Reuters has found that Meta appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission. "While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift 'parody' bots." From the report: Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image. "Pretty cute, huh?" the avatar wrote beneath the picture. All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots' behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups. Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risque: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta's AI tools shouldn't have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta's production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company's enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content. "Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery," he said. While Meta's rules also prohibit "direct impersonation," Stone said the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled as such, but Reuters found that some weren't. Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both "parody" avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story's publication.

Microsoft has found no link between the August 2025 KB5063878 security update and customer reports of failure and data corruption issues affecting solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs). From a report: Redmond first told BleepingComputer last week that it is aware of users reporting SSD failures after installing this month's Windows 11 24H2 security update. In a subsequent service alert seen by BleepingComputer, Redmond said that it was unable to reproduce the issue on up-to-date systems and began collecting user reports with additional details from those affected.

"After thorough investigation, Microsoft has found no connection between the August 2025 Windows security update and the types of hard drive failures reported on social media," Microsoft said in an update to the service alert this week. "As always, we continue to monitor feedback after the release of every Windows update, and will investigate any future reports."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Credit reporting giant TransUnion has disclosed a data breach affecting more than 4.4 million customers' personal information. In a filing with Maine's attorney general's office on Thursday, TransUnion attributed the July 28 breach to unauthorized access of a third-party application storing customers' personal data for its U.S. consumer support operations.

TransUnion claimed "no credit information was accessed," but provided no immediate evidence for its claim. The data breach notice did not specify what specific types of personal data were stolen. In a separate data breach disclosure filed later on Thursday with Texas' attorney general's office, TransUnion confirmed that the stolen personal information includes customers' names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers. [...] It's not clear who is behind the breach at TransUnion, or if the hackers made any demands to the company.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of trade unions in England and Wales, says it found that people are concerned about the way AI is being adopted by businesses and want a say in how the technology is used at their workplace and the wider economy.

It warns that without such a "worker-first plan," use of "intelligent" algorithms could lead to even greater social inequality in the country, plus the kind of civil unrest that goes along with that. The TUC says it wants conditions attached to the tens of billions in public money being spent on AI research and development to ensure that workers are supported and retrained rather than deskilled or replaced. It also wants guardrails in place so that workers are protected from "AI harms" at work, rules to ensure workers are involved in deciding how machine learning is used, and for the government to provide support for those who euphemistically "experience job transitions" as a result of AI disruption.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults.

"This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average.

Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.

A U.S.-China research team has developed the world's first one-step process to convert mixed plastic waste into gasoline and hydrochloric acid with up to 95-99% efficiency, all at room temperature and ambient pressure. InterestingEngineering reports: As the authors put it, "The method supports a circular economy by converting diverse plastic waste into valuable products in a single step." To carry out the conversion, the team combines plastic waste with light isoalkanes, hydrocarbon byproducts available from refinery processes. According to the paper, the process yields "gasoline range" hydrocarbons, mainly molecules with six to 12 carbons, which are the primary component of gasoline. The recovered hydrochloric acid can be safely neutralized and reused as a raw material, potentially displacing several high-temperature, energy-intensive production routes described in the paper. "We present here a strategy for upgrading discarded PVC into chlorine-free fuel range hydrocarbons and [hydrochloric acid] in a single-stage process," the researchers said. Reported conversion efficiencies underscore the potential for real-world use. At 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), the process reached 95 percent conversion for soft PVC pipes and 99 percent for rigid PVC pipes and PVC wires.

In tests that mixed PVC materials with polyolefin waste, the method achieved a 96 percent solid conversion efficiency at 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit). The team describes the approach as applicable beyond laboratory-clean samples. "The process is suitable for handling real-world mixed and contaminated PVC and polyolefin waste streams," the paper states. SCMP points to an ECNU social media post citing the study, which characterized the achievement as a first, efficiently converting difficult-to-degrade mixed plastic waste into premium petrol at ambient temperature and pressure in a single step.

Nevada has been crippled by a cyberattack that began on August 24, taking down state websites, intermittently disabling phone lines, and forcing offices like the DMV to close. The Register reports: The Office of Governor Joseph Lombardo announced the attack via social media on Monday, saying that a "network security incident" took hold in the early hours of August 24. Official state websites remain unavailable, and Lombardo's office warned that phone lines will be intermittently down, although emergency services lines remain operational. State offices are also closed until further notice, including Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) buildings. The state said any missed appointments will be honored on a walk-in basis.

