CYBORG II
- Hall effect thumbstick for WASD or 360° movement;
- 30 mappable inputs with quick-fire Omron switches;
- tall towers with knuckle keys;
- six slots to swap controls on the fly;
- adjust every element for the best fit;
- personalize with your gamer ID;
- mirrored versions for lefties and righties;
- and more!
Source: Azeron Keypad – Joystick Keyboard Gaming!
[…] Called “Take a Message,” the buggy feature was released last year and is supposed to automatically transcribe voicemails as they’re coming in, as well as detect and mark spam calls. Unfortunately, according to reports from multiple users on Reddit (as initially spotted by 9to5Google), the feature has started turning on the microphone while taking voicemails, allowing whoever is leaving you a voicemail to hear you.
[…]
The issue has been reported affecting Pixel devices ranging from the Pixel 4 to the Pixel 10, and on a recent support page, Google’s finally acknowledging it. However, the company’s action might not be enough, depending on how cautious you want to be.
According to Community Manager Siri Tejaswini, the company has “investigated this issue,” and has confirmed it “affects a very small subset of Pixel 4 and 5 devices under very specific and rare circumstances.” The post doesn’t go any further on the how and why of the diagnosis, but says that Google is now disabling Take a Message and “next-gen Call Screen features” on these devices.
[…]
While it’s encouraging that Google is taking action on the Take a Message bug, the company only seems to be acknowledging it for Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 models, at least for now. I’ve asked Google whether owners of other Pixel models should be worried, as user reports seem split on this. Still, because some have mentioned an issue with even the most up-to-date Pixel phone, if you want to practice your own abundance of caution, it might be worth disabling Take a Message on your device, regardless of its model number.
To do this, open your Phone app, then tap the three-lined menu icon at the top-left of the page. Navigate to Settings > Call Assist > Take a Message, and toggle the feature off.
Source: This Pixel Bug Leaked Audio to Incoming Callers, and Google’s Fix Might Not Be Enough | Lifehacker
Most printers, laser or inkjet, are powered by cartridges that are single-use by design; you have to buy a new one when the old one runs out. This is exacerbated by the DRM-infested curfews manufacturers often put on these things, so you usually can’t just refill them yourself. Thankfully, the city of Los Angeles is looking to put an end to the reign of archaic printing norms.
The City Council has voted to create an ordinance that will ban single-use printer cartridges that can’t be refilled or that don’t have a take-back program offered by the vendor. This includes basically any ink or toner module that’s bound to end up in landfill — unable to be properly recycled and therefore in the way of Los Angeles’ zero-waste ambitions.
Printer cartridges are usually built with a combination of plastic, metal, and chemicals that makes them hard to easily dispose. They can be treated as hazardous waste by the city, but even then it would take them hundreds of years to actually disintegrate at a waste site. Since they’re designed to be thrown away in the first place, the real solution is to target the root of the issue — hence the ban.
To be clear, the LA City Council isn’t trying to solve the printer ink crisis or even address affordability — most people only take into account the upfront shelf cost of a printer. The angle is environmental, tied closely to reducing unnecessary loops in the distribution pipeline. Even if the vendor is supposed to collect the empty cartridge from you, there’s no point if it’s being discarded on your behalf.
[…]
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan have created the world’s smallest fully programmable, autonomous robots: microscopic swimming machines that can independently sense and respond to their surroundings, operate for months and cost just a penny each.
A microrobot, fully integrated with sensors and a computer, small enough to balance on the ridge of a fingerprint. (Credit: Marc Miskin, Penn)
Barely visible to the naked eye, each robot measures about 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers, smaller than a grain of salt. Operating at the scale of many biological microorganisms, the robots could advance medicine by monitoring the health of individual cells and manufacturing by helping construct microscale devices.
Powered by light, the robots carry microscopic computers and can be programmed to move in complex patterns, sense local temperatures and adjust their paths accordingly.
Described in Science Robotics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the robots operate without tethers, magnetic fields or joystick-like control from the outside, making them the first truly autonomous, programmable robots at this scale.
“We’ve made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller,” says Marc Miskin, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering and the papers’ senior author. “That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots.”
[…]
Large aquatic creatures, like fish, move by pushing the water behind them. Thanks to Newton’s Third Law, the water exerts an equal and opposite force on the fish, propelling it forward.
A projected timelapse of tracer particle trajectories near a robot consisting of three motors tied together.. (Credit: Lucas Hanson and William Reinhardt, University of Pennsylvania)
The new robots, by contrast, don’t flex their bodies at all. Rather, they generate an electrical field that nudges ions in the surrounding solution. Those ions, in turn, push on nearby water molecules, animating the water around the robot’s body. “It’s as if the robot is in a moving river,” says Miskin, “but the robot is also causing the river to move.”
The robots can adjust the electrical field that causes the effect, allowing them to move in complex patterns and even travel in coordinated groups, much like a school of fish, at speeds of up to one body length per second.
And because the electrodes that generate the field have no moving parts, the robots are extremely durable. “You can repeatedly transfer these robots from one sample to another using a micropipette without damaging them,” says Miskin. Charged by the glow of an LED, the robots can keep swimming for months on end.
[…]
The robot has a complete onboard computer, which allows it to receive and follow instructions autonomously. (Miskin Lab and Blaauw Lab)
“The key challenge for the electronics,” says Blaauw, “is that the solar panels are tiny and produce only 75 nanowatts of power. That is over 100,000 times less power than what a smart watch consumes.” To run the robot’s computer on such little power, the Michigan team developed special circuits that operate at extremely low voltages and bring down the computer’s power consumption by more than 1000 times.
