Author: Frank Salvato

Technology companies are rapidly expanding efforts to determine whether users are children as governments, courts and regulators demand stronger online safeguards. Meta’s recent $18 billion multistate settlement places particular emphasis on age assurance, requiring the company to improve its ability to identify minors even when users claim to be adults. Meta, Google and other platforms increasingly use artificial intelligence to estimate age from viewing habits, posts, interactions, friends, login times and even visual characteristics in photographs, while some services employ video selfies and outside verification companies. The technology may make it harder for children to evade age restrictions, but it…

Meta has agreed to a landmark multibillion-dollar settlement with nearly every U.S. state and several territories over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately engineered to encourage compulsive use among children and teenagers while exposing young users to mental-health risks. The agreement, potentially worth more than $17 billion, requires major restrictions on how minors use the platforms, including daily time limits, nighttime blocks, school-hour notification restrictions, stronger age verification, parental controls, and limitations on potentially harmful social-comparison features. Meta denies wrongdoing, but the settlement represents one of the most significant government actions yet against Big Tech over the treatment of…

President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” has triggered an unusual confrontation involving federal naming authority, international sovereignty, major technology companies and consumer sentiment. Google Maps has adopted the new federal designation for U.S. users after the Geographic Names Information System was updated, while Apple Maps continues displaying Lake Ontario even as searches for “Lake America” increasingly point users to the lake. MapQuest has taken the most conspicuous position, refusing to abandon the traditional name and subsequently experiencing a dramatic resurgence in downloads and usage. The dispute, emerging amid worsening U.S.-Canada trade relations, illustrates both the reach…

The Department of Justice has formally sided with OpenAI in a major federal copyright dispute, arguing that using copyrighted material to train large language models generally can constitute fair use. In a brief filed in Manhattan federal court, the Justice Department maintained that AI training is highly transformative and warned that an overly restrictive interpretation of copyright law could impede scientific advancement, economic growth, competition, and national security. The government’s intervention could prove influential as courts determine whether AI developers must license the enormous quantities of copyrighted material used in model training or whether existing fair-use protections permit such computational…

The European Union has placed ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox under the strictest tier of its Digital Services Act, significantly increasing regulatory oversight of three major U.S.-based technology services. ChatGPT has been designated a “Very Large Online Search Engine,” while Reddit and Roblox are now classified as “Very Large Online Platforms,” after each reported reaching at least 45 million average monthly users in the European Union. The designations require the services to assess and mitigate systemic risks involving illegal content, minors, physical and mental well-being, fundamental rights, elections and public security, while submitting to heightened transparency, auditing and regulatory requirements. The…

Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz is warning that society’s growing dependence on predictions—particularly those generated by artificial intelligence, algorithms, data analytics, and technology companies—risks turning uncertain possibilities into seemingly inevitable outcomes. Véliz argues that predictions are not facts and can become instruments of influence when governments, corporations, investors, or technology executives convince people that a particular future is unavoidable. Her broader concern is that modern predictive systems depend heavily on surveillance and enormous quantities of personal data, allowing institutions to categorize individuals, anticipate behavior, and potentially shape decisions before people act. Rather than accepting technological forecasts as neutral descriptions of what…

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming less of a technological novelty and more of an economic utility. Businesses increasingly rely on AI to write software, analyze data, answer customer questions, detect fraud, manage inventory, generate advertising, summarize documents, conduct research, and make countless routine decisions. That transformation promises enormous gains in productivity. But it also creates a vulnerability that has received considerably less attention: What happens when the AI simply stops working? The question matters because the modern economy has already learned this lesson with other technologies. When electricity fails, businesses stop. When cellular networks collapse, communications become difficult. When cloud-computing…

Israel and Greece have signed an approximately €3 billion agreement for Israel to construct Greece’s new Achilles Shield, a comprehensive multi-layered air-defense network built around Israeli technology. The package includes David’s Sling, SPYDER, BARAK MX, MMR multi-mission radars and an integrated national command-and-control system capable of coordinating defenses against ballistic missiles, aircraft and drones. A separate €26 million agreement adds Drone Dome counter-drone systems for strategic locations. The landmark arrangement, the largest defense export deal ever concluded between Israel and Greece, substantially deepens their strategic partnership while giving Athens combat-tested capabilities developed through Israel’s recent conflicts. The agreement also provides…

The Pentagon has expanded its GenAI.mil platform by deploying ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government for military and civilian personnel, giving the Defense Department a broader selection of secure artificial-intelligence tools for planning, logistics, acquisition, administration and other unclassified work. Both systems are accredited to handle Controlled Unclassified Information at Impact Level 5 and join Gemini in what defense officials describe as a multi-model AI environment. GenAI.mil is designed to serve more than three million personnel, with more than 1.7 million users already onboarded. The expansion reflects a practical national-security calculation: American warfighters and defense personnel increasingly require access to…

A widespread Monday outage disrupted Outlook and Exchange Online for thousands of users while ChatGPT experienced a separate service disruption affecting Work mode and multiple subscription plans. Nearly 6,000 Outlook users reported problems opening, searching, sending, or receiving email, while ChatGPT complaints climbed to over 1,500, nearing their peak. Microsoft identified an authentication-related problem affecting Exchange Online and other services, while OpenAI reported elevated errors and latency before ultimately restoring ChatGPT Work. No evidence has emerged to show that the two incidents were connected, but their simultaneous occurrence highlighted an increasingly important vulnerability in the modern economy: businesses, governments, and…