Pokemon Go players' optional location scans reportedly helped train Niantic Spatial's visual positioning system, which uses camera imagery and 3D maps to navigate when GPS is unavailable or jammed. According to DroneXL, that technology is now being paired with Vantor's drone navigation software for military and intelligence use, raising questions about whether gamers understood that footage collected for in-game rewards could eventually support defense systems. From the report: The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor's aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations.

I have spent years covering how drones lose their way the moment an electronic warfare unit switches on a jammer, a problem that has spread from the battlefield into civilian airspace, from Ukrainian workshops cycling through navigation generations to American programs scrambling for alternatives. The unsettling part of this story is not the technology. It is where the training data came from, and whether the people who supplied it would have agreed had anyone explained the destination. "Now as part of Scopely (the Saudi-owned company that acquired Niantic last year for $3.5 billion), Pokemon GO data is not shared with Niantic Spatial," a company spokesperson said in a statement to Kotaku. "AR Scans collected through Pokemon GO were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokemon GO's move to Scopely."

Riverside County has launched an 8-mile "smart freeway" pilot on northbound I-15 near Temecula, using roadway sensors and an algorithm to coordinate ramp meters and suggest speeds rather than widening the freeway. Officials say the $33 million project could reduce stop-and-go traffic and travel times. According to SFGATE, similar systems in Australia and Denver reportedly cutting delays by 20% to 65%. From the report: Unlike typical on-ramp stoplights that run on a timer lasting a few seconds, Interstate 15 drivers could find themselves waiting up to four minutes or even longer while the system determines the necessary speed for traffic entering the freeway. By spacing out the cars, transportation officials hope to improve traffic flow, reduce stop-and-go traffic and decrease the amount of time that travelers have to spend on the freeway.

The transportation commission spent $33 million to build the project, which will run for two years. Riverside County Transportation Commission spokesperson David Knudsen told SFGATE that if the program is successful, the agency will work with Caltrans to deploy it elsewhere in the county and then potentially to other traffic choke points in California. "This system is a lot less expensive than trying to build new lanes, and so the idea here is let's make the system that we have work better," he said.

Knudsen said the program is not managed by artificial intelligence but instead uses advanced sensors in the roadway to monitor real-time traffic conditions and make adjustments. The stretch of freeway that connects Temecula at the Riverside/San Diego County line to the Interstate 215 interchange in Murrieta can be notoriously clogged. What can be less than a 10-minute drive with no traffic can take between 25 and 45 minutes during the afternoon peak period, according to the transportation commission. "The intent is to create a consistent flow of traffic on the freeway system, and the coordinated ramp metering among the three on-ramps ... will help do that," Knudsen said. "If we can manage that, then we can help prevent that stop-and-go traffic frustration that so many people feel ... on the freeway."

Polish lawmakers have voted to criminalize "trash streaming," with up to five years in prison for online broadcasts of serious crimes such as rape or murder, animal cruelty, humiliating violence, gambling promotion, or even simulated depictions of those acts. Reuters reports: The move is part of a broader push by Poland to tighten regulation of online content. Recent measures include banning the use of mobile phones by children under 16 in schools and introducing stricter age verification rules to access pornography. Under the new provisions, broadcasting crimes punishable by more than five years in prison, including murder or rape, will itself be classed as a separate offence punishable by up to five years behind bars.

The law also covers content showing cruelty to animals, violence aimed at humiliating others, and the promotion of gambling. The same penalties will apply to individuals who simulate or falsely portray the commission of such crimes while streaming, lawmakers said.

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist, captioned: "For years we've had unconfirmed reports, rumors, hints... now we know." From the report: Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed.

"We tried it," says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. "It's a test. We never implemented it [more widely]." The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage "Terminator mode," in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead -- everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead," says Kokhanovskyy. "There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing... Everything it sees will be killed."

With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included "a couple of soldiers, one truck," says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them. Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

A researcher using the name Nightmare Eclipse has released a new Microsoft Defender zero-day exploit called "RoguePlanet," which reportedly works on fully patched Windows 10 and 11 systems and can spawn a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges through a Defender race condition. The release came just hours after Microsoft fixed two previously disclosed flaws during its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop -- its largest Patch Tuesday release ever. BleepingComputer reports: The researcher shared a proof-of-concept exploit on Tuesday afternoon in a self-hosted Git repository after saying that GitHub and GitLab repositories hosting their exploits had previously been removed by Microsoft. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss. I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others," Nightmare Eclipse wrote in the repository.