Still, the solar panels occupy the majority of the space on the robot. Therefore, the second challenge was to cram the processor and memory to store a program in the little space that remained. “We had to totally rethink the computer program instructions,” says Blaauw, “condensing what conventionally would require many instructions for propulsion control into a single, special instruction to shrink the program’s length to fit in the robot’s tiny memory space.”
[…]
The robots have electronic sensors that can detect the temperature to within a third of a degree Celsius. This lets robots move towards areas of increasing temperature, or report the temperature — a proxy for cellular activity — allowing them to monitor the health of individual cells.
“To report out their temperature measurements, we designed a special computer instruction that encodes a value, such as the measured temperature, in the wiggles of a little dance the robot performs,” says Blaauw. “We then look at this dance through a microscope with a camera and decode from the wiggles what the robots are saying to us. It’s very similar to how honey bees communicate with each other.”
The robots are programmed by pulses of light that also power them. Each robot has a unique address that allows the researchers to load different programs on each robot. “This opens up a host of possibilities,” adds Blaauw, “with each robot potentially performing a different role in a larger, joint task.”
Only the Beginning
The final stages of microrobot fabrication deploy hundreds of robots all at once. The tiny machines can then be programmed individually or en masse to carry out experiments. (Credit: Maya Lassiter, University of Pennsylvania)
Future versions of the robots could store more complex programs, move faster, integrate new sensors or operate in more challenging environments. In essence, the current design is a general platform: its propulsion system works seamlessly with electronics, its circuits can be fabricated cheaply at scale and its design allows for adding new capabilities.
[…]
Source: Penn and Michigan Create World’s Smallest Programmable, Autonomous Robots | Penn Engineering
Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something:
I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.
Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just filed a lawsuit against his own IRS, demanding that taxpayers pay him $10 billion.
Ten. Billion. Dollars.
The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Miami, claims that Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization were grievously harmed when IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica back in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was caught, prosecuted, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence—the system worked, justice was served, case closed. But apparently that’s not enough for a man whose appetite for grift has no discernible ceiling.
Before we dive into why this lawsuit is weapons-grade insane, let’s establish some context that the complaint conveniently glosses over.
When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Every major party nominee since Nixon had done so voluntarily. Trump’s excuse? He was being audited and would release them after the audit was complete. Somehow, nearly a decade later, those returns were never officially released. There’s no clear evidence the audit ever existed. The whole thing had the distinct aroma of a man who had something to hide.
In 2020, the New York Times obtained 17 years of Trump’s tax records from Littlejohn. The reporting revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely by reporting chronic business losses. The House Ways & Means Committee later obtained and released some of his returns through proper legal channels.
And the result of all this exposure? Trump won the 2024 election and his net worth has skyrocketed in such an obvious way that, contra Karoline Leavitt’s statement, it would be difficult to find anyone who legitimately believes that Trump isn’t profiting off his Presidency.
According to Forbes, Trump’s wealth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, driven largely by his crypto ventures and the value of Trump Media and Technology Group. So grievous was the harm from this leak that Trump is now richer than he’s ever been.
Which brings us to the lawsuit. Trump is demanding $10 billion—more than his entire current net worth—from the federal government. The federal government he controls and which he’s stocked with cronies.
[…]
The Department of Justice—which would normally defend the government in such lawsuits—is currently headed by an Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General who previously worked as Trump’s personal lawyers and who have repeatedly made it clear that they view their current jobs as still being the President’s personal lawyers.
[…]
As I wrote last year when Trump demanded a mere $230 million in a similar scheme, this creates a situation where Trump’s own lawyers get to decide whether Trump’s claims should be successful—and potentially how much taxpayer money flows directly into his pocket. The fact that it’s now more than 40 times that amount just demonstrates that his corruption has no upper bound.
The damages claimed are laughable. The complaint lists the horrifying “harm” Trump suffered. Hold onto your hats:
ProPublica published at least 50 articles as a result of Defendants’ unlawful disclosures, many of which contained false and inflammatory claims about Defendants’ confidential tax documents.
And:
Because of Defendants’ wrongful conduct, Plaintiffs were subject to, among many others, at least eight (“8”) separate stories in the New York Times which wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history
Eight. Stories. In the New York Times. That’s apparently worth $10 billion in damages. From the US taxpayer. Trump has probably generated more negative headlines in a single weekend of Truth Social posts.
And if the stories were really defamatory (note: they weren’t) sue those publications for defamation and… see how that goes. Because Trump’s defamation lawsuits have a remarkable track record of getting laughed out of court.
But here—clever, clever, clever—this case need never go to court. The IRS and the DOJ (both run by Trump loyalists) can just “settle” and hand over however much taxpayer money Trump wants.
[…]
Apple, Meta, and Google are locked in a fierce battle to lead the next wave of AI, and they’ve recently increased their focus on hardware. With its latest acquisition of the AI startup Q.ai, Apple aims to gain an edge, particularly in the audio sector.
As first reported by Reuters, Apple has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup specializing in imaging and machine learning, particularly technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments. Apple has been adding new AI features to its AirPods, including the live translation capability introduced last year.
The company has also developed technology that detects subtle facial muscle activity, which could help the tech giant enhance the Vision Pro headset.
The Financial Times reported that the deal is valued at nearly $2 billion, making it Apple’s second-largest acquisition to date, after buying Beats Electronics for $3 billion in 2014.
Notably, this is the second time CEO Aviad Maizels has sold a company to Apple. In 2013, he sold PrimeSense, a 3D-sensing company that played a key role in Apple’s transition from fingerprint sensors to facial recognition on iPhones.
