Subject: Billions in Payouts: 4 Tech Companies That Might Owe You Cash This Year
Source: Android Headlines
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/10/billions-in-payouts-4-tech-companies-that-might-owe-you-cash-this-year.html
There are four major tech settlement payouts that people may be eligible for in 2025. AT&T will pay $177 million to customers affected by data breaches from 2019–2024, with potential payouts of up to $7,500 per person. Amazon agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement for allegedly deceptive Prime sign-up practices between 2019 and 2025, compensating around 35 million customers. Anthropic is also set to pay $1.5 billion to authors alleging their work was used to train its AI models, though the settlement is still under judicial review. Lastly, Facebook has begun issuing payments from the Cambridge Analytica settlement for users who filed claims before the 2023 deadline.
Source: WOODtv via WJAC
https://www.wtaj.com/news/regional-news/police-warn-about-ai-homeless-man-prank-heres-what-to-know/
BIG RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) – An AI-driven TikTok trend is resulting in 911 calls by panicked people who think a man has broken into their homes.
The prank uses artificial intelligence to create a picture or video of a “homeless man” entering a person’s home, going through their fridge, or lying in their bed. The prankster sends the fake video to a loved one, who thinks the convincing images are real.
Police departments in at least four states have received calls for reported home intrusions only to find out the “intruder” was an AI-generated person, The New York Times reports.
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Gogolin said investigators and law enforcement also need more advanced training. “There are very few degreed investigators that have a cyber security background, let alone a computer science background particularly at the local level, even at the state level.”
Source: Android Headlines
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/10/publishers-adopt-ai-web-scraping-countermeasures-content-theft-defense.html
News publishers are actively fighting back against unauthorized AI web scraping, abandoning polite requests for aggressive technical defenses. Companies are deploying cyber tactics like AI Tarpits and Proof of Work challenges to ensnare and deter scraping bots. This mounting resistance is now supported by infrastructure provider Cloudflare, which is automatically blocking non-compliant AI crawlers…
Filed: https://www.androidheadlines.com/category/tech-news/artificial-intelligence
Subject: SSA OIG Scam Alert: Unexpected Letter, Text, or Email from the U.S. Supreme Court? Think Scam First 10/08/2025
Source: SSA.gov
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/october-2025-scam-alert-supreme-court.pdf
SSA OIG Scam Alert: Unexpected Letter, Text, or Email from the U.S. Supreme Court? Think Scam First 10/08/2025
Scam Alert – For Immediate Release. October 8, 2025 Unexpected Letter, Text, or Email from the U.S. Supreme Court? Think Scam First
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Social Security Administration (SSA) is warning the public about a new government imposter scam. This scam comes in the form of an official-looking letter identified as a “certificate” on fake U.S. Supreme Court letterhead using forged signatures of […]
The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Social Security Administration (SSA) is warning the public about a new government imposter scam. This scam comes in the form of an official-looking letter identified as a “certificate” on fake U.S. Supreme Court letterhead using forged signatures of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. This high-pressure scam urges individuals to cooperate with the named SSA official, pressuring them to send money or share personal information.
The scam letter is personally addressed to the recipient and claims they are a primary suspect in connection with legal proceedings and criminal charges. The letter may use the real name of an SSA executive and claim that the proceedings “are conducted with the oversight of Attorney General Raúl Torrez” of New Mexico. The letter further claims that according to findings from SSA and the incorrectly named “Drug Enforcement Agency,” the recipient may have been subjected to identity theft, noting that their Social Security number (SSN) has been compromised. The letter states that SSA will issue a new SSN.
Source: Gizmodo
https://www.bespacific.com/image-scrubber/
Gizmodo: “The EFF suggests Image Scrubber as a software tool for obscuring faces, and also stripping out the identifying metadata attached to your photos — which can include your location and sometimes even your name…” “This is a tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests. It will remove identifying metadata (Exif data) from photographs, and also allow you to selectively blur parts of the image to cover faces and other identifiable information.
[…]
Tagged: https://gizmodo.com/tag/surveillance-tech
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Subject: What the Huge AWS Outage Reveals About the Internet
Source: WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/what-that-huge-aws-outage-reveals-about-the-internet/
Source: The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
[thx, Mel ] “It’s always DNS” is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.And so, a quiet suspicion starts to circulate: where have the senior AWS engineers who’ve been to this dance before gone? And the answer increasingly is that they’ve left the building — taking decades of hard-won institutional knowledge about how AWS’s systems work at scale right along with them.
What happened?
At the end of 2023, Justin Garrison left AWS and roasted them on his way out the door. He stated that AWS had seen an increase in Large Scale Events (or LSEs), and predicted significant outages in 2024. It would seem that he discounted the power of inertia, but the pace of senior AWS departures certainly hasn’t slowed — and now, with an outage like this, one is forced to wonder whether those departures are themselves a contributing factor.
