Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram.

The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as ...

The president propped up old coal plants and killed offshore wind farms in the name of national security. That has raised accusations of contradictory energy policies.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright says keeping the plant online would prevent dangerous outages. State leaders disagree.

A global crude glut may complicate the president's plans to boost production in the South American country, whose leader was captured over the weekend.

The 27-nation bloc starts imposing tariffs this year on raw materials with high carbon intensity. Washing machines and car parts could be next.

Young activists plan to seek relief in the lower courts after state's highest bench declined to consider whether lawmakers are violating residents' right to a clean climate.

A federal court has sided with 12 states that said the administration placed unreasonable limits on grants to pay emergency responders.

The lawmakers expressed concerns about a financial analysis company inflating insurer ratings.

It was also the first time that the three-year temperature average broke through the threshold set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The water content of snowpack at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada is at 50 percent of the average for this time of year and 21 percent of the average for April 1, said a state hydrometeorologist.

Farmers watch with distress as the Great Hungarian Plain, once an important site for agriculture, has become increasingly parched and dry.

Talks are underway for South Korea to invest $350 billion in U.S. projects and purchase up to $100 billion worth of U.S. energy products.

A long stretch of humid heat followed by intense thunderstorms is a weather pattern historically seen mostly in and around the tropics. But climate change is making humid heat waves and extreme storms more common in traditionally temperate midlatitude regions such as the midwestern U.S., which has seen episodes of unusually high heat and humidity in recent summers.

Now, MIT scientists have identified a key condition in the atmosphere that determines how hot and humid a midlatitude region can get, and how intense related storms can become. The results may help climate scientists gauge a region’s risk for humid heat waves and extreme storms as the world continues to warm.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Science Advances, the MIT team reports that a region’s maximum humid heat and storm intensity are limited by the strength of an “atmospheric inversion”— a weather condition in which a layer of warm air settles over cooler air.

Inversions are known to act as an atmospheric blanket that traps pollutants at ground level. Now, the MIT researchers have found atmospheric inversions also trap and build up heat and moisture at the surface, particularly in midlatitude regions. The more persistent an inversion, the more heat and humidity a region can accumulate at the surface, which can lead to more oppressive, longer-lasting humid heat waves.

And, when an inversion eventually weakens, the accumulated heat energy is released as convection, which can whip up the hot and humid air into intense thunderstorms and heavy rainfall.

The team says this effect is especially relevant for midlatitude regions, where atmospheric inversions are common. In the U.S., regions to the east of the Rocky Mountains often experience inversions of this kind, with relatively warm air aloft sitting over cooler air near the surface.

As climate change further warms the atmosphere in general, the team suspects that inversions may become more persistent and harder to break. This could mean more frequent humid heat waves and more intense storms for places that are not accustomed to such extreme weather.

“Our analysis shows that the eastern and midwestern regions of U.S. and the eastern Asian regions may be new hotspots for humid heat in the future climate,” says study author Funing Li, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

“As the climate warms, theoretically the atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture,” adds co-author and EAPS Assistant Professor Talia Tamarin-Brodsky. “Which is why new regions in the midlatitudes could experience moist heat waves that will cause stress that they weren’t used to before.”

Air energetics

The atmosphere’s layers generally get colder with altitude. In these typical conditions, when a heat wave comes through a region, it warms the air at ground level. Since warm air is lighter than cold air, it will eventually rise, like a hot air balloon, prompting colder air to sink. This rise and fall of air sets off convection, like bubbles in boiling water. When warm air hits colder altitudes, it condenses into droplets that rain out, typically as a thunderstorm, that can often relieve a heat wave.

For their new study, Li and Tamarin-Brodsky wondered: What would it take to get air at the surface to convect and ultimately end a heat wave? Put another way: What sets the limit to how hot a region can get before air begins to convect to eventually rain?

The team treated the question as a problem of energy. Heat is energy that can be thought of in two forms: the energy that comes from dry heat (i.e., temperature), and the energy that comes from latent, or moist, heat. The scientists reasoned that, for a given portion or “parcel” of air, there is some amount of moisture that, when condensed, contributes to that air parcel’s total energy. Depending on how much energy an air parcel has, it could start to convect, rise up, and eventually rain out.

