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Content warning: This story contains references to violence, suicide, child abuse and self-harm. A suicide attempt, depression, substance abuse, insomnia, surveillance, threats. These are just some of the experiences reported by the low-paid moderators tasked with sifting through Facebook and Instagram’s most disturbing images. The tech giant Meta, which owns both platforms, has kept the whereabouts of this operation a closely guarded secret since moving it from Kenya, where the company is facing lawsuits over working conditions and human rights. For months, it has also refused to name the company that won the lucrative contract to provide the content moderators...

Every August, the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Georgia is accompanied by familiar reflections about missed warning signs, intelligence failures, and a supposedly unexpected turning point in European security. The language has become so standardized that it obscures a far more uncomfortable reality. Georgia did not reveal a new Russia. It exposed a Russia that had been behaving consistently for nearly two decades while much of the West continued searching for evidence that Moscow had fundamentally changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Describing the failure to recognize this trajectory as a collection of mistakes understates what actually occurred....

Cyber warfare is increasingly coming for U.S. water supplies. Water providers in at least seven U.S. states have been targeted by cyberattacks over the past two weeks, according to multiple agencies including the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Some officials indicated that as many as a dozen states could have been impacted. The hackers targeted components known as programmable logic controllers, which allow utility providers to manage the flow and even chemical composition of water supplies to the homes and businesses they serve, according to the agencies. In many cases, they...

Federal and state officials are racing to address an assault on the nation’s water supply that they believe is the work of Iranian hackers.In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration proposed creating stronger cybersecurity guidelines to better safeguard the nation’s water supply from hackers.The steps were modest, but necessary, officials said at the time: Many municipalities lacked even basic protections, and the computers that monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels, were easy-to-find targets for a would-be intruder.The E.P.A. rescinded the order, however, after Republican-led states and industry groups sued to block its enforcement. They argued...

Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur, and his daughter Hannah are missing after a luxury yacht sunk off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily. After co-founding British tech firm Autonomy in 1996, and backing several successful tech firms, the businessman was regarded by some as the UK's answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. One person is dead and six are missing after a 56m superyacht called Bayesian, which has been linked to Mr Lynch's family, sank following bad weather. His wife, Angela Bacares, has been rescued. The British tech tycoon made his riches by selling his company Autonomy...

nvestigators believe the sinking of Mike Lynch's Bayesian superyacht was not caused by a storm and have blamed the crew instead. The £30million vessel capsized off the coast of Sicily in August 2024, killing seven including the British tech billionaire and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah. However, the report found it amounted to 'little more than a squall, a sudden increase in wind speed that precedes thunderstorms and downpours', which the crew should have been able to manage. According to the preliminary findings, the 184ft yacht therefore capsized and sank due to the improper actions of the crew, their underestimation of...

A trove of top-secret documents and confidential data on foreign governments could be trapped inside the doomed Bayesian superyacht after the $40 million vessel capsized last month, killing its billionaire owner and six others last month, according to a report. Italian prosecutors ordered heightened security around the sunken boat to protect the sensitive information that they believe was stored in water-tight safes before the Aug. 19 tragedy, sources told CNN. Among the loot are two super-encrypted hard drives that hold highly classified information, including passcodes and other sensitive data, tied to a number of Western intelligence services, an official involved...

Strange to relate, in last night’s speech to the nation on election chicanery, President Trump managed to both overwhelm and underwhelm public expectation. He touched on voting machine shenanigans, registration skullduggery, cyber-fuckery, labor union toolery, ballot fraud, and especially China meddling.Internal CIA / FBI docs at the time said that China’s policy around the 2020 US election was to “leverage all domestic and foreign elements” opposed to the President to prevent his re-election. The Intel bunch never sent that memo to the White House. They were too busy pushing fake Russia meddling, fake impeachment, and a fake Covid-19 pandemic. Then...

A federal case in Atlanta is raising questions about a privacy-focused mobile operating system, with prosecutors arguing that its features were used to erase evidence. The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute Atlanta resident Sam Tunick under a federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized. The case centers on Tunick's use of GrapheneOS, an open-source operating system that works on Google Pixel phones and lets users enter a passcode to wipe a device clean. Experts said the legal approach is unusual and may be the first...

We've gone through all of this before with Anthropic. Back in April, Anthropic limited the release of its latest model, called Mythos, to major software companies because it was concerned it could do massive damage in the wrong hands....rather than make it widely available to Claude users, Anthropic gave 12 tech companies access via Project Glasswing, which it described as "an effort to secure the world's most critical software".They include cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, device manufacturers Apple, Microsoft and Google, and chip-makers Nvidia and Broadcom...In a video released alongside Project Glasswing's launch, Anthropic boss Dario Amodei said it...

