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Scientists hid secret codes in light to combat video fakes

It's easier than ever to manipulate video footage to deceive the viewer and increasingly difficult for fact checkers to detect such manipulations. Cornell University scientists developed a new weapon in this ongoing arms race: software that codes a "watermark" into light fluctuations, which in turn can reveal when the footage has been tampered with. The researchers presented the breakthrough over the weekend at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and published a scientific paper in Jun

Lurk – A Turing-complete programming language for ZK-SNARKs

Lurk Overview Lurk is a statically scoped dialect of Lisp, influenced by Scheme and Common Lisp. A reference implementation focused on describing and developing the core language can be found in the lurk-lisp repo. Lurk's distinguishing feature relative to most programming languages is that the correct execution of Lurk programs can be directly proved using SNARKs. The resulting proofs are succinct: they are relatively small, can be verified quickly, and they reveal only the information expli

U.S. Judiciary confirms breach of court electronic records service

The U.S. Federal Judiciary confirms that it suffered a cyberattack on its electronic case management systems hosting confidential court documents and is strengthening cybersecurity measures. The organization stated that, while most documents in the system are public, certain sealed filings contain sensitive information that is now protected with stricter access controls aimed at blocking hackers. "The federal Judiciary is taking additional steps to strengthen protections for sensitive case doc

Columbia University data breach impacts nearly 870,000 individuals

​An unknown threat actor has stolen the sensitive personal, financial, and health information of nearly 870,000 Columbia University current and former students and employees after breaching the university's network in May. Established in 1767 as King's College, Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university with a budget of $6.6 billion in 2024, over 20,000 employees, including 4,700 academic staff, and over 35,000 enrolled students across 19 schools and special programs. The

California jury rules Meta violated privacy law in case involving period-tracking app

A California jury ruled against Meta in a privacy-related lawsuit involving the alleged collection of sensitive data from Flo, a period-tracking app. The jury ruled that the plaintiffs proved that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, according to a verdict form filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for Northern District of California. The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit dating back to 2021 against the health-tech company Flo Health and other businesses like Meta, Go

Inside the US Government's Unpublished Report on AI Safety

At a computer security conference in Arlington, Virginia, last October, a few dozen AI researchers took part in a first-of-its-kind exercise in “red teaming,” or stress-testing a cutting-edge language model and other artificial intelligence systems. Over the course of two days, the teams identified 139 novel ways to get the systems to misbehave including by generating misinformation or leaking personal data. More importantly, they showed shortcomings in a new US government standard designed to h

I built a tool to help people remove their info from the Tea App

From: To: [email protected], [email protected] Copy Subject: Request for Immediate Removal of Unauthorized Personal Information Copy To Whom It May Concern, My name is . I have discovered that my personal information is being published and distributed through the Tea Dating Advice app without my knowledge or consent. This includes a post referencing me. This anonymous and unverified content violates my right to privacy, and I am requesting the immediate removal of any

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

Voice phishers strike again, this time hitting Cisco

Cisco said that one of its representatives fell victim to a voice phishing attack that allowed threat actors to download profile information belonging to users of a third-party customer relationship management system. “Our investigation has determined that the exported data primarily consisted of basic account profile information of individuals who registered for a user account on Cisco.com,” the company disclosed. Information included names, organization names, addresses, Cisco assigned user I

Cisco discloses data breach impacting Cisco.com user accounts

Cisco has disclosed that cybercriminals stole the basic profile information of users registered on Cisco.com following a voice phishing (vishing) attack that targeted a company representative. After becoming aware of the incident on July 24th, the networking equipment giant discovered that the attacker tricked an employee and gained access to a third-party cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system used by Cisco. This allowed the threat actor to steal the personal and user infor

Could Apple create an AI search engine to rival Gemini and ChatGPT? Here's how it could succeed