Q.ai launched in 2022 and is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Gradient Ventures, and others. Its founding team, including Maizels and co-founders Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya, will join Apple as part of the acquisition.
[…]
Source: Apple buys Israeli startup Q.ai as the AI race heats up | TechCrunch
tl’dr – if you used the updater to download Notepad++ between from 2025 you could be compromised.
The maintainer of Notepad++ has revealed that state-sponsored attackers hijacked the utility’s update mechanism to redirect update traffic to malicious servers instead.
“The attack involved [an] infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org,” developer Don Ho said. “The compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself.”
The exact mechanism through which this was realized is currently being investigated, Ho added.
The development comes a little over a month after Notepad++ released version 8.8.9 to address an issue that resulted in traffic from WinGUp, the Notepad++ updater, being “occasionally” redirected to malicious domains, resulting in the download of poisoned executables.
Specifically, the problem stemmed from the way the updater verified the integrity and authenticity of the downloaded update file, allowing an attacker who is able to intercept network traffic between the updater client and the update server to trick the tool into downloading a different binary instead.
It’s believed this redirection was highly targeted, with traffic originating from only certain users routed to the rogue servers and fetching the malicious components. The incident is assessed to have commenced in June 2025, more than six months before it came to light.
Independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont revealed that the flaw was being exploited by threat actors in China to hijack networks and deceive targets into downloading malware. In response to the security incident, the Notepad++ website has been migrated to a new hosting provider.
“According to the former hosting provider, the shared hosting server was compromised until September 2, 2025,” Ho explained. “Even after losing server access, attackers maintained credentials to internal services until December 2, 2025, which allowed them to continue redirecting Notepad++ update traffic to malicious servers.”
Found this article interesting? Follow us on Google News, Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.
Source: Notepad++ Official Update Mechanism Hijacked to Deliver Malware to Select Users
Because what the world really needs with great new tech like this is for it to be used as an advertising medium, not something that millions of consumers can actually use on a daily basis.
[…]
As the smallest model in the lineup, the new 13-inch Samsung Color E-Paper offers businesses a compact display option for shelves, counters, tables and doors where traditional paper signage is still widely used. Similar in scale to A4 paper, the display delivers 1,600 x 1,200 resolution in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
With a rechargeable, embedded battery, USB Type-C support and flexible mounting options,1 the display can be deployed without permanent power cables. Its ultra-slim 17.9mm design weighs just 0.9kg with the battery, making it easy to install and reposition across different placements as campaigns change. Samsung’s advanced color imaging algorithm enhances color accuracy and readability to deliver a paper-like look and feel. By smoothing gradations and refining contours, it produces vivid visuals that resemble traditional posters and point-of-purchase displays, helping businesses transition naturally from printed materials to digital signage.
Pioneering Lower‑Impact Signage With Bio‑Based Materials
Samsung’s 13-inch Color E-Paper is the world’s first commercial display to apply a bio-resin derived from phytoplankton in its housing. The display’s housing has been independently verified by global safety and sustainability certification organization UL to consist of 45% recycled plastic and 10% phytoplankton-based bio-resin. This material innovation was developed as an alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastics, which can reduce carbon emissions in the manufacturing process by more than 40%.2
Sustainability is carefully considered in every part of the display, from the housing to the packaging. The entire packaging, including the box, cushion and accessory box, is made from 100% paper.
Day-to-day operation is designed to be just as efficient. The display maintains static images at zero watts power, reducing unnecessary energy usage without compromising reliability.3 When content is updated, overall energy4 use remains far lower than that of conventional digital signage, which helps lower operating costs over time.
Easy Content Control With Samsung E-Paper App and Samsung VXT
Samsung’s 13-inch Color E-Paper supports simple content control for both local and remote operation. The Samsung E-Paper App, available on Android and iOS, allows staff to update and manage local content directly from personal devices, without the need for an additional remote control.
[…]
Alongside the new 13-inch display, Samsung will unveil a 20-inch model for the first time at ISE 2026, a world-renowned audiovisual and systems integration tech show held in Barcelona from Feb. 3-6. With this expansion of the Color E-Paper lineup beyond the existing 32-inch model offering, the Color E-Paper portfolio is increasingly designed to support a wide range of business needs.
[…]
Cybersecurity Researcher Jeremiah Fowler uncovered a data leak of 149 million logins and passwords, and shared his findings with ExpressVPN. We are publishing his report to help the public stay informed and protected as part of our ongoing effort to highlight important security risks.
The publicly exposed database was not password-protected or encrypted. It contained 149,404,754 unique logins and passwords, totaling a massive 96 GB of raw credential data. In a limited sampling of the exposed documents, I saw thousands of files that included emails, usernames, passwords, and the URL links to the login or authorization for the accounts. This is not the first dataset of this kind I have discovered and it only highlights the global threat posed by credential-stealing malware. When data is collected, stolen, or harvested it must be stored somewhere and a cloud based repository is usually the best solution. This discovery also shows that even cybercriminals are not immune to data breaches. The database was publicly accessible, allowing anyone who discovered it to potentially access the credentials of millions of individuals.
The exposed records included usernames and passwords collected from victims around the world, spanning a wide range of commonly used online services and about any type of account imaginable. These ranged from social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and X (formerly Twitter), as well as dating sites or apps, and OnlyFans accounts indicating login paths of both creators and customers. I also saw a large number of streaming and entertainment accounts, including Netflix, HBOmax, DisneyPlus, Roblox, and more. Financial services accounts, crypto wallets or trading accounts, banking and credit card logins also appeared in the limited sample of records I reviewed.
