Meta has announced Facebook Verified, a free badge that will be visible on a user’s profile and is designed to confirm whether that user is a real person or an AI without actually checking that a user is who they say they are.

The new badge is separate from Meta’s existing Meta Verified program and is available to eligible Facebook users who are 18 or older. Users must also be in good standing with Facebook’s community standards before they can be verified.

Alongside profiles, Facebook users will also be able to see a person’s verified status in the Marketplace, Facebook Dating, and Facebook Groups initially. However, Meta has confirmed that it intends to bring the badges to the main feed in the future.

Free, basic verification

Importantly, unlike Meta Verified, Facebook Verified doesn’t require a subscription and is available absolutely free. Users only need to complete the verification process once.

The verification process itself requires Facebook users to record a short selfie video. Facebook then uses the video to check the person’s appearance against their existing profile photos to confirm a match. The process should take just a few minutes.

However, it’s important to know what Facebook Verified actually verifies. Meta says that it means a profile belongs to a real person, not an AI.

Facebook Verified does not necessarily mean that the person is who they say they are. That’s an important distinction to remember when using Facebook from here on out.

Meta says that Facebook Verified will roll out in phases, starting with “select markets.” Unfortunately, it hasn’t confirmed which markets those are.

A massive malvertising campaign is using fake Solana, Luno, and TradingView webpages with malicious JavaScript that instructs browsers to assemble malware directly in memory.

The operation has been active since late 2024 and is localized to 25 languages in 12 countries, primarily in Asia Pacific and Latin America.

A filtering system ensures that only real targets (retail traders and crypto investors) land on the malicious pages, while researchers, scanners, and security bots are redirected to blank pages.

Ad security platform Confiant says that the campaign’s design stands out through its use of the web browser as “a local assembly pipeline” for the malware.

Although the fake portals feature a download button, a ReactJS library on the landing page prepares the browser for a managed download flow, a process typically used for handling various types of file transfers.

According to Confiant’s analysis, the page first registers a service worker, which acts as a download manager and helps build the malware file incrementally.

In the first stage, the page sets up a shared worker that acts as an engine that assembles the malware from components received in the next steps of the attack.

The researchers say that in the second stage “the landing page uses its SharedWorker to request itself for a ‘/config’ response” with seed and size parameters that are randomized and specific for each session.

By rotating these parameters, the threat actors make sure that the resulting malware file has a unique hash to bypass static detection.

Confiant explains that “‘/config’ is an assembly response rather than a normal download response. It returns a template and the inputs the browser needs to build the file locally.”

Remote components retrieved this way and the locally generated bytes are then used to create the malicious payload from a clean version of the Bun executable.

After building the final malware executable, the fake download page hands it to the service worker at the beginning of the process and triggers a same-origin download path.

“From the browser’s point of view, the user is downloading an executable from the landing page domain,” Confiant researchers say, and the mark-of-the-web tag is added, despite some of the components originating from a different source.

The advantage of this technique is that no finished file is transmitted over the network, making detection less likely, and analysis becomes more challenging.

Confiant says that earlier variants of the SourTrade campaign used the StreamSaver project on GitHub to deliver the malicious payload. Since April, though, the operation switched to the same-origin ServiceWorker delivery method.

While Confiant researchers do not reveal the nature of the payload, they found evidence supporting a Bitdefender report in 2025 about a resilient  malvertising campaign that used StreamSaver to distribute malware.

Bitdefender found that the payload had the following capabilities:

• intercept all user network traffic (acting as a proxy)
• collect cookie and password data
• record keystrokes (keylogging) and take screenshots
• steal cryptocurrency wallet data
• establish long-term persistence

Since the SourTrade campaign targets retail traders and crypto investors, users engaged in these activities are advised to avoid downloading financial or cryptocurrency apps from social media advertisements or sponsored search results.

The researchers advise getting executable files from the company’s official website. As an added precaution, they should verify the installer’s digital signature and publisher before running it.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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Samsung has unveiled three new foldable phones — the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8. And while the last of that trio falls into its own category, the former two phones have a lot in common.

Aside from having similar names, they’re both book-style foldables, and they also share plenty of specs. But between very different form factors and differences in their respective camera setups, there’s lots to differentiate them, too.

Ripple effect: As rising memory costs push up the prices of everything from PCs and smartphones to game consoles, one key hardware supplier after another has announced that it can no longer delay price hikes. This time it’s Qualcomm, with a fast-approaching adjustment that could make smartphones, tablets, wearables, and some laptops even less affordable.

Qualcomm issued a letter to its clients on Friday warning that its chips will soon become more expensive due to rising supply costs. The company develops chips that power most Android devices, numerous wearables, automotive systems, and a rising crop of Arm-based laptops, so the impact is expected to be widespread.

