Chegg says it will lay off about 45% of its workforce, or 388 employees, as the "new realities" of artificial intelligence and diminished traffic from internet search have led to plummeting revenue. From a report: The online education company, founded 20 years ago, has been hit by the rise of generative AI software tools, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which have become increasingly popular among students.

Chegg also sued Google in February, arguing that AI summaries of search results have hurt its traffic and sales. The company reiterated that claim on Monday, saying AI and "reduced traffic from Google to content publishers" have damaged its business. "As a result, and reflecting the company's continued investment in AI, Chegg is restructuring the way it operates its academic learning products," the company said. The cuts come after Chegg in May laid off 22% of its workforce, citing increasing adoption of AI. Chegg's market cap has fallen 98.8% in recent years to about $135 million.

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Microsoft says that the File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) now automatically blocks previews for files downloaded from the Internet to block credential theft attacks via malicious documents, according to a report from BleepingComputer. This attack vector is particularly concerning because it requires no user interaction beyond selecting a file to preview and removes the need to trick a target into actually opening or executing it on their system.

For most users, no action is required since the protection is enabled automatically with the October 2025 security update, and existing workflows remain unaffected unless you regularly preview downloaded files.

"This change is designed to enhance security by preventing a vulnerability that could leak NTLM hashes when users preview potentially unsafe files," Microsoft says in a support document published Wednesday.

It is important to note that this may not take effect immediately and could require signing out and signing back in.

"Snippets of proprietary or copyleft reciprocal code can enter AI-generated outputs, contaminating codebases with material that developers can't realistically audit or license properly."

That's the warning from Sean O'Brien, who founded the Yale Privacy Lab at Yale Law School. ZDNet reports: Open software has always counted on its code being regularly replenished. As part of the process of using it, users modify it to improve it. They add features and help to guarantee usability across generations of technology. At the same time, users improve security and patch holes that might put everyone at risk. But O'Brien says, "When generative AI systems ingest thousands of FOSS projects and regurgitate fragments without any provenance, the cycle of reciprocity collapses. The generated snippet appears originless, stripped of its license, author, and context." This means the developer downstream can't meaningfully comply with reciprocal licensing terms because the output cuts the human link between coder and code. Even if an engineer suspects that a block of AI-generated code originated under an open source license, there's no feasible way to identify the source project. The training data has been abstracted into billions of statistical weights, the legal equivalent of a black hole.

The result is what O'Brien calls "license amnesia." He says, "Code floats free of its social contract and developers can't give back because they don't know where to send their contributions...."

"Once AI training sets subsume the collective work of decades of open collaboration, the global commons idea, substantiated into repos and code all over the world, risks becoming a nonrenewable resource, mined and never replenished," says O'Brien. "The damage isn't limited to legal uncertainty. If FOSS projects can't rely upon the energy and labor of contributors to help them fix and improve their code, let alone patch security issues, fundamentally important components of the software the world relies upon are at risk."

O'Brien says, "The commons was never just about free code. It was about freedom to build together." That freedom, and the critical infrastructure that underlies almost all of modern society, is at risk because attribution, ownership, and reciprocity are blurred when AIs siphon up everything on the Internet and launder it (the analogy of money laundering is apt), so that all that code's provenance is obscured.

Has AI just become an easy excuse for firms looking to downsize, asks CNBC: Fabian Stephany, assistant professor of AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, said there might be more to job cuts than meets the eye. Previously there may have been some stigma attached to using AI, but now companies are "scapegoating" the technology to take the fall for challenging business moves such as layoffs. "I'm really skeptical whether the layoffs that we see currently are really due to true efficiency gains. It's rather really a projection into AI in the sense of 'We can use AI to make good excuses,'" Stephany said in an interview with CNBC. Companies can essentially position themselves at the frontier of AI technology to appear innovative and competitive, and simultaneously conceal the real reasons for layoffs, according to Stephany... Some companies that flourished during the pandemic "significantly overhired" and the recent layoffs might just be a "market clearance...."

One founder, Jean-Christophe Bouglé even said in a popular LinkedIn post that AI adoption is at a "much slower pace" than is being claimed and in large corporations "there's not much happening" with AI projects even being rolled back due to cost or security concerns. "At the same time there are announcements of big layoff plans 'because of AI.' It looks like a big excuse, in a context where the economy in many countries is slowing down..."