One serious concern was the presence of credentials associated with .gov domains from numerous countries
[…]
The database had no associated ownership information so I reported it directly to the hosting provider via their online report abuse form. I received a reply several days later stating that they do not host the IP and it is a subsidiary that operates independently while still using the parent organization’s name. It took nearly a month and multiple attempts before action was finally taken and the hosting was suspended and millions of stolen login credentials were no longer accessible. The hosting provider would not disclose any additional information regarding who managed the database, it is not known if the database was used for criminal activity or if this information was gathered for legitimate research purposes or how or why the database was publicly exposed. It is not known how long the database was exposed before I discovered and reported it or others may have gained access to it. One disturbing fact is that the number of records increased from the time I discovered the database until it was restricted and no longer available.
Breakdown of Email Providers (estimated)
- 48M – Gmail
- 4M – Yahoo
- 1.5M – Outlook
- 900k – iCloud
- 1.4M – .edu
Other notable accounts included:
- 17M – FaceBook
- 6.5M – Instagram
- 780k – TikTok
- 3.4M – Netflix
- 100k – OnlyFans
- 420k – Binance
This screenshot shows the total count of records and size of the exposed infostealer database.
This image shows screenshots of accounts and credentials including Instagram, Google accounts, and OnlyFans.
This image shows screenshots of accounts and credentials including Facebook, a government account from Brazil, and a WordPress administrative login.
This screenshot shows how the index was searchable using nothing more than a web browser.
The database appeared to store keylogging and “infostealer” malware,
[…]
Why they couldn’t fund a French company to contribute to a well working open source platform like Jitsi is beyond me.
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 announced on Monday.
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.
What is Visio?
Visio is part of France’s Suite Numérique plan, a digital ecosystem of sovereign tools designed to replace the use of US online services such as Gmail and Slack. These tools are for civil servants and not for public or private company use.
The platform also has an artificial intelligence-powered meeting transcript and speaker diarization feature, using the technology of the French start-up Pyannote.
Viso is also hosted on the French company Outscale’s sovereign cloud infrastructure, which is a subsidiary of French software company Dassault Systèmes.
The French government said that switching to Visio could cut licensing costs and save as much as €1 million per year for every 100,000 users.
The move also comes as Europe has questioned its overreliance on US information technology (IT) infrastructure following US cloud outages last year.
“This strategy highlights France’s commitment to digital sovereignty amid rising geopolitical tensions and fears of foreign surveillance or service disruptions,” Amiel said.
Let us not forget that the reason Nazi Germany was so great at exporting Jews from the Netherlands was for a large part because of the great databases the Netherlands kept at that time containing religious and ethnic information on its’ population.
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.
The RFI is not a solicitation for bids. Rather it represents an attempt to conduct market research into the spectrum of data – personal, financial, location, health, and so on – that ICE investigators can source from technology and advertising companies.
“[T]he Government is seeking to understand the current state of Ad Tech compliant and location data services available to federal investigative and operational entities, considering regulatory constraints and privacy expectations of support investigations activities,” the RFI explains.
Issued on Friday, January 23, 2026, one day prior to the shooting of VA nurse Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent, two weeks after the shooting of Renée Good, and three weeks after the shooting of Keith Porter Jr, the RFI lands amid growing disapproval of ICE tactics and mounting pressure to withhold funding for the agency.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request to elaborate on how it might use ad tech data and to share whether any companies have responded to its invitation.
The RFI follows a similar solicitation published last October for a contractor capable of providing ICE with open source intelligence and social media information to assist the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) directorate’s Targeting Operations Division – tasked with finding and removing “aliens that pose a threat to public safety or national security.”
[…]
Tom Bowman, policy counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology’s (CDT) Security & Surveillance Project, told The Register in a phone interview that ICE is attempting to rebrand surveillance as a commercial transaction.
“But that doesn’t make the surveillance any less intrusive or any less constitutionally suspect,” said Bowman. “This inquiry specifically underscores what really is a long-standing problem – that government agencies have been able to sidestep Fourth Amendment protections by purchasing data that would otherwise need a warrant to collect.”
The data derived from ad tech and various technology businesses, said Bowman, can reveal intimate details about people’s lives, including visits to medical facilities and places of worship.
[…]
“Ad tech compliance regimes were never designed to protect people from government surveillance or coercive enforcement,” he said. “Ad tech data is often collected via consent that is meaningless. The data flows are opaque. And then these types of downstream uses are really difficult to control.”
Bowman argues that while there’s been a broad failure to meaningfully regulate data brokers, legislative solutions are possible.
[…]
Source: ICE takes aim at data held by advertising and tech firms • The Register
According to Appfigures, the top five free iPhone apps right now in the U.S. are:
- ChatGPT
- JumpJumpVPN
- V2Box
- UpScrolled
- Threads
Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the overall most popular iPhone apps for all of 2025, and the top five were:
- ChatGPT
- Threads
- TikTok
I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s not exactly a stretch to infer that the three apps that have suddenly squeezed in between ChatGPT and Threads are on the list due to dissatisfaction with TikTok. Two are VPN apps, which can theoretically be used to access TikTok from a virtual network in a country where the U.S. version of TikTok is unnecessary, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and text sharing app that recently went viral.
To refresh your memory on what’s going on with TikTok, after years of trying to force Chinese-owned ByteDance to relinquish ownership and let a U.S.-friendly buyer take over, a legal entity was created earlier this month that can take ownership of TikTok, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This allows TikTok to comply with a new U.S. law essentially requiring TikTok to be run by a U.S. company or be banned.