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Apple reportedly has an AI search in the works. The AI search experience could have a standalone app and power Siri. Timely and strategic release with broader success of AI search engines. With the launch of Apple Intelligence, Apple sought to enter the AI space after a somewhat late entry. However, several delays of its most sought-after feature, including Siri 2.0, have made it difficult to keep up with more established competitors. A new report d

Idaho has become the wild frontier of vaccination policy and public health

Some 280,000 people live in the five northernmost counties of Idaho. One of the key public officials responsible for their health is Thomas Fletcher, a retired radiologist who lives on a 160-acre farm near Sandpoint. Fletcher grew up in Texas and moved to Idaho in 2016, looking for a place where he could live a rural life alongside likeminded conservatives. In 2022, he joined the seven-member board of health of the Panhandle Health District, the regional public health authority, and he was appo

EHRs: The hidden distraction in your doctor's office

Cheryl Conrad no longer seethes with the frustration that threatened to overwhelm her in 2006. As described in IEEE Spectrum, Cheryl’s husband, Tom, has a rare genetic disease that causes ammonia to accumulate in his blood. At an emergency room visit two decades ago, Cheryl told the doctors Tom needed an immediate dose of lactulose to avoid going into a coma, but they refused to medicate him until his primary doctor confirmed his medical condition hours later. Making the situation more vexing w

Mystery packages with QR codes spark new wave of scams

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust WTF?! A new twist on package-related scams is drawing concern from federal authorities, as the FBI warns Americans to be vigilant when receiving unexpected parcels containing QR codes. According to a recent alert, criminals have begun exploiting the ubiquity of QR codes as a tool for financial fraud and identity theft. The scheme unfolds when an individual receives a package that's addressed to the

Ongoing Lean formalisation of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

Fermat's Last Theorem An ongoing multi-author open source project to formalise a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover. Information about the project The project is currently being led by Kevin Buzzard. Until September 2029 it is being funded by grant EP/Y022904/1, awarded by the EPSRC. The project is hosted at Imperial College London. Kevin would like to extend many many thanks to both of these institutions for their ongoing support of this nonstandard research. General

C++26 Reflections adventures and compile-time UML

The first thing I do every time I need to learn a new codebase is to start drawing the UML diagram of its classes, and usually give up soon after I started. The process of doing it manually is certainly useful, but now with reflections I figure it would be fun to try generate it instead. With C++26 reflections[1] the general consensus is that the magnitude of language change is comparable to what happened with C++11. After my little experiment with it, I would cautiously agree. So how does one

Topics: info int meta std string

Thousands of private ChatGPT conversations found via Google search after feature mishap

What just happened? Numerous organizations have repeatedly warned ChatGPT users over the years never to share personal information with OpenAI's chatbot. A recent incident involving a now-removed feature reveals that potentially thousands of people disclosed deeply intimate information with ChatGPT and also inadvertently made it discoverable through Google search. OpenAI recently confirmed that it has deactivated an opt-in feature that shared chat histories on the open web. Although the functio

Google AI Model Helps Us See the Planet as We Never Have Before

It's a view of Mother Earth as we've never seen her, and it just might help us solve some our most existential issues. Google has launched a new AI model called AlphaEarth Foundations, which can take images and measurements from satellites and other sources to create current and accurate digital representations of lands and waters. With all this data, scientists and researchers can monitor problems like water scarcity, deforestation and crop health. Google says AlphaEarth's AI modeling has alr

Informatica advances its AI to transform 7-day enterprise data mapping nightmares into 5-minute coffee breaks

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 Data platform vendor Informatica is expanding its AI capabilities as the needs of gen AI continue to increase enterprise requirements. Informatica is no stranger to the world of AI; in fact, the company debuted its first Claire AI tool for data in 2018. In the modern generative AI era, the company has expanded its technology with improved

AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here's What It's Doing and Why It Matters