"The Office of the Governor and Governor's Technology Office (GTO) are working continuously with state, local, tribal, and federal partners to restore services safely," the announcement read. "GTO is using temporary routing and operational workarounds to maintain public access where it is feasible. Additionally, GTO is validating systems before returning them to normal operation and sharing updates as needed." Local media outlets are reporting that, further to the original announcement, state offices will remain closed on Tuesday after officials previously expected them to reopen. The state's new cybersecurity office says there is currently no evidence to suggest that any Nevadans' personal information was compromised during the attack.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 4chan and Kiwi Farms sued the United Kingdom's Office of Communications (Ofcom) over its age verification law in U.S. federal court Wednesday, fulfilling a promise it announced on August 23. In the lawsuit, 4chan and Kiwi Farms claim that threats and fines they have received from Ofcom "constitute foreign judgments that would restrict speech under U.S. law." Both entities say in the lawsuit that they are wholly based in the U.S. and that they do not have any operations in the United Kingdom and are therefore not subject to local laws. Ofcom's attempts to fine and block 4chan and Kiwi Farms, and the lawsuit against Ofcom, highlight the messiness involved with trying to restrict access to specific websites or to force companies to comply with age verification laws.

The lawsuit calls Ofcom an "industry-funded global censorship bureau." "Ofcom's ambitions are to regulate Internet communications for the entire world, regardless of where these websites are based or whether they have any connection to the UK," the lawsuit states. "On its website, Ofcom states that 'over 100,000 online services are likely to be in scope of the Online Safety Act -- from the largest social media platforms to the smallest community forum.'" [...] Ofcom began investigating 4chan over alleged violations of the Online Safety Act in June. On August 13, it announced a provisional decision and stated that 4chan had "contravened its duties" and then began to charge the site a penalty of [roughly $26,000] a day. Kiwi Farms has also been threatened with fines, the lawsuit states. "American citizens do not surrender our constitutional rights just because Ofcom sends us an e-mail. In the face of these foreign demands, our clients have bravely chosen to assert their constitutional rights," said Preston Byrne, one of the lawyers representing 4chan and Kiwi Farms.

"We are aware of the lawsuit," an Ofcom spokesperson told 404 Media. "Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based. The Act does not, however, require them to protect users based anywhere else in the world."

Farmers Insurance disclosed a breach affecting 1.1 million customers after attackers exploited Salesforce in a widespread campaign involving ShinyHunters and allied groups. According to BleepingComputer, the hackers stole personal data such as names, birth dates, driver's license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers. From the report: The company disclosed the data breach in an advisory on its website, saying that its database at a third-party vendor was breached on May 29, 2025. "On May 30, 2025, one of Farmers' third-party vendors alerted Farmers to suspicious activity involving an unauthorized actor accessing one of the vendor's databases containing Farmers customer information (the "Incident")," reads the data breach notification (PDF) on its website. "The third-party vendor had monitoring tools in place, which allowed the vendor to quickly detect the activity and take appropriate containment measures, including blocking the unauthorized actor. After learning of the activity, Farmers immediately launched a comprehensive investigation to determine the nature and scope of the Incident and notified appropriate law enforcement authorities."

The company says that its investigation determined that customers' names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's license numbers, and/or last four digits of Social Security numbers were stolen during the breach. Farmers began sending data breach notifications to impacted individuals on August 22, with a sample notification [1, 2] shared with the Maine Attorney General's Office, stating that a combined total of 1,111,386 customers were impacted. While Farmers did not disclose the name of the third-party vendor, BleepingComputer has learned that the data was stolen in the widespread Salesforce data theft attacks that have impacted numerous organizations this year. Further reading: Google Suffers Data Breach in Ongoing Salesforce Data Theft Attacks

An anonymous reader shares a report: Elon Musk's AI startup xAI sued Apple and ChatGPT maker OpenAI in U.S. federal court in Texas on Monday, accusing them of illegally conspiring to thwart competition for artificial intelligence.

Musk earlier this month had threatened to sue Cupertino, California-based Apple, saying in a post on his social media platform X that "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store."

People in Mississippi no longer have access to Bluesky. "If you access Bluesky from a Mississippi IP address, you'll see a message explaining why the app isn't available," announced a Bluesky blog post Friday.

