Technology

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Russian GRU Unit 29155 is best known for its long list of murder and sabotage ops, which include the Salisbury poisonings in England, arms depot explosions in Czechia, and an attempted coup d’etat in Montenegro. But its activities in cyberspace remained in the shadows — until now. After reviewing a trove of hidden data, The Insider can report that the Kremlin’s most notorious black ops squad also fielded a team of hackers — one that attempted to destabilize Ukraine in the months before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

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Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.

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Approximately 6.5 terabytes of data from the interconnected companies Psyclone Media and Political Media in addition to client data such as The Post Millennial, acting as their "face to the political world". Political Media describes itself as a "right of center new media consulting firm" for political and public relations campaigns and is a co-owner of Psyclone Media and Psyclone Hosting. The companies provide website, email and marketing services, in addition to video production and SEO optimization through their "cooperative partners".

Psyclone Media and Political Media's clients have included political action committees (PACs) and Super PACs, congressional candidates and other political organizations including the Tea Party, as well as conservative media figures and outlets such as Parler, Tucker Carlson, and The Washington Times. Their formal campaigns have promoted use of raw milk and disputed the narrative around the 2012 Benghazi attack, in addition to the narratives promoted by their clients through the "Conservative Stack" service, a content management service catering to conservative users.

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When hackers hit a school district, they can expose Social Security numbers, home addresses, and even disability and disciplinary records. Now, cybersecurity advocates warn that the Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts, along with rule changes, are stripping away key defenses that schools need.

“Hardmaxxing is NECESSARY. Softmaxxing alone will NEVER mog you into viability — it’s like putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling building,” declares a chatbot featured prominently on OpenAI’s GPTs page. It has just analyzed a photograph of a man and deemed him “subhuman”. The page, prominently linked from the sidebar in the ChatGPT interface, lists “Looksmaxxing GPT” as #6 in the “Lifestyle” section, behind bots promising astrological analysis, color analysis, and “fictional not-real therapy”.

An alternate reality is unfolding across social media platforms, including China’s Douyin and Weibo, where a surge of falsehoods is fueling anti-American sentiment that could undermine the fragile truce.

For years, when Meta launched new features for Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, teams of reviewers evaluated possible risks: Could it violate users' privacy? Could it cause harm to minors? Could it worsen the spread of misleading or toxic content?

Until recently, what are known inside Meta as privacy and integrity reviews were conducted almost entirely by human evaluators.

But now, according to internal company documents obtained by NPR, up to 90% of all risk assessments will soon be automated.

In practice, this means things like critical updates to Meta's algorithms, new safety features and changes to how content is allowed to be shared across the company's platforms will be mostly approved by a system powered by artificial intelligence — no longer subject to scrutiny by staffers tasked with debating how a platform change could have unforeseen repercussions or be misused.

Inside Meta, the change is being viewed as a win for product developers, who will now be able to release app updates and features more quickly. But current and former Meta employees fear the new automation push comes at the cost of allowing AI to make tricky determinations about how Meta's apps could lead to real world harm.

"Insofar as this process functionally means more stuff launching faster, with less rigorous scrutiny and opposition, it means you're creating higher risks," said a former Meta executive who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation from the company. "Negative externalities of product changes are less likely to be prevented before they start causing problems in the world."

Meta said in a statement that it has invested billions of dollars to support user privacy.

Since 2012, Meta has been under the watch of the Federal Trade Commission after the agency reached an agreement with the company over how it handles users' personal information. As a result, privacy reviews for products have been required, according to current and former Meta employees.

In its statement, Meta said the product risk review changes are intended to streamline decision-making, adding that "human expertise" is still being used for "novel and complex issues," and that only "low-risk decisions" are being automated.

But internal documents reviewed by NPR show that Meta is considering automating reviews for sensitive areas including AI safety, youth risk and a category known as integrity that encompasses things like violent content and the spread of falsehoods.

• An internal strategy paper reveals that OpenAI aims to develop ChatGPT into a personalized assistant by mid-2025, helping users with daily tasks, providing expertise such as programming knowledge, and performing actions online.
• To achieve this, OpenAI plans to use its own reasoning models and introduce new tools like "Computer Use," expanding ChatGPT's features with multimodal capabilities and generative user interfaces; a proprietary search index could serve as a key component.
• OpenAI wants ChatGPT to stand apart from search engines and operating systems as its own product category, identifying short-term competition from other AI chatbots and long-term competition from search services, browsers, and even human interactions.

• Brazil is testing a digital wallet program that allows users to monetize their data.
• A federal bill, when passed, would turn data into commercial assets for citizens — the first such proposal in the world.
• The pilot, a partnership between the public and private sectors, is ahead of similar initiatives in some U.S. states.