Proof of life

Deepfakes are getting harder to spot. But digital forensics expert Hany Farid says the bigger problem isn’t just that AI can fool us. It’s that even when something is real, people may refuse to believe it. What happens when seeing is no longer believing—and the truth has a hard time catching up?

In 30 years of representing whistleblowers, national security attorney Mark Zaid has never had so many government lawyers come to him for advice. They’ve seen things inside the Trump administration that trouble them. And they want to blow the whistle. But as lawyers, they know the law. Which, as it turns out, may be part of the problem.

Frances Haugen walked out of Facebook with more than 20,000 pages of internal documents. And somehow, nobody caught her. Now her story is getting the Hollywood treatment in Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Social Reckoning. But how did she actually pull it off? Haugen takes us behind the scenes of her surprisingly low-tech operation—and explains why the next Facebook whistleblower might not be so lucky.

There’s a new space race underway. And this time, it’s not just about astronauts and moon landings. Companies are launching satellites by the thousands. Militaries are eyeing space as the next battlefield. And now people want to put AI data centers up there, too. So why is everyone suddenly so interested in space? Former astronaut Ed Lu says it has a lot to do with a 60-year-old prediction about computer chips. And there’s just one problem: the rules haven’t kept up.

Across Russia, the internet keeps going dark. The Kremlin says the blackouts are necessary to stop Ukrainian drones. But critics say it is really helping Vladimir Putin accomplish something he’s been working toward for years: an internet the Kremlin can control — and, when it wants to, cut off from the rest of the world.