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A U.S. District Court judge granted a preliminary injunction Thursday that halts the Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act of 2024. NetChoice, a trade organization representing apps like Facebook and Instagram, is challenging the law in a case in the U.S. Northern District of Georgia. It would have required submitting proof of age before accessing social media sites. Judge Amy Totenberg said in the 50-page ruling that the law is constitutionally infirm. "The State seeks to erect barriers to speech that cannot withstand the rigorous scrutiny that the Constitution requires, and the inapt tailoring of the law – which...

SNIP On 20 May 2025, Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company's annual developer conference. It's been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you've probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. "For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode," he said. "It's a total reimagining of Search." You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal. "If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current...

Three weeks after sparking a war of words with anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, apologizing for her targeted remarks, and being inundated with comments about the incident since, seven-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles has deleted her account on X, formerly Twitter. Biles de-activated her account, which had nearly two million followers, after she came to the defense of a transgender high school athlete that Gaines had been attacking. But after Biles personally insulted Gaines (for which she later apologized), it opened up a flood gate of attacks which appears to have led the 28-year-old gymnast - considered the greatest of...

At the moment, a virtual private network (VPN) is a great way to protect your data from hackers. It offers sophisticated encryption that will keep your data hidden from third parties, including cyber criminals, government bodies, and advertisers.However, not even all the best VPNs offer protection that’s future-proofed. You may not be aware of them yet, but there are already highly sophisticated quantum computers that use quantum physics to render their computations significantly more efficient than those performed by classical computers. Because of their superior processing power, these quantum computers have the ability to break encryption methods used to protect...

[H/T bitt]In what experts are calling the largest data breach ever recorded, researchers have confirmed the exposure of a staggering 16 billion password leaks, affecting platforms including Apple, Facebook, Google, Telegram, GitHub, VPN services, and even government portals. This unprecedented breach is believed to be the result of multiple infostealer malware campaigns operating at a massive scale throughout 2025. If the recently reported 184 million credential leak was alarming, this latest development represents a full-scale cybersecurity disaster that demands immediate action.What Happened? Understanding the 16 Billion Credential LeakAccording to an ongoing investigation by cybersecurity researchers at Cybernews, led by analyst...

I saved this image to imgur.com yesterday: Today when I wanted to link to it I got this: Evidently the meme hits a nerve. We'll see how long it lasts this time.

I’ll keep this short and sweet so I can get this out faster to you. As headline says, 16,000,000,000 passwords have been leaked. Most likely the biggest password leak in history. It would probably be a good idea to change your passwords. If you have Google, maybe start there and change your Google password, since a lot of people have numerous saved passwords to bank accounts, social media accounts, email, etc, all under Google. Forbes: Update, June 19, 2025: This story, originally published on June 18, has been updated with comments from the founders of Keeper Security regarding the 16...

Vice President JD Vance was suspended from the left-leaning social media platform Bluesky on Wednesday, just minutes after joining and sharing his first post. “Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis,” Vance wrote in his first post on the X competitor. “So I’m thrilled to be here to engage with all of you.” The vice president went on to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld Tennessee’s restrictions on transgender medical treatments for minors. “To that end, I found Justice [Clarence] Thomas’s concurrence on medical...

You’ve got to give Vice President J.D. Vance some credit here. The man knows how to trigger the snowflake set without even trying.Vance joined the oh-so-bumptiously named X-competitor Bluesky yesterday. It didn’t take long for the fun to start.One moment, he was creating an account; the next, the platform was reacting like Alec Baldwin at the prop department—panicked, unhinged, and a lot of imprudent pointing going on.Let’s start at the beginning.Vice President J.D. Vance joined Bluesky on Wednesday and posted a polite, even warm greeting:Hello Bluesky, I’ve been told this app has become the place to go for common sense...

An apparent internet service outage has disrupted operations on countless major websites including Google, Spotify, and Amazon Web Services.Around midday Thursday, outage monitoring service DownDetector.com reported widespread service disruptions across commonly used platforms like SnapChat and YouTube, with many social media users reporting difficulty accessing several sites.Some notable web services experiencing disruptions include: Spotify, Discord, Google and related services like Google Maps, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, SnapChat, YouTube, OpenAI, CharacterAI, FuboTV, Etsy, Vimeo, UPS, Shopify, Microsoft Azure, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Google Gemini, DoorDash, Calendly, Paramount+, IKEA, Twitch andMicrosoft 365.A full list of shuttered services can be found on DownDetector.com.Cloudflare, an...

