New Google Messages Safety Features Will Blur Nudity, Warn About Scams

Amid ongoing legal battles over coveted GLP-1 therapies, a drug vendor in Washington state is accused of running an outlandish scheme to sell do-it-yourself kits to make illicit knockoff versions of weight-loss and diabetes drugs, Zepbound and Mounjaro. For the alleged scheme, vendor Pivotal Peptides has customers buy a set of ingredients they have to mix together to create their own injectable versions of the drugs.

Subscription fees for video streaming services have been on a steady incline. But despite subscribers paying more, surveys suggest that viewers are becoming less satisfied with what's available to watch. At the start of 2024, the industry began declaring the end of Peak TV, a term coined by FX Networks chairman John Landgraf, refers to an era of rampant content spending that gave us shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones.

A stunning image of differentiated mouse brain tumor cells has won the 2024 Nikon Small World photomicrography contest, yielding valuable insight into how degenerate diseases like Alzheimer's and ALS can arise from disruption in the cytoskeleton of brain cells. The image was taken by Bruno Cisterna, with assistance from Eric Vitriol, both with Augusta University in Georgia. "One of the main problems with neurodegenerative diseases is that we don't fully understand what causes them,” Cisterna said in a statement.

AI software company Anthropic has announced a new tool that can take control of the user's mouse cursor and perform basic tasks on their computer. Announced alongside other improvements to Anthropic's Claude and Haiku models, the tool is straightforwardly called "Computer Use." It's available exclusively with the company's mid-range 3.5 Sonnet model right now, via the API.

Police use of automated license-plate reader cameras is being challenged in a lawsuit alleging that the cameras enable warrantless surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The city of Norfolk, Virginia, was sued yesterday by plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm. Norfolk, a city with about 238,000 residents, "has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move.

Fortinet, a maker of network security software, has kept a critical vulnerability under wraps for more than a week amid reports that attackers are using it to execute malicious code on servers used by sensitive customer organizations. Fortinet representatives didn’t respond to emailed questions and have yet to release any sort of public advisory detailing the vulnerability or the specific software that’s affected.