After dragging its feet for years, America is finally taking its first big step toward shielding victims of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)—also known as revenge porn—from constantly being retraumatized online.

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump is scheduled to sign the Take It Down Act into law. That means that within one year, every online platform will be required to remove both actual NCII and fake nudes generated by artificial intelligence within 48 hours of victims' reports or face steep penalties.

Supporters have touted the 48-hour timeline as remarkably fast, empowering victims to promptly stop revenge porn from spreading widely online. The law's passing comes at a time when AI-generated revenge porn is increasingly harming a wider pool of victims—including some who may have never shared a compromising photo, like dozens of kids in middle and high schools nationwide. Acknowledging the substantial harm to kids already, the law includes steeper penalties for NCII targeting minor victims, a threat lawmakers hope will help minors get harmful images removed "as soon as possible."

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New Orleans police have reportedly spent years scanning live feeds of city streets and secretly using facial recognition to identify suspects in real time—in seeming defiance of a city ordinance designed to prevent false arrests and protect citizens' civil rights.

A Washington Post investigation uncovered the dodgy practice, which relied on a private network of more than 200 cameras to automatically ping cops' phones when a possible match for a suspect was detected. Court records and public data suggest that these cameras "played a role in dozens of arrests," the Post found, but most uses were never disclosed in police reports.

That seems like a problem, the Post reported, since a 2022 city council ordinance required much more oversight for the tech. Rather than instantly detaining supposed suspects the second they pop up on live feeds, cops were only supposed to use the tech to find "specific suspects in their investigations of violent crimes," the Post reported. And in those limited cases, the cops were supposed to send images to a "fusion center," where at least two examiners "trained in identifying faces" using AI software had to agree on alleged matches before cops approached suspects.

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This week, Spotify rushed to remove hundreds of obviously fake podcasts found to be marketing prescription drugs in violation of Spotify's policies and, likely, federal law.

On Thursday, Business Insider (BI) reported that Spotify removed 200 podcasts advertising the sale of opioids and other drugs, but that wasn't the end of the scandal. Today, CNN revealed that it easily uncovered dozens more fake podcasts peddling drugs.

Some of the podcasts may have raised a red flag for a human moderator—with titles like "My Adderall Store" or "Xtrapharma.com" and episodes titled "Order Codeine Online Safe Pharmacy Louisiana" or "Order Xanax 2 mg Online Big Deal On Christmas Season," CNN reported.

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Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.

"The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."

According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

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On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers.

Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion.

Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal.

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Back in February, Elon Musk skewered the Treasury Department for lacking "basic controls" to stop payments to terrorist organizations, boasting at the Oval Office that "any company" has those controls.

Fast-forward three months, and now Musk's social media platform X is suspected of taking payments from sanctioned terrorists and providing premium features that make it easier to raise funds and spread propaganda—including through X's chatbot, Grok. Groups seemingly benefiting from X include Houthi rebels, Hezbollah, and Hamas, as well as groups from Syria, Kuwait, and Iran. Some accounts have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers, paying to boost their reach while X apparently looks the other way.

In a report released Thursday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) flagged popular accounts likely linked to US-sanctioned terrorists. Some of the accounts bear "ID verified" badges, suggesting that X may be going against its own policies that ban sanctioned terrorists from benefiting from its platform.

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Privacy watchdog Noyb sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta Wednesday, threatening to pursue a potentially billion-dollar class action to block Meta's AI training, which starts soon in the European Union.

In the letter, Noyb noted that Meta only recently notified EU users on its platforms that they had until May 27 to opt their public posts out of Meta's AI training data sets. According to Noyb, Meta is also requiring users who already opted out of AI training in 2024 to opt out again or forever lose their opportunity to keep their data out of Meta's models, as training data likely cannot be easily deleted. That's a seeming violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Noyb alleged.

"Meta informed data subjects that, despite that fact that an objection to AI training under Article 21(2) GDPR was accepted in 2024, their personal data will be processed unless they object again—against its former promises, which further undermines any legitimate trust in Meta’s organizational ability to properly execute the necessary steps when data subjects exercise their rights," Noyb's letter said.

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A day after the US Copyright Office dropped a bombshell pre-publication report challenging artificial intelligence firms' argument that all AI training should be considered fair use, the Trump administration fired the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter—sparking speculation that the controversial report hastened her removal.

