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The women-only app Tea now "faces two class action lawsuits filed in California" in response to a recent breach," reports NPR — even as the company is now boasting it has more than 6.2 million users. A spokesperson for Tea told the CBC it's "working to identify any users whose personal information was involved" in a breach of 72,000 images (including 13,000 verification photos and images of government IDs) and a later breach of 1.1 million private messages. Tea said they will be offering those users "free identity protection services." The company said it removed the ID requirement in 2023, but data that was stored before February 2024, when Tea migrated to a more secure system, was accessed in the breach... [Several sites have pointed out Tea's current privacy policy is telling users selfies are "deleted immediately."] Tea was reportedly intended to launch in Canada on Friday, according to information previously posted on the App Store, but as of this week the launch date is now in February 2026. Tea didn't respond to CBC's questions about the apparent delay. Yet even amid the current turmoil, Tea's waitlist has ballooned to 1.5 million women, all eager to join, the company posted on Wednesday. A day later, Tea posted in its Instagram stories that it had approved "well over" 800,000 women into the app that day alone. So, why is it so popular, despite the drama and risks? Tea tapped into a perceived weakness of ther dating apps, according to an associate health studies professor at Ontario's Western University interviewed by the CBC, who thinks users should avoid Tea, at least until its security is restored. Tech blogger John Gruber called the incident "yet another data point for the argument that any 'private messaging' feature that doesn't use E2EE isn't actually private at all." (And later Gruber notes Tea's apparent absence at the top of the charts in Google's Play Store. "I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn't removed Tea from the Play Store, they've delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing.") Besides anonymous discussions about specific men, Tea also allows its users to perform background and criminal record checks, according to NPR, as well as reverse image searches. But the recent breach, besides threatening the safety of its users, also "laid bare the anonymous, one-sided accusations against the men in their dating pools." The CBC points out there's a men's rights group on Reddit now urging civil lawsuits against tea as part of a plan to get the app shut down. And "Cleveland lawyer Aaron Minc, who specializes in cases involving online defamation and harassment, told The Associated Press that his firm has received hundreds of calls from people upset about what's been posted about them on Tea." Yet in response to Tea's latest Instagram post, "The comments were almost entirely from people asking Tea to approve them, so they could join the app."

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The Washington Post reports: In early July, a wasp nest with a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations was found inside the grounds of a sprawling Cold War-era nuclear site in South Carolina that today partly serves as a storage area for radioactive liquid waste. Federal officials said Friday that at least three more contaminated wasp nests were found within the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site, which encompasses an area more than four times the size of the District of Columbia... [F]ederal authorities said that the discoveries were not cause for alarm and experts noted that the discovery of radioactivity in wildlife near nuclear facilities did not necessarily indicate the likelihood of a major leak... In a statement sent to reporters, Edwin Deshong, manager of the Savannah River Site's Office of Environmental Management, said the wasp nests had "very low levels of radioactive contamination" and did not pose health risks to the site's workers, nearby residents or the environment... The Savannah River Site's 43 active underground waste tanks have more than 34 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste. The oldest tanks have previously "developed small hairline cracks" that led to small-volume leaks, the Savannah River Site says on its website. A July report after the first nest was found said there was "no impact" from the contaminated nest, the Post reports, with the nest's high radioactivity level due to "on-site legacy radioactive contamination" rather than "a loss of contamination control." More from the Associated Press: The tank farm is well inside the boundaries of the site and wasps generally fly just a few hundred yards from their nests, so there is no danger they are outside the facility, according to a statement from Savannah River Mission Completion which now oversees the site. If there had been wasps found, they would have significantly lower levels of radiation than their nests, according to the statement which was given to the Aiken Standard. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the news.

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After an 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Russia, "weather authorities leapt into action," reports SFGate, by modeling the threat of a tsunami "and releasing warnings and advisories to prepare their communities..." But some residents of Hawaii, Japan and North America's West Coast turned to AI tools for updates that "appear to have badly bungled the critical task at hand." Google's "AI Overview," for example, reportedly gave "inaccurate information about authorities' safety warnings in Hawaii and elsewhere," according to reports on social media. Thankfully, the tsunami danger quickly subsided on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning without major damage. Still, the issues speak to the growing role of AI tools in people's information diets... and to the tools' potentially dangerous fallibility... A critic of Google — who prompted the search tool to show an AI overview by adding "+ai" to their search — called the text that showed up "dangerously wrong." Responding to similar complaints, Grok told one user on X.com "We'll improve accuracy."

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There's now an "influx" of startups fightging wildfires, reports the Washington Post. "More than 100 new wildfire-related technologies have launched in the U.S. and around the world since 2023, according to Lori Moore-Merrell, who served as U.S. fire administrator during the Biden administration... Unmanned lookout poles that use AI to sense smoke have been erected in the West. Swarms of military-grade drones are increasingly used for wildfire detection and management. AI technology also tracks lightning strikes, which can ignite wildfires..." As America contends with what is already a punishing year of wildfires across massive swaths of the country, new, extremely precise satellite images beamed from space from the initiative FireSat. In March, a satellite outfitted with infrared sensors was launched more than 370 miles into space with the sole task of detecting and monitoring fires. With the ability to loop millions of miles around the planet each day, it found active fires and burn scars using bands of infrared light, demonstrating technology that the project's leaders and its early adopters said could be integral to filling technological gaps in the way they fight burns. The satellite initiative was launched by a nonprofit coalition called Earth Fire Alliance (EFA). Its partners include Muon Space, which is developing the satellites; Google, which is using AI to help filter through the images; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; and the Environmental Defense Fund. The goal is to have 50 satellites in orbit by 2030 to capture the entire world. At full capacity, the constellation is aiming to sweep the entire Earth every 20 minutes to detect small fires. By spring or summer of next year, it plans to launch three more satellites into space that will coordinate with agencies in states including California and Colorado to help them detect and fight fire.

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"The July 2025 results of the Steam Survey were posted a few minutes ago," Phoronix reported last night, "and show a healthy 0.32% increase to put the Linux gaming marketshare at 2.89%." That's a recent high in percentage terms and while Steam saw around 3% in the early days of Steam on Linux a decade ago, in absolute terms this is likely the largest surveyed figure ever for the Linux gaming population. Linux was at 2.89% for July while macOS was at 1.88% and Windows at 95.23%. There does seem to be a jagged line that's trending upward... November: 2.03% December: 2.29% January: 2.06% February: 1.45% March: 2.33% April: 2.27% May: 2.69% June: 2.57% July: 2.89%

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