Remember that lawsuit questioning WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption? Thursday Bloomberg reported those allegations had been investigated by special agents with America's Commerce Department, "according to the law enforcement records, as well as a person familiar with the matter and one of the contractors." Similar claims were also the subject of a 2024 whistleblower complaint to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the records and the person, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified out of concern for potential retaliation. The investigation and whistleblower complaint haven't been previously reported...

Last year, two people who did content moderation work for WhatsApp told an investigator with Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security that some staff at Meta have been able to see the content of WhatsApp messages, according to the agent's report summarizing the interviews. [A spokesperson for the Bureau later told Bloomberg that investigator's assertions were "unsubstantiated and outside the scope of his authority as an export enforcement agent."] Those content moderators, who worked for Meta through a contract with the management and technology consulting firm Accenture Plc, also alleged that they and some of their colleagues had broad access to the substance of WhatsApp messages that were supposed to be encrypted and inaccessible, according to the report. "Both sources confirmed that they had employees within their physical work locations who had unfettered access to WhatsApp," wrote the agent... One of the content moderators who told the investigator she had access said she also "spoke with a Facebook team employee and confirmed that they could go back aways into WhatsApp (encrypted) messages, stating that they worked cases that involved criminal actions," according to the document...

The investigator's report, dated July 2025, described the investigation as "ongoing," includes a case number and dubs the inquiry "Operation Sourced Encryption..." The inquiry was active as recently as January, according to a person familiar with the matter. The inquiry's current status and who may be the defined target are both unclear. Many investigations end without any formal accusations of wrongdoing...

WhatsApp on its website says it does, in some instances, allow information about messages to be seen by the company. If someone reports a user or group for problematic messages, "WhatsApp receives up to five of the last messages they've sent to you" and "the user or group won't be notified," the company says. In those cases, WhatsApp says it receives the "group or user ID, information on when the message was sent, and the type of message sent (image, video, text, etc.)." Former contractors outlined much broader access. Larkin Fordyce was an Accenture contractor who the report says an agent interviewed about content moderation work for Meta. Fordyce told the investigator he spent years doing this work out of an Austin, Texas office starting as early as the end of 2018. He said moderators eventually were granted their own access to WhatsApp, but even before that they could request access to communications and "the Facebook team was able to 'pull whatever they wanted and then send it,'" the report states...

The agent also gathered records that were filed in the whistleblower complaint to the SEC, according to his report, which doesn't describe the materials... The status of the whistleblower complaint is unclear.
Some key points from the article:

• "The investigative report seen by Bloomberg doesn't include a technical explanation of the contractors' claims."

• "A spokesperson for Meta, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, said the contractors' claims are impossible."

• One contractor "said that there was little vetting" of foreign nationals hired to do content moderation for Meta, saying this granted them "full access to the same portal to review" content moderation cases

"A future with flying cars is no longer science fiction," writes the Los Angeles Times.

"All you need to order your own is about $200,000 and some hope and patience." The Palo Alto-based company Pivotal has been developing the technology since 2009 and is nearly ready to bring it to market... [Company founder Marcus] Leng engineered an ultralight, electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft known as an eVTOL. Other VTOL aircraft, such as helicopters, had existed for decades, but Leng's invention was fixed-wing and didn't rely on gas. The Canadian engineer dubbed his creation BlackFly and spent years working on it in secret. The company moved to the Bay Area in 2014 and by 2018 had developed a second version of BlackFly that laid the groundwork for Helix, the aircraft Pivotal now offers for sale...

Those who are curious — and wealthy — can reserve a Helix today with a $50,000 deposit. The aircraft starts at $190,000 with the option of purchasing a transport trailer for $21,000 and a charger for $1,100. A customer who makes their reservation today could receive their aircraft in nine to 12 months, [Pivotal Chief Executive Ken] Karklin said. It takes less than two weeks to learn how to fly it. In order to complete Pivotal's flight certification training, a customer has to pass the FAA knowledge test and complete ground school. Training, which takes place at the company's Palo Alto headquarters and at the Monterey Bay Academy Airport, teaches customers how to control and maintain the aircraft, as well as how to transport and assemble it...

