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But the court, in its emergency docket order, also left in place by a 5-4 order a lower court ruling that threw out NIH memos that enforced the administration's policies.

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AI Mode can now do most of the work to find dinner reservations for you.

• Stolen payment card data is fueling ghost tapping fraud worldwide
• Burner phones are turning identity theft into organized retail scams
• Luxury goods bought with ghost tapping are quickly resold online

Digital payment services have long promised speed and ease, but the same systems are increasingly being manipulated for fraud.

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group researchers are now warning a new wave of fraud known as “ghost-tapping” has been spreading quickly across Southeast Asia and beyond since 2020.

The method allows scammers to load stolen payment details onto burner phones, which are then used for retail fraud.

How ghost-tapping works

Ghost-tapping relies on stolen payment card data, often gathered through phishing, social engineering, or mobile malware.

Once the information is taken, criminals bypass security by intercepting one-time passwords sent to victims, and then upload the stolen data to mobile wallets linked to contactless services such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Syndicates can use burner phones to make purchases in stores or even withdraw money from ATMs.

The process shows parallels with identity theft, where personal and financial data is exploited for profit.

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group says it has observed organized groups distributing not only phones but also software that can relay card details across devices.

This enables a network of mules who present themselves as ordinary shoppers or tourists, purchasing high-value goods such as jewelry or mobile phones, which are later resold through underground Telegram channels.

After a security clampdown on Telegram channels, syndicates shifted operations to alternatives such as Xinbi Guarantee and Tudou Guarantee, which continue to facilitate ghost-tapping deals.

According to the researchers, the high volume of ads and mule recruitment on these platforms suggests that many goods circulating in these markets originate from ghost-tapping.

This campaign is persistent, and even after several arrests of Chinese and Taiwanese nationals in Singapore in 2024, the decentralized nature of Telegram-based trading makes disruption difficult.

Ghost-tapping has wide implications for retail, banks, and payment providers.

Because many stores lack strict Know-Your-Customer checks, fraud is difficult to spot at the point of sale.

Insurance companies are also exposed to the fallout of unauthorized transactions.

In Singapore alone, police recorded hundreds of incidents of phished card data tied to mobile wallets, leading to millions in losses.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has described ghost-tapping as part of a larger professionalization of scamming in the region.

“The convergence between the acceleration and professionalization of these operations on the one hand and their geographical expansion into new parts of the region and beyond on the other translates into a new intensity in the industry - one that governments need to be prepared to respond to,” Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said at the time.

How to stay safe

• Implement multi-factor authentication to strengthen protection against unauthorized use of payment credentials.
• Rely on reputable security suites and properly configured firewalls to mitigate phishing and malware threats before data is stolen.
• Maintain vigilance when entering financial details online to avoid exposing sensitive information to fraudulent sites.

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I’ve been testing the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 for close to a month, and I’m convinced it might just be the best phone on the planet.

Before this, I relied on the Z Fold 7’s older sibling – Samsung’s Z Fold 6 – and I fell in love with that phone almost instantly thanks to its unique design that morphs between a phone and tablet whenever I need.

However even after 12 months of knowing how great the phone is, whenever I talked or wrote about the Z Fold 6, I always explained that I didn’t think it’s the right phone for most people – and if Samsung hadn’t sent us this phone for testing, I’d probably be using something like a Galaxy S25 or Google Pixel 9 because they offer better bang for your buck.

That’s not so much the case with the new Galaxy Z Fold 7.

Yes, it’s still a pricey beast. However, Samsung’s new foldable does a much better job of justifying its high price.

VS. Z Fold 6

The Z Fold 6 was my champion (Image credit: Future)

Samsung took my biggest Z Fold 6 frustrations and eliminated them with the 7.

The outer screen is now a 6.5-inch display instead of 6.3, but more importantly, the squashed aspect ratio of the Z Fold 6 has been changed to a standard 21 by 9. This means you no longer have to deal with compressed or poorly optimized apps that are cut off at the edges, since, when closed, the phone is practically indistinguishable from a standard flagship model.

When opened, you’ll unlock a larger inner screen now, too. I thought the screen on the 6 was great, but that extra space on the 7 is certainly handy for gaming, watching videos, or being productive.

This phone is also impressively slim.

