One of the largest providers of education tech paid off hackers so that they wouldn’t publish tens of millions of children’s personal information. But school districts are facing extortion attempts anyway. The company, PowerSchool, missed a basic cybersecurity step, according to a cybersecurity audit obtained by NBC News, and was hacked last year, leading to one of the largest breaches to date of American children’s personal data. PowerSchool reportedly paid an undisclosed sum to the hackers in exchange for a video of them purporting to delete the files they had stolen, which included some students’ Social Security numbers and other information, like health and disciplinary records. But "a threat actor" is using that stolen data to try to extort schools and school districts in both the U.S. and Canada, according to statements from PowerSchool and various school districts issued Wednesday. "PowerSchool is aware that a threat actor has reached out to multiple school district customers in an attempt to extort them using data from the previously reported December 2024 incident," PowerSchool wrote in a statement Wednesday. "We do not believe this is a new incident, as samples of data match the data previously stolen in December." Public schools across North Carolina received extortion emails Wednesday morning, North Carolina Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Mo Green said in a public bulletin. The threat actor appears to have students' and staffers’ names, contact information, birthdays, medical information, parental information, and in some cases Social Security numbers, he said. Several Canadian school authorities have announced they are also among the victims, including the Peel District School Board in Ontario and the Toronto District School Board. The Calgary Board of Education also issued a warning to parents this week based on communication it had received from PowerSchool. It was not immediately clear who was behind the current extortion attempt. PowerSchool said it believes that the threat actor is using data stolen from the original incident last year, indicating that the original hackers either are behind the current attempts or kept the data and made it accessible to other people.

President Donald Trump is belatedly raging against CBS News’ latest Emmy nomination. The president took to his Truth Social platform on Wednesday morning to vent about the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ decision to nominate the “60 Minutes” interview at the center of his defamation lawsuit against CBS for an Emmy Award last week. “In a total slap in the face to anyone who believes in TRUTH and Honest Journalism, this Fake News Puff Piece has now been nominated for an award by the totally discredited Emmys,” Trump fumed about the Outstanding Edited Interview nod being given to the newsmagazine’s October 2024 sit-down with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. “These antics are why the American People have no trust in the Press, and demand that the Media, very much including 60 Minutes, CBS, and its owners, be held responsible for their corruption and lies, which is exactly what we are doing in Court,” he continued. In a November lawsuit, Trump accused “60 Minutes” of deliberately mis-editing that Harris interview at the Democratic campaign’s direction, an accusation he has repeatedly leveled, including on Wednesday, when he described the interview as “much worse than expected,” “unlawfully fixed,” “manipulated,” and “doctored throughout.” He once again claimed that “60 Minutes” is an “Election Interfering” program. CBS in October called the suit baseless and said, “We will vigorously defend against it.” Numerous First Amendment lawyers agreed that the lawsuit, which alleged that CBS engaged in consumer fraud, was frivolous. However, after Trump won the 2024 election, CBS’ parent company, Paramount, which will need Trump’s approval for its pending merger with Skydance, began to discuss settling the case. Trump and his allies have made it a mission to punish “60 Minutes” and CBS News for the interview. Two days after the inauguration, Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, revived a complaint about the broadcast that his predecessor had dismissed. That inquiry has resulted in the broadcaster releasing the interview’s full transcript despite initially resisting such a move. On Monday, Carr called his probe a “penalty,” not a “threat.” Despite Trump’s attempts to discredit “60 Minutes” and the Emmys, the academy last week told CNN that the Harris interview was “evaluated by two separate panels of judges, including senior editorial leaders from every other major U.S. broadcast news organization.” The interview was selected from more than three dozen submissions and was “nominated on the strength of its journalism.” Meanwhile, Paramount heiress Shari Redstone’s desire to settle the lawsuit to help facilitate a merger has led to discontent within CBS. In late April, Bill Owens, the longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer, announced he would step down because he could no longer make “independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes.” Scott Pelley, the program’s anchor, noted in its first broadcast after Owens’ announcement that Paramount had begun to “supervise our content in new ways” as it looked to finesse the Skydance merger. Despite reports that Redstone had urged “60 Minutes” producers to hold off on segments critical of the president, the newsmagazine has so far refused to comply.

