Meta updated its commercial terms of use to state it could "use any content from a business account's domains, web pages, or URLs" to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain its products and services. Legal experts quoted by Nieman Lab read this as a "remarkable provision" that could let Meta scrape any publisher with a Me…
A US federal magistrate judge in San Francisco ordered former OpenAI engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan to remain in custody, citing flight risk. Prosecutors allege he planted a covert audio recording device, hidden in toilet paper behind a TV, in an executive conference room used for confidential meetings. OpenAI found the device in late Septe…
Meta's AI companion app Muse has reached 10.9 million downloads since its September debut, 10.2 million of them in the United States, according to Sensor Tower. Only 11 other apps have reached 10 million U.S. downloads within 40 days of launch. The most recent was Threads in July 2023, and most of the others were mobile games. Muse is ava…
Privacy firm Redact found that around 80 WhatsApp help and FAQ pages exposed hidden text instructions written for a Meta large language model support chatbot. The text, about 100 blocks in total, sat in the page source under a code block headed "HelpContentGalaxyLLMInclude". Some instructions told the chatbot not to recommend contacting a…
Federal prosecutors charged Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and US permanent resident who joined OpenAI in July 2025, with using a device to intercept oral communications. He allegedly planted a covert audio recorder in an executive-only conference room no later than 28 September 2026. OpenAI's countersurveillance sweep …
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, analyzed December 2025 exploitation of React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182), a CVSS 10.0 unsafe deserialization RCE in React Server Components. It was disclosed on 3 December 2025 and rose to second place among the most exploited CVEs, behind only CVE-2017-9841. Within days of disclosure, actors moved from …
Meta is updating its commercial terms for Meta Business Suite, effective Oct. 30. Under the new terms, accounts authorize Meta and any entity acting on its behalf to use scrapers, bots, crawlers and user agents on domains and URLs "associated with" the account, including news publisher sites. Nieman Lab first reported the change, and lega…
Meta will update its commercial terms on October 30, 2026, authorizing the company or anyone acting on its behalf to scrape content from websites associated with business customers and use it to train AI models and improve its products. "Business customer" is defined broadly: it covers advertisers, sellers, app developers, Page and Group …
Court documents analyzed by NPR indicate that TikTok employees repeatedly warned leadership about risks to minors, including sexual exploitation in live streams and exposure to harmful content. An internal investigation reportedly found children aged 13 to 15 in 112,000 TikTok Live videos in January 2022 alone, with risks of grooming by p…
Canada's proposed C-22 bill, first put forward in 2025 and since partly revised, would require tech companies, including foreign ones, to introduce "technical capabilities" for law enforcement data access. It would also require retention of user metadata. Signal has said it would exit the Canadian market, and Psiphon VPN says it will leav…
Yelp has added a Check for Me feature to its app. An AI voice agent calls a restaurant on the user's behalf to check wait times and texts the result back, based on the party size and phone number the user enters. Yelp is also updating its Yelp AI assistant with an OpenTable booking integration, memory of preferences, 30 days of chat histo…
Court records obtained by NPR show that TikTok employees repeatedly warned executives about risks the platform posed to minors, including sexual exploitation and exposure to suicide-related content. Employee depositions filed in March 2026 describe frustration with how leadership responded. Staff reportedly flagged minors appearing in sex…
Check Point Research reports that commercial antidetect browsers Kameleo, AdsPower and MultiLogin are widely referenced on Russian-language underground forums and are used for account takeover, carding, fraudulent loan applications, ad-revenue fraud and coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB). The tools spoof browser fingerprints, manage p…
On Tuesday Google released TorchTPU as an open-source project. It lets PyTorch AI applications run on Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Google Cloud through a configuration change, with no application rewrite. A day earlier Amazon announced TorchNeuron, which ports PyTorch apps to its Trainium chip and AWS. Amazon is also submit…
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered federal civilian agencies to stop buying DeepSeek products and services and to remove them from government IT systems, citing national security concerns. The order also covers third-party products and services built on DeepSeek technology, though agencies may request exceptions. DHS…
WhatsApp help pages carried hidden instructions for its WhatsApp Support with AI chatbot. They told it not to recommend a data protection authority to users who could not delete their accounts, and not to cite privacy laws such as the GDPR once a user mentioned a lawyer, lawsuit or court. This contradicts WhatsApp's privacy policy for Eur…
Flashpoint joined the UK National Crime Agency (NCA), the DOJ, FBI, U.S. Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and private-sector partners in "Joint Disruption Week", held in London the week beginning October 6, 2026. The operation targeted West African scam networks running cryptocurrency investment scams, impersonation scheme…
Trend Micro announced that contestants at Pwn2Own Ireland 2025 discovered and disclosed 73 unique zero-day vulnerabilities across printers, network storage systems, smart home devices, surveillance equipment, home networking equipment, flagship smartphones and wearables. A total of $1,024,750 was awarded from a prize pool of over $2 milli…
This WeLiveSecurity explainer gives practical advice to people targeted by AI-generated deepfakes, which are increasingly used in fraud, extortion, harassment and non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). It sets out the legal context: the US TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes NCII distribution and requires platforms to remove reported content w…
Tolan, an AI companion app that helps users manage daily tasks, relationships and emotions, raised $30 million from Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Homebrew, according to Upstarts Media. The round doubles its total funding. The company did not disclose its valuation; PitchBook estimates it at more than $268 million with medium …