At 8.9mm thick – when folded – the phone is just 0.7mm thicker than a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Despite my fiancée being used to seeing me open up my phone, she audibly gasped when I did it with the Z fold 7 for the first time, as until that moment, she thought I was testing a standard single-screen phone.

It might only be 3.2mm thinner than the Z Fold 6, and 24g lighter too, but these seemingly small savings make a world of difference in how easy the phone is to handle day in and day out.

The Z Fold 7 is bigger, and better (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

The real world of change comes from the cameras.

While on paper its 12MP ultra wide and 10MP 3X optical zoom lenses don’t look to be any better than what the Galaxy Fold 6 gave us, Samsung says some other hardware tweaks have been made to improve their image quality, which does look to be the case.

But where there’s no doubt that the Z Fold 7 is better with its 200MP main sensor, the same megapixel count you’ll get from Samsung’s S25 Ultra.

I’ll get back to this Ultra comparison in a minute, but know that the camera array on the Z Fold 7 is close to perfection for casual photographers like me.

Selecting this 200MP option allows the phone to produce high-resolution photos that you can crop as needed, or by using the 50 or 12MP options, I can snap a photo that uses pixel binning and other software tricks to enhance the clarity, contrast, and colors of my snaps.

The selfie cameras have been improved too, with the biggest change being that the inner selfie cam is now 10MP – replacing a 4MP under-display camera, and I can’t tell you how much of an upgrade this is.

And while it is now a hole punch, it’s never all that distracting.

The Z Fold 7 has better cameras (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)

Not every aspect has received a major update this time around however.

The battery size of the Z Fold 7 is the same as the Z Fold 6, though some efficiency improvements mean that Samsung says the 7 can squeeze out an extra hour in its tests – bringing it up to 24 hours of use.

This is still less than the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s 31-hour battery life under the same Samsung testing conditions, and I’ve found from my real-world testing that the Fold 7 does usually need a top off towards the late afternoon or evening.

It also still only boasts the same IP48 rating as the Z Fold 6.

This isn’t ideal, though I have to admit that for my day-to-day usage, the IP48 rating is plenty.

I’ve visited three sandy beaches and spent a week in the desert this past year with my foldable as my daily driver, and while I was careful not to drop it in the sand, I didn't go overboard with a ziplock bag or anything, and my phone came away completely unscathed.

It's just superb (Image credit: Peter Hoffmann)VS. S25 Ultra

Okay, I said I’d get back to the S25 Ultra, and here we are.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 was billed as an Ultra-level phone, and in many ways, that’s true.

If you get into the nitty gritty, the Ultra does still have some advantages – chiefly its battery, camera array, and display resolution (and that it supports the S Pen, though I’ve never used a stylus with the Z Fold 6 and frankly couldn’t care less if the Z Fold 7 supported one or not) – but the gap between the Fold 7 and the S25 Ultra in these areas has shrunk from where it was with the Galaxy Z Fold 6.

(Image credit: Future)

And with its massive tablet-like display, the foldable finally has enough of an edge on Samsung’s other phones for me.

I know cost will play the biggest part in deciding your next phone, but I would wholeheartedly recommend giving the Z Fold 7 some attention if your budget can comfortably stretch that far through deals or an affordable monthly contract.

Unlike the Z Fold 6, this feels like a phone you won’t regret buying. I know I’d go out and buy a Z Fold 7 – something I wasn’t able to say about the foldables that came before.

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The vice president spoke about the administration's domestic agenda enacted in a sweeping bill last month that will shift resources from social safety programs to immigration enforcement and tax cuts.

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Both hands-on and hands-off systems required human intervention to avoid accidents in this study.

• Nearly 700 counterfeit Seagate hard drives were seized in a major Malaysian raid
• Counterfeiters converted desktop HDDs into fake surveillance drives for profit
• Thousands of dollars were generated monthly through counterfeit hard drive sales

A large-scale raid in Malaysia has revealed the extent of manipulation in the hard drive market.

Seagate, working alongside the Ministry of Domestic Trade, traced suspicious online offers to a warehouse near Kuala Lumpur.

The raid uncovered a counterfeiting workshop that not only handled its own hard drives but also those from Western Digital and Toshiba.

