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President Donald Trump said he would make countering immigration one of his flagship policies during his second term in the White House, promising an unprecedented number of deportations. A year in, data shows that deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection have surpassed at least 350,000 people. ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s mass removal campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented people, prompting widespread protests and resistance from communities across the United States. ICE uses several technologies to identify and surveil individuals. Homeland Security has also leveraged the shadow…
The UK has officially lost its measles-free status. This means that this highly contagious disease has been circulating continuously in the region for at least a year.The UK has gained, lost and regained measles-free status over the past decade, according to an update posted by the UK Health and Safety Agency (UKHSA) on 26 January. The disease was eradicated in 2016 but experienced a resurgence in 2018, as well as in other parts of Europe. It then regained eradication status in 2021. At this time, measles rates also decreased due to precautions taken to stop the spread of coronavirus disease…
Not all fats are created equal. Studies using mice suggest that some types of fat in the body raise blood pressure, while other types of fat suppress the rise in blood pressure.Excess body fat in humans has long been linked to high blood pressure and many other cardiovascular problems. However, there are two types of fat in the body. One is “brown” fat, which helps you burn energy and keep your body warm, and the other is “white” fat, which stores excess calories.Lead author Dr. Paul Cohen, a cardiologist and physician-scientist at New York’s Rockefeller University, said brown fat had…
TikTok’s U.S. ownership change last week has some users looking for alternative platforms. One app that has been gaining traction is UpScrolled. This is a social network that promises to be impartial on political agendas. The app is currently ranked 12th overall and 2nd in the social networking category in Apple’s App Store. UpScrolled blends the familiar features of Instagram and X, allowing users to share photos, videos, and text posts, discover new content, and send direct messages. The app was founded last year by Essam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist, with the aim of giving users a place to “freely…
Thanks to a new feature announced by Anthropic on Monday, Claude users will be able to invoke interactive apps within the chatbot interface. In keeping with Anthropic’s enterprise focus, most of the launch apps are workplace tools such as Slack, Canva, Figma, Box, and Clay, with Salesforce coming soon. In either case, the app enables a logged-in instance of the service that Claude can access, allowing the user to send Slack messages, generate graphs, or access cloud files, depending on which app is enabled. “Analyzing data, designing content, and managing projects all work more efficiently using a dedicated visual interface,”…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 26, 2026Cyber espionage/malware Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an ongoing campaign targeting users in India using multi-stage backdoors as part of a suspected cyber espionage campaign. According to the eSentire Threat Response Unit (TRU), this activity involves using phishing emails impersonating the Indian Income Tax Department to trick victims into downloading malicious archives, ultimately granting threat actors persistent access to their machines for continuous monitoring and data exfiltration. The ultimate goal of this sophisticated attack is to deploy a variant of a known banking Trojan called Blackmoon (also known as KRBanker) and a legitimate enterprise tool called SyncFuture TSM…
More than 450 technologists from companies including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and Salesforce have signed a letter demanding their CEOs call the White House and remove U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from U.S. cities. “In recent months, Trump has sent federal agents into our cities to criminalize us, our neighbors, friends, colleagues, and families,” IceOut.Tech’s open letter reads. “From Minneapolis to Los Angeles to Chicago, we have seen armed and masked thugs unleash endless acts of reckless violence, kidnapping, terror, and brutality.” Minneapolis has become the center of a large-scale federal immigration operation, employing tactics so violent that many…
Microsoft has announced a new Maia 200 accelerator chip for artificial intelligence (AI) that is three times more powerful than hardware from rivals such as Google and Amazon, company representatives said.This modern chip is used for AI inference rather than training, powering systems and agents used to make predictions, provide answers to queries, and generate outputs based on new data fed to them.The Maia 200 is already deployed in Microsoft’s central U.S. data center region, where the company plans to use the chip to generate synthetic data and enrichment training to improve next-generation large-scale language models (LLMs). The AI accelerator…
Microsoft has announced the launch of its latest chip, the Maia 200. The company describes it as a silicon flagship product designed to scale AI inference. The 200 follows the company’s Maia 100, released in 2023, and is technologically equipped to run powerful AI models faster and more efficiently, the company said. Maia has over 100 billion transistors and delivers performance of over 10 petaflops with 4-bit accuracy and approximately 5 petaflops with 8-bit precision. This is a significant improvement over the previous model. Inference refers to the computational process that runs a model, as opposed to the computations required…
Ravi LakshmananJanuary 26, 2026AI security/vulnerabilities Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions that are advertised as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistants, but also have secret capabilities that siphon developer data to servers based in China. These extensions have been installed a total of 1.5 million times and are still available for download from the official Visual Studio Marketplace. Listed below. ChatGPT – Chinese version (ID: whensunset.chatgpt-china) – 1,340,869 installations ChatGPT – ChatMoss (CodeMoss) (ID: zhukunpeng.chat-moss) – 151,751 installations Koi Security says these extensions are functional and work as expected, but they also capture every…