Meta can't stop states' $1.4 trillion lawsuit from going to trial

Meta can't stop states' $1.4 trillion lawsuit from going to trial

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Meta and TikTok tried to defeat thousands of social media addiction lawsuits in one fell swoop, but an appeals court rejected the attempt in a ruling issued yesterday.

First up among the lawsuits is a case brought against Meta by the California attorney general and other state AGs. Meta said in a July court filing that the state AGs' demands for damages would amount to more than $1.4 trillion. A trial in district court is scheduled to start on August 19, with jury selection beginning August 12.

In a 3-0 ruling yesterday, a judges' panel from the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the Meta and TikTok claims that they have legal immunity to the lawsuits under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

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Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users

Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Google has been all-in with Gemini for the last several years, and despite some animosity online, the bet is paying off. CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), an important milestone for any Google product. While 13 other Google products have managed that feat, Gemini has done it faster than any other.

Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though.

These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

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Less than 2.5% of Taylor Farms' recalled lettuce went to Taco Bells

Less than 2.5% of Taylor Farms' recalled lettuce went to Taco Bells

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Although shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell restaurants has been a prime suspect in an explosive outbreak of the diarrheal parasite Cyclospora, a new report from the Food and Drug Administration finally reveals where all the contaminated lettuce was sold—and only a sliver of it went to Taco Bell locations.

The feces-tainted lettuce was sourced from Mexico and sold by Taylor Farms, a mammoth produce provider based in California. Taylor Farms has drawn scrutiny for its ties to the Trump administration and reluctance to provide information amid the outbreak, which has now sickened over 23,000 people across 47 states, killing two and sending over 500 others to the hospital. Taylor Farms reportedly attempted to delay issuing a recall amid the illnesses and, since then, has refused to clearly report how much tainted lettuce it recalled and where all of it had been shipped.

The FDA's Enforcement Report finally provides some answers: Taylor Farms recalled 236,192 cases of lettuce due to potential Cyclospora contamination. Of those, only 5,900—just shy of 2.5 percent—were sold to Yum, the parent company of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC. The other 97.5 percent of the lettuce that potentially sickened Americans was distributed elsewhere.

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New Pass-ta-key attack reveals all the things we didn't know about passkeys

New Pass-ta-key attack reveals all the things we didn't know about passkeys

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the research has generated confusion among end users and security professionals as they assess whether this new mechanism is truly safe to use.

The attack is called Pass-ta-key—a blending of the word passkey with the phrase “pass the key” and a nod to a plate of pasta. Arie Olshtein, a researcher at security firm Palo Alto Networks, described in a post last week how Pass-ta-key could obtain all passkeys stored in the Google Password Manager app (GPM) for Windows when it’s running on a machine infected with malware.

This came as a surprise to many people because they believed passkeys are stored exclusively in the trusted platform manager (TPM), the locked-down enclave in a hardened silicon chip that’s reserved for storing cryptographic keys and other highly sensitive information on Windows machines. If passkeys are stored in the TPM, then how was Pass-ta-key able to extract the entire set of passkeys stored by the app, they wanted to know.

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With new open models, Meta pitches another reboot of its struggling AI strategy

With new open models, Meta pitches another reboot of its struggling AI strategy

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks.

Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy about AI systems and governance moving forward. The essay aims to differentiate Meta from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which develop proprietary models and have lobbied the US government for help competing against large-scale distillation—which involves using an existing model to train a new one—or open-weight models by Chinese labs.

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Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist

Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits.

The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings. Rather, they are based on false anti-vaccine fearmongering about harms, including the debunked claim that they cause autism, and misinformation that multiple vaccinations can "overwhelm" children's immune systems. This false claim has also been repeatedly debunked and explained.

During a signing event at the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump falsely claimed that pediatricians "have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda," that is "poured into a little child's body, and bad things happen in too many cases. This is an explosion; this is an epidemic," Trump said.

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Developer Cold Iron Studios shuts down cloud version of $60 game with no refunds

Developer Cold Iron Studios shuts down cloud version of $60 game with no refunds

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content).

Cold Iron Studios hasn't offered customers refunds.

TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which is a 2021 co-op, third-person shooter based on the Alien film franchise. However, that would mean paying money for a game that you have already paid money for once.

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