Discovery of altered storage devices

This is not the first time old Seagate HDDs have been modified and sold as new. The Chia cryptocurrency case and other reports show Seagate drives are susceptible to counterfeiting.

In this latest case, nearly 700 Seagate units, some with capacities reaching 18TB, were seized.

Evidence suggests that devices were taken from the secondary market, scrubbed clean, fitted with new labels, and then sold as though they were fresh from the factory.

A striking case involved a desktop HDD being converted into a so-called "new" surveillance HDD, highlighting the deceptive practices being used.

The operation came to light when a sales manager noticed unusually low prices on e-commerce sites such as Lazada and Shopee.

Further investigation showed that the fraudsters reset SMART values to mask the age and use of the drives.

Reports indicate that the sales volume was large, with thousands of US dollars being generated each month.

Many of these products were listed as high-capacity options, making them attractive to customers seeking affordable storage, whether in desktop systems, portable HDD setups, or NAS HDD configurations.

Seagate believes the used equipment may have originated in China, although tracing the precise supply chain remains difficult.

The challenge now lies in finding out how large the network is and who is ultimately responsible for channeling used parts into counterfeit goods.

The raid demonstrates that organized groups are capable of reshaping the appearance of drives so effectively that unsuspecting buyers may only realize the problem once failures occur.

In response, Seagate has strengthened its partner program, demanding that distributors commit to sourcing exclusively from authorized suppliers.

Global Trade Screening is being emphasized as a mechanism to block purchases from companies that appear on sanctions lists.

These steps are designed to reduce the chances of counterfeit drives entering legitimate markets, although it remains to be seen whether this will make a lasting difference.

The discovery is not isolated. Other brands have been affected, as shown by counterfeit UnionSine external devices circulating on Amazon’s marketplace without effective intervention.

Despite alerts, sales continued, and this shows how porous the global distribution chain has become.

For buyers, the risks associated with unusually cheap listings remain, and unless enforcement intensifies, counterfeit devices may continue to slip through unchecked channels.

Via computerbase (originally in German)

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Hamas has endorsed a new proposal for a ceasefire deal with Israel in Gaza, as it faces pressure from Arab countries and seeks to ensure its own survival.

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Large language models have an awkward history with telling the truth, especially if they can't provide a real answer. Hallucinations have been a hazard for AI chatbots since the technology debuted a few years ago. But ChatGPT 5 seems to be going for a new, more humble approach to not knowing answers; admitting it.

Though most AI chatbot responses are accurate, it's impossible to interact with an AI chatbot for long before it provides a partial or complete fabrication as an answer. The AI displays just as much confidence in its answers regardless of their accuracy. AI hallucinations have plagued users and even led to embarrassing moments for the developers during demonstrations.

OpenAI had hinted that the new version of ChatGPT would be willing to plead ignorance over making up an answer, and a viral X post by Kol Tregaskes has drawn attention to the groundbreaking concept of ChatGPT saying, “I don’t know – and I can’t reliably find out.”

GPT-5 says 'I don't know'.Love this, thank you. pic.twitter.com/k6SNFKqZbgAugust 18, 2025

Technically, hallucinations are baked into how these models work. They’re not retrieving facts from a database, even if it looks that way; they're predicting the next most likely word based on patterns in language. When you ask about something obscure or complicated, the AI is guessing the right words to answer it, not doing a classic search engine hunt. Hence, the appearance of entirely made-up sources, statistics, or quotes.

But GPT-5’s ability to stop and say, “I don’t know,” reflects an evolution in how AI models deal with their limitations in terms of their responses, at least. A candid admission of ignorance replaces fictional filler. It may seem anticlimactic, but it's more significant for making the AI seem more trustworthy.

Clarity over hallucinations

Trust is crucial for AI chatbots. Why would you use them if you don't trust the answers? ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have warnings built into them about not relying too much on their answers because of hallucinations, but there are always stories of people ignoring that warning and getting into hot water. If the AI just says it can't answer a question, people might be more inclined to trust the answers it does provide.

Of course, there's still a risk that users will interpret the model's self-doubt as failure. The phrase “I don’t know” might come off as a bug, not a feature, if you don't realize the alternative is a hallucination, not the correct answer. Admitting uncertainty isn't how the all-knowing AI some imagine ChatGPT would behave.

