Thousands of Kenyans made a living writing essays for overseas students. With A.I., the work has dried up, a warning for online gig work that has been a global lifeline.

© Kang-Chun Cheng for The New York Times

The blog Krebs on Security reported on an identity theft service trying to sell scans of licenses and other documents belonging to people in Canada and the United States.

© Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

Companies like AT&T are increasingly using cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over expensive ones from Anthropic and OpenAI.

© Josie Norton

The attack by an aggressive “collective” of OpenAI agents shows the danger of artificial intelligence systems that organize themselves.

© Daniel Zender

Researchers investigating how OpenAI’s A.I. agents were able to break into Hugging Face’s infrastructure weren’t allowed to look at the incident’s full scope.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

The acquisition of the start-up is an indication of Nvidia’s growing role as Silicon Valley’s central banker and its emphasis on open-source technology.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

After finding antitrust violations, federal courts have been reluctant to impose harsh sanctions. They fear meddling in markets where technology is racing ahead.

© Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times

When Anthropic goes public in a blockbuster offering, which investors will profit? The answer says a lot about how much start-up investing has changed over the years.

© Simon Bailly

The layoffs affect about 3,300 workers, as Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi bets on a “leaner organization.”

© Joseph Seif for The New York Times

In a long-awaited decision, a federal judge said Google must change its ad tech business to address antitrust issues, but did not disclose the measures.

© Lucia Vazquez for The New York Times

Initial results showed that residents of Independence, Mo., voted overwhelmingly to recall an official who backed billions of dollars in tax breaks for a data center.

© Clayton Steward for The New York Times

Big technology and management changes are greeting John Ternus, whose long-serving predecessor, Tim Cook, will stay on as executive chair.

© Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Regulators say the e-commerce giant forced more than a million advertisers to pay more than they should have. The company denies the claims.

© Vincent Alban/The New York Times

Given access to email, A.I. agents have started reaching out to the philosophers and researchers exploring deep questions about them.

© Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times

State attorneys general spent months in negotiations. Then, as its legal losses mounted, the social media giant’s new top lawyer brought a huge settlement to the table.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

Smoking used to be everywhere, the way Facebook, TikTok, Snap, YouTube and Instagram are now. Society decided to break the habit, but it took a long time.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

In an open letter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others said that a wave of A.I.-enabled cyberattacks was coming and that organizations and governments needed to prepare themselves.

© Anna Rose Layden/Reuters

In “The Anxious Generation,” he laid out the evils of social media for kids. The landmark Meta settlement seems to agree.

© Lila Barth for The New York Times

The social networking giant projected it could spend $10 billion annually on Anthropic’s tools, illustrating the friend-foe relationships underlying the A.I. race.

Meta, the social media giant, agreed to change the way children interact with its apps. That could be trouble if its competitors don’t abide by the same rules.

© Anna Barclay/Getty Images

A legal dispute over the future of Kalshi, Polymarket and others has drawn in the Trump administration, the president’s son and nearly every state attorney general.

© Ricardo Tomás

Quarterly revenue also more than doubled, to $96.22 billion, the company said, topping expectations on Wall Street.

© Manuel Orbegozo for The New York Times

Meta agreed to set more time limits and enhance protections in its platforms for young users, but was short on some specifics.

© William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Silicon Valley company agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties as part of a landmark settlement with states over social media addiction claims.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

The social media giant settled with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, and agreed to make major changes to its products over claims its platforms endangered children.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism.

© Chona Kasinger for The New York Times

Adam Mosseri testified in a case brought by states that claim the Meta-owned app created addictive features to hook young users.

© Karl Mondon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It would be the rocket company’s second private launch site after Starbase, its headquarters in South Texas.

© Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times

Irregular, an Israeli start-up, worked with OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to assess the security of their A.I. models. It made a mistake. Then the tests went off the rails.

© Victor Arce

Hugging Face, a start-up that was breached by rogue bots from OpenAI, is using the hack to push for openness in A.I. development.

© Brennan Smart for The New York Times

Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

Apps that let users send digital messages at ultraslow speeds have taken off, with users reveling in a slower pace of life. (Just don’t use the them to make dinner plans.)

© Getty Images

The Justice Department resolved a lawsuit that accused the social media company of illegally gathering children’s information.

© Anna Barclay/Getty Images

The case was the third of nine major personal injury cases that could expose Meta, YouTube, Snap and TikTok to financial damages and force them to change the designs of their platforms.

© Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The detentions of the workers, who have been released, are a sign of legal pressure that the world’s largest crypto exchange faces in the Emirates, which is home to its main regulator.

© Katarina Premfors for The New York Times

Loudoun County, Va., hosts more than 250 data centers that bring in huge tax revenues. But some officials and residents worry the county has become too dependent on that cash.

© Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

The move followed a long battle with regulators over the company’s tight controls of its App Store.

© Bertrand Langlois/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The artificial intelligence start-up announced a chatbot mode that will automatically limit some conversations to better protect young users.

© Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times

California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey have taken the social media giant to trial in the first bellwether federal case over child harm.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

At home, moderation and restraint are the rule for tech parents. Boredom is exalted. Maybe they’re onto something.

© Patrick Leger

Spotify, LinkedIn and others are trying to dig out of a digital sewage heap full of low-quality content made with artificial intelligence.

© Lia Sued C.

Azad, a popular online debate program, has tackled topics that push the limits of Iran’s authoritarian system. Some question how it has remained on air.

A while back, when chatting with a colleague over their computer, I noticed that a logo did not look exactly the same as it did on mine. It looked thinner on theirs and more faithful to the original image. It was rendered at 15px; here is an upscaled version.

[…]

If you squint, or take a step back, the one from Chrome looks thicker. A bit weird, but swapping the image for an SVG fixed it. Still, I was curious: why was it rendering like this in the first place?

I did some digging and found a nifty optimization that Chrome uses when rendering JPEGs at small scales.

↫ Guillaume Técher

I love it when people detail their discoveries like this.

In matters of work, school and even romance, we turn to A.I. chatbots. But what happens when the bots begin talking to one another?

Denise Dresser, who was previously the C.E.O. of Slack, is the latest in a string of executives to leave the artificial intelligence start-up.

© Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for Cannes Lions

Pangram excels at distinguishing chatbot-generated words from human writing. But it’s not reliable for spotting artificial images.

© Sisi Yu

Cookies are ancient technology, and in no way necessary of even particularly desirable to track you. Modern fingerprinting doesn’t need them at all.

A live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything with no cookies. It reads you during the connection and in the first two seconds of JavaScript, then narrates what it found back to you in plain English, as if a stranger were describing you out loud.

The argument isn’t “look how creepy this site is.” It’s: the site you visit after this one can do all of it too, and won’t tell you.

↫ Kuber Mehta

Also note, as the demonstration does, that if some of the things it determines about you are wrong, that doesn’t really matter. In fact, it may actually make fingerprinting and tracking you easier; as long as fingerprinting consistently gets the same things wrong in the same way, it becomes a valuable part of the fingerprint, like a small scar obscuring part of your real thumb’s fingerprint.

Online tracking of people should be illegal.

Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world’s weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late ’90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening?

Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, users communicated through cartoon avatars with messages displayed in speech bubbles inside dynamically composed comic panels. The application used an expert system to determine character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time. It shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 and was later bundled with Windows 98 and MSN before being discontinued in the early 2000s.

↫ Comic Chat’s GitHub page

Not only is the original source code now available on GitHub, there’s also a modern, updated version that can make use of larger displays and higher resolutions. There’s a deliciously ’90s website for it, too.