The reason is a new Mississippi law that "requires all users to verify their ages before using common social media sites ranging from Facebook to Nextdoor," noted NPR. Bluesky wrote that their block "will remain in place while the courts decide whether the law will stand." [U]nder the law, we would need to verify every user's age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The potential penalties for non-compliance are substantial — up to $10,000 per user. Building the required verification systems, parental consent workflows, and compliance infrastructure would require significant resources that our small team is currently unable to spare.
Bluesky also notes that the law "requires collecting and storing sensitive personal information from all users...not just those accessing age-restricted content" — and that this information would include "detailed tracking of minors."

TechCrunch notes that even blocking Mississippi has created some problems: Some Bluesky users outside Mississippi subsequently reported issues accessing the service due to their cell providers routing traffic through servers in the state, with CTO Paul Frazee responding Saturday that the company was "working deploy an update to our location detection that we hope will solve some inaccuracies." The company's blog post notes that its decision only applies to the Bluesky app built on the AT Protocol. Other apps may approach the decision differently.
Interestingly, the law had been immediately challenged by NetChoice (a trade association of major tech companies). But while a District Court agreed, blocking the law from going into effect (until court challenges finished), an Appeals Court then lifted that block. A final appeal to America's Supreme Court was unsuccessful — although the ruling by Justice Kavanaugh suggests the law could be overturned later: "To be clear, NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits — namely, that enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members' First Amendment rights under this Court's precedents... [U]nder this Court's case law as it currently stands, the Mississippi law is likely unconstitutional. Nonetheless, because NetChoice has not sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time, I concur in the Court's denial of the application for interim relief."

"A fierce dust storm hit the Black Rock Desert on the eve of its annual Burning Man festival," reports the San Francisco Chronicle, "causing at least four minor injuries and damaging campsites that had been set up early." [Alternate URL]

"Winds of up to 50 mph stirred up the lake bed's alkaline dust so ferociously that participants in the annual art and culture festival reported not being able to see beyond a foot... " The dust storm arrived Saturday evening after strong thunderstorms in the Sierra Nevada drifted off the mountains and whipped up strong winds in the Nevada desert... At 5:14 p.m. Saturday, the weather service issued a dust storm advisory for Black Rock City and warned of "a wall of blowing dust coming off the Smoke Creek and Black Rock Desert playa areas is tracking northward at around 30 mph." The agency warned of visibility less than 1 mile and wind gusts exceeding 45 mph. A weather station at Black Rock City Airport measured gusts up to 52 mph at 5:50 p.m... ["We saw structures being ripped and torn down by the wind speeds even though we buttoned everything down as best as we could..." one Burner told the Chronicle.] Camp residents posted a slew of videos to social media featuring dust tornadoes, destroyed campsites, and fellow campers struggling to hold onto bucking canvases as the wind threatened to rip them away. "Every popup canopy I've seen has been destroyed," one Burner wrote on Reddit... ["Make sure you carry your particle/dust mask and goggles with you when you venture out on playa!" warns Burning Man's official weather page.]

Even after Saturday's storm, Burners won't be out of the woods from hazardous weather. The weather service warned of possible monsoon thunderstorms and heavy rain Sunday through Wednesday, raising concerns that this year's festival could echo disastrous 2023 conditions, when heavy storms stranded tens of thousands of attendees amid thick mud. "It's becoming increasingly likely that we could see an even greater flash flood threat," the weather service wrote in an online forecast. "If you're on the playa at the Black Rock Desert, you may very well be in for a muddy mess Monday through Wednesday." Slow-moving storms could drop an inch of rain or more in a short period.
"Still, gates to the festival had opened by Sunday morning," the article adds, "with organizers cautioning new arrivals to 'drive safely!'"

Burning Man's official weather page currently links to a National Weather Service page with a "Flood Watch" warning through 9 p.m. Sunday, and also predicting a chance of thunderstorms on Sunday and Monday.

After the Tea dating-advice app leaked information on its users, the BBC found two online maps "purporting to represent the locations of women who had signed up for Tea... showing 33,000 pins spread across the United States." The maps were hosted on Google Maps. (Notified by the BBC, Google deleted the maps, saying they violated their harassment policies.)

"Since the breach, more than 10 women have filed class actions against the company which owns Tea," the article points out, noting that leaked content is also spreading around social media: Since the breach, the BBC has found websites, apps and even a "game" featuring the leaked data... The "game" puts the selfies submitted by women head-to-head, instructing users to click on the one they prefer, with leaderboards of the "top 50" and "bottom 50"... [And one researcher calculates more than 12,000 posts on 4Chan referenced the Tea app over the three weeks after the leak.]

