Hacking groups—at least one of which works on behalf of the North Korean government—have found a new and inexpensive way to distribute malware from “bulletproof” hosts: stashing them on public cryptocurrency blockchains. In a Thursday post, members of the Google Threat Intelligence Group said the technique provides the hackers with their own “bulletproof” host, a term that describes cloud platforms that are largely immune from takedowns by law enforcement and…

On Tuesday of last week, Ars Technica hosted a live conversation with Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast and one of tech’s most vocal AI critics, to discuss whether the generative AI industry is experiencing a bubble and when it might burst. My Internet connection had other plans, though, dropping out multiple times and forcing Ars Technica’s Lee Hutchinson to jump in as an excellent emergency backup host….

OnePlus is expected to take the wraps off the OnePlus 15 in the next few weeks, but before that, it’s giving us a look at the software that will run on it. OxygenOS 16, which is based on Android 16, will also come to the company’s other supported phones, and it’s going to include a heaping helping of AI features. OnePlus was slower than most smartphone makers to embrace AI,…

Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned Wednesday. F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its…

On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a small AI language model that reportedly delivers performance similar to what its frontier model Claude Sonnet 4 achieved five months ago but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. The new model is available now to all Claude app, web, and API users. If the benchmarks for Haiku 4.5 reported by Anthropic hold up to independent testing, the fact that…

It’s getting harder to know what’s real on the Internet, and Google is not helping one bit with the announcement of Veo 3.1. The company’s new video model supposedly offers better audio and realism, along with greater prompt accuracy. The updated video AI will be available throughout the Google ecosystem, including the Flow filmmaking tool, where the new model will unlock additional features. And if you’re worried about the cost…

A couple of weeks ago, a YouTuber unboxed what appeared to be a refreshed iPad Pro in full retail packaging, suggesting it would be launching imminently. Today, Apple formally announced the new tablets, and it looks like pretty much everything uncovered by that YouTuber turned out to be accurate. The new iPad Pros, powered by Apple’s also-new M5 chip, use the same basic designs as the M4 iPad Pros from…

Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims. Such “pig butchering” scams have operated for years. They typically work when members of the operation initiate conversations with people on social media and then spend months messaging them. Often, the scammers pose…

As if DirecTV doesn’t have enough trouble keeping customers, the satellite TV provider’s streaming devices will show AI-generated screensaver ads next year, according to an announcement today from partnering ads company Glance. People who use either of DirecTV’s two Gemini streaming devices will start seeing the ads “in early 2026,” per the announcement. DirecTV’s Gemini Air is an Android TV-powered USB device that people can plug into a TV for…

Meetings can be a real drain on productivity, but a new Gmail feature might at least cut down on the time you spend scheduling them. The company has announced “Help Me Schedule” is coming to Gmail, leveraging Gemini AI to recognize when you want to schedule a meeting and offering possible meeting times for the email recipient to choose. The new meeting feature is reminiscent of Magic Cue on Google’s…