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Qantas confirms data breach impacts 5.7 million customers

Australian airline Qantas has confirmed that 5.7 million people have been impacted by a recent data breach, in which threat actors stole customers' data. On July 1st, Qantas disclosed that it had detected a cyberattack the previous day on a third-party platform used by a Qantas airline contact centre. While the company did not share any further details, BleepingComputer learned that the attack shared similarities with other attacks on the aviation industry linked to threat actors classified as

A New Kind of AI Model Lets Data Owners Take Control

A new kind of large language model, developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), makes it possible to control how training data is used even after a model has been built. The new model, called FlexOlmo, could challenge the current industry paradigm of big artificial intelligence companies slurping up data from the web, books, and other sources—often with little regard for ownership—and then owning the resulting models entirely. Once data is baked into an AI model today, extract

Bitcoin Depot breach exposes data of nearly 27,000 crypto users

Bitcoin Depot, an operator of Bitcoin ATMs, is notifying customers of a data breach incident that has exposed their sensitive information. In the letter sent to affected individuals, the company informs that it first detected suspicious activity on its network last year on June 23. Although the internal investigation was completed on July 18, 2024, a parallel investigation by federal agencies dictated that public disclosure of the incident should be withheld until it was completed. “On July 1

Samsung just gave its Galaxy foldable phones a big security upgrade - for free

Kerry Wan/ZDNET Alongside the release of its latest foldables, the Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Galaxy Z Fold 7, tech giant Samsung also announced a slew of new AI features for its devices at Samsung Unpacked. While the new features make it easy to access AI assistance, they also highlight the need for enhanced security -- and Samsung, with its latest Knox update, has stepped up to the plate. Also: The best VPN services (and how to choose the right one for you) Tech companies tend to prefer on-device

Looking for an External Hard Drive? This Seagate 24TB Is Just $0.01/GB for Prime Day

Among the vicious competition in the market for external hard drives, four of the largest players – Seagate, WD, SanDisk, and Samsung – are in a constant fight for your attention. Seagate just came today with an incredible 24TB external hard drive on sale at a new record low price: Selling for just $259 (down from $329), Seagate’s Expansion 24TB HDD set a new record low price per gigabyte of about $0.01, which lower than all other drives (including ones with smaller capacities). See at Amazon

Qantas Contacted by Hackers Responsible for Data Breach Affecting Millions of Customers

Qantas disclosed a cybersecurity incident on July 2 potentially affecting 6 million customers. Ryan Fletcher/Getty Images Qantas has been contacted by a cyber criminal claiming responsibility for the data breach that affected 6 million customers. A company spokesperson confirmed Qantas is working to validate this, adding that since it's a criminal matter, the company "won't be commenting any further on the detail of the contact." There's also no evidence that any of the stolen information has

iMerit believes better-quality data, not more data, is the future of AI

AI data platform iMerit believes the next step toward integrating AI tools at the enterprise level is not more data, but better data. And better data doesn’t come from hordes of gig workers, but from experts across mathematics, medicine, healthcare, finance, autonomy, and other cognitive fields, the company says. “What’s become exceedingly important is the ability to attract and retain the best cognitive experts, because we have to take these large models and make them very customized towards s

New ServiceNow flaw lets attackers enumerate restricted data

A new vulnerability in ServiceNow, dubbed Count(er) Strike, allows low-privileged users to extract sensitive data from tables to which they should not have access. ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that enables organizations to manage digital workflows for their enterprise operations. It is widely adopted across various industries, including public sector organizations, healthcare, financial institutions, and large enterprises. The flaw was discovered by Varonis Threat Labs in February 2025

The biggest AI feature announced at Samsung Unpacked was also the most subtle

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET Alongside the release of its latest foldables, the Galaxy Z Flip 7 and Galaxy Z Fold 7, tech giant Samsung also announced a slew of new AI features for its devices at Samsung Unpacked. While the new features make it easy to access AI assistance, they also highlight the need for enhanced security -- and Samsung, with its latest Knox update, has stepped up to the plate. Also: The best VPN services (and how to choose the right one for you) Tech companies tend to prefer on-dev

Using MPC for Anonymous and Private DNA Analysis

Earlier this year, Monadic DNA kicked off an experiment to demonstrate that people can access and analyze their genetic data with anonymity and privacy. Monadic DNA collected saliva samples from thirty encrypted genomics pioneers at an event in Denver. These participants later used a Web app to claim their genotyping results using a unique kit ID and a self-selected PIN. The app guided users through uploading their data to encrypted storage powered by Nillion’s multi-party compute (MPC) techno

