Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA

Google is bringing more AI muscle to India’s fight against digital fraud, rolling out on-device scam detection for Pixel 9 devices and new screen-sharing alerts for financial apps. Digital fraud continues to rise in India as more people come online for the first time and increasingly rely on smartphones for payments, shopping, and accessing government services. Fraud involving digital transactions accounted for more than half of all reported bank fraud in 2024 — 13,516 cases resulting in losses of ₹5.2 billion (about $58.61 million), according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Online scams caused an estimated ₹70 billion (roughly…

In 2024, Kara Goodwin started feeling a pain in her arm and shoulder that wouldn’t go away.She was diagnosed with bicep tendinitis and frozen shoulder. Doctors thought the resident of Brooklyn, New York, who has run multiple marathons, had an overuse injury from her active lifestyle.Two months later, when the pain hadn’t gone away, Goodwin got an MRI. “They could visibly see the giant tumor that was shattering my humerus bone from the inside out,” she said.Goodwin, now 39, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer that had spread to her bones. It was “quite shocking as a marathon runner,”…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its webpage on autism and vaccines on Wednesday, stating a link between the two has been ignored despite many studies finding no such link.For years, the federal health agency had worked to combat misinformation and disinformation spread about an alleged association between autism and various vaccines or their ingredients.A previous version of the webpage reads, “Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD). No links have been found between any vaccine ingredients and ASD.”CDC to study vaccines and autism, despite several studies…

Here’s a very 2025 headline, courtesy of Variety: “Paramount Bid for WB Discovery Backed by Saudis, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.”But a few hours after that one was published on Tuesday, it got a rewrite: “Paramount Skydance Denies That Its Warner Bros. Discovery Bid Involves Arab Sovereign Wealth Funds.”Variety’s earlier story, Variety explained, had been swatted down by Paramount PR, which called it “categorically inaccurate.”So there you go. Larry and David Ellison, who own Paramount and now want to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, aren’t going to use Middle Eastern oil money to make that deal happen. Got it?Except: Variety isn’t the…

Google is offering voluntary buyouts for employees in its UK offices, Business Insider has learned.An email went out to UK staff this week offering them a voluntary exit package, according to two people familiar with the matter and confirmed by a Google spokesperson.It’s unclear which UK organizations the offers went to, or how many buyouts were offered. Google did not respond when asked for comment about this.”Earlier this year, some of our US teams introduced a voluntary exit programme with severance for U.S.-based Googlers, and we are now also offering the programme in the UK to support our important work…

I wouldn’t ever actually admit to enjoying the workplace chat app Slack (that would be horrifically uncool). But the data speaks for itself.For 2024, I was Business Insider’s second most prolific Slack poster, which is incredibly embarrassing and not a compliment at all.Look, I love chatting! I love sharing links and musings with my colleagues! Fire me! (To my editor reading this: Please don’t, I promise I’ll get back to work.)But despite this, there’s one thing that stymies me over and over — and I know I’m not the only one out there who is plagued by this problem.Whenever you…

ChatGPT is launching group chats globally to all users on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans, OpenAI announced on Thursday. The move comes a week after the company began piloting the feature in select regions, including Japan and New Zealand. The feature allows users to collaborate with each other and ChatGPT in one shared conversation. OpenAI says the launch turns ChatGPT from a one-on-one assistant into a space where friends, family, or co-workers can work together to plan, create, and make decisions. The company sees group chats in ChatGPT as a way for people to coordinate trips, co-write documents, settle…

The ex-Googler team behind the 3D design app Rooms from Things, Inc. is out with its latest project: a playful AI photo editor called Mixup. The iOS-only app lets anyone create new AI-generated photos using “recipes,” which are like Mad Lib-style, fill-in-the-blank prompts for your photos, texts, or sketches. For instance, you could ask Mixup to turn your scribbled sketch into a beautiful Renaissance painting, or to reimagine your pet in a funny Halloween costume. You could use a selfie to see what you’d look like with a different hairstyle, or create something even sillier — like envisioning a friend…

Tribal leaders and education advocates said the Education Department failed to meet a statutory requirement by not consulting with tribes before announcing the transfer of dozens of Native American education programs to other federal agencies.This week, the Education Department said it would break off several of its main offices and hand over their responsibilities to agencies like the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior. Under the plan, those two agencies will run several programs that fund and oversee the education of Native American children and college students. Tribal leaders and Native education organizations said the move will…

Every time you hear a billionaire (or even a millionaire) CEO describe how LLM-based agents are coming for all the human jobs, remember this funny but telling incident about AI’s limitations: Famed AI researcher Andrej Karpathy got one-day early access to Google’s latest model, Gemini 3 — and it refused to believe him when he said the year was 2025. When it finally saw the year for itself, it was thunderstruck, telling him, “I am suffering from a massive case of temporal shock right now.”  Gemini 3 was released on November 18 with such fanfare that Google called it “a…