Electronic Frontier Foundation

California may let Linux bypass age check

Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company's software. Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone. The discovery of NameTag in the live Meta AI app shows that Meta had begun...

Ring gets buzzed by class action for collecting visitors' faces without consent

Perhaps you stopped by a friend's house and rang their Ring doorbell. Or maybe you walked past a neighbor's front door on your way somewhere else. According to a new class action lawsuit, Ring's Familiar Faces feature may have captured your face and generated facial-recognition data from it without your knowledge.

California passes bill declaring death-by-algorithm to 3D-printed ghost guns

California has passed a controversial bill requiring 3D printer manufacturers to build in controls that block the production of firearm components - a move drawing sharp pushback from technologists and privacy advocates. Lawmakers approved Assembly Bill 2047 on May 26. The bill requires manufacturers to embed a “firearm blueprint detection algorithm” in every model by July 2028.

FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones by Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers' IDs

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones—a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase—which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued...

China poaches more AI talent from the U.S. as it eyes the next 'super-app'

BEIJING — A former OpenAI researcher is now chief AI scientist for Tencent in China, and wants to build artificial general intelligence. It's a sign of a shift in the U.S.-China tech race. AI with human-level or above capabilities (AGI) has long been the goal of U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet, which acquired British startup DeepMind.

Diverse binding poses of agonistic neurotoxins on human Na_v1.6

Abstract Voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels are key targets of various venomous toxins. Deciphering the binding poses and mechanisms of action of representative toxins will help to dissect the functional mechanism of the channels and facilitate therapeutic development targeting Nav channels1,2. Here we present cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structures of distinct binding poses of three agonistic peptide toxins on the human Nav1.6–β1 channel complex.

Molecular glue degraders of HuR suppress BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer

Abstract BRAF gain-of-function mutations, particularly BRAF(V600E), affect roughly 10% of all patients with colorectal cancer (CRC), and portend poor prognosis with limited therapeutic interventions. BRAF inhibitors such as encorafenib are ineffective due to MAPK pathway reactivation driven by BRAF dimerization. Combined inhibition of BRAF and EGFR, although approved therapies, results in short survival benefits and frequent treatment resistance and relapse1,2,3.

Microsoft’s AI chief says superintelligence is near, but won’t take your job

Today I’m talking with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And I’m actually going to keep today’s intro short — I’m working from my wife’s family farm this week, as you’ll see in the video, but also this is a real burner of an episode. We covered everything from Mustafa’s approach to training new models to his criticisms of Anthropic talking about Claude as though it is conscious.

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Abstract Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new...