Mr. Deepfakes was the biggest website in the world for sharing AI-generated abuse imagery, swapping tips and tricks for more realistic results, and posting endless, fake, nonconsensual videos of everyone from celebrities to everyday people. In a new podcast by the CBC, I got to tell the tale of how deepfakes started, what targets go…
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bought data from the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ precise movements over time, in a process that often involves siphoning data from ordinary apps like video games, dating services, and fitness trackers, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document obtained by 404 Media. The document shows…
The main bet on the front page of Polymarket right now is “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” The site has this at a 41 percent chance of happening as I write this. On Polymarket, more than $5 million has been spent gambling on this question. On Kalshi, a competing prediction market where…
Amazon’s cloud services are down in some of the Middle East after “objects” hit data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) causing “sparks and fire.” Around 60 services tied to AWS are down in the region, affecting web traffic in the UAE and Bahrain. The outage comes following Iranian attacks on the UAE as…
Joseph speaks to Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Quintin is one of the people behind Rayhunter, an easy to install tool that can detect nearby IMSI-catchers. This tech, sometimes known as Stingrays, poses as a fake cellphone tower to track a phone’s location, intercept…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that exposed prehistoric hookups, marched toward death, feasted on their own bodies, and found a buried legend in the Sahara. First, Neanderthal males had lots more babies with human females than human males had with Neanderthal females. What’s up with that?! Then, strap in…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss wishes made, god complexes, and the point of it all. SAM: This week I wrote about Amazon’s changing policy for wishlists. It’s allowing gifters to choose third-party…
A group of more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have demanded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provide its definition of “domestic terrorist,” after the agency labelled U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, which DHS officers killed, as such. The move also comes as DHS and its various components purchase and deploy a wide…
Tea App Green Flags, a service that claims it can “protect your digital reputation,” will remove negative posts about men from private online groups where women share “red flags” about men they’ve dated in order to help other women. The service is another escalation in the age of online dating, women attempting to protect each…
It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of…
