well, you know, it's because of somebody else,’ or, ‘It's not everything, it's just this one person, we can blame this one individual person for it,’” she said. “People try to defend against it because then they can think, ‘It isn't just because of my identity, it's these other things that are happening, it's because Disney has to be woke or, they have to be seen responding to this.’ You can blame someone else for it. You can defend against feeling like your own self identity is under attack.”

Ultimately, the simplest explanation is that people have intense connections to this company that manufactures happiness as its largest commodity, and, as Hannah Sampson said, “there’s always going to be some way in which current Disney leadership is not living up to the expectation of the fandom.”

“There’s a lot of grist for that now,” she added. “You can't blame people for disappointment and feeling like their pockets are getting emptier and emptier, but I also think the real Disney fandom would not be happy if there wasn't something that they could complain about.”

The web pages of several major companies including Amazon, AT&T, UPS and US Bank were briefly impacted by an apparent outage Thursday.

According to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks internet outages, the problems began for several websites late Thursday morning.

The cause of the outages is not known at this time. Internet company Akamai acknowledged the outage on its website saying they "are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service and that they are "actively investigating the issue."

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As services began to get back online, Akamai tweeted, "We have implemented a fix for this issue, and based on current observations, the service is resuming normal operations. We will continue to monitor to ensure that the impact has been fully mitigated."

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BOSTON —

The single biggest global ransomware attack yet continued to bite Monday as details emerged on how the Russia-linked gang responsible breached the company whose software was the conduit. In essence, the criminals used a tool that helps protect against malware to spread it widely.

An affiliate of the notorious REvil gang, best known for extorting $11 million from the meat-processor JBS after a Memorial Day attack, infected thousands of victims in at least 17 countries on Friday, largely through firms that remotely manage IT infrastructure for multiple customers, cybersecurity researchers said.

REvil was demanding ransoms of up to $5 million. But late Sunday it offered in a posting on its dark web site a universal decryptor software key that would unscramble all affected machines in exchange for $70 million in cryptocurrency. It wasn't clear who they expected might pay that amount.

Sweden may have been hardest hit by the attack — or at least most transparent about it. Its defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, bemoaned on Monday "a serious attack on basic functions in Swedish society."

"It shows how fragile the system is when it comes to IT security and that you must constantly work to develop your ability to defend yourself," he said in a TV interview. Most of the Swedish grocery chain Coop's 800 stores were closed all weekend because their cash register software supplier was crippled. They remained closed Monday. A Swedish pharmacy chain, gas station chain, the state railway and public broadcaster SVT were also hit.

A broad array of businesses and public agencies were affected, including in financial services, travel and leisure and the public sector — though few large companies, the cybersecurity firm Sophos reported. The cybersecurity firm ESET identified victims in countries including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Indonesia, New Zealand and Kenya.

Ransomware criminals infiltrate networks and sow malware that cripples them by scrambling all their data. Victims get a decoder key when they pay up.

In Germany, an unnamed IT services company told authorities several thousand of its customers were compromised, the news agency dpa reported. Also among reported victims were two big Dutch IT services companies — VelzArt and Hoppenbrouwer Techniek. Most ransomware victims don't publicly report attacks or disclose if they've paid ransoms.

On Sunday, the FBI said in a statement that while it was investigating the attack, its scale "may make it so that we are unable to respond to each victim individually." Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger later issued a statement saying President Joe Biden had "directed the full resources of the government to investigate this incident" and urged all who believed they were compromised to alert the FBI.

Biden suggested Saturday the U.S. would respond if it was determined that the Kremlin is at all involved. Less than a month ago, Biden pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop giving safe haven to REvil and other ransomware gangs whose unrelenting extortionary attacks the U.S. deems a national security threat.

On Monday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked if Russia was aware of the attack or had looked into it. He said no, but suggested it could be discussed by the U.S. and Russia in consultations on cybersecurity issues for which no timeline has been specified.

Experts say it was no coincidence that REvil launched the attack at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, knowing U.S. offices would be lightly staffed and many victims might not learn of it until back at work Monday or Tuesday.

Most end users of managed service providers "have no idea" whose software keep their networks humming, said CEO Fred Voccola of the breached software company, Kaseya.

He estimated the victim number in the low thousands, mostly small businesses like "dental practices, architecture firms, plastic surgery centers, libraries, things like that."

Voccola said only between 50-60 of the company's 37,000 customers were compromised. But 70% were managed service providers who use the company's hacked VSA software to manage multiple customers. It automates the installation of software and malware-detection updates and manages backups and other vital tasks.

Kaseya said it sent a detection tool to nearly 900 customers on Saturday night.