[...] Cybersecurity firm ThreatLocker told BleepingComputer that they successfully reproduced the flaw in their testing and confirmed the exploit worked against fully patched Windows 11 systems with KB5094126 installed, and shared a video demonstrating it. "Our initial analysis confirms that the RoguePlanet exploit is viable and performs as described. Organizations using application allowlisting can prevent the exploit from executing, providing an effective layer of protection against this attack," Danny Jenkins, CEO of ThreatLocker, told BleepingComputer.

According to Nightmare Eclipse, RoguePlanet was originally developed as a remote code execution vulnerability that exploited Microsoft Defender's handling of files hosted on remote SMB shares. "In initial development, it was confirmed that this vulnerability was a remote code execution," the researcher explained in a blog post. "It required an attacker to coerce a victim to open a .vhd(x) in a remote SMB server, succesful exploitation resulted in defender overwriting its own files and obviously the end outcome was an RCE."

The researcher says another attack scenario could lead to remote code execution simply by coercing a victim into opening an SMB share if symlink evaluation settings were enabled. However, the researcher claims Microsoft silently hardened Defender in mid-May by patching "mpengine!SysIO*" API, which blocked junction attacks. "Rewriting RoguePlanet to make it functional again drained my soul and I couldn't complete the other scenarios and for now it remains unclear if RoguePlanet is limited to LPE or there is some sort of way to turn it into an RCE," the researcher wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. "We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time. Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.

The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period. The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta.

The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say. [...] Comments that violated Meta's policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta's rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

The Asahi Linux team is warning Apple Silicon users not to upgrade to the macOS 27 beta because Apple's changes to the boot picker and Startup Disk app make Asahi partitions invisible, preventing Linux from booting. The Register reports: The team added: "If you insist on trying out macOS 27 as soon as possible, please ensure you install a secondary copy of macOS 26 first, or install macOS 27 itself on a secondary volume." They've also updated the installer to prevent installs from running on macOS 27 for now. For anyone who ignored all of the above, "we will not support users who have installed the macOS 27 beta without ensuring at least one stable version of macOS is installed."

Considering macOS 27 is in beta, the issue may be accidental rather than an attempt by Apple to block Linux on its hardware. The Asahi team said it has filed bug report. The good news for anyone who pulled the trigger on installing the macOS 27 beta is that although the partition might not be visible, it hasn't gone anywhere. The Asahi team wrote: "If you have already upgraded to the beta and noticed that your Asahi partition has disappeared, do not stress. Your Asahi partition is still there, and you have not lost any data."

A Munich regional court has ruled (PDF) that Google can be held directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The case involved AI Overviews falsely linking two publishers to scams and shady business practices, with the court rejecting Google's argument that users could simply check the sources themselves. The Decoder reports: Google's AI overviews work nothing like traditional search results, the court argues. The AI rewrites and judges results "in its own words and according to its own structure," the ruling says. In the case at hand, for example, it opened with confident claims like "Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices," then built its own structure with a summary, red flags for the alleged scam, and tips for users. The court also found that the AI overview made claims "that are not even made in the search results." None of the linked sources drew any connection between the plaintiffs and the shady companies the AI mentioned. The court called these "the defendant's own statements." Google built the AI, Google offered it to users, so Google owns what it produces, "because it alone has influence over the AI's offering and the algorithms with which the AI operates."

The court also examined existing rulings from Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which gave traditional search engines and autocomplete limited liability. The BGH had argued that search engine operators were only liable as indirect infringers because they merely made third-party content findable. A proactive duty to check results would threaten how search engines work. The Munich court found that this reasoning doesn't apply to AI overviews. A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate "independent, new, and substantive statements" by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites. And only Google can check those statements, the court said, "at least by comparing the underlying third-party websites with its own statements based on them." The court also noted that the AI overview is "by no means absolutely necessary" for using the internet. Traditional search results already help users sort through information, the AI overview is just an extra feature. At the hearing, Google argued that users could check the linked sources themselves to verify if the AI summary was correct. It also said that these users knew "that information generated with AI should not be blindly trusted." The court rejected this.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ComputerWeekly: Microsoft has issued patches for about 200 flaws in its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop, blasting past a previous record high of almost 170 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in October 2025. Among a great many others, the latest update from Redmond fixes a total of 32 critical CVEs and three zero-day flaws. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI's Zero Day Initiative, said: "We are heading into a high-stakes summer for cyber security. June's record-shattering drop ... is a stark warning that AI is supercharging flaw discovery at an uncontrollable scale. The current number of CVEs shipped by Microsoft this year exceeds the total number of CVEs shipped in all of 2018. It is extraordinary that Microsoft can produce so many patches in a single month, and I expect many testers are wondering what quality issues may exist."

