People can block the xAI’s Grok chatbot from creating modifications of their uploaded images on social network X. Neither X or xAI, both Elon Musk-owned businesses, have made a public announcement about this feature, which users began noticing on the iOS app within the image/video upload menu over the past few days. 

This option is likely a response to Grok’s latest scandal, which began at the start of 2026 when the addition of image generation tools to the chatbot saw about 3 million sexualized or nudified images created. An estimated 23,000 of the images made in that 11-day period contained sexualized images of children, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Grok is now facing two separate investigations by regulators in the EU over the issue.

The positive side of the recent feature addition is that X and xAI have taken a step toward limiting inappropriate uses of Grok. This block is a simple toggle and it hasn’t been buried in the UI. So that’s nice.

The negative side, however, is that this token gesture that doesn’t amount to any serious improvement to how Grok works or can be used. It’s great that the chatbot won’t alter the file uploaded by one person, but as reported by The Verge, the block only limits tagging Grok in a reply to create an image edit. There are plenty of workarounds for those dedicated individuals who insist on being able to use generative AI to undress people without their consent or knowledge. 

Hopefully xAI has more powerful protective tools in the works. The limitations Grok on putting real people in scanty clothing that X announced in January seem to have had only partial success at best. If this additional and narrow use case is all the company offers, then the claims of being a zero-tolerance space for nonconsensual nudity are going to ring hollow. Especially since, as we noted at the time, xAI could stop allowing image generation at all until the issue is properly and thoroughly fixed.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/you-can-sort-of-block-grok-from-editing-your-uploaded-photos-215356117.html?src=rss

This week, we’re taking a look at goonbait and RegencyCore If you don’t know what any of that even is, you’re definitely in the right place, so let me break down for ya.

Alysa Liu and goonbait

In Gen Z and Gen A slang, “gooning” refers to extended masturbation without orgasm, sometimes done for the purpose of entering an altered state of consciousness. “Goonbait” is, essentially, media that exists to inspiring gooning.

Speaking of goonbait, a couple weeks ago, I talked about Olympic gold medal figure skater Alysa Liu as the hero athlete of Generations Z and A. It didn’t take much time for some of the weirder members of the younger generations to make it creepy. This is a familiar reaction that too many younger people have to women doing anything in public.

At issue is a widely shared photo of Liu looking hungrily at her gold medal, that some are called goonbait. Here’s an X post that sums it up:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

This inspired many to point out how creepy it is and to make memes of things that are also “goonbait,” like the following:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

The truth is, people used to check whether a coin was gold by marking it with their teeth—gold is a soft metal—and photos of athletes biting their gold medals is an Olympics tradition that’s been around since at least 1992, when Greco-Roman wrestling champ Péter Farkas chomped on his for a photo. I’m pretty sure no one called this picture goonbait. Since then, it’s expected for all medal winners to do that pose for the funny photographs. Liu seems to be making a joke about that tradition in her photo, not creating “goonbait.”

It’s not just people online who are all weird about Alysa Liu; real world people are getting into it too. On March 4, the 20-year-old skater posted a story on her Instagram with the text, “So I land at the airport, & there’s a crowd waiting at the exit with cameras & things for me to sign. All up in my personal space. Someone chased me to my car bruh. Please do not do that to me.”

What is “RegencyCore?”

A fashion and design aesthetic popular among some members of Gens Z and A, RegencyCore springs from the popularity of the fantasy-regency era look of the Netflix show Bridgerton. It draws inspiration from the opulent style of the British Regency era of the early 1800s, but adds a fantasy element of pastel colors and gold accents.

RegencyCore is becoming a whole lifestyle. There are how-to RegencyCore decorating videos on TikTok, tea parties are becoming popular, people are rocking corsets and opera gloves, and some have even taken up archaic hobbies like tablescaping and writing letters, complete with quill pens and sealing wax.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.

The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted. If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your entire digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.

Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done. “The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.” You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. […] Last month, Meta AI safety director Summer Yue said OpenClaw unexpectedly started mass-deleting messages in her email inbox, despite instructions to confirm those actions first. She wrote: “Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”

Krebs also noted the many misconfigured OpenClaw installations users had set up, leaving their administrative dashboards publicly accessible online. According to pentester Jamieson O’Reilly, “a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online.” When those exposed interfaces are accessed, attackers can retrieve the agent’s configuration and sensitive credentials. O’Reilly warned attackers could access “every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.”

“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly added. And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While many of us iPhone owners just installed the recent iOS 26.3.1 bug patch, Apple is currently at work on another update altogether: iOS 26.4. This update is in beta testing, and brings new features and changes, like AI playlists for Apple Music and support for end-to-end encryption for RCS. But Apple’s most recent beta for 26.4 includes something new that most iPhone users will likely enjoy: eight new emojis.

These new emojis aren’t necessarily Apple’s creations. Instead, they’re based on the Unicode Version 17.0, an emoji standard released on Sept. 9, 2025. When the Unicode Standard releases new emoji standards, it’s up to developers to create their own art for their users. In this case, we’re seeing Apple’s interpretations of these new emoji standards. For their part, Google released its Unicode 17 emojis the same day the standard was announced.

Here are Apple’s new emojis for iOS 26.4

The new emojis in this standard are:

• Distorted Face: A fish-eye effect that shows a face with large eyes to the sides of its head, with an overall surprised expression. (I expect to see a lot of these in message threads and social media posts.)

• Fight Cloud: Something you might expect to see above a cartoon brawl.

• Ballet Dancer: A dancer balancing on one foot.

• Orca: What you’d expect from a killer whale emoji. (I’m honestly surprised this wasn’t an option already.)

• Hairy Creature: Bigfoot, now an emoji.

• Trombone: A trombone.

• Landslide: A large rock with falling rocks on its side. (I feel we could have put more effort into this one.)

• Treasure Chest: A reasonably detailed emoji showing a treasure chest bursting open to reveal a crown, gold coins, rubies, and a pearl necklace.

You can see all eight of Apple’s in the image embedded in the following post from Emojipedia on X:

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Unless Apple decides to push them off to iOS 26.5, these emojis will come out with iOS 26.4. There’s no set release date here, but seeing as iOS 18.4 dropped on March 31 last year, there’s a good shot that we’ll see the new emojis on our iPhones before April.

The Netherlands’ military intelligence service and domestic intelligence agency have issued a join warning claiming that Russian hackers have launched “a large-scale global cyber campaign to gain access to Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to dignitaries, military personnel and civil servants.” According to the Dutch alert, hackers are imitating support chatbots to trick key targets into revealing their PINs for those communication platforms, which allows the bad actors to access incoming messages.

Last year in the US, the Pentagon advised members not to use Signal after the platform was subjected to similar phishing scams by Russian hackers. (Although the same US military leaders proved capable of creating their own security breaches without foreign interference just days prior.) 

Having another national government raise concerns about Signal and WhatsApp phishing scams offers yet another reminder to never provide security details or click links without a check on who is really asking for your info.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/dutch-intelligence-services-warn-of-russian-hackers-targeting-signal-and-whatsapp-203707202.html?src=rss

At this January’s massive NAMM music tech show in Los Angeles, six products won “best of show” awards. Several of them went to major music and electronic brands like Yamaha and Boss, but one of the six went to Neural DSP, a much smaller company started in 2017 by Chilean immigrants to Finland.

From its base in the Helsinki area, Neural has made itself an expert in the use of machine learning, robots, and impulse response technology to automate the construction of incredibly lifelike guitar amp modeling software. It quickly jumped into the top ranks of an industry dominated by brands like Universal Audio, Kemper, Line 6, and Fractal. For a hundred bucks, you could buy one of the company’s plugins and sound like a guitar god with a $10,000 recording chain of amps, cabinets, effects pedals, and microphones.