The Budget Lab, a non-partisan policy research center at Yale University, released a report on Wednesday which showed that U.S. labor has actually been little disrupted by AI automation since the release of ChatGPT in 2022... Additionally, New York Fed economists released research in early September which showed that AI use amongst firms "do not point to significant reductions in employment" across the services and manufacturing industry in the New York-Northern New Jersey region.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Associated Press: Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite internet terminals, state media reported Monday... The centers are infamous for recruiting workers from other countries under false pretenses, promising them legitimate jobs and then holding them captive and forcing them to carry out criminal activities.

Scam operations were in the international spotlight last week when the United States and Britain enacted sanctions against organizers of a major Cambodian cyberscam gang, and its alleged ringleader was indicted by a federal court in New York. According to a report in Monday's Myanma Alinn newspaper, the army raided KK Park, a well-documented cybercrime center, as part of operations starting in early September to suppress online fraud, illegal gambling, and cross-border cybercrime.

A web browser linked to Chinese online gambling websites and downloaded millions of times routes all internet traffic through servers in China and covertly installs programs that run in the background, according to findings published by network security company Infoblox. The researchers said the Universe Browser, which advertises itself as offering privacy protection, includes features similar to malware such as key logging and surreptitious connections.

Infoblox collaborated with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on the research. The investigators found links between the browser and Southeast Asia's cybercrime ecosystem, which has connections to money laundering, illegal online gambling, human trafficking and scam operations using forced labor. The browser is directly linked to BBIN, a major online gambling company that has existed since 1999. Infoblox researchers examined the Windows version of the browser and found that it checks users' locations and languages when launched, installs two browser extensions, and disables security features including sandboxing.

SpaceX has deactivated over 2,500 Starlink terminals allegedly used by scam operations in Myanmar, where the service isn't licensed but was reportedly enabling large-scale cybercrime networks tied to human trafficking and fraud. Ars Technica reports: Lauren Dreyer, vice president of Starlink business operations, described the action in an X post last night after reports that Myanmar's military shut down a major scam operation: "SpaceX complies with local laws in all 150+ markets where Starlink is licensed to operate," Dreyer wrote. "SpaceX continually works to identify violations of our Acceptable Use Policy and applicable law... On the rare occasion we identify a violation, we take appropriate action, including working with law enforcement agencies around the world. In Myanmar, for example, SpaceX proactively identified and disabled over 2,500 Starlink Kits in the vicinity of suspected 'scam centers.'"

Starlink is not licensed to operate in Myanmar. While Dreyer didn't say how the terminals were disabled, it's known that Starlink can disable individual terminals based on their ID numbers or use geofencing to block areas from receiving signals. On Monday, Myanmar state media reported that "Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite Internet terminals," according to an Associated Press article. The army reportedly raided a cybercrime center known as KK Park as part of operations that began in early September. The operations reportedly targeted 260 unregistered buildings and resulted in seizure of 30 Starlink terminals and detention of 2,198 people.

"Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park," the AP wrote. The Karen National Union is "part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar's civil war" and "deny any involvement in the scams."

As it nears its 30th anniversary, Pitchfork is testing user reviews and comments in a major shift from its long-standing critic-only model. The site will now let readers rate albums and leave comments, combining those into an aggregated "reader score" alongside the official Pitchfork score. The Verge reports: Pitchfork has historically been a one-sided affair. While it ran the occasional reader poll, there was no way for readers to directly voice their opinion on the site. If you thought that Jet's Shine On deserved better than a 0.0 (first off, you're wrong), there was no way to let the author know other than shouting into the void of this new thing at the time called Twitter. Now the site is considering letting users comment directly on reviews and give albums scores of their own. And then those scores will be averaged up into a single reader score for each album.

Early Monday, an Amazon Web Services outage disrupted banks, games, and Peloton classes. Eight Sleep customers faced a different problem. Their internet-enabled mattresses malfunctioned. People woke to beds locked in upright positions, excessive heat, flashing lights, and unexpected alarms. Matteo Franceschetti, the company's chief executive, apologized and said engineers were building an outage-proof mode. By Monday evening, all devices functioned again, though some experienced data processing delays. The mattresses adjust temperature between 55 and 110 degrees and elevate bodies into different positions. They activate soundscapes and vibrational alarms. The advanced models cost over $5,000. A yearly subscription of $199 to $399 is required for temperature controls.

alternative_right shares a report from the Internet Archive: This October, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That's one trillion memories, moments, and movements -- preserved for the public and available to access via the Wayback Machine.