The Capacity, Performance, and Reliability of MicroSD Cards

Or: What are the best microSD cards you can get for under $15 in 2024 2025? Before you get in: Support me on Patreon! If you just want to see my (current) top picks, click here. If you want to see details on the cards I’m testing, click here. If you want to see the table with my raw data, click here. If you want to see more ways you can help, click here. If you want to read in more detail about the background behind this project and my methodology, read on! Table of Contents Introductio

SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty service to meet surging demand

Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Wary of the US government and tech companies, the European Union (EU) has seen a surge in support for open source and Linux. In the last few months, local EU governments, including the city of Lyon in France, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, and Denmark, have begun their move to Linux and open-source software from Microsoft Windows and Office. Now, Luxembourg-based European open-source powerhouse SUSE is offering extensive support to

Choosing a Database Schema for Polymorphic Data (2024)

Designing a schema for your relational database is a daunting task that has long term implications for the database's performance, maintainability, and correctness. And it often requires making decisions before having a clear picture of the exact shape and distribution of your data, or what the common access patterns will look like. It's not a permanent decision: tables can be altered and databases migrated. But these migrations can be slow and expensive. To top it all off, some data is less am

Libpostal: C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world

libpostal: international street address NLP libpostal is a C library for parsing/normalizing street addresses around the world using statistical NLP and open data. The goal of this project is to understand location-based strings in every language, everywhere. For a more comprehensive overview of the research behind libpostal, be sure to check out the (lengthy) introductory blog posts: 🇧🇷 🇫🇮 🇳🇬 🇯🇵 🇽🇰 🇧🇩 🇵🇱 🇻🇳 🇧🇪 🇲🇦 🇺🇦 🇯🇲 🇷🇺 🇮🇳 🇱🇻 🇧🇴 🇩🇪 🇸🇳 🇦🇲 🇰🇷 🇳🇴 🇲🇽 🇨🇿 🇹🇷 🇪🇸 🇸🇸 🇪🇪 🇧🇭 🇳🇱 🇨🇳 🇵🇹 🇵🇷 🇬🇧 🇵🇸 Address

Samsung announces major security enhancements coming to One UI 8

Samsung has announced multiple data security and privacy enhancements for its upcoming Galaxy smartphones running One UI 8, its custom user interface on top of Android. Key highlights include the introduction of a system-level architecture named Knox Enhanced Encrypted Protection (KEEP), upgrades to Knox Matrix, and the addition of quantum resistance to WiFi connectivity. Keeping AI data secure With AI tools taking an increasing role in day-to-day smartphone use, protecting user inputs has be

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as a standard way for LLMs to interact with external tools. While this unlocks new capabilities, it also introduces new risk surfaces. In this post, we show how an attacker can exploit Supabase’s MCP integration to leak a developer’s private SQL tables. The Problem LLMs are often used to process data according to pre-defined instructions. The system prompt, user instructions, and the data context is provided to the LLM as text. [ SYSTEM PROMPT ] You ar

The Tradeoffs of SSMs and Transformers

This blog post was adapted from a talk I’ve given a handful of times over the last year. It was meant to be a high-level talk accessible to a fairly broad audience, but hopefully has some interesting insights, opinions, and intuitions around sequence models for the dedicated researchers too. State Space Models Just so we’re on the same page, I’ll start by defining what I mean by a state space model. (This section isn’t strictly necessary to get to the main part of this post though; feel free t

I tested the 4 most popular health trackers for a year - and they're on sale for Prime Day

The Oura Ring is, in my opinion, the sleep and health tracker to rule them all. Not only does it track your sleep, stress, activity, and more, it also creates helpful data illustrations that encourages healthy habits, whether that's a consistent bedtime routine, daily activity, or reduced alcohol consumption. Many users, myself included, have reported changing their drinking habits after seeing their heart rate's response to a few beers late at night on Oura's graphs. Earning high sleep scores

Supabase MCP leaks your entire SQL Database, a lethal trifecta attack

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database (via) Here's yet another example of a lethal trifecta attack, where an LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to potentially malicious instructions and a mechanism to communicate data back out to an attacker. In this case, General Analysis identify all three components in a single MCP - the Supabase MCP. They imagine a scenario where a developer asks Cursor, running the Supabase MCP, to "use cursor’s agent to list the latest support

I found a subscription-free smart ring that rivals Oura - and it's $50 off for Prime Day

ZDNET's key takeaways The Ultrahuman Ring Air is the brand's first foray into the smart ring space, and it's available for $349, no subscription required The ring is great for hardcore fitness enthusiasts and recreational exercisers looking to use their health data to optimize their wellness routines The app's user interface could be improved for easier access to daily logging functions. $349 at Amazon For Amazon Prime Day, the retailer is offering the Ultrahuman Ring Air at a $50 discount, b

