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TikTok Settles U.S. Child Privacy Case for $400 Million

TikTok will pay $400 million to settle U.S. DOJ/FTC claims that it violated COPPA by collecting data from children under 13.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced a $400 million settlement with TikTok and ByteDance resolving a 2024 lawsuit over violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). TikTok will pay $300 million immediately and $100 million upon entry of an order vacating a prior consent decree against its predecessor Musical.ly; it is one of the largest recoveries ever obtained in a COPPA case. The DOJ and FTC, filing in California, alleged TikTok knowingly allowed children under 13 to create accounts and illegally collected data via Kids Mode. TikTok was previously fined €345 million by Ireland's Data Protection Commission in 2023 for GDPR breaches involving children's data.

Security Affairs · 23d agoPolicy & legal

TikTok Agrees to $400 Million Settlement in U.S. Child Privacy Lawsuit

TikTok agrees to pay $400 million to settle a DOJ child-privacy lawsuit alleging COPPA violations including collecting data from children under 13.

The DOJ announced that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit alleging massive-scale invasions of children's privacy. TikTok pays $300 million immediately and $100 million upon vacating the prior Musical.ly consent decree. The complaint alleged children under 13 could create accounts, data was collected in Kids Mode, and parental deletion requests went unheeded. DOJ called it one of the largest recoveries ever under COPPA, following TikTok's 2023 €345 million GDPR fine.

The Hacker News · 25d agoPolicy & legal

Former TikTok execs built an app that uses AI to teach you how to pose for a photo

Ex-TikTok employees launched Superpose, an iOS camera app using generative AI to suggest photo poses, with $2.2M raised.

Former TikTok employees Melody Chu and Jing Liu launched Superpose, an iOS camera app that generates four AI pose suggestions per photo, with over 22,000 downloads and 190,000 poses generated since July. The app offers five free generations daily, with paid packs of five for $2.99 or 20 for $9.99. The startup raised $2.2 million from Khosla Ventures, Meitu, and OVTR VC, competing with Google's Camera Coach and Adobe's AI photo critique features.

TechCrunch · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Senators press TikTok over withholding of safety features for some users

Sens. Blackburn and Blumenthal demand TikTok explain why safety features were withheld from about 10% of users, following a teenager's suicide.

Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter demanding answers from TikTok after a Bloomberg report showed the company withheld algorithmic safety changes from a control group of about 10% of users, including 16-year-old Chase Nasca, who died by suicide in February 2022. An internal review found the teen viewed more than 7,500 videos in his final two weeks, 73% with themes of sadness or personal struggles. The senators tied the case to the Kids Online Safety Act, which advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee on August 5, and set a September 1 deadline for responses.

The Record · 27d agoPolicy & legal

Meta to Pay Up to $18B Over Teen Social Media Use

Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and cap teen Facebook and Instagram use at two hours daily, settling child-safety lawsuits from most US states.

Meta settled claims that it deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, ending a federal trial as Instagram head Adam Mosseri began testifying and Mark Zuckerberg was expected to testify. Of roughly $16.7 billion for 47 states and territories, $12.7 billion is guaranteed and $5 billion is contingent on Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube adopting similar teen protections. The deal also resolved state privacy claims tied to Cambridge Analytica for an additional $459 million, while New Mexico (a $567 million ruling) and Florida opted out of the settlement.

Security Affairs · 20d agoPolicy & legal

AgenticGen: Reward-Guided Agentic Video Generation for Advertising

AgenticGen applies DPO and GRPO reward-guided reasoning to ad video generation, improving TikTok CTR 2.72%, CVR 2.63%, and Advv 9.61%.

AgenticGen decomposes advertising video generation into two trainable reasoning stages, strategy selection and draft generation, supervised by online business feedback. It learns a performance-based reward from accumulated online feedback plus a rubric-based reward aligned with human quality standards, then optimizes policies with DPO followed by GRPO using process and outcome rewards. Online A/B experiments in the TikTok advertising system show CTR up 2.72%, CVR up 2.63%, and Advv up 9.61% over an SFT baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 17d agoAI research

Meta pledges to overhaul kids’ safety protections, pay $17 billion to settle social media case

Meta settles states' kids' online safety lawsuit for $17 billion, agreeing to landmark usage limits, age restrictions, and independent auditing.

Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle a civil suit from nearly every US state and territory alleging it hid research showing Facebook and Instagram are addictive to minors and violated COPPA by collecting data on children under 13. The settlement imposes reforms including two-hour daily limits for users under 18, a midnight-to-6am usage block, non-personalized feed options, and an independent auditor. Meta also settled separately with Texas for about $1 billion.

The Record · 21d agoPolicy & legal

I’ve been deepfaked: What do I do?

ESET outlines steps for deepfake victims: preserving evidence, using platform reporting tools, and legal remedies like the US TAKE IT DOWN Act and StopNCII.org.

ESET published a how-to guide for people who discover deepfakes of themselves, covering evidence preservation, platform-specific reporting on Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X, and escalation to publishers or data protection regulators. It notes the US TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and requires 48-hour takedowns, while UK and EU laws add creation offenses and GDPR Article 17 erasure rights. Services like StopNCII.org and TakeItDown.NCMEC.org hash images so participating platforms such as Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and X can find and remove matching copies.

ESET WeLiveSecurity · 14d agoAI safety & security1

EU Chief Warns of AI-Powered Hacking, Moves to Rein In Social Media

EU Commission President von der Leyen warned AI will enable unprecedented hacking and announced Kids Act and Digital Fairness Act proposals regulating social media.

In her State of the European Union 2026 speech, Ursula von der Leyen warned that upcoming AI models 'will allow hacking on a level we never thought possible' and cited dangers of self-improving models, referencing a Hugging Face incident. She reaffirmed the AI Act as the core guardrail framework and pledged cooperation with Canada, the UK, and other partners. She also proposed a Kids Act banning social media under age 13 and personal accounts under 15, plus a Digital Fairness Act to be proposed in autumn.

SecurityWeek · 14h agoAI policy

How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?

A FOSS maintainer manually graded 102 F-Droid apps from the September 12, 2026 update batch, finding many show signs of LLM-generated code.

A student and FOSS app maintainer reviewed 102 apps pushed to F-Droid on September 12, 2026, assigning each a three-tier rating for likelihood of LLM-authored code (mostly AI >50%, hard to say/mostly human, no signs of AI). The heuristic relies on commit aesthetics, README and branding style, and the presence of agentic infrastructure like Claude Code or Codex, which automatically places an app in the 'mostly AI' tier. Example ratings include Amber (Nostr event signer) as mostly AI, and Aria for Misskey as showing no AI signs. The author stresses reliable detection of LLM-generated code from text alone is impossible, so ratings are approximate.

Perplexity Portable Computer Is Now Available on Windows, Powered by NVIDIA RTX

Perplexity launches Portable Computer local AI agent on Windows for NVIDIA RTX PCs with 24GB+ VRAM, keeping sensitive work on-device.

Perplexity released Portable Computer, a local version of its agentic Perplexity Computer, in its Windows app for NVIDIA GeForce RTX PCs and RTX PRO Workstations with 24GB or more VRAM. It runs a locally post-trained model such as Qwen 3.8 27B optimized for NVIDIA RTX GPUs, handling multistep tasks and file analysis on-device with a SPACE sandbox and built-in browser. Connectors cover Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, and GitHub, and the agent can escalate to cloud models only with user permission.

NVIDIA Blog · 2d agoAI industry

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup from a former Spotify leader for making music apps

Former Spotify innovation head raises $5.5M pre-seed for A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building playful music-creation apps with selective generative AI features.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by former Spotify head of innovation Máuhan M Zonoozy, raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital and others. The startup ships small music-play apps including Speed Surfer, Usersound, Stacks, Drops, Sampler, and the iOS mixer app bop, plus a new prompt-based sound creation feature. Zonoozy says the company deliberately avoids infusing AI into every product, arguing human taste and participation become more valuable as AI-generated content grows abundant.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI industry 2 sources

Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks

Chris Domas explains at Black Hat how legal compiler optimizations can strip security checks and memory-clearing operations, turning secure C source into vulnerable binaries.

David Bombal interviews researcher Chris Domas at Black Hat USA 2026 about how the C abstract machine permits compilers to legally transform code in ways that remove security protections, delete memory-clearing operations, and introduce time-of-check to time-of-use vulnerabilities. Factors like register pressure, structure layout, and data size affect vulnerability, with examples where 17 or 33 byte buffers are safe while nearby sizes produce vulnerable code. An AI-assisted analysis of 500 million lines of open-source code identified 300 potentially dangerous patterns. Recommended mitigations include enabling compiler warnings, using sanitizers, analyzing optimized builds, and testing the exact binary that ships.