And with the addition of hundreds of CVEs in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and other third-party flaws taking the total to almost 600, Chris Goettl, vice president of security product management at Ivanti, said talk of a 'Patch Apocalypse' was no longer unwarranted. "We are in the Patch Apocalypse. The Patch Apocalypse is now," said Goettl. "This is not intended to be a scare tactic. It is meant to outline the challenge that many organizations were anticipating, but the new generation of LLMs [Large Language Models] has accelerated significantly in the first half of 2026."

"There are going to be more CVEs resolved by vendors at a faster and more continuous pace than we have ever seen previously. Unfortunately, this will also include more zero-day and n-day exploits than previously seen as well. The window from release from a vendor to exploitation had already shortened to five days as of 2023 threat intelligence data." Goettl said that many suppliers have acknowledged the need to use AI tools in their security research to identify and resolve flaws, with Oracle, Google Chrome and Mozilla all upping the cadence of their updates. Whether or not Microsoft follows suit remains to be seen.

The Pentagon has added Alibaba, BYD, Baidu, Unitree, and other Chinese companies to its list of firms it says support China's military, barring them from U.S. defense contracts. The companies and China's embassy deny the allegations. The Associated Press reports: Created in 2021 by a congressional mandate, the list (PDF) seeks to identify Chinese companies that the Pentagon considers to have links to the Chinese military -- not only those directly controlled by the Chinese military and security forces but also those contributing to the country's defense industrial base. When updating the list last year, the Pentagon said the Chinese military sought to acquire advanced technologies and expertise developed by Chinese companies, universities and research programs that "appear to be civilian entities."

The Chinese Embassy on Monday accused the U.S. of "overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies." It said Chinese companies observe the laws and regulations of the countries where they do business. "The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies," the embassy said in a statement. [...] The Chinese Embassy on Monday accused the U.S. of "overstretching the concept of national security and making discriminatory lists to go after Chinese companies." It said Chinese companies observe the laws and regulations of the countries where they do business. "The U.S. should stop its wrong practice and create a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for Chinese companies," the embassy said in a statement.

Meta says it will expand how it uses off-platform activity shared by other businesses to personalize Facebook and Instagram feeds as well as AI responses, not just ads. The change starts in July and can be disabled through the "Activity from other businesses" setting, though Meta says it is not collecting new data as part of the update. The Verge reports: For example, Meta says if you bought a tent online recently, you might see camping-related videos in your Reels feed. "We aren't collecting any new data as part of this update," the blog post says. "This is about using information that businesses already send to us to further improve your experience."

Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez tells The Verge that the company previously only used the activity across its apps, such as likes, views, and follows, to tailor the content you see. The company also started using conversations with its AI assistant to personalize ads last year.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has given Apple, Google, and other tech firms until September to introduce device-level protections that prevent children from taking, sharing, or viewing explicit images. "If businesses do not comply within three months, legislation will be brought forward requiring the protection to be added to all phones and tablets sold in the UK," reports The Guardian. "Tech firms that fail to do so could face fines, and their senior managers could be made criminally liable." From the report: "Today, I am calling on tech companies operating in this country to introduce vice controls that prevent children from sending and receiving sexually explicit images. Because this is not an impossible challenge," he said. "If they choose not, then we will act and we will change the law." [...] Under the changes, sexual predators will be prevented from being able to exploit and abuse victims through their devices, and children stopped from being able to access pornography, the Home Office said. Adults will still be able to take, share or view nude content once they have verified their age.

In the Commons, Melanie Ward, the Labour MP for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy, said: "It's time to stop asking social media companies to make their products safe, and instead time to start requiring them to do so through regulation." Clive Efford, the Labour MP for Eltham and Chislehurst, said the "sociopaths" running social media platforms had no concern for the welfare of children. "The only message that they're going to listen to is if there's legislation put before this house that is going to act and send a clear message to them." The proposal is designed to sit alongside the Online Safety Act, which requires companies to have processes for removing material that is illegal or harmful to children.

Researchers say mysterious, seconds-long GPS interference bursts detected across Europe appear to come from Russian EKS early-warning satellites, making this "a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space," reports Ars Technica. The signals may be tests of space-based jamming capability, short satellite communications, or something else, but experts say they raise troubling questions about whether GPS disruption could eventually be weaponized on a continental scale. From the report: The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Krizise at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada.

