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$6.4M VerifTools marketplace offline

The FBI and Dutch police today said that they seized two domains and a blog tied to VerifTools, an international criminal marketplace that sold identity documents for as little as $9.…

Anthropic will start training its AI models on user data, including new chat transcripts and coding sessions, unless users choose to opt out. The Verge: It's also extending its data retention policy to five years -- again, for users that don't choose to opt out. All users will have to make a decision by September 28th. For users that click "Accept" now, Anthropic will immediately begin training its models on their data and keeping said data for up to five years, according to a blog post published by Anthropic on Thursday. The setting applies to "new or resumed chats and coding sessions." Even if you do agree to Anthropic training its AI models on your data, it won't do so with previous chats or coding sessions that you haven't resumed. But if you do continue an old chat or coding session, all bets are off.

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'The homeland is no longer secure,' says Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency leader

The Pentagon outfit responsible for preventing foriegn agents from infiltrating defense agencies says the US isn't doing a very good job of preventing state secrets from falling into Chinese hands.…

Only a few Android phones will be able to support the service

Users of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones could soon find themselves able to make voice calls via a satellite connection, if Skylo Technologies can get all its ducks in a row.…

Every breath people take in their homes or car probably contains significant amounts of microplastics small enough to burrow deep into lungs, new peer-reviewed research finds, bringing into focus a little understood route of exposure and health threat. The Guardian: The study, published in the journal Plos One, estimates humans can inhale as much as 68,000 tiny plastic particles daily. Previous studies have identified larger pieces of airborne microplastics, but those are not as much of a health threat because they do not hang in the air as long, or move as deep into the pulmonary system. The smaller bits measure between 1 and 10 micrometers, or about one-seventh the thickness of a human hair, and present more of a health threat because they can more easily be distributed throughout the body. The findings "suggest that the health impacts of microplastic inhalation may be more substantial than we realize," the authors wrote.

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Media multitool taps Vulkan for GPU encoding, adds VVC support, and dusts off some ancient formats

FFmpeg 8.0 brings GPU-accelerated video encoding via Vulkan – and can now subtitle your videos automatically using integrated speech recognition.…

Solo entrepreneurs now launch 35% of all startups, double the rate from a decade ago, yet venture capital funding patterns remain virtually unchanged, according to an analysis by venture capitalist Sajith Pai. Carta's equity management data reveals that while solo-founded companies grew from 17% of 2,600 startups in 2015 to 35% of 3,800 startups in 2024, their share of VC funding barely moved from 15 to 17%. "Valley VCs don't like solo founders," Pai, who is a partner at India-based venture firm Blume, writes in his analysis. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan confirmed the accelerator's practice of persuading solo founders to find partners after acceptance.The bias persists despite prominent solo-founded successes including Amazon, SpaceX, and Zoom. Pai notes that "most unicorn startups have cofounders" but questions whether this reflects genuine risk differences or simply that cofounded startups receive five times more funding opportunities. "The bias against solo founders is so strong," Pai observes, that it appears repeatedly in founder complaints and venture capitalist commentary, even as other Silicon Valley biases against women and non-elite universities gradually ease.

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Also, not one but two new models of the classic 1200

The new native 68K AmigaOS web browser leans on the machines' underlying emulation system to offer modern facilities on a retro OS.…

Typepad, which launched in 2003 to make it easier for the masses to start their blogging journey, is shutting down. From a blog post: We have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025. After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad -- including account management, blogs, and all associated content -- will no longer be available. Your account and all related services will be permanently deactivated. Please note that after this date, you will no longer be able to access or export any blog content.

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Think BYOC will solve all your sovereignty and privacy worries? You might be missing the point

INTERVIEW Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a concept gaining traction as companies seek ways to resolve sovereignty and privacy issues, but its implementation can vary widely depending on interpretation.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, says it found that people are concerned about the way AI is being adopted by businesses and want a say in how the technology is used at their workplace and the wider economy. It warns that without such a "worker-first plan," use of "intelligent" algorithms could lead to even greater social inequality in the country, plus the kind of civil unrest that goes along with that. The TUC says it wants conditions attached to the tens of billions in public money being spent on AI research and development to ensure that workers are supported and retrained rather than deskilled or replaced. It also wants guardrails in place so that workers are protected from "AI harms" at work, rules to ensure workers are involved in deciding how machine learning is used, and for the government to provide support for those who euphemistically "experience job transitions" as a result of AI disruption.

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Because not every bot wants to live inside Microsoft's walled garden

Google and code editor company Zed Industries have introduced the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standard way for AI agents to integrate with an IDE, with the idea that this will prevent developers getting locked into VS Code.…

Apple has warned that "EU-style rules" proposed by the UK competition watchdog "are bad for users and bad for developers." From a report: It says EU laws -- which have sought to make it easier for smaller firms to compete with big tech -- have resulted in some Apple features and enhancements being delayed for European users. It argues the UK risks similar hold-ups if the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) pushes ahead with plans designed to open up markets the regulator says is too dominated by Apple and Google. [...] The CMA wants UK app makers to be able to use and exchange data with Apple's mobile technology -- something called "interoperability." Without it, app makers cannot create the full range of innovative products and services, it argues. Apple claims under EU interoperability rules it has received over 100 requests -- some from big tech rivals -- demanding access to sensitive user data, including sensitive information Apple itself cannot access. It argues the rules are effectively allowing other firms to demand its data and intellectual property for free.

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Regulator points to lack of 'basic access controls' between internet-facing systems, internal network

South Korea's privacy watchdog has slapped SK Telecom with a record ₩134.5 billion ($97 million) fine after finding that the mobile giant left its network wide open to hackers through a catalog of bungles.…

Company cleared to launch again after April failure

Firefly Aerospace has been given the green light to resume launches after its April failure.…

The Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark money organization, is paying Democratic influencers up to $8,000 monthly through its Chorus Creator Incubator Program, Wired reports. Contracts prohibit participants from disclosing their payments or identifying funders, the publication added. The program launched last month includes over 90 creators with a collective audience exceeding 40 million followers. Influencers must attend advocacy trainings and messaging check-ins while Chorus retains approval rights over political content made with program resources. The Sixteen Thirty Fund distributed over $400 million to left-leaning causes in 2020.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has removed the iPhone torrenting client, iTorrent, from AltStore PAL's alternative iOS marketplace in the EU, showing that it can still exert control over apps that aren't listed on the official App Store. iTorrent developer Daniil Vinogradov told TorrentFreak that Apple has revoked his distribution rights to publish apps in any alternative iOS stores, so the issue isn't tied to AltStore PAL itself.

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Credit agency offers own services as compensation

Credit scoring and monitoring biz TransUnion says that it recently suffered a breach affecting nearly 4.5 million individuals.…

Shadowserver counts more than 13,000 appliances still wide open – including thousands in US, Germany, and UK

Thousands of Citrix NetScaler appliances remain exposed to a trio of security flaws that the vendor patched this week, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild.…

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults. "This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average. Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.

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