This week I had a great experience with charitable giving thanks to Donors Choose, a charity that gives money through to teachers for classroom needs. Right now is a good time to give with school starting soon. And the way Donors Choose works feels personally meaningful.

The site lets you browse projects that need funding: $115 for classroom organizers for a kindergarten in Louisiana, $70 for planters and seeds for a garden in Oklahoma, $1300 for iPads in Washington DC, or heartbreakingly $239 for fans for kids in juvie without fresh air. The requests vary widely and the schools are all over the US; you can choose what speaks to you most. Or just give some money and let the organization figure out where to send it.

I ended up spending several hours choosing projects a few bucks at a time. I used the map view to focus on poor, rural areas where the parents weren’t going to be able to raise money with a bake sale. Mostly places I had some connection to, rural Texas and New Mexico near where I used to live. Places I used to drive through thinking “thank God I didn’t grow up here, I’d be stuck”. I don’t know that a copy of The Maze Runner is going to make all the difference to help a kid in Gallup, NM access the wider world around him, but if a Teach for America teacher thinks it’d help then that’s probably a good use of $7.

One of the sad but inspirational things I learned looking through the site is that the teachers themselves are often donating. As if taking an oath of poverty to become a teacher isn’t enough. If you’re in an industry that pays well, consider chipping in a few bucks as thanks for whatever teacher gave you the education to get you where you are today.

Riot’s hugely popular game League of Legends is still installing malware, some five months after saying they don't use it, players can delete it, and they planned to remove it.

The malware in question is Pando Media Booster. A few years ago this software was arguably useful, it allowed games like LoL to distribute patches via a peer-to-peer network. But Pando was discontinued in August 2013. Then in February 2014 someone used Pando to install malware on any suckers who still had the software. The software Riot is still distributing. And all of Riot’s customers who clicked “yes” on the update dialog had their browsers hijacked.

Riot has millions of users all over the world. I’m sympathetic to how hard it is to make software changes; they’re famously behind on a whole lot of development projects. But continuing to distribute malware to customers is unacceptable.