For years, hashing technology has made it possible for platforms to automatically detect known child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) to stop kids from being retraumatized online. However, rapidly detecting new or unknown CSAM remained a bigger challenge for platforms as new victims continued to be victimized. Now, AI may be ready to change that.

Today, a prominent child safety organization, Thorn, in partnership with a leading cloud-based AI solutions provider, Hive, announced the release of an AI model designed to flag unknown CSAM at upload. It's the earliest AI technology striving to expose unreported CSAM at scale.

An expansion of Thorn's CSAM detection tool, Safer, the new "Predict" feature uses "advanced machine learning (ML) classification models" to "detect new or previously unreported CSAM and child sexual exploitation behavior (CSE), generating a risk score to make human decisions easier and faster."

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Federal prosecutors have charged five men with running an extensive phishing scheme that allegedly allowed them to compromise hundreds of companies nationwide, gain non-public information, and steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency.

The charges, detailed in court documents unsealed Wednesday, pertain to a crime group security researchers have dubbed Scattered Spider. Members were behind a massive breach on MGM last year that cost the casino and resort company $100 million. MGM preemptively shut down large parts of its internal networks after discovering the breach, causing slot machines and keycards for thousands of hotel rooms to stop working and slowing electronic transfers. Scattered Spider also breached the internal network of authentication provider Twilio, which allowed the group to hack or target hundreds of other companies.

Not your father’s phishing campaign

Key to Scattered Spider’s success were phishing attacks so methodical and well-orchestrated they were hard to detect even when sophisticated defenses were implemented. Microsoft researchers, who track the group under the name Octo Tempest, declared it “one of the most dangerous financial criminal groups.”

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On May 7, 2011, Georgia resident Tonya Brand noticed a pain on the inside of her right thigh. As the pain grew worse in the 4- to 5-inch area of her leg, she headed to a hospital. There, doctors suspected she had a blood clot. But an ultrasound the next day failed to find one. Instead, it revealed a mysterious toothpick-sized object lodged in Brand's leg.

Over the next few weeks, the painful area became a bulge, and on June 17, Brand put pressure on it. Unexpectedly, the protrusion popped, and a 1.5-inch metal wire came poking out of her leg, piercing her skin.

The piece of metal was later determined to be part of a metal filter she had implanted in a vein in her abdomen more than two years earlier, in March 2009, according to a lawsuit Brand filed. The filter was initially placed in her inferior vena cava (IVC), the body's largest vein tasked with bringing deoxygenated blood from the lower body back up to the heart. The filter is intended to catch blood clots, preventing them from getting into the lungs, where they could cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Brand got the IVC filter ahead of a spinal surgery she had in 2009, which could boost her risk of clots.

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When it comes to space policy, a hallmark of the first Trump administration was its embrace of private companies. NASA sought to build fewer expensive things and buy more lower-cost services. In doing so, it aimed to foster a healthy ecosystem of private space companies.

Under the leadership of Jim Bridenstine, NASA, during these years, stood on the shoulders of more than a decade of government investment in commercial space. This culminated in a triumphant Crew Dragon mission in the summer of 2020, the first privately led human orbital spaceflight.

This Demo-2 mission, sending NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station on a SpaceX vehicle, validated NASA’s long push into commercial space. Since then, the agency has only doubled down on this approach, generally using fixed-price contracts and buying a service instead of telling companies what and how to build while paying a premium.

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We're nearing the end of the year, and there are typically a flood of announcements regarding quantum computers around now, in part because some companies want to live up to promised schedules. Most of these involve evolutionary improvements on previous generations of hardware. But this year, we have something new: the first company to market with a new qubit technology.

The technology is called a dual-rail qubit, and it is intended to make the most common form of error trivially easy to detect in hardware, thus making error correction far more efficient. And, while tech giant Amazon has been experimenting with them, a startup called Quantum Circuits is the first to give the public access to dual-rail qubits via a cloud service.

While the tech is interesting on its own, it also provides us with a window into how the field as a whole is thinking about getting error-corrected quantum computing to work.

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"Updating our site reputation abuse policy" is how Google, in almost wondrously opaque fashion, announced yesterday that big changes have come to some big websites, especially those that rely on their domain authority to promote lucrative third-party product recommendations.

If you've searched for reviews and seen results that make you ask why so many old-fashioned news sites seem to be "reviewing" products lately—especially products outside that site's expertise—that's what Google is targeting.