Voice of America is off the air for now, having been gutted by President Donald Trump, but it may soon return — partly as a vessel for one of his favorite MAGA propaganda outlets. One America News (OAN), the amateurish far-right TV outlet best known for promoting Trump’s 2020 election lies, is going to provide “newsfeed services” to VOA and other US-funded international broadcasters, according to Kari Lake, the MAGA loyalist Trump picked to run a hollowed-out VOA. In a late-night X post, Lake said the idea originated from the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which beams Radio Martí into Cuba. OAN will provide “their newsfeed and video service free-of-charge,” she wrote, portraying it as a win for taxpayers. Lake noted that she doesn’t currently have editorial control over VOA, so the immediate impact may be negligible. But having access to OAN content is a big step toward turning the Voice of America into the Voice of Trump — an outcome that journalists at the network have feared. VOA’s networks and websites are currently offline, but a handful of employees were called back to work on Tuesday. Staffers told CNN they sense that Lake wants to reboot the network as a shell of its former self. The goal, they believe, is to terminate most of the employee base but keep enough of the network intact to satisfy the federal judges who are scrutinizing the shutdown. Repurposing OAN content would be in line with such a strategy. Patsy Widakuswara and Jessica Jerreat, two of the sidelined journalists who are suing over Trump’s actions against VOA, told CNN in a statement, “Congress mandated VOA to report reliable and authoritative news, not to outsource its journalism to outlets aligned with the president’s agenda.” “VOA already has talented and professional journalists ready to tell America’s story in line with the VOA Charter, but we are blocked from our own newsroom,” they said. “That is why we will continue fighting for our rights in court.” OAN launched in 2013 and, during the first Trump presidency, quickly morphed into a conspiracy-boosting outlet with a far fringier voice than right-leaning outlets like Newsmax and Fox News. Former congressman Matt Gaetz, a MAGA devotee, currently hosts a primetime show on the network. The little-watched cable channel was a leading proponent of Trump’s 2020 election lies and has settled multiple defamation lawsuits resulting from its on-air claims. Last year, OAN settled a lawsuit from voting technology company Smartmatic alleging the channel spread lies about the election to “increase viewership and revenue.” The network also settled a defamation suit from a Dominion Voting Systems executive, whose case revealed how OAN coordinated with Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and others to spread election lies. OAN currently still faces a defamation lawsuit from Dominion. The network’s viewership and revenue have dwindled since DirecTV dropped it in 2022.

Netflix is getting its first facelift in 12 years. The streaming giant on Wednesday announced a major overhaul of its home page, the first redesign since it unveiled its current home page in November 2013. Additionally, the streamer announced it will begin testing generative AI-boosted search and a TikTok-like vertical video feed on mobile. While Netflix emphasized that these will initially be considered “small tests,” meaning that not all Netflix users will initially receive the tools, the global scale of the tests suggests a much larger undertaking. The streamer’s sleek new TV home page will move its main menu from the left-hand side to the middle of the page, similar to rival Apple TV. Content descriptions will appear more compact, and recommendations will be more personalized in real-time based on browsing behavior and the viewing time of day, the company said. Signaling the streaming giant’s ambitions outside of TV and film, the new menu will also emphasize more of Netflix’s live events and gaming offerings, especially for users who have indicated a preference for such content. Netflix Chief Product Officer Eunice Kim and Chief Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone revealed the new home page, along with the generative AI search tools and vertical video beta, to reporters on Tuesday during the company’s first-ever virtual “Product & Tech” event. Netflix has been working on the new home page since last year, Kim told reporters, adding that the company will roll out the experiences “in the next weeks and months.” The first step of Netflix’s foray into generative AI-boosted search will come via an opt-in beta test on mobile. Users will be able to discover content using “natural conversational phrases like ‘I want something funny and upbeat,’” the company said. Netflix will begin testing the mobile vertical video feature in the coming weeks. The TikTok-like feed will contain clips from Netflix shows and movies, offering users bite-sized samples of content to scroll through for discovery, with programming just a tap away. The announcement comes less than three weeks after Netflix reported record profits during its latest quarterly report, assuaging investors’ anxieties in the face of economic chaos born from President Trump’s tariffs. Notably, however, Netflix’s announcement comes just over one week before its May 14 upfront, when it will showcase its slate of offerings to advertisers. While Kim noted that “this wasn’t … timed to influence the upfronts,” the rebrand, coupled with Netflix’s recent performance, is sure to stir up excitement even as advertisers appear sheepish in the face of economic headwinds.

