53 place 6
Researchers at the University of Vienna extracted phone numbers for 3.5 billion WhatsApp users by systematically checking every possible number through the messaging service's contact discovery feature. The technique yielded profile photos for 57% of those accounts and profile text for 29 percent. The researchers checked roughly 100 million numbers per hour using WhatsApp's browser-based app.
The team warned Meta in April and deleted their data. The company implemented stricter rate-limiting by October to
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Slashdot
The AFL-CIO, which represents some 15 million workers across the US, is backing a planned Minnesota economic blackout to protest ICE. Read more ›
725
President Donald Trump threatens tariffs on Denmark and other European nations over Greenland annexation, citing national security concerns. Read more ›
433
This week Google "unveiled a set of tools for retailers that helps them roll out AI agents," reports the Wall Street Journal, The new retail AI agents, which help shoppers find their desired items, provide customer support and let people order food at restaurants, are part of what Alphabet-owned Google calls Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Major retailers, including home improvement giant Lowe's, the grocer Kroger and pizza chain Papa... Read more ›
348 fresh
Visits to the US by international travelers declined for the eighth straight month in December, in a continued blow to the tourism industry. Read more ›
241 fresh
AMD’s 2026 PC strategy focuses on incremental CPU updates, price-to-performance GPUs, and cautious AI upscaling. Read more ›
213 fresh
=[ "More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct," reports CoinDesk, citing a new analysis by cryptocurrency data aggregator CoinGecko. And most of those failures occurred in 2025: The study looked at token listings on GeckoTerminal between mid-2021 and the end of 2025. Of the nearly 20.2 million tokens that entered the market during that period, 53.2% are no longer actively traded. A staggering 11.6 million of... Read more ›
153 fresh
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is headed to Davos to challenge President Donald Trump's economic agenda. Read more ›
95 fresh
Actor Matt Damon said Netflix wants action movies to reiterate plot lines multiple times because people are on their phones while watching a movie. Read more ›
88 fresh
Watch Australian Open for free. Live stream Musetti vs. Collignon in the 2026 Australian Open online for free from anywhere in the world. Read more ›
75 fresh
Since the United States announced it would “run” Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has openly floated similar interventions elsewhere in Latin America. But the country Donald Trump has fixated on most isn’t an adversary — it’s an ally. Greenland, a NATO member and longtime partner of the United States has repeatedly […] Read more ›
50
Increasing DDR5 prices are leading buyers to buy "ancient" desktop platforms going as far back as the DDR3 era. YouTuber discovers 4790K powered system with an RTX 2060 Super and $40 worth of 32GB DDR3 memory can run games modern AAA games at 60FPS. Read more ›
47
Numbers speak louder than words, and in this case, Netflix will still get dibs on Sony's movie slate for years to come. Read more ›
43
We now have some idea of what's at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI. As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing, as part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its non-profit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages from the "wrongful gains" of OpenAI and Microsoft. Musk claimed in the filing that he's... Read more ›
42
"Share a Disney quote that sums up how you're feeling right now!" That's what Disney posted on Threads the other day, and people immediately replied with lines from Star Wars, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and even Mary Poppins. The throughline between all the quotes: they were pretty pointedly anti-fascist and clearly aimed at the […] Read more ›
40
See the Moon phase expected for January 18, 2025 as well as when the next Full Moon is expected. Read more ›
38 fresh
I began choosing grocery cashiers over self-checkout and was surprised by how much small human interactions helped combat loneliness. Read more ›
33
Watch Australian Open for free. Live stream Berrettini vs. de Minaur in the 2026 Australian Open online for free from anywhere in the world. Read more ›
33 fresh
Turns out people might like to circumvent centralized financial infrastructure in times of political upheaval. Read more ›
32
As 2026 begins, MIT Technology Review publishes "educated guesses" on emerging technologies that will define the future, advances "we think will drive progress or incite the most change — for better or worse — in the years ahead." This year's list includes next-gen nuclear, gene-editing drugs (as well as the "resurrection" of ancient genes from extinct creatures), and three AI-related developments: AI companions, AI coding tools, and "mechanistic interpretability" for... Read more ›
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Slashdot
Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, died Tuesday. He was 68. From a report: His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate... Read more ›
210
BrianFagioli writes: Wine 11.0 has officially landed, wrapping up a year of development with more than 6,000 code changes and a broad set of upgrades that touch gaming, desktop behavior, and long-standing architectural work. The biggest milestone is the completion of the new WoW64 model, which is now considered fully supported and allows 32-bit and even 16-bit applications to run in a cleaner way inside 64-bit prefixes. Wine also gains... Read more ›
98
A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration -- an independent network of researchers -- evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies. The biological mechanisms overlap considerably with antidepressants. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins," said Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director Read more ›
94
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once told an audience that he views local PC hardware the same way he views a 100-year-old electric generator he saw in a brewery museum -- as a relic of a pre-grid era, destined to be replaced by centralized utilities that users simply rent rather than own. The anecdote, shared at a talk a few years ago, positioned Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as the... Read more ›
86
Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the "enshittification" of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be "the beginning of the end for enshittification" in a new article for the Guardian — "our chance to make tech good again". There is only one reason the world isn't bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US's defective products: its (former) trading... Read more ›
85
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gothamist: City regulators on Tuesday accused Uber and DoorDash of deliberately altering their app interfaces to discourage customers from tipping food delivery workers, a move that has cost the employees more than $550 million over the last two years. A report (PDF) published by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection argues that food delivery app giants retaliated against minimum wage rules for... Read more ›
75
"Since the United States reopened its embassy in Cuba in 2015, a number of personnel have reported a series of debilitating medical ailments which include dizziness, fatigue, problems with memory, and impaired vision," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "For ten years, these sudden and unexplained onsets have been studied with no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Now comes word that a device, purchased by the Pentagon, has... Read more ›
75
After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier. Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions... Read more ›
74
A recent Microsoft Patch Tuesday update has introduced a bug in Windows 11 23H2 that causes some PCs to refuse to shut down or hibernate, "no matter how many times you try," reports The Register. From the report: In a notice on its Windows release health dashboard, Microsoft confirmed that some PCs running Windows 11 23H2 might fail to power down properly after installing the latest security updates. Instead of... Read more ›
69
Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwritten label. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the closet where it was found... Read more ›
65
Most popular sources
Business Insider
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44% 31 |
Tom's Hardware
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22% 18 |
Vox
|
4% 2 |
Wired
|
4% 6 |
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Slashdot
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4% 1 |
| View sources » | |
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18.01.2026 04:34
Last update: 04:25 EDT.
News rating updated: 11:20.
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