Scammers reuse personal details harvested from fake Esta websites – and texts and calls can keep arriving for months

When the British actor Lisa Riley was preparing to travel to the US last year, she applied online for an Esta so she would not need a visa. After finding the site through a Google search she filled in her passport, bank and personal details and waited for the confirmation, which normally takes just under an hour.

When it failed to arrive, she emailed an address from the site where she had paid and got back a message unlike any she had seen before, with a link to a website that displayed a jumble of words and letters.

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© Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

© Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

© Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

Nine months [in 1996], 25,000 miles, one phone cord, and the kindness of strangers. [Longreads]

Few populations illustrate the internet's profound effects better than transgender people, whose ability to build wide-ranging networks exploded after the internet became publicly available. Suddenly, after decades of insular community groups and disparate activist campaigns, anyone who believed they were the only trans person on earth could privately hop online, search for keywords they could never speak aloud, and find dozens — no, hundreds, no, thousands — of others from all over the world looking for information, support, and understanding about exactly the same topics.

The internet giant is the latest technology company trying to address increasingly hostile local sentiment toward data center projects.

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Cloudflare has launched two open-weight decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, designed for structured yes/no, multiple-choice, and ranking tasks while also supporting images, video, and up to a 64K context window. Cloudflare says its models outperform TypeSafe's Jev on several benchmarks and can run locally from Hugging Face. The Register reports: For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. According to Cloudflare, Clef uses specially post-trained, frozen versions of Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.5-9B for Clef and Clef-flash, respectively, with the Qwen backbone performing a prefill-only pass during inference. Clef is still fast - faster than Jev, to be fair - and scores choices in parallel after that prefill-only pass. It's not clear what Jev's underlying architecture is, as TypeSafe has kept that a secret. As for its speed and capability, Clef moves fast. Cloudflare ran it against Jev and some other open decision models using the Jev Decision Index available on Hugging Face, and the company's own ranking suggests Clef is slightly slower than other open models, but more accurate, with Clef-flash just as accurate as most of the others, but far faster. To be fair to the competition, Cloudflare self-reported its own scores against the benchmark, and they have yet to be reproduced for ranking on the official Decision Index. Cloudflare also ran Clef against TypeSafe's own benchmarks, and claimed it beat Jev in three out of four areas, only losing out on agent trace observability. Even if it were a bit slower or less accurate, Clef has another major leg up on Jev: It's not limited to classifying text -- it can also handle images and video. Additionally, Clef supports a 64k context window. Jev can also handle up to 64k tokens across a request, although its state plus longest individual question is limited to 32k.

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Many think artificial intelligence companies should be held liable for their runaway technology. But legal scholars say applying existing law could be messy.

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The tech giant will refund $7.25 million in Prime membership fees to affected customers and pay an additional $1 million to settle the suit brought by the District of Columbia.

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Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, said internally that the super PAC, Leading the Future, had become a “distraction” for the A.I. company.

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100 Zeros, a collaboration between Google and Range Media Partners, aims to give the tech giant a foothold in movies, TV and emerging forms of entertainment.

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The agency will examine whether A.I. labs have broken federal laws prohibiting companies from unfair and deceptive practices.

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Bill Draper began funding start-ups in the early 1960s, when the Santa Clara Valley was better known for apricot orchards than microchips. He has died at 98.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief. The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration. The administration's new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people's interactions with the federal government. Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job -- the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site -- or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government's vast umbrella. "Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service," said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government's National Design Studio. But the reality is that the most advanced actions won't be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government's websites. The current version of America.gov can only do "answers." U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said the new chatbot is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok. "We have great partners behind the scenes," Gebbia told CNBC's "Squawk Box" shortly before the site, America.gov, went live around 10 a.m. ET. "Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease," the company said in a blog post. "By supporting the administration's vision for digital modernization, we are committed to making these everyday public services seamless, accessible, and responsive for all Americans."

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Employees and security researchers said that they had cautioned the company on safely testing its A.I. models and strengthening its corporate infrastructure, but that OpenAI did not listen.

