Link to the study: https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmen.0000145

OpenAI says it has removed the "warning" messages in its AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT, that indicated when content might violate its terms of service.

TikTok is again available on app stores in the US after President Donald Trump delayed a ban on the app.

The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it’s pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose. Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the AI Safety Institute to the “AI Security Institute.” (Same first letters: same URL.) With that, the body will shift from primarily exploring areas like existential risk and bias in large language models, to a focus on cybersecurity, specifically “strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime.”

Bit patterned media expected to arrive in the next decade.

How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?

After users noticed a new button on Instagram to downvote or dislike comments, the company confirmed that it is testing a way for users to signal that they either didn’t like the comment or don’t think it’s relevant.

If you want to write something on the U.S. government’s official DOGE website, apparently you can just… do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal.

It’s bad if you like to keep ebook backup copies.

Every time you step into a grocery store, you step into a machinery of data that tracks, analyzes, shares, and influences your shopping behavior. Based on shopping history and data shared from data brokers—including internet browsing history and online purchases—grocery stores may infer your age, gender, race, economic status, family makeup, health conditions, or other lifestyle characteristics. Grocery stores might categorize shoppers as “interested in fitness and not price sensitive” based on often buying organic foods and visiting gym websites or “expecting mother with a toddler” based on purchases of prenatal vitamins and searching online for toddler-sized clothing. Grocers build detailed profiles of consumers to nudge them towards shopping choices that increase their profits, whether through different prices or personalized discounts and offers—at the expense of the consumer. Even worse, grocery stores also sell data gleaned about you to other companies, further enriching their profits while undermining consumers’ privacy.

AI agents aren’t just indexing your content anymore. With tools like OpenAI’s Operator, Anthropic’s Computer Use API, and BrowserBase’s Open Operator, these agents can navigate the web, mimic real users, and even take actions at scale. The challenge? Knowing whether they’re enhancing your user experience—or opening the door to abuse.

In some scenarios, apps might encourage agent use if it improves usability and adoption, but in other cases, it could present unacceptable risks for application developers or be used as a method for malicious attacks (e.g. credential stuffing or fake account creation).

In either scenario, observability is paramount. Applications need to know what traffic is on their site (is this a human? A bot? A good bot or a bad one?) in order to make intelligent decisions about how to shape traffic and enforce desired usage patterns. AI agents add an additional wrinkle as users are already sharing their credentials with tools like Operator, meaning even a well-intentioned agent creates potential risk for these applications and their users.

The key question is: Can you detect AI agent traffic on your application today?

We tested multiple AI agent toolkits across high-traffic consumer sites, and the results were clear—legacy detection techniques (CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, user-agent filtering) are largely ineffective. Here’s what we found.

I propose that the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs and system prompt influence.

I have noticed a bias towards specific technologies in multiple popular models and have noted anecdotally in conversation and online discussion people choosing technology based on how well AI tooling can assist with its usage or implementation.

While it has long been the case that developers have considered documentation and support availability when choosing software, AI’s influence dramatically amplifies this factor in decision-making, often in ways that aren’t immediately apparent and with undisclosed influence.

In France, rightsholders have taken legal action to get large VPN providers on board with their pirate site blocking program. The aim is to prevent circumvention of existing blocking measures in place to reduce widespread copyright infringement. From the VPN provider's perspective, site blocking threatens online freedom. Swiss provider ProtonVPN describes blocking as 'a dangerous attack on Internet freedom on the altar of corporate greed'.

The UK government order is an attempt to force Apple to provide access to encrypted user data, including device backups that can include contact lists, as well as location and messaging history, for any Apple user worldwide. The secret order, which the Washington Post reported was issued in January 2025 by the Home Office, the interior ministry, concerns Advanced Data Protection, an iPhone option that uses end-to-end encryption on data stored in the cloud, and means Apple has no access to user data stored on its servers. The UK government should drop the order.

The president of Mexico on Thursday expressed hope that Google "reconsiders" its decision to change its online maps to reflect U.S. President Donald Trump's claim that he has the authority to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico.

Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order announcing he was changing the name of the body of water to the Gulf of America.

For U.S. users of Google Maps, the gulf was listed as the Gulf of America as of Thursday. Google, whose CEO attended Trump's inauguration along with other tech moguls, said last month it has "a long-standing practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources."

But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum warned Thursday that her government "will file a civil suit" against Google if it does not revert back to labeling the international body of water the Gulf of Mexico.

At a time when European sovereignty is gaining momentum in Brussels, the Parliament's email advises using only US-based communication tools.