Daily Tech News 30 January 2026

• Trust no-one: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores - never heard of it - that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users' private messages with the app's chatbot exposed. (404 Media) (archive site)

  The exposed chats showed users asked the app "How do I painlessly kill myself," to write suicide notes, "how to make meth," and how to hack various apps.

  How could this happen? Did some brilliant hacker find a devious path through a rat's nest of firewalls and security devices to reach the servers?
  
  Not exactly.

  The issue is a misconfiguration in the app's usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an "authenticated" user who can access the app's backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

  Every message from every user was public. Oops.
  
  And half of all iOS apps have the same problem.
  
  
  
• 404 Media seems to have fallen on stupid times, judging from the sidebar: App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits, well, okay, that's legit tech news with a prurient slant. Two Heads, Three Boobs: The AI Babe Meta Is Getting Surreal is less legit. And I Replaced My Friends With AI Because They Won't Play Tarkov With Me is just pathetic whether it's real or not.

• An AI toy exposed conversations with toddlers to anyone with a GMail account. (Wired) (archive site)

  Bondu confirmed in conversations with the researchers that more than 50,000 chat transcripts were accessible through the exposed web portal, essentially all conversations the toys had engaged in other than those that had been manually deleted by parents or staff.

  Oops again.
  
  
  
• How we created more technical debt in six months than in a ten year old system. (GitHub)
  
  I highlight this one because they weren't using AI. Just one bad decision that snowballed into an avalanche of consequences.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is working to rebuild trust in Windows. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  Far too late for that.
  
  Also, The Verge is working to destroy any tattered shreds of misplaced trust that it still desperately clings to. It's gone full-blown Trotskyite student newspaper.
  
  
  
• Medium has gone to shit as well. (Tech Crunch)
  
  They're giving staff the day off to join in the strike in support of child rapists and murderers.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is in talks with himself to merge some of his companies. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Though exactly which ones and under what terms is unknown.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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