Technology

• Nick Clegg, former Meta executive and UK Deputy Prime Minister, has reiterated a familiar line when it comes to AI and artist consent.
• He said that any push for consent would “basically kill” the AI industry.
• Clegg added that the sheer volume of data that AI is trained on makes it “implausible” to ask for consent.

The DSA aims to ensure a safer environment online for minors, in this context, the Commission has opened formal proceedings against Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos for suspected breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

In parallel, Member States, coming together in the European Board for Digital Services, are taking a coordinated action against smaller pornographic platforms. These actions will reinforce the Commission's effort to protect minors from harmful content online, both as regards very large adult platforms supervised by the Commission and smaller ones that fall under the supervision of the Digital Services Coordinators.

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The results were striking: Once generative AI (GenAI) entered the market, the total number of images for sale skyrocketed, while the number of human-generated images fell dramatically. On the flip side, consumers showed a taste for the influx of AI-generated images, choosing GenAI images over human-generated ones.

To the dismay of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the law currently prevents Big Tech companies from opening banks. But if Congress passes the GENIUS Act, tech firms may start issuing private currencies and forcing us to use them.

Four former Volkswagen managers have been convicted of fraud for their roles in the so-called Dieselgate scandal, which erupted when U.S. regulators discovered that the company had installed software to cheat emissions tests on millions of VW, Audi, and Porsche vehicles worldwide.

• Following backlash to statements that Duolingo will be AI-first, threatening jobs in the process, CEO Luis von Ahn has tried to walk back his statement.
• Unfortunately, the CEO doesn’t walk back any of the key points he originally outlined, choosing instead to try, and fail to placate the maddening crowd.
• Unfortunately the PR team may soon be replaced by AI as this latest statement has done anything but instil confidence in the firm’s users.

This article is about covert agent communication channel websites used by the CIA in many countries from the late 2000s until the early 2010s, when they were uncovered by counter intelligence of the targeted countries circa 2010-2013.

This article uses publicly available information to publicly disclose for the first time a few hundred of what we feel are extremely likely candidate sites of the network. The starting point for this research was the September 2022 Reuters article "America’s Throwaway Spies" for the first time gave nine example websites, and their analyst from Citizenlabs claims to have found 885 websites in total, but did not publicly disclose them. Starting from only the nine disclosed websites, we were then able to find a few hundred websites that share os many similarities with them, i.e. a common fingerprint, that we believe makes them beyond reasonable doubt part of the same network.

One morning in January, Byju Raveendran sat in the back seat of his shiny black Cadillac as it sped through Dubai. Just three years prior, the schoolteachers’ son had appeared on the Forbes list of richest Indians as founder and CEO of Byju’s, then one of the world’s most valuable education technology companies. He was dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, while his driver, Hashim, was more formally attired in a collared shirt. Raveendran, square-jawed and muscular at 45, told me he typically rides beside Hashim in the passenger seat, seeming intent on underscoring his down-to-earthness. “I always sit there, no, Hashim?” he asked, with a boyish laugh. Hashim nodded.

Former Byju’s employees had told me about Raveendran’s love for staying at the world’s finest hotels, and the upscale properties and luxury cars his family owned when he was based in Bengaluru. I’d heard his wife and co-founder, Divya Gokulnath, described as a jet-setter who networked with Silicon Valley elites.

But beyond the Cadillac, Raveendran didn’t seem keen for me to get a glimpse of his wealth. He was facing accusations of defrauding U.S. lenders for hundreds of millions of dollars, while tens of thousands of his employees had been laid off. I’d hoped to be invited to his home — one source told me it was a mansion in a gated community of Dubai. Instead, he showed up at my hotel on short notice to take me to a South Indian restaurant for a simple breakfast of idli, vada, and sambar — his staple meal during a modest upbringing in a village in Kerala.

Raveendran wanted to show he hadn’t let success get to his head, and wouldn’t let his company’s staggering problems, either. He was defiant that his entrepreneurial journey wasn’t over yet. “Why I am confident of a comeback is that the most valuable thing I had is still with me,” he said, referring to himself.

In short:

Donald Trump has revealed plans to end the United States's Digital Equity Act, which provides funding to programs that assist people to live in an increasingly online world.

The US president has branded the act — which was first intended to bring internet access to every home and business in the country — "racist and illegal".

What's next?

Whether Mr Trump has the legal authority to end the program remains unknown, but his government can now simply stop providing funding assistance covered by the act.

The Syrian army’s failure to repel a modest opposition attack on Aleppo in December, which ultimately culminated in the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, defies explanation.

The opposition’s military strength and its use of drones were contributing factors, no doubt, but they were hardly enough. The Syrian army had previously reclaimed vast swaths of territory from rebel forces. By the summer of 2024, Assad’s government controlled two-thirds of the country. The sudden unraveling and the conventional explanations behind it belie what unfolded beneath the surface of the military event itself.

In a previous interview with New Lines, a high-ranking Syrian officer, who recounted the final days of the regime’s existence, disclosed a revealing detail that I decided to spend some time pursuing. A closer examination revealed it to be the key to understanding the regime’s collapse from a different angle, not merely as a logistical or battlefield failure, but as the result of a silent, invisible war.

The snippet of information was this: A mobile application, distributed quietly among Syrian officers via a Telegram channel, had spread rapidly in their ranks. In truth, the app was a carefully planted trap, the opening salvo of a hidden cyberwar — perhaps one of the first of its kind against a modern army. Militias had weaponized smartphones, turning them into lethal instruments against a regular military force.

Beyond revealing the contours of a cyberattack against the Syrian army, this investigation seeks to understand the application itself, its technology and reach, and to uncover the nature of the information it siphoned from within military ranks. This, in turn, leads directly to the potential impact on Syria’s military operations.

The larger question remains: Who orchestrated the cyberattack, and to what end?

The answers may point to players within the conflict itself — factions of the Syrian opposition, regional or international intelligence services, or other, still unseen hands. In any case, the attack must be understood within its full political and military context.

Yvette Blauvelt arrived at Seattle’s University Village with a “cone of shame.”

A Tesla owner since 2019, she felt as if she had to justify why she was at the protest against Tesla CEO Elon Musk held biweekly at the upscale mall. So she brought a pet recovery cone to wear around her neck, and a picture of a sad dog.

“I love my car. I don’t love what’s going on with Elon Musk,” Blauvelt said.

Imagine you are planning the funeral music for a loved one who has died. You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity.

We tend to think about inheritance in physical terms: money, property, personal belongings. But the vast volume of digital stuff we accumulate in life and leave behind in death is now just as important – and this “digital legacy” is probably more meaningful.

Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving. They include now-familiar items such as social media and banking accounts, along with our stored photos, videos and messages. But they also encompass virtual currencies, behavioural tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.

This digital data is not only fundamental to our online identities in life, but to our inheritance in death. So how can we properly plan for what happens to it?

In late April 2025, the Meta Oversight Board (“Board”) published its first six decisions since Meta implemented sweeping changes to its content moderation policy. While these decisions prompted concern among many over ongoing inconsistencies in its approach to freedom of expression, some also welcomed the Board’s critical stance on certain recent changes (see here and here).

In this post, I argue that the Board appears to be shifting towards a more permissive stance on harmful or discriminatory expression. If this trend continues, it could significantly reshape the boundaries of acceptable speech on Meta’s platforms – with far-reaching implications for online public discourse. This also raises broader questions about the Board’s independence and legitimacy at a time when content governance is becoming increasingly politicised.

High schools and colleges are stuck in limbo: Use of generative AI to cut corners and cheat is rampant, but there’s no clear consensus on how to fight back.