Messaging platform Discord has said the official ID photos of around 70,000 users have been stolen by hackers.

The app, which is popular with gamers and teenagers, said the hackers targeted a firm responsible for verifying the ages of its users. Discord said its own platform was not breached.

The stolen data could include personal information, partial credit card numbers and messages with Discord’s customer service agents, the firm said.

No full credit card details, passwords or messages and activity beyond conversations with Discord customer support were leaked, it added.

Discord said it had revoked the third-party service’s access and was continuing to investigate. It said all affected users have been contacted.

“Looking ahead, we recommend impacted users stay alert when receiving messages or other communication that may seem suspicious,” it said.

Until recently, a hack like this could not have happened, because companies had no need to process and collect proofs of age.

Now, so many governments are following the UK and introducing age verification for unsuitable or pornographic content that a company like Discord has to roll out age checks for a decent portion of its 200 million active users.

It’s a bit like the way that shops have to check your age if you’re buying alcohol – only because it’s online, it comes with a lot of additional complications.

A shop, for instance, won’t keep a copy of your passport once they’ve checked your age.

And it definitely won’t keep it in a massive (yet strangely light) safe along with thousands of other passport photocopies, stored right by its front door, ready to be taken.

Online, it’s surprisingly easy to do just that.

Read more on Sky News:
AI ‘distorting women online’
Pros and cons of digital IDs
Impact of new online safety rules

It’s worth noting that the age verification system used by Discord wasn’t hacked itself. That system asked people to take a photo of themselves, then used software to estimate their age. Once the check was complete, the image was immediately deleted.

The problem came with the appeals part of the process, which was supplied to Discord by an as-yet-unnamed third party.

If someone thought that the age verification system had wrongly barred them from Discord they could send in a picture of their ID to prove their age. This collection of images was hacked. As a result, Discord says, more than 70,000 IDs are now in the possession of hackers.

(The hackers themselves claim that the number is much bigger – 2,185,151 photos. Discord says this is wrong and the hackers are simply trying to extort money. It’s a messy situation.)

There are ways to make age verification safer. Companies could stop storing photo ID, for instance (although then it would be impossible to know for sure if their checks were correct).

And advocates of ID cards will point out that a proper government ID could avoid the need to send pictures of your passport simply to prove your age. You’d use your digital ID instead, which would stay safely on your device.

But the best way to stop data being hacked is not to collect it in the first place.

We’re at the start of a defining test – can governments actually police the internet? Or will the measures that are supposed to make us safer actually end up making us less secure?

The World Transformed, a left-wing political festival, has historically ran alongside the Labour Party Conference as an unofficial fringe event.

But a lot has changed since it began in 2016, organised then by the Corbyn-backed group Momentum. And like the former Labour leader himself, TWT has gone independent.

From Thursday to Sunday, a programme of politics, arts and cultural events will be held in Manchester, a week after Labour’s annual party gathering ended.

“It no longer made any sense to be a fringe festival of the Labour conference,” Hope Worsdale, an organiser since 2018, tells Sky News. “We need a space for the independent left to come together.”

This decision was made before the formation of Your Party in July and the surge of support behind the Greens and its new leader Zack Polanski, but both these factors have given TWT some extra momentum. Organisers say it is not just a festival, but a “statement of intent from the British left” – and a left that looks different from how it used to.

Previous headline speakers were Labour MPs in the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group, and in 2021, the showstopper was American democrat Bernie Sanders calling in live for an event alongside John McDonnell.

This year, Mr Polanski, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana are the only British politicians due to speak at events – though Brian Leishman, who lost the Labour whip in the summer, is also scheduled on a panel.

TWT was put on pause last year for organisers to reflect upon its role going forward, after Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory.

In 2021, 2022 and 2023, while he was leader of the opposition, the festival was able to “co-exist” with Labour as a space for activists on the left to discuss ideas.

But the prime minister’s “shift to the right” has alienated so many of those grassroots members that it was felt TWT’s core audience would no longer be at Labour Party conferences, says Hope, who joined Labour in the Corbyn years and has since left.

“Our official position isn’t that Labour is dead and no one should engage with it,” she says.

“But they have shifted the values of Labour so radically since the last election, broken promise after promise, attacked civil liberties… there’s been such a suite of terrible decisions that mean people who are generally progressive and generally left wing feel like they have to take their organising elsewhere.”

So what’s on the cards?

There will be 120 events held in Hulme, Manchester, from Thursday to Sunday evening.

At the heart of the programme is daily assemblies, which organisers say are “designed to hold genuinely constructive debates about what we should do and how we should do it”.

But there’s just as much partying as there is politics – Dele Sosimi and his Afrobeat Orchestra are headlining the Saturday night slot while a “mystery guest” will host what TWT calls its “infamous” pub quiz on Friday night.

Back in 2018 that was Ed Miliband’s job, when 10,000 activists were expected to attend TWT. This year, organisers anticipate around 3,000 people will gather, but those involved insist this is a real chance for the left to strategise and co-ordinate, given the involvement of over 75 grassroots groups, trade unions, and activist networks.

