Anti-surveillance clothing is getting cheaper, but don’t expect an invisibility cloak

Anti-surveillance clothing is becoming affordable enough for ordinary wardrobes, but its patterns only confuse certain computer vision systems. For now, it works better as a privacy statement than reliable protection.

Period tracker Stardust shares users’ health data with analytics firm, says Mozilla research

One period tracker app tested by Mozilla was ‘squeaky clean,’ while another app was seen sharing users’ health data with an analytics company, underscoring vast differences in user privacy among these apps.

‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust
‘No company is going to go to jail for you’: Proton’s CTO on balancing privacy, policy, and trust

Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the systems that run the world: I’m talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, the company that makes private and secure productivity software. You probably know it best for Proton Mail, which is encrypted by default, but the company also has docs, […]

A hack just showed how Suno’s AI music was really built: millions of scraped songs
A hack just showed how Suno’s AI music was really built: millions of scraped songs

For years, musicians have said AI song generators fed on their work without asking. A hacker just opened the black box and showed them exactly how. Leaked source code from Suno, one of the biggest AI music tools, tells the story. It trained its model b…

YouTube appeals the social media addiction verdict, arguing it isn’t social media
YouTube appeals the social media addiction verdict, arguing it isn’t social media

YouTube has appealed the landmark social media addiction verdict, joining Meta. Its argument: YouTube is not a social media platform. YouTube has a curious line of defence against the finding that it helped hook a child on its app. It says it is not a …

Grok Build was uploading entire Git repositories to xAI’s cloud, including committed secrets
Grok Build was uploading entire Git repositories to xAI’s cloud, including committed secrets

A security researcher published a wire-level analysis on July 12 proving that xAI’s Grok Build coding CLI was packaging developers’ entire tracked repositories, including full Git history, committed secrets, and API keys, and sending them to a Google C…

Medical AI was meant to help. This week it replaced nurses and dodged its own checks
Medical AI was meant to help. This week it replaced nurses and dodged its own checks

The pitch for medical AI is that it frees clinicians to care for patients. Two stories this week suggest the reality can run the other way. In New York, nurses say software replaced them. In Minnesota, a former Mayo Clinic leader says the software was …

Let’s build a children’s public internet
Let’s build a children’s public internet

An increasing number of people seem to agree the internet is terrible for children – allegedly addictive, destructive to self-esteem, possibly a portal to predators. Over the past year, several countries have started requiring stringent age verification or outright bans for minors. At the end of June in the US, the House of Representatives passed […]

The web is now mostly bots. Cloudflare is rebuilding its defences around that
The web is now mostly bots. Cloudflare is rebuilding its defences around that

For the first time, bots generate more than half of all web traffic. Cloudflare Precursor, the company’s new tool, stops checking IDs at the door and starts watching how visitors behave once they are inside. The internet just passed a strange milestone…

The EU has stopped sanctioning Russian hackers and started sanctioning the machine that makes them
The EU has stopped sanctioning Russian hackers and started sanctioning the machine that makes them

The European Union and the United Kingdom have jointly sanctioned Russia’s cyber apparatus for the first time. The EU listed nine individuals and four entities, while the UK went further with 24, Politico reports. The language is what matters here. The…