Bloomberg, which obtained the letter, reports that price hikes will rise by an unspecified double-digit percentage, and will apply to components shipped after September 1. Qualcomm has been unable to escape the skyrocketing supply costs that have impacted Microsoft, Apple, Sony, and numerous other manufacturers.

Memory and storage are the biggest culprits, having quintupled in price since late last year as AI data center construction absorbs most of the available production capacity of DRAM and NAND manufacturers. RAM prices could rise by another 40% to 50% in the third quarter of this year, then an additional 30% to 40% in Q4. The ripple effect has also pushed up the prices of CPUs, printed circuit boards, and other components. Qualcomm at least partially blames its upcoming price hike on the need to find alternative suppliers.

Samsung phones, which are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, might be the most popular affected products. However, wearable devices like smart glasses and VR headsets also use chips from the same family. Additionally, Microsoft and various PC manufacturers are attempting to promote an alternative Arm-based version of Windows via new lineups of more powerful Snapdragon SoCs.

Qualcomm’s adjustment might also affect Google’s plans to launch a lineup of Snapdragon-based laptops using a new Android-based operating system later this year.

Qualcomm’s products even extend to the AI data centers responsible for the component shortages. The company recently unveiled ambitious plans to compete with Nvidia in the server CPU market.

The situation is expected to worsen next year due to further price hikes from the manufacturer that Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Arm, and MediaTek all rely heavily upon: TSMC. Recent reports indicate that the chipmaker will raise prices for most of its semiconductor nodes at least once next year by around 10%, creating a much broader ripple effect.

“Everybody’s on their phone at my program!” joked Charlie Bailey, a librarian in South Philadelphia. He’s just asked his audience to pull out their phones so that he can walk them through the steps of disabling Apple Intelligence and Gemini.

Bailey stands at the front of a library classroom that’s outfitted for children – the focal point is the vibrant rug he’s standing on, which reminds us that M is for “moon” and Z is for “zebra.” But the 20-odd adults in the room aren’t here to learn about the alphabet. They’re at a workshop called Avoiding AI, which, in this context does not stand for “apple” and “igloo.”

“I was inspired by the feeling of people’s frustration with AI tools being kind of forced onto them, and feeling like AI tools we didn’t ask for are suddenly everywhere in our lives,” Bailey told TechCrunch.

Bailey starts the hour-long workshop with an overview of how AI chatbots and other consumer AI tools work, explaining why people might want to use these products, and why they might opt to abstain. Then, he walks through all of the most popular tech platforms and devices, showing step-by-step instructions on the projector to guide people through turning off specific features.

“As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.”

Bailey got the idea for the Avoiding AI workshop from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. He was one of dozens of librarians from around the world who contacted Cyrus after she published a journal article about developing her own workshop.

“This has never happened before with anything I’ve worked on,” Cyrus told TechCrunch. “Nobody has ever been emailing me like, ‘Can you give me your Intro to Computers slides?’”

At the Bangor Public Library, patrons turn to Cyrus when they need help with anything involving technology.

“More and more, I was getting questions about, ‘How do I turn this [AI] stuff off? Why is it trying to write my emails for me? Why is it trying to summarize my one-sentence email that I can easily read?’” Cyrus said. “I just decided that with so much media hype out there about AI products, it would be a good opportunity to teach people about the basics of what is happening when you’re using this technology, and then getting into how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it.”

Usually, Cyrus’ classes like Intro to Computers get about a dozen attendees. But so many people expressed interest in her first Avoiding AI workshop that she had to cut off registration at 30 people, open a waitlist, and share the workshop on Zoom. Including the livestream, about 70 people attended each of Cyrus’ first two workshops.

When Bailey followed Cyrus’ lead to host a workshop in Philadelphia, the reception was similarly unprecedented. The library’s Instagram post about the “Avoiding AI” event got over 2,000 likes and 220 shares, whereas most of the library’s posts don’t get more than a few dozen likes. He scheduled a second program because the first got too many registrations.

from the cruelty-is-all-they-have dept

No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible.

Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, many of them from (direct quote right here) “shithole countries.” They blame Biden for this completely imaginary “crisis” and preach the same message to the faithful over and over again: “worst of the worst.”

But it’s not that and it’s never been that. If the administration was simply trying to eject dangerous criminals, ICE wouldn’t be sending officers to immigration courts to pounce on migrants who are following the rules for staying in this country. ICE wouldn’t have set up a fake college to snare foreigners following the visa rules by continuing their education. And the government wouldn’t be telling its lawyers to dismiss ongoing removal proceedings solely for the purpose of making migrants attending scheduled probation check-ins immediately arrestable.

It’s only getting nastier and uglier. The Trump administration is now moving up immigration hearing dates for the sole purpose of generating more unearned “wins” that will, in turn, generate more deportations. Here’s Gwynne Hogan with the brutally nasty details for The City Reporter:

The mass immigration hearings picked up in New York City in early June, The City Reporter reported at the time. They were dubbed mega masters because a single judge could be assigned a docket of more than 100 cases a day, about double a regular master calendar docket before.