Sparks Fly: NVIDIA Accelerates Local AI at IFA 2026

NVIDIA announces local AI push at IFA 2026 with faster llama.cpp/vLLM inference, PAIR routing tool, and October RTX Spark PCs.

At IFA 2026, NVIDIA announced simplified local AI support for agents in Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, and Perplexity Portable Computer, plus new llama.cpp and vLLM optimizations delivering up to 1.9x faster local inference. NVIDIA also unveiled PAIR, a Personal AI Router for distributing inference across a local network's PCs, and compact RTX Spark Windows PCs from Lenovo and Acer arriving in October. The post recaps recent local-capable model releases including Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B), Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and Qwen3.8-27B, DeepSeek v4 Flash (284B MoE, 13B active), Meta Muse Glimmer (30B), Z.ai GLM-5.3-Flash, LTX 2.5, and MiniMax-H3 with the FastH3 distilled variant.

NVIDIA Blog · 13d agoAI industry

Risky Bulletin: Dutch intel services to get extensive new powers

Netherlands proposed a bill granting AIVD and MIVD expanded warrantless tapping, faster hacking powers, and forced data disclosure, citing Russia, China, and Iran threats.

The Dutch government introduced a bill greatly expanding surveillance powers of intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD, allowing up to one year of tapping without pre-approval and simplified hacking operations against 'foreign adversaries'. Agencies could compel Dutch companies or citizens to provide data under threat of charges, share data with the private sector, and oversight bodies would merge into a new CTT board. The bill follows similar overhauls in Ireland, Germany, and France after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The newsletter also reports Moonwell hacked for $8.7M, a Cosmos EVM bug exploited for ~$3M, ShinyHunters listing McKesson with claimed hundreds of millions of records, and a pro-Kremlin DDoS claim against Norway's government network.

Risky Business News · 17d agoPolicy & legal

Two alleged TeamPCP members arrested and charged after months of software supply

Australian Federal Police, with FBI support, arrested two alleged TeamPCP members behind supply-chain attacks that compromised over 1,000 organizations.

The AFP charged two Western Australian men, identified by media as Ruben Ian Thomson (21) and Louis Michael Gaebler (23), with 14 combined offences including unauthorized data modification and dealing in criminal proceeds. TeamPCP is blamed for poisoning open-source software releases including Trivy, LiteLLM, and the mini Shai-Hulud worm campaign, exposing over 500,000 credentials and at least 300 GB of data. Victims included the European Commission and GitHub, with remediation costs estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers from Flare traced one suspect through leaked passwords, a GitHub alias, and a Steam profile.

CyberScoop · 20d agoPolicy & legal1

Beneath the Surface: Detecting and Blocking Hidden Malicious Traffic Distribution Systems

Unit 42 built an ML-based detector for malicious traffic distribution systems, finding malicious TDS chains average longer redirections and more URLs than legitimate ones.

Traffic distribution systems redirect victims through chains of intermediate domains to hide final destinations, serving phishing, malvertising, and online gambling operations. Unit 42's topological analysis of redirection graphs found malicious TDS traffic uses longer chains (about 25% exceed four hops vs 10% benign), more URLs (median 126 vs 80), and fewer isolated subgraphs with higher connectivity. These features power an ML detector integrated into Advanced DNS Security and Advanced URL Filtering to identify and block malicious TDS infrastructure in customer traffic.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

The Government is Monitoring Anti

Fusion center bulletins reveal US law enforcement monitoring anti-Flock social media accounts and warning police ahead of the DeFlock Week of Action against license plate readers.

Public records requests by 404 Media and journalist Dan Boguslaw exposed intelligence bulletins from fusion centers in Colorado, Wisconsin, and Florida tracking anti-Flock sentiment, camera vandalism videos, and the DeFlock National Week of Action against automated license plate readers scheduled for August 16-22. The bulletins highlight Instagram accounts like Nomark.Project posting daily camera takedowns, and a device found during a June 25 traffic stop that could locate Flock cameras. Police are advised to increase patrols around ALPR locations and warned about upcoming DeFlock events, including 11 Florida cities signed up. DeFlock creator Will Freeman said the project never called for vandalism and that over 100 surveillance contracts have been canceled through civic engagement.

404 Media · Aug 12, 2026Policy & legal1