Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among multiple clients without the need to expose raw data. Its ability to safeguard privacy, at the heart of FL, has recently been a hot-button debate topic. To elaborate, several studies have introduced a type of attacks known as gradient leakage attacks (GLAs), which exploit the gradients shared during training to reconstruct clients' raw data. On the flip side, some literature, however, contends no substantial privacy risk in practical FL environments due to the effectiveness of such GLAs being limited to overly relaxed conditions, such as small batch sizes and knowledge of clients' data distributions. This paper bridges this critical gap by empirically demonstrating that clients' data can still be effectively reconstructed, even within realistic FL environments. Upon revisiting GLAs, we recognize that their performance failures stem from their inability to handle the gradient matching problem. To alleviate the performance bottlenecks identified above, we develop FedLeak, which introduces two novel techniques, partial gradient matching and gradient regularization. Moreover, to evaluate the performance of FedLeak in real-world FL environments, we formulate a practical evaluation protocol grounded in a thorough review of extensive FL literature and industry practices. Under this protocol, FedLeak can still achieve high-fidelity data reconstruction, thereby underscoring the significant vulnerability in FL systems and the urgent need for more effective defense methods.

Disinformation about the Los Angeles protests is spreading on social media networks and is being made worse by users turning to AI chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT to perform fact-checking. As residents of the LA area took to the streets in recent days to protest increasingly frequent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, conservative posters on social media platforms like X and Facebook flooded their feeds with inaccurate information. In addition to well-worn tactics like repurposing old protest footage or clips from video games and movies, posters have claimed that the protesters are little more than paid agitators being directed by shadowy forces--something for which there is no evidence. In the midst of fast-moving and divisive news stories like the LA protests, and as companies like X and Meta have stepped back from moderating the content on their platforms, users have been turning to AI chatbots for answers--which in many cases have been completely inaccurate. On Monday, the San Francisco Chronicle published images of National Guard troops sleeping on floors.

A 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation included in President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" has brushed up against a mounting battle over the growth of data centers. On Thursday, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, posted on X that the megabill's 10-year block on states regulating artificial intelligence could "make it easier for corporations to get zoning variances, so massive AI data centers could be built in close proximity to residential areas." Massie, who did not vote for the bill, followed up his initial tweet with a screenshot of a story on a proposed data center in Oldham County, Kentucky, which downsized and changed locations following local pushback. "This isn't a conspiracy theory; this was a recent issue in my Congressional district," he wrote of concerns over the placement of data centers. "It was resolved at the local level because local officials had leverage. The big beautiful bill undermines the ability of local communities to decide where the AI data centers will be built."

The Trump administration is mobilizing 700 Marines to respond to protests triggered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Los Angeles. Aerial footage of protests downtown on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday evening seemed to show crowds of a few hundred people, while another pro-immigration rally earlier on Monday reportedly drew thousands. With 4,000 members of the National Guard already deployed to the city, in addition to ICE and local police, armed law-enforcement officers appear to outnumber actual protesters, who have remained largely nonviolent (aside from the ones who set several robotic taxicabs on fire). What follows is a speculative attempt to convey the emotional truth of what these troops might encounter. We woke up at dawn, heads pounding, in a hut lit by a single bulb. We were two clicks outside the perimeter and three clicks from the nearest Lamill or Blue Bottle--a desperate goddamn distance, no no no this can't be happening.

Will Cain tries to make sense of the divide over the'One Big Beautiful Bill.' Plus, Kennedy joins Will to discuss some of the most salacious stories in pop culture and politics. Both Republicans and Democrats have used analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as a political cudgel when it suits them, but with unfavorable reviews of President Donald Trump's "one big, beautiful bill" coming out, some in the GOP are questioning the relevancy of the agency. The CBO's latest analysis of the gargantuan tax cut and spending package found that the House Republican-authored super bill would add 2.4 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade and boot millions off of health insurance. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is signaling that changes are likely to the House's version of President Trump's "big, beautiful bill." Senate Republicans will now get their chance to tweak and change the legislation, and have vowed to do so, despite warnings from Trump to reshape the bill as little as possible.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are no longer friends. Tension between the two exploded into public view in the middle of last week, with each leveling sharp barbs at the other. Four days into the public feud between the world's most powerful person and the world's richest person, though, I declare Musk the loser. An unstoppable force has lost its battle with an immovable object. From my colleagues Hugo Lowell and Andrew Roth: On Thursday, Elon Musk called for Donald Trump's impeachment and mocked his connections to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as the US president threatened to cancel federal contracts and tax subsidies for Musk's companies, in an extraordinary social media feud that erupted between the former allies.

In the three months before August last year, Russia fired a total of 1,100, according to a report by Ukraine's general staff. A steep rise followed, with 818 drones recorded in August, 1,410 in September and more than 2,000 in October. But the numbers just keep going up. In May, for the first time, the number of drones exceeded 4,000. This month is likely to set a new record.

Russia launched a major drone attack on Ukraine overnight, damaging buildings in Kyiv and hitting a maternity ward in Odesa. Two people were killed and several others injured. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack as "one of the biggest" of the war, saying Moscow's forces fired more than 315 drones and seven missiles.

It is a significant overhaul of a department that in 40 years has never before been placed so squarely on the chopping block. Here's how today's defense tech companies, which have fostered close connections to the Trump administration, stand to gain, and why safety testing might suffer as a result. The Operational Test and Evaluation office is "the last gate before a technology gets to the field," says Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot for the US Navy who is now a professor of engineering and computer science at George Mason University. Though the military can do small experiments with new systems without running it by the office, it has to test anything that gets fielded at scale. "In a bipartisan way--up until now--everybody has seen it's working to help reduce waste, fraud, and abuse," she says.

When it comes to autonomous vehicles on city roads, that's been the approach in most of the world's countries. But on Tuesday, the UK announced it would put a cautious foot on the pedal, when the Department of Transport said it would accelerate plans to allow companies to operate self-driving cars on public roads in limited pilot programs starting spring of next year. The British government had initially planned to open up its roads for self-driving vehicles more than a year later, in the second half of 2027. "We can see what a massive economic opportunity this technology presents," Transport secretary Heidi Alexander tells WIRED in an interview. The department estimates the autonomous vehicle industry will create 38,000 jobs and generate 42 billion pounds ( 57 million US) for the country by 2035.