With the Israel-Hamas war intensifying by the day, many people are desperate for accurate information about the conflict. Getting it has proven difficult. This has been most apparent on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, where insiders say even the company’s primary fact-checking tool, Community Notes, has been a source of …
Read More »Who’s Responsible for the Gaza Hospital Explosion? Here’s Why It’s Hard to Know What’s Real
Yesterday evening around 7 pm local time, an explosion rocked the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. Within minutes, information about what had happened was distorted by partisan narratives, disinformation, and a rush to be first to post about the blast. Add in mainstream media outlets parroting official statements without …
Read More »The US Congress Was Targeted With Predator Spyware
As the Israel-Hamas war escalated this week, WIRED looked at the conditions that contributed to Israel's intelligence failures ahead of Hamas' initial attack last Saturday, as well as the hacktivism and digital mayhem that has subsequently sprung up around the kinetic war. The situation has led to a torrent of …
Read More »A New Protocol Vulnerability Will Haunt the Web for Years
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Cloudflare revealed this week that they battled massive, record-setting distributed denial of service attacks against their cloud infrastructure in August and September. DDoS attacks, in which attackers attempt to overwhelm a service with junk traffic to bring it down, are a classic internet menace, and hackers …
Read More »New Clues Suggest Stolen FTX Funds Went to Russia-Linked Money Launderers
As the criminal trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried unfolds in a Manhattan courtroom, some observers in the cryptocurrency world have been watching a different FTX-related crime in progress: The still-unidentified thieves who stole more than $400 million out of FTX on the same day that the exchange declared bankruptcy …
Read More »A Graphic Hamas Video Donald Trump Jr. Shared on X Is Actually Real, Research Confirms
Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. posted a graphic video to X (formerly Twitter) that purported to show Hamas fighters murdering Israeli citizens during the attack last Saturday morning. “You don’t negotiate with this,” Trump Jr. wrote. “There’s only one way to handle this.” The son of former US president Donald …
Read More »The UN Risks Normalizing Internet Censorship
The United Nations’ main internet governance body will host its next international forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 2025, the UN may take its discussions on the future of an open internet to Russia. Holding the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), back to back, in authoritarian countries notorious for their surveillance …
Read More »Elon Musk Is Shitposting His Way Through the Israel-Hamas War
yesterday night, what’s left of the Trust and Safety team at X (formerly Twitter) announced the measures it was taking to try and curb the virulent spread of disinformation around the Israel-Hamas war on its platform. The statement, issued three days after the conflict began, reads: “As the events continue …
Read More »Google Steps Up Its Push to Kill the Password
Less than six months ago, Google announced that it was launching support for the password replacement known as “passkeys” for all personal accounts across its billions of users. Today, the company said it is going a step further and will make passkeys the default login setting for users. When you …
Read More »The Israel-Hamas War Is Drowning X in Disinformation
In the wake of Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israel this weekend—and the Israeli military’s response—journalists, researchers, open source intelligence (OSINT) experts, and fact-checkers rushed to verify the deluge of raw video footage and images being shared online by people on the ground. But users of X (formerly Twitter) seeking information …
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