In 2020, Neural branched out into hardware, putting its tech not in your computer but in a floor-based box covered with footswitches and called the Quad Cortex. While the company’s plugins could each replace one entire pedalboard of gear—plus a few amps and cabs—the Quad Cortex could replace a Guitar Center-sized warehouse of devices, offering hundreds of amps, cabs, and effects.

Read full article

Comments

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, who has led the upstart social platform since 2021, is stepping down from her role as its top executive. Toni Schneider, who has been an advisor and investor in Bluesky, will take over the job temporarily while Graber stays on as Chief Innovation Officer. 

“As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a blog post. Schneider, who was previously CEO at WordPress parent Automattic, will be that “experienced operator and leader” while Blueksy’s board searches for a permanent CEO, she said.

Graber’s history with Bluesky dates back to its early days as a side project at Jack Dorsey’s Twitter. She was officially brought on as CEO in 2021 as Bluesky spun off into an independent company (it officially ended its association with Twitter in 2022 and Dorsey cut ties with Bluesky in 2024). She led the company through its launch and early viral success as it grew from an invitation-only platform to the 43 million-user service it is today. During that time, she’s become known as an advocate for decentralized social media and for trolling Mark Zuckerberg’s t-shirt choices. 

Nearly three years since it launched publicly, Bluesky has carved out a small but influential niche in the post-Twitter social landscape. The platform is less than a third of the size of Meta’s competitor, Threads, which has also copied some of Bluesky’s signature features. Bluesky also has yet to roll out any meaningful monetization features, though it has teased a premium subscription service in the past.

As Chief Innovation Officer, Graber will presumably still be an influential voice at the company going forward. And, as Wired points out, she still has a seat on Bluesky’s board so she will get some say in who steps into the role permanently. Until then, Schneider, who is also a partner at VC firm Tre Ventures, will lead the company. “I deeply believe in what this team has built and the open social web they’re fighting for,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/blueskys-ceo-is-stepping-down-after-nearly-5-years-201900960.html?src=rss

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Rejoice, Peloton/Garmin users—you no longer need to double log your Bike workouts, nor use third-party apps to bridge the gap between the two devices. The latest Peloton app update now lets you sync Peloton workouts to your Garmin. A previous update enabled syncing the opposite way, but now we have both.

Garmin Forerunner 165 Music Running Smartwatch

$249.99
at Amazon

$299.99
Save $50.00

$249.99
at Amazon

$299.99
Save $50.00

How to enable syncing between Peloton and Garmin

To enable syncing, open up the Peloton app on your phone. Tap the person-looking icon in the bottom right (not your profile pic in the top left, which is different) and then tap the hamburger menu in the top right corner, and then Connected apps & devices. 

I did the workout in the right-hand screenshot on a Peloton Bike, with no Garmin watch present at all.
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

You’ll see Garmin Connect as an option under the list of apps. Tap this, and then you can set up your Garmin/Peloton connection. You’ll need to log in to your Garmin account, and then you have two options: 

• Turn on Auto-import activities if you want your Garmin activities to show up in your Peloton history. You can choose to only import some activity types if you don’t want them all.

• Turn on Send to Garmin Connect if you want your Peloton activities to show up in your Garmin history. Again, you can select activity types if you don’t want everything syncing. 

These are two separate toggles because you may not want everything synced both ways. For example, if I have Peloton sharing my rides to Strava, I don’t necessarily want to sync Peloton rides to Garmin to also be shared to Strava from there. 

Why the new syncing between Peloton and Garmin is an improvement

Previously, if you wanted Peloton rides logged on your Garmin, you probably did this one of two ways. The most straightforward way was to just wear your Garmin watch and also log a workout on the watch. This way you had two entries (one in each app). The main drawback of this is that you don’t have all of Peloton’s data: no power, cadence, output, and so on. Syncing the ride from Peloton to Garmin now means you get all that data and the name of the ride (“5 min Warm Up 60s” in my example here).