It is unsurprising that the leak was exploited. The app had drawn criticism ever since it had grown in popularity. Defamation, with the spread of unproven allegations, and doxxing, when someone's identifying information is published without their consent, were real possibilities. Men's groups had wanted to take the app down — and when they found the data breach, they saw it as a chance for retribution.
They weren't the only ones with a gripe against Tea. Back in 2023 the fiance of Tea's CEO founder approached the administrator of a collection of Facebook groups called "Are We Dating the Same Guy?" to see if she'd be the "face" of the Tea app, reports 404 Media. But they add that after Tea failed to recruit her, Tea "shifted tactics" to raid her Facebook groups instead: Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook groups with nearly identical names. 404 Media also identified a number of seemingly hijacked Facebook accounts that spammed the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups with links to Tea app.
Reviews for the Tea app show several women later thought the app was affiliated with their trusted Facebook groups, the reporter said this week on a 404 Media podcast.

And they add that founder Sean Cook took over the "Tara" personna that his fiance has used for technical support. "So he's on the app pretend to be a woman, talking to other women who are on the app in order to weed out men who are being deceptive..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader samleecole for sharing the article.

The Atlantic reports some YouTube users noticed their uploaded videos have since "been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything..."

"For creators who want to differentiate themselves from the new synthetic content, YouTube seems interested in making the job harder." When I asked Google, YouTube's parent company, about what's happening to these videos, the spokesperson Allison Toh wrote, "We're running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses image enhancement technology to sharpen content. These enhancements are not done with generative AI." But this is a tricky statement: "Generative AI" has no strict technical definition, and "image enhancement technology" could be anything. I asked for more detail about which technologies are being employed, and to what end. Toh said YouTube is "using traditional machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos," she told me. (It's unknown whether the modified videos are being shown to all users or just some; tech companies will sometimes run limited tests of new features.)

While running this experiment, YouTube has also been encouraging people to create and post AI-generated short videos using a recently launched suite of tools that allow users to animate still photos and add effects "like swimming underwater, twinning with a lookalike sibling, and more." YouTube didn't tell me what motivated its experiment, but some people suspect that it has to do with creating a more uniform aesthetic across the platform. As one YouTube commenter wrote: "They're training us, the audience, to get used to the AI look and eventually view it as normal."

Google isn't the only company rushing to mix AI-generated content into its platforms. Meta encourages users to create and publish their own AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram using the company's "AI Studio" tool. Last December, Meta's vice president of product for generative AI told the Financial Times that "we expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that [human] accounts do...."

This is an odd turn for "social" media to take. Platforms that are supposedly based on the idea of connecting people with one another, or at least sharing experiences and performances — YouTube's slogan until 2013 was "Broadcast Yourself" — now seem focused on getting us to consume impersonal, algorithmic gruel.

The U.S. government's 10% stake in Intel "is a mistake," writes the Washington Post's editorial board, calling Intel "an aging also-ran in critical markets" that "has spent recent years stumbling on execution and missing one strategic opportunity after another."

But TechCrunch points out that the U.S. government "does not appear to be committing new funds. Instead, it's simply making good on what Intel described as 'grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel.'" Specifically, the $8.9 billion is supposed to come from $5.7 billion awarded-but-not-paid to Intel under the Biden administration's CHIPS Act, as well as $3.2 billion also awarded by the Biden administration through the Secure Enclave program. In a post on his social network Truth Social, Trump wrote, "The United States paid nothing for these shares..." Trump has been critical of the CHIPS Act, calling it a "horrible, horrible thing" and calling on House Speaker Mike Johnson to "get rid" of it...

According to The New York Times, some bankers and lawyers believe the CHIPS Act may not allow the government to convert its grants to equity, opening this deal to potential legal challenges.
Reuters writes that the money "will not be enough for its contract-chipmaking business to flourish, analysts said. Intel still needs external customers for its cutting-edge 14A manufacturing process to go to production, says Summit Insights analyst Kinngai Chan, "to make its foundry arm economically viable." "We don't think any government investment will change the fate of its foundry arm if they cannot secure enough customers..."

