You're listening to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our digital world.
Security researchers at Socket have uncovered seven hundred thirty-seven fake VPN extensions on the Chrome Web Store, impersonating trusted names like NordVPN and Proton VPN. With more than seventy-five thousand combined installs, these add-ons were quietly routing users' entire browser sessions through proxies controlled by a single unknown operator. Hundreds remain live, so it is worth opening your extensions panel right now and removing anything you don't recognize.
Shifting to the crypto space, Bitcoin miner Hyperscale has sold off the majority of its Bitcoin holdings to fund a pivot toward AI data centers. The company says it plans to rebuild its reserves through ongoing mining and future purchases, but the move reflects a broader pattern of miners chasing the economics of artificial intelligence infrastructure over digital currency.
And Google is giving users a new option when it comes to AI-generated images, allowing them to remove the visible watermark from outputs. The company is clear that turning off the visual tag won't affect the invisible metadata embedded in the file, which is used to identify AI-generated content at a technical level. It's a small but telling shift in how platforms are navigating transparency versus aesthetics.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