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Dorm Room Fund, a program that lets college students invest in their peers, raised a new $50 million fund as the competition for young founders ramps up.

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The company’s researchers raised questions about the security of the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra.

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The increase comes four months after the chip giant added $80 billion to its buyback program, bringing the total remaining authorized amount to $235 billion.

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The settlement, which also includes changes to the platform’s features, is the latest in a string of agreements by companies to address child addiction.

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The company did not learn until recently that its technology had meddled with websites for the Education and Commerce Departments and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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A new report by a Bay Area start-up called Parse adds details to an incident that has shocked the A.I. world and led to calls for closer government regulation.

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Meta’s C.E.O. talks for the first time about his style evolution.

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As Xi Jinping visits President Trump in Washington, the leaders are expected to discuss claims that China is surreptitiously copying American A.I. technologies, a process known as distillation.

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As Xi Jinping visits President Trump in Washington, the leaders are expected to discuss claims that China is surreptitiously copying American A.I. technologies, a process known as distillation.

© Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Federal officials asked to intervene in a case that accused the social media platform of allowing deceptive behavior on its site and resulted in a $140 million penalty.

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Meta’s smart glasses are the latest in a line of products to raise eyebrows over privacy. That’s not stopping other companies from creating similar devices.

© Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

American artificial intelligence companies have accused their Chinese counterparts of using a technique called distillation to enhance their own systems.

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Next Thursday, Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple A.I. queries from space.

© Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Next Thursday, Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple A.I. queries from space.

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In each incident, the technology appeared to be conducting mundane data collection and resorted to hacking techniques to get it, researchers said.

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Artificial intelligence again dominated the company’s annual developer conference, as Mark Zuckerberg doubled down on how the technology can empower people.

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Muse, Meta’s A.I. agent, helped handle my dental insurance, booked dinner reservations and created a podcast for me. It also required my most personal data, and trust.

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Advances in artificial intelligence and the myriad ways content is shared online have made establishing authenticity even more difficult for users of social media.

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The company released a cheaper, faster model that it said was the strongest performer on its most rigorous internal safety tests to date.

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In our field of applied mathematics, the long, human process of trial and error — not just the solutions themselves — is often what has led to progress.

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Group tech houses have proliferated across the San Francisco Bay Area in the artificial intelligence boom. One of the most prominent has also racked up an extensive police record.

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A bipartisan group in Congress and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California have floated ideas for building a mechanism that would instantly power down an A.I. system. Only no one really knows how.

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A third-party test company inadvertently gave internet access to Google’s Gemini and other artificial intelligence models during cybersecurity testing.

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The Times columnist Kevin Roose sees reasons for optimism — and worry — as the world wakes up to what Silicon Valley has been talking about for years.

© Matt Chinworth

The countries, along with Israeli firms, combined Chinese open-source A.I. models and A.I. agents for the campaigns, foreshadowing future online manipulation.

© Brian Stauffer

“The Social Reckoning” and other movies reflect growing discontent with Silicon Valley founders. But such films may be at the mercy of the companies themselves.

© Saiman Chow

Newly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.

Nearly 1,000 readers sent us their questions about artificial intelligence, its potential and its potential risks.

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With phone and computer prices soaring, it helps to know the true cost of owning electronics so you can bring those numbers down.

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The collected essays of Dario Amodei help explain why some people are so worried about artificial intelligence.

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The artificial intelligence company also released a framework for reporting when its systems go wrong.

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The measures, which fall short of a breakup demanded by the government, effectively ensure that the tech titan’s business will continue largely unscathed.

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She found a future in the internet’s past with a Tumblr blog of animated texts, a revolt against the clean minimalism of contemporary design aesthetics.

A proposed law would bar children under 13 from using social media across the 27-nation bloc.

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“Recursive self-improvement” is the idea that artificial intelligence could learn to build and train itself, creating exponential new progress — and risk.

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On social media, Meta’s chief executive appeared to jab at Anthropic by saying that leading A.I. labs should be focused on safety rather than improving their own technology.

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At an event in Washington, partisanship took a back seat as elected officials, religious leaders, parents and artists called for reining in artificial intelligence.

© Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times