Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily briefing on the stories shaping our digital world.
LinkedIn's new AI slop reporting button has now been clicked more than one million times in just three weeks, and it's having a real effect. The platform says users who paste in AI-generated posts are seeing roughly forty percent fewer views, a sign that audiences are actively pushing back against synthetic content flooding their feeds.
Turning to infrastructure, the political battle over data centers is getting louder and more complicated. President Trump is warning communities that opposing new facilities is, quote, a mistake, while Texas Governor Greg Abbott is taking the opposite view, saying data centers that faced local backlash, quote, basically dug their own grave. With billions of dollars and enormous energy demands on the line, this tension between tech ambition and community resistance isn't going away.
And on the security front, researchers have identified an evolved version of the Android banking trojan ToxicPanda. This updated malware uses a fake VPN permission prompt to disable Google Play Protect, then quietly installs hidden payloads. It's already targeting three hundred forty-nine banking and crypto apps across sixteen countries, and can seize shell-level control of a device.
Stay skeptical, stay secure. Tech Beat out.