Reuters has reported that Intel's current 18A process — less advanced than 14A — is facing problems with yield, the measure of how many chips printed are good enough to make available to customers. Large chip factories including TSMC swallow the cost of poor yields during the first iterations of the process when working with customers like Apple. For Intel, which reported net losses for six straight quarters, that's hard to do and still turn a profit. "If the yield is bad then new customers won't use Intel Foundry, so it really won't fix the technical aspect of the company," said Ryuta Makino, analyst at Gabelli Funds, which holds Intel stock.

Makino, who believes that Intel can ultimately produce chips at optimal yields, views the deal as a net negative for Intel compared with just receiving the funding under the CHIPS Act as originally promised under the Biden Administration. "This isn't free money," he said. The federal government will not take a seat on Intel's board and has agreed to vote with the company's board on matters that need shareholder approval, Intel said. But this voting agreement comes with "limited exceptions" and the government is getting Intel's shares at a 17.5% discount to their closing price on Friday. The stake will make the U.S. government Intel's biggest shareholder, though neither Trump nor Intel disclosed when the transaction would happen...

Some analysts say Intel could benefit from the government's support, including in building out factories. Intel has said it is investing more than $100 billion to expand its U.S. factories and expects to begin high-volume chip production later this year at its Arizona plant. "To have access to capital and a new partial owner that wants to see you succeed are both important," said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel.

Threads now has more than 400 million monthly active users. But who are these people who are actually using Threads, asks Mashable? And what is their cultural footprint? Threads is the Big Bang Theory of social media. Bland, boring, largely unoffensive, and somehow, it was the most popular show on television for years... At any given time, "Twitter" and "X" are searched somewhere between 12 and 30 times more than "Threads" on Google, according to the search engine's Trends data. Threads is a popular platform without much of an identity...

[Threads] is consistently good at one thing users really want from a social media platform: for their posts to be seen and engaged with. Threads might be boring in comparison to its competitors, but its users say it might be the only place on the internet right now where they don't feel they are screaming into the void.... Much like TikTok, you don't actually have to have thousands of followers to find decent engagement on the app. One user, commenting in a Reddit forum questioning who actually uses the app, said they "find it worthwhile" because "you can just say stuff on there under a tag and people will find it and respond...." According to consumer research company GWI, while users signed up for Threads because of its integration with Instagram, they're staying because Threads users are "community-focused," noting there's a strong overlap between Discord users and Threads users....

It just doesn't have the same flair as X or Twitter, which could be because Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, went out of his way to ensure politics was downplayed when Threads first launched. (Meta has since backtracked slightly by phasing "civic content" back into Threads "with a more personalized approach....") Threads is still in its adolescence. It lacks the media ecosystem that made Twitter indispensable for journalists, politicians, and celebrities. But it has something else: sheer scale and Meta's backing. With Instagram's 2 billion users as a feeder system, Meta can keep funneling people toward Threads whether they like it or not.
The article also points out Threads is integrated with the fediverse, supporting ActivityPub's decentralized protocol...

The Washington Post looks at the rise of low-effort, high-volume "AI slop" videos: The major social media platforms, scared of driving viewers away, have tried to crack down on slop accounts, using AI tools of their own to detect and flag videos they believe were synthetically made. YouTube last month said it would demonetize creators for "inauthentic" and "mass-produced" content. But the systems are imperfect, and the creators can easily spin up new accounts — or just push their AI tools to pump out videos similar to the banned ones, dodging attempts to snuff them out.
One place where they're coming from... Jiaru Tang, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology who recently interviewed creators in China, said AI video has become one of the hottest new income opportunities there for workers in the internet's underbelly, who previously made money writing fake news articles or running spam accounts. Many university students, stay-at-home moms and the recently unemployed now see AI video as a kind of gig work, like driving an Uber. The average small creator she interviewed did their day jobs and then, at night, "spent two to three hours making AI-slop money," she said. A few she spoke with made $2,000 to $3,000 a month at it.
But the article provides other examples of the "wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work"

• A 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho first went viral in June "with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers..." (He told the Post the videos earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok's creator program.)

• "To stand out, some creators have built AI-generated influencers with lives a viewer can follow along. 'Why does everybody think I'm AI? ... I'm a human being, just like you guys,' says the AI woman in one since-removed TikTok video, which was watched more than 1 million times."

• One AI-generated video a dog biting a woman's face off (revealing a salad) received a quarter of a billion views.

British telecommunications service provider Colt Telecom "has offices in over 30 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia, reports CPO magazine. "It manages nearly 1,000 data centers and roughly 75,000 km of fiber infrastructure."