Humans have visually documented about 1,470 square miles, or a mere 0.001 percent, of the deep seafloor, according to a new study. That’s a little larger than the size of Rhode Island. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, arrives as nations debate whether to pursue industrial mining of the seabed for critical minerals. Some scientists argue that so little is known about the undersea world that more research on the deep seafloor is needed to responsibly move forward with extractive activities. “More information is always beneficial, so we can make more informed and better decisions,” said Katy Croff Bell, a deep ocean explorer who led the study and is the founder of the Ocean Discovery League, a nonprofit group that promotes seafloor exploration. Learning more about the deep sea is essential for understanding how climate change and human activities are affecting oceans, she said. But the study also highlights the fundamental excitement of exploration that drives many marine scientists. “You can just imagine what’s in the rest of the 99.999 percent,” Dr. Bell said. The era of visual documentation included in the study began in 1958, with the deep-sea submersible Trieste. The images collected since then let biologists discover new organisms and observe how they interact with each other and their environments, providing insights into ocean ecosystems. Bringing deep-sea organisms to the surface to study is challenging. Adapted for high pressures, few animals, if any, survive the journey, so photos and videos are crucial. “There are some habitats you can’t sample from a ship,” said Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the University of Louisiana who was not involved in the study. “You have to go there in an R.O.V. and do it,” he said, referring to remotely operated vehicles. Getting seafloor visuals helps geologists, too. Before the advent of remotely operated undersea vehicles and crewed submersibles, researchers had a more limited approach: drop a big bucket off a ship, drag it along, haul it up and see what was inside. “They’d just have a jumble of rocks and try to sort it out, with no context,” said Emily Chin, a geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who was not involved in the new study. “It’s like people who study meteorites, trying to understand a process on another planet.” Seeing seafloor rock outcrops in photos and videos has allowed scientists to learn how fundamental Earth processes work. It also helps companies assess potential sites for mining and oil and gas activities. But getting to the seafloor is expensive, both in funds and time. Exploring one square kilometer of deep seafloor can cost anywhere from $2 million to $20 million, Dr. Bell estimated. The dives can take years to prepare for, and just hours to go wrong. And once a dive is underway, it progresses slowly. A rover tethered to a ship has a limited radius of exploration, moving at a crawl, and relocating the ship is tedious. With so many barriers, Dr. Bell wanted to know how much seafloor we’ve seen, and how much is left to explore. Dr. Bell and her collaborators collected more than 43,000 records of deep-sea dives and assessed the photos and videos that have been collected, estimating how much seafloor area the dives documented. All together, they estimated that between 2,130 and 3,823 square kilometers of the deep seafloor have been imaged. That works out to about 0.001 percent of the entire deep seafloor. “I knew it was going to be small, but I’m not sure if I expected it to be quite that small,” Dr. Bell said. “We’ve been doing this for almost 70 years.” The study excludes proprietary dives where the data are not publicly available, such as from military operations or oil and gas exploration. Even if those increased the documented area by an order of magnitude, Dr. Bell said, “I don’t think it’s enough to move the needle.” Much of what deep-sea marine biologists know about the seafloor is based on that small fraction. The situation is akin to extrapolating information from an area smaller than Houston to all of Earth’s land surfaces, the authors say. The study also found that high-income countries led 99.7 percent of all deep dives, with the United States, Japan and New Zealand topping the charts. Most dives were within 200 nautical miles of those three countries. That means that dives are being led by a small group of countries, potentially biasing what is researched and where, the authors said. “There are many people around the world that have deep sea expertise,” Dr. Bell said. “They just don’t have the tools to be able to do the kind of research and exploration that they want to do.” Dives tend to be in the same areas, such as the Mariana Trench or Monterey Canyon, or target the same kinds of features of interest, like hydrothermal vents, the study found. And since the 1980s, most deep dives have been in shallower, more coastal waters. That leaves many areas in the deep sea unexplored. “The study is a good assessment of where we’re at and, quite literally, where we need to go in the deep sea,” Dr. McClain said.

