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Discord started rolling out age verification to its entire user base this week, months after pausing the plan in February amid privacy concerns over biometric scans and ID checks. CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said over 90% of users won't need to submit ID, as the platform will instead rely on existing account signals like tenure and activity patterns to estimate age.
Researchers received ethical approval from a major UK retail bank's privacy governance body in August 2024 to study transaction data from women customers, aiming to identify behavioral signatures of financial abuse. The study compared a victim-survivor group against a matched control group, using strict filtering criteria such as account type, age, and transaction frequency to build comparable samples from the bank's 28 million customers.
Researchers analyzed geolocated outbreak data for 32 environmentally linked emerging infectious diseases, combining these with global datasets on socio-environmental factors such as land use, climate and biodiversity. Using disease-specific driver hypotheses developed with experts across virology, ecology and public health, they built geospatial statistical models to identify common human-caused patterns behind where outbreaks occur.
Digital Realty's chief technology officer Chris Sharp says the data centre industry is moving away from copper for internal networking, though not electrical power or cooling systems. A typical 100MW facility uses around 400 tonnes of copper overall, with up to 20 tonnes used specifically in the wiring that connects servers together. Sharp argues this copper wiring between GPUs and CPUs is now a bottleneck limiting performance.
In Ulanqab, a farming region in Inner Mongolia known as China's 'potato capital', large-scale data centre construction is underway alongside agricultural land. Workers described the project as proceeding in multiple phases, with one phase completed roughly every year and more planned. These facilities are intended to provide the computing power behind China's AI ambitions.
BBC correspondent Laura Bicker visited data centre sites in Inner Mongolia, part of a wave of construction underpinning China's AI ambitions. Her report contrasts public attitudes toward data centre development in China with those in the US, coming just before a planned meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Washington.
Snorkel AI, a company that builds AI training data sets and simulated environments, closed a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its $1.3 billion valuation from 17 months earlier. The round included existing backers Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, alongside new leads Insight Partners and S32. Snorkel reports an annualized revenue run-rate of $375 million, up 18-fold over the past year.
Hacking group ShinyHunters says it breached FBI systems and stole personal data on thousands of agents and job applicants, including names, home addresses and phone numbers. 404 Media reported the group first breached an Oracle PeopleSoft HR server before pivoting into an Amazon-hosted government cloud, and the FBI's job application portals appeared defaced and offline. ShinyHunters says the hack is not financially motivated and is demanding the FBI remove a report containing what it calls false allegations about the group.
Hacking group ShinyHunters told 404 Media it breached FBI-related systems and obtained personal data on all FBI employees and applicants, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and spouse details. The group provided a sample of roughly 5,000 records, and 404 Media verified some phone numbers matched named individuals and linked others to Justice Department personnel. ShinyHunters also defaced the FBI's jobs website on Tuesday.
Sweden's data protection authority IMY has fined IT provider Miljödata SEK 1.8 million ($183,000) following a GDPR investigation into an August 2025 ransomware attack. The breach hit systems used by 80% of Swedish municipalities, exposing personal ID numbers, health data, and records involving minors after attackers published stolen data on the dark web under the name 'Datacarry'.
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust revealed that a technician's mistake on August 18 overwrote its maternity records database while attempting to copy a radiotherapy database for reporting purposes. The error used outdated instructions meant for another system, and a setting that should have been updated was missed, causing the maternity database covering September 2011 to November 2022 to be wiped instead. While clinical notes, test results and observations were largely recovered, the trust says it cannot restore full logs showing who accessed maternity records during that 11-year period.
Warren Buffett, who stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway's chairman last week, built his fortune avoiding flashy AI stocks in favor of utilities and industrial firms. Two of those older deals — the 2000 purchase of MidAmerican Energy and the 2016 acquisition of Precision Castparts — are now benefiting from AI's surging demand for electricity and turbines, according to analysts cited by CNN.