Early in the morning on October 21, 2016, Scott Shapiro got out of bed, opened his Dell laptop to read the day’s news, and found that the internet was broken. Not his internet, though at first it struck Shapiro that way as he checked and double-checked his computer’s Wi-Fi connection …
Read More »Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit From a Sexual Abuse Survivor
Omegle, the video and text chat site that paired strangers together to talk, ultimately shut down as part of a legal mediation with a female user who sued the company, claiming its defective and negligent design enabled her to be sexually abused through the site. Omegle’s chatting service was shut …
Read More »Police Use of Face Recognition Is Sweeping the UK
A Beyoncé gig, the coronation of King Charles, and the British Formula One Grand Prix all have one thing in common: Thousands of people at the events, which all took place earlier this year, had their faces scanned by police-operated face recognition tech. Backed by the Conservative government, police forces …
Read More »New Jersey Keeps Newborn DNA for 23 Years. Parents Are Suing
When Hannah Lovaglio’s children were born, she didn’t think twice about the newborn health screening they received in the hospital. The routine test uses a few drops of blood from a heel prick to test for dozens of potentially fatal or disabling genetic diseases. “I assumed that this was for …
Read More »This Is the Ops Manual for the Most Tech-Savvy Animal Liberation Group in the US
In recent years, the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere has carried out some of the most brazen and tech-savvy operations and investigations to ever target the animal agriculture industry. It has rescued pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens from factory farms and slaughterhouses in midnight intrusions; captured virtual reality footage …
Read More »What a Bloody San Francisco Street Brawl Tells Us About the Age of Citizen Surveillance
Just when the people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San …
Read More »‘Party Time!’ Crypto Land Celebrates as Sam Bankman-Fried Is Found Guilty
At 7:33 pm eastern yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. The crypto industry exhaled. The verdict was a “huge relief,” says market analyst Noelle Acheson, formerly of crypto brokerage Genesis. The fraud at FTX, which threw the …
Read More »Sam Bankman-Fried Sealed His Fate Long Before the FTX Trial
The simplest legal advice is to say nothing at all. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX, who recently took to the stand at his own fraud trial, isn’t very good at that. But, most likely, it won’t be his testimony that seals his fate. It will be the monthlong …
Read More »Maine Mass Shooting Disinformation Floods Social Media as Suspect Remains at Large
Following a mass shooting at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston, Maine, yesterday evening that left at least 18 people dead, state police urgently warned residents to “stay inside your home with the doors locked” as they mounted a manhunt for the suspect. Misinformation about the suspect flooded social …
Read More »The AI-Generated Child Abuse Nightmare Is Here
A horrific new era of ultrarealistic, AI-generated, child sexual abuse images is now underway, experts warn. Offenders are using downloadable open source generative AI models, which can produce images, to devastating effects. The technology is being used to create hundreds of new images of children who have previously been abused. …
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