“Imagine putting a balloon around a parcel of air and asking, will it stay in the same place, will it go up, or will it sink?” Tamarin-Brodsky says. “It’s not just about warm air that’s lifting. You also have to think about the moisture that’s there. So we consider the energetics of an air parcel while taking into account the moisture in that air. Then we can find the maximum ‘moist energy’ that can accumulate near the surface before the air becomes unstable and convects.”

Heat barrier

As they worked through their analysis, the researchers found that the maximum amount of moist energy, or the highest level of heat and humidity that the air can hold, is set by the presence and strength of an atmospheric inversion. In cases where atmospheric layers are inverted (when a layer of warm or light air settles over colder or heavier, ground-level air), the air has to accumulate more heat and moisture in order for an air parcel to build up enough energy to lift up and break through the inversion layer. The more persistent the inversion is, the hotter and more humid air must get before it can rise up and convect.

Their analysis suggests that an atmospheric inversion can increase a region’s capacity to hold heat and humidity. How high this heat and humidity can get depends on how stable the inversion is. If a blanket of warm air parks over a region without moving, it allows more humid heat to build up, versus if the blanket is quickly removed. When the air eventually convects, the accumulated heat and moisture will generate stronger, more intense storms.

“This increasing inversion has two effects: more severe humid heat waves, and less frequent but more extreme convective storms,” Tamarin-Brodsky says.

Inversions in the atmosphere form in various ways. At night, the surface that warmed during the day cools by radiating heat to space, making the air in contact with it cooler and denser than the air above. This creates a shallow layer in which temperature increases with height, called a nocturnal inversion. Inversions can also form when a shallow layer of cool marine air moves inland from the ocean and slides beneath warmer air over the land, leaving cool air near the surface and warmer air above. In some cases, persistent inversions can form when air heated over sun-warmed mountains is carried over colder low-lying regions, so that a warm layer aloft caps cooler air near the ground.

“The Great Plains and the Midwest have had many inversions historically due to the Rocky Mountains,” Li says. “The mountains act as an efficient elevated heat source, and westerly winds carry this relatively warm air downstream into the central and midwestern U.S., where it can help create a persistent temperature inversion that caps colder air near the surface.”

“In a future climate for the Midwest, they may experience both more severe thunderstorms and more extreme humid heat waves,” Tamarin-Brodsky says. “Our theory gives an understanding of the limit for humid heat and severe convection for these communities that will be future heat wave and thunderstorm hotspots.”

This research is part of the MIT Climate Grand Challenge on Weather and Climate Extremes. Support was provided by Schmidt Sciences.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02503-x

It is essential to understand the best way to frame a persuasive message aimed at increasing concern about climate change and support for pro-environmental action. Now a Registered Report presents a large-scale study that tests and compares the effectiveness of ten widely cited messaging strategies.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02536-2

How to effectively communicate climate change to the public has long been studied and debated. Through a registered report megastudy, researchers tested the ten most-cited climate change messaging strategies published, finding that many had significant, but small, effects on climate change attitudes.

Probably a college prank.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

404 Media has the story:

Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone...

2025 was the year age verification went from a fringe policy experiment to a sweeping reality across the United States. Half of the U.S. now mandates age verification for accessing adult content or social media platforms. Nine states saw their laws take effect this year alone, with more coming in 2026.

The good news is that courts have blocked many of the laws seeking to impose age-verification gates on social media, largely for the same reasons that EFF opposes these efforts.  Age-verification measures censor the internet and burden access to online speech. Though age-verification mandates are often touted as "online safety" measures for young people, the laws actually do more harm than good. They undermine the fundamental speech rights of adults and young people alike, create new barriers to internet access, and put at risk all internet users' privacy, anonymity, and security.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by this onslaught of laws and the invasive technologies behind them, you're not alone. That's why we've launched EFF's Age Verification Resource Hub at EFF.org/Age—a one-stop shop to understand what these laws actually do, what's at stake, why EFF opposes all forms of age verification, how to protect yourself, and how to join the fight for a free, open, private, and safe internet. Moreover, there is hope. Although the Supreme Court ruled that imposing age-verification gates to access adult content does not violate the First Amendment on its face, the legal fight continues regarding whether those laws are constitutional. 

As we built the hub throughout 2025, we also fought state mandates in legislatures, courts, and regulatory hearings. Here's a summary of what happened this year.

