Russian drones found near vital European offshore gas site, get blown up

Russian drones found near vital European offshore gas site, get blown up

fivenewscrypto    août 13, 2026   

Romanian army divers used explosives to destroy two Russian-made drones found floating in the Black Sea near Romania’s largest natural gas project, according to the NATO member country’s defense minister.

Defense Minister Radu Miruță posted a Facebook video supposedly showing one of the drones being blown up in the water by explosive ordnance disposal divers of the Romanian army on August 11, as reported by Reuters and other news outlets. The drones were first spotted in the water by a ship working in the vicinity of the Neptun Deep—an offshore gas project under development in the Black Sea that will make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union.

A Romanian Coast Guard ship that responded with army soldiers aboard found two drifting Gerbera-type drones of Russian design along with other debris. Miruță also disclosed that Romania had reached out to “Ukrainian partners who confirmed that the systems do not belong to them.”

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Chrome adopts what may be the best protection yet against account takeovers

Chrome adopts what may be the best protection yet against account takeovers

fivenewscrypto    août 12, 2026   

Google’s Chrome browser has added a new feature that could go a long way in preventing a form of account takeover that’s grown increasingly common as users adopt two-factor authentication, passkeys, and similar protections.

The new Chrome protection is known as device-bound session credentials (DBSCs). The measure stores a unique encryption key in a silicon-resident fortress that’s built into the device running the browser. On Windows machines, this fortress is called a TPM, short for Trusted Platform Module. On macOS and iOS, it’s known as a secure enclave. Other platforms have differing names. Recently released versions of Chrome for Windows and macOS generate a key that’s stored in this fortress.

An antidote to session cookie theft

DBSCs protect against the theft of session cookies, the unique strings of characters that websites store on browsers. Session cookies greatly speed up browsing on sensitive sites that require user authentication. Instead of requiring the exchange of credentials each time a user opens a new site page, the server sets a session cookie that effectively proves the user has already successfully logged in.

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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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