All news with #content provenance tag

Google to Let Users Set AI Mode as Default Search Option

🔎 Google will let users set AI mode as their default search tab, replacing the traditional blue links view for those who opt in. The change will be user-controlled via a toggle or button so individuals can choose AI-driven summaries as their primary experience while the classic Web tab remains accessible. Google says it is studying the impact on ads and publishers.

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Politics

📘 Bruce Schneier announces his new book, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform our Politics, Government, and Citizenship, coauthored with Nathan Sanders and published by MIT Press on October 21; signed copies will be available directly from the author after publication. The book surveys AI’s impact across politics, legislating, administration, the judiciary, and citizenship, including AI-driven propaganda and artificial conversation, focusing on uses within functioning democracies. Schneier adopts a cautiously optimistic stance, stresses the importance of imagining second-order effects, and argues for the creation of public AI to better serve democratic ends.

Cloudflare AI Week 2025: Product, Security, and Tools

🔒 Cloudflare framed AI Week 2025 around products and controls to help organizations adopt AI while retaining safety and visibility. The company emphasized four core priorities: securing AI environments and workflows; protecting original content from misuse; enabling developers to build secure AI experiences; and applying AI to improve Cloudflare’s services. Key launches included AI Gateway, Infire, AI Crawl Control, expanded CASB scanning, and MCP Server Portals, with a continued focus on customer feedback and ongoing investment.

Google Cloud: Monthly AI product and security update

🔔 This month Google Cloud expanded its AI stack across models, tooling, and security. Highlights include Gemini 2.5 Flash with native image generation and SynthID watermarking on Vertex AI, new Veo video models, the Gemini CLI, and a global Anthropic Claude endpoint. Google also published 101 gen‑AI blueprints, developer guidance for choosing tools, and security advances for agents and AI workloads.

AI Crawler Traffic: Purpose and Industry Breakdown

🔍 Cloudflare Radar introduces industry-focused AI crawler insights and a new crawl purpose selector that classifies bots as Training, Search, User action, or Undeclared. The update surfaces top bot trends, crawl-to-refer ratios, and per-industry views so publishers can see who crawls their content and why. Data shows Training drives nearly 80% of crawl requests, while User action and Undeclared exhibit smaller, cyclical patterns.

Cloudflare Launches AI Crawl Control with 402 Support

🛡️Cloudflare has rebranded its AI Audit beta as AI Crawl Control and moved the tool to general availability, giving publishers more granular ways to manage AI crawlers. Paid customers can now block specific bots and return customizable HTTP 402 Payment Required responses containing contact or licensing instructions. The feature aims to replace the binary allow-or-block choice with a channel for negotiation and potential monetization, while pay-per-crawl remains in beta.

The AI Fix #65 — Excel Copilot Dangers and Social Media

⚠️ In episode 65 of The AI Fix, Graham Cluley warns that Microsoft Excel’s new COPILOT function can produce unpredictable, non-reproducible formula results and should not be used for important numeric work. The hosts also discuss a research experiment that created a 500‑AI social network and the arXiv paper Can We Fix Social Media?. The episode blends technical analysis with lighter AI culture stories and offers subscription and support notes.

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Arrives on Vertex AI Preview

🖼️ Google announced native image generation and editing in Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, now available in preview on Vertex AI. The model delivers state-of-the-art capabilities including multi-image fusion, character and style consistency, and conversational editing to refine visuals via natural-language loops. Built-in SynthID watermarking supports responsible, transparent use. Developers and partners report promising integrations and low-latency performance for real-time editing workflows.

Cloudflare AI Week 2025: Securing AI, Protecting Content

🔒 Cloudflare this week outlines a multi-pronged plan to help organizations build secure, production-grade AI experiences while protecting original content and infrastructure. The company will roll out controls to detect Shadow AI, enforce approved AI toolchains, and harden models against poisoning or misuse. It is expanding Crawl Control for content owners and enhancing the AI Gateway with caching, observability, and framework integrations to reduce risk and operational cost.

Data Integrity Must Be Core for AI Agents in Web 3.0

🔐 In this essay Bruce Schneier (with Davi Ottenheimer) argues that data integrity must be the foundational trust mechanism for autonomous AI agents operating in Web 3.0. He frames integrity as distinct from availability and confidentiality, and breaks it into input, processing, storage, and contextual dimensions. The piece describes decentralized protocols and cryptographic verification as ways to restore stewardship to data creators and offers practical controls such as signatures, DIDs, formal verification, compartmentalization, continuous monitoring, and independent certification to make AI behavior verifiable and accountable.

GenAI-Enabled Phishing: Risks from AI Web Services

🚨 Unit 42 analyzes how rapid adoption of web-based generative AI is creating new phishing attack surfaces. Attackers are leveraging AI-powered website builders, writing assistants and chatbots to generate convincing phishing pages, clone brands and automate large-scale campaigns. Unit 42 observed real-world credential-stealing pages and misuse of trial accounts lacking guardrails. Customers are advised to use Advanced URL Filtering and Advanced DNS Security and report incidents to Unit 42 Incident Response.

The AI Fix Episode 63: Robots, GPT-5 and Ethics Debate

🎧 In episode 63 of The AI Fix, hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley dissect a wide range of AI developments and controversies. Topics include Unitree Robotics referencing Black Mirror to market its A2 robot dog, concerns over shared ChatGPT conversations appearing in Google, and OpenAI releasing gpt-oss, its first open-weight model since GPT-2. The show also examines ethical issues around AI-created avatars of deceased individuals and separates the hype from the reality of GPT-5 claims.

OSS Rebuild: Reproducible Builds to Harden Open Source

🔐 Google’s Open Source Security Team today announced OSS Rebuild, a new project to reproduce upstream artifacts and supply SLSA-grade provenance for popular package ecosystems. The service automates declarative build definitions and reproducible builds for PyPI, npm, and Crates.io, generating attestations that meet SLSA Build Level 3 requirements without requiring publisher changes. Security teams can use the project to verify published artifacts, detect unexpected embedded source or build-time compromises, and integrate the resulting provenance into vulnerability response workflows. The project is available as a hosted data set and as open-source tooling and infrastructure for organizations to run their own rebuild pipelines.