Linux fréttir

Meta also replaces a legacy C++ media-handling security library with Rust

Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option. …

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the first high-profile lawsuit -- considered a "bellwether" case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints -- goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality. TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported. For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was 6 years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She's fighting to claim untold damages -- including potentially punitive damages -- to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks. [...] To win, K.G.M.'s lawyers will need to "parcel out" how much harm is attributed to each platform, due to design features, not the content that was targeted to K.G.M., Clay Calvert, a technology policy expert and senior fellow at a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute, wrote. Internet law expert Eric Goldman told The Washington Post that detailing those harms will likely be K.G.M.'s biggest struggle, since social media addiction has yet to be legally recognized, and tracing who caused what harms may not be straightforward. However, Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of K.G.M.'s lawyers, told the Post that K.G.M. is prepared to put up this fight. "She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how in so many ways it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence," Bergman said. The research is unclear on whether social media is harmful for kids or whether social media addiction exists, Tamar Mendelson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. And so far, research only shows a correlation between Internet use and mental health, Mendelson noted, which could doom K.G.M.'s case and others.' However, social media companies' internal research might concern a jury, Bergman told the Post. On Monday, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit working to rein in Big Tech, published a report analyzing recently unsealed documents in K.G.M.'s case that supposedly provide "smoking-gun evidence" that platforms "purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing" -- while putting increased engagement from young users at the center of their business models. Most of the unsealed documents came from Meta. An internal email shows Mark Zuckerberg decided Meta's top strategic priority was getting teens "locked in" to Meta's family of apps. Another damning document discusses allowing "tweens" to use a private mode inspired by fake Instagram accounts ("finstas"). The same document includes an admission that internal data showed Facebook use correlated with lower well-being. Internal communications showed Meta seemingly bragging that "teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to" and an employee declaring, "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug," likening all social media platforms to "pushers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Agency looks to understand the extent of identifying information available to its masked agents

It's not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission.…

Citigroup has rolled out mandatory AI training for all 175,000 of its employees across 80 locations worldwide, a sweeping initiative that CEO Jane Fraser describes as helping workers "reinvent themselves" before the technology permanently alters what they do for a living. The $205 billion bank sent out an internal memo last year requiring staffers to learn prompting skills specifically. Fraser told the Washington Post at Davos that AI "will change the nature of what people do every day" and "will take some jobs away." The adaptive training platform lets experts complete the course in under 10 minutes while beginners need about 30 minutes. Citi reported last year that employees had entered more than 6.5 million prompts into its built-in AI tools, and Q4 2025 data shows a 70% adoption rate for the bank's proprietary AI tools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers with the Tech Transparency Project found all sorts of apps that let users create fake non-consensual nudes of real people

The mobile app emperors have no clothes. Apple and Google have made millions of dollars from AI apps that let users undress people even as both companies claim to ban such software from their stores, according to a new study.…

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser that has spent two decades battling tech giants over control of the internet, is now turning its attention to AI and deploying roughly $1.4 billion in reserves to fund what president Mark Surman calls a "rebel alliance" of startups focused on AI safety, transparency and governance. The organization released a report Tuesday outlining its strategy to counter the growing dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised more than $60 billion and $30 billion respectively from investors and now command valuations of $500 billion and $350 billion. Mozilla Ventures, a fund launched in 2022 with an initial $35 million commitment, has invested in more than 55 companies to date and is exploring raising additional capital. Surman, who runs the organization from a farm outside Toronto, acknowledged the financial mismatch but said Mozilla is playing the long game. By 2028, he wants Mozilla to be funding a "mainstream" open-source AI ecosystem for developers. The effort faces headwinds from the Trump administration, which has criticized AI safety efforts as "woke AI" and signed an executive order establishing a task force to challenge state AI regulations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta plans to test new subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps, the company told TechCrunch on Monday. The tech giant said the new subscriptions will unlock more productivity and creativity, along with expanded AI capabilities. In the coming months, Meta said it will offer a premium experience on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp that gives users access to special features and more control over how they share and connect, while keeping the core experiences free. Meta doesn't appear to be locked into one strategy, noting that it will test a variety of subscription features and bundles, and that each app subscription will have a distinct set of exclusive features.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plus, the gang says it got in via Microsoft Entra SSO

ShinyHunters says it stole several slices of data from Panera Bread, but that's just the yeast of everyone's problems. The extortionist gang also claims to have stolen data from CarMax and Edmunds, in addition to three other organizations it posted to its blog last week.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google on Tuesday announced an expanded set of Android theft-protection features, designed to make its mobile devices less of a target for criminals. Building on existing tools like Theft Detection Lock, Offline Device Lock, and others introduced in 2024, the newly launched updates include stronger authentication safeguards and enhanced recovery tools, the company said. [...] With the new features, users of Android devices running Android 16 or higher will have more control over the Failed Authentication Lock feature that automatically locks the device after an excessive number of failed login attempts. Now users will have access to a dedicated on/off toggle switch in the device's settings. The devices will also offer stronger protection against a thief trying to guess a device owner's PIN, pattern, or password by increasing the lockout time after failed attempts. Plus, Identity Check, a feature rolled out for Android 15 and higher last year, now covers all features and apps that use biometrics -- like banking apps or the Google Password Manager.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An expandable tablet, and a phone that reboots into desktop Windows

