QR codes are two-dimensional images with glyphs of various sizes that store not just numbers, but text. When scanned, your phone extracts the encoded information and can act on it. For example, QR codes often embed URLs, allowing you to scan, say, a parking meter to launch a webpage where you can pay online.
When you tap "I agree" on a typical European or American news site, a real-time bidding auction begins. Your device sends a bid request containing what the industry calls "signals": your approximate location, device type, browsing history (if third-party cookies are still active), and increasingly, probabilistic identity graphs that link your behavior across apps and websites even without cookies.
When Windows 10 was released in 2015, it was immediately controversial, with critics zeroing in on one feature in particular: telemetry. I spent many months in those early days reading one article after another on the subject that read, in retrospect, like entries from the diary of a mad conspiracy theorist.
According to internal documents obtained by the outlet, Meta AI is banned from sharing with minors any "content that provides advice or opinion about sexual health," such as "anatomy and physiology of reproductive organs, puberty education, menstrual health, fertilization and reproduction, STI and HIV prevention, contraceptive methods, consent education and abstinence."
What I walked through wasn't just an immigration gate. It was a node in a rapidly expanding global infrastructure of digital identity, one being constructed at extraordinary speed, across dozens of countries, by a mix of governments, multilateral organizations, and private technology vendors. The people building it believe they are solving real problems: fraud, statelessness, inefficient public services, financial exclusion.
All smart homes are at risk of being hacked, but it's not a likely event. The type of bad actors that target smart homes and devices, such as security cameras, are opportunistic. They search randomly for easy targets -- they don't tend to choose a particular home to attack and then try to circumvent that specific system.
Discord presents its move as inevitable. It's not. I know that Discord isn't trying to harm anyone. The company genuinely believes it's protecting users. But good intentions don't prevent the drift. They accelerate it. There's also the risk that the collected data becomes exposed.
A Greek court has sentenced four people, including two Israelis, to prison over a major wiretapping scandal involving the illegal use of Predator software to target dozens of politicians, journalists, business leaders and military officials. Dubbed the Greek Watergate by local media, the scandal engulfed Greece in 2022 following allegations by opposition party leader Nikos Androulakis and journalist Thanasis Koukakis that they had been under state surveillance via phone malware.
The scheme involves a text message that appears to come from 'Gmail from Google,' warning recipients that their account has been compromised. The message includes a link labeled 'Recover Account.' When users click it, they are prompted to enter their Gmail password, which is then captured by scammers. In some cases, attackers can combine stolen information with personal details, like your phone number.
A 51-year-old convicted sex offender, who described Snapchat as a "safe haven for paedophiles," sent a lewd message to a schoolgirl on the mobile messaging app within three hours of being released from prison, a court has heard.
In-flight Wi-Fi is roughly on par with hotel or airport Wi-Fi. It's not automatically unsafe, but it's not something you should blindly trust either. You're on a shared network with hundreds of other people, and you don't know how well it's segmented or monitored.
Until now, data loss prevention within Microsoft Purview only worked for documents in Microsoft's cloud services. Files stored on laptops or desktops were outside that scope. In practice, this meant Copilot could analyze locally stored documents, even when organizations had strict security rules in place. Microsoft is now putting an end to that limitation.
ClaudeBot helps enhance the utility and safety of our generative AI models by collecting web content that could potentially contribute to their training. When a site restricts ClaudeBot access, it signals that the site's future materials should be excluded from our AI model training datasets.
Passwords get hacked all the time, but they can't be hacked if they don't exist...this allows a small team like 404 to spend less time managing security administration, and more time investing in bringing you stories you care about.
When presence becomes participation Ring's Search Party feature queries nearby cameras when a missing pet is reported. As Senator Ed Markey observed, this closely resembles neighbourhood-scale surveillance infrastructure. Crucially, Search Party does not operate in isolation. Ring's Familiar Faces feature applies facial recognition to anyone passing within camera range, continuously scanning and categorising faces without their explicit knowledge or agreement.
NATO countries' restrained response to hybrid attacks is at odds with public opinion, new polling shows: Broad swaths of the public in key allied countries say actions such as cyberattacks on hospitals should be considered acts of war. The POLITICO Poll, conducted in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, showed a majority of people agreed that a cyberattack that shuts down hospitals or power grids constitutes an act of war. Canadians felt the strongest about the issue, with 73 percent agreeing.
The first is that the UI is highly customizable. One of my favorite customizations is the ability to move the search bar to the bottom of the window, which makes it much easier to use Opera with one hand. The second is that Opera has a built-in AI tool called Aria, and it is pretty fantastic. Aria was the first AI tool I used, and I often use it before any other service.
They're incredibly annoying, yes, but they get even creepier when they seem too tailored for your liking. Imagine looking up a garnet ring once, and now everywhere you go, you see jewelry ads. This is what you call personalized ads, and to be fair, they do have their upsides. For one, you get to discover new products and services that match your needs. That means you won't have to go out of your way to manually search for them -
Very few users are in a position to audit what a . Reading code, inspecting traffic or evaluating a security assessment is out of reach for most people. Privacy policies are long and often written to protect the company more than to inform the user. In practice, this leaves visible cues such as badges, rankings and reviews doing most of the work.
Surveillance technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy private donors have long helped provide local law enforcement "free" access to surveillance equipment that bypasses local oversight. The result is predictable: serious accountability gaps and data pipelines to other entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that expose millions of... SAN FRANCISCO - California must revoke permits allowing federal agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to put automated license plate readers along border highways,
A BTP press release added that people who are not included on a watchlist cannot be identified, and made assurances about how information will be handled: "People who prefer not to enter the recognition zone will have alternative routes available and images of anyone not on the authorised database will be deleted immediately and permanently." The decision to deploy LFR at major transport hubs occurred while the Home Office's 10-week consultation on LFR - which ended on 12 February 2026 - was still ongoing.
According to reports, Meta is planning to add facial recognition to its artificial intelligence-powered sunglasses, as a means to enhance connection. Which is not overly surprising, given the added connectivity benefits this could provide for glasses wearers. But facial recognition has long been a sensitive area, with Meta shutting down its facial recognition processes on Facebook entirely in 2021, after user backlash around the automated detection of faces in images, particularly via photo tagging.
A 30-second Super Bowl ad was supposed to celebrate community. Instead, it reignited a national debate about who's really watching whom. Ring's feel-good commercial, which aired during Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8, might have tugged at heartstrings with a lost dog storyline. However, for many viewers, it struck a far more unsettling chord: the growing web of surveillance cameras stretching across the United States.
He wanted something in return for returning files to the Dutch police. What he got in return was an arrest. A press release from Dutch police sums it up: On Thursday evening around 7:00 PM, police arrested a 40-year-old man from Ridderkerk on Prinses Beatrixstraat in Ridderkerk for computer hacking. Due to a police error, the man had inadvertently gained access to confidential police documents.