Tensions have apparently only escalated since. Now, as industry advocates decry the report as overstepping the office's authority, social media posts on Monday described an apparent standoff at the Copyright Office between Capitol Police and men rumored to be with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

A source familiar with the matter told Wired that the men were actually "Brian Nieves, who claimed he was the new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, who said he was the new acting director of the Copyright Office, as well as acting Registrar," but it remains "unclear whether the men accurately identified themselves." A spokesperson for the Capitol Police told Wired that no one was escorted off the premises or denied entry to the office.

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Alex Mashinsky—the disgraced founder of the Celsius Network cryptocurrency bank who deceived hundreds of thousands into losing billions with the catchy slogan "unbank yourself"—was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday.

In December, Mashinsky pleaded guilty to securities fraud and commodities fraud. Federal prosecutors slammed him for reaping $48 million in profits while causing billions in investor losses by artificially inflating the value of his network's token, Cel. The Department of Justice and dozens of victims urged the court to order a maximum sentence of 20 years, while Mashinsky hoped the court would agree that he had shown remorse and should only serve one year and one day, Reuters reported.

Mashinsky's downfall started in 2022, when the Celsius Network suddenly stopped allowing withdrawals, claiming that "extreme market conditions" were to blame, a shady move that caused some customers to question the crypto bank's financial health. One month later, the bank filed for bankruptcy, exposing a $1.19 billion deficit in its balance sheets and still holding onto customers' funds while scoffing at supposed "misinformation" that their money would be lost.

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The Trump administration's steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation's most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that's a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly overhauled a historically wonky Department of Defense-designed tool that automates layoffs of federal workers.

Expected to expedite DOGE's already rushed efforts to shrink the government, the redesigned software could make it easier for DOGE to quickly dismantle the biggest agencies in a blink, sources familiar with the revamp told Reuters.

Developed more than two decades ago, AutoRIF (short for automated reductions in force) was deemed too "clunky" to use across government, sources told Reuters. In a 2003 audit, the DOD's Office of the Inspector General noted, for example, that "specialized reduction-in-force procedures needed for the National Guard technicians made the module impractical." Basically, each department needed to weigh its cuts differently to avoid gutting essential personnel. Despite several software updates since then, Wired reported, the tool remained subject to errors, sources told Reuters, requiring most federal agencies to continue conducting firings manually rather than risk work stoppages or other negative outcomes from sloppy firings.

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China has finally agreed to open negotiations with the Trump administration as the tech industry warns that tariffs could soon spike Americans' costs for the 10 most popular consumer technology products by more than $123 billion annually.

On Wednesday, the Chinese Embassy in the US announced on X (formerly Twitter) that "China’s lead on China-US economic and trade affairs," He Lifeng, will meet with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from May 9 to 12 to open talks. For those talks to go smoothly, China's Ministry of Commerce told reporters Wednesday, the US must "demonstrate sincerity" and come ready to "correct its wrongdoings," including facing "the severe negative impacts of its unilateral tariff measures on itself and the world."

Previously, China had demanded that President Trump drop all tariffs to begin negotiations, which Trump refused while seemingly holding out on making a deal on TikTok to keep the potential bargaining chip.

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The most popular online destination for deepfake porn shut down permanently this weekend, 404 Media reported.

"Mr. Deepfakes" drew a swarm of toxic users who, researchers noted, were willing to pay as much as $1,500 for creators to use advanced face-swapping techniques to make celebrities or other targets appear in non-consensual pornographic videos. At its peak, researchers found that 43,000 videos were viewed more than 1.5 billion times on the platform. The videos were generated by nearly 4,000 creators, who profited from the unethical—and now illegal—sales.

But as of this weekend, none of those videos are available to view, and the forums where requests were made for new videos went dark, 404 Media reported. According to a notice posted on the platform, the plug was pulled when "a critical service provider" terminated the service "permanently."

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A judge who may be the first to rule on whether AI training data is fair use appeared skeptical Thursday at a hearing where Meta faced off with book authors over the social media company's alleged copyright infringement.

Meta, like most AI companies, holds that training must be deemed fair use, or else the entire AI industry could face immense setbacks, wasting precious time negotiating data contracts while falling behind global rivals. Meta urged the court to rule that AI training is a transformative use that only references books to create an entirely new work that doesn't replicate authors' ideas or replace books in their markets.

At the hearing that followed after both sides requested summary judgment, however, Judge Vince Chhabria pushed back on the Meta attorneys' argument that the company's Llama AI models posed no threat to authors in their markets, Reuters reported.

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President Donald Trump escalated his attack on NPR and PBS on Thursday when he signed an executive order demanding the end of all federal funding supporting the news outlets.

