Remember when President Donald Trump put his son-in-law in charge of negotiating a grand bargain in the Middle East, back in his first term? Understandable if not, given that no grand bargain emerged and the region is more on fire than ever courtesy of the U.S. and Israel’s disastrous war with Iran, the atrocities of the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and a raging conflict between Yemen’s Houthi rebels and a Saudi-led coalition. Yet Jared Kushner is more than one of the many ghouls who have clambered over a track record of failure right back into Trump’s second-term White House, where he’s still a top envoy. He also got owned by the Dutch, according to an excerpt from Matthew Cole’s new book, _Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East_ , published in Vanity Fair. According to Cole, Dutch intelligence services captured and flipped a Russian hacker operating for the GRU (Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency) in late 2017. By the end of the year, the operative had given them access to a GRU server containing screenshots of Kushner’s iPhone X, and the Dutch spies were able to reverse-engineer the original method the GRU used to penetrate the phone’s then-state-of-the-art security. This gave them access to a continual image feed (albeit without audio) of the phone’s screen. This roughly overlaps with the timeline during which Kushner was allegedly using a personal cell phone instead of a secure government device, using his private email (allegedly routed to Trump Org servers in 2017) to conduct official government business, and receiving Top Secret intelligence without a permanent security clearance, by the way. In early 2018, Dutch intelligence personnel began monitoring Kushner’s phone and identified him logging into a Dubai-based bank account that had received around $750 million. This is the Alpha account. According to Cole, the Alpha account belonged to the United Arab Emirates-based (and government-funded) Watani Al Emarat Foundation, and was held at the First Abu Dhabi Bank. That bank is, in turn, chaired by the brother of UAE leader Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ). Cole reported Kushner and MBZ partly managed the account as a slush fund, or what a source described to him as “a shared pool of money for off-the-books diplomatic objectives,” and that MBZ and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) contributed the money. The royals had originally discussed putting more than $10 billion into a broader fund that could have helped pay for Trump’s border wall “in an effort to secure a second term in the White House,” Cole wrote, but that plan fizzled out, so they settled on lesser Kushner-facilitated schemes. Cole also learned of another account, which unlike Alpha may not have been known to the Dutch. MBZ allegedly transferred about $1 billion to a separate Israeli Central Bank account, Beta, that one source characterized as an allocation “for Kushner’s personal benefit.” Here emerges one of the most bizarre details: According to Cole, Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu recommended Kushner use the Israeli Central Bank in the first place. This situation ended up with Kushner being required to notify Netanyahu before using the Beta account for any transfers or transactions. If true, that effectively means the leader of a foreign country had oversight of a billion dollars meant for Kushner. Kushner allegedly sent notices of any account activity to Netanyahu via the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman. The money allegedly went through convoluted trails, including Azerbaijani banks that provide “well-established but unadvertised” services moving large amounts of money. Kushner also allegedly helped negotiate a deal involving a third payment, in which the UAE effectively bought a promise of Israeli military support against any Iranian attack on the UAE. All told, MBZ and MBS allegedly transferred at least $2 billion into accounts intended for Kushner’s use, whether it was striking international deals or “personal benefit.” Cole argued failing to disclose the accounts may have violated federal ethics and tax rules. A former Mueller prosecutor told Cole that if Kushner made any promises in exchange for the money, it might be a violation of federal bribery laws and the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Two of Trump’s national security advisers, a chief of staff and a former CIA director told Cole that they were unaware of any presidential authorization that would let Kushner access a foreign government’s bank accounts. The Dutch findings eventually leaked, with a source telling Cole about them in spring 2020. Neither the GRU nor Dutch intelligence seems to have been looking at Kushner as a friend, and for the Dutch to retain access, they presumably had to leave the U.S. in the dark on Russian penetration of his phone. Dutch agencies limited intelligence-sharing ties with their U.S. counterparts last year over human rights concerns. Counsel for Kushner denied the accusations to Cole, saying he has “no idea” about the Israeli bank account and “there are no accounts and never were.” They also denied that Kushner had ever entered any agreements with foreign leaders or officials that were not “agreed to by the President of the United States and in the best interests of the United States.” In a further statement posted on Thursday, Kushner said the allegations are “completely insane and never happened,” and called them “outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism.” Kushner also suggested the report is a “mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent.” The Daily Beast reported his counsel has threatened a lawsuit. Friedman has also denied any knowledge or involvement. It’s not clear whether Kushner ever learned his phone was hacked before Cole reached out for comment.

Drupal has patched two critical vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to execute code remotely on websites running any supported version of the content management system.

Swedish broadcaster TV4 has denied reports that artificial intelligence deleted a forthcoming reality series due to launch next month. According to an initial report from newspaper _Aftonbladet_ , the incident involving the entire second series of _The Challenge Sverige_ happened after production company Mastiff “let an AI agent into the server”, which deleted the fully edited show. TV4 confirmed the show, due to premiere next month, has had to be recut, pushing its launch into 2027. TV4’s programme director Mia Lindqvist subsequently denied that AI was responsible for the mishap, telling _Aftonbladet_ that the issue was down to a backup failing. An investigation by TV4 found that the show was deleted due to human error, with no AI involved. “The raw material is there, so it’s no problem, but of course it means we lose time,” she added.

A German court has explicitly named Mastodon and Bluesky as positive examples of social networks that could retain hosting protection. It gets Bluesky’s feeds wrong, but its reasoning about user control might be more useful than it realises.

It is tempting to “unskew” polls after repeat misses. But predicting future poll bias only works until it doesn’t

Home of RSS Parrot, a free Fediverse service that lets you turn Mastodon into an RSS or Atom feed reader.

A scheme for watermarking the text generated by large language models shows high text quality preservation and detection accuracy and low latency, and is feasible in large-scale-production settings.

In my first weeks as Executive Director of EFF, I’ve been reminded every day how consequential this moment is in determining what kind of future we will have. What each one of us steps up to do—with our expertise, energy, and resources—will determine whether our future is one of openness, security, and fundamental rights, or one controlled through fear, surveillance, and centralized power.

Starting October 1 2026, anyone using WhatsApp as a platform to reach their target audience will be charged by Meta for outbound messages. Until that date, it will have been free to do so within a 24-hour window opened by the user’s last message, meaning that as long as your chatbot (or human agent) was engaging and helpful enough, users seeking support for health, livelihoods, education and psycho-social support could chat for as long as they wanted to (and could afford to themselves). All implementers had to pay for was the cost of the WhatsApp Business Service Provider (BSP) platform, such as Turn.io, as well as any re-engagement messages to wake up ‘dormant’ users. In the near future, any message sent in response to users will be charged at the same rate as ‘utility templates’, whose costs vary region by region.This change has huge scale, sustainability, user experience and impact implications for many social impact organisations using, or thinking about using, WhatsApp to reach people across the Global South.