A coalition of states led by Washington, Colorado and California sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, charging that it was unlawfully withholding billions of dollars allocated by Congress for electric-vehicle charging stations across the United States. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law provided $5 billion to states to build stations around the country. So far, 71 stations have been built, with many more in development, according to the research firm Atlas Public Policy. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, states that federal agencies have unlawfully frozen those funds and halted approvals for new stations, depriving states of critical resources and damaging the growing electric-vehicle industry. The White House budget proposal released last week said that it was canceling funding for “failed electric-vehicle-charger grant programs.” President Trump had already taken aim at the program in a January executive order, and the Transportation Department followed with a similar memo the next month. But cutting the funding entirely would require approval from Congress, the lawsuit argued. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “The president continues his unconstitutional attempts to withhold funding that Congress appropriated to programs he dislikes,” said Rob Bonta, the California attorney general. “This time he’s illegally stripping away billions of dollars for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, all to line the pockets of his Big Oil friends.” Nearly two million “zero-emission vehicles” have been sold in California, one-third of the nationwide total and part of a longstanding effort in the famously car-centric state to reduce air pollution. California had been relying on $384 million from the federal program for charging stations, according to Mr. Bonta’s office. The state has also invested heavily in charging infrastructure from its own general fund and from the proceeds of carbon credits sold to polluters, to the point that public and shared private chargers in California now outnumber nozzles on gas pumps. Across state lines, however, charging is spottier. The federal program, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI program, started by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had aimed to build charging networks beyond urban areas and states like California as part of its effort to combat climate change by accelerating the nation’s transition to electric vehicles. California officials noted on Wednesday that one of the biggest beneficiaries of a stalled domestic E.V. program would be China, which has a substantial lead in E.V. manufacturing and sales abroad. The biggest losers would be rural states that had expected the federal dollars and Tesla, the E.V. company whose billionaire chief executive, Elon Musk, is a supporter of Mr. Trump. Tesla has the biggest market share of electric vehicles in the United States, although sales were down in the first quarter of 2025. “When America retreats, China wins,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said, calling the withholding of federal funds “yet another Trump gift to China.” “Instead of hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, President Trump could actually help Elon — and the nation — by following the law and releasing this bipartisan funding,” Mr. Newsom said. Joining the complaint were the attorneys general of Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont and the District of Columbia, all of whom are Democrats. The memo from the Transportation Department to state officials in February said the administration was reviewing the NEVI program and suspending approvals of state plans. The lawsuit asks the court to declare that memo unlawful and to order the administration to release the funds. A website tracking NEVI funding run by Atlas Public Policy shows that at least $521 million of the money has been awarded, and some $44 million has been spent. Many of the stations already opened are clustered in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the data shows. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Loren McDonald, the chief analyst at Paren, an E.V. analytics company, said the federal government had been a minor player in the E.V. charging space, with most stations built by private companies. Mr. McDonald said it took many states a long time to decide where to build stations and find companies to bid on the contracts, resulting in a lag time in construction. States that already had experience in building charging stations, like Ohio and Pennsylvania, were able to move faster, he said. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs said, the president’s order has been disruptive. Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado said in a statement that his state stood to lose tens of millions of dollars in funding after making “significant progress,” in laying the foundation for widespread E.V. adoption. Officials had planned to use the federal support to fill gaps in rural Colorado and underserved communities, he said. “Congress had the foresight to authorize funding to build this important infrastructure,” Mr. Weiser added, “and it must be restored immediately.” In Washington State, the lawsuit contends, the president’s order has held up $55 million in approved congressional funding for E.V. charging, stalling 40 proposed projects. The White House and the Transportation Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Netflix's homepage is getting a makeover. The streaming giant announced Wednesday that it is revamping its look to make the platform "more personal" and improve its interface. It is Netflix's first major redesign since 2013. “We’ve been constantly improving it over the last 12 years, mostly behind the scenes, but now, thanks to a combination of new technology and the expansion of our entertainment offerings, we think it’s time to take a giant leap forward," Eunice Kim, Netflix’s chief product officer, said in a presentation about the update. The new layout is designed to increase Netflix’s ability to tailor its suggestions to each viewer, make navigation easier and create a Netflix Hub, which will be personalized to each user, according to Netflix's publication, Tudum. Netflix continues to double down on its offerings to its subscribers, including live events programming. It has already hosted its first NFL games, and weekly World Wrestling Entertainment “Raw” shows began streaming this year. The homepage updates are “simpler, more intuitive and better represents the breadth of entertainment on Netflix today," Kim said, adding that Netflix "reaches a global audience of more than 700 million people with incredibly diverse tastes."