The Laws That Took Effect (And Immediately Backfired)

Nine states’ age verification laws for accessing adult content went into effect in 2025:

• South Carolina (January 1)
• Florida (January 1)
• Tennessee (January 13)
• Georgia (July 1)
• Wyoming (July 1)
• North Dakota (August 1)
• Arizona (September 26)
• Ohio (September 30)
• Missouri (November 30)

Predictably, users didn’t stop accessing adult content after the laws went into effect, they just changed how they got to it. As we’ve said elsewhere: the internet always routes around censorship. 

In fact, research from the New York Center for Social Media and Politics and the public policy nonprofit the Phoenix Center confirm what we’ve warned from the beginning: age verification laws don’t work. Their research found:

• Searches for platforms that have blocked access to residents in states with these laws dropped significantly, while searches for offshore sites surged.
• Researchers saw a predictable surge in VPN usage following the enactment of age verification laws, where for example, Florida saw a 1,150% increase in VPN demand after its law took effect.

As foretold, when platforms block access or require invasive verification, it drives people to sites that operate outside the law—platforms that often pose greater safety risks. Instead of protecting young people, these laws push them toward less secure, less regulated spaces.

Legislation Watch: Expanding Beyond “Adult Content” Lawmakers Take Aim at Social Media Platforms

Earlier this year, we raised the alarm that state legislatures wouldn’t stop at adult content. Sure enough, throughout 2025, lawmakers set their sights on young people’s social media usage, passing laws that require platforms to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for accounts belonging to anyone under 18. Four states already passed similar laws in previous years.  These laws were swiftly blocked in courts because they violate the First Amendment and subject every user to surveillance as a condition of participation in online speech. 

Warning Labels and Time Limits

​​And it doesn’t stop with age verification. California and Minnesota passed new laws this year requiring social media platforms to display warning labels to users. Virginia’s SB 854, which also passed this year, took a different approach. It requires social media platforms to use “commercially reasonable efforts” to determine a user's age and, if that user is under 16, limits them to one hour per day per application by default unless a parent changes the time allowance.

EFF is opposed to these laws as they have serious First Amendment concerns. And courts have agreed: in November 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado temporarily halted Colorado's warning label law, which would have required platforms to display warnings to users under 18 about the negative impacts of social media. We expect courts to similarly halt California and Minnesota’s laws.

App Store and Device-Level Age Verification

2025 also saw the rise of device-level and app-store age verification laws, which shift the obligation to verify users onto app stores and operating system providers. These laws seriously impact users’ (adults and young people alike) from accessing information, particularly since these laws block a much broader swath of content (not only adult or sexual content), but every bit of content provided by every application. In October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043), which takes a slightly different approach to age verification in that it requires “operating system providers”—not just app stores—to offer an interface at device/account setup that prompts the account holder to indicate the user’s birth date or age. Developers must request an age signal when applications are downloaded and launched. These laws expand beyond earlier legislation passed in other states that mandate individual websites implement the law, and apply the responsibility to app stores, operating systems, or device makers at a more fundamental level.

Again, these laws have drawn legal challenges. In October, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed a lawsuit arguing that Texas’s SB 2420 is unconstitutional. A separate suit, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) v. Paxton, challenges the same law on First Amendment grounds, arguing it violates the free speech rights of young people and adults alike. Both lawsuits argue that the burdens placed on platforms, developers, and users outweigh any proposed benefits.

From Legislation to Regulation: Rulemaking Processes Begin

States with existing laws have also begun the process of rulemaking—translating broad statutory language into specific regulatory requirements. These rulemaking processes matter, because the specific technical requirements, data—handling procedures, and enforcement mechanisms will determine just how invasive these laws become in practice. 

California’s Attorney General held a hearing in November to solicit public comment on methods and standards for age assurance under SB 976, the “Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act,” which will require age verification by the end of 2026. EFF supported the legal challenge to S.B. 976 since its passage, and federal courts have blocked portions of the law from taking effect. Now in the rulemaking process, EFF submitted comments raising concerns about the discriminatory impacts of any proposed regulations.

New York's Attorney General also released proposed rules for the state’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, describing which companies must comply and the standards for determining users’ age and obtaining parental consent. EFF submitted comments opposing the age verification requirements in September of 2024, and again in December 2025.

Our comments in both states warn that these rules risk entrenching invasive age verification systems and normalizing surveillance as a prerequisite for online participation.

