THE BIG STORY

Global Hacker Marketplace Seized

U.S. and international law enforcement agencies have seized Genesis Market, which for the last five years operated as an invitation-only online marketplace selling stolen credentials, cookies and digital browser fingerprints gathered from compromised systems, TechCrunch reports.

The FBI announced the takedown, dubbed “Operation Cookie Monster,” on Wednesday. During the operation, about 120 people were arrested and 200 searches were carried out worldwide.

Since its launch in March 2018, Genesis Market has offered access to data stolen from over 1.5 million compromised computers around the world containing more than 80 million account access credentials.

Internet users can see if their access credentials have been compromised by checking at Have I Been Pwned, a free service that aggregates data breaches and helps people establish if they've been impacted by malicious activity on the web.

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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Coming Next in AI: Instant Videos?

New York startup Runway AI and several other companies are working on artificial intelligence systems that can produce short videos based on a few words typed into a computer, the New York Times reports. They represent the next stage in an industry race—one that includes tech titans like Microsoft and Google as well as much smaller firms—to create AI systems that some believe could be the next big thing in technology, as important as web browsers or the iPhone.

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APPS

The Rise of ByteDance's Instagram Rival

As U.S. lawmakers work on plans for a TikTok ban or forced sale, the app’s Chinese parent company is driving another of its social platforms into the top charts of app downloads, TechCrunch reports. ByteDance-owned app Lemon8, an Instagram rival, last week jumped into the U.S. App Store’s top charts on Monday, becoming one of the most downloaded free apps in the U.S.—ahead of YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook.

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COMPUTING

How Rust Became the Hot Language

An out-of-order elevator in 2006 prompted Graydon Hoare, a 29-year-old computer programmer working for Mozilla, to start work on a new computer language, one that he hoped would make it possible to write small, fast code without memory bugs. Today, the MIT Technology Review reports, 2.8 million coders are writing in Rust, making his creation one of the hottest programming languages on the planet.

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SPONSORED

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QUICK HITS

• Tech executive Bob Lee, who founded the mobile payment service Cash App and became chief product officer at the cryptocurrency startup MobileCoin, was killed in a stabbing in San Francisco on a block near the Salesforce Tower and Google’s San Francisco offices.
• Tech layoffs are way up—and so are tech stocks. Shares of Facebook-owner Meta, which has announced 21,000 layoffs since last July, have gained more than 70 percent year to date, compared with 5 percent for the S&P 500.
• Twitter exiles could have a new home: Email subscription platform Substack on Wednesday announced—on Twitter—a new Notes feature that closely resembles Twitter in its design allows users to share posts, images, and ideas.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“At this point, if I see a high-resolution video, I am probably going to trust it. But that will change pretty quickly.”

—Phillip Isola, an MIT professor who specializes in AI
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