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1 in 3 Americans Has Been Hit by an Online Shopping Scam — Here’s How to Avoid It If you’ve ever clicked “Buy Now” on a deal that looked too good to be true, and later found the item never arrived or was a cheap counterfeit, you’re far from alone. According to a November 2025 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly one in three U.S. adults say they have experienced an online shopping scam. The number is a stark reminder that what used to be an occasional risk has become a routine hazard of buying online. ...

What Instagram’s New Muse AI Means for Your Privacy (and How to Opt Out) Meta has introduced a new AI image generation tool called Muse, and it’s already drawing criticism from Hollywood, cybersecurity companies, and privacy advocates. The tool can generate new images based on photos you’ve posted to Instagram—raising obvious questions about how your pictures are being used, who controls them, and what you can do about it. ...

AI Coding Assistants: Are the Security Risks Worth the Speed? AI-powered coding tools—like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and other large language models trained on code—promise real productivity gains. Developers write boilerplate faster, debug with natural language queries, and generate entire functions in seconds. But as adoption accelerates, a growing body of reporting from outlets like Dark Reading indicates that these same tools can introduce serious security vulnerabilities, open the door to data leakage, and fuel a new wave of “shadow AI” in organizations. ...

1 in 3 Americans Has Been Scammed While Shopping Online – Here’s How to Protect Yourself If you shop online, the odds are not in your favor. According to a November 2025 study by the Pew Research Center, about a third of Americans say they’ve had an online shopping scam happen to them. That’s 32 percent of U.S. adults — a striking number that underscores how common these frauds have become. ...

How to Stop Meta’s New Muse AI From Using Your Instagram Photos Meta’s latest image-generation tool, Muse, launched in early July 2026. It lets users describe a scene and get a synthetic picture in return. But the backlash came fast: the model is trained partly on public Instagram photos, and neither the platform nor Meta asked most users for permission. ...

AI Coding Tools: How to Weigh Security Risks Against Productivity Gains AI-powered coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and various ChatGPT-based plug-ins have moved from novelty to near-standard tooling in many development teams. The promise is straightforward: write less boilerplate, catch bugs faster, and let developers focus on harder problems. But recent reporting has raised a sharper question: Are the security risks introduced by these tools starting to cancel out the productivity gains? ...

1 in 3 Americans Hit by Online Shopping Scams – How to Protect Yourself Intro If you’ve ever clicked “Buy Now” on a deal that seemed too good to be true, only to receive nothing (or a knockoff that looks nothing like the listing), you’re far from alone. According to new data from the Pew Research Center, about a third of U.S. adults say they have experienced an online shopping scam. That’s a startling number—roughly 80 million people—and it means that many of us know someone who’s been burned, or have been burned ourselves. ...

Online Shopping Scams Hit 1 in 3 Americans: How to Protect Yourself If you’ve ever clicked a link for a great deal and ended up with nothing but an empty bank account, you’re far from alone. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, about a third of Americans say they’ve had an online shopping scam happen to them. That’s roughly one in three adults. As holiday shopping season approaches, the risk is especially high. Here’s what the data shows and what you can do to avoid becoming a statistic. ...

Instagram’s new AI can remix your photos without permission: How to opt out now Earlier this week, Meta launched an AI image generator integrated directly into Instagram. The tool can take any photo you’ve posted publicly and use it as the basis for creating new, AI-generated images — without asking you first. Privacy experts immediately flagged the feature as a serious risk for unauthorized use of likenesses, particularly with the potential for deepfakes. ...

AI Coding Tools: Boost Productivity Without Inviting Security Risks If you write code for a living—or even just for fun—you’ve likely tried an AI coding assistant. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Cursor promise to speed up development by generating functions, fixing boilerplate, and even suggesting entire modules. And they do speed things up. But there’s a catch: the same code that saves you time can also introduce security holes. ...