The digital world offers many opportunities for self-expression and development, but it is also a space where disagreements can escalate quickly, and bullying, harassment and revenge are present. Doxxing is a leading form of online retaliation that can have a significant impact on the mental health and physical safety of children. Minimizing the chances of this occurring requires a change in online behavior, for both parents and children. ...
Potentially Historic Massive Data Leak Austrian researchers have revealed a mass enumeration vulnerability in WhatsApp that allowed the extraction of 3.5 billion user phone numbers. This finding highlights a security flaw in the app’s “contact discovery” feature, which, lacking strict rate limiting, allowed researchers to scrape a large portion of WhatsApp’s user base. The method exploited by the researchers is based on how WhatsApp makes it easy to add contacts: when you enter a phone number, the platform instantly checks whether that number is registered and often displays the profile photo and associated name. By repeating this process billions of times using the browser-based WhatsApp app, researchers were able to collect phone numbers of almost all WhatsApp users in the world. ...
The idea of entering into a romantic relationship with an artificial intelligence system, popularized by the movie “Her,” has moved from the realm of science fiction to a tangible reality thanks to the proliferation of generative AI and large-scale language models (LLM). Virtual companion apps, also known as companion apps, are experiencing a significant boom, satisfying psychological and sometimes romantic needs for a growing user base. Platforms like Character.AI, Nomi, and Replika, as well as the foray of big players like OpenAI (with “verified adult erotica” plans) and Elon Musk’s xAI (with flirtatious companions in Grok), demonstrate the market demand for this technology. However, this rapid growth comes with serious security and privacy risks that users should consider before sharing intimate information with their AI peers. ...