The Boundaries Keep Shifting

As we’ve said, age verification will not stop at adult content and social media. Lawmakers are already proposing bills to require ID checks for everything from skincare products in California to diet supplements in Washington. Lawmakers in Wisconsin and Michigan have set their targets on virtual private networks, or VPNs—proposing various legislation that would ban the use of VPNs to prevent people from bypassing age verification laws. AI chatbots are next on the list, with several states considering legislation that would require age verification for all users. Behind the reasonable-sounding talking points lies a sprawling surveillance regime that would reshape how people of all ages use the internet. EFF remains ready to push back against these efforts in legislatures, regulatory hearings, and court rooms.

2025 showed us that age verification mandates are spreading rapidly, despite clear evidence that they don't work and actively harm the people they claim to protect. 2026 will be the year we push back harder—like the future of a free, open, private, and safe internet depends on it.

This is why we must fight back to protect the internet that we know and love. If you want to learn more about these bills, visit EFF.org/Age

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

Our Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) guides, which provide practical advice and explainers for how to deal with government and corporate surveillance, had a big year. We published several large updates to existing guides and released three all new guides. And with frequent massive protests across the U.S., our guide to attending a protest remained one of the most popular guides of the year, so we made sure our translations were up to date.

(Re)learn All You Need to Know About Encryption

We started this year by taking a deep look at our various encryption guides, which start with the basics before moving up to deeper concepts. We slimmed each guide down and tried to focus on making them as clear and concise as deep explainers on complicated topics can be. We reviewed and edited four guides in total:

• What Should I Know About Encryption? 
• Key Concepts in Encryption
• Key Verification
• A Deep Dive on End-to-End Encryption: How Do Public Key Encryption Systems Work?

And if you’re not sure where to start, we got you covered with the new Interested in Encryption? playlist.

New Guides

We launched three new guides this year, including iPhone and Android privacy guides, which walk you through all the various privacy options of your phone. Both of these guides received a handful of updates throughout their first year as new features were released or, in the case of the iPhone, a new design language was introduced. These also got a fun little boost from a segment on "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" telling people how to disable their phone’s advertising identifier.

We also launched our How to: Manage Your Digital Footprint guide. This guide is designed to help you claw back some of the data you may find about yourself online, walking through different privacy options across different platforms, digging up old accounts, removing yourself from people search sites, and much more.

Always Be Updating

As is the case with most software, there is always incremental work to do. This year, that meant small updates to our WhatsApp and Signal guides to acknowledge new features (both are already on deck for similar updates early next year as well). 

We overhauled our device encryption guides for Windows, Mac, and Linux, rolling what was once three guides into one, and including more detailed guidance on how to handle recovery keys. Some slight changes to how this works on both Windows and Mac means this one will get another look early next year as well.

Speaking of rolling multiple guides into one, we did the same with our guidance for the Tor browser, where it once lived across three guides, it now lives as one that covers all the major desktop platforms (the mobile guide remains separate).

The password manager guide saw some small changes to note some new features with Apple and Chrome’s managers, as well as some new independent security audits. Likewise, the VPN guide got a light touch to address the TunnelVision security issue.

Finally, the secure deletion guide got a much needed update after years of dormancy. With the proliferation of solid state drives (SSDs, not to be confused with SSD), not much has changed in the secure deletion space, but we did move our guidance for those SSDs to the top of the guide to make it easier to find, while still acknowledging many people around the world still only have access to a computer with spinning disk drives. 

Translations

As always, we worked on translations for these updates. We’re very close to a point where every current SSD guide is updated and translated into Arabic, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

And with the help of Localization Lab, we also now have translations for a handful of the most important guides in Changana, Mozambican Portuguese, Ndau, Luganda, and Bengali.

Blogs Blogs Blogs

Sometimes we take our SSD-like advice and blog it so we can respond to news events or talk about more niche topics. This year, we blogged about new features, like WhatsApp’s “Advanced Chat Privacy” and Google’s "Advanced Protection.” We also broke down the differences between how different secure chat clients handle backups and pushed for expanding encryption on Android and iPhone.

We fight for more privacy and security every day of every year, but until we get that, stronger controls of our data and a better understanding of how technology works is our best defense.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 02 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02535-3

The Atlantic Ocean is having an increasing influence on the Arctic but the drivers of this are unclear. By combining ocean modelling and deep learning methods, the authors show that the increased flow through the Barents Sea Opening is driven by spectral changes of atmospheric variability.