We'll be commemorating this historic achievement on October 22, 2025, with a global event: a party at our San Francisco headquarters and a livestream for friends and supporters around the world. More than a celebration, it's a tribute to what we've built together: a free and open digital library of the web.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AI content has proliferated across the Internet over the past few years, but those early confabulations with mutated hands have evolved into synthetic images and videos that can be hard to differentiate from reality. Having helped to create this problem, Google has some responsibility to keep AI video in check on YouTube. To that end, the company has started rolling out its promised likeness detection system for creators. [...] The likeness detection tool, which is similar to the site's copyright detection system, has now expanded beyond the initial small group of testers. YouTube says the first batch of eligible creators have been notified that they can use likeness detection, but interested parties will need to hand Google even more personal information to get protection from AI fakes.

Currently, likeness detection is a beta feature in limited testing, so not all creators will see it as an option in YouTube Studio. When it does appear, it will be tucked into the existing "Content detection" menu. In YouTube's demo video, the setup flow appears to assume the channel has only a single host whose likeness needs protection. That person must verify their identity, which requires a photo of a government ID and a video of their face. It's unclear why YouTube needs this data in addition to the videos people have already posted with their oh-so stealable faces, but rules are rules.

After signing up, YouTube will flag videos from other channels that appear to have the user's face. YouTube's algorithm can't know for sure what is and is not an AI video. So some of the face match results may be false positives from channels that have used a short clip under fair use guidelines. If creators do spot an AI fake, they can add some details and submit a report in a few minutes. If the video includes content copied from the creator's channel that does not adhere to fair use guidelines, YouTube suggests also submitting a copyright removal request. However, just because a person's likeness appears in an AI video does not necessarily mean YouTube will remove it.

The German Koblenz Regional Court has banned the internet service provider 1&1 from marketing its fiber-to-the-curb service as fiber-optic DSL. The court found that the company misled customers because its network uses copper cables for the final stage of connections, sometimes extending up to a mile from the distribution box to subscribers' homes.

Customers who visited the ISP's website and checked connection availability received a notification stating that a "1&1 fiber optic DSL connection" was available, even though fiber optic cables terminate at street-level distribution boxes or building service rooms. The company pairs the copper lines with vectoring technology to boost DSL speeds to 100 megabits per second. The Federation of German Consumer Organizations filed the lawsuit. Ramona Pop, the organization's chairperson, said that anyone who promises fiber optics but delivers only DSL is deceiving customers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday afternoon, Amazon confirmed that an outage affecting Amazon Web Services' cloud hosting, which had impacted millions across the Internet, had been resolved. Considered the worst outage since last year's CrowdStrike chaos, Amazon's outage caused "global turmoil," Reuters reported. AWS is the world's largest cloud provider and, therefore, the "backbone of much of the Internet," ZDNet noted. Ultimately, more than 28 AWS services were disrupted, causing perhaps billions in damages, one analyst estimated for CNN.

[...] Amazon's problems originated at a US site that is its "oldest and largest for web services" and often "the default region for many AWS services," Reuters noted. The same site has experienced two outages before in 2020 and 2021, but while the tech giant had confirmed that those prior issues had been "fully mitigated," apparently the fixes did not ensure stability into 2025. ZDNet noted that Amazon's first sign of the outage was "increased error rates and latency across numerous key services" tied to its cloud database technology. Although "engineers later identified a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution problem" as the root of these issues and quickly fixed it, "other AWS services began to fail in its wake, leaving the platform still impaired" as more than two dozen AWS services shut down. At the peak of the outage on Monday, Down Detector tracked more than 8 million reports globally from users panicked by the outage, ZDNet reported. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, told Reuters that "software developers need to build better fault tolerance."

"When people cut costs and cut corners to try to get an application up, and then forget that they skipped that last step and didn't really protect against an outage, those companies are the ones who really ought to be scrutinized later."

OpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas on Tuesday, an AI-powered web browser that CEO Sam Altman described as "smooth" and "quick" during a livestream announcement. The browser is available globally on macOS while versions for Windows, iOS, and Android are expected soon. Atlas includes memory features that personalize the browsing experience and an agent mode that allows ChatGPT to perform tasks such as booking reservations and flights or editing documents.

Users can manage these stored memories through the browser's settings and can open incognito windows. The browser displays a split-screen view by default when users click links from search results. The view shows both the webpage and the ChatGPT transcript simultaneously. Atlas also offers webpage summarization and a feature called "cursor chat" that allows users to select text and have ChatGPT revise it inline.

