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If youve ever been hit with a sketchy text warning you of an overdue toll road payment or mysterious U.S. Postal Service fees, youve likely been targeted by one of the largest cyber scams sweeping the globe. Now, Google is suing an international cybercrime group it believes is responsible for the ubiquitous text-based phishing scheme, which may have raked in as much as $1 billion over the last three years. In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, Google alleges that 25 people are part of a sprawling scam operation known as Lighthouse that was designed to swipe the logins and passwords of victims caught in its web. The Lighthouse scam hinges on tricking people with bogus texts, prompting them to click a link and share their credentials on fake websites. The sites display legitimate-looking logos of brands such as Google, Gmail, and YouTube in hopes of convincing potential victims that their fake web pages are real, hence the companys involvement. Google says that it found 107 website templates misusing Google branding on their sign-in screens in order to fool people into thinking those sites are safe and actually connected to Googles products. According to the lawsuit, almost 200 fake web templates connected to the Lighthouse network imitate U.S. websites like those belonging to the New York City government and USPS. Beyond Googles own logos, the fake sites display official-looking logos of payment companies and social media platforms. Google and other security researchers believe that the text-phishing scam network is based in China, well beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement. Bad actors built Lighthouse as a phishing-as-a-service kit to generate and deploy massive smishing (SMS phishing) attacks, Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado wrote on the companys blog. These attacks exploit established brands like E-ZPass to steal peoples financial information. Google notes that this family of cybercrime is causing immense financial harm around the globe, and that the company intends to disrupt the schemes core infrastructure with the lawsuit. In it, Google alleges that the unnamed individuals connected to the Lighthouse scam have run afoul of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act; the Lanham Act, which protects trademarks; and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Because the operation is seemingly based in China, Googles suit likely wont be dragging anyone to court overnight, but the suit could still disrupt the groups web hosting and other aspects of its infrastructure. Because Google doesnt know the names of the 25 individuals connected to the scam, the suit includes their Telegram handles when they are known. To fight cyber scams on U.S. soil, Google also announced Wednesday that it will back a handful of bipartisan bills designed to disrupt fraud, counter scams, and block robocalls that originate overseas. Legal action can address a single operation; robust public policy can address the broader threat of scams, DeLaine Prado said. We encourage Congress to enact these crucial bills and help bring a decisive end to the financial harm and damage wrought by foreign cybercriminals.
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World Labs, the AI model developer cofounded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has released its 3D-space generating model, Marble. At the World Labs website, creators can now input text prompts, images, or videos of pieces of a real-world environment. Marble uses them to create full 3D environments, which can include interior spaces or expansive exterior ones. Marble can reconstruct, generate, and simulate 3D worldsthink of it as a type of world model. In an interview with Fast Company, Li describes world models as a “significant” evolution of the generative AI era. The large world model is really a significant step towards unlocking AI’s capability,” a category she calls “spatial.” Spatial intelligence refers to a systems ability to perceive, model, reason about, and take actions within physical or geometric spacesimilar to how humans or animals choose their actions based on their understanding of their surroundings. World Labs launched in September of 2024, when it began working on the Marble model. Two months ago it released a preview of the model to a group of creatives, who began buliding worlds and giving feedback.This week, Li posted a sort of manifesto on Substack arguing that spatial intelligence is the next frontier in AI. For humans, she says, spatial intelligence of the physical world around us provides the scaffolding upon which we build our cognition. Spatial intelligence will transform how we create and interact with real and virtual worldsrevolutionizing storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery, and beyond, she writes. World Labs believes that endowing machines (including robots) with such spatial intelligence could be transformative for a number of industries in the coming years. Using a web interface, users can feed Marble a scene description, images or videos, or coarse 3D layouts and the model will generate a realistic 3D environment. A user might input a set of images from the bedroom where they grew up, then upload the images to Marble, which will then intelligently sew them together to create an immersive digital 3D version of the room. The user can then use a set of tools to refine or expand their bedroom recreation, making small touchups like adding a clock. Or, they might make larger changes: adding a desk and chair or rendering the whole room with a different kind of light. More advanced users can create (or import) a rough 3D scene including the major fixtures of an environment, then use text prompts to control the overall style. The editing tools let you iterate with the model and go back and forth and edit what the world looks like in various ways to help you [get] that vision out of your head and making that perfect world, says World Labs cofounder Justin Johnson. World Labs is also hosting a hub where people can share their 3D creations. Marble can output 3D worlds so that other creators, perhaps using other tools, can build on or enhance them. It can generate worlds as Gaussian splats, meshes, or videosformats familiar to graphics pros. That’s really cool because it lets you take those 3D assets and then compose them with all kinds of other traditional workflows, Johnson says. You could take your triangle mesh and drop it into a game. You could take your gaussian splat and then use it for a VFX shot and composite and other things. In generative AI, a Gaussian splat is the highest quality way of rendering 3D objects and spaces. The model generates millions or billions of tiny splatssemi-transparent particles occupying different points within a 3D space. They are small, smooth blobs whose brightness, opacity, color, or density is greatest at their center, with those values falling smoothly off in a bell-curve shape down to zero at their edges. The blobs then interconnect with their neighbors, which increases the smooth, consistent feel. When billions of these splats overlap, they can approximate the smooth surfaces, colors, and lighting of a 3D scene. While anyone can now experiment with Marble, professionals such as artists, engineers, and VFX designers might find it useful in their work. Li and her cofounders, Ben Mildenhall, Johnson, and Christoph Lassner, say that this spatial intelligence could transform a variety of industries, including gaming, film production, and robotics. Li, who also codirects the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, was recently awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering at a ceremony with King Charles in London. Her cofounders have impressive bona fides, too. Lassner developed Pulsar, a sphere-based renderer that paved the way for 3D Gaussian Splatting. Johnson, who worked with Li as a graduate student at Stanford, created real-time style transfer (in which the visual style of one image is applied to another), which was deployed by Meta, Snap, and Prisma. Ben Mildenhall cocreated the neural radiance field (NeRF) method, which revolutionized 3D scene reconstruction. World Labs is offering a tiered subscription plan, starting with a free tier that includes enough credits to generate four worlds. The higher tiers add more credits and more tools, with the top plan priced at $95 per month.
