For years, a Chinese-language market for crypto scammers and money launderers—by some measures, the internet’s biggest black market of all time—operated in plain sight on the messaging service Telegram, facilitating tens of billions of dollars in illicit finance. Now, thanks to the scrutiny of one team of crypto crime researchers …

Through the Bing APIs, Microsoft helped other search engines save on the cost and time of crawling billions of web pages and developing a searchable index of all available content. The tools allowed them to automatically submit queries and get back results that they could present to their own users …

A confession: This dispatch will not be coming to you from one of the long-devout Martha Wells faithful. I’m a convert, a curious reader who turned to Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series after reading my colleague Meghan Herbst’s fantastic 2024 profile of the author, which left me questioning who would …

Violent threats and calls for impeachment on social media platforms against US judges have skyrocketed by 327 percent since last year, according to new research from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE). Many of the posts are violent and politically charged. “THIS JUDGE NEEDS TO BE REMOVED AND …

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers. The CFPB proposed the new rule in early December under former director Rohit …

Odds are, at this point you’ve probably seen or know someone who has a smart bird feeder. They’re fairly recognizable from a distance with their clear housing, cameras, and solar panels, and perhaps a friend or family member has sent you a photo or video of a bright goldfinch or …

A key question in artificial intelligence is how often models go beyond just regurgitating and remixing what they have learned and produce truly novel ideas or insights. A new project from Google DeepMind shows that with a few clever tweaks these models can at least surpass human expertise designing certain …

Other Phones to Consider There are several older phones from Motorola, HMD, and other brands with the headphone jack, but you should probably avoid them if they launched before 2024. If none of the above options strike your fancy, here are some others to consider, all tested by me. Photograph: …

I’ve become popular with children lately. It’s not intentional. It’s just because I’ve been riding around town on the new Pro series JackRabbit OG2—a zippy, motorized electric bike so small, its simple existence can make a gobsmacked tween lean out of his mom’s car window all the way down to …

More importantly, there is no indication of battery life in the app. Like the Eargo 7, the Eargo 8 claims an impressive 16 hours of running time (plus a whopping 224 more hours of charge in the slightly larger carrying case), but there’s no way to tell where you’re at …