Crypto-Funded Chinese Peptide Labs Are Booming
Key takeaways
- Google rolled out a new Android feature this week aimed at the wave of AI-powered impersonation scams that help fraudsters spoof a familiar number and clone a person’s voice.
- Researchers have detailed a clever new browser side-channel attack called FROST that fingerprints other tabs—and sometimes the apps on your device—by measuring how long it takes to read from a sandboxed file on your SSD.
- Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photograph: Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Meta has been quietly stashing dormant face recognition code on more than 50 million phones, WIRED reported this week, tucked inside the companion app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. If activated, the feature—known internally as Name Tag—would let wearers identify people in front of them by matching captured faces against a biometric gallery sitting on the user’s device. It’s the same kind of technology Meta said it walked away from in 2021, after paying out billions of dollars to settle biometric privacy lawsuits in Texas and Illinois.
Meanwhile, xAI is asking a federal judge to force four people suing the company over Grok-generated deepfake nudes to drop their pseudonyms and litigate under their real names—including one plaintiff who alleges the chatbot was used to fabricate sexual images of her as a child. The plaintiffs say they’d sooner drop the suit than submit to harassment and doxing from Musk’s online supporters. xAI’s lawyers, however, claim that since the deepfakes will remain under seal, there’s “nothing inherently stigmatizing” about naming the people in them.
Google rolled out a new Android feature this week aimed at the wave of AI-powered impersonation scams that help fraudsters spoof a familiar number and clone a person’s voice. Packaged with Google Dialer and shipping to phones running Android 12 or later, it pings the caller’s device for a silent cryptographic handshake. If the call is fake, Android will flag it and strip the contact photo from the screen, but only if both ends are on Google Dialer, which leaves iPhones out of the picture.