But this entity, a complex joint corporate venture in charge of U.S. operations for TikTok, appears from the outside to be struggling to keep everything in order, amid the handoff from TikTok’s Singapore base of operations (U.S. TikTok data was already largely housed in the U.S., so it’s not clear if this transition actually involves any large, burdensome data transfers).
According to an X post from TikTok, the problem is that there’s been “a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites,” and there may be various glitches, service slowdowns, failures, and issues with user metrics. Oracle has further clarified that the TikTok issue stems from a weather-related blackout at one of its data centers. Oracle owns 15 percent of the new TikTok U.S. venture.
The issues TikTok is referring to dovetail nicely with the descriptions of problems described by users likw videos that sit in review indefinitely, and posts that get low or zero view counts, often despite high numbers for other engagement metrics like comments or shares. Other general issues that fit with a data center interruption include a possible lack of analytics in TikTok Studio, livestreamers apparently getting random messages saying they need to stop streaming immediately, and irrelevant search results.
[…]
Source: Looks Like American TikTok’s Problems Are Sending Users Flocking to Alternatives
It’s quite bizarre that TikTok has to use an outmoded platform which is not in the top social networks (X Twitter) to post that it is experiencing problems.
Google has agreed to pay $68m (£51m) to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people’s private conversations through their phones.
Users accused Google Assistant – a virtual assistant present on many Android devices – of recording private conversations after it was inadvertently triggered on their devices.
They claimed the recordings were then shared with advertisers in order to send them targeted advertising.
The BBC has contacted Google for comment. But in a filing seeking to settle the case, it denied wrongdoing and said it was seeking to avoid litigation.
Google Assistant is designed to wait in standby mode until it hears a particular phrase – typically “Hey Google” – which activates it.
The phone then records what it hears and sends the recording to Google’s servers where it can be analysed.
[…]
The claim has been brought as a class action lawsuit rather than an individual case – meaning if it is approved, the money will be paid out across many different claimants.
Those eligible for a payout will have owned Google devices dating back to May 2016.
But lawyers for the plaintiffs may ask for up to one-third of the settlement – amounting to about $22m in legal fees.
It follows a similar case in January where Apple agreed to pay $95m to settle a case alleging some of its devices were listening to people through its voice-activated assistant Siri without their permission.
The tech firm also denied any wrongdoing, as well as claims that it “recorded, disclosed to third parties, or failed to delete, conversations recorded as the result of a Siri activation” without consent.
Source: Google to pay $68m to settle lawsuit claiming it recorded private conversations
A recent report released by Lunio, a platform specializing in invalid traffic (IVT) detection and prevention, reveals that a staggering $63 billion (€53.6 billion) is wasted annually on digital advertising due to bot traffic and ad fraud. This finding underscores a significant issue plaguing the advertising industry.
The 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report released by Lunio analyzes over 2.7 billion paid ad clicks across major platforms such as Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Bing, covering the period from August 2024 to August 2025. The results paint a rather grim picture of the challenges faced by advertisers in ensuring genuine user engagement.
The Hidden Costs of Invalid Traffic
Invalid traffic, or IVT, encompasses clicks, impressions, or conversions that originate from users lacking genuine intent. This can range from coordinated bot activities and automated scraping to malicious competitor behavior or accidental clicks. While some invalid traffic may not be intentionally harmful, it invariably drains advertising budgets and distorts analytics, which, in turn, misguides automated targeting algorithms.
According to Lunio’s analysis, 8.51% of all paid traffic is classified as invalid, resulting in a silent yet substantial burden on return on ad spend (ROAS). For advertisers aiming for a 3-4x ROAS, even a small IVT rate could mean millions in potential lost revenue, as marketing budgets are wasted on traffic that fails to convert.
TikTok and Social Platforms Suffer the Most
The report highlights distinctive differences in IVT rates across ad platforms, with TikTok exhibiting the highest average IVT rate at 24.2%. This alarming statistic indicates that nearly one in four paid ad clicks on the site is associated with non-human or invalid activity. The rapid growth of TikTok, combined with high levels of automated engagement, has made the platform particularly susceptible to fraud.
Other social platforms are also grappling with high IVT exposure, with LinkedIn and X/Twitter recording rates of 19.88% and 12.79%, respectively. Conversely, Meta has managed to achieve an average IVT of 8.2%, thanks in part to extensive investments in bot detection and fraud prevention, bolstering advertiser confidence in their platform.
Google’s Strengths and Weaknesses
Among major search platforms, Google continues to outperform Bing and Microsoft in terms of managing invalid traffic. Lunio’s data shows that Google Ads boasts an average IVT rate of 7.57%, compared to Bing’s 10.32%. However, the report also identifies weaknesses within Google’s extensive advertising ecosystem. While search campaigns remain the cleanest format, with an average IVT rate of 5.21%, this rate escalates significantly when moving to automated inventory. Display and video campaigns, for instance, recorded IVT rates of 12.02% and 20.62%, respectively.
As Google shifts towards more automated solutions, visibility over traffic quality becomes increasingly essential to prevent wasted budgets from extending alongside performance gains. The findings indicate that while Google’s search platform may be a robust option, the rising automation across its ecosystem presents a duality of risk.
Industry Impact and Future Challenges
Industries such as financial services, education, and telecommunications are disproportionately affected by invalid traffic, with lead generation campaigns encountering 32% higher rates compared to eCommerce models. Gaming and iGaming take the lead, averaging an astonishing IVT rate of 18.49% largely due to aggressive competition and the prevalence of sophisticated fraud.