I Tried Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp, and This Is the One I'd Recommend

Key points: Most widely used messaging app Uses the same encryption protocol as Signal Collects heaps of your data Free, but owned and operated by Meta WhatsApp is the most popular private messaging app on this list, with about 2 billion monthly users, according to Exploding Topics. Because it's so popular, there's a higher chance that other people you might be chatting with have WhatsApp, and therefore your chats can be encrypted. And if the person you're chatting with doesn't have WhatsAp

SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty support service to meet surging demand

Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Wary of the US government and tech companies, the European Union (EU) has seen a surge in support for open source and Linux. In the last few months, local EU governments, including Lyon, France, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, and Denmark, have begun their move to Linux and open-source software from Microsoft Windows and Office. Now, Luxembourg-based European open-source powerhouse SUSE is offering extensive support to businesses an

The era of exploration

Large language models are the unintended byproduct of about three decades worth of freely accessible human text online. Ilya Sutskever compared this reservoir of information to fossil fuel, abundant but ultimately finite. Some studies suggest that, at current token‑consumption rates, frontier labs could exhaust the highest‑quality English web text well before the decade ends. Even if those projections prove overly pessimistic, one fact is clear: today’s models consume data far faster than humans

How ChatGPT actually works (and why it's been so game-changing)

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Back in the day (and by "in the day," I mean late 2022, before AI chatbots exploded on the scene), tools like Google and Wolfram Alpha interacted with users via a single-line text entry field and provided text results. Google returned search results -- a list of web pages and articles that would (hopefully) provide information related to the search queries. Wolfram Alpha generally provided answers that were mathematical and data analysis-related. ChatGPT, by contra

A million customer conversations with AI agents yielded this surprising lesson

Mykyta Atamanchuk/Getty Images Salesforce has had over one million AI agent-customer conversations. The company launched AI agents on its Salesforce Help site in October 2024, a full-screen experience that makes getting support simpler and more intuitive. With more than 60 million visits each year, Salesforce Help offers a wide range of product content through organized directories, search, and direct support. Having handled a million support requests since the launch of AI agents, Salesforce

ChatGPT Glossary: 53 AI Terms Everyone Should Know

AI is everywhere. From the massive popularity of ChatGPT to Google cramming AI summaries at the top of its search results, AI is completely taking over the internet. With AI, you can get instant answers to pretty much any question. It can feel like talking to someone who has a Ph.D. in everything. But that aspect of AI chatbots is only one part of the AI landscape. Sure, having ChatGPT help do your homework or having Midjourney create fascinating images of mechs based on country of origin is co

Windows 11 usage is surging? Not so fast - here's the real story

Richard Drury/Getty Images It happens like clockwork, around the first of each month. Sites that focus on technology churn out nearly identical articles, all based on a chart prepared by the good folks at Statcounter Global Stats. Here's the latest chart, covering the 12 months ending June 30, 2025. Every month, tech bloggers try to turn a chart like this one into a story, but most of them miss what's actually happening. Statcounter GS I saw that chart in dozens of posts this month, along wit

CoreWeave acquires data center provider Core Scientific in $9B stock deal

In Brief CoreWeave announced Monday that it signed a $9 billion all-stock deal to acquire Core Scientific, a data center infrastructure provider. As a result of the deal, CoreWeave says it will gain access to more than a gigawatt of data center capacity — enough energy to power more than 850,000 homes — that it can rent out for AI training and inference workloads. Much like CoreWeave, Core Scientific previously offered Bitcoin mining services, but now its GPUs will run and train generative AI

'Batavia' Windows spyware campaign targets dozens of Russian orgs

A previously undocumented spyware called ‘Batavia’ has been targeting large industrial enterprises in Russia in a phishing email campaign that uses contract-related lures. The researchers believe the operation has been active since at least last year in July and is ongoing. Based on telemetry data, the phishing emails delivering Batavia have reached employees at several dozen Russian organizations have been targeted. Since January 2025, the campaign has increased in intensity and peaked toward

The Era of Exploration

Large language models are the unintended byproduct of about three decades worth of freely accessible human text online. Ilya Sutskever compared this reservoir of information to fossil fuel, abundant but ultimately finite. Some studies suggest that, at current token‑consumption rates, frontier labs could exhaust the highest‑quality English web text well before the decade ends. Even if those projections prove overly pessimistic, one fact is clear: today’s models consume data far faster than humans