For most mobile devices, the OS is either Android or iOS, but a pair of new systems promises a host of additional OS options you can dual boot into. The Android phone can run Linux and boot into Windows 11 where it functions as a PC while the tablet runs a smorgasbord of Google-free OSes.…

The massively hyped agentic personal assistant has security experts wondering why anyone would install it

Security concerns for the new agentic AI tool formerly known as Clawdbot remain, despite a rebrand prompted by trademark concerns raised by Anthropic. Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet?…

France will replace the American platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own domestically developed video conferencing platform, which will be used in all government departments by 2027, the country said. From a report: The move is part of France's strategy to stop using foreign software vendors, especially those from the United States, and regain control over critical digital infrastructure. It comes at a crucial moment as France, like Europe, reaches a turning point regarding digital sovereignty. "The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," said David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform. On Monday, the government announced it will instead be using the French-made videoconference platform Visio. The platform has been in testing for a year and has around 40,000 users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IDC and Lenovo say enterprises are pressing ahead with pilot deployments despite mixed evidence on returns

Despite a growing number of reports that AI is not benefiting many businesses, Lenovo and IDC say that firms in EMEA are pushing ahead with pilot deployments and still expect it to drive growth and transform how they operate.…

No salvation from the memory winter, though - plant won't start churning out chips until 2028

Flush with cash from skyrocketing memory prices, Micron continued its fab expansion this week, this time breaking ground on a $24 billion manufacturing complex that will eventually produce chips used in storage devices.…

Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com -- a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party -- to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo Electric. The misconfiguration meant anyone attempting to set up an Outlook account using an example.com email address could have inadvertently sent test credentials to Sumitomo Electric's servers. Under RFC2606, example.com resolves only to IP addresses assigned to the Internet Assigned Names Authority. Microsoft confirmed it has "updated the service to no longer provide suggested server information for example.com" and said it is investigating. Security researcher Dan Tentler of Phobos Group noted the company appears to have simply removed the problematic endpoint rather than fixing the underlying routing -- "not found" errors now appear where the JSON responses previously occurred. Tinyapps.org, which noted the behavior earlier this month, said the misconfiguration had persisted for five years. Microsoft has not explained how Sumitomo Electric's domain entered its configuration. The incident follows 2024's revelation that a forgotten test account with admin privileges enabled Russia-state hackers to monitor Microsoft executives' email for two months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Analytics features arrive first; agentic AI comes later

Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD.…

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight -- the closest the timepiece has ever been to the theoretical point of annihilation since scientists created it during the Cold War in 1947. The clock now stands four seconds nearer than last year's setting, and this marks the third time in four years that the Bulletin has moved it closer to midnight. The Chicago-based nonprofit pointed to aggressive behavior by nuclear powers Russia, China and the United States, fraying nuclear arms control frameworks, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, unregulated AI integration into military systems, and climate change. "In terms of nuclear risks, nothing in 2025 trended in the right direction," said Alexandra Bell, the Bulletin's president and CEO. The last remaining nuclear arms pact between the US and Russia, the New START treaty, expires on February 5.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores in a shift to focus on its online same-day delivery service and new big-box retail stores. From a report: The e-commerce giant said Tuesday that some of its shuttered Amazon-branded brick-and-mortar stores would be converted into Whole Foods Market locations. Amazon said its branded stores failed to deliver the right economic model and distinctive customer experience necessary for large-scale expansion. Amazon's same-day delivery service for groceries is currently available in more than 5,000 U.S. cities and towns. The company said it plans to expand the service to more communities in 2026 but didn't specify where. Amazon said it planned to open over 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vicar of Rome decries naive and unquestioning reliance on technology

Catholics need to develop critical thinking skills to counter the dark side of AI and counter unnatural attachments to chatbots, the pope said this week in a message marking the Church's social communications day.…

OpenAI launched a dedicated team in October called OpenAI for Science, led by vice president Kevin Weil, that aims to make scientists more productive -- but Weil admitted in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the LLM cannot yet produce novel discoveries and says that's not currently the mission. UC Berkeley statistician Nikita Zhivotovskiy, who has used LLMs since the first ChatGPT, told the publication: "So far, they seem to mainly combine existing results, sometimes incorrectly, rather than produce genuinely new approaches." "I don't think models are there yet," Weil admitted. "Maybe they'll get there. I'm optimistic that they will." The models excel at surfacing forgotten solutions and finding connections across fields, but Weil says the bar for accelerating science doesn't require "Einstein-level reimagining of an entire field." GPT-5 has read substantially every paper written in the last 30 years, he says, and can bring together analogies from unrelated disciplines. That accumulation of existing knowledge -- helping scientists avoid struggling on problems already solved -- is itself an acceleration.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.