Moreover, the emergence of “agentic AI,” autonomous systems interacting with ads on behalf of users, presents an evolving challenge for marketers. While not inherently malicious, this new category complicates the distinction between genuine engagement and synthetic interaction. According to Simran Cashyap, CPTO of Lunio, this technological advancement may disrupt conventional understandings of “real” traffic, urging advertisers to seek stronger tools and protections to ensure that their optimization processes remain grounded in reality.
As automation reshapes the digital advertising landscape, gaining visibility into traffic quality is not merely a defensive strategy but a competitive advantage. The industry faces the complex task of evolving alongside faster technological advancements in order to maintain integrity in performance metrics. The full report can be accessed at Advanced Television.
The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union’s executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. “The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices,” the Commission said in a statement.
The company will also have to hand over “anonymized ranking, query, click and view data held by Google Search” to rival search engines. The Commission says this will help competing companies to optimize their services and offer more viable alternatives to Google Search.
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Google was already in hot water with the EU for allegedly favoring its own services — such as travel, finance and shopping — over those from rivals and stopping Google Play app developers from easily directing consumers to alternative, cheaper ways to pay for digital goods and services. The bloc charged Google with DMA violations related to those issues last March.
In November, the EU opened an investigation into Google’s alleged demotion of commercial content on news websites in search results. The following month, it commenced a probe into Google’s AI practices, including whether the company used online publishers’ material for AI Overviews and AI Mode without “appropriate compensation” or offering the ability to opt out.
Source: The EU tells Google to give external AI assistants the same access to Android as Gemini has
Whitening your teeth often comes at a financial and physical cost. Many of today’s most popular products including gels, strips, and rinses rely on peroxide-based bleaching solutions. While effective, the chemical processes generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) compounds that not only destroy staining molecules—they can eventually erode tooth enamel. Over time, this can actually make it easier to stain again or cause long-term dental health problems.
According to a study published in the journal ACS Nano, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed an alternative solution that not only whitens teeth, but repairs them, too. Instead of harsh chemicals, the new method relies on vibrations.
The team swapped peroxide for their new ceramic powder creation called BSCT. To make it, they heated a solution of strontium and calcium ions as well as barium titanate. If shaken quickly enough (such as with an electric toothbrush), the mixture generates a tiny electric field through what’s called the piezoelectric effect. While commonly associated with guitar amplification and electric cigarette lighters, piezoelectricity also creates ROS chemical reactions that are similar to peroxide bleach.
After artificially staining human teeth with coffee and tea, researchers applied BSCT and saw visible whitening after four hours of utilizing an electric toothbrush. By 12 hours of brushing, the teeth were nearly 50 percent whiter than control teeth brushed with saline. Not only that, but BSCT actually regenerated damaged dentin and enamel thanks to healing deposits of barium, calcium, and strontium layered atop the teeth.
A second experiment involved rats fed with high-sugar diets. Researchers brushed the rodents’ teeth for one minute per day over four weeks, then measured their oral microbiomes. They discovered the BSCT powder killed common mouth bacteria such as Porphyromonas gingivalis and Staphylococcus aureus while also reducing inflammation.
The team hasn’t incorporated BSCT powder into an actual toothpaste yet, but hope to experiment with combinations in the future. In the meantime, they believe their alternative to harsh whitening products may soon find their way into dentist offices and stores.
Source: New whitening powder activates with your electric toothbrush | Popular Science
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Confidence—not just agreement—shapes how persuasive a message is
The study, in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, reveals that the persuasiveness of a message can hinge on the type of words it uses—specifically, whether those words have clear opposites. The research shows that when companies frame a message with words that are “reversible,” meaning they have an easily retrievable opposite (such as intense/mild or guilty/innocent), people who disagree with the claim tend to mentally flip it to the opposite meaning (for example, “The scent is intense” becomes “The scent is mild”).
Why words with clear opposites are processed differently
The study shows that this difference matters because people handle disagreement in different ways. When a message uses a word with a clear opposite, rejecting the claim requires an extra step retrieving and substituting the opposite word which makes people feel less certain about their opposing belief.
But when a word doesn’t have a clear opposite, people tend to negate them by simply adding “not” to the original word (for example, “not prominent” or “not romantic”). In those cases, the study finds that skeptics tend to feel more confident in their counter-belief, making those messages less effective overall.
A strategic advantage for marketers
“For marketers, this creates a powerful advantage: by using easily reversible words in a positive affirmation—such as ‘the scent is intense’—companies can maximize certainty among those who accept the claim while minimizing certainty among people who reject the message, because they tend to feel less strongly about their opposing belief,” said Maimone, who is now a postdoctoral scholar in marketing at the University of Florida.
“Our study highlights a subtle but influential linguistic mechanism that helps explain why some marketing and political messages are more effective than others.”
That’s why this matters for marketing. If a company uses a simple, positive claim with an easily reversible word—like “the scent is intense”—most consumers who believe it feel confident in that belief. But even the consumers who disagree tend to feel less sure about their own negative conclusion because flipping the message to the opposite (“it’s mild”) takes extra mental work.
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Source: Why some messages are more convincing than others
Great target for hackers then, the server with unencrypted bitlocker keys on it.
Microsoft has confirmed in a statement to Forbes that the company will provide the FBI access to BitLocker encryption keys if a valid legal order is requested. These keys enable the ability to decrypt and access the data on a computer running Windows, giving law enforcement the means to break into a device and access its data.
The news comes as Forbes reports that Microsoft gave the FBI the BitLocker encryption keys to access a device in Guam that law enforcement believed to have “evidence that would help prove individuals handling the island’s Covid unemployment assistance program were part of a plot to steal funds” in early 2025.