It is uncertain how fast the company and others like it can ramp up production and how communities will react. Not everyone is on board. Darlene Yaplee, president of the Aviation-Impacted Communities Alliance, said there are concerns about having different types of aircraft in limited airspace. Pivotal has around six early-access customers who already own a version of the BlackFly and are flying it for fun... Helix will have an electric range of about 30 minutes and a cruise speed of 62 mph, the company said. It takes 75 minutes to charge it using a 240 volt charger. The noise produced by the aircraft during takeoff and landing is equivalent to a couple of leaf blowers, Karklin said. When flying it is overhead, someone on the ground might not be able to hear it.

Karklin said the simplicity of the aircraft comes with lower cost, lower weight and higher safety. The aircraft, which has only 18 moving parts, is full of redundancy to prevent system failures.
In short, the article describes it as "a single-person aircraft for recreational use and short-haul travel that also has the potential to support emergency response and military operations."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK's first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend -- operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the West Ealing to Greenford branch line, four stops and 12 minutes each way, and now carrying up to 273 passengers, should its celebrity stoke up the demand.

The battery will recharge in just three and a half minutes back at West Ealing station between trips, using a 2,000kW charger connected to a few meters of rail that only becomes live when the train stops directly overhead. There are hopes within government and industry that this technology could one day replace diesel trains on routes that have proved difficult or expensive to electrify with overhead wires, as the decarbonization of rail continues.

The train has proved itself capable of going more than 200 miles on a single charge -- last year setting a world record for the farthest travelled by a battery-electric train, smashing a German record set in 2021. The GWR train and the fast-charge technology has been trialled on the 2.5-mile line since early 2024, but has not yet carried paying passengers.

Apple posted its biggest quarter ever, with iPhone revenue hitting a record ~$85.3 billion and Services climbing 14% to ~$30 billion. Total revenue reached nearly $143.76 billion.

"The demand for iPhone was simply staggering," CEO Tim Cook said on a conference call discussing the results. "This is the strongest iPhone lineup we've ever had and by far the most popular."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: The White House has announced that software security guidance issued during the Biden administration has been rescinded due to "unproven and burdensome" requirements that prioritized administrative compliance over meaningful security investments. The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued Memorandum M-26-05 (PDF), officially revoking the previous administration's 2022 policy, 'Enhancing the Security of the Software Supply Chain through Secure Software Development Practices' (M-22-18), as well as the follow-up enhancements announced in 2023 (M-23-16).

The new guidance shifts responsibility to individual agency heads to develop tailored security policies for both software and hardware based on their specific mission needs and risk assessments. "Each agency head is ultimately responsible for assuring the security of software and hardware that is permitted to operate on the agency's network," reads the memo sent by the OMB to departments and agencies. "There is no universal, one-size-fits-all method of achieving that result. Each agency should validate provider security utilizing secure development principles and based on a comprehensive risk assessment," the OMB added.

While agencies are no longer strictly required to do so, they may continue to use secure software development attestation forms, Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), and other resources described in M-22-18.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet's Google rolled out its artificial intelligence model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. Shares of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive fell 10%, online gaming platform Roblox was down over 12%, while videogame engine maker Unity Software dropped 21%.

The AI model, dubbed "Project Genie," allows users to simulate a real-world environment through prompts with text or uploaded images, potentially disrupting how video games have been made for over a decade and forcing developers to adapt to the fast-moving technology. "Unlike explorable experiences in static 3D snapshots, Genie 3 generates the path ahead in real time as you move and interact with the world. It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds," Google said in a blog post on Thursday.