The REvil offer to offer blanket decryption for all victims of the Kaseya attack in exchange for $70 million suggested its inability to cope with the sheer quantity of infected networks, said Allan Liska, an analyst with the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

But Kevin Reed of Acronis said the offer of a universal decryptor could be a PR stunt because no human involvement would be needed to pay a $45,000 base ransom demand apparently sent to the vast majority of targets. Analysts reported seeing demands of $5 million and $500,000 for bigger targets, which would require negotiation.

Analyst Brett Callow of Emsisoft said he suspects REvil is hoping insurers might crunch the numbers and determine the $70 million will be cheaper for them than extended downtime.

Sophisticated ransomware gangs on REvil's level usually examine a victim's financial records — and insurance policies if they can find them — from files they steal before activating the ransomware. The criminals then threaten to dump the stolen data online unless paid, although that does not appear to have happened in this case. But this attack was apparently bare-bones. REvil seems only to have scrambled victims' data.

Dutch researchers said they alerted Miami-based Kaseya to the breach and said the criminals used a "zero day," the industry term for a previous unknown security hole in software. Voccola would not confirm that or offer details of the breach — except to say that it was not phishing.

"The level of sophistication here was extraordinary," he said.

It was not the first ransomware attack to leverage managed services providers. In 2019, criminals hobbled the networks of 22 Texas municipalities through one. That same year, 400 U.S. dental practices were crippled in a separate attack.

Active since April 2019, REvil provides ransomware-as-a-service, meaning it develops the network-paralyzing software and leases it to so-called affiliates who infect targets and earn the lion's share of ransoms. U.S. officials say the most potent ransomware gangs are based in Russia and allied states and operate with Kremlin tolerance and sometimes collude with Russian security services.

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AP reporters Jim Heintz in Moscow, Jan Olsen in Stockholm, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Jari Tanner in Helsinki and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The digital divide in Ohio has been an issue for years. Now, it's escalating.

“We believe this is an economic issue,” said Angie Cooper, Chief Program Officer at Heartland Forward.

Right now, more than 1.4 million Ohioans don’t have internet service and 29% of Ohio K-12 students don't have adequate access, which may be causing a long-term domino effect across communities.

“Not having affordable high-speed Internet access is impactful to not just students, it's impactful to our workforce. It's impactful to our health care. We saw that even while people were signing up for vaccinations. If you didn't have access to get online these things became very, very challenging,” Cooper explained.

But state leaders are taking a step towards change by partnering with the FF and the nonprofit Heartland Forward. Together they're launching a $3.2 billion Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which is a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program. If you qualify, can get up to $50 off broadband service in your area and up to $100 to help buy a computer or tablet to allow access at home.

However, the program will not be sticking around for long. The benefits are set to expire when funds run out or six months after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declares an end to the pandemic.

“Once funds run out, the emergency broadband benefit program will not be available. Those dollars will not be available to households,” Cooper said. “That's why it's so important. This was passed during COVID and it's so important for people to be aware that there's money out there for them to receive.”

So far 2.3 million households have signed up nationwide. Yet, we're told the numbers in Ohio are missing the mark.

“The numbers in Ohio still need to be increased,” said Cooper.

Cooper says the program is simply a temporary fix giving hope as the state looks for something permanent.

“Heartland Forward will be working over the months and years with state leaders and with the federal government to ensure that there are permanent solutions put in place.”

Do I qualify?

A household is eligible for the program if one member of the household meets at least one of the following criteria:

• Has an income that is at or below 135 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines or participates in certain assistance programs, such as SNAP, Medicaid or the FCC’s Lifeline program;
• Approved to receive benefits under the free and reduced-price school lunch or breakfast program;
• Received a Federal Pell Grant during the current award year;
• Experienced a substantial loss of income through job loss or furlough since Feb. 29, 2020; or
• Meets the eligibility criteria for a participating provider’s existing low-income or COVID-19 program

How do I apply?

Those eligible can enroll in the program in several different ways.

If you do not have access to the internet, you can sign up through a participating broadband provider or by calling (833) 511-0311 between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. any day of the week to request a mail-in application and more information about the program.

If you shave access to the internet, they can apply online by clicking here.

For more information about EBB, click here.

If you need help with the application process you can also call the RemotEDx Connectivity Champions at (844) K12-OHIO or click here.

The Transportation Security Administration is expected to issue new cybersecurity measures this week aimed at the pipeline industry for the first time.

The new rules will apply to U.S. pipeline operators and follow the ransomware attack against one of the country's largest, Colonial Pipeline, earlier this month. The attack resulted in a disruption to fuel supply on the entire east coast for nearly two weeks.

Pipeline companies would be required to report cyber incidents to the federal government as soon as possible.

They will also reportedly be asked to review their security system to determine any weaknesses or risks.

The rules are coming from the TSA, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post reports a security directive is expected this week, and more rules will be released in the coming weeks.

This is the first time such rules will be issued for the pipeline industry. Previously, there were voluntary guidelines.

Alex Livingston and Robin Dich contributed to this report