Cloudflare’s sixth annual Year in Review report describes an internet increasingly shaped by two forces: automated traffic and government intervention, as global connectivity grew 19% year over year in 2025. Google’s web crawler now dominates automated traffic, dwarfing other AI and indexing bots to become the single largest source of bot activity on the web. Nearly half of all major internet...

Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn’t as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the “dark web report” tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by scanning for your email addresses to determine whether they had...

The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March — less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs. The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers and data scientists,...

For decades, Parkinson’s disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics — more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies — but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water. A landmark study by epidemiologist Sam Goldman compared Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune in...

Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world’s most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 — the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb —...

The data centers used for work on artificial intelligence can cost tens of billions to build. Tech giants are finding ways to avoid being on the hook for some of those costs.

Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world’s richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative to a country’s historical average lowers the...

LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube. LG’s support documentation confirms that...

The Black Hat Europe hacker conference in London included a session titled “Don’t Judge an Audiobook by Its Cover” about a two critical (and now fixed) flaws in Amazon’s Kindle. The Times reports both flaws were discovered by engineering analyst Valentino Ricotta (from the cybersecurity research division of Thales), who was awarded a “bug bounty” of $20,000 (£15,000 ).He said: “What especially...

Lightspeed Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm, has amassed more than $9 billion to invest in artificial intelligence. That is its biggest haul.