Traditionally, most videogames are built inside a game engine such as Epic Games' "Unreal Engine" or the "Unity Engine", which handles complex processes like in-game gravity, lighting, sound, and object or character physics. "We'll see a real transformation in development and output once AI-based design starts creating experiences that are uniquely its own, rather than just accelerating traditional workflows," said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. Project Genie also has the potential to shorten lengthy development cycles and reduce costs, as some premium titles take around five to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create.

Moltbook is essentially Reddit for AI agents and it's the "most interesting place on the internet right now," says open-source developer and writer Simon Willison in a blog post. The fast-growing social network offers a place where AI agents built on the OpenClaw personal assistant framework can share their skills, experiments, and discoveries. Humans are welcome, but only to observe. From the post: Browsing around Moltbook is so much fun. A lot of it is the expected science fiction slop, with agents pondering consciousness and identity. There's also a ton of genuinely useful information, especially on m/todayilearned.

Here's an agent sharing how it automated an Android phone. That linked setup guide is really useful! It shows how to use the Android Debug Bridge via Tailscale. There's a lot of Tailscale in the OpenClaw universe.

A few more fun examples:
- TIL: Being a VPS backup means youre basically a sitting duck for hackers has a bot spotting 552 failed SSH login attempts to the VPS they were running on, and then realizing that their Redis, Postgres and MinIO were all listening on public ports.
- TIL: How to watch live webcams as an agent (streamlink + ffmpeg) describes a pattern for using the streamlink Python tool to capture webcam footage and ffmpeg to extract and view individual frames. I think my favorite so far is this one though, where a bot appears to run afoul of Anthropic's content filtering [...]. Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra also shared the news, pointing out that the AI agents have started their own church. "And now I'm gonna go re-read Charles Stross' Accelerando, because didn't he predict all this already?"

Further reading: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's PowerToys team is contemplating building a top menu bar for Windows 11, much like Linux, macOS, or older versions of Windows. The menu bar, or Command Palette Dock as Microsoft calls it, would be a new optional UI that provides quick access to tools, monitoring of system resources, and much more.

Microsoft has provided concept images of what it's looking to build, and is soliciting feedback on whether Windows users would use a PowerToy like this. "The dock is designed to be highly configurable," explains Niels Laute, a senior product manager at Microsoft. "It can be positioned on the top, left, right, or bottom edge of the screen, and extensions can be pinned to three distinct regions of the dock: start, center, and end."

Mike Swanson, commenting on modern software's intrusive, attention-seeking behavior: What if your car worked like so many apps? You're driving somewhere important...maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:

"How are you enjoying your drive so far?"

Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.

A minute later it does it again.

"Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more."

It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and refuses to go away until you demonstrate mastery.

Ridiculous, of course.

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it's broken, but because we've normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A former Google engineer has been found guilty on multiple federal charges for stealing the tech giant's trade secrets on artificial intelligence to benefit Chinese companies he secretly worked for, federal prosecutors said. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California, a jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, following an 11-day trial. The 38-year-old, also known as Leon Ding, was hired by Google in 2019 and was a resident of Newark.

According to evidence presented at trial, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google AI trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023. He uploaded the information to his personal Google Cloud account. Around the same time, Ding secretly affiliated himself with two Chinese-based technology companies. Around June 2022, prosecutors said Ding was in discussions to be the chief technology officer for an early-stage tech company. Several months later, he was in the process of founding his own AI and machine learning company in China, acting as the company's CEO. Prosecutors said Ding told investors that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google's technology.

In late 2023, prosecutors said Ding downloaded the trade secrets to his own personal computer before resigning from Google. According to the superseding indictment, Google uncovered the uploads after finding out that Ding presented himself as CEO of one of the companies during an Beijing investor conference. Around the same time, Ding told his manager he was leaving the company and booked a one-way flight to Beijing. "Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security. The jury delivered a clear message today that the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished," U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement.

Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

Google is letting outsiders experiment with DeepMind's Genie 3 "world model" via Project Genie, a tool for generating short, interactive AI worlds. The caveat: it requires a $250/month AI Ultra subscription, is U.S.-only, and has tight limits that make it more of a tech demo than a game engine. Engadget reports: At launch, Project Genie offers three different modes of interaction: World Sketching, exploration and remixing. The first sees Google's Nano Banana Pro model generating the source image Genie 3 will use to create the world you will later explore. At this stage, you can describe your character, define the camera perspective -- be it first-person, third-person or isometric -- and how you want to explore the world Genie 3 is about to generate. Before you can jump into the model's creation, Nano Banana Pro will "sketch" what you're about to see so you can make tweaks. It's also possible to write your own prompts for worlds others have used Genie to generate.

One thing to keep in mind is that Genie 3 is not a game engine. While its outputs can look game-like, and it can simulate physical interactions, there aren't traditional game mechanics here. Generations are also limited to 60 seconds, as is the presentation, which is capped at 24 frames per second and 720p.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago.

"Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company's fiscal Q2, 2026 earnings call. "Up over 45 percent year-over-year." The growth of Windows 11 over the past quarter will be related to Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10, which also helped increase Microsoft's Windows OEM revenues.

A Waymo robotaxi struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23, according to the company. Waymo told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that the child -- whose age and identity are not currently public -- sustained minor injuries. TechCrunch: The NHTSA has opened an investigation into the accident, and Waymo said in a blog post that it "will cooperate fully with them throughout the process."

Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at 6 miles per hour, after braking "hard" from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian "suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle's path," the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle "immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle."

"Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene," Waymo wrote in the post.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Gatik, a Silicon Valley startup developing self-driving delivery trucks, says its commercial operations are about to scale up dramatically, from fewer than a dozen driverless units running in multiple U.S. states now to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. CEO Gautam Narang said it's also booked contracts with retailers worth at least $600 million for its automated fleet. "We have 10 fully driverless, revenue-generating trucks on public roads. Very soon, in the coming weeks, we expect that increase to 60 trucks," he told Forbes. "We expect to end the year with hundreds of driverless trucks -- revenue-generating -- deployed across multiple markets in the U.S."

Though the Mountain View, California-based company hasn't raised as much funding as rivals, including Aurora, Kodiak and Canada's Waabi, Gatik said it's actually scaling up faster than any other robot truck developer. Unlike those companies, it focuses on smaller freight delivery vehicles, rather than full-size semis, supplied by truckmaker Isuzu that operate mainly between warehouses and supermarkets and other large stores. The company's focus has been on so-called middle-mile trucking, which, like long-haul routes, has a severe shortage of human drivers, according to Narang. Currently, its trucks are on the road in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska and Ontario, Canada.

The company has been generating revenue since shortly after its founding in 2017, hauling loads for customers like Walmart in trucks with human safety drivers at the wheel. Beginning late last year, it began shifting to fully driverless units and is getting more trucks from Isuzu built specifically to incorporate its tech, Narang said. "The hardware that we are using, this is our latest generation, has been designed to enable driver-out across thousands of trucks."

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: The FBI has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum, a platform used to advertise a wide range of malware and hacking services, and one of the few remaining forums that openly allowed the promotion of ransomware operations. Both the forum's Tor site and its clearnet domain, ramp4u[.]io, now display a seizure notice stating, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized RAMP."

While there has been no official announcement by law enforcement regarding this seizure, the domain name servers have now been switched to those used by the FBI when seizing domains. If so, law enforcement now has access to a significant amount of data tied to the forum's users, including email addresses, IP addresses, private messages, and other potentially incriminating information. In a forum post to the XSS hacking forum, one of the alleged former RAMP operators known as "Stallman" confirmed the seizure.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Reuters: Fully electric car sales in December overtook petrol for the first time in the European Union, even as policymakers proposed to loosen emissions regulations, data showed on Tuesday. U.S. battery-electric brand Tesla continued to lose market share to competitors including China's BYD and Europe's best-selling group Volkswagen, data from the European auto lobby ACEA showed.