If you’ve been double logging, there’s one thing you should know about switching over: The workout logged by the Peloton won’t include heart rate data unless you have some kind of heart rate monitor paired to the Peloton device. Fortunately, you can probably use your Garmin for this, without starting a Garmin workout. Just tap the Broadcast heart rate item in your watch’s control panel in your Forerunner or other compatible watches. Here’s the instructions for setting this up on the Forerunner 570; for other models of Garmin watch, check your device manual to see whether you have this feature and where to access it.

The other common way was by using SyncMyWorkout, a paid service that syncs data between your Garmin and Peloton accounts. This service may have just become obsolete for many users, although it does seem to have a historical data import feature that the Peloton/Garmin integration does not. 

Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max make deceptively large changes to how Apple’s high-end laptop and desktop chips are built.

We’ve already covered those changes in some depth, but in essence: The M5 Pro and M5 Max are no longer monolithic chips with all the CPU and GPU cores and everything else packed into a single silicon die. Using an “all-new Fusion Architecture” like the one used to combine two Max chips into a single Ultra chip, Apple now splits the CPU cores (and other things) into one piece of silicon, and the GPU cores (and other things) into another piece of silicon. These two dies are then packaged together into one chip.

M5 Pro and M5 Max both use the same 18-core CPU die, but Pro uses a 20-core GPU die, and Max gets a 40-core GPU die. (Because the memory controller is also part of the GPU die, the Max chip still offers more memory bandwidth and supports higher memory configurations than the Pro one does.)

Read full article

Comments

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down after overseeing the platform’s growth from a Twitter research project into a 40-million-user alternative to X. “As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a statement.

She will be transitioning to a new Chief Innovation Officer role while Venture capitalist Toni Schneider will serve as interim CEO until the board searches for a permanent replacement. Wired reports: Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, when it was a research project within Twitter focused on developing a decentralized framework for the social web. She became the company’s first chief executive officer in 2021, when it spun out into an independent entity. She oversaw the platform’s remarkable rise and the growing pains it experienced as it transformed from a quirky Twitter offshoot to a full-fledged alternative to X. Schneider tells WIRED that he intends to help Bluesky “become not just the best open social app, but the foundation for a whole new generation of user-owned networks.”

Schneider, who will continue working as a partner at the venture capital firm True Ventures while at Bluesky, was previously CEO of the WordPress parent company, Automattic, from 2006 to 2014. He also served as its CEO again in 2024 while top executive Matt Mullenweg went on a sabbatical. During that time, Schneider met Graber and became an adviser to Bluesky’s leadership. In a blog post announcing his new role, Schneider said he plans to emphasize scaling, describing his job as “to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.”

This isn’t the end for Graber and Bluesky. She will transition to become the company’s chief innovation officer, a role focused on Bluesky’s technology stack rather than its business operations. The position was created for her. Graber, who began her career as a software engineer, has always sounded the most enthusiastic when discussing Bluesky’s technology rather than its revenue streams. Bluesky’s board of directors will appoint the next permanent CEO. The members include Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, crypto-focused VC Kinjal Shah, TechDirt founder Mike Masnick, and Graber. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was originally part of the board but quit in 2024.) This means Graber will have input on her successor. The talent search is still in early stages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration agreed to stop pursuing a breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster as part of a settlement that blindsided state attorneys general in the middle of a trial. Attorneys general from 27 states and the District of Columbia are continuing to pursue the case without the US government, at least for now.

The US Department of Justice and most US states sued Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary in 2024, during the Biden administration. The lawsuit alleged that Live Nation has a monopoly on “the delivery of nearly all live music in America today,” and asked a federal court to order the divestiture of Ticketmaster.

The case went to trial, and testimony began last week in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. But the US and Live Nation informed the court of a proposed settlement on March 8, taking state attorneys general by surprise. The judge presiding over the case reportedly said in court today that the way the settlement was announced “is absolutely unacceptable.”

Read full article

Comments