By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries. Such interference patterns happened mostly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during business hours in Europe, Humphreys told the YouTube channel Veritasium. Because such "continental-scale" interference was simultaneously affecting GPS receivers across Europe and beyond, Humphreys and his colleagues calculated that the source had to be at least 1,200 kilometers above the Earth.

[...] In the Veritasium video, Humphreys speculated that the Russians may have been testing the satellites' GPS interference capabilities only briefly on a neighboring frequency adjacent to the typical GPS band. "And then in the eventual future when there is a hot conflict, they go ahead and tune their transmitter down to the GPS band, but it's much more damaging now that it lies right on that band," he said. Incidentally, the raw data also revealed a second interference burst from the Russian satellites in a lower-frequency band used by China's BeiDou navigation system. "I can no longer say this is accidental with confidence," Humphreys told Veritasium. He also described the Russian satellites' quiet demonstration as a "massive escalation in the electronic warfare background conflict that is going on right now." Richard Bowden, division head of assured and resilient PNT at the multinational technology company GMV in Spain, wrote in a LinkedIn comment: "These signals are, without a doubt, intentional and placed on or around GNSS signals, and have the potential to disrupt legitimate use of GNSS services. But from our side at least, we can't be sure they are intentionally malicious or intended as an EW [electronic warfare] weapon."

Last Thursday, Wired reported that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system called NameTag into software installed on millions of phones. In a follow-up report, Wired says the tech giant has now removed the face-recognition-related code, while saying "no final decision" has been made about whether the feature will launch. From the report: On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

NameTag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly described releasing it during a "dynamic political environment," when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted. Last week, WIRED reported that much of NameTag's machinery was already built into the Meta AI app, downloaded by millions of users, as early as January, even as Meta publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition. After WIRED's report, Stone dismissed the findings, writing that the company couldn't answer questions about how the system would work because "the feature does not exist." Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, called the reporting "incredibly misleading" and "absolutely dishonest."

[...] The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not yet exist. Gone is the face-recognition software itself, along with the code that ran the NameTag recognition process and the "Person recognized" alert the app would have shown if someone were identified. The update also strips out a folder where the app would have stored the cropped images and biometric signatures of faces it captured but could not identify. [...] A few fragments of the NameTag system remain in the version of latest Meta AI, including an internal debug menu label and a dormant link meant to open a recognized person's profile. The leftover code points to parts of the system that are no longer there.

A burglar took a self-driving Waymo taxi to rob a San Francisco yoga studio this past January, reports TechCrunch — "and police have still not caught them."

Even the police officer assigned to the case thought it would be easier to solve, notes The San Francisco Chronicle, since Waymos are outfitted with multiple high-definition cameras and require users to make accounts with their credit card numbers: It's common for officers to seek video footage of a crime from any of the Waymos, Teslas and other high-tech vehicles that record their surroundings. That information can be crucial for identifying suspects or creating a reliable timeline of events. At times, police will go so far as to obtain search warrants to tow the vehicle "witnesses" to ensure they don't lose valuable video evidence. In the Hot 8 Yoga burglary case, San Francisco police issued a search warrant that forced Waymo to turn over information on the account that ordered the ride and video footage from the white Jaguar that served as the getaway car, police records show.

Faye said that he couldn't discuss certain details of the case, but that the Waymo user's account information didn't lead police to the suspect. In general, he said, it's not unusual for a criminal to order a service with stolen information or a burner phone. The video evidence didn't help much either, Faye said. He said that the company had not retained interior footage of the car by the time the search warrant was filed in April and that it had kept the faces seen outside the car blurred for privacy reasons... Waymo does not publicly disclose how long it retains video footage. The company blurs faces and license plates in the public-facing images it uses in a database designed for research....

Last year in Los Angeles, a person allegedly robbed a grocery store before hopping in a Waymo. Officers were able to chase down the vehicle after the suspect got inside, and the car pulled itself over after police turned on the car's emergency lights, according to Los Angeles-area news outlets.
"Farah Issa, studio manager of Hot 8 Yoga, showed the Chronicle a copy of the surveillance video from her phone, noting how the Waymo dropped off the suspect and waited for him to finish the burglary before taking off again."

