In 2025, Big Tech got almost everything it wanted from President Trump, as he backs policies that let the industry grow unfettered, worrying some conservatives
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/ technology/tech-trump.html @terigoodson : “The conservative party stands for the free market and not picking winners and losers, yet what we've seen so far in the T...
Apple announces a “major evolution” of the Apple Security Bounty program, doubling its top award to $2M for exploit chains that could be abused for spyware
$2M Top Payout Usman Qureshi / iPhone in Canada : Apple Doubles Security Bounty Rewards to $2 Million Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer : Apple now offers $2 million for zero-click RCE vulnerabilities Ti...
Apple removes ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE officer sightings, from the App Store; AG Pam Bondi directed the DOJ to ask Apple to remove the app
Here's What We Know ABC Columbia : Apple removes ICE tracking apps Joe Sommerlad / The Independent : Apple pulls ICE tracking apps after pressure from the White House thesun.my : Apple pulls immigrati...
Filing: in its ChatGPT lawsuit, the NYT asked OpenAI to produce 120M user chats to analyze how often ChatGPT regurgitates its articles, after OpenAI offered 20M
Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica : Bluesky: @quinnypig.com . Forums: Slashdot and Ars OpenForum Bluesky: Corey Quinn / @quinnypig.com : I am no statistician, but can't you get meaningful signal from or...
The Wikimedia Foundation pauses an experiment that showed Wikipedia users AI-generated summaries at the top of some articles, following an editor backlash
Say No ‘Need To One-Up’ With Google David Uzondu / Neowin : Wikipedia suffers backlash from human editors over AI summaries, prompting feature pause Zack Zwiezen / Kotaku : Wikipedia Won't Add AI-Gene...
The US DOJ announces criminal charges against 16 individuals allegedly linked to DanaBot, a Russia-based malware operation that infected 300K+ machines globally
“Although the DanaBot C2s are active for extended periods of time, 50% of the infected victims only communicate … Forums: r/ActiveMeasures : Feds charge 16 Russians allegedly tied to botnets used in c...
Investigation: for two years, New Orleans police secretly scanned city streets using 200+ facial recognition cameras, seemingly violating a 2022 city ordinance
www.washingtonpost.com/business/ 202... Important investigative work by @douglasmac.bsky.social & @aaronschaffer.com: Mary Branscombe / @marypcbuk : “every minute of every hour of every day” [embedde...
Mozilla responds to backlash over Firefox's new Terms of Use, which critics have called out for being overly broad, and says it won't use people's data for AI
“These changes are not driven by a desire by Mozilla to use people's data for AI or sell it to advertisers,” Mozilla spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel said in an email to TechCrunch. techcrunch.com/20...
The technology of passkeys is elegant, but the complexities of syncing them to password managers can contribute to platform lock-in and make them less usable
https://arstechnica.com/... @funnymonkey@freeradical.zone : This piece on Passkeys is stellar, and shows what happens when Big Tech does its best to extinguish a good idea through “enthusiastic” adopt...
Researchers find a yearlong ongoing supply-chain attack targeting malicious and benevolent security personnel and stealing over 390K WordPress credentials
arstechnica.com/security/202... Forums: news.ycombinator.com : Yearlong supply-chain attack targeting security pros steals 390K credentials r/technology : Yearlong supply-chain attack targeting securi...