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Access to open source visuals of the current Iran conflict, which has spread to many parts of the Middle East, continues to be sporadic. Videos and photos from within Iran trickle out on social media as the Iranian internet blackout hinders the flow of digital communication.

In past conflicts, satellite imagery has provided a vital overview of potential damage to both military and civilian infrastructure, especially when there are digital black spots or obstacles to on-the-ground reporting. But imagery from commercial providers is becoming increasingly restricted, leaving even those who have access to the most expensive imagery in the dark.

Shortly after the war in Gaza began in 2023, Bellingcat introduced a free tool authored by University College London lecturer and Bellingcat contributor, Ollie Ballinger, that was able to estimate the number of damaged buildings in a given area. This helped monitor and map the scale of destruction across the territory as Israel’s military operation progressed.

Bellingcat is now introducing an updated version of the open source tool — called the Iran Conflict Damage Proxy Map — focused on destruction in Iran and the wider Gulf region.

It can be accessed here.

Banks, governments and technology providers need to be prepared for quantum computer hackers capable of breaking most existing encryption systems by 2029, Google has warned.

The tech company said in a blogpost that quantum computers would pose a “significant threat to current cryptographic standards” before the end of the decade and urged other companies to follow its lead.

The company, owned by Alphabet, said: “The encryption currently used to keep your information confidential and secure could easily be broken by a large-scale quantum computer in coming years.”

As it stands, quantum computers – which can rapidly carry out complex tasks – are a nascent technology with great potential and significant obstacles to being widely usable.

AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned.

In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) – the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT – successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted.

The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a “fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online”.

In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a “Dolores park”.

In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence.

Study link - https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

Name: The accidental hacker.

Age: It doesn’t matter how old Sammy Azdoufal is. What he did is what’s important here, and what he did is very much of the age.

And what did Azdoufal do? He hooked up his DJI Romo vacuum cleaner to his PS5 controller.

Why? Because, he told the New York-based tech news publication the Verge, it sounded fun.

OK, each to their own. And how did he do this? He used an AI coding assistant, Claude Code, to reverse-engineer how the home robot vacuum communicated with DJI’s remote cloud servers …

Whoa, you’re losing me. I’m losing myself too, to be honest. Look, Azdoufal is a software engineer, he’s the head of AI strategy at a holiday rental company, he knows how to do this stuff. But what’s interesting is what happened next …

What happened next? Presumably he lay on the sofa, directing his vacuum cleaner with his joystick – which does actually sound fun, even if it slightly negates the whole point of a robot. He found that not only could he control his own robot, but that he had gained access to data from other robot vacuum cleaners.

What kind of data? Live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps from nearly 7,000 devices across 24 countries.

FBI DIRECTOR KASH Patel enjoys access to a litany of professional perks, among them use of a Gulfstream G550 jet, a 15-passenger luxury aircraft owned by the Department of Justice that he has reportedly taken to visit his aspiring country musician girlfriend. Responding to growing outrage about his personal use of the government jet, Patel has insisted those who track his flights are dangerous and cowardly.

Unfortunately for Patel, tracking flights is legal, easy, and an important tool of government transparency.

Software engineer and plane tracking enthusiast John Wiseman recommended ADS-B Exchange and Airplanes.live, another service. “They don’t use FAA data, so they’re not bound by FAA rules on what data can be distributed. They also don’t take requests from aircraft owners to anonymize flights,” Wiseman explained.

The first thing Lana Ponting remembers about the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital in Montreal, Canada, is the smell - almost medicinal.

"I didn't like the look of the place. It didn't look like a hospital to me," she told the BBC from her home in Manitoba.

That hospital – once the home of a Scottish shipping magnate – would be her home for a month in April 1958, after a judge ordered the then-16-year-old to undergo treatment for "disobedient" behaviour.

It was there that Ms Ponting became one of thousands of people experimented on as part of the CIA's top-secret research into mind control. Now, she is one of two named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for Canadian victims of the experiments. On Thursday, a judge denied the Royal Victoria Hospital's appeal, paving the way for the lawsuit to proceed.

A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.

The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.

The new agreement replaces one the US supreme court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. The judge said he would explain his decision in a hearing on Tuesday.

Donald Trump announced Friday that he is withdrawing his support and endorsement of Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene, a longtime ally and previously fierce defender of the president and the Maga movement.

Trump’s move away from Greene came just hours after she said in an interview she thought the president’s attempts to stop the release of the files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is “insanely the wrong direction to go”.

“I am withdrawing my support and endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene, of the great state of Georgia,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday evening. “All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!”

A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday upheld the hate crime convictions of three white men who chased Ahmaud Arbery through their Georgia subdivision with pickup trucks before one of them killed the Black man with a shotgun.

A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took well over a year to rule after attorneys for the defendants urged the judges in March 2024 to overturn the case, arguing the men's history of racist text messages and social media posts failed to prove they targeted Arbery because of his race.

Even if the appeals judges had thrown out their hate-crime convictions, the trio faced no immediate reprieve from prison. That's because they're also serving life sentences for murder after being convicted in a Georgia state court.

Well-known AI chatbots can be configured to routinely answer health queries with false information that appears authoritative, complete with fake citations from real medical journals, Australian researchers have found.

Without better internal safeguards, widely used AI tools can be easily deployed to churn out dangerous health misinformation at high volumes, they warned in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

“If a technology is vulnerable to misuse, malicious actors will inevitably attempt to exploit it - whether for financial gain or to cause harm,” said senior study author Ashley Hopkins of Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health in Adelaide.

We’ve made the difficult decision to sunset the Ghostery Private Browser (formerly known as Dawn). While it’s always tough to retire a product, this change reflects the evolution of the mobile web and our commitment to protecting your privacy more effectively across the platforms you already use.

A decision by Spain's Socialist government to backtrack on a promise to cancel a contract to buy bullets from an Israeli firm drew a rebuke on Wednesday from its junior coalition partners, with some allies threatening to withdraw support.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's minority government has struggled to pass legislation since securing a new term by cobbling together an alliance of left-wing and regional separatist parties in 2023.