April 4, 2025

Cyberattacks by AI agents are coming

Agents are the talk of the AI industry—they’re capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily…

The Download: how people fall for pig butchering schemes, and saving glaciers

March 27, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there Gavesh’s journey had started, seemingly innocently, with a job ad on Facebook promising work he desperately needed. Instead, he found himself…

Google rolls out new vacation-planning features to Search, Maps, and Gemini

March 27, 2025
Google is rolling out a slew of new features — some powered by AI — across Search, Maps, and Gemini that are designed to help people plan their summer vacations. The new features arrive as users have been turning to tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT for help with planning trips. Google Search’s AI Overviews, which display […]

How to save a glacier

March 27, 2025
Glaciers generally move so slowly you can’t see their progress with the naked eye. (Their pace is … glacial.) But these massive bodies of ice do march downhill, with potentially planet-altering consequences.   There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the…

Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there

March 27, 2025
Heading north in the dark, the only way Gavesh could try to track his progress through the Thai countryside was by watching the road signs zip by. The Jeep’s three occupants—Gavesh, a driver, and a young Chinese woman—had no languages in common, so they drove for hours in nervous silence as they wove their way…

NHS vendor Advanced to pay £3M fine following 2022 ransomware attack

March 27, 2025
NHS vendor Advanced will pay just over £3 million ($3.8 million) in fines for not implementing basic security measures before it suffered a ransomware attack in 2022, the U.K.’s data protection regulator has confirmed.  It’s half the fine that the Information Commissioner’s Office had initially sought in August 2024, when the data watchdog said it […]

OpenAI will reportedly close its SoftBank-led $40 billion round soon

March 27, 2025
While you’re busy Ghibli-fying your images with ChatGPT’s new image-generation capabilities, OpenAI is out raising a ton more cash. The company is close to finalizing a new $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report noted that other funds, including the hedge fund Magnetar Capital, Coatue Management, Founders […]

OpenAI’s viral Studio Ghibli moment highlights AI copyright concerns

March 26, 2025
It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image generator went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away”. In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing […]