Google has filed a lawsuit to dismantle the sprawling Badbox 2.0 botnet, which infected over 10 million Android devices with pre-installed malware. Badbox 2.0 "is already the largest known botnet of internet-connected TV devices, and it grows each day. It has harmed millions of victims in the United States and around the world and threatens many more," Google said in its complaint. SecurityWeek reports: The internet giant cautions that, while it has been used mainly for fraud, the botnet could be used for more harmful types of cybercrime, such as ransomware or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. In addition to pre-installing the malware on devices, Badbox 2.0's operators also tricked users into installing infected applications that provided them with further access to their personal devices, Google says. As part of their operation, the individuals behind Badbox 2.0 sold access to the infected devices to be used as residential proxies, and conducted ad fraud schemes by abusing these devices to create fake ad views or to exploit pay-per-click compensation models, the company continues. The internet giant also points out that this is the second global botnet the perpetrators have built, after the initial Badbox botnet was disrupted by German law enforcement in 2023.

According to Google, Badbox 2.0 is operated by multiple cybercrime groups from China, each having a different role in maintaining the botnet, such as establishing infrastructure, developing and pre-installing the malware on devices, and conducting fraud. "The BadBox 2.0 Enterprise includes several connected threat actor groups that design and implement complex criminal schemes targeting internet-connected devices both before and after the consumer receives the device," Google says. "While each member of the Enterprise plays a distinct role, they all collaborate to execute the BadBox 2.0 Scheme. All of the threat actor groups are connected to one another through the BadBox 2.0 shared C2 infrastructure and historical and current business ties," the company continues.

Christine Hunsicker, founder of the failed "Clothing-as-a-Service" startup CaaStle, has been criminally charged with defrauding investors of over $300 million by falsifying financials and misrepresenting the company's health. CNBC reports: Authorities said Christine Hunsicker, 48, of Lafayette, New Jersey, promoted CaaStle to investors as a more than $1.4 billion "Clothing-as-a-Service" business that helped companies rent apparel to consumers with an option to buy, despite knowing it was financially distressed and short of cash. The alleged fraud spanned six years starting in 2019, three years after the Princeton University alumna was named one of Inc magazine's "Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs" and Crain's New York Business' "40 Under 40."

Hunsicker was charged in a six-count indictment with wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, making false statements to a bank and aggravated identity theft. She turned herself in to authorities, and could face decades in prison if convicted. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a related civil lawsuit. In a joint statement, Hunsicker's lawyers Michael Levy and Anna Skotko said the indictment presented "an incomplete and very distorted picture," despite their client being "fully cooperative and transparent" with prosecutors. "There is much more to this story, and we look forward to telling it," the lawyers added.

Authorities said Hunsicker falsified CaaStle's financial statements and bank records to raise capital. This included alleged representations that CaaStle earned $66.3 million on revenue of $439.9 million in 2023, when it actually lost $81 million on revenue of $15.7 million. Hunsicker was also accused of falsely telling investors their money would go toward buying discounted shares from existing shareholders who needed liquidity, including after the 2022 collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Prosecutors said Hunsicker fraudulently raised more than $275 million for CaaStle and $30 million for a related venture, P180.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Privacy-focused browser DuckDuckGo is rolling out a new setting that lets users filter out AI images in search results. The company says it's launching the feature in response to feedback from users who said AI images can get in the way of finding what they're looking for.

Users can access the new setting by conducting a search on DuckDuckGo and heading to the Images tab. From there, they will see a new dropdown menu titled "AI images." Users can then choose whether or not they want to see AI content by selecting "show" or "hide." Users can also turn on the filter in their search settings by tapping the "Hide AI-Generated Images" option. "The filter relies on manually curated open-source blocklists, including the 'nuclear' list, provided by uBlockOrigin and uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist," DuckDuckGo said in a post on X. "While it won't catch 100% of AI-generated results, it will greatly reduce the number of AI-generated images you see." DuckDuckGo says it has plans to add other similar filters in the future.

Brandon Vigliarolo writes via The Register: A tech executive's alleged affair exposed on a stadium jumbotron is ripe fodder for the gossip rags, but it exhibits something else: proof that we need not wait for an AI-fueled dystopian surveillance state to descend on us -- we're perfectly able and willing to surveil ourselves. The embracing couple caught at a Coldplay concert this week as the jumbotron camera panned around the audience would have been another unremarkable clip, if not for the pair panicking and rushing to hide, triggering attendees to publish the memorable moment on social media. "Either they're having an affair or they're very shy," Coldplay singer Chris Martin said of the pair's reaction.

As is always the case when viral moments of unknown people get uploaded to the internet, they didn't remain anonymous for long, with the internet quickly identifying them as the CEO of data infrastructure outfit Astronomer, Andy Byron, and its Chief People Officer, Kristin Cabot. We're not going to weigh in on Byron's, who internet sleuths have determined is married (for now), or Cabot's behavior - making someone pay for the moral transgression of an alleged extramarital affair may be enough reason for the internet to go on a witch hunt, but that's not our concern here.

What's worrying is what this moment says - yet again - about us as a society: We have cameras everywhere, our personal data has become one of the most valuable commodities in the world, and we're all perpetually ready to use that tech to make those we feel have violated the social contract pay publicly for their transgressions. This is hardly a new phenomenon. [...] There's really no reason to set up an expensive and oppressive surveillance state when we all have location tracking, internet-connected shaming machines in our pockets. Big tech gave us the tools of our own surveillance, and as "ColdplayGate" shows yet again, we'll keep using those tools if they'll make us feel better about ourselves - especially if someone else gets knocked down a peg in the process.

President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, marking the first major U.S. regulation of stablecoins by creating a legal framework for their issuance and consumer protections, while also championing crypto innovation as a major financial revolution. The bill passed the House on Thursday with the support of 206 Republicans and 102 Democrats. From a report: Members of Congress and top executives from Robinhood, Tether, Gemini and other crypto and financial firms were in attendance for the signing ceremony. The fate of the GENIUS Act was in question earlier this week when a dozen conservatives stymied a procedural vote. A compromise was ultimately reached, and the holdouts allowed the legislation to proceed. The president on Friday suggested that he spoke to the holdouts individually on the phone to persuade them, after House Speaker Mike Johnson told him there were a dozen Republicans opposing the bill.

"The good news is, I call up, 'Hello, Jim, how are you?' 'Sir, you have my vote.' Boom. 'Sir, you have my vote.' I really just, they just want a little love," he said. "Unfortunately, it's always the same 12 people." David Sacks, the venture capitalist-turned Mr. Trump's AI and crypto czar, said the president "stepped in and saved this bill." Mr. Trump also said Vice President JD Vance had been on the phone late at night, helping push the legislation through.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted." On Wednesday, programmer Przemysaw Debiak (known as "Psyho"), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled "Humans vs AI." Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.

The competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes. The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry's legendary battle against industrial automation, Debiak's victory represents a human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits to prove that human skill still matters in an age of advancing AI. Both stories feature exhausting endurance contests -- Henry drove steel spikes for hours until his heart gave out, while Debiak coded for 10 hours on minimal sleep. The parallel extends to the bittersweet nature of both victories: Henry won his race but died from the effort, symbolizing the inevitable march of automation, while Debiak's acknowledgment that humanity prevailed "for now" suggests he recognizes this may be a temporary triumph against increasingly capable machines. While Debiak won 500,000 yen and survived his ordeal better than the legendary steel driver, the AtCoder World Tour Finals pushes humans and AI models to their limits through complex optimization challenges that have no perfect solution -- only incrementally better ones. "Humanity has prevailed (for now!)," wrote Debiak on X, noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive."

Ring has restored police access to user video footage and returned to its original crime-prevention mission under founder Jamie Siminoff, who rejoined Amazon in April after a two-year absence. The video doorbell company announced a partnership with law enforcement technology firm Axon that allows police to request footage through Axon's digital evidence management system, effectively reviving a controversial feature Ring discontinued last year.

Siminoff scrapped Ring's socially-focused mission statement "Keep people close to what's important" that Amazon introduced in 2024 and reinstated the company's original mandate to "make neighborhoods safer." The company previously paid $5.8 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations of privacy violations in 2023, though Amazon denied wrongdoing.

Netflix says it has used visual effects created by generative AI in one of its original TV shows for the first time. From a report: The streaming giant's co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said AI, which produces videos and images based on prompts, was used to create a scene of a building collapsing in the Argentine science fiction show, The Eternaut. He said the technology allowed the production team to complete sequences faster and at a lower cost.

The use of generative AI is controversial in the entertainment industry over concerns it creates content using others' work without their consent and fears that it will replace the work of humans. [...] Asked about Netflix's use of AI, Mr Sarandos said the technology has allowed productions with smaller budgets to use advanced visual effects.

LibreOffice has accused Microsoft of intentionally using "unnecessarily complex" file formats to lock in Office users, claiming the company weaponizes its Office Open XML schema to create barriers for competitors. The open-source office suite argued that Microsoft's OOXML format includes deeply nested structures with non-intuitive naming conventions and numerous optional elements that make implementation difficult for developers outside Microsoft.

LibreOffice compared the situation to a railway system where tracks are public but one company's control system is so convoluted that competitors cannot build compatible trains.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Since Monday morning, Claude Code users have been hit with unexpectedly restrictive usage limits. The problems, many of which have been aired on Claude Code's GitHub page, seem to be concentrated among heavy users of the service, many of whom are on the $200-a-month Max plan.

Users are only told "Claude usage limit reached," and given a time (typically within a matter of hours) when the limit will reset. But with no explicit announcement of a change in limits, many users have concluded that their subscription has been downgraded or that their usage is being inaccurately tracked.

"Your tracking of usage limits has changed and is no longer accurate," one user complained. "There is no way in the 30 minutes of a few requests I have hit the 900 messages." When reached for comment, an Anthropic representative confirmed the issues but declined to elaborate further.

Microsoft has shut down its Movies & TV storefront on the Microsoft Store, ending the ability to purchase new entertainment content on Windows PCs and Xbox consoles. The company announced that as of July 18, users can no longer buy or rent movies and TV shows through Microsoft.com, the Microsoft Store on Windows, or the Microsoft Store on Xbox.

Customers who previously purchased content from the Microsoft Store can continue accessing their libraries through the Movies & TV app, which remains available for download. Microsoft will not offer refunds for recent purchases. US customers can use the Movies Anywhere service to sync their purchased content to other compatible platforms.

An anonymous reader shares a column: I can't open LinkedIn without seeing a new post from a Microsoft employee who lost their job in the company's latest round of layoffs. Around 15,000 jobs have been eliminated at Microsoft over the past couple months -- the biggest cuts at the company in more than a decade.

I've spoken to more than a dozen Microsoft employees in recent weeks, and everyone is concerned about the company's direction in this AI era. Morale is at an all-time low, and employees are worried that regular layoffs are simply the new normal.

Sources tell me that Microsoft's leadership team had the choice between reducing investment in AI infrastructure for the upcoming financial year or deeply cutting its headcount and operating expenses. It's very clear what route Microsoft chose.

Delta Air Lines plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI by the end of this year, up from the current 3% of fares that are AI-determined. President Glen Hauenstein told investors last week the airline's long-term strategy aims to eliminate static pricing altogether in favor of personalized fares calculated by AI algorithms.

The AI pricing pilot program, which has tripled in scope over nine months, has produced "amazingly favorable unit revenues," according to the airline.

You're not alone if you think the move is problematic. Consumer Watchdog analyst Justin Kloczko told Fortune that the airline is "basically hacking our brains," and Senator Ruben Gallego called Delta's practice "predatory pricing."

The computer science major needs a rebrand, Google's head of Android Sameer Samat said, arguing that the discipline is widely misunderstood as simply learning to code. "It is thought of as, 'go learn how to do Java coding,'" Samat said of the major, adding that if that's what students want to do, "you don't need a degree."

Samat, who studied computer science at UC San Diego, views the field differently: "It's definitely not learning to code. It is the science, in my opinion, of solving problems." The major should focus on breaking down problems, learning system design, and collaboration rather than just coding skills, Samat said.

India has achieved 50% of its installed electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources -- five years ahead of its 2030 target under the Paris Agreement, signalling accelerating momentum in the country's clean energy transition. From a report: The announcement comes as India's renewable power output rose at its fastest pace since 2022 in the first half of 2025, while coal-fired generation declined nearly 3%. Fossil fuels still accounted for over two-thirds of the increase in power generation last year. India plans to expand coal-fired capacity by 80 GW by 2032 to meet rising demand.