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The worst part of any medical is waiting for results. That can be especially true of sexual health tests. Those conducted in person can take 2448 hours, but if theyre submitted via at-home collection kit and mailed to a lab, it can take even longer. A new test from diagnostics company Visby Medical, launching nationwide today is changing that. Now that it’s successfully completed a pilot period, the company is bringing a 30-minute, lab-accurate PCR test for three common sexually transmitted infections to women at home. From a self-collected vaginal swab, the $149.99 test can diagnose chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasisthree common infections that can all easily be treated with antibiotics. It also connects patients who test positive with a healthcare provider via United Healthcares OptumNow telehealth service. If you tell somebody, I have an STD test for the home, what they think I mean is You’re going to give me a collection kit, I’m going to pee in the cup and send it back and get a result a week later, says Adam de la Zerda, founder and CEO of Visby Medical. With his machine, he says, all they have to do is close the lid and the test starts running, and in 30 minutes youll get your result. Cleared by the FDA in March as the first at-home diagnostic for these STIs, Visbys test is now going wide with the test following a smaller pilot launch on its site and via diagnostics platform Everlywell. It parlayed that approval into a funding round that in July had brought in $55 million, led by healthcare investment firm Catalio Capital Management. The company last raised money in 2022, when a $135 million funding roundfocused on developing the STI test and a point-of-care COVID and flu testvalued the company at more than $1 billion. According to PitchBook, it’s raised a total of $486 million [Photo: Visby Medical] To underscore the convenience element of the new test, Visby is also making it available for same-day delivery via GoPuff and DoorDash in 10 major cities including Las Vegas, Atlanta, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Orders can be placed via the Visby website, which helps identify the best delivery option for a buyer, and dispatched via one of the apps. It looks and feels just like ordering lunch, de la Zerda says. Its nobodys business what you just received from DoorDashit could be a bag of burritos or a Visby test. Visbys test is also getting a cosign from a competitor, with digital health platform Everlywell selling it. From test to treatment De la Zerda says that the STI test has been the companys goal since it was founded in 2012. Visby had just finished its initial clinical trials on a test for use in doctors offices when the pandemic forced a pivot to COVID, for which Visby developed a point of care test. Even then, the focus was at-home PCR, with Visby landing $19 million from a federal prize competition with an early, point-of-care version of the test. The FDA authorizationvia the agencys De Novo pathway for novel medical devicestook roughly a year from submission to approval, included Visbys app, which is powered by Google Cloud to decode the test results.The test itself demonstrated the ability to identify 98.8% of negative and 97.2% of positive chlamydia samples; 99.1% of negative and 100% of positive gonorrhea samples; and 98.5% of negative and 97.8% positive trichomoniasis samples. Visbys ability to say that its test is actually diagnosing STIsas opposed to other at-home STI screenings that require a lab test to confirm their resultsmeant de la Zerda wanted to build an easy way to be treated into the test process and price tag. We got a true diagnostic claim, de la Zerda says. That enabled us to go to folks like United Health, OptumNow, and say lets leverage that telemedicine platform you guys have built and create that connectivity for people.’ With a 24/7 provider network active in all 50 states, OptumNow can connect Visby users with a clinician and have a prescription sent to a local pharmacy within about 710 minutes, de la Zerda says. Its a powerful thing to enable somebody to test for a stigmatized condition in the privacy of their home and not just leave them hanging with a diagnosis, he says. Thats part of how Visbys test ended up on a competitors platform. Team of rivals Besides the Visby website and its delivery partners, the test is also being offered via Everlywell, a digital health platform that offers home testing on conditions that include fertility, STIs, food sensitivities, and immune health. STI specifically is an incredibly important, undertested epidemic where this [at-home] format lends itself to eliminating stigma and creating privacy, says Julia Cheek, founder and CEO of Everlywell. Though the company sells its own five-panel sexual health testing kit for, it functions as a blood and urine collection kit that users have to mail into a lab for results. Cheek says the speed and convenience of Visbys test made it an obvious choice for Everlywell, which serves a user base of 80% women. Its not fully comprehensive yet, but we want to be able to meet people where they are and offer them different options, she syas. We fundamentally believe the consumer deserves access to whatever test is available, accurate and gets them what they need. Everlywell has offered Visbys test since August, and she says users have responded positively, with both companies already planning to invest further in marketing the test to Everlywell users in 2026. Even as the STI test shows promise, de la Zerda sees todays wide launch as a starting point. If you rank the top 200 tests that people are running on a PCR machine, just about every single one of them we can have a Visby test to run it as well, he says. Its the same technology.
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