But it's arguably the most human thing ChatGPT could do in this instance. OpenAI's proclaimed goal is artificial general intelligence, AI that can perform any intellectual task a human can. But one of the ironies of AGI is that mimicking human thinking includes uncertainties as well as capabilities.

Sometimes, the smartest thing you can do is to say you don't know something. You can't learn if you refuse to admit there are things you don't know. And, at least it avoids the spectacle of an AI telling you to eat rocks for your health.

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California and Texas, the country's two most populous states, are getting closer to redrawing their congressional districts in a political fight sparked by President Trump.

(Image credit: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images; Brandon Bell)

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• Apple started with almost no Swift examples and achieved surprising results
• StarChat-Beta was pushed into uncharted territory without clear guidance
• Nearly one million working SwiftUI programs emerged after repeated iterations

Apple researchers recently revealed an experiment in which an AI model was trained to generate user interface code in SwiftUI, even though almost no SwiftUI examples were present in the original data.

The study began with StarChat-Beta, an open source model designed for coding. Its training sources, including TheStack and other collections, contained almost no Swift code.

This absence meant the model did not have the advantage of existing examples to guide its responses, which made the results surprising when a stronger system eventually emerged.

Creating a loop of self-improvement

The team’s solution was to create a feedback cycle. They gave StarChat-Beta a set of interface descriptions and asked it to generate SwiftUI programs from those prompts.

Each generated program was compiled to ensure it actually ran. Interfaces that worked were then compared with the original descriptions using another model, GPT-4V, which judged whether the output matched the request.

Only those that passed both stages remained in the dataset. This cycle was repeated five times, and with every round, the cleaner dataset was fed back into the next model.

By the end of the process, the researchers had nearly one million working SwiftUI samples and a model they called UICoder.

The model was then measured against both automated tests and human evaluation, where results showed it not only performed better than its base model, but also achieved a compilation success rate higher than GPT-4.

One of the striking aspects of the study is that Swift code had been almost entirely excluded from the initial training data.

According to the team, this happened by accident when TheStack dataset was created, leaving only scattered examples found on web pages.

This oversight rules out the idea that UICoder merely recycled code it had already seen - instead, its improvement came from the iterative cycle of generating, filtering, and retraining on its own outputs.

While the results centered on SwiftUI, the researchers suggested the approach “would likely generalize to other languages and UI toolkits.”

If so, this could open paths for more models to be trained in specialized domains where training data is limited.

The prospect raises questions about reliability, sustainability, and whether synthetic datasets can continue to scale without introducing hidden flaws.

UICoder was also trained under carefully controlled conditions, and its success in wider settings is not guaranteed.

Via 9to5mac

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• AWS CEO Matt Garman says younger workers are the most engaged with AI
• They’re also cheap to train up with skills for the future
• Workers need to be prepared to learn, and for change

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman has called the idea of firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”.

Speaking in a YouTube interview with Matthew Berman, Garman backed up his position by arguing junior staff are usually the least expensive, but also the most engaged with AI tools, therefore they’re best set up to feel the boost of AI in their workflows - rather than be replaced by it.

Taking a longer-term look at the scenario, Garman added without junior employees gaining experience, companies will have no skilled workforce in the future.

AWS CEO doesn’t see AI replacing human roles

Consequentially, Garman advocated for the continued hiring of graduates to teach them core software and problem-solving skills to futureproof against future workplace challenges, like today’s skills shortages.

He still encourages the use of AI tools, but to assist rather than replace junior talent.

When asked about how much of AWS’s code is now AI-written (we know that at least a third of Google, Meta and Microsoft’s code is now AI-generated), Garman described the notion as a “silly metric,” but acknowledged over 80% of the company’s developers now use AI in their workflows across code generation and more.

Garman indicated “curious” workers will get the most out of AI – combining their own desire to learn more with Amazon training initiatives.

He added workers should “be flexible, be willing to learn, and be willing to accept that their job may be a little bit different,” noting that this is a time of transition.

Broadly positive for the future of jobs, Garman’s thoughts align with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s thoughts on AI’s impact on the workforce.

In June 2025, ex-AWS CEO Jassy acknowledged that AI will ultimately end up replacing some human workers, but it would free up other jobs to avoid a net loss of roles.

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