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The European Commission unveiled a plan to bar children under 13 from social media, allowing parent-supervised accounts for ages 13 to 15. To enforce this, Brussels has built its own free, open-source age-verification app, being piloted in Cyprus, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain, with full EU rollout expected by end of 2026.
Google has started actively prompting users on its homepage to set up a video selfie as an optional sign-in method, following its initial announcement of the feature in July. The setup involves recording a short video while turning your head, which Google can use later to verify identity if you're locked out of your account. Google also says the selfie data may be used to estimate a user's age and, with opt-in consent, to improve its broader facial recognition and verification systems.
The European Commission unveiled the EU Kids Act, a proposal that would ban social media accounts for children under 13, mandate age verification, and force companies like Meta, Google, YouTube and Roblox to prove their platforms are safely designed. President Ursula von der Leyen said the law shifts the burden of proof onto platforms and gives parents more control over children's online experiences. The measure still needs to go through debate and a vote before becoming law.
A blog post examines Bend 2, a programming language designed for an AI-assisted workflow where humans write 'laws' and AI writes implementations plus formal proofs that a compiler checks. Using Bend's own homepage demo as an example, the author notes that stating a simple game rule takes 58 lines of code, while the AI-generated proof of that rule balloons to 442 lines. The piece argues this ratio illustrates a broader vibe-coding pitfall rather than being unique to Bend.
A dark web marketplace called Nexus was found selling access to a database containing roughly 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver's licenses and 3 million travel documents, according to Krebs on Security. The breach appears linked to identity verification firm IDScan, which is now investigating, while the FBI has also opened a probe; the Nexus listing vanished from the dark web after the report but its operators have not claimed to have deleted the stolen data.
The European Union is preparing the EU Kids Act, a proposed law that goes beyond social media to limit children's access to video platforms, chatbots and online games. Under the draft, minors would face tiered restrictions by age, ranging from no access for under-3s to parent-supervised accounts and eventual independent access at 15, with mandatory age checks before signup or download.
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that regulators may eventually need to require AI companies to have a verifiable shutdown mechanism, checkable by outside parties, to disable systems that become too dangerous. He said most AI labs already have some way to pull the plug internally, but argued this should become part of the broader policy debate rather than left to individual firms.
Verus is an open-source tool that mathematically verifies Rust programs against formal specifications, checking correctness across all possible inputs rather than sampling test cases. It builds on Rust's existing memory-safety guarantees to also confirm that code produces expected results and doesn't leak sensitive data.
Signal has introduced Automatic Key Verification, a key transparency feature that checks whether the public keys stored for your account actually belong to your own devices, reducing reliance on manually comparing safety numbers. Trail of Bits built one of three independent auditors that continuously verify this system by maintaining its own Merkle tree copy of the global key map and periodically signing it to confirm consistency.
Anthropic has made its consumer chatbot Claude unavailable to anyone under 18, requiring users to confirm their age when creating an account. The company says it uses detection systems to flag possible underage users and will suspend accounts showing such signals until identity is verified through Yoti, a third-party age-verification service.
ID verification company IDScan disclosed that hackers accessed its systems without authorization, a breach later linked to a criminal marketplace called Nexus selling scans of over 170 million identity documents. Security researcher Brian Krebs verified the stolen trove includes 153 million driver's licenses, 10 million ID cards, 3 million passports and travel documents, and hundreds of thousands of medical cards, mostly belonging to US residents with some Canadian records included. The attackers claimed to have quietly siphoned data from IDScan's systems for more than a year before being detected.
IDScan, a Louisiana-based identity verification firm used by venues and dispensaries, confirmed hackers stole driver's licenses and other government ID data from its cloud systems. The admission follows a report by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs that a dark web site allowed searches of over 150 million U.S. and Canadian residents' license records, including photos and data belonging to high-profile figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.