People are disabling the "recording light" on Meta's Ray-Ban smartglasses — "by my count, thousands of people," says tech journalist Joanna Stern in a new video report: STERN: "They're hiring people on Facebook Marketplace to drill out the light for as much as $100. According to our reporting, folks are offering this service in at least 30 states — despite Meta's attempts to stop it... In most states, we found multiple listings. In the New York and New Jersey area alone there were 23 listings."
Stern watched a man in New Jersey disable and then conceal the light with a drill and dental probe in a New Jersey garage (a skill he learned watching YouTube and TikTok videos). He said the same day he'd already been contacted by eight more interested customers, and Stern also found at least 10 other people willing to do the same thing, just in New Jersey. "But what we found is they're all over the country."

Meta sold 7 million smartglasses in 2025, but a Meta spokesperson insisted to the videomaker that a "majority" of their smartglasses owners aren't blocking the recording light. And furthermore, they added "We aggressively target anyone advertising tampering tools, have removed thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings for these services, and pursue legal action when appropriate." (The reporter acknowledges "many" of the Marketplace ads disappeared after they brought them to Meta's attention — and Meta also said they were working with other retailers and sellers to take down listings for smartglasses-tampering parts.)

The reporter also heard from one journalist who said they'd used it so they could record the activities of federal immigration agents without being targeted. "Others told me they just don't want people asking questions when they're recording." (There's video of one young man saying "It's already difficult enough to film in public. I don't want to have a blinking light on my face.")

Tampering with smartglasses isn't illegal — though it is against Meta's Terms of Service, and could void your warranty. But a lawyer in the report says recording others without consent may be illegal, depending on a wide range of "jurisdictional nuances" like whether you live in an all-party consent state or a one-party consent state. "This seems to be our new reality," the report concludes: "more cameras, more microphones everywhere, and less certainty about who and what is recording." (Tech blogger John Gruber offered this assessment. "Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.")

Stern's report points out that "People are trying to fight back. Apps have popped up that use Bluetooth to scan for nearby camera glasses." (In the video one app-maker wonders why Meta isn't offering the same service themselves. "There are technical solutions to these problems.")

Ironically, when I watched the report on YouTube, it was preceded by... an ad for Meta's Ray-Ban AI smartglasses.

A "growing wave" of Reddit's "promoted posts" are sending U.S. and European audiences to money-stealing scams that impersonate major news organizations including the BBC, the Financial Times, and The Guardian, according to new findings from Bitdefender Labs.

"Domains are short-lived and rapidly rotated to evade detection," they write, noting that the impersonating sites apparently even use language "to falsely imply that the investment platform had been reviewed, approved, or vetted" by the legitimate site they're impersonating: The campaign promotes fake AI-powered investment platforms such as Wencoin STX, Warrior Coin AI, and Nevo Coin, using fabricated celebrity endorsements, cloned news websites, fake interviews, and invented financial success stories to lure victims into depositing money. Researchers Andrea Olariu and Emanuel Puscasu have identified multiple promoted Reddit posts masquerading as legitimate financial or breaking news stories.

Some ads claimed that:

— NVIDIA and OpenAI were "creating the future"
— Heathrow police discovered hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash
— Governments and banks were allegedly trying to "hide" a revolutionary AI investment platform
— European regulators were "silencing" articles about AI trading systems

Some Reddit ads delivered in video format, including what appeared to be a deepfake BBC news segment featuring a news anchor presenting fabricated financial headlines... Examples observed by researchers included:

— Fake BBC pages discussing "$20 billion conversations" tied to AI investments
— Fraudulent Financial Times articles about Heathrow airport cash seizures
— Fake Guardian stories claiming governments were trying to suppress coverage of Wencoin STX or Nevo Coin

The pages featured fabricated interviews, fake profit screenshots, manipulated banking documents, false testimonials, and even fictional journalists or business editors designed to make the scam look legitimate. In many cases, the content sought to create a sense of exclusivity or conspiracy, suggesting that banks, regulators, or governments were trying to suppress public access to the investment platform...

Our researchers found that after users clicked links embedded within the fake Guardian articles, they were redirected to a registration form allegedly used to create a "Nevo Coin" investment account. The form requested personal contact information, including the victim's name, email address, and phone number. To increase pressure and encourage immediate action, the page warned that registration availability was limited, claiming that once all spots were filled, new user registrations would be suspended.
And in the final stage, they're asked to deposit money...

Sales have increased for Hyundai's under-$35,000 IONIQ 5, totalling 18,395 for the first five months of 2026, reports Electrek, "up 16% from the same period last year."

