The Web

Does protecting children justify snooping on private messages? That is the sensitive question facing EU countries Wednesday as they wrangle over a push to combat child sexual abuse material online.... Read more

There's been a striking decline in public confidence in social media platforms, according to the 2025 Ethics Index published by the Governance Institute of Australia. One in four Australians now rate social media as "very unethical."... Read more

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law groundbreaking legislation requiring the world's largest artificial intelligence companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols and report critical incidents, state lawmakers announced Monday.... Read more

Despite years of congressional hearings, lawsuits, academic research, whistleblowers and testimony from parents and teenagers about the dangers of Instagram, Meta's wildly popular app has failed to protect children from harm, with "woefully ineffective" safety measures, according to a new report from former employee and whistleblower Arturo Bejar and four... Read more

EU chief Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday threw her support behind growing calls to ban social media use for children, promising to weigh action at the European level in coming months.... Read more

China's top internet regulator said Tuesday it would take action against ByteDance-owned news app Jinri Toutiao and Alibaba's internet browser company UCWeb for allegedly displaying harmful content, a day after announcing a two-month social media crackdown.... Read more

As cyber threats grow more sophisticated by the day, UC Riverside researchers are making computing safer thanks to research that targets some of the internet's most pressing security challenges.... Read more

The parents of teenagers who killed themselves after interactions with artificial intelligence chatbots are planning to testify to Congress on Tuesday about the dangers of the technology.... Read more

Australia will not require social media giants to verify the ages of all users under its ban on under-16s using the platforms, Canberra said Tuesday.... Read more

New York's attorney general on Monday proposed regulations for its crackdown on addictive social media feeds for children, including rules for verifying a user's age.... Read more

French lawmakers urged a social media ban for under-15s and "digital curfew" for older minors Thursday, with massively popular short video platform TikTok the focus of renewed harsh government scrutiny.... Read more

China's internet regulator said on Thursday it had ordered "warnings and strict punishment" to bosses at popular social media app Xiaohongshu over its online content, slamming "trivial" and "negative" posts.... Read more

Alphabet Inc.'s Google was sued by advertising exchange PubMatic Inc., which is seeking billions of dollars over its claim that the search giant has illegally monopolized the ad technology market.... Read more

In one new corner of the internet, users are invited to "paint the world." And paint they have. Welcome to wplace—an ever-evolving, gamified global map overflowing with drawings made on a more than 4-trillion-pixel canvas.... Read more

On September 2nd, a federal judge ruled against the U.S. government's proposal that Google should sell its Chrome web browser to restore competition in online search.... Read more

Artificial intelligence chatbot makers OpenAI and Meta say they are adjusting how their chatbots respond to teenagers asking questions about suicide or showing signs of mental and emotional distress.... Read more

Australia said Tuesday it will oblige tech giants to prevent online tools being used to create AI-generated nude images or stalk people without detection.... Read more

An international research team from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has developed a method to detect compromised hosts at an internet scale by probing servers with public SSH keys previously observed in attacker operations.... Read more

Australia's government trial has found age-assurance for its under-16 social media ban can be done effectively and protect privacy, but there is not a one-size-fits-all model.... Read more

The videos are strikingly lifelike, featuring bikini-clad women conducting street interviews and eliciting lewd comments—but they are entirely fake, generated by AI tools increasingly used to flood social media with sexist content.... Read more

Austria's data protection authority said Friday that it has ordered YouTube to comply with EU regulations and respond to requests by users for access to data that it holds on them.... Read more

We know that a person's Google history can be used as evidence in court, but what about a conversation with an artificial intelligence chatbot?... Read more

The United Kingdom recently launched a broad system of age verification that requires any platforms that host pornography or other "harmful" content to ensure their users are 18 or older.... Read more

Fresh off a trade truce with Donald Trump, the EU is back in the US leader's crosshairs after he vowed to punish countries that seek to curb big tech's powers.... Read more

The White House launched a TikTok account on Tuesday, as President Donald Trump continues to permit the Chinese-owned platform to operate in the United States despite a law requiring its sale.... Read more