When that tribal knowledge departs, you’re left having to reinvent an awful lot of in-house expertise that didn’t want to participate in your RTO games, or play Layoff Roulette yet again this cycle. This doesn’t impact your service reliability — until one day it very much does, in spectacular fashion. I suspect that day is today.
…
Source: Gizmodo
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/10/deepfakes-beware-youtubes-likeness-detection-is-watching.html
After months of testing, YouTube has started rolling out its new likeness detection feature to the creators. It allows creators to control how their likeness is used across the platform, especially in AI-generated content.
YouTube, the popular video streaming platform, has now launched likeness detection technology for its creators. The feature underwent months of pilot testing before rolling out to the stable version. It enables the creators to identify and request the removal of AI-generated videos that misuse their appearance or voice.
YouTube aims to combat deceptive AI videos with its likeness detection feature
Creators are given full control over how their likeness is used
Once verified, the creators will be able to review the videos flagged by YouTube’s algorithm. Creators can either request the removal of the video, submit a copyright claim, or archive it.
YouTube’s representative told TechCrunch that this is just the first wave of the rollout. More creators are expected to gain access to the likeness detection feature in the coming months. The official emphasized that the tool is built to prevent misuse of creators’ likenesses, particularly in misleading product endorsements or misinformation campaigns.
Subject: Clickbait Gives AI Models ‘Brain Rot,’ Researchers Find
Source: Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com/clickbait-gives-ai-models-brain-rot-researchers-find-2000675101
Interestingly, the researchers also found that mitigation techniques done to try to minimize the impact of the junk data couldn’t fully reverse the harm of bad information. As a result, the researchers warn that the process of crawling the web for any and all data may not actually produce better results for LLMs, as the volume of information does not equate to quality. They suggest more careful curation could be necessary to address these potential harms, as there may not be any going back once you feed the model garbage. Apparently, for LLMs, the “you are what you eat” rule applies.
Subject: Tech Giants Demand Global Ban on AI Superintelligence
Source: Gizmodo
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/10/tech-public-figures-call-for-global-ban-ai-superintelligence-development.html
More than 800 public figures, including Steve Wozniak and Prince Harry, have signed a statement calling for a ban on developing AI superintelligence. The move reflects growing fears over AI’s potential to threaten jobs, freedom, and even humanity’s survival.Without a doubt, AI is amazing. The things it can do, the automations, and the way we interact with it have really changed our lives. But like they say, too much of a good thing is bad. Which is why more than 800 public figures, including Steve Wozniak and Prince Harry, have called for the ban of AI superintelligence.
Public figures call for ban on AI superintelligence – According to a report from The Financial Times, more than 800 public figures, which also includes AI scientists, former military leaders, and CEOs, have signed a statement that calls for the ban on the work that could lead to AI superintelligence.
The statement in part reads, “We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not to be lifted before there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in.”
Speaking to NBC News, the Future of Life Institute’s executive director, Anthony Aguirre, said, “We’ve, at some level, had this path chosen for us by the AI companies and founders and the economic system that’s driving them, but no one’s really asked almost anybody else, ‘Is this what we want?“
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Filed: Artificial Intelligence News
Source: Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com/cryptos-reliance-on-centralized-infrastructure-exposed-by-aws-outage-2000676251
Earlier this week, an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to temporary downtimes for a vast number of web apps and services, including end-to-end encrypted messenger Signal. In response, many technologists pointed to the situation as yet another example of the supposedly decentralized internet’s reliance on centralized infrastructure.
While crypto is supposed to be a decentralized alternative to much of that centralization, particularly in terms of financial applications, even that segment of the web experienced large amounts of downtime. Centralized exchanges, such as Coinbase and Robinhood, were inaccessible for a period of time, which should not be viewed as too surprising, but it didn’t stop there.
Actual crypto infrastructure, such as web-based wallets and so-called decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, was also inaccessible. Perhaps most troubling, entire blockchain networks stopped working, as the vast majority (all?) of the nodes on those specific networks were running on AWS.
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However, there is a growing concern that the crypto industry more generally has embraced far too much centralization, as highlighted by an Ethereum Foundation researcher’s recent move to work on a stablecoin-focused blockchain incubated by fintech giant Stripe. And Bitcoin itself, which is supposed to be the gold standard for crypto decentralization, is not at all immune from this push towards more centralization, as Wall Street’s embrace of the crypto asset as a store of value has led to centralization by way of the reintroduction of the third-party custodians Satoshi intended to avoid.
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The value proposition of this new financial technology becomes less clear the more its underlying, fundamental utility is abstracted away from the end user, but the reality is that the average person tends to use apps that make things user-friendly and convenient over all else.
Filed: Cryptocurrencies