Meta Platforms won a $168 million verdict against the Israeli surveillance firm NSO, the company said Tuesday, capping a six-year arm wrestling match between America’s biggest social networking platform and the world’s best known spyware company. Meta had already won a December ruling finding that NSO had unlawfully exploited a bug in its messaging service WhatsApp to plant spy software on its users’ phones. On Tuesday, a jury in California ruled that NSO owed Meta $444,719 in compensatory damages — and $167.3 million in punitive damages, Meta said. “Today’s verdict in WhatsApp’s case is an important step forward for privacy and security as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone,” Meta said in a statement. In its statement, NSO said it would “carefully examine the verdict’s details and pursue appropriate legal remedies, including further proceedings and an appeal.” NSO, an Israeli firm that first drew global attention in 2016, has become “a poster child for the surveillance industry and their abuses and impunity,” said Natalia Krapiva, a senior lawyer with the human rights group Access Now. NSO has long argued that its software is used to track terrorists and pedophiles, but the firm has been implicated in abusive surveillance in countries around the world, including Saudi Arabia, Spain, Mexico, Poland, and El Salvador. WhatsApp’s lawsuit — which was filed in 2019 and at one point made its way to the Supreme Court — has been closely followed both by NSO’s competitors in the surveillance technology space and by human rights advocates critical of the industry. Victims of state-backed hacking have struggled to hold suppliers of spy software accountable for what their customers do with their tools, while hacking firms have long worried that their products could draw legal sanctions. The WhatsApp verdict was a sign that both outcomes were possible, said Krapiva. “This is something that will hopefully show spyware companies that there will be consequences if you are careless, if you are brazen, and if you act in such a way as NSO did in these cases,” she said.

Amazon’s Zoox issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis after a crash in Las Vegas last month, the company said Tuesday. The recall surrounds a defect with the vehicle’s automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing “the risk of a crash,” according to a report submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Zoox submitted the recall after an April 8 incident in Las Vegas where an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, the NHTSA report states. There were no injuries in the crash and only minor damage occurred to both vehicles.“After analysis and rigorous testing, Zoox identified the root cause,” the company said in a blog post. “We issued a software update that was implemented across all Zoox vehicles. All Zoox vehicles on the road today, including our purpose-built robotaxi and test fleet, have the updated software.” Zoox paused all driverless vehicle operations while it reviewed the incident. It’s since resumed operations after rolling out the software update. Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for over $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.” However, Amazon has fallen far behind Alphabet’s Waymo, which has robotaxi services operating in multiple U.S. markets. Tesla has also announced plans to launch a robotaxi offering in Austin in June, though the company has missed many prior target dates for releasing its technology. Zoox has been testing its robotaxis in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Foster City, California. Last month, Zoox began testing a small fleet of retrofitted vehicles in Los Angeles. Last month, NHTSA closed a probe into two crashes involving Toyota Highlanders equipped with Zoox’s autonomous vehicle technology. The agency opened the probe last May after the vehicles braked suddenly and were rear-ended by motorcyclists, which led to minor injuries.

TeleMessage, the app that President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, appeared to use to archive his group chats, has suspended all services after hackers claimed to have stolen files from it. A spokesperson for Smarsh, the company that owns TeleMessage, said Monday that the company “is investigating a potential security incident. Upon detection, we acted quickly to contain it and engaged an external cybersecurity firm to support our investigation.” “Out of an abundance of caution, all TeleMessage services have been temporarily suspended,” the spokesperson said.The app, which uses encryption technology similar to that of the popular messaging service Signal but also offers government agencies and companies a way to back up copies of chats for compliance purposes, first came under public scrutiny after Waltz appeared to be using it during a Cabinet meeting last week. His use of the app reignited concerns about the security of his communication methods that were sparked by the “Signalgate” controversy, in which he accidentally invited a journalist into a Signal chat of top administration officials as it planned military strikes on Houthis in Yemen. Customs and Border Protection has paused its use of the app, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said.