"This is a tactic where third-party content is published on a host site in an attempt to take advantage of the host's already-established ranking signals," Google's post on its Search Central blog reads. "The goal of this tactic is for the content to rank better than it could otherwise on a different site, and leads to a bad search experience for users."

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Archaeologists have discovered numerous ceramic or clay whistles at Aztec sites, dubbed "death whistles" because of their distinctive skull shapes. A new paper published in the journal Communications Psychology examines the acoustical elements of the unique shrieking sounds produced by those whistles, as well as how human listeners are emotionally affected by the sounds. The findings support the hypothesis that such whistles may have been used in Aztec religious rituals or perhaps as mythological symbols.

Archaeologists unearthed the first Aztec death whistles, also known as ehecachichtlis, in 1999 while excavating the Tlatelolco site in Mexico City. They found the body of a sacrificial victim, a 20-year-old male who had been beheaded, at the base of the main stairway of a temple dedicated to the wind god Ehecatl. The skeleton was clutching two ceramic skull-shaped whistles, one in each hand, along with other artifacts. More skull whistles were subsequently found, and they've found their way into popular culture. For instance, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), Egon Spengler had such a whistle in his secret laboratory collection.

Scholars have puzzled over the purpose of the skull whistles, although given the dearth of concrete evidence, most suggestions are highly speculative. One hypothesis is that it was used in battle, with hundreds of warriors blowing their whistles simultaneously as a battle cry. Music archaeologist Arnd Adje Both has dismissed that idea, suggesting instead that the whistle's purpose was more likely tied to ceremonial or religious practices, like human sacrifice. Yet another hypothesis proposes that the whistles were intended as symbols of a deity. The skull shape, for instance, might allude to the Aztec god of the underworld, Mictlantecuhtli.

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Windows 10's free, guaranteed security updates stop in October 2025, less than a year from now. Windows 10 users with supported PCs have been offered the Windows 11 upgrade plenty of times before. But now Microsoft is apparently making a fresh push to get users to upgrade, sending them full-screen reminders recommending they buy new computers.

The reminders, which users have seen within the last few days, all mention the end of Windows 10 support but otherwise seem to differ from computer to computer. My Ars colleague Kyle Orland got one focused on Windows 11's gaming features, while posters on X (formerly Twitter) got screens that emphasized the ease of migrating from old PCs to new ones and other Windows 11 features. One specifically recommended upgrading to a Copilot+ PC, which supports a handful of extra AI features that other Windows 11 PCs don't, but other messages didn't mention Copilot+ specifically.

None of the messages mention upgrading to Windows 11 directly, though Kyle said his PC meets Windows 11's requirements. These messages may be intended mostly for people using older PCs that can't officially install the Windows 11 update.

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A day after SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the sixth time, the company received good news from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding future launch operations from its Starbase facility in South Texas.

In a draft version of what is known as an "Environmental Assessment," the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.

"FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action," the federal agency stated in its conclusion.

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The Strava app is one of the most popular ways for cyclists, runners, hikers, and other distance sports enthusiasts to track their performance and grab some bragging rights. Because most athletic types will have the app installed already—and because it's hard or impossible to run two tracking apps at once—many apps use Strava's API as a go-between for workout data.

Strava emailed its more than 100 million users earlier this week to notify them about "important updates on how Strava data can be displayed, accessed, and used by third-party apps." In the update, Strava noted that third-party apps "are no longer able to display your Strava activity data on their surfaces to other users," that Strava's API data cannot be used "in artificial intelligence models or other similar applications," and that third-party apps must be designed so as to "complement" Strava's look and feel "rather than replicating it."

What does this actually mean? It depends on which apps you're using. DC Rainmaker, a longtime fitness tech blogger, sees the "other users" clause as something that "immediately break[s] almost all coaching apps that have connections to Strava." If an app needs to see your Strava workout to provide insights on performance or connect you to a group, Strava's API seems to block it now. A manager at the training app Intervals posted on the app's official forum that the API change would break Intervals' ability to use Strava as its data source.

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The bug affects calls to iPhones and reportedly impacts calls to Macs, potentially turning any device into a hot mic.

A new Apple FaceTime bug has the potential to let callers hear you and see you, even if you don't accept the call. Here's how to protect yourself until there's a fix.

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