But meanwhile BYD's overseas sales surpassed 160,000 for the first time last month, "up 80% from May 2025 and 19% from the previous record of 135,098 set in April." Through the first five months of 2026, BYD sold 616,263 vehicles overseas. In May, overseas sales accounted for over 41% of BYD's total sales. In several major markets, including the UK, BYD surpassed Tesla and Kia to become the best-selling EV brand through April. "With fuel prices remaining high, more drivers are turning to electric vehicles as a smarter and more economical choice," Bono Ge, BYD UK's Country Manager, said last month.
Elsewhere Electrek notes that Toyota's bZ (starting at under $35,000) was the third-best-selling EV in the U.S. in the first three months of 2026, behind only the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. "Last month, bZ sales doubled from May 2025, with 2,646 units sold."

And meanwhile the first Volkswagen ID. Polo and Cupra Raval models "rolled off the production line at the Group's Martorell plant in Spain, the first of several new affordable, mass-market EVs." Starting at €24,995 ($29,000) and €26,000 ($30,100), the ID. Polo and Cupra Raval are the first models from the Group's Electric Urban Car Family...

[T]he first customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this summer and into the fall. Following the ID. Polo and Cupra Raval, Volkswagen will introduce new members to the Electric Urban Car Family, including the ID. Cross, an electric version of the T-Cross, later this year. According to Volkswagen, the ID. Cross will start at around €28,000 ($32,500).

Bluesky's chief operating officer believes teen social media bans "risk entrenching Big Tech's dominance," reports CNBC: Rose Wang, Bluesky's chief operating officer, told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday that the smaller open-source platform isn't opposed to regulation but that smaller players in the industry should be protected. "I support the protection and the safety of youth... The question that we have then is at what cost? Because essentially what I'm scared of is in the long term, we're headed to a world where there's about three to five platforms, and extreme heavy regulation of those platforms...

"Basically the whole compliance teams of these platforms are 10 times the size of our entire team," Wang said. "So, basically, we're living in a world where it's almost impossible for smaller entrants to come in and build healthier spaces."
The article notes Bluesky had grown to 43 million users as of March, "which is still only around 10% of X's estimated 450 million users. Bluesky has struggled to maintain popularity, and by the end of October last year, it had reportedly seen a 40% drop in daily mobile active users over the past 12 months."

A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for remotely updating cryptographic keys, meaning ordinary GPS receivers may have been receiving the traffic all along without anyone outside the military noticing. The findings have been detailed by Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, in a new article in Inside GNSS. 404 Media reports: [...] From the beginning, he suspected that the subframe field contained encrypted transmissions because the data was so random. "Random data is actually very unusual to get in nature," Murdoch said. "If you see it, either it's been carefully designed to be random -- but then, why is someone sending out random data? -- or it's encrypted data. I thought encrypted data is by far the most likely explanation." He returned to the subframe on and off over the years, and solicited guesses about its content on Stack Exchange in 2023. Ahmed Kamruddin, a master's student at UCL, developed the project further in 2025. Then, this year, Murdoch put the last pieces of the puzzle together over several weeks by analyzing open archive Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) recordings collected since 2007 and kept by GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.

This dataset included more than 12 million observations of Subframe 4, Page 17, yielding 3,994 unique 176-bit messages. Within this corpus, Murdoch pinpointed key-repeating "sentinels" including a pattern that appeared in February 2010 and was broadcast on and off across dozens of satellites for more than a decade. Murdoch discovered that this particular sentinel was transmitted by all 31 operational satellites within a window of a few hours on May 26, 2011, potentially heralding the activation of a new operational system. He confirmed that this timeline coincided with the rollout of the military's Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) and the Over-the-Air Rekeying (OTAR) by cross-referencing declassified documents, including a 2015 presentation about the dates of the operation.

"There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data," Murdoch said. "That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it's for." These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures. For the next 11 years, this expansive rekeying operation was overlooked in public GPS data. In 2022, the system entered a new phase, according to Murdoch's analysis. The shift was characterized by a slowing in the message rotation rate. Later, in December 2023, broadcasts carrying a distinctive "TEXT" prefix emerged then gradually spread across the constellation.

Murdoch isn't sure what explains the recent transition, though it could be a possible modernization of the infrastructure or the introduction of a new protocol. But to him, the bigger takeaway is that the signals were always available for anyone willing to take a closer look, a discovery that suggests that there could be more revelations hidden for the cryptographically curious among us. "Every receiver in the world decodes Subframe 4, Page 17," Murdoch said in his new article. "Almost none of them have ever looked at it. The lesson generalizes: There is more to learn from the bytes already arriving at our antennas than from the bytes we wish were specified differently. The data are publicly available. The signal is overhead, twice a day, every day."