For decades, the way we find information on the internet changed only in small ways. Doing a traditional Google search today doesn't feel all that different from when, in the 1990s, you would Ask Jeeves. Sure, a lot has changed under the hood, the results are likely far more relevant and the interface has some new features, but you're still typing in keywords and getting a list of websites that might hold the answer. That way of searching, it seems, is starting to go the way of AltaVista, may i

Dropbox Passwords is shutting down, and you have to act fast

Dropbox has announced that its password manager, Dropbox Passwords, is shutting down soon. And you don’t have long to find a new solution. Dropbox Passwords shutdown will happen in three stages on accelerated timeline Dropbox Passwords is being discontinued, and users are encouraged to find a new password solution elsewhere. Why the shutdown? Per a support doc, it’s “part of our efforts to focus on enhancing other features in our core product.” Though web service shutdowns often come with ex

Ready or not, age verification is rolling out across the internet

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. On July 25th, the UK became one of the first countries to widely implement age verification. Its Online Safety Act requires sites hosting porn and other content deemed “harmful” — including Reddit, Discord, Grindr, X, and Bluesky — to verify that users are over the age of 18. The early results have been chaotic. While many services have complied, so

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data

Indeed, the curators of DataComp CommonPool were themselves aware it was likely that PII would appear in the data set and did take some measures to preserve privacy, including automatically detecting and blurring faces. But in their limited data set, Hong’s team found and validated over 800 faces that the algorithm had missed, and they estimated that overall, the algorithm had missed 102 million faces in the entire data set. On the other hand, they did not apply filters that could have recognize

Luma and Runway expect robotics to eventually be a big revenue driver for them

In Brief AI video-generating startups Luma and Runway are looking beyond movie studios. These video-generating AI companies have their sights set on other markets for future revenue streams and have been in talks with both robotics and self-driving car companies, according to reporting from The Information. The report didn’t identify which companies Luma and Runway are in talks with. This potential revenue stream makes sense for Luma in particular. The company announced it was looking to buil

Data breach at Tea reportedly contains images and DMs from last week

Last week, social network Tea experienced a data breach that exposed personal information for its users. The dating safety app for women said at the time that "there is no evidence to suggest that current or additional user data was affected." However, 404 Media reports that the problem is bigger than originally stated. The site credits independent security researcher Kasra Rahjerdi , who found that content from the platform as recent as last week has been exposed. Additionally, this source cla

Solid protocol restores digital agency

How Solid Protocol Restores Digital Agency The current state of digital identity is a mess. Your personal information is scattered across hundreds of locations: social media companies, IoT companies, government agencies, websites you have accounts on, and data brokers you’ve never heard of. These entities collect, store, and trade your data, often without your knowledge or consent. It’s both redundant and inconsistent. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, of fragmented digital profiles that ofte

GPT might be an information virus (2023)

Obligatory: the views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not represent the views and opinions of my employer. In light of all the hype going around about ChatGPT, I wanted to offer my “hot take” on what the next 2-5 years of the web look like. One aspect of the rise of generative models that isn’t getting the right amount of attention is the long-term effects on the information economy. I think that being able to automatically produce arbitrary content that is indistinguisha

AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here's a Look Under the Hood

For decades, the way we find information on the internet changed only in small ways. Doing a traditional Google search today doesn't feel all that different from when, in the 1990s, you would Ask Jeeves. Sure, a lot has changed under the hood, the results are likely far more relevant and the interface has some new features, but you're still typing in keywords and getting a list of websites that might hold the answer. That way of searching, it seems, is starting to go the way of AltaVista, may i

DJI couldn't confirm or deny it disguised this drone to evade a US ban

is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget. DJI barely sells drones in the United States anymore. The shelves are bare; resellers are jacking up prices. It appears an unofficial ban at US customs is to blame. But on Amazon, you can now buy a drone that’s a a dead ringer for the DJI Mini 4 Pro — the SkyRover X1 — for a reasonable $758. And that’s probably because DJI made it happen.