Law Enforcement & Public Safety
A simple Alexa command exposed my husband's sordid affair in graphic detail: Cheaters use 'sneak mode' to cover their tracks at home... but you can still uncover their hidden evidence
'I found out because I bought a new Amazon Alexa and while setting it up realized this is linked via our family prime account,' the woman shared on Reddit. 'Found in history, 'Alexa play beautiful love songs,' followed by the sound of them having sex.' To find such recordings saved to an Amazon Alexa, open the Alexa app, tap More, go to Alexa Privacy, then select Review Voice History to see recordings by date or device. Users can play back clips, delete individual recordings or delete their entire voice history. If you own a Google Home, open the Google Home app and tap Activity to review recent home events, including camera, doorbell and device activity. To check Assistant recordings, go to your Google Account activity controls and review or delete Google Assistant activity.
After decades risking arrest, South Korea's tattoo artists step into the limelight
After decades risking arrest, South Korea's tattoo artists step into the limelight When Kim Tae-nam took the stage last Saturday in Seoul, it was a moment he had long been waiting for - the career he had chosen was no longer illegal. He couldn't stop smiling, the relief spilling into his voice: This was only possible because of our effort, all your sweat and tears. Let's hear it from everyone: Tattoos are art! They had gathered on a rooftop in Seongsu, a hip Seoul neighbourhood, for Ink Bomb: more than 90 local tattooists and artists openly celebrating body art, which had thrived in the shadows for decades. Just days before, South Korea's top court had overturned its 1992 ruling that defined tattooing as a medical act - bringing to an end Korean tattooists' decades-long fight for legitimacy.
Causal Label Recovery in Payment Networks
Fraud detection models in payment networks train on chargeback labels that are systematically biased. Every label must survive three sequential gates: authorization (declined transactions generate no labels), issuer reporting (unreported fraud is invisible), and delay (pending chargebacks are missing at training time). Labels that do arrive may be corrupted by first-party misuse or issuer misclassification. A companion paper [arXiv:2605.27557] proved that these four impairments impose a minimax lower bound on detection performance. This paper asks: can that bound be achieved? We formalize the observation pipeline as a sequential missing-data problem with three propensity stages and a corruption layer, and construct the Sequential Triply Robust (STR) estimator. The STR corrects for all four impairments simultaneously and achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound -- no estimator can have lower asymptotic variance. It is sequentially triply robust: at each gate, consistency requires only that either the propensity model or the outcome regression is correctly specified, not both. We provide corruption correction via noise-rate-adjusted pseudo-labels, empirical Bayes shrinkage to stabilize inverse-propensity weights for small issuers, a plug-in variance estimator yielding valid confidence intervals, and a Bernstein concentration inequality for finite-sample guarantees. On the operational side, we derive the optimal training delay -- the maturity window that minimizes the sum of label-quality loss and model staleness -- and prove that the STR permits training on data that is days old rather than months old, decoupling model freshness from the chargeback maturity cycle. The STR provably dominates naive chargeback-based training in mean squared error for any sample size.
Image of Thai police in sparkly dresses with handcuffed suspect turns out to be AI fake
The real image, which the police station has since shared, shows the officers in normal clothes and no female officer in the picture at all. The real image, which the police station has since shared, shows the officers in normal clothes and no female officer in the picture at all. Picture was created by administrator in charge of station's Facebook account who wanted to create'friendlier image' It was an arresting image and an irresistible story. A group of tough Thai police officers - five men and one woman - all wearing elaborate festival-style dresses, surrounding a drug dealer they had caught while undercover. The image, released by local police, was so compelling that it found its way on to the front page of the UK's Daily Star, as well as in picture stories in the Telegraph, the Sun and the New York Post. The Sun wrote: "The burly crew of five men and one woman slipped into skin tight sequins and feathers for the covert mission in Thailand ."
Taiwan suspects Nvidia chips smuggled to China via Japan
Japan is one of many locations in Asia where Chinese companies access American AI chips -- by renting hardware that's owned by foreign firms and installed in overseas data centers. Taiwan prosecutors suspect that three individuals successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips to China after first exporting them to Japan, people familiar with the matter said. The trio was detained last week by Taiwan's Keelung District Prosecutors Office for allegedly falsifying documents related to exports of Super Micro Computer servers containing advanced Nvidia chips, which the U.S. has barred from sale to China without a license from Washington. The move marked the island democracy's first public crackdown on AI chip diversion after years of pressure from the U.S. to take a more active role in curtailing China's tech access. When Taiwan authorities apprehended the three defendants -- who've now been officially detained -- they also seized about 50 servers for which they accuse the trio of preparing fraudulent export documents. But at least one shipment had already gone through Taiwan customs, according to the people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to speak about an ongoing criminal investigation.
Ballots Have Been Seized Across the US. No One Knows What Will Happen Next
Ballots Have Been Seized Across the US. So far this year, authorities have seized or demanded ballots from elections in four states. Experts fear the trend could throw the midterms into chaos unless courts draw a line. As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago in several states in search, it claims, of fraud or other malfeasance. But experts believe the goal may be more varied. The seizures began in January when FBI agents armed with a warrant raided an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, and grabbed 600 boxes of ballots from 2020.
The Fundamental Limits of Fraud Detection in Card Payment Networks
Card payment fraud detection is usually framed as a supervised classification problem. Although this approach has generated practical progress, improvement has remained incremental despite major advances in model architecture. We argue that this is not mainly a failure of function approximation or optimization, but a consequence of structural information impairments inherent to the payment ecosystem. We formalize card authorization as a sequential decision problem with delayed, censored, corrupted, and counterfactually missing feedback. We derive a minimax regret lower bound showing that these impairments enter multiplicatively in the denominator of the achievable learning rate. The bound implies that improving issuer reporting quality or reducing censorship can yield larger reductions in the regret floor than increasing model complexity. We also show that heterogeneity across issuers worsens learnability beyond what average impairment rates suggest. The paper contributes a theory of why fraud detection in payment networks is fundamentally harder than in standard online learning settings, identifies ecosystem information quality as the key bottleneck, and provides a theoretical basis for prioritizing investments in reporting infrastructure, dispute process quality, and selective exploration. The paper is theory-first and does not rely on proprietary transaction data.
Google Security Engineer Arrested in Million-Dollar Polymarket Trading Scheme
According to federal prosecutors, Michele Spagnuolo made more than $1 million on the prediction market platform using confidential information about Google Search traffic. A Google security engineer has been charged with crimes stemming from allegedly placing trades on Polymarket using confidential internal information from the tech giant. Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen, was arrested this morning in New York, as first reported by ABC News. Spagnuolo is charged with one count each of commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. He has worked at Google since 2014 and was based out of the company's Zurich, Switzerland, offices.
Russia to task bankers with shooting down Ukrainian drones
Russian lawmakers have passed a bill to allow trained bank employees to shoot down Ukrainian drones amid an increase in the number of attacks. The draft legislation, which would see banks across Russia install electronic jamming systems while selected employees would shoot down incoming unmanned aircraft, passed in its third and final reading in the lower house Duma on Tuesday, according to the state-run TASS news agency. The bill says the legislation is needed to protect Bank of Russia facilities, including those located in the new constituent entities of the Russian Federation - referring to the four eastern Ukrainian regions that Moscow has announced it has annexed despite not controlling them fully - amid the increasing number of sabotage and terrorist attacks. Under the plan, banks would finance the installation of the equipment on their premises. With banks in almost every town, their incorporation into Russia's air defences could help expand its cover.