YouTube has started using artificial intelligence (AI) to figure out when users are children pretending to be adults on the popular video-sharing platform amid pressure to protect minors from sensitive content.... Read more

Popular generative AI web browser assistants are collecting and sharing sensitive user data, such as medical records and social security numbers, without adequate safeguards, finds a new study led by researchers from UCL and Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria.... Read more

For Hong Kong law student "C," AI-made pornography was a distant danger until a university classmate created graphic images of her and multiple other women.... Read more

Instagram users are warning about a new location sharing feature, fearing that the hugely popular app could be putting people in danger by revealing their whereabouts without their knowledge.... Read more

OpenAI released a keenly awaited new generation of its hallmark ChatGPT on Thursday, touting "significant" advancements in artificial intelligence capabilities as a global race over the technology accelerates.... Read more

Quick: Think of "folklore." Did images of witches, trolls, goblins or other fairytale creatures and stories populate your mind?... Read more

ChatGPT will tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked, according to new research from a watchdog group.... Read more

Meta on Tuesday said it shut nearly seven million WhatsApp accounts linked to scammers in the first half of this year and is ramping up safeguards against such schemes.... Read more

Internet security is a major concern, but cryptographic protocol analysis tools often require a long time due to their computational complexity. Professor Kazuhiro Ogata and Assistant Professor Canh Minh Do of the Department of Computing Science at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) have successfully parallelized two key... Read more

With quantum computing on the horizon, cryptographers are working to secure digital communications against a new generation of potential threats.... Read more

Generative artificial intelligence assistants like ChatGPT are cutting into traditional online search traffic, depriving news sites of visitors and impacting the advertising revenue they desperately need, in a crushing blow to an industry already fighting for survival.... Read more

A US federal court ruled Thursday that Google must open its Android operating system to rival app stores, after the internet giant lost an appeal in an antitrust case filed by Fortnite maker Epic Games.... Read more

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter declared a state of local emergency on July 29 following a days-long cyber attack on the city's Internet-based computer networks that led the city to call in the FBI and Gov. Tim Walz to enlist the aid of the Minnesota National Guard's cybersecurity experts.... Read more

Australia will use landmark social media laws to ban children under 16 from video-streaming site YouTube, a top minister said Wednesday stressing the need to shield them from "predatory algorithms."... Read more

If you're a Microsoft Authenticator user, like me, you've probably received at least one notice that the app's password management features are no longer usable and that your stored passwords will be inaccessible starting Aug. 1 unless you have the Edge browser.... Read more

New UK age verification measures to prevent children accessing harmful online content came into force on Friday, with campaigners hailing them a "milestone" in their years-long battle for stronger regulations.... Read more

Instagram parent company Meta has introduced new safety features aimed at protecting teens who use its platforms, including information about accounts that message them and an option to block and report accounts with one tap.... Read more

Big tech platforms often present content moderation as a seamless, tech‑driven system. But human labor, often outsourced to countries such as India and the Philippines, plays a pivotal role in making judgments that involve understanding context. Technology alone can't do this.... Read more

Major social media platforms are enabling and profiting from misinformation around extreme weather events, endangering lives and impeding emergency response efforts, a research group said Tuesday.... Read more

Nextdoor, the social media site that aims to create connections among neighbors, is trying to shake off an uneven past and a nagging sense it is being underutilized. How? It is turning to professional journalists for help.... Read more

People have nicknamed the security system that monitors and controls internet traffic entering and leaving China "The Great Firewall of China."... Read more

Five EU countries including France will test an app aimed at preventing children from accessing harmful content online by checking users' ages, the European Commission said Monday.... Read more

The contemporary internet has been with us since roughly 1995. Its current underlying economic model—surveillance capitalism—began in the early 2000s, when Google and then Facebook realized how much our personal information and online behavior revealed about us and claimed it for themselves to sell to advertisers.... Read more

Elon Musk's startup xAI apologized Saturday for offensive posts published by its artificial intelligence assistant Grok this week, blaming them on a software update meant to make it function more like a human.... Read more

The latest version of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is echoing the views of its billionaire creator, so much so that it will sometimes search online for Musk's stance on an issue before offering up an opinion.... Read more