In addition to the large number of cases, many of these hearings were scheduled just weeks in advance and replaced hearings people might have had on the books months or years away.

The City Reporter observed one such mega master hearing where, on a docket of 121 cases, 39 people and their family members were ordered removed for failing to show up to court. In some instances, family members’ cases were linked.

As this report notes, for years most hearing dates were generally scheduled 180 days out from the initial hearing. But in the past few months — along with the creation of these so-called “mega masters” — the lead time has dropped precipitously. In May, the average was 98 days. By June, it was 42 days.

This is deliberate. Migrants engaged in the legal process would have no reason to believe their cases would be accelerated. After all, the mass deportation surges the Trump administration has generated tens of thousands of new cases, which would generally result in additional delays, rather than sudden accelerations.

And while the government is required to notify migrants of schedule changes, it’s not as though it’s a push notification via the normally accepted form of human connection these days. It’s a letter sent by snail mail. And it’s not as though this government is going to perform any due diligence to make sure the notification is seen by the intended recipient.

What’s happening here is the administration flooding the docket and ambushing migrants who fail to check their hearing status daily and who would have no reason to do so when they hadn’t seen any changes to hearing dates for several months.

The plan is as ugly as it is shitty: accelerate thousands of hearing dates and send federal officers out to scoop up migrants who are now on the wrong end of in absentia rulings handed down by judges who are deliberately overloaded to prevent them from fully engaging with these cases.

This is all in service to the impossible deportation goals set by the administration. You can’t get 2-3,000 arrests per day without cheating. Here’s how this has been playing out over the past couple of months.

In June, 4,447 people were ordered removed by immigration judges in the [New York City] “in absentia,” meaning they’d missed their hearings, the report found. That was more than double the number in May when 2,189 were ordered removed in absentia. 

The analysis found the surge echoed a rise in absentia removal orders across the country. There were 53,808 such orders nationally in June, a 55% jump from a month earlier. 

The real human cost is as incalculable as it is heartbreaking:

On Friday morning, several dozen people managed to make it to a courtroom inside 26 Federal Plaza for their mega master hearing where Immigration Judge Thanos Kanellakos appeared virtually from a courtroom in Maryland, overseeing a docket of 90 cases.

Most of the people who made it to court had traveled hundreds of miles from Tennessee, Georgia, North Dakota and Illinois to attend.

[…]

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Several people at court told The City Reporter they’d had a court date scheduled months or even years away when they happened to double-check the online portal recently and learned they had a new hearing scheduled a few days away.

There is no legitimate reason for the government to be doing this. There is only the constant desire to hurt human beings this administration considers to be less than human. That’s why it’s trying to eradicate temporary protected status for all but the whitest migrants. And that’s why it’s engaging in barely disguised entrapment to keep its flying rail cars and prison camps loaded with its preferred scapegoats.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, doj, due process, ice, mass deportation, mega master, trump administration

Prediction market Kalshi sent Netflix a cease-and-desist letter on Friday demanding that the streaming service take down the trailer for an upcoming documentary. In the letter, Kalshi claimed the trailer is “defamatory” and contains “both fabricated documents and false and misleading statements.”

“Instadocs: The Prediction Games” is a documentary about the rise of prediction markets. According to Netflix, the film — part of the streamer’s “Instadoc” series of fast-turnaround documentaries  — features interviews with both Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour.

The trailer, however, focuses on a recent party in Las Vegas, where men who have “made millions of dollars on prediction markets, probably eight figures, just over the course of the World Cup” have gathered to watch the World Cup final. One of the guests declares, “I like betting on Kalshi,” while another shows off an apparent $5,000 bet on their phone.

However, Kalshi is currently banned from operating in Nevada due to a court order. In its cease-and-desist letter, Kalshi said the bet shown on the phone is actually a screenshot of a bet made on May 16, 2025 — long before the ban. But the company argued that in the trailer, Netflix “misled its millions of customers into believing this individual was able to successfully trade sport event contracts in Nevada on July 19, 2026.”

In its letter, Kalshi also said that it recently spoke to a Netflix employee who “agreed not to feature the receipt in the documentary when it is released” on Sunday, July 26.

“However — despite Kalshi demonstrating to this employee that the claims in the video were demonstrably false — Netflix inexplicably refused to remove the receipt from the trailer currently circulating on the homepage of the Netflix app,” the company said.

Netflix doesn’t dispute that the screenshot is of a bet from 2025, but a spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter that none of the documentary footage was fabricated.

“The footage was filmed at the Winible World Cup Watch Weekend in Las Vegas on July 17, 2026,” the spokesperson said. “The featured trader with the trade on Spain showed us a screenshot of his bet, that was made in May 2025 prior to any Nevada court order. Any specific trades or bets referenced during that weekend are between the individual and the app in which they placed the trades.”