SpaceX surpassed the 10,000-satellite milestone for its Starlink constellation after two Falcon 9 launches on Oct. 19 added 56 more satellites to orbit. The company now operates about two-thirds of all active satellites worldwide and continues to break reuse records. Space.com reports: A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink internet satellites lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 3:24 p.m. EDT (1924 GMT; 12:24 p.m. local California time). Those 28 included the 10,000th Starlink spacecraft ever to reach orbit, which a SpaceX employee noted on the company's launch webcast: "From Tintin to 10,000! Go Starlink, go Falcon, go SpaceX!"

It was also the 132nd Falcon 9 liftoff of the year, equaling the mark set by the rocket last year -- and there are still nearly 2.5 months to go in 2025. [...] This launch was the second of the day for SpaceX; less than two hours earlier, another Falcon 9 sent 28 more Starlink satellites up from Florida's Space Coast. That earlier liftoff was the 31st for that Falcon 9's first stage, setting a new reuse record.

Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT's Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work.

She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.

Readers in 2025 "may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free..." argues a new review at Bookforum. "The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances that hit their beats like clockwork, to say nothing of what's literally thoughtlessly churned out by LLM-powered bots."

They write that author Joanna Walsh "wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was," in the golden age of user-generated content — and funny cat picture sites like I Can Has Cheezburger: I Can Has Cheezburger... was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that's good (and much that's bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school ("just as a hobby, won't be big and professional"), and even, in Walsh's account, the World Wide Web itself. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s as "Web 2.0," including Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders and hackers, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures — wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects...

[U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, about the bottom line, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a "user," Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, and turn us into, "helpless addicts." For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, a viral post earning an author a book deal, or a reputation as a top commenter leading to a staff writing job on a web publication... But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax, or maybe a trickle of revenue, rather than free fun or a ticket to fame. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video. On what was once called Twitter, users can pay, and sometimes get paid, to post with greater reach...

The chapters are bookended by an introduction on the early promise of 2004 and a coda on the defeat of 2025 and supplemented by an appendix with a straightforward timeline of the major events and publications that serve as the book's touchstones... The online spaces where amateur content creators once "created and steered online culture" have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.

"This is an attempt to stop Waymo cars from driving into the dead end," complains a home-made sign in San Francisco, "where they are forced to reverse and adversely affect the lives of the residents."

On an orange traffic post, the home-made sign declares "NO WAYMO — 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m," with an explanation for the rest of the neighborhood. "Waymo comes at all hours of the night and up to 7 times per hour with flashing lights and screaming reverse sounds, waking people up and destroying the quality of life."

SFGate reports that 1,400 people on Reddit upvoted a photo of the sign's text: It delves into the bureaucratic mess — multiple requests to Waymo, conversations with engineers, and 311 [municipal services] tickets, which had all apparently gone ignored — before finally providing instructions for human drivers. "Please move [the cones] back after you have entered so we can continue to try to block the Waymo cars from entering and disrupting the lives of residents."

This isn't the first time Waymo's autonomous vehicles have disrupted San Francisco residents' peace. Last year, a fleet of the robotaxis created another sleepless fiasco in the city's SoMa neighborhood, honking at each other for hours throughout the night for two and a half weeks.
Other on Reddit shared the concern. "I live at an dead end street in Noe Valley, and these Waymos always stuck there," another commenter posted. "It's been bad for more than a year," agreed another comment. "People on the Internet think you're just a hater but it's a real issue with Waymos."

On Thursday "the sign remained at the corner of Lake Street and Second Avenue," notes SFGate. And yet "something appeared to have shifted. "Waymo vehicles weren't allowing drop-offs or pickups on the street, though whether this was due to the home-printed plea, the cone blockage, or simply updating routes remains unclear."

"A new study published on Monday found that communications from cellphone carriers, retailers, banks, and even militaries are being broadcast unencrypted through geostationary satellites..." reports Gizmodo. "The team obtained unencrypted internet communications from U.S. military sea vessels and even communications regarding narcotics trafficking from Mexican military and law enforcement." Researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Maryland scanned 39 of these satellites from a rooftop in Southern California over three years. They found that roughly half of the signals they analyzed were transmitting unencrypted data, potentially exposing everything from phone calls and military logistics to a retail chain's inventory. "There is a clear mismatch between how satellite customers expect data to be secured and how it is secured in practice," the researchers wrote in their paper titled "Don't Look Up: There Are Sensitive Internal Links in the Clear on GEO Satellites...." "They assumed that no one was ever going to check and scan all these satellites and see what was out there. That was their method of security," Aaron Schulman, a UCSD professor and co-lead of the study, told Wired....