But now "a cyber attack has caused widespread multi-day service disruption..." On August 14, 2025, the telecom giant said it had detected a cyber attack that began two days earlier, on August 12. Upon learning of the cyber intrusion, the telecommunications service provider responded by proactively taking some systems offline to contain the cyber attack. Although Colt Telecom's cyber incident response team was working around the clock to mitigate the impacts of the cyber attack, service disruption has persisted for days. However, the service disruption did not affect the company's core network infrastructure, suggesting that Colt customers could still access its network services... The company also did not provide a clear timeline for resolving the service disruption. A week after the apparent ransomware attack, Colt Online and the Voice API platform remained unavailable.
And now Colt Technology Services "confirms that customer documentation was stolen," reports the tech news site BleepingComputer: "A criminal group has accessed certain files from our systems that may contain information related to our customers and posted the document titles on the dark web," reads an updated security incident advisory on Colt's site.

"We understand that this is concerning for you."

"Customers are able to request a list of filenames posted on the dark web from the dedicated call centre."

As first spotted by cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont, Colt added the no-index HTML meta tag to the web page, making it so it won't be indexed by search engines.

This statement comes after the Warlock Group began selling on the Ramp cybercrime forum what they claim is 1 million documents stolen from Colt. The documents are being sold for $200,000 and allegedly contain financial information, network architecture data, and customer information... The Warlock Group (aka Storm-2603) is a ransomware gang attributed to Chinese threat actors who utilize the leaked LockBit Windows and Babuk VMware ESXi encryptors in attacks... Last month, Microsoft reported that the threat actors were exploiting a SharePoint vulnerability to breach corporate networks and deploy ransomware.
"Colt is not the only telecom firm that has been named by WarLock on its leak website in recent days," SecurityWeek points out. "The cybercriminals claim to have also stolen data from France-based Orange."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the news.

Bluesky has blocked access to its service in Mississippi rather than comply with a new state law requiring age verification for all social media users. TechCrunch reports: In a blog post published on Friday, the company explains that, as a small team, it doesn't have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require, and it raised concerns about the law's broad scope and privacy implications. Mississippi's HB 1126 requires platforms to introduce age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. On Thursday, U.S. Supreme Court justices decided to block an emergency appeal that would have prevented the law from going into effect as the legal challenges it faces played out in the courts. As a result, Bluesky had to decide what it would do about compliance.

Instead of requiring age verification before users could access age-restricted content, this law requires age verification of all users. That means Bluesky would have to verify every user's age and obtain parental consent for anyone under 18. The company notes that the potential penalties for noncompliance are hefty, too -- up to $10,000 per user. Bluesky also stresses that the law goes beyond child safety, as intended, and would create "significant barriers that limit free speech and disproportionately harm smaller platforms and emerging technologies." To comply, Bluesky would have to collect and store sensitive information from all its users, in addition to the detailed tracking of minors. This is different from how it's expected to comply with other age verification laws, like the U.K.'s Online Safety Act (OSA), which only requires age checks for certain content and features.

Mississippi's law blocks anyone from using the site unless they provide their personal and sensitive information. The company notes that its decision only applies to the Bluesky app built on the AT Protocol. Other apps may approach the decision differently.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won't pay a proposed fine by the UK's media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act. According to Preston Byrne, managing partner of law firm Byrne & Storm, Ofcom has provisionally decided to impose a 20,000-pound fine "with daily penalties thereafter" for as long as the site fails to comply with its request. "Ofcom's notices create no legal obligations in the United States," he told the BBC, adding he believed the regulator's investigation was part of an "illegal campaign of harassment" against US tech firms.

"4chan has broken no laws in the United States -- my client will not pay any penalty," Mr Byrne said. Ofcom began investigating 4chan over whether it was complying with its obligations under the UK's Online Safety Act. Then in August, it said it had issued 4chan with "a provisional notice of contravention" for failing to comply with two requests for information. Ofcom said its investigation would examine whether the message board was complying with the act, including requirements to protect its users from illegal content. "American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an email," law firms Byrne & Storm and Coleman Law wrote. "Under settled principles of US law, American courts will not enforce foreign penal fines or censorship codes. If necessary, we will seek appropriate relief in US federal court to confirm these principles."

The statement calls on the Trump administration to intervene and protect American businesses from "extraterritorial censorship mandates."