Author: Nick Gold

Connor Moucka, accused of stealing large amounts of customer data from companies that used Snowflake’s cloud storage services, has agreed to be extradited to the US to face charges, Cyberscoop reports. Around 165 companies were affected by the Snowflake breaches, including AT&T and Ticketmaster.Alexander “Connor” Moucka, who was arrested in Canada on October 30th at the request of the US government, agreed to the extradition in writing before a judge in the Superior Court of Justice in Kitchener last Friday, waiving Canada’s requirement for a 30-day waiting period.Moucka is facing 20 federal charges that include violations of the Computer Fraud…

Getting added to the wrong group chat is a common problem, but what if that group chat is describing an upcoming military strike? That’s what happened to The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to a Signal group chat formed by high-ranking members of the Trump administration to discuss plans for military strikes on Yemen. As a result, he had the details of a bombing attack targeting the Houthis hours before it actually occurred on March 15th, facts later confirmed not only by the attacks going off on schedule but in comments from National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes,…

23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, raising concerns about what will happen to the DNA-testing company and all the data it’s collected from customers over the years. In the event that 23andMe is sold, its massive genetic database may end up in the hands of a different company entirely — one that users never consented to handing their personal information over to.If you’ve submitted your DNA to the company via its saliva-testing kits, 23andMe will typically have your genetic, ancestry, and family connections data on file, alongside any personal information that was used to create your account, including your name, address,…

DNA testing firm 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to help the company sell itself after years of financial difficulties. Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s co-founder and CEO, announced on X that she has resigned with immediate effect to become an independent bidder for the company, with chief financial and accounting officer Joe Selsavage stepping in as interim CEO.“After a thorough evaluation of strategic alternatives, we have determined that a court-supervised sale process is the best path forward to maximize the value of the business,” Mark Jensen, chair and member of the Special Committee of the Board of Directors, said…

Google Maps users have recently been complaining on places like Reddit that their Timeline data — the app’s historical record of where they’ve been — had disappeared. Now, Google has confirmed that it accidentally deleted the data and that anyone who wasn’t using Google’s cloud backups is out of luck.Google spokesperson Genevieve Park provided this statement in an email to The Verge:We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people. Nearly everyone with encrypted Timeline backups will be able to restore their data; unfortunately those who did not have backups enabled will not…

Google has started rolling out new AI features to Gemini Live that let it “see” your screen or through your smartphone camera and answer questions about either in real-time, Google spokesperson Alex Joseph has confirmed in an email to The Verge. The features come nearly a year after Google first demonstrated the “Project Astra” work that powers them.A Reddit user said the feature showed up on their Xiaomi phone, as spotted by 9to5Google. Today, the same user posted the video below demonstrating Gemini’s new screen-reading ability. It’s one of the two features Google said in early March would “start rolling…

Apple is working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch in order to enable AI features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On Newsletter.The cameras will be “inside the display” for the standard Series Watch, while the Apple Watch Ultra would feature it on the side, next to the digital crown and button, according to Gurman. With them, the Apple Watch would be able to “see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information,” which he says is also the plan for camera-equipped AirPods Apple is rumored to…

Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr said companies looking for regulatory approval should “get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination,” according to an interview with Bloomberg. Carr reportedly brought up Paramount’s merger with Skydance, Verizon’s purchase of Frontier Communications, and T-Mobile’s plans to acquire most of US Cellular as potential deals that could be affected.“We can only under the statute move forward and approve a transaction if we find that doing so serves the public interest,” Carr told Bloomberg. “If there’s businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really…

Cloudflare, one of the biggest network internet infrastructure companies in the world, has announced AI Labyrinth, a new tool to fight web-crawling bots that scrape sites for AI training data without permission. The company says in a blog post that when it detects “inappropriate bot behavior,” the free, opt-in tool lures crawlers down a path of links to AI-generated decoy pages that “slow down, confuse, and waste the resources” of those acting in bad faith.Websites have long used the honor system approach of robots.txt, a text file that gives or denies permission to scrapers, but which AI companies, even well-known…

An update to the Philips Hue app this week appears to have leaked a new Hue Secure video doorbell, reports Hueblog. The unannounced product shows up in a section offering instructions for adding devices that you have no QR code for.From the screenshots below, taken in the iOS Hue app by my colleague Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, the Hue Secure doorbell is a straightforward video doorbell — tall, rectangular, and with what looks like a large button inside of an LED circle. As of this writing, the app still shows it on my phone.I could only get so far in the…