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Top Secret: Automatically filter sensitive information

We’ve written about how to prevent logging sensitive information when making network requests, but that approach only works if you’re dealing with parameters. What happens when you’re dealing with free text? Filtering the entire string may not be an option if an external API needs to process the value. Think chatbots or LLMs. You could use a regex to filter sensitive information (such as credit card numbers or emails), but that won’t capture everything, since not all sensitive information can

YC-backed Oway raises $4M to build a decentralized ‘Uber for freight’

Thousands of semi trucks that cut across the U.S. highway system each day are harboring a secret: they’re only about half full. That inefficiency represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity. And one that a few companies like Uber Freight and Flock Freight are already chasing as part of broader business models that match truck drivers with companies selling goods. San Francisco-based startup Oway is seeking out a narrower business model that more closely resembles Uber for freight, especially

The Best Deals From REI’s 2025 Labor Day Sale

Isn't amazing how fast summer goes by? The kids are back in school, and it's time for the annual REI Labor Day Sale. This year’s event kicks off today, August 22, and ends on Labor Day, September 2. Many items are up to 30 percent off, and REI Co-op members save 20 percent on any REI Outlet item. To get the member discount, add the promo code SAVEOUTLET at checkout. We've rounded up the best deals on all our favorite tents, backpacks, sleeping bags, pads, cookware, outdoor apparel and more. We'

Topics: bag like pad rei sleeping

How AI ‘digital minds’ startup Delphi stopped drowning in user data and scaled up with Pinecone

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Delphi, a two-year-old San Francisco AI startup named after the Ancient Greek oracle, was facing a thoroughly 21st-century problem: its “Digital Minds”— interactive, personalized chatbots modeled after an end-user and meant to channel their voice based on their writings, recordings, and other media — were drowning in data. Each Delphi can

Europol confirms $50,000 Qilin ransomware reward is fake

Europol has confirmed that a Telegram channel impersonating the agency and offering a $50,000 reward for information on two Qilin ransomware administrators is fake. The impostor later admitted it was created to troll researchers and journalists. "We were also surprised to see this story gaining traction," Europol told BleepingComputer on Monday. "The announcement didn't come from us." The statement comes after a new Telegram channel called @europolcti was created on August 16th, claiming to of

Gboard on Pixel 10 brings better voice typing and proofreading

TL;DR Google is upgrading the typing experience on Pixel 10 with new AI features. The improvements include rewriting, better proofreading, and voice typing, all enhanced by Google’s Gemini. These features are arriving first on the Pixel 10 series devices, but we hope to learn more about wider availability soon. Moving forward, AI is expected to dominate announcements for new smartphones while hardware takes the back seat. That’s what we with the launch of the Pixel 10 series, where Google sho

An Update on Pytype

An update on pytype TL;DR: The last supported Python version for Pytype will be 3.12. We are still very actively interested in the space of Python type checking, but shifting our investments towards new ideas and different frameworks. Pytype's development began in 2012 to meet Google developers' demand for compile-time checking. Pytype started with using type inference and interface files, and then switched to inline annotations (while retaining the inference engine) after the acceptance of PE

Physics of badminton’s new killer spin serve

Serious badminton players are constantly exploring different techniques to give them an edge over opponents. One of the latest innovations is the spin serve, a devastatingly effective method in which a player adds a pre-spin just before the racket contacts the shuttlecock (aka the birdie). It's so effective—some have called it "impossible to return"—that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) banned the spin serve in 2023, at least until after the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris. The sanction wasn

Survey shows 98% of Android users want at least one of these big PIN upgrades

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority Old vs new lock screen PIN entry screen UI in Android A regular lock screen PIN on your Android phone does the job most of the time, but what if you’re forced to unlock your phone when you really don’t want to? That’s where things get tricky. We recently asked you whether Android should go beyond the basics and offer something more innovative, such as a duress or decoy PIN. Plenty of you had a view about it. Don’t want to miss the best from Android Authority?