Source: Microsoft gave FBI BitLocker keys, raising privacy fears | Windows Central
Heads up, workers of the world: Microsoft 365 is currently down. Microsoft’s flagship work suite, which includes tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, is currently experiencing issues impacting users. It’s not yet clear exactly why these problems are occurring, but according to Downdetector (owned by Lifehacker parent company Ziff Davis) thousands of users are reporting issues.
There are any number of causes that could trigger a widespread outage like this, and in all likelihood, Microsoft will have the issue isolated and fixed soon—especially considering how many companies and users rely on Microsoft 365 to function. But it does follow a number of high-profile outages this week. Just this morning, Yahoo! and AOL were both down. Last week, X experienced an outage, as did Verizon—quite famously, I might add.
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Source: It’s Not Just You, Microsoft 365 Is Down | Lifehacker
A study led by Stanford Medicine researchers has found that an injection blocking a protein linked to aging can reverse the natural loss of knee cartilage in older mice. The same treatment also stopped arthritis from developing after knee injuries that resemble ACL tears, which are common among athletes and recreational exercisers. Researchers note that an oral version of the treatment is already being tested in clinical trials aimed at treating age-related muscle weakness.
Human cartilage samples taken from knee replacement surgeries also responded positively. These samples included both the supportive extracellular matrix of the joint and cartilage-producing chondrocyte cells. When treated, the tissue began forming new, functional cartilage.
Together, the findings suggest that cartilage lost due to aging or arthritis may one day be restored using either a pill or a targeted injection. If successful in people, such treatments could reduce or even eliminate the need for knee and hip replacement surgery.
A Direct Attack on Osteoarthritis
Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease that affects about one in five adults in the United States and generates an estimated $65 billion each year in direct health care costs. Current treatments focus on managing pain or replacing damaged joints surgically. There are no approved drugs that can slow or reverse the underlying cartilage damage.
The new approach targets the root cause of the disease rather than its symptoms, offering a potential shift in how osteoarthritis is treated.
The Role of a Master Aging Enzyme
The protein at the center of the study is called 15-PGDH. Researchers refer to it as a gerozyme because its levels increase as the body ages. Gerozymes were identified by the same research team in 2023 and are known to drive the gradual loss of tissue function.
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In most of these tissues, repair happens through the activation and specialization of stem cells. Cartilage appears to be different. In this case, chondrocytes change how their genes behave, shifting into a more youthful state without relying on stem cells.
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Earlier research from Blau’s lab showed that prostaglandin E2 is essential for muscle stem cell function. The enzyme 15-PGDH breaks down prostaglandin E2. By blocking 15-PGDH or increasing prostaglandin E2 levels, researchers previously supported the repair of damaged muscle, nerve, bone, colon, liver, and blood cells in young mice.
This led the team to question whether the same pathway might be involved in cartilage aging and joint damage. When they compared knee cartilage from young and old mice, they found that 15-PGDH levels roughly doubled with age.
Regrowing Cartilage in Aging Knees
Researchers then injected older mice with a small molecule that inhibits 15-PGDH. They first administered the drug into the abdomen to affect the entire body, and later injected it directly into the knee joint. In both cases, cartilage that had become thin and dysfunctional with age thickened across the joint surface.
Additional tests confirmed that the regenerated tissue was hyaline cartilage rather than the less functional fibrocartilage.
“Cartilage regeneration to such an extent in aged mice took us by surprise,” Bhutani said. “The effect was remarkable.”
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The researchers also tested cartilage taken from patients undergoing total knee replacement for osteoarthritis. After one week of treatment with the 15-PGDH inhibitor, the tissue showed fewer 15-PGDH-producing chondrocytes, reduced expression of cartilage degradation and fibrocartilage genes, and early signs of articular cartilage regeneration.
“The mechanism is quite striking and really shifted our perspective about how tissue regeneration can occur,” Bhutani said. “It’s clear that a large pool of already existing cells in cartilage are changing their gene expression patterns. And by targeting these cells for regeneration, we may have an opportunity to have a bigger overall impact clinically.”
Looking Toward Human Trials
Blau added, “Phase 1 clinical trials of a 15-PGDH inhibitor for muscle weakness have shown that it is safe and active in healthy volunteers. Our hope is that a similar trial will be launched soon to test its effect in cartilage regeneration. We are very excited about this potential breakthrough. Imagine regrowing existing cartilage and avoiding joint replacement.”
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Source: Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis | ScienceDaily
Microsoft’s January Windows update has delivered another blow for unsuspecting users – apps including Outlook might freeze when saving files to cloud storage services such as OneDrive or Dropbox.
The megacorp acknowledged the latest issue days after releasing an emergency out-of-band update to deal with connection and authentication failures in the Windows App. Yet another fault in the update caused some Windows 11 23H2 PCs to refuse to shut down or hibernate.
According to Microsoft, after installing the January 13 update, “some applications might become unresponsive or experience unexpected errors when opening files from or saving files to cloud-backed storage, such as OneDrive or Dropbox.”
One application is Outlook, which, when combined with a PST (Personal Storage Table) file on OneDrive, “might become unresponsive and fail to reopen unless its process is terminated in Task Manager, or the system is restarted.” Sent emails might also fail to appear.
The workaround for Outlook is to move the PST file out of OneDrive. Putting a PST file in OneDrive is generally not recommended except for backup purposes, though there are plenty of scenarios where users or administrators do so, and changing a workflow due to a bug introduced by an update is not ideal.
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Source: Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive • The Register
one of the main roles of RSS is to supply directly to you a steady stream of updates from a website. Every new article published on that site is served up in a list that can be interpreted by an RSS reader.
