Rare, fleeting radio flashes in the sky have bewildered astronomers for more than a decade. These “fast radio bursts,” blips that flare and then disappear in a couple seconds or less, flit in and out of existence so quickly that astronomers struggle to study them, let alone pinpoint their cosmic provenance. The mystery deepened last week, when teams based in the Netherlands and Australia discovered evidence that these bursts are more common and more diverse in duration and energy than previously thought.

Since the 2000s, 750 confirmed bursts have been found at radio frequencies between 100 megahertz and 8 gigahertz, most of them by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment.

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. Offenders are sharing datasets of abuse images that can be used to customize AI models, and they’re starting to sell monthly subscriptions to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The details of how the technology is being abused are included in a new, wide-ranging report released by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit

In 2019, Instagram’s top executive, Adam Mosseri, went on TV to describe how the Meta-owned social media app was “rethinking the whole experience” to prioritize the “well-being” of users above all else. Today, a bipartisan group of attorneys general representing 42 US states alleged in a series of lawsuits that Mosseri’s remarks were part of a decade-long pattern of deceit by Meta that claimed Instagram and Facebook were safe, while they in fact did young people harm.

The suits claim Meta put user engagement ahead of user safety. “Despite overwhelming internal research, independent expert analysis, and publicly available data that its social media platforms harm young users, Meta still refuses

California has suspended driverless vehicles operated by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise in the city of San Francisco—just two months after the state began allowing the robotaxis to pick up paying passengers around the clock. The suspension stems from a gruesome incident on October 2 in which a human-driven vehicle hit a female pedestrian and threw her into the path of a Cruise car. The driverless Cruise car hit her, stopped, and then tried to pull over, dragging her approximately 20 feet.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles says in a statement that it has determined that Cruise’s vehicles are not safe for public operation, and that the company ”misrepresented” safety

Earlier this month, Google executive Ulku Rowe became the first person to face Google in court over sexist discrimination since a 2018 mass walkout led the company to stop forcing employees to settle such matters privately. A Manhattan jury rendered its verdict last week, finding that Google had discriminated against Rowe on the basis of her gender and retaliated after she objected to the mistreatment.

Rowe says the verdict represents the culmination of years of Googlers pushing back against their employer’s behavior, and she hopes it will be a first step toward greater equity at the company.

“I was able to bring this lawsuit because of the steps that many, many

For nearly 30 years, actor Charles Martinet was the voice of Nintendo’s most iconic character: Mario. He also lent vocals to Luigi, Wario, and others. When Nintendo confirmed in August that Martinet had essentially retired from that role, fans became fixated on who would voice the “mama mia”s in the franchise’s next game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

For any other game, that level of interest in one character’s voice would be outsized, but for this one it meant fans pored over a one-second clip ahead of the game’s release, saying “Wonder” in an effort to suss out Martinet’s involvement.

Mario and Martinet have been intrinsically intertwined since his first role in

Remember when Chromebooks first launched with the pitch that they’d be cheap and all they’d need to run was a web browser, so you didn’t have to worry about specs? Yeah. Well, they mostly lived up to the cheap part, but the specs … those are hit or miss. To address this, Google recently rolled out a big upgrade called Chromebook Plus, an umbrella category for a new class of devices from various manufacturers.

The “Plus” stands for better performance—faster processors, more memory, more storage, and better video cameras. The suprising thing is that the prices … are still cheap. Even more amazing than

A federal law authorizing a vast amount of the United States military’s foreign intelligence collection is set to expire in two months, pulling the plug on history’s most prolific eavesdropping operation and the primary means by which US spies intercept the private communications of people deemed threatening, or simply interesting, by the US government—the world’s foremost surveillant.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) relies heavily on the statute, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, when compelling the cooperation of communications giants that oversee huge swaths of the world’s internet traffic, intercepting hundreds of millions of phone calls and email messages each year, and eavesdropping on the personal conversations

Amazon is splashing out on new vehicle inspectors to watch for damage or wear to its vast fleet of delivery vans—and they’re not human. The retailer is installing camera-studded inspection stations equipped with artificial intelligence-powered technology called AVI, or automated vehicle inspection, at hundreds of its distribution centers worldwide.

When a driver working out of any of the 20 delivery centers currently equipped with the tech returns their vehicle at the end of a shift, they slowly drive it through a sensor-laden archway made by startup UVeye, which has headquarters in the US and Israel.

The technology is made up of three separate high-res camera systems: One scans a vehicle’s undercarriage,

Danny Mekić, an Amsterdam-based PhD researcher, was studying a proposed European law meant to combat child sexual abuse when he came across a rather odd discovery. All of a sudden, he started seeing ads on X, formerly Twitter, that featured young girls and sinister-looking men against a dark background, set to an eerie soundtrack. The advertisements, which displayed stats from a survey about child sexual abuse and online privacy, were paid for by the European Commission.

Mekić thought the videos were unusual for a governmental organization and decided to delve deeper. The survey findings highlighted in the videos suggested that a majority of EU