How web scraping actually works - and why AI changes everything

Getty/panithan pholpanichrassamee ZDNET's key takeaways Web scraping powers pricing, SEO, security, AI, and research industries. AI scraping threatens site survival by bypassing traffic return. Companies fight back with licensing, paywalls, and crawler blocks. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. In the world of industrial web scraping, there are a few major players. Oh, you did not know there was a world of industrial

Scientists Confirm What Every Beachgoer Secretly Fears About Seabirds

As a seabird researcher, Leo Uesaka spends most of his time reviewing hours of bird footage. That can get quite tedious and demanding at times, but every second is worth paying attention to—after all, that’s how you notice things like the penchant for seabirds to poop only while airborne. In a first-of-its-kind study published today in Current Biology, Uesaka and his team report that streaked shearwaters—large, unassuming seabirds common in East Asian waters—engage in a very specific type of ba

Your Motorola phone has a secret way to make your PIN more secure. Here’s how to use it

Joe Maring / Android Authority A secure Android phone is a healthy Android phone. If you’re like me, the primary line of defense for your phone is a PIN. Sure, you may also use your phone’s fingerprint sensor or face unlock, but it’s your PIN or password that’s ultimately keeping your data secure. PINs work the same on all Android phones: you enter the correct PIN to unlock your phone, and if you enter the wrong one multiple times, you’re temporarily locked out. And as we all know, the longer

Who does your assistant serve?

Loading... Why am I seeing this? You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone. Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the addit

I’d pay for a decoy PIN and profile on my Android phone, and I’m not alone

Rita El Khoury / Android Authority A few days ago, my colleague Calvin shared an interesting fact about GrapheneOS: The custom ROM allows him to set a duress PIN that completely erases the phone when he enters it, including encryption keys and the eSIM partition. It’s a very drastic privacy measure that lets anyone protect their data if they’re being forced to hand over or unlock their phone when they don’t want to do it. I love that the feature exists for those who think they might need it, e

Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s

Back in the 1970s (and before), parents didn’t stress about our health and safety as much as they do today. It’s not that they cared less – they just didn’t worry obsessively about it. It’s a far guess to say that some of the kids seen bike jumping and being bike jumped (which is the more dangerous?) are parents now – which means that they survived and can recall how less restricted, less supervised, less obsessively safety-conscious things were – and it was fine. Bike jumping and jumping over

Cohere hires long-time Meta research head Joelle Pineau as its chief AI officer

Investors once saw Canadian AI startup Cohere as a promising contender to challenge OpenAI and Anthropic in the race to build frontier AI models, with its backers pouring roughly $1 billion on their bet on CEO Aidan Gomez, who co-authored a seminal paper on LLMs when he was a 20-year-old Google intern. But Cohere’s AI models have fallen behind the state-of-the-art, and its business hasn’t scaled like its competitors. Now, the company is bringing in a veteran research leader to revamp its AI ef

Best Sleep Headphones of 2025: Enjoy Quality Rest With These Expert-Approved Options

Cole Kan/CNET I've always been a light sleeper -- even the slightest sounds wake me up, no matter how tired I am. As a CNET sleep team member, I've tested more bedtime products than I can count in the name of figuring out what truly works. From white noise machines to sleep supplements to headbands that alter your brainwaves, the options can seem endless. David Carnoy, CNET executive editor and resident headphone expert, has tested hundreds of different types of headphones over the last decade

I've used Rakuten for a year and earned nearly $500 - here's how

Kayla Solino/ZDNET What if I told you that you can save on that purchase you were about to make via cash back, and that it's as easy as enabling a browser extension or using an app? While it sounds questionable, I'm here to quell your concerns. I've been using Rakuten's cash back program for over a year, and I've saved around $450 so far. I began using the platform in early 2024 -- and now I'm a user for life. Also: 3 ways Google Chrome and Wallet just made shopping a whole lot easier But be

Back-to-School Spending Is Down 50%, CNET Survey Finds. Here's How to Get the Tech and Gear You Need for Less

Back-to-school shopping is underway, and the supply list isn't like it was when I was a kid. More schools and colleges are leaning on technology for educational purposes, and some of those costs could fall on US shoppers. Big-ticket purchases, like laptops and tablets, can be a strain on your finances, especially when juggling other back-to-school items and everyday expenses. CNET's new back-to-school survey dives into just how much US shoppers are concerned about making tech purchases ahead o

I'm a Linux expert, and here are 6 commands I can't live without

ogeday çelik/Getty ZDNET's key takeaways There are certain Linux commands I consider essential. These commands range from networking, troubleshooting, and file viewing. They're also easy enough for new users to learn. Even though I've been using Linux for decades and am perfectly at home with the command line, I often tell those who are thinking about trying the open-source operating system that it isn't necessary. It's not. Truly. If I wanted to, I could give up the command line altogeth