Even more surprisingly, the researchers didn't need any fancy spy gear to collect this data. Their setup used only off-the-shelf hardware, including a $185 satellite dish, a $140 roof mount with a $195 motor, and a $230 tuner card. Altogether, the system cost roughly $750 and was installed on a university building in La Jolla, San Diego.

With their simple setup, the researchers were able to collect a wide range of communication data, including phone calls, texts, in-flight Wi-Fi data from airline passengers, and signals from electric utilities. They even obtained U.S. and Mexican military and law enforcement communications, as well as ATM transactions and corporate communications... When it came to telecoms, specifically, the team collected phone numbers, calls, and texts from customers of T-Mobile, AT&T Mexico, and Telmex... It only took the team nine hours to collect the phone numbers of over 2,700 T-Mobile users, along with some of their calls and text messages.
T-Mobile told Gizmodo the lack of encryption was "a vendor's technical misconfiguration" affecting "a limited number of cell sites" and was "not network-wide... [W]e implemented nationwide Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) encryption for all customers to further protect signaling traffic as it travels between mobile handsets and the network core, including call set up, numbers dialed and text message content. We appreciate our collaboration with the security research community, whose work helps reinforce our ongoing commitment to protecting customer data and enhances security across the industry."

Indeed, the researchers write that "Each time we discovered sensitive information in our data, we went through considerable effort to determine the responsible party, establish contact, and disclose the vulnerability. In several cases, the responsible party told us that they had deployed a remedy. For the following parties, we re-scanned with their permission and were able to verify a remedy had been deployed: T-Mobile, WalMart, and KPU."

The researchers acknowledge that exposure "was limited to a relatively small number of cell towers in specific remote areas."

"Earlier available only to the paying subscribers, the Comet browser now offers its core features to all users at no cost," writes the Times of India. "This includes AI-powered search, contextual recommendations, and integrated tools designed to streamline research and content discovery." They say the move reflects the Chromium-based browser's goal to "compete with incumbents like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge" — but also reflects Perplexity's "broader mission to democratize AI tools."
More details from The Verge: The internet is better on Comet," the company says, promising to remain free forever as it styles the browser as a serious challenger to Google's Chrome...

It's supposed to make surfing the web simpler and help you with tasks like shopping, booking trips, and general life admin. To borrow the company's words again: you "get more done." The AI-powered browser launched in July, though was only available for users who subscribed to the $200 per month Perplexity Max plan... No subscription at all will be needed to use Comet going forward, the company says.
Perplexity has even struck deals with major sites including the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times to offer free access to their sites for one month through the Comet browser. And last week Perplexity also launched an agressive paid referral program, where active Perplexity Pro/Max subscribers get a payout of up to $15 for each friend who downloads and uses Comet through their affiliate link. (The payout size is based on the friend's country, with $15 being the payout amount for a U.S. user, with $10 payouts for users in 19 other countries include Canada, Australia, the U.K., several EU countries, Japan, and South Korea.

In addition, Srinivas has been sharing positive tweets about Comet. (Like "This is unbelievable. Comet automatically hunts down Sora 2 invite codes across the web and signs you up!") But Perplexity is making even bigger claims for its browser: Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said that the Comet AI browser can improve productivity so that companies won't need to hire more people. "Instead of hiring one more person on your team, you could just use Comet to supplement all the work that you're doing," Srinivas told CNBC's "Squawk Box"... The CEO said the artificial intelligence-powered web browser is a "true personal assistant" that allows users to complete more tasks in the same amount of time and said that the productivity gained could be worth $10,000 per year for a single person...

Other tech companies have also been rolling out their own AI browser assistants. In January, OpenAI introduced its web agent, Operator, and Google released Gemini AI to its Chrome browser in September.
Meanwhile, The Verge adds, The Browser Company (makers of the Arc browser) "is going all in on Dia, and Opera just launched its own AI browser, Neon."

Of course, popularity brings problems, writes the Times of India: iPhone users are being warned by Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas against downloading a fake 'Comet' app on the App Store. He clarified that the official iOS version is not yet released and the current listing is unauthorized spam..
And earlier this month the browser security platform LayerX described a "CometJacking" attack where malicious prompts could be hidden in URLs (as a parameter). Comet is instructed "to look for data in memory and connected services (e.g., Gmail, Calendar), encode the results (e.g., base64), and POST them to an attacker-controlled endpoint... all while appearing to the user as a harmless 'ask the assistant' flow." (And with some trivial encoding it also seems to evade exfiltration checks.)

The Hacker News reported that Perplexity has classified the findings as "no security impact."