Google has found a new way to police the speech of its users: scolding them for typing factual terms into its search bar. After a Justice Department lawsuit resulted in Texas ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens at state universities, I used Google to look up more details about the case. In response to the search “texas scholarships for illegal aliens,” the search engine’s AI overview slapped a patronizing warning at the top of the page, scolding me that “the term ‘illegal alien’ is considered pejorative and offensive.” “It is more accurate and respectful to use terms like ‘undocumented students’...

A fame-seeking teenager died attempting an alarming social-media challenge called “dusting,” according to her heartbroken parents. Renna O’Rourke, 19, of Arizona, passed away Sunday after trying the viral trend, also called “chroming,” in which netizens film themselves inhaling keyboard cleaning spray to get high for views online. “She always said, ‘I’m gonna be famous, Dad. Just you watch. I’m gonna be famous,’ and unfortunately, this is not under the most optimal of circumstances,” her grieving father, Aaron O’Rourke, told AZ Family. The Tempe teen went into cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital. She remained unconscious in the intensive...

Hackers have leaked what they claim is AT&T’s database which was reportedly stolen by the ShinyHunters group in April 2024 after they exploited major security flaws in the Snowflake cloud data platform. But is this really the Snowflake-linked data? We took a closer look. As seen by the Hackread.com research team, the data was first posted on a well-known Russian cybercrime forum on May 15, 2025. It was re-uploaded on the same forum on June 3, 2025, after which it began circulating among other hackers and forums. After analyzing the leaked data, we found it contains a detailed set of...

Google is launching AI Mode, a new AI-powered search feature for US-based users. After a short testing period in its Labs environment, the feature will be rolling out for everyone in the coming weeks via a new Search tab and the Google app. The company describes AI Mode as its “most powerful AI search, with more advanced reasoning and multimodality, and the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web.” New features of AI Mode include Deep Search with longer-than-usual, report-style responses, Search Live, which enables users to talk with Search about what they see...

An Irish man has died and a child has been injured in a shooting incident at a shopping centre in County Carlow on Sunday. Emergency services are currently at the scene at the Fairgreen Shopping Centre, with an army bomb disposal team also in attendance. Gardaí (Irish police) were alerted to the incident shortly after 18:15 local time. The girl was treated by paramedics at the scene. Gardaí said it is not yet known how her injuries were sustained. The shopping centre has been evacuated and the area has been sealed off by police. The cordon will remain in place...

The Transportation Security Administration has issued a major warning for all travelers that they may be in danger of being tricked by USB malware. In a recent post on social media, the agency warned that travelers may find their devices hacked by scammers who install malware in the USB port in the airports. "In this technology age, cybersecurity has never been more important," the Facebook post read. "You’ve likely heard about things like email scams and social media scams (tip: don’t accept that friend request from your buddy’s 'new' profile), but today we want to share our two best tips...

Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler stumbled upon a large database of login information and passwords containing over 184 million records recently. He mentioned the discovery in an article on Website Planet. The data was not encrypted in any form and stored publicly, which meant that anyone with knowledge of its existence could download the data. The sheer size of the database, more than 47 gigabytes of data, makes it one of the largest leaks in recent history. In early 2024, a 70 million records password dump was discovered. A preliminary sampling of the data unveiled emails, usernames, passwords, and also links...

Left-wing darling Hasan Piker has been booted from the streaming platform Twitch after he suggested that the killing of two Israeli Embassy diplomats in Washington, DC looked like it could be a “false flag” operation. Piker, 33, claimed his account, which has more than 2.8 million followers, was suspended because of his “critical examination” of the manifesto of suspected terrorist Elias Rodriguez, who was charged with executing embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday night. He said the attack had all the hallmarks of a “false flag operation,” a term used for an...

An Indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon has sued The New York Times, saying the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography. The Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the rainforest, filed the defamation lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages this week in a court in Los Angeles. It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process....

OnlyFans users in Sweden could face prison sentences under a harsh new law that treats buying online sex shows the same as paying a prostitute for sex. The law, which will take effect July 1, also criminalizes profiting from or promoting others who perform sexual acts for payment on demand. “This is a new form of sex purchase, and it’s high time we modernize the legislation to include digital platforms,” Swedish member of parliament Teresa Carvalho said after the bill passed. Under the new law, it will be illegal to pay someone to carry out a sexual act remotely —...