Thousands of networks—many of them operated by the US government and Fortune 500 companies—face an “imminent threat” of being breached by a nation-state hacking group following the breach of a major maker of software, the federal government warned Wednesday.
F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long-term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.
Unprecedented
During that time, F5 said, the hackers took control of the network segment the company uses to create and distribute updates for BIG IP, a line of server appliances that F5 says is used by 48 of the world’s top 50 corporations. Wednesday’s disclosure went on to say the threat group downloaded proprietary BIG-IP source code information about vulnerabilities that had been privately discovered but not yet patched. The hackers also obtained configuration settings some customers used inside their networks.
Users of the Fastmail email service can now download and an install a desktop app to access their mail. The standalone client is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
On Sept. 29, 2025, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, equity company Silver Lake, and investment firm Affinity Partners, the latter of which is led by Jared Kushner, announced their intention to acquire EA for $55 billion. Once complete, the acquisition would take the company private, add another high-profile video game publisher to the PIF's portfolio, and put one of the biggest video game publishers under owners with close personal ties to the U.S. government.
Today, the same day that Meta announced that it will soon use your AI chats to personalize the ads it shows you, Instagram head Adam Mosseri made a “myth busting” video attempting to set the record straight on a persistent rumor about Meta: “I swear, we do not listen to your microphone,” he says.
Meta’s ad targeting systems can be eerily precise, sometimes showing you things that you feel like you’ve only discussed in a verbal conversation and would only be possible for Meta to know about if it was listening through a device’s microphone. It’s a perception that Meta has been trying to push back on for years:
In 2016, the company, then known as Facebook, said that it “does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed.”
In a 2018 Senate hearing, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to the question on the topic with a direct “no.”
In a support document titled “are Facebook and Instagram listening to your conversations without your knowledge?”, Meta says “No. We do not use your microphone unless you’ve given us permission, and even then, we only use it when you’re actively using a feature that requires the microphone.”
In Wednesday’s video, Mosseri says he’s had “a lot” of passionate conversations about the topic, including “at least a few” with his wife.
“We do not listen to you,” according to Mosseri. “We do not use the phone’s microphone to eavesdrop on you.” Listening to you through your phone’s microphone “would be a gross violation of privacy” and would drain your phone’s battery, he says.
Mosseri also offers a few possible explanations of why you “might see an ad for something that you recently talked to somebody about,” which I’ve block-quoted below:
One, maybe you actually tapped on something that was related or even searched for that product online on a website, maybe before you had that conversation. We actually do work with advertisers who share information with us about who is on their website to try to target those people with ads. So if you were looking at a product on a website, then that advertiser might have paid us to reach you with an ad.
Two, we show people ads that we think that they’re interested in, or products we think they’re interested in, in part based on what their friends are interested in and what similar people with similar interests are interested in. So it could be that you were talking to someone about a product, and they, before, had to actually looked for or searched for that product, or that, in general, people with similar interests were doing the exact same thing.
Three, you might have actually seen that ad before you had a conversation and not realized it. We scroll quickly, we scroll by ads quickly, and sometimes you internalize some of that, and that actually affects what you talk about later.
Four, random chance, coincidence, it happens.
Still, despite his video, Mosseri seemingly expects this rumor to persist. “I know some of you are just not going to believe me, no matter how much I try to explain it,” he says. And many comments on the video are skeptical of the explanation: “That is exactly what I would say if I was listening to people’s conversations,” according to one of the most-liked comments.
Google plans to begin testing its recently announced verification scheme for Android developers in the coming weeks, but there's still precious little information on how the process will work. F-Droid, the free and open source app repository, isn't waiting for the full rollout to take a position. In a blog post, F-Droid staff say that Google's plan to force devs outside Google Play to register with the company threatens to kill alternative app stores like F-Droid.
F-Droid has been around for about 15 years and is the largest source of free and open source software (FOSS) for Android. Because the apps in F-Droid are not installed via the Play Store, you have to sideload each APK manually, and Google is targeting that process in the name of security.
Several weeks ago, Google announced plans to force all Android app developers to register their apps and identity with Google. Apps that have not been validated by the Big G will not be installable on any certified Android devices in the future. Since virtually every Android device outside of China runs Google services, that means Google is in control of the software we get to install on Android.
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Users of the Fastmail email service can now download and an install a desktop app to access their mail. The standalone client is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