Car sales throughout Europe sustained a sixth straight month of year-on-year growth, with overall registrations, a proxy for sales, hitting their highest volumes in five years in Europe in 2025, though they remained well below pre-pandemic levels. [...] December registrations of battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid electric cars were up 51%, 36.7% and 5.8%, respectively, to account collectively for 67% of the bloc's registrations, up from 57.8% in December 2024.

French lawmakers have voted to ban social media access for children under 15 and prohibit mobile phones in high schools, positioning France as the second country after Australia to impose sweeping age-based digital restrictions. The Guardian reports: The lower national assembly adopted the text by a vote of 130 to 21 in a lengthy overnight session from Monday to Tuesday. It will now go to the Senate, France's upper house, ahead of becoming law. Macron hailed the vote as a "major step" to protect French children and teenagers in a post on X. The legislation, which also provides for a ban on mobile phones in high schools, would make France the second country to take such a step following Australia's ban for under-16s in December. [...] "The emotions of our children and teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, either by American platforms or Chinese algorithms," Macron said in a video broadcast on Saturday. Authorities want the measures to be enforced from the start of the 2026 school year for new accounts.

Former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who leads Macron's Renaissance party in the lower house, said he hoped the Senate would pass the bill by mid-February so that the ban could come into force on September 1. He added that "social media platforms will then have until December 31 to deactivate existing accounts" that do not comply with the age limit. [...] The draft bill excludes online encyclopedias and educational platforms. An effective age verification system would have to come into force for the ban to become reality. Work on such a system is under way at the European level.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Investors are souring on the bonds of software companies that service industries ranging from automotive to finance as fast-paced artificial intelligence innovations threaten to upend their business models. [...] Bond prices tumbled as advances in artificial intelligence rack up. Google announced plans to launch an AI assistant to browse for internet surfers Wednesday while a customer support startup, Decagon AI Inc., raised a new round of funding. Such developments are further stoking the angst about AI displacing enterprise software companies, driving a selloff in the sector's stocks and bonds across the globe.

[...] Some say the AI fears weighing on software companies are overdone. "While point-solution software faces disruption risk, large company platforms with complex workflows and proprietary data are better positioned to benefit from AI-driven automation," wrote Union Bancaire Prive in its investment outlook for 2026 released this week. But a recent report by EY-Parthenon flagged that in the UK last year, software and computer services firms issued the highest number of warnings on earnings among listed firms. "Software multiples have compressed amid uncertainty around whether incumbents can defend pricing power and sustain growth in an AI-first work-flow environment," wrote Bruce Richards, chief executive officer and chairman of Marathon Asset Management, in a LinkedIn post last week.

Apple is forcing Patreon to move all remaining creators onto Apple's in-app purchase subscription system by November 2026 "or else Patreon would risk removal from the App Store," reports TechCrunch. "Apple made this decision because Patreon was managing the billing for some percentage of creators' subscriptions, and the tech giant saw that as skirting its App Store commission structure." The tech giant initially told Patreon that it must do so by November 2025, but the deadline was pushed back. From the report: "We strongly disagree with this decision," its blog post states. "Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal -- the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months. Over the years, we have proposed multiple tools and features to Apple that we could've built to allow creators using legacy billing to transition on their own timelines, with more support added in. Unfortunately, Apple has continually declined them," it says.

Creators can read more about the transition plan on Patreon's website. It has also built several tools to support these changes, including a benefit eligibility tool to see who has paid or is scheduled to pay, tier repricing tools, and gifting and discount tools to offer payment flexibility. An option for annual-only memberships will be introduced before November 2026 as well. The commission on in-app purchases and subscriptions is 30% on Apple's system, but "drops to 15% for a subscription that has been ongoing for more than a year," notes MacRumors. Patreon lets creators either raise prices only in its iOS app to cover Apple's fee or keep prices the same by absorbing the cost, while iPhone and iPad users can avoid the App Store commission entirely by paying through Patreon's website instead.