Dick Durbin

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Tuesday objected to a request to pass by unanimous consent a bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee to strip big tech companies of legal immunity for child pornography and other child predatory material posted on their social media platforms. Wyden argued the legislation would weaken the encryption safeguards of popular websites and apps and inadvertently make it easier for predators to gain access the communications and photos of children.…

Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodo’s weekly deep dive on what’s been happening in artificial intelligence.What to Watch For: Taylor Swift's "Midnights" What to Watch For: Taylor Swift's "Midnights" vinyl salesConcerns about AI porn—or, more commonly “deepfake porn”—are not new. For years, countless women and girls have been subjected to a flood of non-consensual pornographic imagery that is easy to distribute online but quite difficult to get taken down. Most notably, celebrity deepfake porn has been an ongoing source of…

Senator Dick Durbin waves his cell phone at a crowd of advocates calling for change.Screenshot: Senate Committee on the Judiciary / Gizmodo“The last search on his phone before Carson ended his life was for hacks to find out the identities of his abusers,” said Kristin Bride, the parent of a child suicide victimand a social media reform advocate. Bride testified before a panel of senators about the cyberbullying that led to her son’s death and the other problems that plague kids online. “These are not coincidences,…

TikTok, owned by China's ByteDance, should be removed from app stores run by Apple Inc and Alphabet's Google because the short video social media app poses a risk to national security, Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat on the intelligence committee, said in a letter dated. The app, which Congress has already banned from federal government devices, has come under increasing criticism because of concern that China's government could use it to harvest data on Americans or advance Chinese interests. "No company subject to…

Whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko will testify before a U.S. Senate committee about the social media company’s alleged security failings, in accordance with a congressional subpoena. Zatko, previously Twitter’s head of security, was also subpoenaed by Musk’s legal team earlier this week, to testify in the ongoing court battle over the billionaire’s attempt to back out of his fraught $44 billion Twitter purchase.The allegations that Zatko made about his former employer, in a 200-page disclosure sent to multiple government…