In his order, Trump claimed that unlike in the 1960s, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was funded to ensure Americans had access to critical news, there are plenty of news options today. He has joined other Republicans accusing NPR and PBS of promoting a left-leaning bias. In a White House statement, he ordered any agency directly or indirectly funding the outlets' allegedly "woke propaganda" to "end the madness" as soon as possible, cutting off current funding "to the maximum extent allowed by law" and declining "to provide future funding."

Trump's authority to cut off CPB's funding continues to be disputed. In March, his administration reportedly planned to direct Congress to rescind CPB funding—as both NPR and PBS are fully funded through 2027—but according to PBS, budget director Russell Vought has yet to send over any guidance.

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Pushing to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that its chatbots caused a teen's suicide, Character Technologies is arguing that chatbot outputs should be considered "pure speech" deserving of the highest degree of protection under the First Amendment.

In their motion to dismiss, the developers of Character.AI (C.AI) argued that it doesn't matter who the speaker is—whether it's a video game character spouting scripted dialogue, a foreign propagandist circulating misinformation, or a chatbot churning out AI-generated responses to prompting—courts protect listeners' rights to access that speech. Accusing the mother of the departed teen, Megan Garcia, of attempting to "insert this Court into the conversations of millions of C.AI users" and supposedly endeavoring to "shut down" C.AI, the chatbot maker argued that the First Amendment bars all of her claims.

"The Court need not wrestle with the novel questions of who should be deemed the speaker of the allegedly harmful content here and whether that speaker has First Amendment rights," Character Technologies argued, "because the First Amendment protects the public’s 'right to receive information and ideas.'"

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Back in the mid-1990s, when The Net was among the top box office draws and Americans were just starting to flock online in droves, kids had to swipe their parents' credit cards or find a fraudulent number online to access adult content on the web. But today's kids—even in states with the strictest age verification laws—know they can just use Google.

Last month, a study analyzing the relative popularity of Google search terms found that age verification laws shift users' search behavior. It's impossible to tell if the shift represents young users attempting to circumvent the child-focused law or adult users who aren't the actual target of the laws. But overall, enforcement causes nearly half of users to stop searching for popular adult sites complying with laws and instead search for a noncompliant rival (48 percent) or virtual private network (VPN) services (34 percent), which are used to mask a location and circumvent age checks on preferred sites, the study found.

"Individuals adapt primarily by moving to content providers that do not require age verification," the study concluded.

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Everyone expects that the Take It Down Act—which requires platforms to remove both real and artificial intelligence-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) within 48 hours of victims' reports—will likely pass a vote in the House of Representatives tonight.

After that, it goes to Donald Trump's desk, where the president has confirmed that he will promptly sign it into law, joining first lady Melania Trump in strongly campaigning for its swift passing. Victims-turned-advocates, many of them children, similarly pushed lawmakers to take urgent action to protect a growing number of victims from the increasing risks of being repeatedly targeted in fake sexualized images or revenge porn that experts say can quickly spread widely online.

Digital privacy experts tried to raise some concerns, warning that the law seemed overly broad and could trigger widespread censorship online. Given such a short window to comply, platforms will likely remove some content that may not be NCII, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned. And even more troublingly, the law does not explicitly exempt encrypted messages, which could potentially encourage platforms to one day break encryption due to the liability threat. Also, it seemed likely that the removal process could be abused by people who hope platforms will automatically remove any reported content, especially after Trump admitted that he would use the law to censor his enemies.

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Elon Musk raced to build Colossus, the world's largest supercomputer, in Memphis, Tennessee. He bragged that construction only took 122 days and expected that his biggest AI rivals would struggle to catch up.

To leap ahead, his firm xAI "removed whatever was unnecessary" to complete the build, questioning "everything" that might delay operations and taking the timeline "into our own hands," xAI's website said.

Now, xAI is facing calls to shut down gas turbines that power the supercomputer, as Memphis residents in historically Black communities—which have long suffered from industrial pollution causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy—allege that xAI has been secretly running more turbines than the local government knows, without permits.

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Donald Trump's executive order requiring artificial intelligence training in education as a national priority has been met with enthusiasm and confusion.

On the one hand, his plans to promote early AI training in K–12 schools appear to be "critical," as Trump says, to "maintain America’s global dominance in this technological revolution for future generations." To that end, the order established an AI Presidential Challenge to highlight significant student and educator achievements and encourage innovative thinking.

"It is the policy of the United States to promote AI literacy and proficiency among Americans by promoting the appropriate integration of AI into education, providing comprehensive AI training for educators, and fostering early exposure to AI concepts and technology to develop an AI-ready workforce and the next generation of American AI innovators," Trump's order said.

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