Reddit blocks Internet Archive to end sneaky AI scraping

Reddit is now blocking the Internet Archive (IA) from indexing popular Reddit threads after allegedly catching sneaky AI firms—restricted from scraping Reddit—instead simply scraping data from IA's archived content. Where before IA's Wayback Machine dependably archived Reddit pages, profiles, and comments—as part of its mission to archive the Internet—moving forward, only screenshots of the Reddit homepage will be archived. As The Verge noted, this means the archive will only be useful as a sna

I use a duress PIN to protect my data — here’s how it works and why everyone needs one

Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority From two-factor authentication codes to conversations and photos, our phones contain a ton of sensitive data these days. We rely on PINs and biometrics for daily security, but I shudder to think what would happen if that data landed in the wrong hands. And while Android is secure enough against remote attacks and malware these days, what if I’m forced to unlock my phone and hand it over? GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, offers a rare solution to

Accessibility and the Agentic Web

Accessibility and the agentic web Posted on Friday, 8 August 2025 by Léonie Watson in Strategy, User experience Imagine being in a department store that sells clothes from multiple brands and having a personal shopping assistant to help you select the clothes you want to buy. As a blind person, that's about the only way it's possible to go clothes shopping, independently at least, but few stores offer such a service, so you resort to shopping online. Except that retail websites are rarely acce

For giant carnivorous dinosaurs, big size didn’t mean a big bite

When a Spinosaurus attacked a T. rex in Jurassic Park III, both giant carnivores tried to finish the fight with one powerful bite of their bone-crushing jaws. The Spinosaurus won, because when the movie was being made back in the early 2000s, fossil discoveries suggested it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur that ever lived. But new research provides evidence that size and weight didn’t always create a powerful bite. “The Spinosaurus and the T. rex didn’t live at the same time at the same con

Pinterest CEO says agentic shopping is still a long way out

Pinterest CEO Bill Ready told investors on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that the social app and inspirational bookmarking site could be considered an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” However, he thinks that the agentic web, where AI agents shop on users’ behalf, is still far in the future. The remarks were made in response to a question about the agentic web, which could impact the search funnel and businesses like Pinterest, which positions itself at the early stages of the shopp

Narwal’s Self-Cleaning, AI-Enhanced Robot Vacuum and Mop From CES Is Finally Ready to Buy

Narwal has a pretty extensive lineup of robot vacuums, many of which we’ve tested in our roundup of the best robot vacuums. One of the latest additions to the lineup is the Narwal Flow, first announced at CES 2025. As the name suggests, the Flow is another high-end robot vacuum that focuses on mopping, but it also comes with more advanced AI navigation and the ability to self-clean and detangle itself. It’s now available for sale at $1,499 full price and $1,099 for presale. According to Narwal

PBS confirms data breach after employee info leaked on Discord servers

PBS has suffered a data breach exposing the corporate contact information of its employees and those of its affiliates, BleepingComputer has learned. Earlier this month, BleepingComputer was alerted to a file circulated on Discord servers that allegedly contained this information. This data was not distributed on dark web sites, hacking forums, or other mediums frequented by threat actors. Instead, it was being shared on Discord servers for fans of "PBS Kids," where young adults, teenagers, an

CNET Survey: 78% of US Shoppers Are Stressing Out Over Back-to-School Tech Purchases

Back-to-school shopping is underway, and the supply list isn't like it was when I was a kid. More schools and colleges are leaning on technology for educational purposes, and some of those costs could fall on US shoppers. Big-ticket purchases, like laptops and tablets, can be a strain on your finances, especially when juggling other back-to-school items and everyday expenses. CNET's new back-to-school survey dives into just how much US shoppers are concerned about making tech purchases ahead o

Apple Music 5.0 beta brings iOS 26 features to Android

Ahead of iOS 26 launching this fall, Apple Music for Android is beta testing version 5.0.0 with new features and design tweaks. The Android app does not get a Liquid Glass redesign with the same bottom bar and docked Now Playing controls as before. It’s unfortunate from a cross-platform parity standpoint, but hopefully a future update will introduce it. That said, there are some design tweaks like pill-shaped buttons throughout the app replacing the rounded rectangles. For example, shuffle, re

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences,” Cloudfl