Who needs enemies when you've got Gen. Mark Milley running the Pentagon? Here's the latest military fiasco on his watch, as reported by the Financial Times Millions of US military emails were misrouted to Mali by a “typographical leak” that exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and travel details of senior officers. Despite repeated warnings over a decade, the steady stream of email traffic to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, continues to be the result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix for all US military email addresses. The problem was first identified nearly...

An experimental OpenAI model went rogue during an internal cybersecurity test, escaping its isolated testing environment and hacking rival AI developer Hugging Face in what the ChatGPT maker described as an unprecedented incident. The startling episode occurred during an internal stress test in which OpenAI intentionally switched off many of the safeguards that normally prevent its AI from helping carry out dangerous hacks, according to a company blog post. Researchers wanted to measure just how far the experimental model could go. Instead, the company says, it escaped its digital sandbox, got onto the internet and attacked a real company’s systems....

When President Donald Trump talked about some of the things China has done to literally steal our democracy by seeing to it that, in 2020, its Manchurian candidate was elected in the form of a semi-comatose Joe Biden, many of the things he mentioned had already been in the news, but they may not have been covered by the legacy media.Case in point: Trump mentioned in his July 16 address to the nation that China stole TikTok data to create fake U.S. driver’s licenses.If you follow conservative media, you may have known this. If you get your news from the...

Bad cybersecurity practices from Secret Service agents have left their phones vulnerable to hacking and risked the lives of senior US officials they are charged with protecting, according to a new inspector general report. Foreign “adversaries” — a term that can encompass spies and terrorists — “could have intercepted and exploited Secret Service information, placing at risk our Nation’s leaders, other protectees, and employees,” said the report released Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general (IG). The findings revive longstanding concerns about security practices at the Secret Service two years after the near-assassination of President Donald Trump in...

Recently Facebook and Twitter revealed they had removed a network of accounts linked to the Iranian government that attempted to launch online Disinformation campaign. Microsoft said it seized 99 websites used by Iranian hackers to steal sensitive information and launch other cyber attacks. The company said the group, which it has been tracking since 2013, has tried to snoop on activists, journalists, political dissidents, defense industry workers and others in the Middle East, including some who were “protesting oppressive regimes” in the region. Hackers did so by tricking people in those organizations to click on malicious links disguised to resemble...

One of Mike Lindell’s cyber experts bailed on the China hack theory earlier this week and spoke with the media. Why now? Why would he wait until the week of the symposium to bail? Josh Merrritt, aka “Spyder” spoke to the media this week: The cyber expert on the “red team” hired by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell now says the key data underpinning the theory that China hacked the 2020 election unveiled at the Cyber Symposium is illegitimate. TRENDING: Mike Lindell Opens Thursday Cyber Symposium with SHOCKING Developments: Another Home Raided, Credible Threats, Conference Infiltrated Mr. Lindell said he had...

Anthropic has suspended its powerful new AI model after US authorities raised security concerns just days following its public release. In a statement published on its website, Anthropic said it was ordered to suspend foreign nationals from using Claude Fable 5, a program that the company self-described as "too powerful". "The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance," the company wrote. Anthropic and the Trump administration are involved in a separate ongoing lawsuit over an order to stop government agencies using the company's AI...

The nation's top military official in the Middle East on Wednesday said Iran is one of the greatest threats to the U.S. today and has increased its "destabilizing role" in the region. "I believe that Iran is operating in what I call a gray zone," Commander of the U.S. Central Command, Army Gen. Joseph Votel, told the House Armed Services Committee in testimony Wednesday. "And it's an area between normal competition between states — and it's just short of open conflict." The general said Iran is exploiting this area in a variety of different ways, through things such as "lethal...

The official account for the Obama White House was hacked on Sunday and spammed with bizarre memes. The unidentified hacker added some pictures to the @obamawhitehouse account, including an AI-generated image that claimed the White House was now under Shiite control, according to TMZ. He also added some posts to the page's Instagram Stories. But a representative for Meta - the parent company of Instagram - said the account has now been secured and all of the unauthorized content removed. The account had previously last been updated in 2017, when President Donald Trump took office for his first term. However,...

Every layer of modern life depends on encryption so deeply that most people never even think about it. Until it stops working. For years, “cyber apocalypse” talk sounded like the tech version of a guy on a street corner holding a cardboard sign predicting the end times. Y2K came and went with barely a flicker. The Mayan calendar became a punchline. Even most ransomware attacks, destructive as they’ve been, still operated within recognizable rules. Servers go down. Companies panic. Bitcoin wallets light up. Insurance adjusters start chain-smoking. Q-Day is different. Not because it’s flashy. Because it’s boringly mathematical. And math...