Technology

• EFF Guide.

Shared here for public benefit.

Before going to a protest, demonstrators or observers should note that their cellphones may subject them to surveillance tactics by law enforcement. If your cellphone is on and unsecured, your location can be tracked and your unencrypted communications, such as SMS, may be intercepted. Additionally, police may retrieve your messages and the content of your phone if they take custody of your phone, or later by warrant or subpoena.

The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

Get an audio overview of Search results in Labs, then click through to learn more.

Today, we’re launching a new Search experiment in Labs – Audio Overviews, which uses our latest Gemini models to generate quick, conversational audio overviews for certain search queries. Searching for a topic you’re not familiar with? An audio overview can help you get a lay of the land, offering a convenient, hands-free way to absorb information whether you're multitasking or simply prefer an audio experience.

Want to explore a topic further? We display helpful web pages right within the audio player on the search results page so you can easily dive in and learn more.

To try it out, opt into the experiment in Labs. When our systems determine it might be useful, you’ll see the option on the search results page to tap to generate a short audio overview on the topic of your query. You can give a thumbs up/down on each discussion, and the experiment as a whole in Labs.

The Apple and Google app stores continue to offer private browsing apps that are surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies, more than six weeks after they were identified in a Tech Transparency Project report. Apple and Google may also be profiting from these apps, which put Americans’ privacy and U.S. national security at risk, TTP found.

The apps are virtual private networks (VPNs), which promise to mask a user’s identity as they browse the internet. But Chinese-owned VPNs raise serious privacy and security concerns for Americans because Chinese companies can be forced to share user data with the Chinese government under the country’s national security laws. VPNs have access to particularly sensitive user data since they see all of a person’s web activity.

The North Texas Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and FBI Dallas’s North Texas Child Exploitation Task Force announce the conclusion of Operation Soteria Shield, a month-long collaborative enforcement effort conducted in April 2025 aimed at rescuing children from online sexual exploitation and bringing perpetrators to justice. This operation was run in conjunction with the National Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and was jointly managed by the FBI Dallas Division, Dallas Police Department, Plano Police Department, Wylie Police Department, and Garland Police Department.

More than 70 Texas law enforcement agencies joined forces throughout the month of April to combat the exploitation of children in the digital space. These agencies leveraged the expertise of highly skilled computer crimes investigators that worked around the clock to identify victims and apprehend offenders engaged in the production, distribution, and possession of child sexual abuse material.

Operation Soteria Shield resulted in the rescue of 109 children and the arrest of 244 offenders. In addition to these enforcement actions, investigators seized extensive volumes of digital evidence, including terabytes of illicit data stored on electronic devices that were used in the commission of these crimes. These devices are undergoing forensic analysis and may lead to further arrests and the identification of additional victims.

At a time of growing concern over the power of the world's mighty tech companies, one German state is turning its back on US giant Microsoft.

In less than three months' time, almost no civil servant, police officer or judge in Schleswig-Holstein will be using any of Microsoft's ubiquitous programs at work.

Mozilla Petition> Meta: Help Users Stop Accidentally Sharing Private AI Conversations

Meta recently launched its own AI app, like ChatGPT. The Meta AI app comes with a “Discover Feed” — a public stream of real user AI conversations posted by users. Meta says that users know that they're sharing their AI conversations publicly. But a number of posts suggest otherwise. You can find posts that appear to show users' personal data, medical issues, work problems, and calendar reminders in the Discover Feed.

Footage of the crash circulating in the aftermath clearly suggests an issue with the plane’s flaps. Ahmed Busnaina, a university distinguished professor, says the engine might have been the problem.

A Google Cloud outage took down multiple popular online services including Spotify, Discord, and Google, with tens of thousands of users reporting issues, according to Downdetector.

Cloudflare, which also reported service issues, attributed them to Google Cloud and said its core services were unaffected.

• Today, we’ve filed a lawsuit against the entity behind CrushAI and are taking other steps to clamp down on nudify apps.
• We’re building new technology to detect ads for nudify apps and sharing signals about these apps with other tech companies so they can take action too.
• We have strict rules against non-consensual intimate imagery – whether it’s real or AI-generated – including the promotion of nudify apps.

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

Hey everyone, this is Olga, the product manager for the summary feature again. Thank you all for engaging so deeply with this discussion and sharing your thoughts so far.

Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March. As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further. With that in mind, we’d like to take a step back so we have more time to talk through things properly. We’re still in the very early stages of thinking about a feature like this, so this is actually a really good time for us to discuss here.

A few important things to start with:

1. Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such.
2. We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.
3. With all this in mind, we’ll pause the launch of the experiment so that we can focus on this discussion first and determine next steps together.

We’ve also started putting together some context around the main points brought up through the conversation so far, and will follow-up with that in separate messages so we can discuss further.

A study from Profound of OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.

Around 10 French clients with leases on Teslas are suing the US carmaker, run by Elon Musk, because they consider the vehicles to be "extreme-right" symbols, the law firm representing them said on Wednesday.

Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.

Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data - Prof Gina Neff

Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a “gold mine” for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.

This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is “vastly underestimated” by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.

The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.

Using public information and making small tweaks, an alpha-seeking AI fund manager outperformed 93% of mutual fund managers by an average of 600%.