Collaboration ‘vital’

A key question the left will need to address is how it can avoid splitting the vote given the rise of the Greens, socialist independents and the formation of Your Party,

One activist from the We Deserve Better organisation, which is campaigning for a left-wing electoral alliance and will be at TWT this weekend, acknowledged collaboration is “vital” if the left is to make gains under Britain’s first-past-the-post system.

But it remains to be seen whether Your Party co-leaders Mr Corbyn and Ms Sultana can even work together following their public spat last month, let alone with other parties. The pair put on a united front at a rally in Liverpool on the eve of TWT, when Sultana said she was “truly sorry” and promised “no more of that”. But will the truce last?

“It’s not ideal”, says the activist. “Hopefully they are back on track…a lot of collaboration is happening at the grassroots and we need to make sure it’s formalised so we can beat Labour and the right, we need to put on united front.”

They point to seats like Ilford North, where Health Secretary Wes Streeting clung on by a margin of just 528 votes in the general election, after a challenge from British-Palestinian candidate Leanne Mohamad, who ran in protest against Labour’s stance on Gaza.

Meanwhile, in Hackney, the Greens are hoping to gain their first directly elected mayor next May, with the Hackney Independent Socialist Group of councillors throwing their weight behind the party’s candidate, Zoe Garbett.

The We Deserve Better activist says Labour’s “hostile war on the left” has made these areas ripe for the taking, and what is more important than party affiliation is galvanising momentum behind one candidate who shares socialist values on issues like public ownership and immigration – be they the Greens, independents, or Your Party.

“The World Transformed reflects a general reorientation of the left outside of Labour. If they are taking these places for granted, we are going to win. If we unite as the left then we can win even bigger. Bring it on.”

Is Labour in danger?

There is some cause for Labour to be worried. It is haemorrhaging votes to both the right and the left after a tumultuous first year in office (13% to Reform UK, 10% to the Greens and 10% to the Lib Dems, according to an Ipsos poll in September).

Many Labour MPs feel the prime minister has spent too much energy trying to “out Reform Reform” with a focus on immigration, and he needs to do more to win back moderate and progressive voters that will be gathering at TWT this weekend.

One fed-up MP told Sky News it was a shame TWT had decided to branch away from Labour, but not a surprise.

“This was something that was on the cards for a while, a parting of the ways, it’s another thing to show what’s happening with the direction of the party.”

He said in previous years the festival “was full of people for the first time in their life who were excited about politics and had a leadership looking at how it could challenge the biggest issues in our country”.

“Debates could be heated but it was always a place for intellectual discussion and that inside the Labour Party is now dead.”

But he said the party ultimately had bigger things to worry about than TWT, with a budget round the corner and potentially catastrophic local elections in May.

“I don’t think it will keep Keir Starmer or Morgan McSweeney up at night.”

Letitia James – New York attorney general and long-time critic of Donald Trump – has been indicted for fraud.

Ms James, a Democrat, was charged on Thursday with one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution, in connection with a home she purchased in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2020.

The 66-year-old could face up to 30 years in prison and up to a $1m (£752m) fine on each count if convicted, according to Sky’s US partner network NBC News.

Mr Trump has been advocating charging Ms James for months, posting on social media without citing any evidence that she’s “guilty as hell” and telling reporters at the White House: “It looks to me like she’s really guilty of something, but I really don’t know.”

In a lengthy statement, Ms James vehemently denied any wrongdoing and described the indictment as “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponisation of our justice system”.

She said: “These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost.”

The indictment was presented to a grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the newly appointed attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Ms Halligan, who has previously worked as a lawyer for Mr Trump, replaced veteran prosecutor Erik Siebert, who had resisted filing charges against Ms James and former FBI director James Comey, who was charged with lying to Congress two weeks ago.

The indictment pertains to Ms James’s purchase of a house in Norfolk, where she has family.

During the sale, she allegedly signed a document called a “second home rider” in which she agreed to keep the property primarily for her “personal use and enjoyment for at least one year”. However, the indictment claims she instead rented it out to a family of three.

According to the indictment, the misrepresentation allowed Ms James to obtain favourable loan terms that are not available for investment properties.

History of Trump and James

Ms James’s indictment is the latest indication that the Trump administration is determined to use the powers of the justice department to target the president’s political and public figure foes.

In a statement on Truth Social last month, Mr Trump called on US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who leads the department, to prosecute his political opponents.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote.

Ms James is a particularly personal target of Mr Trump. During the president’s first term in office, she sued him and his administration dozens of times.

Last year, she won a staggering judgment against the Trump Organization after she brought a civil lawsuit alleging he and his companies defrauded banks by overstating the value of his real estate holdings on financial statements.

An appeals court later overturned a hefty fine Mr Trump was ordered to pay, but upheld a lower court’s finding that he had committed fraud.

What happens now?

Ms James is scheduled to make an initial appearance in the federal court in Norfolk on 24 October.

The case has been assigned to US District Judge Jamar K Walker, who was appointed by Joe Biden.

The standard for securing an indictment before a federal grand jury is much lower than securing a unanimous conviction by a jury at trial, NBC reported.

The Justice Manual, which guides federal prosecutors, says attorneys for the government should move forward on a case only if they believe the admissible evidence – evidence that is allowed to be presented in a court of law – would be enough to obtain and sustain a conviction.