In earlier, simpler internet times, RSS was the way to keep up to date with what was happening on all of your favorite sites. You would open your RSS reader and tap through newly published articles one by one, in chronological order, in the same way you would check your email. It was an easy way to keep tabs on what was new and what was of interest.
Unfortunately, RSS is no longer how most of us consume “content.” (Google famously killed its beloved Google Reader more than a decade ago.) It’s now the norm to check social media or the front pages of many different sites to see what’s new
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The RSS standard actually remains the default way of distributing podcasts, with each new episode—together with the episode title, cover art, and descriptive blurb—appearing as a new entry in the feed of your podcast app of choice. When you subscribe to a new show through Pocket Casts or Apple Podcasts, you’re essentially pointing the app towards the RSS feed for the podcast you want to listen to, and it takes care of serving up each new episode.
In times gone by, websites would prominently display their RSS feed links somewhere on the front page. That’s less common now, but you can often find these feeds if you dig deeper or run a web search for them (incidentally, the Lifehacker RSS feed can be found here). Some sites offer multiple RSS feeds covering different categories of content, such as tech or sports.
Even when a site doesn’t explicitly offer RSS feeds, the best RSS readers can now produce their own approximation of them by watching for new activity on a site, so you can direct the app toward the site you want to keep tabs on
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RSS is clearly useful if you have a selection of favorite websites and you want to skim through everything they publish (or everything they publish in a certain category, if the site has several feeds). No one is choosing what you see but you—you have more control over your news diet, free from any choices made by an algorithm.
Using RSS means you can catch up on everything, methodically and chronologically, even if you’ve been offline for a week (you don’t have to catch up on everything, of course—but you can, if you want, as your feed will operate on an infinite scroll). It’s also a cleaner, less cluttered way of using the internet, as you only need to click through on the specific articles you want to read.
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RSS readers aren’t quite as ubiquitous as they once were, but you can still find quite a few if you take a look around.
Feedly
The best RSS reader currently in operation is arguably Feedly, which offers a bunch of features across free and paid-for plans (starting from $8 per month): It has a clean, clear interface, it can generate RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them, it can sort feeds in a variety of ways, it can incorporate email newsletters, and plenty more besides.
Feeder
Feeder is a good place to start for RSS newbies because it gets you up and running quickly, and offers a straightforward interface. It works seamlessly across all the major platforms, and if you need extra bells and whistles—including a real time dashboard, access to more feeds, and sophisticated filters for your feeds—paid plans start at $9.99 per month.
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Source: Why Everyone Should Still Use an RSS Reader in 2026 | Lifehacker
Matt Damon has claimed that Netflix pushes directors to reiterate the plot for viewers who are watching while on their phones.
The actor has just released new action film The Rip on the streaming platform, which sees him reunite with frequent collaborator Ben Affleck.
During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast alongside his co-star, Damon spoke about collaborating with Netflix, saying they want bigger action earlier in such films, and push for the plot to be repeated to accommodate attention spans.
“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces,” he said. “One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third… You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale.
“And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”
Affleck went on to praise Netflix series Adolescence, which became a huge success last year, and the fact that it “didn’t do any of that shit”.
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Source: Threads Is Now Clearly More Popular Than X (in Mobile App Form), Report Says
Insane that people are still on X. Numbers for both platforms will be inflated due to embeds on web.
Matt Damon has claimed that Netflix pushes directors to reiterate the plot for viewers who are watching while on their phones.
The actor has just released new action film The Rip on the streaming platform, which sees him reunite with frequent collaborator Ben Affleck.
During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast alongside his co-star, Damon spoke about collaborating with Netflix, saying they want bigger action earlier in such films, and push for the plot to be repeated to accommodate attention spans.
“The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have three set pieces,” he said. “One in the first act, one in the second, one in the third… You spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your finale.
“And now they’re like, ‘Can we get a big one in the first five minutes? We want people to stay tuned in. And it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.’”
Affleck went on to praise Netflix series Adolescence, which became a huge success last year, and the fact that it “didn’t do any of that shit”.
[…]
Source: Netflix tells directors to repeat plot for people using phones while watching, says Matt Damon
The growing integration of LLMs into applications has introduced new security risks, notably known as Promptware – maliciously engineered prompts designed to manipulate LLMs to compromise the CIA triad of these applications. While prior research warned about a potential shift in the threat landscape for LLM-powered applications, the risk posed by Promptware is frequently perceived as low. In this paper, we investigate the risk Promptware poses to users of Gemini-powered assistants (web application, mobile application, and Google Assistant). We propose a novel Threat Analysis and Risk Assessment (TARA) framework to assess Promptware risks for end users. Our analysis focuses on a new variant of Promptware called Targeted Promptware Attacks, which leverage indirect prompt injection via common user interactions such as emails, calendar invitations, and shared documents. We demonstrate 14 attack scenarios applied against Gemini-powered assistants across five identified threat classes: Short-term Context Poisoning, Permanent Memory Poisoning, Tool Misuse, Automatic Agent Invocation, and Automatic App Invocation. These attacks highlight both digital and physical consequences, including spamming, phishing, disinformation campaigns, data exfiltration, unapproved user video streaming, and control of home automation devices. We reveal Promptware’s potential for on-device lateral movement, escaping the boundaries of the LLM-powered application, to trigger malicious actions using a device’s applications. Our TARA reveals that 73% of the analyzed threats pose High-Critical risk to end users. We discuss mitigations and reassess the risk (in response to deployed mitigations) and show that the risk could be reduced significantly to Very Low-Medium. We disclosed our findings to Google, which deployed dedicated mitigations.
This screenshot shows the total count of records and size of the exposed infostealer database.
